Brothers when the time comes, with good fortune from both worlds as our companion, then by one single warrior on foot a king may be with terror, though he own more than a hundred thousand horsemen.
From an Ismaili poem in praise of the Assassins*
AT THE BEGINNING OF the tenth century the Khitai, a Turco-Mongolian people from the steppes to the north of China, swiftly subjugated a large area of what is today Mongolia and Northern China. The Chinese had been dealing with the nomads of the steppes for hundreds of years from the Xiongnu, or Huns, through to the Tanguts, by a combination of military action, treaty, buying off, marriage alliances and ensuring that the ‘cooked’ barbarians buffered the empire from the ‘raw’ savages – but this time it was different. The Khitai were strong enough and China was sufficiently weak, due to civil wars that had wracked the empire since 860, for them to take a dynastic name, the Liao, and rule as emperors in northern China from 907 to 1125.
The presence of an empire in China that also spread into the ‘free’ steppes made the Turks of the region to the north-east of China uneasy and when the Liao started to place garrisons in the steppes it seemed clear that submission and regulated taxation were the likely consequence. The Turks therefore did what nomadic people have a tendency to do when faced with interference in their affairs by centralised governments – they began to migrate. They headed west and into the Dar al-Islam. Such was the volume of steppe nomads that entered Islam at this time that Arab writers started to differentiate them from the Turks who had been a part of the military forces of Islam for some time – they called these new arrivals the Turcomen.
The movement became extensive at the beginning of the eleventh century, but even before this there had been a movement of tribes into Transoxania. At first, the Islamic states of northern Persia tried to hold back this influx; Maqdisi wrote of strongholds and frontier posts against the Turcomen, but it was useless, and dynasties such as the Samanids simply disappeared amid the chaos that ensued.
The most significant group among the Turks were the Ghuzz tribes, and within these tribes the most important clan to enter Islam at this time were the Saljuqs. Duqaq was the progenitor of the family, but his son Saljuq was the eponymous state-builder. The family converted to Sunni Islam late in the tenth century and involved themselves, probably quite lucratively, in the wars, essentially caused by the migration of the Turks, in Transoxania and Khwarazm, south of the Aral Sea. It is likely that the Saljuqs chose the Sunni branch of Islam over the Shiite simply because the wandering Sufis, or holy men, with whom they would have come in contact on the fringes of the Dar al-Islam, practised a form of Islam that carried a large component of mysticism and folk religion – much akin to the shamanistic beliefs of the steppes. These Sufis were part of a much looser and much more catholic Sunnism.
In 1026, Saljuq’s successor, Arslan Israil settled with the tribe in Ghaznavid territory, but they were troublesome tenants and the Ghaznavid sultan, Mahmud, pushed them out and seized Arslan. Arslan’s brothers, Toghril Beg and Chaghri Beg, fled and sought refuge with another of the new Ghuzz arrivals, the Qarakhanids, who also involved themselves with mercenary warfare against the Byzantine and Armenian frontiers to Islam’s north-west. Meanwhile, more and more Ghuzz kept flowing into the Ghaznavid lands and the Saljuqs profited from this new military muscle to deprive Masud, who had succeeded his father, Mahmud, as the Ghaznavid sultan of the cities of Marv, Herat and Nishapur in 1038. Toghril Beg proclaimed himself sultan, and in 1040 a Saljuq-Ghuzz army made up almost entirely of horse archers – a concept previously unheard of in the Islamic world – defeated a huge Ghaznavid army at the Battle of Dandanqan, just north of Marv. By this one battle the Saljuqs took the whole of Khurasan, and the Ghaznavids withdrew to their lands in India, where they commenced the process of Islamisation of the north of the sub-continent.
After consolidation of the province they had taken from the Ghaznavids, the Saljuqs moved west and, no doubt due to their continued successes, they attracted a great many more bands of Ghuzz Turks to their banner. They were able to campaign in all seasons – they were inured to hardship and their supply train was made up of two-humped camels, which were able to withstand brutal winters and also travel great distances every day. They moved rapidly across the eastern Islamic lands, moving through Azerbaijan and into the Jazira, until they were halted and defeated by Kurds near Mosul. This was, however, only a temporary setback, and they moved on to the removal of the Buyids and the ‘liberation’ of the Sunni caliph in 1055. The caliph accepted the Saljuqs readily, although really he had no choice. Officially, he was the head of the Islamic world, but everyone knew where the real power lay – with the men of the sword.
The Saljuq achievement was impressive – with their defeat of the Ghaznavids and Buyids, they had shown the total superiority of cavalry warfare over armies that deployed infantry as their main force and only used cavalry as an auxiliary arm. They had also managed to maintain an army in the field over repeated campaigns – this was highly unusual anywhere in the medieval world. This had been achieved by their creation of the askari – technically, a bodyguard of Mamluks for the sultan, but actually more like a small standing army, around which the more ephemeral and temporary tribal troops or auxiliaries were arranged. They had also moved from simple booty share-outs at the end of campaigns to pay their army, to adopting the Islamic iqta system – at least to provide payment for their askari.
A Saljuq trooper’s iqta bears some parallels to the fief of a western knight, to the extent that it provided his salary. However, in many ways, the iqta was more complex, in that it could be a ‘share’ of an industry, such as the spice trade, a textile production centre or simply a piece of land, but unlike the western knight, the iqta holder was not resident on the land from which the iqta was drawn. Local government officers, often civilians, managed it for him and collected the taxes or rents for him. Furthermore the iqta, in theory, was not hereditary like a fief, so in some ways it paid for service and not family loyalty. The distribution of iqta was therefore a powerful means of ensuring loyalty to the sultan and of rewarding emirs.
The Saljuqs also showed themselves to be much more than mere tribal warriors, with the speed in which they brought relatively orderly and effective, if oppressive, government to Persia and Iraq. Afdal al-Din relates an apocryphal story of Sultan Qavurt’s firmness, which illustrates nicely the arbitrary but effective justice of these military men. Qavurt, he states, had visited one of his provinces one winter. When he left the province, bread was selling at one dinar for one hundred manns, but when he returned later, it was reported to him that the price of bread had risen to one dinar for ninety manns. Immediately, he went with ten horsemen and summoned all the bakers. He asked them, ‘Have locusts attacked the town since I left?’ They answered, ‘No’. He then asked, ‘Has there been some other natural catastrophe?’ Again they answered, ‘No’. He said, ‘Praise be to God. When I left with my entourage, the expenses laid upon the province were halved and the price of bread should have fallen to one dinar per one hundred and twenty manns.’ He then cast several of the well-known bakers into their ovens to be burnt and left the province.* Such rough and ready efficiency, and the project of consolidation that the Saljuqs were embarked on, immediately began to affect the embryonic Ismaili communities in the north-west of Persia. Taxation of these areas first required them to be brought under control, and the Saljuqs started consolidating their rule with aplomb.
The Ismailis always flourished during times of government chaos, but now they faced a determined and organised foe – whilst the Sunni world had the military power of the new Turks to deploy against Shiites of all colours, it was also rearming itself intellectually, to try to win the doctrinal battle that fed into the loyalties of the ulama and umma. The key agent in this Sunni scholarly renaissance was the great wazir of the Saljuq state, Nizam al-Mulk. A long section of his Siyasatnama, or Book of Government, is dedicated to denigrating both the independent Persian branch of the creed and their ‘parents’, the Fatimid Ismailis. He wrote that the object of the Ismailis was to abolish Islam, to mislead mankind and to lead them into perdition, and that they were the companions of the Antichrist; he also accused them of being Mazdakdites.†
The Saljuq ‘party line’ was built on these thoughts and the theocratic message was subtly linked to a more nationalistic one when it was claimed by the authorities that the Ismailis, a sinister perverted and deviant group, were plotting harm to Persia and seeking to destroy its religion. The new Nizari Ismailis of Hasan-i-Sabbah were also singled out and accused of general vices and murders. The writing of controversial works against the Ismailis had, in fact, started in 1011 with a polemic written by leading Sunni and Twelver Shiite jurists at the behest of the caliph, which stated that the Fatimids had no Alid family link. This was obviously an attempt to ensure any unity between the Seveners and Twelvers, both Shiite groups, would be disrupted. The proclamation was read in mosques throughout the Abbasids’ realm. Such writings became the stock in trade of some of the great Sunni theologians and jurists of the Saljuq period. Al-Ghazali was the creator of the political doctrine that reasserted the importance of the office of the caliph as leader of the faithful, whilst allowing all political power to flow through the sultan.* He worked at the Nizamiyya, the great madrasa or Islamic university that Nizam al-Mulk founded in Baghdad to challenge al-Azhar in Cairo, as well as the later secret training schools of the Nizar Ismailis. After Nizam al-Mulk’s death in 1092, al-Ghazali continued to write anti-Ismaili treatises under the patronage of the reinvigorated Abbasid caliphs, in particular al-Mustazhir, who held the caliphate from 1094 to 1118. These texts were disseminated around the Saljuq Empire through Nizamiyya madrasas, which the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk, had sponsored in the cities of Nishapur, Herat, Marv, Damascus, Basra and Mosul. Al-Ghazali constructed arguments to show that the Ismailis were specifically excluded from the umma. Making war on them and enslaving them was therefore entirely acceptable – indeed it was a virtuous act for all true believers.
The espionage services that had failed so spectacularly in the past were also reinvigorated, and within a short period of time Hasan-i-Sabbah’s disciples found it much more difficult to disseminate their teaching in the larger cities. He himself had had to avoid the city of Rayy, probably Persia’s largest city at this time, because one of Nizam al-Mulk’s chief agents – the city’s governor, Abu Muslim – had been informed of his intended visit to the city in 1090. It was not surprising that the Saljuqs were watching Rayy carefully – an Ismaili dai had once advised a younger colleague of the support to be found in the city: ‘Go to Rayy, because there in Rayy, and in the provinces of Tabaristan and Mazandaran there are many Shiites, who will listen to your call.’*
As discussed earlier, the Ismailis had gained a strong position in Daylam among the now-converted Twelver Shiites of the region, but now Nizam al-Mulk and Sultan Malikshah commenced a campaign to drive them from the region. The campaign started as a police action with a wave of arrests. It seems that Nizam and Malikshah knew that they were up against an enemy who was well integrated into the local communities, as they attempted first to weed them out rather than to commit the whole region to the hammer blows of a full army occupation. The Ismailis of Saveh, a city between the metropolises of Rayy and Qom, were the first to be targeted. Eighteen of them were arrested on charges of having joined together in prayers separately from the Sunni inhabitants of the city, and for praying according to the Shiite rites. They were interrogated and then released, but subsequently one of the city’s muezzins was found murdered. It is possible that he was the first victim of the new form of resistance by the Ismailis, that of assassination, but he may equally have been the victim of a Sunni fanatic, as it was rumoured in the town’s markets that he was a secret convert to Ismailism. Whatever the case, Nizam al-Mulk used the opportunity to bring a known Ismaili, Tahir the Carpenter, to trial, claiming that the murder had been committed to stop the muezzin – a wavering convert to Ismailism – from revealing a far larger conspiracy, of Batini in the city, to the authorities. The great wazir also insisted on the death penalty once Tahir was found guilty.
At first glance, it seems a little strange that Nizam al-Mulk should take such a keen interest in what appears to be a decidedly local issue, but, as was seen in the evolution of the Qarmatian state of Bahrain, Ismailism had a element of radical social and political change inherent in its religious teachings. Since Nizam al-Mulk’s great project was the consolidation and control of all of the loose association of territories that made up the Saljuq Empire, the growth of any alternate sources of political doctrine was alarming to him. What was more, the Ismailis, as will be seen below, had begun to literally carve out distinct mini-states inside the Saljuq lands. By 1085, Hasan was already being discussed in court circles as a successful preacher of heresy in both Khurasan and Iraq. The heresiarch Hasan would have been viewed as a political threat by Nizam al-Mulk simply because that is how the great wazir viewed heterodoxy:
What a king needs most is right religion, because kingship and religion are two brothers. Whenever any disturbance appears in the kingdom, disorder also occurs in religion; and people of bad religion and malefactors appear. Whenever there is disorder in the affairs of religion and the kingdom is disturbed the power of malefactors increases. And they cause the kings to lose their dignity and make them troubled at heart; innovations appear and rebels become powerful.*
The minister went on to single out the Ismailis for special attention:
Never has there been a more sinister, more perverted or more iniquitous crowd than these people, who behind walls are plotting harm to this country and seeking to destroy the religion . . . and as far as they can they will leave nothing undone in the pursuit of vice, mischief, murder and heresy.†
Nizam al-Mulk’s character was also likely to be unforgiving. His own life had been hard and he was unlikely to give quarter to anyone. Ibn al-Athir, speaking of his early years, said:
His father lost all his property and belongings and his mother died while he was still a nursling. So his father used to take him round to various nurses for milk and they nourished him. As a young man God gave him great aptitude for hard work and for acquiring knowledge. He then entered the service of the sultans and as time passed by he rose from rank to rank very rapidly. Nizam al-Mulk, in spite of his excellence, high position, love of learning and the learned, was an intriguer, prone to haughtiness and influence.‡
In truth, Nizam was no worse that any other Persian minister in terms of his scheming. During the rise to power of a Persian bureaucrat, it was de rigueur to bring down at least one of your rivals through a whispering campaign and to cause the death and impoverishment of his family too, if possible. Nepotism was also standard practice and Nizam installed several of his sons in positions of power.
The Nizari Ismailis must then have realised that they were up against a resolute and single-minded foe and the Saveh incident made it clear to Hasan that he and his followers were standing directly in the path of a Saljuq juggernaut. The sheer numbers of men available to Nizam al-Mulk and the Saljuqs meant that direct confrontation could not be considered. Throughout the entire Saljuq period, vast armies took the field under the sultans. The sultan’s nephew, according to Ibn al-Qalanasi, took four hundred thousand men with him into Anatolia to meet the Byzantine emperor in battle at Manzikert in 1071, and whilst al-Qalanasi may have fallen victim to the hyperbole that has affected so many recorders of armies over the years, it certainly took a month to transport Sultan Alp Arslan’s army across the Oxus in 1072. Even as late as the 1130s, during the state’s waning as a great power, Sultan Sanjar fielded an army of one hundred thousand cavalrymen, made up of his own men and the armies of the emirs of Sistan, Ghur, Ghazna, Mazandaran and Khurasan.
The army had also evolved from the largely tribal-based forces of the early Saljuq state. By the reign of Malikshah, there was a growing reliance on Mamluks, although there was still, judging by the sultans’ attitude to the free Turcomen, a large degree of reliance on the men of the tribes for campaigns. Nizam al-Mulk wrote in his Siyasatnama, that the Saljuq dynasty was under an obligation to the Turcomen due to blood ties with them, and because of the part they had played in the foundation and maintenance of the empire and its armies.*
Malikshah wrote confidently to Hasan of the consequences of challenging the Saljuq state:
O Hasan-i-Sabbah. It is surprising that you have invented a new faith and religion and have enticed people into it by various devious means. You have been traitorous to the ruling authority. You have beguiled many brave and simple mountain-folk by exploiting their simple nature and have formed an army of them who, wherever they go, kill innocent people and make them targets of their daggers. Moreover you revile against the Abbasid Caliphs who are responsible for the maintenance of Islam, of the empire, of the nation and who are the upholders of religion and the State. It is they who are the foundation of the organisation and administration. You should desist from following this wrong path and become a good Muslim, or else we might be forced to send troops against you. The commencement of this action depends on your behaviour or upon the receipt of your reply. Keep away from the dangerous policy you are following. Have mercy on your own self and on your followers and do not unnecessarily hurl them into disaster, do not let your strong defences and fortresses deceive you and make you conceited. With this sincere advice, I may add this also very clearly that even if Alamut were one of the fortresses of the heavens, I could level it to the ground by the grace of God.*
The Saljuqs’ army did, however, have some exploitable military weaknesses and its simple size and composition were chief among these. As discussed above, the core of the sultan’s army was his askari, and in order to create a true field army for campaigns, he was reliant on his emirs and provincial governors joining him with their military forces, as well as the short-term employment of the tribal Turcoman auxiliaries. The main weakness of this composite force was that it lacked cohesion and was liable to disperse of its own accord – this was particularly true of the Turcomen who, being free nomads, had other concerns like moving their flocks to new pastures and less mundane tasks like simple raiding and being a nuisance to the peasantry. The allegiance of the emirs could reasonably be expected by virtue of the simple fact that the sultan, in this early period, led the army in person and therefore by example – he also gave and took away iqtas.
Another concern was that the army was composed almost entirely of cavalry and there was always the problem of providing fodder, especially as each trooper almost certainly took at least two horses – a charger and a pack horse – on campaign with him. Whilst the logistics in terms of ‘pasture or fodder per animal’ are difficult to compute exactly, the average consumption of a small pony of the sort used by the Turks and Mongols has been suggested as being about five kilograms per day.† In the early fourteenth century, when the Mongols were attempting to avoid living off the land in their preparations for an invasion of Syria, a daily ration of about six kilograms per horse per day has been suggested as the rations allowed by the Ilkhan Ghazan for his cavalry.‡ Nishapuri wrote that, at the apogee of the dynasty in the reign of Malikshah, the Saljuq standing army was about fifty thousand strong, though of course this would be swollen by Turcomen auxiliaries during campaigns.§ As discussed earlier, the agriculture of Persia was fragile and therefore easily strained, and only about 10 per cent of it was true pastureland, with another 10 per cent being farmed cropland.¶ Keeping a cavalry army in the field would have strained the resources of any area in which it was decamped, as well as those of the state granaries.
Then there was straightforward monetary expense. Certainly the askari, and probably the standing army, were equipped by the sultan. Whilst armour and arms were usually family heirlooms, due to the sheer expense of buying mail,* the Saljuq system of warfare had other expenses. It required the production, transport and replacement of vast numbers of arrows; the Turks, and the Mongols, both avoided close combat until the enemy was sufficiently weakened by their archery. A Turkish archery manual from the fifteenth-century Mamluk Dynasty of Egypt describes the Pillars of Archery as being, ‘the infliction of injury, the ability to strike from a distance, the ability to strike swiftly and the ability to protect oneself’.† The tactic used for achieving this was a long-range assault by high-volume, rapid-fire ‘shower shooting’ into the ranks of the enemy as the army was advancing. As the Saljuqs closed on their enemies they would begin to choose individual targets for their arrow strikes and then finally move to sword and spear only when the enemy was in a state of near disintegration.
Writers from the time of Saladin and of the Mamluk sultanate describe the huge camel-loads of arrows taken on campaign.‡ Added to this logistical expense there was the problem of simply paying the army. The Saljuq army was paid mainly in cash and partly in treasury drafts. There was therefore a requirement for the transport of vast amounts of coin for each campaign and long campaigns would, of course, drain the state’s revenues. Booty taken in battle was a bonus and a further inducement to loyalty among the sultan’s troops, but, obviously for this to occur there had to be booty to be taken. This was almost guaranteed during campaigns of straightforward conquest, but when the army was being used internally to suppress sedition, there was little hope of accruing treasure. The problem of fodder and provisions for the men was alleviated, to some degree, by the iqta system, which, being spread over the entire state, ensured that there was, at least in theory, well-managed government land in every area, from which supplies could be drawn by a campaign force.
The final point about the Saljuq army was that whilst it was predominantly made up of Turkish cavalry, it relied for its infantry and camp guards on the Daylamites. This would be significant for the later infiltration of sultans’ and wazirs’ bodyguards by the Assassins, since Hasan’s dais had, as discussed earlier, been proselytising in the Daylamite regions for many years now. There was already a history of Shiism in this group – the opportunities this gave for a ‘ready-made’ fifth column in the Saljuq army cannot have been overlooked by Hasan.
Malikshah’s letter to Hasan spoke of a fortress named Alamut and the initial Ismaili response to the Saljuq threat was to seek fortified places in which to base their headquarters. The difficulties of keeping an army in the field for the Saljuqs have been alluded to above. Added to this was the fact that, before the late thirteenth century, the Mongols’ arrival in Persia with Chinese siege engineers and the tenacious destruction of the Crusader strongholds of Syria by the Egyptian Mamluk sultanate, meant that siege warfare in the Middle East had not been well developed, and relied to a great extent on the ability to starve out the occupiers of a castle. A well-prepared and fortified foe was, needless to say, a difficult proposition – especially for a large army consuming provisions at a faster rate than the besieged were.
In classic castle warfare, as practised with exemplary skill by the Crusaders of Syria – up until King Guy’s disastrous decision to engage Saladin at the Battle of Hattin – the defenders of a fortified place aimed simply to hold out until the arrival of the state’s field army or a relief force from an ally.* Hasan’s Ismailis had no such hope of relief as their forces were comprised of what amounted to little more than a local militia, even though the Daylamites, as discussed earlier, were infantry warriors with a long and proud heritage. Therefore, despite the fact that the Saljuqs would find reducing castles extremely difficult, having no hope of relief certainly meant that the surrender of even ‘fortresses of the heavens’ could not be put off forever. In 1747, Frederick the Great instructed his generals that, ‘the art of defending fortified places consists in putting off the moment of their reduction.’ What he meant by this was that fortification could never be the total solution to the problem of winning a war, and that offensive action was required both to relieve such places and to defeat the enemy. In the selection of his offensive action, Hasan had to look at the resources he had available and at the enemy he was fighting – when both were taken into account, assassination would have emerged as the appropriate and obvious stratagem.
Hasan knew the Saljuqs well: he had worked at their court as an administrator under Nizam al-Mulk before his flight to Egypt. Indeed, some sources suggest that the skill he displayed whilst working on land reform was such that Nizam al-Mulk became jealous of the younger man’s talent and started a whispering campaign against him at court – this led to Hasan having to flee from the sultan’s suspicions. Hasan would therefore have known that, despite being an empire, the Saljuq state was also very much a ‘family firm’, like almost every other medieval enterprise. Every family has its petty rivalries and jealousies, but in the case of imperial kin these carry serious political repercussions. The chronicler Al-Zahira relates one of the Saljuq family’s spats: ‘Gawhar Khatun was the aunt of Sultan Malikshah and sister of Sultan Alp Arslan. She was pious and good. On the death of her brother Alp Arslan, Nizam al-Mulk took away much of her wealth. She therefore went to Rayy to recruit the Mubaraki Guards for a fight against Nizam al-Mulk. The latter hinted to Malikshah to do away with her and she was killed. When the news reached Baghdad, people condemned Nizam al-Mulk for it.’*
It was not only aunts that Malikshah had had trouble with during his reign. Earlier in 1072, upon the unexpected death of his father, Alp Arslan, Malikshah had been compelled to defeat and subsequently execute an uncle, Qavord, who had challenged his reign to succeed. Poor Malikshah’s father had been failed by, of all things, his skill in archery when, during his invasion of Qarakhanid territory at the end of 1072, a prisoner brought before him suddenly attacked him with a knife. Alp Arslan, shouting to his attendants to leave the prisoner alone, drew an arrow himself but missed his mark and was mortally wounded.
Under Malikshah, the Saljuq state experienced a unity that it had never previously been able to attain, but even during this period Anatolia had broken away to become independent as the sultanate of Rum. In 1092, following Malikshah’s death, the state essentially fractured, with the Syrian provinces seceding and east and west Persia separating. Part of the problem was the fact that the possessions of the chiefs of steppe societies were distributed among all his relatives – in particular to his numerous sons, through what has become known as the ‘patrimonial share-out’. This was very egalitarian and very much in the nature of tribal society, but it was a political time bomb and, almost without exception, led to internecine fighting and political murder among the beneficiaries of the will. A death, or a few deaths, at the top could bring the whole edifice down, or at the very least bring its leaders into conflict that often escalated into all-out civil war.
There was also the aristocratic nature of Saljuq society. As discussed above, the state was a family firm and Louis XIV’s encomium to himself, ‘L’État, c’est Moi’, was certainly true of medieval sultans. Eliminating the man at the top meant a total loss of raison d’être for the state. This also applied to lower lords, as in many ways the Saljuq state was a pyramid of fealty, with emirs of progressively higher ranking supporting the royal house. What this meant, in effect, was that there was only limited allegiance within the state and this was based on loyalty to the person of the sultan and to his family, but not to any great project or ideal. The Saljuq state did not have the religious zeal of the early Fatimid state’s dawa, nor of the later Syrian jihad states of Zangi, Nur al-Din or Saladin to drive it along. It did not have the ideal of Rome, as did Byzantium, nor God’s Will, as did the Crusaders. In short, Hasan would have looked at the Saljuq state and seen a state lacking belief – a product his little state had in abundance. Certainly, Nizam al-Mulk had gone a long way in resuscitating the Sunni cause, but Sunnism was really the heritage of the ulama, the ‘men of the pen’, and, to a limited degree, the caliph.
The question that Hasan, therefore, would have posed to himself was a very simple one: would a Saljuq lord be prepared to die in a war of religion? Before the advent of the Crusaders, and the Holy War they inspired among Muslims, this was unlikely. Certainly Saljuq emirs were brave, and concepts such as glory, fighting with and for comrades and simple martial pride were central to their culture – but would they risk their lives off the battlefield for concepts as abstract as right religion? It seems not, given the evidence for later collaboration and coming to terms with the Ismailis by various members of the Saljuq aristocracy. Therefore, Hasan’s decision to implement a policy of assassination; of bringing the spectre of death to hearth and home, away from the battlefield; of threatening soldiers with an ignominious death in the bedchamber or in the street, a death bereft of all glory – in short, not a death with your boots on – hit hard at the core of the Saljuq lords’ psyche. Hasan was not a military man but he seems to have understood one of the most basic rules of warfare – you must empathise with your enemy and understand what makes him act and what will make him detract from action.
As discussed earlier, the Saljuq Empire lacked belief in any great project, whereas the citizens of Hasan’s state had such belief in abundance. One of Malikshah’s accusations against him was that he led simple people to carry out murder and other disastrous acts of self-destruction. Certainly, Hasan would have realised that the religious fervour his preaching and the Ismaili creed imbued in his followers could make up for his lack of numbers. However, even then, taking the field against the Saljuqs was unlikely to be successful, and did not meet a second rule of war – maximising efficiency.
Battle is an uncertain business in the best of circumstances, and it is common sense to avoid it at all costs, at least until every advantage has been gained over an opponent. Hasan would certainly lose many men in any engagement – men he could ill afford to squander. If he only managed to defend territory, he would essentially not have solved his problem of continued aggression from the Saljuq state. Two things are worth noting here. The first is that Hasan’s logic was strikingly modern; the simple acquisition of enemy territory is seen now as an immature military strategy. The destruction of the opponent’s army is the goal of the modern military approach.* Obviously, eradication of the vast Saljuq army was impossible, but forcing its disintegration through destruction of its leadership was certainly feasible, and what Hasan’s forces lacked in numbers, they made up for in devotion to their cause.
This brings us to the second point. It is somewhat ridiculous for Malikshah to accuse Hasan of deluding simple folk, and it is equally farcical to take on the suggestion of Marco Polo and other European writers that the Assassins of the Ismailis were drugged with hashish or even opium before carrying out their political murders.† The requirements of infiltration, and gaining proximity to their targets, despite the large askari of any senior emir, and the small army of a bodyguard that surrounded the sultan, meant that the fidai’in Assassin groups sent to murder the leaders of the Saljuq state had to be made up of intelligent, adaptable and resourceful men. The Ismailis would have known exactly what to look for, because the Shiite cause in general, and the Ismaili cause in particular, had been using taqiyya for centuries and were seasoned conspirators. Such men can be selected from among the populace, but are unlikely to be ‘simple’. What is more likely is that volunteers were selected on the above criteria of creativity and aptitude, as well as their strong devotion to the faith and Hasan.
It may have been their unswerving commitment to Hasan that led some etymologists, prior to the great orientalist De Sacy, to believe that the Assassins’ name originated from the Persian word hasaniyyun, or ‘followers of Hasan’.* The mistake, given that these men were prepared to die for Hasan, would have been an easy one to make, but in fact the term for these volunteers found in many of the Ismaili sources is fidai, which is translated as ‘devotee’ – also, and perhaps more accurately, deriving from the verb ‘to redeem’. This conveys the idea of completing a pledge or delivering oneself from a state of sin, by means of a sacrifice. This may be oversimplifying the case but the self-imposed restriction of the Assassins, to the use of daggers alone in their killings, required them to get so close to their victim that escape was almost certainly impossible after the strike. The fact that escape does not in fact seem to even have been contemplated makes the notion that they were sacrificing their lives for their creed a credible one.
In this respect, and in the recruitment of volunteers, it is interesting to parallel the Assassins with the early Irish Republican Brotherhood and the later Irish Republican Army. Pearse and his compatriots in the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 identified their hopeless stand against the British, ‘as a sacrificing and cleansing thing’, that would raise the banners of rebellion all over Ireland. It is certainly more than possible that the fidai’in’s self-sacrifice worked in a decidedly similar fashion. Therefore it was not just a religious act, but also established a ‘lore’ of sacrifice for the cause. In the 1970s, IRA volunteers were forcefully dissuaded from joining the organisation by senior members of the organisation – initiates have stated how they had ‘the fear of God’ put into them, and how sacrifice, dedication and honour were stressed, whilst the fact of almost guaranteed imprisonment and death was repeated over and over.
The IRA’s assault on the British state was carried out with a physical campaign of terror, but it also relied very much on the threat of violence being maintained. The Assassins relied in the same way, on the fear of their blades’ strike just as much as on their actual body count. Just one fidai being ‘turned’ by their enemies, or deserting the cause, would have been enough to destroy the atmosphere of fear and intimidation they built up as time went on. Volunteers, therefore, were absolutely not just simple folk, or the medieval equivalent of cannon fodder – they were an elite, and had a distinct place in the Ismaili hierarchy.
This hierarchy ran from the lasiqs, or laymen, through to rafiqs (companions), dais, dai kabirs (superior missionaries) and at the top, the sheik-el-jebel, or mountain sheik. Ismaili encyclopaedic works have a tendency to make hierarchies out of every aspect of life. A tenth-century survey of arts and crafts even ranked these activities into basic necessities, accessory trades and luxuries; each artificer was also ranked in terms of the ‘merit’ of the craft he undertook. This merit was related to the craft’s indispensability, skill requirement and simple nobility, as in painting and music.* This idea of strict hierarchy would be one of the most important elements of the Ismaili Assassins’ strength in times of need, and was consistently reasserted through the evolving religious theory of the sect. Ismaili missionaries also developed a theory affirming both the inequality of men and the necessity of strict discipline within the community, based around religious instruction. This instruction came from only a few inspired individuals simply because the Ismailis believed that the spontaneous impulses of normal human beings would, if left unrestrained, prevent the establishment of a viable society.† The applicability of this to the creation of a military creed is obvious, as is the idea that developed later in the Assassin sect, that its leaders were divinely ordained. The Ismaili writer, Afdal al-Din Kashani, wrote in the twelfth century that such individuals were singled out for power by divine favour, and were owed unremitting loyalty.
The many rankings and levels within Nizari Ismailism also meant that the organisation could embrace the many expectations of its likely followers. We can be sure that not all the adherents of the Nizari cause were particularly interested in its religious dogma per se, but Shiism does require that all aspects of life, whether they be legal, social or intellectual, are directed by the follower’s faith. For some, the organisation was undoubtedly simply an organisation of protection – for others, a means to attack enemies. There were of course those who were motivated entirely by faith, and those who entered the order as a fidai doubtless thought they were creating a new order on earth and carrying out God’s plan. By contrast, for the petty statesmen who became involved with the Assassins, the organisation was a vehicle for maintaining their independence from the empire-building Saljuqs. For many more, the creed gave meaning to hard, short lives and a simple promise of salvation.
A further suggestion for the mysterious origins of the word Assassin was that it was derived from the ancient Achaemenid-Persian word shahanshah, meaning ‘king of kings’. Certainly Persian national pride, that had grown anew under the Buyids and then been dashed down by the Saljuq Turks, was resurrected by the daggers of the Assassins. But the later spread of the creed into Syria, its large native Syrian following, its upholding of the Arab Nizar’s claim to the imamate, and the lack of any history of sacrificial-style killings in Persian history, all mean that the organisation’s ‘patriotism’ should perhaps be viewed as a simple nationalistic reaction against the Turkish invasion. This antipathy for the Turks was certainly a feature of eleventh- and twelfth-century Syria too. The king of kings theory is almost certainly no more than the romantic musing of a western orientalist.*
If the murders and the sacrifices of the fidai’in were therefore entirely religiously driven, as I believe they were, then what of the myth of the Assassins being hashshashin, or addicts of hashish? Certainly, the fidai’in were enraptured with the idea of attaining Paradise, perhaps even unnaturally so. But were the exhausted, starving and outnumbered Crusaders at Antioch, who saw, quite distinctly, an army of their own dead pilgrims and knights rise up and ride with them against the Turkish army of Kerbogha, any less so?
The consumption of hashish was certainly common in the medieval Middle East – a traveller to Persia in the 1920s even suggested that in that period at least 30 per cent of the population was addicted to the drug as well as to opium.* This may be why Marco Polo and other western chroniclers ending up confusing the facts. The Mamluk sultan Baybars had to expressly deny its use to his troops. Tradition records that the first Sufi to discover the usefulness of the substance for getting in direct contact with God was Sheikh Haydar of Khurasan, who requested that the plant be grown around his tomb upon his death; he gave his name to a colloquialism for the drug – the wine of Haydar. He left a charming description of his first high: ‘I plucked a few leaves and ate them and got into a happy mood in which you find me now.’† The only thing that can be said here is that the sheikh’s reaction seems to be a common one to the drug, and that it does little to incite fervour, rather the opposite. Even if it did so, as Shakespeare’s porter in Macbeth said of the demon drink, ‘it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.’‡
The use of hashish is certainly a misnomer, just one slur among many others made against the fidai’in by the Sunni religious propagandists. Later, Marco Polo would have heard the tales of Assassin grand masters corrupting their followers with hashish from the lips of Crusaders and from Sunni lords of the Levant – it is notable that the Crusader writers treat the Nizari Ismailis in much the same manner as the Sunni writers, who placed the sect beyond even that of simple heresy. Another term they used, mulhid, grouped the Assassins with the lowest of the infidels, the polytheists. The term was obviously applied universally across the Islamic world, as even William of Rubruck, the pope’s envoy, wrote it as mulidet in his descriptions of the Assassins, during an account of his journey through the lands of the Mongol Golden Horde of Russia, to the Mongol capital of Qaraqorum in the 1250s. So the fidai’in were not chemically controlled and Marco Polo got far closer to the true motivation of the Assassins when he wrote that: ‘The chief thereupon addressing them, said: “We have the assurances of our Prophet that he who defends his lord shall inherit Paradise, and if you show yourselves devoted to the obedience of my orders, that happy lot awaits you.”’*
But was the religious fervour of the adherents merely manipulated by Hasan? After all, he never left the safety of Alamut castle, and in fact only left his room twice during his reign of over thirty years as grand master – yet he managed to direct murders all over the Middle East. It could be argued that this did occur, but equally, matters of religion were central to life in the Middle Ages – men spent more time preparing for the afterlife than any modern man can possibly conceive of.† Life was short and not occupied overmuch by luxury; preparation for Paradise or Hell was a very pressing concern, even for the young. Fatalism also appears to have been a constant aspect of medieval Islamic psychology. Indeed, such was the strength of belief in fate among Muslims, that both De Joinville, the Crusader and chronicler, and his near contemporary, the Arabic soldier Ibn Munqidh, both noted the phenomenon but from different viewpoints:
They think that no man can die, save on the appointed day; which is a thing no one ought to believe, for God has power to prolong our lives and to shorten them. And this the Bedouins believe, and this is why they will not wear armour when they go into battle.‡
The hour of one’s death is not brought nearer by exposing oneself to danger nor delayed by being over cautious.§
Following his sacrifice, what did the fidai have to look forward too? The Quran has enough verses pertaining to Paradise not to require the construction of further propaganda by Hasan. Sura 55 has the following:
They will recline on Carpets,
Whose inner linings will be
Of the Gardens will be
Near and easy of reach.
In them will be Maidens,
Chaste, restraining their glances,
Whom No man or Jinn
Before them has touched
Like unto rubies and coral.
And besides these two,
There are two other Gardens,
Dark-green in colour
From plentiful watering
In them each will be
Two springs pouring forth water
In continuous abundance
In them will be Fruits,
And dates and pomegranates:
In them will be Fair Maidens, good, beautiful:
Maidens restrained as to glances, in goodly pavilions
Throughout the Sura, the following verse is repeated and interspersed with the listing of Heaven’s delights:
Then which of the favours
Of your Lord will ye deny?
The line is decidedly double-edged, as the believer was expected to accept Paradise from God, but equally was expected to do God’s bidding on earth. Through carrying out God’s will, he would show his obedience; then there was obedience and reverence for the fidai’s master here on earth. Hasan reiterated in his writings the permanent need of mankind for a divinely guided teacher. His writings started from the Shiite doctrine of the talim, the authoritative teaching of the imams, and described, in very rigid terms how only the imam and his deputy on earth, in this case Hasan himself, was owed total loyalty.
The language of Ismaili treatises on the duty of followers to the teacher is built upon ideas of submission (islam), obedience (taa) and submissiveness (dhull).* Later grand masters would claim to be imams of the line of Nizar to assure such devotion, but Hasan seems not to have needed to do so. Perhaps his personal example was enough – he had sacrificed much for the cause. He could have retained a comfortable position at either the Saljuq or Fatimid court, but had suffered imprisonment, pursuit and exile from family for his faith. He was an example to his men and his prestige must have been immense within the Ismaili world, simply because so many men were prepared to lay down their lives for him and for his creed. As Napoleon said, ‘a man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.’ In terms of the appeal of martyrdom, the words of an Iranian soldier of the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s speaks volumes about the strength, not only of faith, but of the Persian lore of sacrifice:
Martyrdom brings us closer to God. We do not seek death but we regard death as a journey from one form of life to another, and to be martyred while opposing God’s enemies brings us closer to God. There are two phases to martyrdom: we approach God and we also remove the obstacles that exist between God and the people.†
Assassination, the weapon of offensive-defence, had therefore been selected, but this could not be an immediate riposte to the Saljuq threat. Recruitment, training, target selection and simple opportunity would certainly all delay the planned offensive. Hasan’s more immediate concern was with defence. He knew that his planned campaign of terror had enough ideology to sustain it: his preaching, with its emphasis on martyrdom and its promise of divine and human fulfilment, was enough to fill his Assassin soldiers with sufficient pride and courage, and ensure their absolute devotion. He was putting in place the organisation to maintain the planned assault over a protracted period, but first he needed a defence plan for the counter-attack that his first killing would certainly provoke from the Saljuqs.
He travelled to the environs of Qazvin, where his operatives had been reconnoitring for suitable ‘ready-made’ solutions to the problem. Hasan was personally involved in the acquisition of his key stronghold, Alamut.
Hasan’s achievement in capturing Alamut is shrouded in a large degree of mystery. It has been suggested variously that he managed to convert the keeper of the fortress, or that he managed to sneak so many of his followers into Alamut’s garrison that one morning its constable awoke to find himself the only non-Ismaili left within its walls. A third tale had Hasan simply buying the ruin from an unhappy owner, and there is an additional account that is certainly an historical topos, attached to this last story. It says that Hasan offered the owner of Alamut a large sum of gold for a patch of land in the fortress’s environs that could be enclosed only within a cow skin. The greedy owner acquiesced at which point Hasan cut the cowhide into fine strips and completely encircled Alamut’s walls with it.
Whatever the case, Hasan occupied Alamut in 1090. His gold or his effort had secured him a very rough gem – Alamut was in poor condition, with crumbling walls and deficiencies in both water supply and local food supply – it would have been unable to withstand any kind of siege. It was the peculiar nature of the nascent Ismaili ‘state’ that solved both these problems. Canals and waterways in the fortress’s environs were repaired and the lands were tilled and sown – both by his followers and by villagers, who saw in the Ismailis an organisation that was more likely to protect them from robbery, and less likely to squeeze them for tax, than the local Saljuq authorities. How many of these individuals actually converted ‘fully’ to Ismailism is a difficult question, but there were certainly a sizeable number of new supporters of the new rule among the peasantry.
Alamut is usually translated as ‘Eagle’s Teaching’, from a pre-Islamic tale of a Persian lord being led to found the castle on the mountain’s inaccessible high peak after seeing an eagle alight there. The castle was rebuilt in 860 by a Shiite missionary, who was also coincidentally called Hasan, and its history extended into the eighteenth century when it became a state prison. It was in fact only one of about fifty fortified places in the mountain district, but it was important because it sat above the shortest road between the Caspian Sea and the city of Qazvin.
It would be wrong to think of Alamut in the sense of a western medieval castle. It did not strategically dominate a large area of fertile land, nor was it built in a greatly ‘scientific’ manner like the huge concentric castles of the Crusaders in Syria, that, due to their interruption of Muslim communications, also had an offensive role. It seems likely that, because of the highly mobile nature of first Arab and then later Turkish warfare, fortification was never really that highly developed in the medieval Islamic world. However, it did reach a degree of sophistication under the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, in response to the two-front war they fought in Syria against the Crusaders and Mongols.
The Persian word used to describe Alamut is qal’a which translates simply as ‘fortified place’ rather than castle per se. It is perhaps therefore better to view Alamut as a bolt-hole or refuge, not dissimilar to the fortified villages of Umbria, Tuscany and the Marches in Italy. As a bolt-hole, however, Alamut was perfect. The Crusaders of Syria enhanced natural defences by the addition of glacis walls and turrets. For Alamut there was no need to decide on how to manufacture killing zones or how high a curtain wall would need to be, simply because of the forbidding nature of the fortress’s environs. The descriptions by a visitor to Hasan’s bastion in the early twentieth century describe how the journey up to the mountain stronghold begins with a long passage through gorges, and along narrow and difficult paths that traverse steeply descending and ascending spurs. Well below the mountain on which Alamut sits, there are two rivers forming gorges which are ‘quite impassable after heavy rain or snow’,* and only after that does the going get very difficult.
The one useable path goes down into a narrow passage, cut through the hills by fast-flowing mountain streams that become rivers in winter. Then there is an easier section of valley that might hearten an assailant, but then he would have to traverse the slopes of the main range, before re-crossing another ravine to arrive in another valley below the Rock of Alamut. Standing below would, however, probably be quite a depressing experience for any erstwhile attacking force, as this rock has almost vertical walls which are about six hundred feet high, having been lifted volcanically into a standing position. They can only be approached on one side, thus immediately limiting the options for encirclement and dispersed attack – staples of medieval siege warfare. Defence of this one viable point of entry would have been easy, even for the undoubtedly limited garrison of about two hundred men that Alamut could have accommodated.* At its base, the profusion of smaller rounded hills would have made the placing of mangonels difficult, and any rainfall ensured that the whole area would be flooded by the sudden appearance of streams and rivers. Even in dry weather the uneven surface that was full of ravines would have made it extremely hard to muster and move troops around the area.
Hasan and his predecessors had improved the rock’s natural defences with both extensive walls encircling its very top and fortifications below. These walls were simple compared to the masonry work seen in the cut-stone edifices of Crak des Chevaliers or Montfort in Syria, but then mining of the walls of Alamut would have been a near impossible option for any attacker due to the nature of the ground.
The fact that Hasan fortified quickly in response to an imminent threat of attack by Malikshah and Nizam al-Mulk is indicated by the rectangular holes in the upper stones of many of the walls. It seems evident that quickly erected wooden structures were used to improvise higher walls in a reduced time frame. There is no evidence of a natural water supply to Alamut, but the canal construction discussed above was diverted and brought a water supply underground, into the bowels of the castle. The area around the castle boasted orchards, and it seems that the entire mountain region was cultivated quite effectively. Even in the early twentieth century, despite the poverty of the soil, it seems that this area grew rice and other staple crops in relative abundance.† Contemporary Muslim writers also described the astonishing fertility of the stark mountain valley – it seems likely that it was their descriptions of this improbable lushness, disseminated throughout the East on the tongues of merchants and travellers, that eventually mutated into the gardens of Paradise that Marco Polo described so lyrically, and with such blithe indifference to fact:
The Old Man was called Alaoddin in their language. In a valley between two mountains he had constructed the largest and most beautiful garden that ever was seen. Every good fruit in the world grows there. And in that place he caused to be built the most beautiful house and palace ever seen, because they were gilded and adorned with all the beautiful things in the world. And furthermore he had conduits built. Through one of these flowed wine, through another milk, through another honey, and through another water. And the most beautiful women and girls were there, who knew how to play all instruments and who sang and danced better than any other women. And the Old Man made his people believe that his garden was Paradise. And the reason why he had built it in such a way was that Muhammad had told the Saracens that those who go to Paradise will have as many beautiful women as they want and that there will flow rivers of wine, milk, honey, and water. And so he had ordered that garden to be made according to the way Muhammad had described
Paradise to the Saracens, and the Saracens of that country truly believed the garden to be Paradise.*
It is hard to relate the above to the stark environment in which Alamut sits, and Hasan’s lifestyle and those of his adherents was equally spartan. It is also possible that Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone and the other Europeans who reported these fantastic tales of the secret oases of rapture to be found in the Old Man of the Mountain’s sanctuary here on Earth, had also misunderstood Ismaili doctrine and its stress on the nearness of the Kingdom of God. Those European writers who were churchmen certainly should have understood this idea, simply because it was much akin to one of the driving causes of the Crusading movement – that of there being two Jerusalems: the physical city and the celestial city of God, and the idea that both could be attained in this lifetime.† The following piece from a Sunni ‘mole’ who claimed to have been initiated into all the Batinis’ sacraments, describes how Paradise in the next world could only be reached by attaining understanding in this life:
He says: ‘If someone does not reach the Garden of Paradise in this world, he will not reach it in the Hereafter, because the Garden of Paradise is exclusively for the masters of understanding and the people of minds, not for the ignorant. The best of things is what is hidden, and that is why the Garden of Paradise is called the Janna, because it is mustajanna [veiled, concealed]. The jinn are so-called because of their concealment from human beings. The grave is called the majanna, because it covers the person inside it. The shield is called the mijann, because the warrior covers himself with it. In this Garden of Paradise [janna] is that which is screened from these degenerate creatures who have no knowledge and no minds.’‡
Hasan’s defence plan relied on generating among the local populace an unshakeable fervour and undeviating devotion for the Ismaili faith and himself, as much as it did on fortresses and mountains. His regime was a harsh one. He killed one of his own sons because of a false charge of misconduct, and despite his regret upon learning the truth, he still found it in himself to put his second son to death for drinking wine.* A flute player was expelled from Alamut forever and music was banned by the grand master. Given that the above interdictions on wine and song were for all the adherents of the faith, from the most ordinary members upwards, we can be sure that the training and lifestyle of the elite fidai’in was highly, if not severely, disciplined.
The skills of dissimulation and disguise required a considerable education. Learning the language of their foes – in this early period, Turkish – would not have been a requirement, as Islam carried a mix of languages and Arabic remained the lingua franca, but the mannerisms of individuals such as merchants and military men would have been studied and emulated. This was particularly the case later, when ‘sleepers’ were deployed in royal courts, and even more so once the operation went truly international, as in the attempt on the Great Khan’s life and the slaying of Crusader princes. Even with this expansion of the operation, however, the fidai’in do not seem to have received any training in languages contrary to what has been suggested in the inventive accounts of occidental chroniclers of the Crusaders, and later European writers, such as Burchard of Strasbourg, who claimed that the fidai were taught, ‘Latin, Greek, Roman, Saracen as well as many others’.†
The first great test of Hasan’s defence plan came in 1092, with Malikshah’s launch of a twin offensive against Alamut and Quhistan, a region far to the south-east of Alamut in the central lands of the Saljuq Empire. Hasan’s agents had managed to subvert Quhistan almost completely, leading to the capture of its fortified places and an insurrection against its Turkish lords. Such newly acquired territories were designated as jazira, or islands, by the Ismaili Assassins and there would be many more such outposts.
A siege of Alamut was started in June by one of Malikshah’s emirs and in the early stages it looked likely that Alamut might fall, as Hasan had few supplies and his garrison consisted of only about eighty men – but these few were enough to hold off the besiegers until help started to arrive from Qazvin. Only about three hundred men came to Alamut’s rescue but surprisingly this was enough to turn around the situation. According to the Ismaili sources, this small force made a sally from Alamut in October 1092 and routed the Saljuq forces. This seems unlikely – indeed other writers indicate that the Saljuqs saw virtually nothing of the enemy, except for the ominous figure of one white-robed individual, who was often seen in the distant peaks, observing them, but who disappeared into nothingness when approached. What is more probable, therefore, is that Hasan’s fortifications, the beginnings of winter and the difficulty of maintaining the Saljuq army’s supplies in the high mountains were enough to erode the morale of Malikshah’s men.
Hasan’s defensive strategy had passed through its baptism of fire, but what really stopped the Saljuq campaign was his first fidai’in offensive. Hasan ‘spread the snare of artifices in order at the first opportunity to catch some splendid game, such as Nizam al-Mulk, in the net of destruction and increase thereby his own reputation’.* The chosen Assassin was Bu Tahir Arrani, and he timed his attack for a moment when it was obvious that Nizam al-Mulk’s guard would be down. The elderly great wazir had just completed his work for the day in the audience chamber and was being carried in his litter to the tent of his women when Arrani struck him with his dagger. The Assassin was disguised as a wandering Sufi, and no doubt the wazir’s mind was distracted with thoughts of the evening’s pleasures to be had. The Sufi approached the wazir with a petition and while Nizam was reading it his killer drove the dagger into his chest. Nizam al-Mulk’s bodyguard hacked Arrani to death as he became entangled in the tent-ropes but it was too late – the wazir was dead, and with his death the Saljuq Empire began to splinter. Malikshah died shortly after Nizam al-Mulk, as a result the Saljuq assault on Quhistan fizzled out; the sultana followed her husband to the grave soon after, and an almost predictable civil war ensued. The Nizari Ismaili Assassin state had secured its first victory.
This was truly a double victory, in that the physical apparatus of the Saljuq Empire had been stalled by the internecine fighting that followed the death of the great wazir and sultan, but there was more to it than that. Mistrust had been sown at the very heart of government, and rumours abounded that Malikshah, in fear of his great wazir’s increasing power, had himself arranged for the killing of Nizam al-Mulk. Ibn al-Jawzi went as far as to claim that, ‘the beliefs of Sultan Malikshah were corrupted because of his companionship with Batinis,’ and that the sultan had been seduced by the preaching of the Assassin sect and was a secret convert.
The conspiracy theories really began to spin out of control, however, with the death of the sultan, which was laid at the caliph’s door. The story went that Malikshah had ordered Caliph al-Muqtadi to leave Baghdad and he was advancing towards the city when Nizam al-Mulk was murdered. The sultan then called on the caliph:
to tell him that he should leave Baghdad and go wherever else he liked. The caliph was perplexed. He asked the sultan for a month’s respite but the latter refused. The caliph sent for Taj al-Mulk [Nizam al-Mulk’s son] who was appointed as wazir after the murder of Nizam al-Mulk and told him to ask the sultan to give him ten days. Taj al-Mulk pleaded to the sultan for him saying that anyone who wants to travel from one place to another needs at least ten days for preparation, so why deny that to the caliph? The sultan ultimately granted ten days respite, and within the period of the ten days Malikshah fell ill and died.*
The implication that the caliph and the new wazir were involved in the sultan’s death by poison was strengthened by the fact that Taj al-Mulk and the caliph were in cahoots over the succession to the sultanate of the four-year-old son of Malikshah, Mahmud, over the expected heir, Berkyaruq. The subsequent murder of Taj al-Mulk by the former bodyguards of Nizam al-Mulk, despite his attempts to buy off their leaders with two hundred thousand dinars each, only added to the murkiness of the whole affair and the confusion that followed the deaths of the leaders of the state. Taj al-Mulk was torn to pieces by his father’s guards and his fingers were sent to Berkyaruq. All in all, this was a very satisfactory result for Hasan, as was the seizing of Berkyaruq by Mahmud’s supporters. They had intended to blind him in order to render him useless to his backers in the Nizamiyya bodyguard and were only restrained from doing so when Mahmud caught smallpox and died.
During this period of confusion that his first killing had evoked, Hasan went on the offensive with the seizure of the mountain castle of Girdkuh, in the eastern Elburz Mountains in 1096. Its appropriation was a relatively simple matter, given that the region’s governor was a secret convert to Ismailism and had given his loyalty to Hasan’s new Nizari Ismailism following the ‘official’ schism from the Fatimids in 1094. The chronicler Rashid al-Din claims that the fortress was, in fact, occupied by an Ismaili dai some two hundred years before the Assassins made their first killing.* The castle’s capture brought with it control of the main communication route between Khurasan and the west of Persia. However attempts to push their influence south towards Isfahan, whilst initially successful with the capture of two hill forts outside the city, ended badly with the massacre of all their supporters on the streets of the metropolis by Isfahan’s citizens and militia. This was only the first of a series of bitter reprisals against the sect in the cities of Persia. A general slaughter ensued in Nishapur in 1096 and the fate of ringleaders generally did not end with a simple execution but with a more elaborate and agonising death: ‘He was paraded on a camel through the streets of Isfahan, a spectacle for thousands, pelted with mud and dirt, and mocked in derisive verses; afterwards he was crucified, and hung on the cross for seven days. Arrows were fired at him as he hung there, helpless and tormented, and finally his body was burned to ashes.’†
The backlash detailed above, however, seems to have been very much a grass roots reaction, since the contenders for the Saljuq throne, for a short time at least, were content to leave the Assassins alone whilst they fought their brothers and half-brothers for the sultanate. The Isfahan operation got underway again and the dai Attash was able to get a position as a schoolteacher to the children of the garrison of a castle called Shahdiz to the south of the city. He was then able to convert enough of the troops to bring the fort over to the Nizari cause without the spilling of a drop of blood. At the nearby castle of Khalinjan, an Ismaili carpenter gave a huge banquet in a nearby village for its garrison; the troops enjoyed the party so much that this castle was also captured bloodlessly. The troops woke up the next day, presumably hungover and homeless – perhaps Sherman’s affirmation that ‘war is cruelty’ does not always hold true.
Sultan Berkyaruq involved himself even further than mere partying with the Assassins, and went as far as to enlist the Assassins of Quhistan against his brother’s lieutenants in Khurasan. Whilst there are tales of his own near assassination in 1096, the attempt had none of the hallmarks of the fidai’in and did not hold him back from a short political alliance with Hasan. It has been calculated that of the fifty assassinations made under Hasan’s reign as grand master, over half occurred in this early period of the Saljuq civil war, and that many of these were advantageous to Berkyaruq.* The nearest we have to a ‘catalogue’ of these murders is the recording of Juvaini, who was able to consult the Ismaili library of Alamut before it was consigned to flames by the Mongols. He tells us of Hasan’s ongoing campaign against the upper echelons of Saljuq government:
Some time after the death of Nizam al-Mulk two of his sons were also stabbed, one, whose name was Ahmad, in Baghdad – he became paralysed – and Fakhr al-Mulk in Nishapur. And from then onwards he used to cause the emirs, commanders and any notables to be assassinated by his fidai’in one after the other; and anyone who opposed him in any way he would get rid of with this trick. To record the names of all these people would take too long . . .†
The assaults on the sons of Nizam al-Mulk began in October 1100, when an emir of Rayy was stabbed to death in front of Fakhr al-Mulk as he walked in his garden. Under torture, the Assassin claimed that six more men were marked for death and when Fakhr tremulously enquired if he would be one of them, the fidai told him that he was too insignificant for their poniards. Fakhr was doubtless relieved, but he was to die later in Nishapur in 1106 as the victim of an Assassin disguised as a beggar. This fidai was also interrogated under torture and gave the names of twelve senior courtiers as Ismaili collaborators – all of whom were summarily executed by the Saljuqs. They were later shown to be innocent of all charges. In 1109 Ahmad al-Mulk was crossing the Tigris on his way to the Great Mosque of Baghdad when an Assassin leapt aboard his boat and struck him in the neck with his dagger, paralysing him, as Juvaini relates above.
Berkyaruq was riding a tiger, and soon enough he found that the Ismaili Assassin tiger had begun to devour chunks of his kingdom and his army. Army officers took bodyguards everywhere with them, and wearing mail under one’s clothes became highly fashionable. It was usual practice for officers to appear before their lord unarmed, a very obvious safeguard for the monarch in dangerous times, but Berkyaruq had to grant a special dispensation to his senior lieutenants so they could retain their swords in his presence – such was the general fear that others in the court circle had been turned by the Assassins, or were even disguised fidai’in.
By 1101, Berkyaruq had established some degree of control over western Persia, though his half-brother Muhammad still retained a large parcel of lands in the north of Iraq and in the Jazira. Unfortunately the central treasury had been emptied by his predecessor, Mahmud’s mother, Turkman Khatun, who had paid off as many of the emirs as she could, in order to ensure their hostility against Berkyaruq. Berkyaruq had to borrow fifty thousand dinars from the caliph in 1101 and before this the chronicler Bundari records how Mahmud could not even afford to buy the daily beer allowance for his officials and had to resort to returning empty beer boxes to the brewer to obtain credit.* Berkyaruq was only able to achieve the stabilisation of the western empire by effectively giving away Khurasan to his young half-brother, Sanjar.
The new sultan of eastern Persia fixed his sights on the reduction of the Ismaili Assassin islands that afflicted his realm. Sanjar sent a force to Quhistan, which laid waste to the countryside around the Assassin strongholds and then applied mangonels to the walls of their castles. The Ismailis were able to bribe off one of the emirs sent to destroy them, which gave them respite for some three years, but the same emir then returned with a force swollen with Sunni ghazi, or volunteer fighters. This time the castles, which obviously were not as impregnable as Alamut, were brought down by the mangonels. Ismaili women and children were enslaved and their leaders brought to heel and made to pledge that they would not rebuild their fortresses, rearm themselves or proselytise their faith. The Saljuq forces then retired with only this promise obtained from the Assassins – it proved worthless and Quhistan was soon enough undergoing re-infiltration by the sect. At first glance the Sanjar’s ‘clemency’ seems odd when compared to the absolute obliteration of the Ismailis that might have been expected, but it is very likely that he saw that Berkyaruq’s reign was coming to an end. Indeed the sultan died in 1105, and the potential battles between new contenders for the throne of the west were certainly more of a concern than a campaign of extirpation against a foe thought to have been contained.
Berkyaruq’s response in the west was equally fitful – it might be suggested that he only acted against the Ismailis at all because it played well with his Sunni subjects, who were now openly accusing him of complicity with the Assassins. Ibn al-Jawzi wrote that, ‘Berkyaruq, by his declaration of enmity towards the Nizaris removed the doubts in the minds of people so that the suspicion in which he was held began to melt away.’ He gave free reign to the pogroms against ‘fifth-column’ Ismailis in the cities of Persia, and Ibn al-Athir recorded that many, many innocents were caught up in the butchery that now extended to the cities of Iraq.
Hasan appears to have been temporarily stymied by the Saljuq response. The senior officers of the regime were on guard against his daggers and he had lost much of his extended power through the persecutions and mass executions in the cities. His response was perceptive, dramatic and inspired. Realising that an extension of the war was the only way to avoid his dominions being effectively surrounded by the more integrated Saljuq forces, he dispatched dais to Syria – a possession of the Saljuqs, but also a distracted and fractious province. Its political make-up had been as disturbed by the murder of Nizam al-Mulk, and the break up of the Saljuq Empire, as Persia had been, and it was now perfectly suitable for infiltration by the Ismailis and their Assassins. Of this Syrian campaign we will read more later.
Hasan turned back to more local issues. He was able to improve the defence of the Alamut region by the acquisition of the castle of Lamasar, which lay to the north-west of Alamut but still in the Elburz Mountains. Lamasar guarded an important pass to the Caspian Sea and cut across the main highway from Khurasan to the central cities of Iran. Hasan’s lieutenant, and successor as grand master, Buzurg Umid was put in charge of the operation to capture the castle and he achieved this through a stealthy attack upon the fortress in the middle of the night, in which the entire garrison was slain by silent daggers. Other not so silent, but nevertheless consecrated, daggers were sent with fidai’in to the Sunni religious leaders who had done so much in recent years to stir up the populace against the Ismailis. By assassinating some of these leaders, Hasan hoped to intimidate all the preachers. Hasan’s decision to target the Sunni religious intelligentsia shows an acute understanding of how Berkyaruq was being forced to act against the Ismailis by preachers and the public anger they stirred. By this act, Hasan also allowed his followers to vent their spleens, which could only be good for morale. The Mufti of Isfahan was murdered in his own mosque, thus fulfilling the Quranic prescription of ‘the life for the life, and the eye for the eye, and the nose for the nose, and the ear for the ear, and the tooth for the tooth, and for wounds retaliation’,* as it avenged the massacres of 1094. In Nishapur, the city of the massacres of 1096, retribution was also inflicted on the head of the most violent anti-Ismaili faction and again the murder had strong psychological overtones, as it was carried out in the city’s main mosque.
Despite these successes, the years from 1105 to 1118 were hard years for Hasan’s followers in the west of Persia. As discussed above, Berkyaruq died in 1105 and Sultan Muhammad acceded to the western throne. Ismaili settlements and strongholds in the hills and mountains around Isfahan were raided constantly, as Muhammad would not tolerate their presence so close to his chosen capital. Such was the brutality that the Saljuq troops brought to the campaign and the entire region, that the Nizaris were even joined in their resistance against the sultan by the Jewish congregations of the area.
Shahdiz came under intense attack, so the dai Attash, who had been responsible for its acquisition, now arranged its defence and he did so chiefly through the unusual military strategy of religious argument. He sent letters to the sultan, claiming that apart from a few minor points of doctrine, the Ismailis were in fact the same as Sunnis and therefore warranted the protection of the sultan. Hasan had written to Malikshah in this same vein in the past, claiming that the Abbasids and Nizam al-Mulk had misrepresented him and his followers to the sultan for their own ends. It was of course this correspondence that led to the rumours of Malikshah having, at the very least condoned, if not having actually arranged, the murder of his great wazir. Attash obviously wished to create the same sort of confusion and mutual suspicion at Muhammad’s court, as Hasan’s letters had at Malikshah’s.
The correspondence also bought time for the dai to organise the physical defences of Shahdiz. Muhammad’s advisers treated the note seriously and spent weeks debating it. When this debate had finally run its course, the religious jurists decided that annihilation of the heretical sect was acceptable and this resolution was no doubt helped along by the writings of al-Ghazali: ‘The meaning of repentance of an apostate is his abandoning of his inner religion. The secret apostate does not give up his inner confessions . . . He may be killed for his unbelief because we are convinced that he stays an unbeliever who sticks to his inner beliefs.’* Doubtless, the fact that an Assassin very nearly took the life of one of the sultan’s senior emirs during the deliberations also encouraged their decision to make war on Attash.
Attash then started on a new stalling tactic. He offered to withdraw from the Isfahan environs, but demanded another fortress further away, citing the massacres of Nizaris in the 1090s as his need for a safe haven. This was agreed to and arrangements were made for the Nizaris of Shahdiz to be allowed to go to Alamut and to another stronghold in the southern Zagros Mountains. Ismailis had been living relatively peacefully there since 1092, when a dai who had come to the region as a shoemaker had converted an enclave of former followers of the Fatimids to the Nizari faith, and had secured the area for Hasan’s sect by obtaining the fortress of Arrajan.
The party for Arrajan left and arrived safely at their home, but then Attash and the remaining garrison at Shahdiz broke the accord and decided on resistance. He concentrated all his efforts on defence in one wing of the castle, but having only eighty men meant he still had to leave one wall undefended, with only shields and spears propped up against the battlements as a somewhat hopeful ruse against an attack on that part of the castle. It was soon pointed out to the sultan that one part of the ramparts was suspiciously quiet and the Saljuqs soon broke in through the undefended sector. There was a general slaughter of the garrison, although it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise, as Nizari Ismaili Assassins almost always fought to the death. Attash’s wife, wearing her finest jewellery and clothes, completed the horror show by flinging herself from the high ramparts on to the stony ground below. Attash himself was captured and after being shown living to the populace of Isfahan, he was flayed alive. His skin was then stuffed with straw, presumably so that his body would not putrefy too badly as it was sent on tour around the cities of Persia while his head travelled to Baghdad. As he was being stretched out to be flayed, a member of the crowd mockingly called out that astrology – the understanding of which all Assassin masters were supposed to be adept – had surely not predicted this end. Attash is said to have replied that he had, through the stars, portended a ceremonial parade through the streets of Isfahan for himself, but not of this kind.
Attash’s fate, the ongoing massacres and the unremitting fanaticism of the Nizari Ismailis in defending their masters and their homes, seems to give the lie to the second half of Sherman’s axiom on the nature of war – ‘The crueller it is, the sooner it will be over’ – because this war would continue with just such barbarism and with new foes for the Nizaris, for the next century and a half.
Muhammad instructed his brother Sanjar in the east to begin attacks on the Assassin strongholds in his lands. In the west, Arrajan fell to Muhammad and the smaller castle-community of Takrit in Iraq was evacuated by the Nizaris, as the western Saljuq offensive began to show more success. In 1107 Sultan Muhammad then seems to have settled on the destruction of Hasan’s headquarters as the key to the war. Whilst the immediate storming of Alamut was not possible, due to its near-impregnable position, the sultan’s troops attempted, by a process of bringing down the forts surrounding Alamut, and destruction of its croplands, to both isolate and to starve out Hasan’s followers. The campaign went on for eight years, with the Saljuq troopers returning every autumn to burn crops and slay villagers. It was Hasan’s cold determination and fierce discipline that ensured the survival of the Ismaili sect during this period, although many of its adherents did not. Juvaini writes of the inhabitants of Alamut eating grass to stave off hunger. The grand master sent his wife and daughters to Girdkuh, as if their presence might cause him some weakness of will. He wrote to the castle’s governor, ‘since these women work the spindle on behalf of our propaganda, give them their needs as wages therefore.’*
During these eight years the regime pushed itself beyond human pity and weakness – it was during this time that Hasan killed both of his sons. The first, Husain, had assumed that he would reign when his father died, but Hasan allowed no special status for kin. For him the hierarchy was all, and when Husain was accused of murdering one of his competitors for the succession, Hasan was quick – almost certainly too quick – to bring him to trial and execution. Perhaps wine was solace for the loss of a brother, but one goatskin of wine was enough to seal the fate of the second son. Hasan’s wife and daughters never returned and he was now devoid of family having either effectively banished or killed them all. His adamantine spirit was impervious to worldly needs, and yet a Byzantine mission to Alamut reported the following about Hasan:
His natural dignity, his distinguished manner, his smile, which is always courteous and pleasant but never familiar or casual, the grace of his attitudes, the striking firmness of his movements, all combine to produce an undeniable superiority, which is magnetic in its domination. There is no pride or arrogance, he emanates calm and good will.†
It was perhaps only the character of Hasan that saw the Nizaris survive the eight-year war, although the fidai’in must have also boosted the castle garrison’s morale with the killing of the religious judge, or qadi, of Nishapur at the end of Ramadan (during the very celebrations that marked the end of the fast) in 1109. Similarly, in 1108 they had managed to kill the qadi of Isfahan, despite his large bodyguard and body armour, in the middle of Friday prayers in one of the city’s main mosques. By this point the fidai’in and their deeds were becoming the stuff of legend in Persia’s great cities, and at home mothers of Assassins would weep with joy at news of their sons’ success in murder and subsequent sacrifice. Indeed, it is recorded that a Syrian mother who learned of her son’s successful mission and death, ‘anointed her eyelids with kohl, and was full of joy; then after a few days her son returned unharmed, and she was grieved and tore her hair and blackened her face’.* The fidai’in also appear to have adopted a uniform at this time for domestic guard duties, comprising a simple white robe with red cords to secure it, red turbans and red boots. The uniform may have been created as a visible sign of resistance, designed to boost the morale of the lower orders of the sect – white was chosen simply because it was the complete opposite of the black of the Abbasids’ ceremonial robes. It seems that the fidai’in also carried large axes when guarding the grand master; the immense size of these weapons may have been more ceremonial than anything else. Their impressive size, and the white-robed guards bearing them, gave prestige appropriate to Hasan’s position as an uncrowned king and created the image of strength at the heart of the movement.
Such strength was certainly required in 1117 as mangonels were brought, laboriously, up to the walls of both Alamut and Lamasar. As described earlier, siege artillery in the twelfth century was generally poorly developed. The manual of warfare that al-Tarsusi produced for Saladin tells us that the Persian or Turkish mangonel could only throw stones of ‘more or less’ fifty pounds, although he goes on to discuss a traction-driven catapult that must have been capable of more than this. Therefore, the physical impact of these devices could not have been that great, given the height of the rock on which Alamut sat, but the psychological effect must have been vast, and this time the Turks seemed determined to drive the siege to its full conclusion.
However, in April 1118, news of Muhammad’s death in Isfahan was heard, and true to form, the Saljuq emirs packed up their war against the Assassins and ran back to the capital, to ensure first place for themselves in the reframing of power that attended the death of every sultan. Rumours abounded that the Assassins of Shahdiz, who of course had lost their fortress and leader Attash, to the Saljuqs, had bribed and threatened a barber or surgeon to use a poisoned blade on Sultan Muhammad. The tale seems unlikely, simply because it is out of character with the Assassins’ ethos of death by the dagger, followed by the sacrifice of the Assassin’s own life, but it proves how the psychological fallout of the assassination campaign was just as important as the killings themselves. It was also suggested that the wazir at the court of Muhammad was a secret Ismaili, and that he had hobbled the operation of 1118 by making accusations against the expedition’s leading emir – causing his downfall and execution once Muhammad was dead.*
The death of Muhammad brought a respite to the Nizaris; it also brought Sanjar, the thirty-two-year-old sultan of the east to the top of the Saljuq pile, where he would remain for the next thirty-nine years. The new Great Sultan faced three major problems. Politically, the Saljuq Empire was still a loose confederation of semi-independent kingdoms, over which he exercised only nominal sovereignty – this made concerted action difficult. Unfortunately, concerted action was exactly what was required to face his second problem in the north-east of the empire: the Ghuzz Turk tribes – the very tribes from whom the Saljuqs had come – had always been troublesome neighbours, ever since the Arab defeat of the Chinese in 751 and the extension of Islamic power into the region that followed this victory. They were, however, now beginning to raid Islamic lands with impunity, and were also being pushed further west by events beyond the River Oxus.
The Khitai Liao Dynasty of China had fallen and the Khitai were pushed from western China by the new lords of China, the Jin. The Khitai were still a powerful force, however, and they displaced the Ghuzz Turks, who, having nowhere else to go, had started to enter the Dar al-Islam en masse, once again, from 1100 onwards. All this would give rise to the myth of Prester John in the west and the hopes of the Crusader kingdoms that a great Christian king would ride from the east to destroy Islam. What it meant for Sanjar was that his presence in the east was required more than in the west of his lands. He therefore settled his capital at Marv, and tried to deal with the Ghuzz migration, through military confrontation and partly through meeting their needs for pasture and attempting to pacify them, using officers called shahnas. These officers treated the Ghuzz as special subjects and whilst they collected dues of sheep for the sultan’s table, they also ensured there was enough grassland and water for each tribe. This appeasement of the Ghuzz worked for a while, but the unruly tribesmen, and the problem of maintaining his superiority in the highly chaotic world of Saljuq politics, distracted Sanjar to a great extent from his third problem – the need to destroy the Nizari Assassins.
Sanjar did, however, manage to campaign on and off against the Assassins of Alamut in person and his emirs worked away against Quhistan for years, burning cropland and denuding the area of its population. The Saljuq troops were told once again that the enslavement of Ismaili women and children was acceptable. This was totally against Islamic law but the Nizaris’ status as mulhid meant they were outside of the umma and this fine point of theology allowed the Saljuqs to put them into bondage.
The sultan’s first brief campaign against Hasan’s stronghold was brought to a sudden halt by the grand master’s imaginative correspondence, which was effectively the medieval equivalent of a letter-bomb campaign:
Hasan-i-Sabbah would send ambassadors to seek peace but his offers were not accepted. He then by all manner of wiles bribed certain of the sultan’s courtiers to defend him before the sultan; and he suborned one of his eunuchs with a large sum of money and sent him a dagger, which was struck in the ground beside the sultan’s bed one night when he lay in a drunken sleep. When the sultan awoke and saw the dagger he was filled with alarm but not knowing who to suspect he ordered the matter to be kept secret. Hasan-i-Sabbah then sent a messenger with the following message: ‘Did I not wish the sultan well that dagger which was struck into the hard ground would have been planted in his soft breast’. The sultan took fright and from then on inclined towards peace with them. In short because of this imposture the sultan refrained from attacking them and during his reign their cause prospered.*
Juvaini has the story half right. In fact the Nizaris did not prosper in this period but they did consolidate what they had. After Sanjar’s emissaries had witnessed one fidai cutting his own throat and another leaping from Alamut’s battlements to his death upon a mere nod from Hasan, there was a tacit agreement made between Sanjar and the grand master that the Nizaris should retain their lands and most of the revenue they drew from it, as long as they remained ‘good’ subjects of the sultan. Sanjar also appears to have gained from this accord the opportunity to have fidai’in deployed against mutual enemies, and a promise that the dais would not proselytise in his lands. Hasan seemed to have secured a great deal with Sanjar and, given the relentless Saljuq assaults of the last few years, he may have needed just such an agreement, if only to repair the physical fabric of his state. However, in many ways the agreement was the beginning of the end of the Nizari Assassins as a real force in Persian life. Their dawa was the state’s raison d’être and it demanded that conversion to Ismailism and destruction of the upholders of wrong religion must continue. By voluntarily denying themselves the right to preach everywhere, they effectively gave up the ends for which their killings were the means – the Ismaili faith’s eventual victory in the lands of Islam. Without that goal, the faith was little more than an increasingly ossified exercise in religious conservatism, and without a cause they were little more than common murderers. It would take another great religious revolution, and the leadership of another remarkable leader in Syria, to at least partially revive its soul.
Hasan died in 1124, certainly of natural causes, and perhaps even comfortably in his bed. Given the landscape of blood and murder that medieval Persian politics was, this in itself was quite a feat, but his achievement was much more than that. He had created the oddest of things – a dictatorship that individuals entered into freely. There was no free thinking for adherents of the grand master – acceptance of his teaching as the representative of the imam and a total rejection of free choice was the only path to Paradise. To modern eyes, such devotion might seem to be a suffocation of all things human, but for creating an army of God on earth it was ideal and it would maintain the Nizari Assassin cause through another century and a half of struggle.
The struggle with the Saljuqs reignited in 1126, with assaults by Sanjar’s emirs against both Quhistan and Alamut. Hasan had selected Buzurg Umid as his successor – the choice was not surprising: Umid had been a child page in the castle of Alamut before its capture by Hasan, and had been taken under the grand master’s wing from an early age. He had also led the assault that had captured the castle of Lamasar. The fact that he and his comrades had moved so calmly and methodically around the castle, slitting the throats of all of its inhabitants surely proved that he was just the man of steel to follow the man of ice.
Initially Sanjar’s men were successful, with an entire Ismaili village being put to the sword in Quhistan. The denouement of this slaughter was the village head leaping to his death from the highest minaret in the town. There was also the partial destruction and burning of another settlement, from which a great deal of booty was taken. Then, however, the campaign started to unravel, as the emirs headed north to the environs of Alamut. They were roundly beaten in a pair of pitched battles that included local forces fighting for each side. The Saljuqs lost both booty and territory and had one commander captured. With such a dismal end to the campaign, revenge scarcely seemed necessary but Umid exacted it through his fidai’in anyway. This time, however, there was a new development in the methodology of killing. Sanjar’s wazir was the victim and he was killed by two trusted servants. His two favourite grooms had been in his service for just over a year when they revealed themselves to be fidai’in and killed him among his prize Arab horses, as he discussed which steed to give to the sultan for a New Year gift. They had hidden the dagger in a horse’s mane – from stroking the horse’s neck to the killing stroke was achieved in one swift movement. The audacious murder stopped the planning of any more attacks by the sultan and showed that Umid had absorbed all of Hasan’s understanding of human frailty and the psychology of terror.
Umid also followed Hasan’s policy with the building of further fortifications. The new castle of Maymundiz was founded to the northwest of Alamut. This apparent renaissance in the fortunes of the Nizaris brought Mahmud, the junior sultan of the west, to the conclusion that negotiation with the sect was a better option than confrontation, especially as he was now having difficulties with his own emirs. His plans, however, unravelled when two Nizari envoys from Alamut were torn to pieces by the Isfahan mob, before they could even begin talks with the sultan’s men. Umid then showed that he was also capable of fighting ‘classical’ warfare as well as a war of terror, by attacking the city of Qazvin, killing four hundred people and robbing the treasury. The death of one Saljuq emir in this confrontation was enough to send the rest of the garrison into a precipitate flight.
Perhaps the Nizaris on the battlefield were just as indifferent to personal safety as their Assassins were in their consecrated killings, and such an ideology would have been truly terrifying to soldiers trained in the Turkish tradition of avoiding direct confrontation. Indeed, Islamic war manuals of this period state that the ability to protect oneself, and not to throw away one’s life, is a duty of the soldier to the army. The Turks’ abrupt flight when confronted by a foe quite ready to die also brings Herodotus’s thoughts on the Persian defeat at Marathon to mind: he says they failed because of ‘that most dangerous tendency in war: a wish to kill but not to die in the process’. Dealing with an enemy who is prepared to fight to the death has been a problem for many armies at different times throughout history. The Turko-Mongolic method of warfare, as described by John of Plano Carpini, ‘if they can avoid it, the Mongols do not like to fight hand to hand but they wound and kill men and horses with their arrows; they only come to close quarters when men and horses have been weakened by arrows’, was fine for keeping such dangerous individuals at more than a weapon’s length away on an open battlefield, but in urban combat, as at Qazvin, closing in on the enemy with a death wish was unavoidable.
Mahmud responded to the debacle of Qazvin with an assault on Alamut, but this was easily beaten off, and his failure against the Assassins was complete by the time of his death in 1131. His and Sanjar’s failed campaigns had actually left the Nizaris stronger than before, as the populace were attracted by the resistance of these Persians to the oppressive Turks. Mahmud’s death also saw the usual infighting among his relatives and emirs for control of western Persia. His son, Masud, won the initial stages of the contest and was proclaimed sultan, but then many of his senior emirs connived with the caliph to depose him. The caliph’s interest in further disturbing the Saljuq polity was probably based around his territorial ambitions. The caliphs had always retained personally sponsored religious college lands around Baghdad. Now with the splintering of the Saljuq Empire into petty principalities, and Sanjar’s preoccupation with the east, Caliph al-Mustarshid was attempting, like the renaissance pope Julius II against the French, to extend his temporal empire and free himself of the Saljuqs.
It has long been a subject of dispute just how much involvement Sanjar and Masud had in the subsequent slaying of the Abbasid caliph by Assassins, but it certainly worked to the advantage of Masud. In 1135, the caliph took his small Baghdad army into the sultan’s lands, but half of his force quickly deserted him, and Masud captured him easily and took him to the city of Maragha in north-west Persia, enticingly close to Nizari territory. Masud’s problem now was what to do with his illustrious prisoner – the caliph, by involving himself with matters of this earth, had become a political embarrassment. Acts of lèse majesté such as this normally called for execution of the miscreant and extirpation of his family, but the caliph was the titular head of the Sunni world and really belonged to the spiritual world. Masud’s solution seems to have been not to lift a finger to end the caliph’s life, but not to stir himself to its defence either. Sanjar attempted to keep himself clear of the deed with a message to Masud:
When my child Masud Ghiyas-ad-Din has seen this edict let him at once proceed to the Commander of the Faithful and after kissing the dust of the audience hall, which is the asylum of all the world, let him crave fair pardon for the crimes and misdemeanours which are the result of desertion [by God] and seek forgiveness for the faults he has committed; and let him know that the falling of so many thunderbolts and the blowing of violent winds such as no one has experienced the like of in this age and which have now continued for twenty days - these things I consider to have been caused by that event and I fear lest from this disturbance the armies and the people be thrown into confusion. By God! Let him see fit to make amends, let him regard it as his bounden duty!*
Certainly there had been earthquakes and thunderstorms all over the empire for the last month and the last thunderclap came when Masud left the palace he had given over to the caliph, unattended and unguarded. He took his entire retinue with him to greet mere messengers from his brother on the road outside Maragha. Such was the ease of murdering the caliph that a large band of Assassins was able to virtually walk into Maragha and stab the Commander of the Faithful to death. Celebrations erupted inside Alamut and lasted for seven days and nights.
Umid’s Assassins had previously murdered the governor of Maragha and the prefect of Isfahan; in Tabriz and Qazvin the prefect and mufti also fell to the fidai’in’s daggers. In 1138 they bagged their second caliph. Although in truth, Caliph al-Rashid had been ‘retired’ from the post by a panel of religious judges at Sultan Masud’s express orders, because he had been playing the same empire-building games of his predecessor. The ex-caliph was marching on Alamut with a small force to revenge the killing of al-Mustarshid, but he fell sick on the way and was resting in Isfahan when fidai’in entered his audience chamber and stabbed him to death. Juvaini tells us that, ‘from that time onwards the Abbasid Caliphs went into hiding and concealed themselves from the people,’† which was all fine for Sultan Masud and brought another seven-day celebration to Alamut. This apparently included the beating of kettledrums and blowing of trumpets from the ramparts of the fortress. Evidently Hasan’s interdiction on music had been allowed to lapse, or was at least ignored on very special occasions. The Nizaris also deployed regular forces to capture a Shiite preacher, a certain Abu Hashim, who had tried to set up an alternative radical religion to Ismailism in the villages at the edge of the Nizari domains. The Nizaris read the proofs of their religion to Hashim while they burned him.
It was business as usual for the Assassins despite Umid’s death from natural causes in February 1138, but normal business was becoming more and more difficult for Sanjar. Just to the south of the Aral Sea, a dynasty grew up from Turkish emirs who had stayed loyal to Malikshah but who upon his death began a quick march towards independence from the Saljuqs. These petty kings, perhaps somewhat pretentiously, took the title of Khwarazm shahs, and by the late 1130s they had become a discernable threat to the far north-east of Sanjar’s lands, just at a time when direct confrontation with the Khitai also seemed unavoidable. In 1141, Sanjar was totally defeated by the Khitai on the Qatwan steppe near Samarqand. He bravely rode into the Khitai lines at the head of his personal bodyguard of three hundred men and emerged with only fifteen remaining; a similar rate of attrition was applied to the rest of his army by the Khitai archers. It was to be only the first taste of the disasters that would come to Islam from Central Asia. The Khitai army was decidedly similar to the Mongol hordes of steppe archers that Chinggis Khan and his successors would later unleash on Persia.
With one battle, Sanjar lost lands across the Oxus River that Islam had held since 751, but even then his problems were not over – his chastisement at the hands of the Khitai just seemed to make the Ghuzz Turks within the Dar al-Islam more truculent. The Ghuzz killed a dues collector and refused to send meat to the sultan’s table. The shahna was sent to investigate and to bring the Ghuzz back into line, but they claimed the special rights of appeal to the sultan given to them in the reign of Malikshah. When the shahna returned with troops to back up his refusal to call the sultan into the affair, he and his son were killed by the Ghuzz. Sanjar reluctantly, and chiefly at the behest of his emirs, went to war with the Ghuzz – battle was joined in 1153 and Sanjar was defeated. His great cities of Marv and Nishapur were sacked and, worse still, he was captured.
The Ghuzz held him for three years in a cage, although oddly enough they still recognised him as their sultan and placed him on a throne during the day, and then returned him to his coop at night. He did eventually manage to escape his royal captivity, but died, broken by his experiences, soon after in 1157. The Ghuzz may have needed to have a sultan, even if they were his jailers, simply because they were unable to produce a government of their own. Ghuzz tribes overran Khurasan and Kirman but, unlike the Saljuqs, these tribes never accepted Islam or its cultural institutions. There was to be no order at all, to speak of, until the rise of the Khwarazm shahs from their regional obscurity, at the end of the century.
With the death of Sanjar, the eastern Saljuq Empire was effectively at an end – its demise had essentially been brought about by the knife stroke of one Assassin in 1092. The Assassins had acquired a new leader in 1138, in the form of Umid’s son, Muhammad, and the early part of his reign shows an odd provincialism in the Ismaili chronicles. Successful cattle-rustling raids are recorded proudly, as is the failed and halfhearted attack by Sultan Masud on Alamut in 1143. However, most of the warfare recorded in the chronicles was related to a vicious local contest with the Saljuq governor of Rayy, who built towers out of the skulls of those whom he merely suspected of being Ismaili. The governor was eventually bought to heel on the orders of Sanjar, who also found him to be a problem, and he was later murdered in Sultan Masud’s court in Baghdad. Sanjar received his head in a box; perhaps it cheered him a little after the events of 1141.
In a rare break from the narrow local politics and murder described above, in 1143 the minor Saljuq sultan in control of Baghdad, Daud, was assassinated. He was far from his realm and visiting Tabriz, when four Syrian fidai’in took his life. The Assassins involved in the killing were listed in the roll of honour kept in Alamut, which recorded both the victims of the Assassins and the fidai’in who carried out the murders. This was indeed odd, as the men had most definitely come from Syria, not from Persia, and had acted at the very least in connivance with, and at the worst in direct collaboration with, Zangi, the ruler of Mosul and leading light of the Syrian jihad against the Crusaders.
To discover why Zangi wished Daud dead, why he was fighting a counter-Crusade, and even how the Crusaders had ever managed to take most of Syria and threaten Egypt with their dominion in the first place, we have to go back once again to the Assassins’ daggers, the death they brought and the fear they inspired.