In this year also news was received from Homs that its lord, the emir Jana al-Dawla Husain Atabeg on descending from the citadel to the mosque for the Friday prayer, surrounded by his principal officers with full armour, and occupying his place of prayer, according to custom, was set upon by three Persians belonging to the Batini. They were accompanied by a sheikh, to whom they owed allegiance and obedience, and all of them were dressed in the garb of ascetics. When the sheikh gave the signal they attacked the emir with their knives and killed him and a number of his officers. There were in the mosque at the time ten Sufis, Persians and others; they were suspected of complicity in the crime, and were straightaway executed in cold blood, every man of them, although they were innocent. The people of Homs were greatly perturbed at this event, and at once dispersed in panic. Most of the Turks amongst the inhabitants fled to Damascus . . .
From the Damascus Chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanasi for the year 1102–3*
THE TACTICS USED IN Persia were repeated in Syria to good effect. Political murder was followed by political chaos and this allowed the Nizari Assassins to extend their control over both the territory and the loyalties of petty rulers and people. What was different in Syria was that there was a political wild card, in that Crusaders had entered the region in 1095. Despite their near destruction at both the Battle of Dorylaeum and the siege of Antioch, the Crusaders had completed the political fragmentation of the Levant by carving out, by the beginning of the twelfth century, a strong position on the Syrian coast, and around Jerusalem. They had also gained outposts as far inland as Edessa. In his chronicle, the Historia Hierosolymitana, Fulcher of Chartres asked why the many kingdoms of Islam feared to attack this little occidental colony and its people, and why Egypt, Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria did not send ‘at least a hundred times a hundred thousand fighters’ into the field to destroy the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem. The pious historian attributed the miracle of the survival of the Crusaders to God’s will. Certainly religion had something to do with it, but it was the faith and dawa of, first the Fatimids, and then the Nizari Assassins, that called into existence the exhausted and distracted state of Syria that the Crusaders entered in 1097. They had also ensured that the Crusaders would never face the full power of the Islamic world.
From as early as the tenth century, there had been Fatimid Ismaili religious missions operating in Syria. They had been sent to cultivate the peoples before the expected push of the Fatimid armies through Syria and on to Baghdad. But as we have seen, the Fatimid Islamic world-domination project effectively ran out of steam after the disappearance of Caliph Hakim in 1021, stalled in Syria and subsequently went into reverse once the Saljuqs had reinvigorated the Sunni cause, following their taking of Baghdad in 1055. The Fatimid dawa had, however, made successful inroads into much of Syria and left behind pockets of Mustali Ismailis.
The Sunni renaissance in Syria under their new champions began with the first Turkish invasions of 1063. In 1077 an attempt was made to invade Egypt itself, and by 1079 the Turks had lieutenants in both Damascus and Jerusalem, with Nizamiyya madrasas propagating the Sunni creed all over northern Syria. During this push west, the Turks met, almost inadvertently, the Byzantines in battle. The Saljuq sultan, Alp Arslan, had tried through parley to avoid a confrontation with the Byzantines, but the problem was that the sultan did not have total control of the Turcomen who had been raiding Byzantine lands. Indeed these Turcomen had been sent to the west of the sultanate, partly to fight the Fatimids, but also to remove their destructive tendencies from the heart of the Saljuq empire. The sultan therefore could not give a cast-iron guarantee that they would not continue their assaults against the Greeks in Anatolia. Meanwhile, the Greek emperor, Romanus, was spoiling for a fight. He had brought his army into Anatolia to secure the border, but the exercise had not gone well. His army was constantly harassed by Turks using hit-and-run raids, which even extended into the night. He was under political pressure at home to get a result, and his army, particularly the Turkish mercenary component, was deserting at an alarming rate. He rushed into battle with the sultan, without really thinking about what he was doing.
The emperor’s army met the sultan’s forces near Manzikert on 19 August in 1071, in one of history’s most significant battles, and the Greek army was annihilated. Or at least those who stood with the emperor were. Many of the Greek nobles deserted their leader early on in the fight. The capture and subsequent ransoming of Romanus was enough to end his reign and the panicking Byzantines, fearing that the Turks would follow up their victory by crossing the Bosporus, sent missives to the pope asking for a western army to come to their aid. The Turks were, however, looking south, not north, and began again their war with the Fatimids. By 1092 only the Syrian coastline remained in the hands of the Fatimids and they were only able to hold on to these cities because the Egyptian navy maintained supplies to their besieged garrisons.
The killing of Nizam al-Mulk brought all this Saljuq success to an end. The fragmentation of Persia and its polity brought about by this one assassination, and the death of Sultan Malikshah soon after, has been discussed above, but the situation was even worse in Syria. Tutush, the brother of Sultan Malikshah and ruler of Damascus, upon hearing of Malikshah’s death began his preparations for taking over the entire Saljuq Empire. He mustered his army and began occupying the territories of Syria one after another. Between 1092 and 1095, he conducted bloody campaigns that brought Syria’s infrastructure close to collapse. His objective was to take Aleppo and Antioch and other minor dependencies, before challenging his nephew Berkyaruq in 1095. He managed to take the cities, but failed in his larger enterprise. Berkyaruq, despite his youth, defeated his uncle and Tutush died in battle. Shortly after, an Assassin made an attempt on Berkyaruq’s life and it took the new sultan some considerable time to recover from his wounds.
If Berkyaruq had died, the western Saljuq Empire would probably have disintegrated in just the way that the eastern part did, only sixty years later under Sultan Sanjar. As it was, the death of Tutush meant that Saljuq Syria fractured into a collection of city-states without any bond to one another. This was the favourable political situation that faced the Crusaders as they began their march into Syria in 1097. Furthermore, each of these city-states was governed by men mutually suspicious of each other’s motives. It also meant that the two most important cities of Syria, Damascus and Aleppo, fell to the inexperienced sons of Tutush to govern. Neither of these sons was capable of dealing with the ongoing economic, political and agricultural crisis that the long Fatimid–Saljuq confrontation in Syria had brought about. The power vacuum that Tutush’s sudden death left in the countryside also allowed opportunistic and independent-minded Bedouin regimes to take control. Their nomadic pastoralism particularly damaged the agricultural resources of Damascus and Aleppo, and also limited safe communications between all the cities of Syria.
There followed plague that affected the area in 1097, 1099 and 1100. All of this meant that, for Aleppo and Damascus, a long war against the Crusaders was not economically sustainable. This, however, did not stop the two brothers, Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus, from undertaking short wars against each other in 1096 and 1097. The conflicts between the two were brief because neither Aleppo nor Damascus had many troops – another impediment to challenging the Crusaders. Many Saljuq emirs and their troopers were simply deserting Syria for the lucrative business of the Saljuq civil war in Persia. Baghdad changed hands some thirty times between October 1099 and April 1101, and both sides were paying well for more troops. The emirs also returned to Persia to ensure the safety of their iqtas, compared to which, their Syrian possessions were worthless.
Syria was therefore of little value to the Saljuqs, now that the Nizari Assassins had caused Persia to teeter on the brink of collapse, following their murder of Nizam al-Mulk, but it was really very attractive to the Nizaris themselves. Hasan-i-Sabbah had sent dais to the region probably as early as 1100 and he must have known that he was throwing seeds into fertile land. Syria was a heterogeneous mix of Arabs, Greeks and Armenians in the cities, and the populace viewed their Turkish masters as tax-hungry tyrannical aliens. The Saljuq invasions had caused enormous social upheaval, overthrowing Arab landowners, traders and bureaucrats, who had been the dominating element in earlier times.
The people of Syria were also renowned for being politically and religiously militant, and the Turkish rulers of cities often had cause to fear the mob. Unpopular leaders like Ridwan of Aleppo had particular dread of a popular revolt. There was also a very free mix of religions in Syria, despite the Saljuqs’ attempts to bring orthodoxy to the region. Large minorities of Maronite Christians and Druze and Nusayri Muslims existed, as well as the ‘left over’ Fatimid Mustali Ismailis discussed above.* Many of these Mustali Ismailis converted to the Nizari branch once the New Preaching was established. The Nizari dais could then expect, at the least, more tolerance from these groups than they had received from the Sunnis of Persia – perhaps even assistance in what might be called a religious ‘popular front’ against persecution by local Sunni Turkish rulers and Sunni clerics.
The first readily identifiable Assassin leader in Syria was al-Hakim al-Munajjim, ‘the physician-astrologer’, and it seems that he followed the Nizari blueprint for acquiring fortified places, but with a new twist. Ridwan of Aleppo was easily identified as a leader with a particularly weak powerbase, an ambition to take his brother’s dominions and a large Shiite population in his city, of which he was afraid. A few years earlier he had even proclaimed Fatimid allegiance as a means to shore up his domestic approval. Al-Munajjim seems to have presented himself and his followers to Ridwan as ‘fixers’, who could take care of all his political and population concerns, in return for the free use of Aleppo as a base for propagating their faith, and the chance to obtain the highly desired fortresses.
The physician-astrologer quickly organised the killing of al-Dawla of Homs, as described by al-Qalanasi at the head of this chapter. This removal of one of Ridwan’s political enemies, who was also an ally of his brother in Damascus, pleased the prince enough for him to grant the Nizaris a house of propaganda in the city. It was al-Munajjim’s last killing, after which he died of natural causes – a common achievement of Assassin chiefs at this time, it would seem. He was succeeded by Abu Tahir al-Saigh, a goldsmith, who made it his business to attempt the capture of a series of mountain strongholds to the south of Aleppo, which the killing of al-Dawla had left without an effective overlord. Their first attack was on the castle of Afamiya, which Ridwan had lost to a lord called Khalaf, who had made his living by banditry some years earlier.
The Aleppan Assassins’ approach to the castle’s capture was highly ingenious. They first made contact with Ismailis inside the castle, who, like the robber lord, were devotees of the Fatimid creed, but who, unlike him, were now about to change their colours. Then six of them obtained, perhaps through the medieval equivalent of car-jacking, a Crusader’s horse, mule and armour and proceeded to the castle’s front gate There they hailed the lord and claimed that they wished to enter his service and had brought these goods as proof of their fighting worth and as a gift to their new potential master. Khalaf took the men into his service and into the citadel of his castle, where they wasted no time in tunnelling through the wall to allow their new converts in the castle’s lower town to slip into the citadel. There they gathered slowly until their force was large enough to be able to move through the castle killing all Khalaf’s guards and the robber lord, along with his entire family. As Khalaf woke to find a fidai at his bedside, he is said to have stuttered out the question, ‘Who are you?’ The reply cannot have lessened his fear, ‘I am the Angel of Death come to take your soul.’
In early 1106, Abu Tahir came down from Aleppo to assume control of the Assassins’ first castle in Syria. He was not to be allowed to enjoy it for long. The Crusader lord, Tancred of Antioch, was campaigning nearby and evidently saw an opportunity for mischief.* He quickly captured the brother of one of the senior Afamiya Ismaili converts and marched on the castle. At first, he simply besieged the castle until the Assassins agreed to pay tribute, but after a few months he tightened the siege and forced Abu Tahir and his men into capitulation. They first had to arrange for their own ransoms to be paid by their compatriots in Aleppo, they were then packed off once again to do the dirty work of Ridwan, in the hope of being granted a second chance at obtaining a useable headquarters.
In 1111, the Saljuq sultan of Persia, Muhammad, had managed to calm things enough in his own lands to contemplate trying to bring the Syrian provinces back under Isfahan’s control. This was presented as a jihad against the Crusaders, but it was obvious to the petty princes of the Levant and the Assassins what this invasion really meant. Ridwan closed Aleppo’s gates to the sultan’s 1111 expedition and the sultan’s army destroyed the countryside surrounding Aleppo to a far greater extent than Crusaders had ever done. The expedition’s leaders had evidently expected much, much more of the lord of Aleppo:
They had expected that either the king, Fakhr al-Muluk Ridwan, lord of Aleppo, would himself come out to join them, or else his officers would join them by his command. But he paid no heed to any of them, and shut the gates of Aleppo, took hostages from the townsmen into the citadel, and organised his troops with the armed bands of the Batinis and the loyal citizens for garrison duty to guard the city wall and to prevent the citizens from ascending it. Besides this he gave a free hand to the brigands to seize whosoever they could from the fringes of the army.*
It is obvious that the ‘brigands’ were Assassins. Only the fidai’in of the Nizari Batinis would have had the skill to snatch individuals from the expedition’s camp. Their murder and abduction of troops from the army’s camp made Ridwan a wanted man among the Saljuqs of Persia. Their other role of guarding the citadel and taking hostages from the populace made them unpopular with the Sunnis of Aleppo. The expedition’s leader, Mawdud, the emir of Mosul, returned two years later with orders from the sultan to bring all the Saljuq emirs of Syria together to launch an assault on the Franj – the Franks – but the order deliberately excluded Aleppo from this hopeful union of Muslims.
Mawdud established himself in Damascus, which had fallen into the care of Tughtigin. Tughtigin had been the atabeg, or guardian, of the son of Duqaq of Damascus but when both Duqaq and his son died, this had left him effectively as the prince of the city, but without a crown. It was this lack of legitimacy that may have required him to allow the sultan’s forces into Damascus since he needed a caliphal diploma to rule lawfully and the caliph was under the sultan’s power. In fact, Tughtigin feared that Mawdud might use his forces to take Damascus away from him. He would have taken warning from the fact that Mawdud had become emir of Mosul by virtue of having led an expedition that the sultan of Baghdad had sponsored against its independent ruler in 1108.
The subsequent assassination of Mawdud in Damascus was almost certainly instigated by Ridwan, but Tughtigin’s complicity cannot be ruled out; following a victory for the joint Damascus–Mosul forces over the Kingdom of Jerusalem at al-Sinnabrah, the forces of Damascus did not march on with the army of Mosul to attempt the capture of any towns, but rather concentrated on plundering the environs of Jerusalem and Jaffa. The lord of Damascus appears to have been happy to see the Franks ‘reined in’, since they had been raiding the lands of Damascus with increasing frequency, but he was reluctant to see Mawdud gain a foothold in the region by taking fortified towns from the Franks. He was also keen for the Franks to remain an effective deterrent to the Great Saljuqs’ ambitions in Syria. The atabeg therefore had to show some decidedly neat footwork in order to survive as Damascus’s prince, both politically and in a very real sense:
On the last Friday of the Second Rabi of the year 507 [2 October 1113] the emir Mawdud came as was his custom from the encampment at the meadow outside the Iron Gate to the Cathedral Mosque, in the company of the atabeg. When the prayers were completed and Mawdud had performed some supplementary prostrations, they went out together, the atabeg walking in front by way of showing respect for him. Surrounding them both were Daylamites, Turks, Khurasanis, [militiamen] and armour bearers, with weapons of all kinds, fine tempered blades and keen thrusting swords, rapiers of various sorts and unsheathed poniards, so that they were walking as if in the midst of a tangled thicket of intertwined spikes, while the people stood round them to witness their pomp and the magnificence of their state. When they entered the court of the mosque, a man leapt out of the crowd, without exciting the attention of anyone, and approaching the emir Mawdud as though to call down a blessing on him and beg alms of him, seized the belt of his riding cloak and smote him twice with his poniard below the navel. One of the blows penetrated his flank and the other his thigh. As the Assassin struck his second blow swords fell upon him on every side and he was struck with every kind of weapon. His head was cut off that it might be known who it was but he could not be recognised, so a fire was kindled for him and he was thrown upon it. The atabeg had moved on some paces during the occurrence and was surrounded by his own officers, while Mawdud, controlling himself, walked on till he was close to the north gate of the mosque. There he collapsed, and was carried to the residence of the atabeg who walked alongside him. The people were at first cast into a great commotion and confusion, but afterwards calmed down on seeing the emir walking on. The surgeon was called for and sewed up part of the wounds, but he died, may God have mercy upon him, a few hours later on the same day.*
The fact that Mawdud was killed in such a public manner and in the mosque courtyard is not that surprising. The Assassins needed the maximum public exposure for their killings in Syria if they were to achieve their secondary aim of intimidation. Also medieval killings often required absolute proof of death for any murder or execution to have political value. The Mongols, for example, would distribute heads and even body parts around all parts of the dominions, in order to prove to everyone that a wrong-doer had been done away with and that equal punishment could be expected by all other miscreants. The Assassins had to rely on word of mouth to achieve the same effect.
There was, however, a downside to such sensational killings. In his chronicle, Ibn al-Athir claims that even the king of the Franks, Baldwin, was incensed by such an ungodly murder in a place of worship. But this did not stop him and Roger, who had succeeded Tancred as lord of Antioch, from allying themselves with Damascus, Aleppo and Prince Il-Ghazi of Mardin in 1115, after Sultan Muhammad sent yet another expedition into Syria in order to bring jihad to the Franj, and doubtless also to punish Tughtigin. With religion put to one side, the union made perfect sense. On the Muslim side, there was simply no advantage to the Syrian leaders in the complete expulsion of the Franks from the Levant, if this meant a loss of their independence to Isfahan and Baghdad, and the Crusaders had to look for local and temporary allies to face a powerful foe.
Realpolitik was by now becoming the standard form of earthly endeavour for both the Knights of the Holy Crusade and for the Islamic princes of Syria. The Nizari Assassins, as always when political confusion was rife, prospered. Only a few months later, the Persian Saljuq army withdrew after being heavily defeated by Roger’s forces at the Battle of Danith. This was to be their last attempt to bring Syria back into the Great Saljuq fold. The Assassins had, therefore, effectively seen off their fierce opponents from Persia in this, their new land, but their patron Ridwan had died in 1113, and his death had brought them new and deadlier enemies much closer to home.
As Ridwan lay dying in December 1113, Ibn al-Khashab, the Sunni qadi of Aleppo, and Ibn Badi, the leader of the city militia, gathered supporters and as many of the city’s militiamen as they could trust, together. During the night, they spread out through the city, seizing and killing as many of the Nizari Ismailis as they could find. The qadi knew that he did not have the manpower to take on his Turkish overlords, but he hoped to deprive Ridwan’s son and heir, Alp Arslan, of the support base his father had relied on and by virtue of this, to force the young prince, who was only sixteen, to depend on the Sunni body politic.
The qadi’s policy seemed initially to be a success and Alp Arslan, perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, added his support to the anti-Nizari campaign. Abu Tahir was killed and about two hundred of his followers were also executed. Under the prince’s guidance, the purge quickly became a bloodbath, as these things are wont to do, and was used as a cloak for the destruction of all possible opposition to the new reign. Certainly, several more Nizaris were executed, by being thrown off the citadel, but two of Alp Arslan’s brothers were also executed and officers and palace functionaries were included in the indiscriminate slaughter. Alp Arslan was eventually killed by one of his close servants named Lu Lu, in September 1114, as he slept. One of Ridwan’s infant sons was then placed on the throne.
As discussed earlier, the city aligned itself with Damascus and Baldwin, against the sultan’s forces, in 1115, but this did not stop Roger of Antioch from occupying the major fortresses ringing the city, in preparation for its reduction in the same year. In response to this threat Lu Lu, now the atabeg, called on Il-Ghazi of Mardin for support. Il-Ghazi quickly occupied Aleppo and was supported by the Sunni ulama of the city, who had been strengthened by the witch hunt of 1113 against the Nizaris. These same Sunni clerics had been the most voluble of all in their calls for jihad against the Franks, ever since the first refugees from the coastal cities, taken over the last few years by the Crusaders, had flooded into Aleppo. Indeed it was the same men who had started the pogrom against the Nizaris of Aleppo, that had taken their call for Holy War to Baghdad, as early as 1111. In a concerted campaign of protest against the sultan’s inactivity, they disturbed the Friday prayers and broke the pulpit of the city’s main mosque. This was a forceful political statement, as the pulpit symbolised the authority of the sultan. Contemporary Syrian literature also kept up the calls for jihad:
Ungodliness has brought to Syria a blow from which Islam will resound endlessly
Truth is ignored, crime is justified . . . and blood flows freely
How many Muslims fatally wounded
And Muslim women violated in the heart of the harem
How many mosques changed into convents?
The crucifix stands in the middle of the mihrab *
The phrases ‘truth is ignored’ and ‘crime is justified’, might well have been aimed at the Nizaris. Their deeds were seen by the Sunni populations of Aleppo and other cities as hampering the jihad. Certainly their unsuccessful attempt on the life of a Persian visitor to the city, who was either popular because of his fervent Sunnism or because of the way he threw his money around, was noted among their crimes by the local populace. In truth, however, to single out the Assassins was far from fair. The ineffective Muslim response to the Crusaders had as much to do with the desire among the petty princes of Syria to preserve their independence as it did with the Nizaris. In fact, the Assassins were a target for the Sunni jurists calling for jihad simply because the Sunni concept of jihad involved far more than simple Holy War. It required just rule and Ridwan’s use of the Batinis against his own people was in opposition to this. It also required a union between the men of the pen and Quran and the men of the sword which could not take place whilst heretics had the ear of the military men.
Al-Khashab, the qadi of Aleppo who had helped organise the anti-Nizari persecutions of 1113, had therefore apparently won another victory over them by securing Il-Ghazi’s attachment to the Sunni factions of Aleppo. Before the Battle of Ager Sainguinis, or Field of Blood, in 1119, he preached to Il-Ghazi’s troops whilst holding a spear, before they rode forward to assault Roger of Antioch’s army. The incongruity of a religious judge on the field of battle is reflected in the disdain of some of the prince’s troops for the presence of a ‘turban’ in their ranks. At the end of the battle, Roger was dead and his men and horses, according to Ibn al-Qalanasi, looked like stretched-out hedgehogs, such was the volume of arrows the men of Il-Ghazi had poured into them.
It was a great victory and it seemed to herald the emergence of the kind of union between faith and military action that had brought Islam its early conquests. The Sunni world had lost this union during its subjugation by professional Turkish military men. After the Fatimids fell under the power of their own wazirs, the Assassins were effectively the only political group to retain a direct link between military action and religious belief. Now the Assassins of Aleppo found themselves under pressure from just such a union, between the Sunni ulama and the Turkish prince Il-Ghazi. The organisation therefore went underground in Aleppo, but it was far from ready to cede the city to the Sunnis, and far from inactive in other arenas.
Many of the Nizari Assassins had to take refuge in Frankish lands during Il-Ghazi’s reign and the lack of mountain refuges was evidently impairing the movement’s success in Syria. A lifeline to Alamut was therefore vital in maintaining the continued flow of both Persian organisers and fidai’in to Syria. Whilst it is a matter of some controversy, it can be said with reasonable confidence that the Nizari Assassins of Alamut were, in this period, responsible for a number of killings in Christian Georgia, perhaps also in Azerbaijan, in order to keep open a corridor of communication with Syria. It also made sense for the Alamut Assassins to try to extend their influence in this region. Islam’s Georgian border was not well protected in this period as a result of the Saljuq civil wars that the Assassins themselves had started with their murder of Nizam al-Mulk. The Georgians took advantage of this to take territory from the Saljuq Empire and this, of course, placed pressure on the nearby Nizari state based around Alamut, and on communications between Alamut and the Syrian mission. In 1121, David IV of Georgia defeated Sultan Mahmud’s army and took Tiflis. The Georgians refused to continue paying tribute to the Saljuqs from this point and attempted further expansion. Assassinations of Georgian lords, however, impeded any further push into the Dar al-Islam.
Through the corridor that the Assassins kept open between Alamut and Syria, Persian dais and fidai’in did manage to keep infiltrating Syria. From 1113 they cultivated the towns and villages around Aleppo, especially to its east where there was a significant Shiite population. By 1114 their renaissance in the region was so complete that they were able to send a force of one hundred men to take the castle of Shaizar, which had been conveniently abandoned by its Muslim lord and his men, as they had all been invited to watch a tourney celebrate Easter at a nearby Christian town. Upon their return, the now ex-tenants found the gates closed to them, but they rallied the townspeople of the castle’s settlements and villages to their side, hastily formed an attack and after overwhelming the Nizaris, they killed them all. The lords of this castle were the family of Usama Ibn Munqidh, an Arab warrior who has left us a record of the period and of the action of the day:
On that day I had an encounter with an Ismaili who had a dagger in his hand while I had my sword. He rushed on me with the dagger and I hit him in the middle of his forearm as he held the grip of the dagger in his hand with the blade close to his forearm. My blow cut off about four finger-lengths of the blade and cut his forearm in two in the middle. The mark of the edge of the dagger was left on the edge of my sword and the trace of it is there to this day . . .*
Usama’s memoirs also show how the Assassins’ blades were not just aimed at ‘great’ men. There was a low-level war between minor lords and the sect also taking place, over patches of territory, water sources and, of course, fortified places. The governor of a castle close to Shaizar told Usama how he was attacked by four fidai’in. The governor recalled how, after the attack, he said to a servant:
‘The back of my shoulder is itching in a place I can’t reach’, and he called one of his attendants to see what had bitten him. The attendant looked and behold, there was a cut in which was lodged the point of a dagger which had broken in his back and which he had not known about . . .*
So the Assassins were up against tough men in this turf war, as Usama’s next reminiscence makes clear:
One of our comrades, named Hammam al-Hajj had an encounter with one of the Ismailis when they attacked the Castle of Shaizar in a portico of my uncle’s house . . . the Ismaili had in his hand a dagger while al-Hajj held a sword. The Batinite rushed on him with the knife but al-Hajj struck him with the sword above his eyes. The blow broke his skull and his brains fell out and were scattered over the ground. Al-Hajj laying his sword from his hand vomited all that he had in his stomach on account of the sickening he felt at the sight of those brains . . .†
The brains and chief organiser of the Assassins in Syria, now that Abu Tahir was dead, was named Bahram, and he had to wait some time before he could score a real success. Even then it was only an act of revenge and not the hoped-for gaining of a real foothold. Ibn Badi, the militia leader of Aleppo, who had been a joint organiser of the massacre of Nizaris in Aleppo in 1113, was expelled from the city by Il-Ghazi in 1119. The Sunnis had had their great victory over Roger of Antioch in the same year, but the Assassins had to make do with a much smaller triumph at a ford on the River Euphrates, where Ibn Badi and his two sons were crossing to take refuge in the city of Mardin; they were ambushed and knifed to death.
It was small recompense for all that they had lost, but the psychological impact of the killing was enough for the Assassins to be able now to make threats against Il-Ghazi, and everyone knew such threats were never empty. In 1120, they demanded a fortress from the prince of Aleppo – he acquiesced, but then very rapidly had the castle destroyed. He rather disingenuously excused himself from the Assassins’ wrath by claiming that he had ordered the demolition but then revoked the order. He claimed that by the time his second message had got to the emir of the castle, the orders for its knocking down had already been carried out. No doubt a vengeance killing was planned against Il-Ghazi, but the prince died in 1122 of natural causes. Of course, someone had to pay and the emir who had carried out the demolition was killed some years later when he had no doubt forgotten all about the incident. The Assassins had very long memories.
Il-Ghazi’s death brought his son, Suleiman, to the throne of Aleppo, but his cousin Balak quickly usurped the crown after a whirlwind campaign of blockades and crop burning. In fact, this was to be a propitious regime change for the Sunni Aleppans, as Balak was strongly anti-Ismaili. He expelled all known and suspected Nizari sympathisers from the city after forcing them to sell their property and then proceeded to arrest a man suspected of being the representative of Bahram. The history of the sect as a real force in Aleppan politics ends with Balak’s persecutions in 1122. The new prince of Aleppo was also a superb soldier, as well as a good Sunni, and he defeated and captured King Baldwin II in battle at Manzara in the same year. Unfortunately for the Sunni Aleppans, he was killed in 1124 at Manbj whilst besieging a rebel emir. He had just received an appeal for aid against the Crusaders from Tyre, and was making a last inspection of his mangonels surrounding the emir’s castle before leaving for the coastal city, but he was hit by an arrow shot from the walls of the fortress. He pulled the arrow from his neck and with the words, ‘that blow will be fatal for all the Muslims,’ he then fell dead.
Once again the realpolitik of Syrian politics had reared its head. Turkish princes had to spend as much time fighting their peers and other pretenders as they did the Franks, but Balak’s brief career as a ghazi, waging jihad against the King of Jerusalem, was enough to gain him a perhaps slightly exaggerated inscription on his tomb to this effect. It read, ‘Sword of those who fight the Holy War, leader of the armies of the Muslims, vanquisher of the infidels and polytheists.’* It is evident from this that, by this time, a tradition of the Turkish princes from the house of Il-Ghazi fighting the Sunni jihad was certainly beginning to evolve. Al–Adim had written of Il-Ghazi’s followers, ‘[They] bravely make it their duty to fight with heroism . . . they spill their blood for the holy war.’† The kind of harsh discipline that Hasan-i-Sabbah had used to form the cohesive and seemingly unbreakable strength of the Nizari Assassins was not present in the Sunni leaders of this embryonic jihad, but Balak seems to have maintained a strong adherence to the precepts of Islamic justice, ‘[He] would impale a Turk for taking a bit of meat from a poor man and he would not let anyone harm the [local] Christians even by word.’*
The Assassins seem to have realised that this Sunni jihad was not just aimed at the Crusaders and that the complete union of the Turkish military men and the Sunni ulama spelt danger for their mission in Syria. Other ‘dissident’ groups, such as native Christians in Aleppo, were already feeling the weight of this hardening of Sunni sentiment after Balak’s death left them without a protector:
A Muslim judge in Aleppo, Abu’l Hasan son of Khashab, told the Christians to rebuild the two mosques. Two bishops were in the town, an orthodox Edessene named Gregory and Samson, a Melkite. The church treasurers would not agree but said. ‘We will not do this for we should open a door against ourselves that whenever a mosque is destroyed we must rebuild it out of church funds’. On the Friday at the judge’s order thousands of Muslims with carpenters axes rushed to the churches, to Saint Jacob’s, broke the pulpit and the angels of the altar, defaced the pictures, made an opening in the south wall of the sanctuary, prayed there, and made it a mosque. The same with the Greek church . . .†
The Assassins would therefore have been horrified to see the ‘turban’ Ibn al-Khashab, once again involving himself in military affairs and organizing the defence of Aleppo against a renewed Frankish threat, following the death of Balak. Il-Ghazi’s son, Timurtash, had released King Baldwin II in exchange for a ransom of twenty thousand dinars. He also presented him with a gold helmet, but this chivalry was poorly repaid by Baldwin, who made another attempt on Aleppo.
Ibn al-Khashab did not waste time calling on Timurtash for assistance, since he was out of the city and did not seem to show much interest in returning to break the siege, but instead sent to al-Bursuqi, the emir of Mosul. He came at once and broke through the Franks’ lines. It might be cynical to suggest that the chance of controlling both Mosul and Aleppo was too good an opportunity to miss for al-Bursuqi, but that is certainly not how the Islamic chroniclers saw it, and he certainly saved the city as its supplies were almost exhausted when he arrived. He then chased the Franks all the way back to Antioch according to Ibn al-Qalanasi, and
By this Aq-Sunqur al-Bursuqi acquired great merit and renown, and having entered Aleppo, he governed it with uprightness and protected the interests of its people, and made every effort to defend the city and keep the enemy at a distance from it. Thus its affairs were set in order, its districts restored to prosperity, its roads made safe, and caravans frequented it with their merchandise and objects of trade.*
This all sounds extremely pleasant and above all, ordered, and there was no place for the Nizari preaching in a well-ordered and ‘just’ society.
It was as if al-Bursuqi was following what might be called the first ‘anti-terror guide’ as written by Ibn Zafar al-Siqilli in the twelfth century. In his guide for rulers wishing to avoid rebellion in their lands, Ibn Zafar identifies the methods and philosophy a prince needs to employ: paternal affection for all subjects, vigilance over the populace, courage to defend the people, sagacity to delude foes and prudence to take advantage of every opportunity. If terrorism came to the prince’s lands, he was advised to have patience and not give way to depression, execute strict justice, secure the roads and protect people seeking refuge, conciliate alienated subjects and show generosity and clemency.† This seems like good advice, even for governments today, and such actions completely stymied the Assassins’ attempts to regain Aleppo.
The movement did best, as we have seen, in times of turmoil and when chaos reigned. They attempted to re-create just such conditions in Aleppo, by the murder of Ibn al-Khashab in the summer of 1125, as he left the great Mosque of the city. The qadi was fatally stabbed in the chest by a fidai disguised as an ascetic, but the political order of Aleppo could not now be smashed by just one killing. Later, in November 1127, al-Bursuqi saw himself in a dream, being torn apart by eleven dogs. He had his dream interpreted and was warned not to attend prayers the next day. He ignored the advice and was set upon by some eight fidai’in as he left the Friday Mosque.‡ His murder, however, did little more than vent Bahram’s spleen and Ibn al-Qalanasi’s chronicle tells us why: ‘Al-Bursuqi was succeeded by his son, the emir Masud, who was noted for the nobility and purity of his character . . . and he maintained the laudable conduct and aims of his father; his power was thus firmly established and his affairs rightly and excellently ordered.’§
There was no chance against such ‘excellently ordered affairs’ and the Nizari Assassins headed away from Aleppo and towards the south. Bahram, apparently, was a master of disguise and he did not appear openly in Damascus until the end of 1126. By this time Tughtigin, who was already suspected of secret collusion with the Assassins back in 1113 with the killing of Mawdud, had accepted the bolstering of his forces by one hundred Nizari fighters. He took the Nizaris with him when he went out to meet the Franks in battle in January 1126. His army was routed by a furious and well-delivered Crusader charge, but the fact remains that the emir of Damascus was in cahoots with Bahram long before the dai revealed himself, and already so indebted to the Nizaris that when they asked for a castle he gave them one.
The fortress of Banyas was on the border with the Latin Kingdom, so perhaps Tughtigin thought he might make use of the Assassins’ skills against the Franks. However, assassinations of Occidentals was a little way in the future yet, and the emir’s granting of the fortress and an Ismaili house of propaganda in the city to Bahram may say more about his fear of the sect than any great defence planning on his part.
Bahram set about improving the fortifications of Banyas, aided by his ‘rabble of varlets, half-wits, peasants, low fellows, and vile scum’,* and at last, the Assassins had their bolt-hole. They soon needed it as they began a campaign of banditry in the region and attempted to extend their influence to the west around the river Jordan. The area was an enclave for Druze and Nusayri Muslims. Bahram’s aim, therefore, may have been either to seek an alliance with these other persecuted sects, or to convert them. In order to achieve this, it was decided that the most powerful clan leader in the area should be killed – he was quickly captured, placed in fetters and then put to death in cold blood. This, however, caused a huge backlash among the very people the Assassins had wished to impress by their deed, and Bahram had to retreat to Banyas.
The Nizaris marched out of their new castle, later the same year, in order to crush a union of villagers and tribesmen that had formed around the dead man’s clan, but as Bahram and his men camped ready for battle the next day, the tribesmen
. . . rose to meet him in a body like lions rising from their lairs to defend their cubs, and flew at them as mountain-hawks at partridges. On approaching his broken faction and god-forsaken host they charged upon them when they were in their camp and took them off their guard. Shouting the battle cry, they took them unawares, and ere the horseman could mount his steed or the foot soldier could seize his weapons death overtook the greater part of the Batinis, by smiting with the sword, abrading with the poniards of fate, sprinkling with the arrows of destruction, and stoning with the rocks of predestination . . .
Bahram’s head and hand was cut off, after he had been dissected by swords and knives, and one of the slayers who took these along with his ring, to Egypt, carrying the joyful tidings of his death and destruction, was vested with a robe of honour and rewarded.*
Bahram’s body parts were received with joy at the court of Cairo. This is not surprising considering that Syria was still seen as the rightful property of the caliphate of Egypt by Fatimids. The propaganda of the Nizaris against the Fatimids had also been so widespread and apparently so effective, in both Syria and even Egypt, that Caliph al-Amir felt compelled in 1122 to lay out ‘once and for all’ his family’s legitimacy and claim to be the true imams. It perhaps seems churlish of the caliph to be refuting the claims of his now long-dead uncle Nizar, but the Fatimids were still technically at war with the Saljuqs, and very much at war with the Crusaders. The continued adherence of their followers in Syria was therefore vital to their war aims. The sijill, or epistle, was drafted by the theologians of the Cairo court and distributed all over Egypt and Syria.
The Fatimids were certainly at war with the Assassins. Al-Afdal, the wazir responsible for Nizar’s dispossession and death had been assassinated in 1121 by Assassins sent from Aleppo. After this, the new wazir al-Mamun set his militia the task of rooting out any other fidai’in, and also tried to seal the border with Syria with road-blocks and stop-and-search policies. The remaining family of Nizar were also put under surveillance and his sister was made to listen to the first public proclamation of the caliph’s anti-Nizar epistle.†
The first thing that should be noted about the Fatimids’ war with the Crusaders was that, following the death of Tutush and the splintering of the Saljuq government in Syria, the Fatimids had been able to retake Jerusalem and other towns of the interior from the Turks, but they had not had sufficient time to consolidate their position before the Franks’ arrival in Palestine. They were also still, in 1095, playing the ‘Great Game’ against the Saljuqs over the whole of the Levant, and it is feasible that the Fatimids would have not been entirely displeased by the formation of a Latin state in northern Syria. A contemporary writer, Al-Azimi, states that in 1095 the Byzantine emperor wrote to the Fatimids about the Crusade’s arrival in Asia Minor.* The Fatimids may well have tried to utilise this outside force in their strategy to meet the Saljuq threat.
The Fatimids were accustomed to accounting for the presence of a third force in Syria: Byzantine operations in northern Syria were not uncommon in the late eleventh century. There is even, albeit tenuous, evidence of collusion between the Crusaders and Fatimids over northern Syria. The contemporary Arab writer al-Athir wrote that when ‘the master of Egypt saw the expansion of the Saljuq Empire they took fright and asked the Franj to march on Syria.’† It is notable, however, that there is no other contemporary textual evidence for this complicity. What seems more likely is that al-Afdal had not colluded in the Crusader invasion, but when it took place he hoped that the diversion in the north would impair Saljuq attempts to recover in Syria. He therefore stood aside as the Crusaders conquered Antioch, but when the Crusade began its march south to Jerusalem, he reversed his policy, even imprisoning Frankish envoys sent to Cairo in 1098.
The Fatimid response to the Franks’ invasion of the south was initially concerted, but ultimately unsuccessful. Their jihad failed on the battlefield, chiefly because of the fiscal exhaustion of Egypt and Frankish superiority at sea. The Crusaders were often engaged by the Fatimid army between 1099 and 1105. Due to the state reforms that al-Afdal had introduced, Egypt had, by this point, developed a medium-sized, well-developed army that was composed of various ethnic units. Fulcher of Chartres records the presence of Ethiopians in the Fatimid Jerusalem garrison, and how a wing of Arab cavalry encircled the Frankish rear at the Battle of Ascalon. This army brought defeat to the Franks at Ramla in 1103, but the Fatimids were unable to press their advantage to take Jaffa, as their naval blockade was cut short by the arrival of a pilgrim fleet. Any victories could also not be followed up by prolonged military deployment, simply because of lack of finance and overstretched resources. Egypt, despite relief measures, had not fully recovered from the famine and virtual civil war that had afflicted the state between 1066 and 1073. The Nile valley remained under-populated and under-cultivated, and Syria had become largely independent of Egypt during the civil wars incited by the Turkish and Black troops, causing a further loss of revenue to the caliphate.
There was also the problem of western naval superiority, based around a new ship-building technology available in the docks of the Italian maritime republics. The depleted resources of Egypt did not allow it to match the volume of ships produced by Venice, Genoa and Pisa in this period. The loss of twenty-five ships in a storm, in 1105, was a heavy blow to the Fatimids’ naval resources, but they enjoyed success at Sidon in 1108. The fleet, however, failed to save Tripoli in 1109 from the Genoese, and was trapped and badly mauled at Beirut in 1110. The coastal cities of Syria did not have their own warships, and the Byzantines had almost completely contained the Turkish naval threat by 1092. Egypt, therefore, fought the naval war single-handed, but despite this, and the obvious superiority of the Latins at sea, its wazirs managed to supply the Muslim cities of the Syrian coast until Tyre eventually fell in 1124.
Al-Afdal was, as has been discussed earlier, a soldier and not an ideologue. He wrote to the leaders, both military and religious, of Damascus in 1102, requesting ‘the help of its army in the Holy War for Muslim land and Muslim folk’. The ideological opposition between the Sunni Turks and the Fatimids did therefore not preclude cooperation between the Egyptian caliphate and the local rulers of Syria – sometimes the need for alliance against the Franks prevailed over such ideals. A policy of cooperation was shown by Sunni Damascus’s assistance to the Fatimid Syrian ports, which the Egyptian fleet was also defending, and by Damascene troops assisting the Fatimids at the battle of Ascalon in 1118 – from which their leaders earned Fatimid robes of honour.
Despite all this effort, the Fatimids were, however, effectively defeated by the Franks in Palestine. Poor battlefield leadership and low army morale may have been partly to blame. Lack of organisation at the higher levels of the state also ensured that it took up to two months for the Fatimids to mobilise and establish an army in Palestine. This ensured that the Franks had plenty of opportunity to reinforce their resources for each assault. Furthermore, the Fatimid army was always operating at a distance from its bases, whilst the Franks were operating within an area already consolidated by them. Al-Afdal was effectively robbed of victory many times, simply by bizarre occurrences that also hint at the poor condition of Fatimid military leadership. At one point, there was even a mini war between the Egyptian navy and the land forces. On another occasion the commander of the land forces was accidentally killed, and this was enough to break the army’s will to continue. Ibn al-Athir wrote of how this superstitious general had received a prediction that he would die as the result of a fall from his horse, and how,when he became governor of Beirut, he ordered all the paving-stones removed from the streets, for fear that his horse might stumble. Then, just as battle with the Franks was commencing, his horse reared without having been attacked, and the general fell dead among his troops.
The Fatimids’ withdrawal from the war for Syria was, however, not a direct result of Frankish victories per se. Egyptian ‘isolationism’ in the period immediately after 1125 was a result of sustained political crises. The slaying of al-Afdal by the Assassins in 1121 may well have been achieved with the connivance of the caliph – indeed in Syria it was believed that the Assassins were not even involved in the killing:
In this year news arrived of the assassination of al-Afdal by the Batinis but this statement is not true. On the contrary it is an empty pretence and an insubstantial calumny. The real cause, upon which all accurate and indisputable narratives concerning this affair are agreed, was an estrangement between him and his lord, the Caliph al-Amir, arising out of al-Afdal’s constraint upon him and restraining him from following out his inclinations, and the aversion which he had shown to him on several occasions . . . When he was killed al-Amir manifested unconcealed joy before all the courtiers and men of rank in Misr and Cairo. It is said also that the place of his assassination was in Misr on the middle of the bridge at the head of al-Suwaiqataon the last day of Ramadan. He was fifty-seven years of age at this time, having been born at Akka [Acre] in the year 458 [1066]. He was a firm believer in the doctrines of the Sunna, upright in conduct, a lover of justice. All eyes wept and all hearts sorrowed for him; time did not produce his like after him, and after his loss the government fell into disrepute.*
Al-Afdal’s death began a veritable procession of nearly continuous infighting as wazirs and caliphs competed for the allegiances of army factions. Then in 1130 al-Amir, the tenth caliph, fell victim to the poniards of the fidai’in. The Arabic historian, Ibn Khaldun, tells us that:
On Tuesday, the 3rd of the month, the caliph proceeded to Fustat and thence to the Island of Eoda, where he had built a pleasure house for a favourite Bedouin concubine. Some persons who were plotting his death were lying there concealed with their arms ready. As he was going by them, they sprang out and fell upon him with their swords. He had then crossed the bridge, and had no other escort than a few pages, courtiers, and attendants. They bore him in a boat across the Nile and brought him still living into Cairo. That night he was taken to the castle and there he died.*
This was enough to virtually kill the Fatimids as a political force to be reckoned with. Before this point, they had at least attempted to compete with the Franks for Syria. Indeed, the focus of the Fatimid resistance, Ascalon, was a Muslim shrine, and the Fatimid response to the Crusaders was jihad. Many historians have overlooked this, maybe because jihad was not, in this period, a discrete action in Shiism as it was for Sunnis. It was rather a consistent presence in the religion as we have seen with the continuing war of the Nizari Ismailis. The assassination of the caliph exhausted even this small flame of jihad and the ideological drive in the Fatimid dynasty completely died. The last four Fatimid caliphs in Cairo were not recognised as imams, and did not even attempt to claim the title. Even the Ismailis, who had remained faithful to the Fatimids, broke away from the Mustalian branch and many joined the Nizari Assassins. Egypt folded in on itself and awaited extinction – the only question now being who would claim the corpse.
Revolutions, according to Vergniaud, devour their own children, but in this case the Nizari Assassin rebels had brought destruction to an estranged parent. They continued the war against those they were not so closely related to in Syria. They were now under a new leader, another Persian named Ismail, who despite his propitious name and strong start to his rule, was to end his days in failure. Despite Bahram’s death and the seizure of Banyas, the compliance of Tughtigin and the active assistance of his wazir seemed to herald great things for the Nizaris in Damascus. But Tughtigin died in 1128, and, as at Aleppo, the Assassins were undone by the actions of members of the Sunni ulama, who plotted with Tughtigin’s heir Buri to kill his father’s wazir and purge the city.
Ibn al-Athir reported in his later chronicle of the events of Syria that, ‘al-Mazdaghani [the wazir] had written to the Franj proposing to hand over Damascus to them if they would give him the city of Tyre in return. Agreement had been reached. They had even set a date, a Friday.’ This would explain the speed with which Buri and his comrades moved against the wazir and his Nizari supporters, but the Sunni chronicler was writing in the 1200s, when the notion of jihad against the Crusaders was well developed and he was undoubtedly biased. The Sunni chronicler Ibn al-Qalanasi had family who actually took part in the massacre of the Nizaris in Damascus. His contemporary account mentions nothing of any such conspiracy, but does talk of the boiling hatred of the people of Damascus towards both the wazir and the Nizaris. The Nizaris’ arrogance, overconfidence and overt violence were perhaps their undoing:
Their hands and tongues were lengthened by slander and abuse against the men of repute among the subjects, and with greed and spoliation against lonely travellers on the highway, whom they seized with violence and used despitefully, and with the slaying of men outrageously and unjustly . . .*
Their ruin came suddenly and without warning:
On Wednesday 17th Ramadan 523 [4 September 1129] the wazir presented himself as usual with all the emirs and commanders in the Rose Pavilion at the Palace of the Citadel at Damascus, and various matters were transacted and discussed in the council with Buri and those present, until the hour of their withdrawal and return to their houses. The wazir rose to withdraw after them, according to his custom, and at that moment Buri gave the signal to his bodyguard, who struck the wazir’s head several blows with his sword and killed him. His head was then cut off, carried with his dead body to the ash heap at the Iron Gate, and thrown upon it, that all the people might see the act of God upon one who plotted and sought helpers other than Him [God]. His body was burned with fire some days later, and reduced to ashes strewn by the winds. ‘This is the reward for that which his hands wrought, and God is not unjust towards His creatures.’
The report of this spread immediately, and the militia of Damascus, assisted by the mob and the refuse of the city, rose with swords and naked poniards and put to death all the Batinis and their adherents upon whom they could lay hands, and every person connected with them or related to them. They pursued them into their dwellings, fetched them out of their houses, and dispatched them all either by dismemberment with swords or slaughter with poniards, and they were thrown out upon the dung heaps like abandoned carrion. A large number of individuals among them who had taken refuge in various high quarters in order to protect themselves, and who hoped for safety through their intercession, were forcibly seized and their blood was shed without fear of consequences. By the next morning the quarters and streets of the city were cleared of the Batinis and the dogs were yelping and quarrelling over their limbs and corpses. ‘Verily in this is a sign to men of intelligence.’
Amongst those who were captured was the man known as Shadhi the freedman, the pupil of Abu Tahir the Batini goldsmith who was formerly at Aleppo. This accursed freedman was the root of all the trouble and evil, and was repaid with the severest punishment, at which the hearts of many of the Believers were comforted. He was crucified, along with a few others of the sect, on the battlements of the wall of Damascus, in order that it might be seen how God had dealt with the oppressors and brought signal chastisement upon the infidels.
As for Ismail the missionary, who was living at Banyas, and those who were with him, when they heard the report of this disaster they were filled with despair and humiliation and began to lay the blame upon one another, while their supporters dispersed throughout the country. Ismail himself, knowing that disaster threatened him if he remained at Banyas and being unable to put up an obstinate resistance, sent to the Franks, promising to deliver up Banyas to them, in order to seek safety with them. He surrendered it to them accordingly, and he with a number of others came into their hands and slunk away from Banyas into the Frankish territories in the utmost abasement and wretchedness. Ismail was smitten by the disease of dysentery, and dying of it was buried in Banyas at the beginning of the year 524 [1130]. So this district was rid of them and purified from their uncleanliness.*
The nemesis experienced by the Assassins after their hubris at Damascus was almost classical in its exaction of its due, and the sect was never able to re-establish itself in the city. Damascus would, soon enough, become the centre of the fully formed Sunni jihad that would, in time, retake Jerusalem from the Franks and push the Assassins to the margins of Syrian politics. The device of taqiyya was used in desperation by those who remained within the Muslim zone and, as recorded above, many fled to Frankish areas. They attempted to exact revenge on Damascus through the Franks, by their gifting of Banyas to King Baldwin II, who realised that its strategic position close to Damascus, and on the road that linked the city with Jerusalem, effectively made it an offensive fortification for the Latin Kingdom. Using it as his base, he brought a large force, which included contingents from Edessa, Antioch and the coastal cities, close to Damascus’s walls.
Buri acted quickly to meet this threat and after gathering allies from the nomadic Turcomen of the region, as well as Arab bands, he struck the Crusader force as it was in the act of foraging and destroying the environs of Damascus. Spread out and unready for pitched battle, the Crusaders were scattered by the sudden attacks. They quit the area the next day after setting fire to their camps and Buri returned to Damascus in triumph. He was not to be allowed to bask in glory for long – Baldwin returned later the same year, but his war plans were wrecked by appalling weather. However, it would not be the King of the Franks, with his knights and lances, that would finish Buri – once again, it would be the Assassins’ daggers.
Two Turcomen arrived in Damascus one day seeking employment. Their pay demands were no more than the normal fixed rate and they were hired on the spot, as Buri’s vetting procedures were evidently nonexistent. Within only a few months he brought the pair into his close bodyguard.* Then, on 7 May 1131, as he was riding back from the baths, these Turks attacked him. He had reached the gate of his palace and his bodyguard of Khurasanis, Daylamites and Turks were preparing to leave him, when the new guards came at him with their daggers. The first blow only grazed his neck and the second is recorded as striking him in the flank. Buri saved himself from further injury by throwing himself from his horse, then his loyal bodyguards rushed upon the Assassins and killed them. More and more troops of the prince’s askari appeared and continued hacking at the Assassins’ bodies, cutting them to pieces.
Buri had survived and it seemed for a short time that he would recover from the attack and his wounds. Certainly, Muslim medical facilities were at this time among the best in the world; the work of Dioscorides, the famous Byzantine physician, had been translated into Arabic, complete with diagrams, in the early Islamic period, and such was the size of the trading network of Islam, that Indian medicine and even Chinese remedies were known to Muslim physicians. Skilled treatment of wounds by Muslim physicians is attested to by Usama Ibn Munqidh, who had opportunities through Crusader friends of comparing this to what he recounts as being ‘the barbaric treatment of patients’ by Latin doctors. He recalls how a servant of his, who was stabbed by a drunken Turk, received an abdominal wound that was about four fingers deep:
The jarrahun [surgeon] made frequent visits to my servant until he was better, could walk and do his work, but the wound would not close up completely. For two months it continued to excrete something like scabs and yellow water then the cut at last closed up, the abdomen of the man resumed its normal condition and he returned to perfect health.*
But such healing took time:
I once witnessed, in an encounter between us and the Franks, one of our horsemen named Badi Ibn Tahl al-Qushayri, who was one of our brave men, receive in his chest a lance thrust from a Frankish knight while clothed only in two cloth garments. The lance cut his breast-bone and came out of his side. He turned back right away but we never thought he would make his home alive. But as Allah, worthy of admiration is He, had predestined, he survived and his wound was healed. But for one year after that he could not sit up if he was lying on his back unless someone held his shoulders and helped him. At last his suffering entirely disappeared and he reverted to his old ways . . .†
It may have been either Buri’s character, or the fact that politically things always deteriorated when a prince was incapacitated, that made him leave his bed early and continue with the business of government. His flank wound became a running sore and almost certainly became infected. He died just over a year after the attack. Stories like this, of a lingering death after an Assassin had struck, may have leant credence to the notion that the fidai’in used poison on their daggers, but this seems unlikely given the sacred nature of their killing method. If poison was to be used, why not charge a glass of wine with it or use arrows and spears? In short, the method of bringing death was as important, and in some ways, more important than the mere political worth of each victim. Arnold of Lubeck, writing in the twelfth century said of the fidai’in that: ‘When therefore any of them have chosen to die in this way the Chief hands them knives which are, so to speak, consecrated.’‡ The holiness of the act of murder is therefore evident.
The political worth of the murder of Buri was small, given the continued Sunni revival that was taking place in the Syrian cities and the Nizaris’ much less spectacular activity of obtaining castles. Many of these were obtained through simple purchase during the period following the Nizaris’ expulsion from Damascus, but would prove to be of enormous value to the sect’s future in Syria. They concentrated their efforts on the Jabal Bahra out to the west of the Orontes River, as well as the hinterland between the Muslims and Franks. They bought the mountain fortress of Qadmus in 1132, and they were able to obtain the nearby and larger castle of al-Kahf from its owner, when they interceded in a dispute between him and his cousins. They took direct action against the Franks, for the first time since 1126, and forced out the Crusader garrison from the castle of Khariba in 1137. Then in 1140, they took the fortress of Masyaf from a governor of Usama Ibn Munqidh’s clan, and also took the castle of Khawabi that lay just south of al-Kahf. This small chain of castles, Masyaf, al-Kahf and Khawabi, would become the core command centre and refuge of the Assassins in Syria just as Alamut, Maymundiz and Lamasar were in Persia.
Such was the degree of secrecy that the Assassins’ taqiyya engendered in this period, that the names of the key Nizari players are unknown to, or at least unrecorded by, the contemporary chroniclers. It is only with the brief appearance of Nizari irregulars in the army of Raymond of Antioch in 1149, and the disclosure of his identity as chief dai in Syria to all his followers in 1162 by Rashid al-Din, that the history of the sect surfaces in the general Syrian histories of the period. Indeed, so quiet were the fidai’in, that their assassination in 1149 of the leader of the resistance to Bahram (when the Nizaris had tried to extend their influence west of the Jordan in 1128), went virtually unrecorded by the chroniclers. Most writers from the 1120s onwards were more interested in writing about the house of Zangi and its rise to power in the region.
Only a few months before the Assassins’ attack on him, Buri had received letters from Zangi, who was in theory only an atabeg, but was effectively the lord of Mosul, and from 1128, of Aleppo too, following the assassination of Ibn al-Khashab. Zangi wrote requesting the assistance of Damascus against the Franks. Five hundred men were sent under the command of Buri’s son, but Zangi treacherously imprisoned these men, seized the city of Hama and then demanded ransom which Buri, realising that he was now dealing with the region’s new strong man, eventually paid. Zangi had married the daughter of Ridwan – the unfortunate lady was already the widow of Il-Ghazi and Balak. He had also transferred his father’s remains to the city and had obtained diplomas from the sultan of Iraq, giving him undisputed authority over the whole of Syria and northern Iraq. The Syrian Assassins must have realised that, with the union of Mosul and Aleppo under Zangi, they were witnessing the renaissance of Turkish ambitions for a united Syria, reconnected to the eastern Sunni world. There was also the unpleasant fact that Zangi’s domain of Mosul cut right across their lifeline to Alamut.
However, there was not always complete enmity between the Assassins and Zangi – as recorded at the end of chapter three, Zangi would have at the very least smiled at the murder of the Iraqi Saljuq sultan, Daud. The death of Zangi’s main political rival in the Jazira freed him for operations in Syria. The fact the Assassins came from Syria meant that they would have travelled across Zangi’s territories – perhaps they were given safe passage, or maybe Zangi’s complicity in their mission was even greater than this.
So Zangi was not above cutting cards with the Devil, but he was also a brilliant leader of men and had the perseverance to travel the length and breadth of Syria and Iraq for eighteen years on campaigns. His charismatic leadership was vital to the maintenance of a Turcoman army in the field, particularly at the successful siege of Edessa, which he took from the Crusader Joscelin II in 1144. Al-Qalanasi described how Zangi called on the tribes of Turcomen to carry out the obligation of Holy War, but he also controlled these Turcoman forces through iron discipline. He crucified transgressors of his laws – this, as well as his call for jihad and the booty his successes accrued, was enough to hold his army together. From the very outset of the Crusades, no Muslim leader, excepting the Nizari Ismaili masters, had managed to achieve such a prolonged union of his forces as Zangi did. The Turcomen, in the past, had always dispersed at harvest time and showed no supra-tribal loyalty. Any unity that was achieved by a Muslim army had been ephemeral. The achievement of Zangi was to realise that the Sunni revival and an alliance between the Sunni ulama and himself could be an effective stalking horse for his ambition to build a dynasty in Syria. If he also brought Holy War to the Franj then that was an added bonus and could only help his cause. In fact he had a lot to thank the Nizaris for, as they had called this alliance into existence by their bloody acts in Aleppo and Damascus.
Zangi was even able to utilise jihad during his assaults on the dominions of Damascus in the early 1140s. The city had passed through a turbulent period that had included the killing of a prince by his own mother, and the death of another in a palace conspiracy. Zangi began a siege of Damascus in 1139–40. When the leaders of Damascus called on the Crusaders for help and allied themselves with King Fulk, Zangi’s religious propaganda machine went into overtime. An inscription of 1142 at Aleppo, written in a period when most of Zangi’s actions had in fact been against Muslims, describes him as the ‘tamer of the infidels and polytheists, leader in the holy war, helper of the armies, protector of the Muslims’.
It perhaps seemed fortunate for the Crusaders, the Damascenes and every other group, including the Assassins, that he was killed in September 1146, by a Christian slave as he lay drunk in his tent, but Zangi’s capture of Edessa had already effectively made him a shahid, or martyr. Upon his death, his army plundered and then rapidly dispersed in time-honoured fashion and the counter–crusade looked likely to collapse before Zangi’s son, Nur al–Din, could consolidate his position. This did not happen, however, because by this time there was a lore of jihad evolving in northern Syria – Zangi’s martyrdom was elemental to the maturing of this tradition.