If the people of the world whom Chinggis Khan and his followers killed had remained, they would be cramped for room in the world.
Anonymous Persian writer, c.1347*
THE ASSASSINS HAD MURDERED one of the princes of the Khwarazm shahs back in the early 1150s, but the dynasty, at that time, had not been a real force to be reckoned with. It was with the death of Sultan Sanjar in 1157 that it came into its own, and the shah Il-Arslan consequently emerged as the most powerful ruler in eastern Persia. He was still paying tribute to the Khitai, whose steppe empire held a strong position between the Dar al-Islam and China, and was unable to fully assert his authority over the Ghuzz.
As a result of the prosperity of his lands around the Aral Sea, he was, however, able to recruit heavily for his army among the Turkish tribes, and it therefore grew quickly. Il-Arslan’s troopers had a reputation for viciousness, and are recorded as having carried off Muslim children into slavery and of depriving local farms of the herds they needed to survive. Il-Arslan’s death in 1172 was followed by civil war, but his son Tekish, after finally establishing himself as shah, was able to throw off his allegiance to the rapidly ailing Khitai at the end of the twelfth century. He was also able to involve himself, to his own profit, in the war between the last Saljuq sultan of Iraq, Toghril, and Caliph al-Nasir, who was trying, like the earlier caliph, al-Mustarshid, to take advantage of the collapse of the Saljuq Empire to extend his lands.
Tekish backed the caliph, and in 1194 he defeated and killed Toghril near Rayy. However, he then found himself at loggerheads with the caliph over the inclusion of his name in the khutba at Friday prayers in Baghdad. This would have been tantamount to the caliph accepting the dominion of yet another secular, albeit Sunni, lord, and al-Nasir was more ambitious than that. The caliph went to war, but was poorly equipped to deal with Tekish’s vast army of one hundred and seventy thousand cavalry – he was defeated in 1196.
Tekish died in 1200, but this feud and the brutality of their troops had already alienated grass-root Sunni Muslim opinion from the Khwarazm shahs. Tekish’s son, Ala al-Din Muhammad, only worsened matters by continuing the dispute with the caliph, and making western Iraq a war zone in a conflict with a minor Saljuq emir, Mengli, who had managed to remain independent of the shah. Contemporary writers recorded that the crimes committed by the shah’s army, ‘were greater than the irregularities committed by the Ghuzz in Khurasan and were not less than those committed by the Christians of the Caucasus, the Georgians, the Khitai Turks and the Franks of Syria’.* Muhammad made another error by continuing his attacks on the Khitai. This made the Mongols’ work of dismembering the Khitai steppe empire far easier, and so removed a powerful buffer state – Juvaini called them a ‘great wall’ between the Muslims and fierce enemies – from between himself and the new power in Asia.
From the end of the twelfth century, this was then an obvious new foe for the Nizari Ismailis, since the shah now controlled vast areas of Persia. Furthermore, he was ostensibly Sunni, though alienated from the ulama, and most of all, he was Turkish. His capture of Rayy had also brought his forces dangerously close to Alamut.
Doubtless the Nizari Ismailis would have to look for ways of bringing down this nascent empire as they had that of the Saljuqs, but before they faced this new threat, they had perplexing internal matters to deal with. Muhammad, the grand master, had shown a great deal of provincialism in his outlook and the murders he ordered. By 1143 there was a general dissatisfaction inside the organisation with the apparent abandonment of the project to convert the whole of Islam.
Muhammad might have pointed to the difficulties currently being experienced by the Syrian mission in its attempts to extend the dawa, and to the fact that agreements made between Hasan-i-Sabbah and Sanjar effectively restricted the sect’s missionary work in Persia. Such arguments would however have found little sympathy among Nizari firebrands, and a radical faction formed around Muhammad’s son Hasan, who at this time was about seventeen years old. Perhaps Muhammad later regretted having given his son the same name as the great Hasan-i-Sabbah, as it certainly seemed to assist him in his demagoguery. He drank wine openly, thus implying he was above the law, and devoured the writings of the first Hasan, whose copious works were stored in Alamut’s library.
Hasan also had eloquence on his side, and at this time a tale began to emerge that Hasan himself was the awaited imam and a direct descendant of Nizar. This doubtless grew out of much earlier propaganda that Hasani-Sabbah had disseminated, about the smuggling out of Egypt of an infant grandson of Nizar. Muhammad saw how Hasan was using this story and acted quickly to stop the usurpation of his powers by his son:
He denounced him roundly and having assembled the people spoke as follows: ‘This Hasan is my son, and I am not the imam but one of his dais. Whoever listens to these words and believes them is an infidel and atheist.’ And on these grounds he punished some who had believed in his son’s Imamate with all manner of tortures and torments, and on one occasion put two-hundred and fifty persons to death in Alamut and then binding their corpses on the backs of two-hundred and fifty others condemned on the same charge, he expelled these latter from the castle.*
Hasan was frightened enough by his father’s actions to write a series of treatises, denying that he had ever believed himself to be the imam and he managed to survive the remaining years of his father’s reign and then succeed him. Hasan II maintained the rudiments of his father’s rule for the first two years, but was certainly not as harsh in enforcing discipline as Muhammad had been.
Then in 1164 he very literally made a complete volte-face, by changing the direction of worship away from Mecca, and declaring during Ramadan that the Millennium was beginning. He strode up to the pulpit that he had had built outside Alamut and addressed his followers in Arabic, as if he were receiving the words directly from a heavenly messenger. He claimed to be acting as the mouthpiece for a hidden imam and that the imam told the people to obey Hasan as the Qaim, the bringer of the Qiyama, or Resurrection, as a hujja and as a dai. He then invited his people to break the feast of Ramadan, as the Holy Law had now fulfilled its purpose in maintaining mankind until the Millennium, which had now, of course, come to pass.
In the Festival of the Resurrection that followed, the Sunni chroniclers tell us that widespread debauchery, playing of harps and drinking of wine took place, as well as the stoning to death of individuals who continued to follow the sharia. Hasan’s message was subsequently received enthusiastically in all the enclaves of Ismailism in Persia. In Syria, most leaders of the sect seem to have allowed the new directive to run a little while, but then put an end to it and returned to the sharia’s interdiction on wine and re-instigation of the rules of chastity. This may have had as much to do with the splitting away of the Syrian mission under its impressive leader Rashid al-Din, who controlled the mission from 1160, as much as for any of the finer details of theology.
Hasan II may well have believed that the Millennium and the end of the Holy Law was at hand, but it cannot be denied that his announcement was also an attempt to politically re-invigorate the movement, after the safe but stale years of Muhammad’s stewardship. As we have seen above, the sect was as nothing without the fervour of dawa. Hasan II also perhaps hoped to strengthen his position at the organisation’s head, by his proclamation of the Resurrection and by being ‘appointed’ Qaim by the hidden imam. Among the adherents of Ismailism, he was called Ala dhikrhi’s Salam, meaning ‘peace be on his mention’, and a personality cult seems to have been the basis of his rule, in rather the opposite fashion to that of his father, who relied on hierarchy and the chain of command to manage the movement.
Nizar Ismailism was a radical sect but this was only reflected in its dealings with other Muslims and in the methods it used to ensure its survival. There was also, however, a broad streak of conformism and conservatism that ran through Ismailism, that could not accept Hasan II’s sweeping changes. The conservative elements in the organisation thought they had found a champion in Hasan’s brother-in-law and they backed his revolt against the Qaim. Hasan was stabbed to death by his brother-in-law in January 1166, but the killing was swiftly avenged by Hasan’s son, Muhammad. Muhammad, despite being only nineteen years old, obviously had enough experience of, and stomach for, bloody statecraft to not only torture and eliminate his uncle, but also to extend his revenge to the entire household of the murderer, including women and children.
Muhammad II let the Resurrection run on, and seems to have sought to more fully understand it and explain it through his many writings. He certainly had a long enough reign to undertake such a project. He also went on to proclaim himself imam, claiming to be descended from the mysterious smuggled grandson of Nizar. Yet despite this attempt to re-energise the movement, there was little political action undertaken in these years. The reforms seem rather to have eroded the strict hierarchy of the movement that had earlier made it a real force to be reckoned with – it was more like a religion of personal salvation than a revolutionary movement.
The wazir of the Caliph of Baghdad was murdered by fidai’in and the Sunni theologian Fakhr al-Din Razi of Rayy was silenced, but little else was achieved. Razi seems to have particularly enjoyed destroying the arguments of the Ismailis in his seminary and filling his students with contempt and hatred for the sect. He was an obvious candidate for assassination, but the Assassins’ response was in fact a lot more inventive than mere elimination. A fidai enrolled in Razi’s seminary and studiously attended lectures for seven months, and doubtless had to bite his tongue to stop himself launching into argument with his teacher. One day, he sought out Razi in a quiet part of the college, ostensibly to question him over a difficult theological question. In fact, the question turned out to be very simple – did the teacher wish to have his belly slit from navel to throat, or would he rather accept a small bag of gold and some fine Yemeni garments as the first of a series of payments the imam Muhammad was prepared to give him as a stipend? The chroniclers give Razi the witty reply that the argument was too pointed for him to refuse such a kind offer. Razi remained silent on the Ismailis and their doctrines until he died in 1209 and his story stands as a perfect example for George Bernard Shaw’s quip that, ‘assassination is the extreme form of censorship.’*
The first clash with the Khwarazm shah came in 1199, probably by chance. There is no evidence that the shah had decided on a policy of persecution of the Ismailis at this point; indeed there had been a leaning towards Shiism by the shah, in an attempt to find a new legitimacy after his attacks on the caliph. The attack on the Assassin castle of Arslan-Gushai near Qazvin, therefore had as much to do with the Khwarazmians’ desire to control all of Persia, following their humbling of the minor Saljuq sultans and the caliph, than any policy of direct attack on the Ismailis. The Khwarazmians were satisfied with the withdrawal of the castle’s garrison under treaty, and the fact that they were able to achieve this says a lot about their military power at this point. Arslan-Gushai was described as being, ‘a strong castle built of solid rock upon a lofty mountain top, which seizes Heaven by the forelock and butts Orion; and it was crammed with men eager to give their lives and supported by every manner of arms’.*
As a background to this small conflict, there was also an ongoing war of words between the caliph, al-Nasir, and the Khwarazmians, who had beaten the caliph on the battlefield but could not drag him from the pulpit. In a particularly clever move, al-Nasir called on both Twelver Shiites and the Ismailis to rejoin mainstream Islam. His call perhaps seems somewhat hopeful, given the history of violence between the Abbasids and the Shiites, but the response from the two divisions of Shiism was more enthusiastic than could possibly have been expected. This surprising unity may have been due to the ongoing chaos and misery that the Khwarazmians were bringing to just about everyone in Persia. The Assassins were particularly affected, as the campaign against them in Quhistan had been picked up by Tekish’s son, the new shah, Ala al-Din Muhammad. Standing together was the only form of action anyone who was not a Khwarazmian Turk, and thereby employed in wrecking the country, could take.
The caliph’s appeal was also the cause of yet another strange change in the faith of the Assassins in 1210. Muhammad II died in September and it has been suggested that his heir, Hasan III, had a hand in the old man’s demise. There is certainly mention in the chronicles of Muhammad wearing armour in his son’s presence and surrounding himself with axe-wielding fidai’in. The irony of an assassination of the Assassins’ master was not to be contemplated.
Upon his accession, Hasan moved with some speed to stop the ‘heresy’ of the Resurrection and reintroduce the sharia to Alamut and the other Ismaili settlements. He also sent to the caliph and to the Khwarazm shah to inform them both of the return of sharia law, and the re-adoption of Islamic practice in his lands. Fatwas were sent from Baghdad and other major centres of the Sunni world, stating that the Ismailis were no longer heretics and that Hasan III and his followers were ‘neo-Muslims’. Sunni teachers were sent to Alamut and the other settlements, employed as qadis, and it was almost as if the Nizari creed had never existed – although Hasan III did organise tours of the library of Alamut for interested Sunni officials. The sect’s history was there for all to see in copious volumes.
Hasan’s mother went on pilgrimage via Baghdad, where she was the guest of the caliph in 1212, but the trip nearly went very badly wrong. The Sharif of Mecca’s cousin was murdered during her stay at the holy city, and suspicion naturally fell on the entourage of the mother of the Lord of the Assassins. The fact that the sharif’s cousin was almost his twin in looks only made the matter worse as the sharif was sure the fidai’in had been after him and killed his cousin in error. He was also certain that the caliph was involved. The sharif fined the hajj party and exacted his penalty by basically robbing them of all they had as they returned home. The incident did not, however, affect Hasan’s relationship with the caliph. Perhaps the sharif’s unfortunate cousin had succumbed to a fidai’s blade after all – a later sharif was certainly killed by an Assassin, at the caliph’s behest.
Hasan was invited to spend some time in Baghdad as an honoured guest – by travelling to Baghdad he became the first grand master to leave Alamut. He went even further afield, to Azerbaijan, to secure treaties with the leaders there, and to Gilan, the densely forested area surrounding the south of the Caspian Sea, to claim four brides from the emirs there. He took a personal letter of recommendation from the caliph to bolster his qualification as a son-in-law.
Hasan III had effectively made the Assassin state respectable. He had normal relations with his neighbours, and made and broke treaties with them, just as any other prince might. He assisted in a league of emirs against Mengli, the sultan of western Iraq, and after Mengli’s defeat in 1215, he obtained more districts for his little state from his Sunni allies. His diplomacy extended well beyond the parochialism of his immediate predecessors and he sent emissaries to the new power in the East. Chinggis Khan was fairly well advanced on his career of conquest by this point, but had not reached towards Islam yet. Hasan’s informants and agents in the eastern Muslim lands must have been sending information back on the new empire-builder at a very early stage, as Hasan, wisely as it later transpired, offered duty and allegiance to the Khan.
Hasan III died at the beginning of November 1221 and his only son, Ala al-Din, succeeded him. Hasan’s death serves, perhaps, as a warning against polygamy:
The disease of which Jalal al-Din [Hasan III] died was dysentery and it was suspected hat he had been poisoned by his wives in connivance with his sister and some of his kinsmen. The wazir, who by virtue of his will was administrator of the kingdom and tutor of his son, Ala al-Din, put to death a great number of his relations, his sister, wives and intimates and confidants on this suspicion. And some he burnt.*
Poisoning by a wife is certainly not that uncommon, but to be poisoned by wives marks Hasan out as being fairly remarkable, and in many ways he was. His ‘conversion’ to orthodoxy in 1210 and relations with the caliph take some explaining and may ultimately have been what led to his death, despite obvious successes for the Ismaili state. It could be suggested that it was all done under the philosophy of taqiyya, the time-honoured tradition of Shiites disavowing their true beliefs, so that they might survive and continue to propagate their faith in times of danger. Certainly Hasan’s accommodation took place at a time when the ravages of the Khwarazmians were a menace to every polity in Persia, but there may be more to Hasan’s union with the caliph than just this.
The Xi Xia, the kingdom lying to the west of China and to the east of the Khitai, had just been conquered by Chinggis Khan in 1209, and by 1218 the Mongols would be occupying the lands of the Khitai. Could it be that Hasan saw further than anyone and portended the storm that would come from the east? This is certainly possible, especially if we believe in the Ismailis’ skills in astrology, but what is more likely is that Hasan III could see that a clash between the Khwarazm shah and Chinggis Khan was inevitable. Hasan, with his intellect, contacts with the Mongols, and first-hand experience of the Khwarazm shah, knew who the victor of such an outcome would be. Given the past experience of the Saljuq invasion, an alignment with the Sunni caliph made perfect sense for the Assassins if they were to survive. What is also likely is that Hasan undertook the change to strengthen his own position, as the Resurrection, with its lawlessness, had, over time, actually eroded the position of the grand master through its denial of all laws.
Ala al-Din was only nine when he succeeded his father, under the control of a wazir, who maintained the policies of his father. From the peripheries of the Persian-Ismaili state there were growing defections from the policy of accommodation with the Sunnis and some adherents were even reverting back to the practices of the Millennium – perhaps the joys of wine-drinking and harp-playing were too much to go without. Ala al-Din, despite his youth, seems to have shrugged off his wazir’s tutelage, and moved the organisation to an ideological ‘half-way’ position. The period of active Neo-Islam was certainly over, but the Resurrection and Millennium were not re-proclaimed. What Ala al-Din and his close advisers seem to have aimed for was the extension of the personality cult surrounding the imam, who was now of course, Ala al-Din himself. Ala al-Din therefore ruled more like a heaven-anointed king than a grand master – whilst there were some advantages to this form of rule in this period, there were dangers too.
In the larger scheme of things, what Ala al-Din and the Assassins did at this point did not really matter however. They had proved in the past that their daggers could change the course of events, but now events were moving so fast that any such disruption would have only a slim chance of changing anything. The Assassins were now up against the proclaimed destiny of Chinggis Khan and that destiny was to conquer the entirety of the known world. After the Mongol conquest of the Khitai Empire, which was pretty much completed by 1218, there was almost immediate friction between the Mongols and the Khwarazm shah. In the same year, Chinggis Khan sent an embassy to the shah. In this he was responding tardily to an earlier delegation, sent by the Khwarazmians in 1215, which may have been requesting an alliance and a commercial treaty. This was certainly what the Khan suggested in his letters of 1218, and it was agreed to. At this point, Chinggis may well have been wary of engaging the shah. As we know, the Khwarazmians could, in theory, call one hundred and seventy thousand cavalry to the field and the Khan still had his Chinese project going on – Beijing had only fallen in 1215, and the remnants of the Jin Empire and of the Xi Xia were not fully subjugated yet.
The Mongols subsequently sent four hundred merchants to Utrar, on the borders of the two empires, which lay on the Jaxartes River in modern day Kazakhstan. The merchants were plundered by ill-disciplined Turcoman troops. The shah had said of the Turcoman in the past that even he found it impossible to control them because he was beholden to their tribal leaders. Perhaps he should have tried this excuse on Chinggis, but instead, when the Khan sent ambassadors to demand the arrest of the governor of Utrar the shah murdered one envoy and sent the others back with their heads shaved. In response, in 1219, Chinggis Khan crossed the Jaxartes with an army of between one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand men.
The shah should, in theory, have been able to match this invading force, but he had a number of problems. First, as we have seen, his army was ill-disciplined and he had not had time to put in place reforms suggested by his wazir. The minister had suggested that one thousand of the Turcomen should be taken into direct service of the shah to act as his bodyguard, and this number should be increased over time to ten thousand. Around this core, the rest of the army could then gain order and discipline. This was certainly a pattern the Saljuqs had used effectively, which would find its fullest development in the Ottoman armies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
So the shah could not be sure of his troops, and he could not be sure of his generals either. His mother had been plotting against him, in disappointment that her favourite son had not succeeded to the throne, and many of the leaders of Ala al-Din Muhammad’s army had tribal associations with his mother’s family. He attempted, therefore, to avoid the risk of a coup d’état by dispersing his forces around Khurasan, and so was at the head of a decidedly reduced army as he faced up to Chinggis Khan. Finally, of course, the shah had estranged many of his Persian troops by virtue of his conflict with the caliph and his cruelties against the Persian people.
At Utrar, Chinggis Khan’s army faced a force of about sixty thousand men, and the walls of the town, which were already strong, had been refortified. Leaving a force to surround the city, the Khan then divided his remaining forces. He set out for Bukhara and his son, Jochi, was sent to form the northern limb of a three-pronged assault on the shah’s empire. Another army, probably led by the generals Jebe and Subedei, formed the southern prong. The siege of Utrar went on for five months and even after the Mongols had broken into the city, the governor retired to the citadel where he put up further resistance for another month. He was doubtless in fear of his life and in fear of the likely manner of his death – he was after all the casus belli of the whole affair.
Jochi’s northern forces witnessed the pleasant sight of the Khwarazmians deserting their assigned task of defending the city of Jand and the city fell easily enough to the Mongols in April 1219. The same occurred on the southern approach, as the shah’s army simply fell away. Bukhara and Samarqand, the shah’s capital, were approached by Chinggis Khan’s central army. It also seems that the Khan picked up a great many Ghuzz Turks on the way to Bukhara and added them to his force, so his advance was ‘accompanied by a host of fearless Turks that knew not clean from unclean, and considered the bowl of war to be a basin of rich soup and held a mouthful of the sword to be a beaker of wine’.*
He approached Bukhara in March 1220, and at last, the sultan’s army made a response. A force of twenty thousand men came out from the city to engage the Mongol army, but was destroyed rapidly and totally, in a battle that the chroniclers were able to record in only a few lines. The gates of Bukhara were then immediately opened to the Mongols. The Khan sat down in the main mosque and asked if it was the sultan’s palace. He then ordered his horses’ bellies to be filled and his troopers flung Qurans from caskets to make troughs for their mounts. The city’s singing girls were sent for and a wine party began in the main mosque. The Muslims could now see how their new masters would behave. The pages of the Quran were trampled under horses’ hooves, as the Khan and his men retired for the night.
The next day, the Khan mounted the mosque’s pulpit and addressed the people. ‘O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.’* He sent Mongols with each nobleman to collect all their gold and then, in order to save Mongol troops from danger, the Khan set the people of Bukhara the task of reducing their own citadel. Some of the shah’s men were still holed up in the citadel and fired arrows at the townspeople as they approached the citadel’s walls. The Mongols then set fire to the city to push the townspeople towards the citadel. The citizen attackers were therefore caught between the arrows from the citadel and the flames at their backs:
And on either side the furnace of battle was heated. On the outside, mangonels were erected, bows bent and stones and arrows discharged; and on the inside, ballistas and pots of naphtha were set in motion. It was like a red hot furnace fed from without with hard sticks thrust into the recess . . . for days they fought in this manner; the garrison made sorties against the besiegers . . . but finally they were reduced to the last extremity; resistance was no longer in their power and they stood excused before God and man. The moat had been filed with animate and inanimate objects and raised up with levies and by people of Bukhara; the outworks had been captured and fire hurled into the citadel; and their leaders and notables, who were the chief men of the age and the favourites of the sultan and who in their glory would set their feet on the head of Heaven, now became the captives of abasement and were drowned in the Sea of annihilation.†
The populace was sent into the fields by the Khan, while the city’s walls were levelled. He took every able-bodied man and boy with him as a levy, and moved on to Samarqand, where he was met by his son’s detachment, with the civilians of Utrar also formed into a levy. News came at this point of the shah’s flight from the war and the Khan sent the two generals, Subedei and Jebe, to pursue Ala al-Din Muhammad. Chinggis then spent two days just encircling the walls of Samarqand, at this time one of the greatest cities in the world. On the third day, his army was engaged by the Khwarazmians of the city’s garrison, and in a great battle of mounted archers the Khwarazmians may even have won the day. This was not, however, enough to dislodge the Mongols from their siege, and by the next day the encirclement of the city was complete.
The Mongols attempted to stop further sallies from the city by placing extra forces at each of its gates, but the Khwarazmians came out again, showing much more stomach for battle than their shah had. They deployed elephants against the Mongol troopers, who, after initial difficulties, managed to pour so many arrows in to them that the poor beasts turned tail and trampled their own infantry in a dash back to the city. The battle continued until nightfall when the Khwarazmians retired and closed the city’s gates.
The Mongols gained entrance to the city the next day, through a secret meeting with the qadi of the city and other members of the ulama. The Mongols began flattening the walls of the city after gaining entrance, but otherwise the populace was unharmed by their entry and the Khwarazmians withdrew to the citadel where they were encircled by the Mongols just as they had been at Bukhara. The people and the elephants were then rudely ejected from the city. The chroniclers tell us that the elephants starved to death, but say little else about the people, except that their possessions were pillaged by the Khan’s men.
The citadel was broken into, following a heavy bombardment from the Mongols’ Chinese siege engineers. The Khwarazmians staged a last stand in the Friday mosque, but the Mongols threw naphtha at the mosque until all the defenders inside were burned alive. The survivors of the citadel’s garrison were then separated and the Ghuzz Turks had the front of their heads shaved in the Mongol fashion and joined the Mongol army. The Qipchaq Turks, from the steppes of the Caucasus, who formed the elite of the shah’s army, were however immediately executed.
The conquest of Khwarazm was handed on to Chinggis’s sons, Ogedei and Chaghatai, and the now leaderless Khwarazmians elected one of the kinsmen of the shah’s mother as sultan to defend their homeland by the Aral Sea. Juvaini mockingly called him the nauruz king, or ‘king for a day’, and such was the speed with which the entire area east of the Oxus was conquered by the Mongols that the name seems apt. At the end of this destruction, Juvaini records the one-day sultan as drinking ‘the wine of adversity’, and of having his heart cut in two after viewing the Mongol destruction of his homeland. The devastation was so complete that Juvaini, normally so fastidious about numbers stated, ‘I have heard of such a quantity of slain that I did not believe the report and so have not recorded it.’* Artisans, as noted below, escaped the general holocaust only to be deported to Mongolia as slave labour.
A flavour of the kind of warfare and genocide the Mongols employed all over eastern Persia is given by Juvaini:
The Tartar army planted a standard on top of the wall, and warriors climbed up and caused the earth to ring with their shouts, cries, yelps and uproar. The inhabitants opposed them in all the streets and quarters of the town: in every lane they engaged in battle and in every cul-de-sac they resisted stoutly. The Mongols meanwhile were setting fire to their houses and quarters with pots of naphtha and sewing the people to one another with arrows and mangonels . . . In the morning the people of the town for a while applied themselves to battle in the same manner and bared the claw of conflict with sword, arrow and banner. By now the greater part of the town was destroyed; the houses with their goods and treasures were but mounds of earth; and the Mongols despaired of benefiting from the stores of their wealth. They therefore agreed among themselves to abandon the use of fire and rather to withhold from the people the water of the Oxus, across which a bridge had been built inside the town. Three thousand men from the Mongol army put themselves in readiness and struck at the centre of the bridge; but the inhabitants entrapped them there so no one was able to return.
On this account the townspeople became more energetic in their action and more stubborn in their resistance. On the outside also, the weapons of war became more furious, the sea of battle more raging and the winds of confusion more tumultuous, on earth and in the heavens. Quarter by quarter, house by house, the Mongols took the town, destroying the buildings and slaughtering the inhabitants, until finally the whole town was in their hands. Then they drove the people out into the open; those that were artisans or craftsmen, of whom there were more than one-hundred thousand, were separated from the rest; the children and young women were reduced to slavery and borne off into captivity; and the men that remained were divided among the army, and to each fighting man fell the execution of twenty-four persons . . .†
Such stories of rampant destruction were, however, generally limited to towns that resisted occupation. A number of points are worth noting here. First, extirpation and the crushing of all resistance were obvious sequelae to the Mongol policy of requiring total submission or il from all peoples. Negotiation for terms with the Mongols was really a non-starter, until the world-conquest project got into trouble in the 1260s because of the stubborn resistance of the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and warfare between the descendants of Chinggis Khan. Only at this point was negotiation and parley with likely allies, such as the western Europeans, undertaken as near equals.
Second, in this early stage, the Mongols were quite happy to wreck the entire world and kill all of its inhabitants, if this was what was required for world domination. They had no interest in the life of cities, and, because they practised nomadic pastoralism, no interest in agriculture either. Indeed, depopulating may even have been a deliberate policy, as it opened new pasture for their vast flocks. Their total wreckage of the ancient qanat system of underground canals that maintained Persia’s fragile agrarian fertility meant that those who survived the initial killing and the burning down of granaries faced slow starvation as the soil turned to dust. Thirdly, news of such wanton killing spread fast – indeed, later in the 1240s the English herring fleet lost a fortune as no one from Scandinavia would dare cross the sea to buy their catch for fear of the Mongols.*
A review of Mongol policy then makes it seem odd that the Assassins are often accused of being the first terrorists, when their attacks were almost entirely limited to men of power and influence. There were rarely any indiscriminate killings, nor were there female victims or the striking down of children by the fidai’in, even though child sovereigns were not uncommon in the medieval world. The real war of terror in the Middle Ages was brought to Eurasia by the Mongol superpower, during their war on terror against the Assassins. They used the simple volume of killings as coercion, whereas the killings of the Assassins caused intimidation and ‘terror’ through their highly public nature and the way in which they sowed distrust among the guarded and their guards, and between those vying for power. The ordinary citizen usually appears in history only as a voiceless statistic – ‘Old one hundred names’, as the Chinese would call such ordinary people, are missing from a history of the Assassins simply because the Assassins did not slay such individuals.
The real number of deaths directly attributable to the Mongol genocide in the Dar al-Islam will be disputed over and over by historians. In the past, some have even gone as far as to suggest that millions died in Herat and Nishapur, and to accept verbatim the chroniclers’ undoubtedly over-inflated numbers for the carnage in Persia. However, there is no reason to completely dismiss the accounts and accounting of contemporaries of the events – they resonate with the enormity of the devastation, as it presented itself to the people of the time. Refusing to sail from Sweden to England just for some fish does not seem so ridiculous when we consider that such horrors were whispered across Islam and through Europe. The later Assassins’ policy towards the Mongols was born of this terror.
The massacre and destruction of Transoxania, and south of the Aral Sea, was mild compared with the fate of Khurasan over the next few years. Tolui, Chinggis’s youngest son, was placed in charge of this phase of the operation, and the previous deaths of cities were used to encourage surrender by the great metropolises of Balkh, Herat and Nishapur. These cities were soon enough razed to the ground, however, after minor rebellions and their populations were slaughtered. Tolui’s reign of terror continued until 1223, and the message eventually spread throughout the region that the Mongols meant what they said – that only total submission equalled survival. The Ismaili grand master, Hasan, so Juvaini tells us, had sent couriers to make submission to Chinggis Khan, even before the Mongols had reached Khwarazmian territory. This and the fact that the Ismailis were enemies of the shah, seems to have given the Assassins immunity from the destruction wreaked on Khurasan by the Khan’s men as they extinguished the Khwarazmian state.
Chinggis Khan’s determination to totally destroy eastern Islam may simply have been related to a fear, similar to that of Rome’s fear of Carthage, that Ala al-Din Muhammad’s armies were a direct threat to the Mongol lands, and likely to impinge on the main Chinggisid project of conquering China. But, as we have seen, the shah’s army soon enough fell apart and his son, Jalal al-Din, was only really able to form any resistance once the main Mongol forces had quit the Dar al-Islam with Chinggis Khan in 1223 to campaign once again against the Xi Xia.
The Great Khan died in 1227, and this effectively put Persia on the back boiler for the Mongols, as they struggled to decide on the succession to the World Conqueror. During this lull in the storm, what was left of Persia began to take stock. The shah had died on an island in the Caspian, after being chased right across northern Persia by Jebe and Subedei, who had burnt and pillaged their way across Manzandaran. The two Mongol generals had passed close to the Assassin castles, where many notables sought refuge, but left them unharmed. They did, however, carry out a hurried massacre of the towns around Rayy before moving on. Their armies then crossed the Caucasus, defeated the Russians on the River Kalka and butchered the Turks of the Qipchaq steppes of southern Russia on their way home to Mongolia.
This left Jalal al-Din, having broken through the Mongol lines, and after several desperate adventures that included having to swim the Indus, returning in 1226 to try to restore his rule in the mountains of western Persia. The west, unlike many parts of the east of Persia, was not at this point being ruled directly by Mongol viceroys.
The Assassins had meanwhile taken the opportunity of the destruction of the shah’s empire to extend their lands. They had seized Damghan, and attacked Rayy. Jalal al-Din’s return threatened to call a halt to this expansion, and this, in addition to raids undertaken by the new shah’s wazir against Quhistan, was enough to bring three fidai’in to the city of Ganja, where they murdered one of the shah’s officers in the middle of the night. Evidently disappointed that there were no guards to kill them, they then forced the issue by brandishing their bloody daggers and running towards the residence of the wazir whilst shouting the name of Ala al-Din as loudly as they could. Unfortunately the wazir was not at home, and after lightly wounding a servant, who was the herald of this disappointing news, they rushed into the town. The whole thing became entirely bathetic – the trio rushed into the town centre, still shouting at the top of their lungs until enough townsmen gathered to stone them to death from the rooftops above. The sacrifice had, at last, been made.
The Assassins followed up on their daggers with words, and an envoy was sent to the shah from Alamut. The wazir, perhaps thinking of what might have occurred had he been at home that night, readily invited the envoy to parley. It seems that the Assassin envoy, Ahmad, was good company. Soon enough, he and the wazir were enjoying wine and conversation, and the Assassins agreed to pay Jalal al-Din a stipend for their possession of Damghan. The conversation even grew amicable enough for the wazir to ask Ahmad about the presence of any hidden fidai’in in his own Khwarazmians. To this end the envoy replied that there were fidai’in throughout the shah’s army, in his stables and even among the shah’s bodyguard. The wazir attempted to call Ahmad’s bluff by guaranteeing the safety of any fidai’in if he could produce just one. Ahmad briefly left the table and returned with five. One, an Indian, told the wazir that he could have murdered him on many occasions, but had not done so because he had not yet received the order. The wazir was so frightened by this that he sent a message back to Ala al-Din with Ahmad, that he was merely the shah’s functionary and only obeyed his lord’s orders. Jalal al-Din got word of the bizarre dinner party and insisted that the wazir burn the five fidai’in alive, in front of the wazir’s own tent. The wazir now realised what a difficult situation he had put himself in, and he had to work hard to stay alive. He carried out the shah’s orders, and as the fidai’in were hurled into the fire they cried out their devotion to Ala al-Din. He then negotiated a fine for himself with the Assassins of fifty thousand gold dinars for the incinerated men and also reduced the annual tribute of thirty thousand dinars for Damghan by a third for five years.
The truce did not last between the shah and the Assassins, chiefly because Ala al-Din’s policy was to maintain friendly relations with both the caliph and the Mongols, the shah’s enemies. Ahmad, the envoy who had visited the wazir, was sent east to the Mongol capital, Qaraqorum, to maintain a presence for Alamut at a court that was rapidly filling with envoys from all over Asia. As Ahmad’s embassy returned to Persia in 1228, the Khwarazmians attacked its caravan train and slew seventy Assassins, because they suspected that there were Mongolian envoys among them. Even this was not enough, however, to turn what had become a low-level war, of occasional assassination followed by Khwarazmian reprisal, into the kind of all-out-siege war that the conflict with the Saljuqs had been.
Ala al-Din was keen for the peace, however phoney it might be, to be maintained and he even over-paid the tribute he sent the shah. He also showered gifts on the envoy sent to collect the tribute. Perhaps conversion through theological argument was not enough in this time. Certainly, the envoy was mightily impressed by the satin cloaks and Chinese crepe that were piled into his outstretched hands and by the camels and horses waiting outside for him. Ala al-Din needed peace with the shah because he was contesting a nasty little border war with his neighbours, the Gilanis. Hostilities had begun ostensively over the four brides Ala al-Din’s father had obtained from Gilan, since all four had been executed after Hasan III’s poisoning. However, the conflict had just as much to do with the exaction of payment from travellers on the road below the Elburz Mountains that led from the sea to the major cities of the region.
Ala al-Din, despite being only in his teens during his contest with Jalal al-Din, effectively outlasted the shah, who was killed in 1231 by a Kurdish bandit. The shah’s death was enough to cause the final disintegration of the Khwarazmian state. Many of its soldiers left for mercenary employment in the Levant, where we will meet them later. The grand master sent missionaries during this period into India, where the faith flourished without the attendant need of political murder – this of course is where the Ismaili sect’s headquarters and its head, the Aga Khan, are resident today.
Despite the statements of Sunni historians that he was brain-addled and melancholic as a result of excessive blood loss during a surgical procedure undertaken when he was a small child, Ala al-Din maintained an effective foreign policy – this included having almost permanent emissaries at the court of the new Great Khan, Ogedei. His representatives would, however, have been competing for the attentions of the Mongols with numerous emissaries from all over Europe, from the Christian states of Georgia and Armenia, as well as envoys from the still unconquered Chinese southern Song. Ala al-Din’s men evidently did a good job in their diplomacy, as the Assassins were simple onlookers of the Mongol offensive into western Islam of 1230. Western Persia was conquered and northern Mesopotamia was taken. Georgia and Armenia took vassalage to the Mongols, and in 1241 the army of the Golden Horde moved out of Asia and into Europe, where they inflicted a crushing defeat on the cream of Polish chivalry and of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Leignitz.
Something very odd then happened, that must have caught the attention of the Assassins. Ogedei died, and though the whole of central Europe lay open to them, the Mongols retired from their march on Vienna and all offensive operations ceased, on every front. Upon the death of the Khan, all roads were closed to trade and war traffic, and the entire state seemed to hold its breath while its leaders returned to Qaraqorum for a quriltai, or tribal meeting, to select the new Khan. Europe was saved by the natural passing-away of Ogedei, and Ala al-Din may have considered that even an unnatural death of a Khan might one day do the same for his kingdom.
The Mongols squabbled over the accession for five years, whilst the regency was held by Ogedei’s widow. Even then, Batu Khan of the Golden Horde in Russia would not accept the new Khan, Guyuk, and it seems reasonable to mark the beginning of the Mongol superpower’s break-up from 1241. Certainly, the tendency for internecine fighting, that would become a dominant feature of the Mongol world empire from the 1260s onwards, started in the short reign of Guyuk, which ended with his death in 1248, as the Khan was on his way to challenge Batu. This hostility within the Chingisid family would certainly have reminded the Assassins of the Saljuq family feuds following the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk and death of Malikshah – and may have led them more and more to the conclusion that just one dagger could solve their Mongol problem.
Despite the above interregnum, the Mongols did, however, subdue Anatolia in this period, following the total defeat of the last Saljuq sultan of Rum at the Battle of Kose Dagh, in 1243. This left the rump of the Abbasid caliph’s state of southern Iraq and the Assassins statelets effectively surrounded. The invasion of Eastern Europe did not raise the western Christian states to any response. Indeed, the courts of France and England sent a mission requesting aid home empty-handed and the Bishop of Winchester is recorded as having said to Henry III of England that he should, ‘Let those dogs devour each other and be utterly wiped out, and then we shall see, founded on their ruins, the universal Catholic Church, and there shall truly be one shepherd and one flock.’*
Perhaps it was the long-hoped-for coming of Prester John to save the now desperate Crusader states from the Muslim jihad, an event the West had been waiting for since first news of him in 1157,† that made the invasion of Eastern Europe only a secondary concern of the western kings and of the pope. Certainly, they redoubled their efforts to convert and befriend the Mongol Khans. Pope Innocent IV sent his envoy, John of Plano Carpini to the enthronement of Guyuk Khan, whilst the Abbasid caliph and the Assassins sent a joint delegation. Carpini’s friends described him as being so enormously fat that a particularly strong ass had to be found to transport him across Asia, to Qaraqorum, to discuss an alliance over the Holy Land. It seems likely that the Khans were already concerned over the Assassins’ reputation, as Friar John tells us about the security arrangements that Guyuk employed, as well as the host of states vying for Mongol favour:
In the wall of boards about the tent were two great gates, by one of these, the emperor only was to enter, and at that gate there was no guard of men appointed to stand, although it stood continually open, because no one dared go in or come out by it. All that were admitted entered by another gate at which there stood watchmen with bows, swords, and arrows. And whosoever approached the tent beyond the bounds and limit assigned, and, being caught, was beaten, but if he fled, he was shot at with arrows. Without the door stood Duke Jeroslav of Susdal, in Russia, and a great many dukes of the Cathayans, and of the Solangs. The two sons also of the King of Georgia, an ambassador of the Caliph of Baghdad, who was a sultan and, we think, more than ten other sultans of the Saracens beside. And as it was told us by the agents, there were more than four thousand ambassadors, partly, of such as paid tribute and such as presented gifts, and other sultans and dukes, which came to present themselves, and such as the Tartars had sent for, and such as were governors of lands. All these were placed without the enclosure, and had drink given to them.*
The friar also intimates that he realises such parleying and kowtowing by all these envoys would be of little avail in the long run:
Their intent and purpose is to subdue the whole world, as they had been commanded by Chinggis Khan. Hence it is that the emperor in his letters writes after this manner: ‘The power of God, and emperor of all men’. Also upon his seal, there is engraved: ‘God in heaven and Guyuk Khan upon earth, the power of God: the seal of the emperor of all men.’†
The security arrangements continued inside the Khan’s yurt:
Then each one of us bowed his left knee four times, and they gave us warning not to touch the threshold. And after they had searched us most diligently for knives, and could not find any about us, we entered in at the door upon the east side; because no man dare presume to enter at the west door, but the emperor only.‡
King Louis IX of France sent the next envoy to the Mongols, a rather thinner Franciscan called William of Rubruck, in 1248. William carried a portable altar in the hope of making converts of the ruling house, and in this he was competing for the Mongols’ attentions with the Nestorian Christians and Muslims:
Then the priests of idols arrive and they do the same. The monk told me that the Khan believes only the Christians, but that he wants everybody to pray for him. The monk lied, for the Khan believes in no one, as you shall soon learn. Every one seeks the court as flies seek honey and they leave it satisfied, each imagining he has the prince’s favours, and showering blessings on him . . .*
Despite William’s acerbic view, there was a confidence in Europe that newly baptised Mongols would become the instrument of Outremer’s salvation. This meant that there was absolutely no sympathy for embassies that had been sent as early as 1238 to the courts of France and of England by the Syrian-Ismaili mission. The envoys were, in fact, sent in the names of both Ala al-Din and of the Abbasid caliph to seek alliances against the Mongols. Ala al-Din’s foreign policy was limited simply by the fact that the Mongols had little need of alliances and allies, and the Europeans thought they did not either. His only ally at this juncture was ironically the Abbasid caliph, the original enemy of the Assassins but now a friend of convenience. Ala al-Din, simply by virtue of being an Assassin grand master, had always found friends in short supply, and now had a new enemy very close to home, in the form of his son, Rukn al-Din, or ‘Pillar of the Faith’.
It seems that with advancing years, Ala al-Din had become, to put it mildly, eccentric and dangerously contrary. Anyone venturing to contradict him or question his policies, risked mutilation, amputation of limbs and death by torture. This, in addition to the natural tendency of courtiers to seek the favour of the heir apparent, encouraged many within Alamut to look to Rukn al-Din for instructions, rather than to the grand master. This strained the relationship between father and son, and Ala al-Din tried to change the succession to a younger son. However, he was frustrated in this by his own following, who could only accept the eldest son as the new imam – the grand masters were becoming more and more like kings, less and less like first ministers.
Ala al-Din next confined his son to the harem and spent more and more time with his companion, Hasan of Mazandaran. Hasan had been abducted as a child from his home by the Mongols; he had then escaped and fled to Alamut. The relationship of this attractive youth with Ala al-Din seems to have become dangerously sado-masochistic, and whilst he accrued great wealth and influence as the grand master’s favourite, he also suffered the torments of broken teeth and the severing of half of his penis at his master’s hands. Ala al-Din would spend a great deal of time dressed in rags and acting as a shepherd with Hasan, and whilst his father was roving around the mountains, Rukn al-Din would emerge from the harem to conspire with the leaders of Alamut. These conversations seem to have centred on ensuring that Ala al-Din did not change his policy of continued appeasement of the Mongols. The old man had begun to speak more and more of unleashing the fidai’in on Qaraqorum. There was also equally a concern that Ala al-Din might send Assassins against his own son. At this time too, the Ismaili state was suffering from the grand master’s increased removal from worldy business, as well as suffering what appears to have been a crime wave, with highway robbery becoming a daily event.
Things came to a head in 1255, when Rukn al-Din stated at one of these meetings that, ‘my life is not safe with my father’, and that he planned to flee to Syria. Juvaini states that he then went on to offer a form of ultimatum to the leaders of Alamut, in which he stated that because ‘of my father’s evil behaviour the Mongol army intends to attack this kingdom and my father is concerned about nothing. I shall secede from him and send messengers to the Emperor of the Face of the Earth and to the servants of his court and accept submission and allegiance.’* Rukn al-Din was unable to carry out any such plan because he then fell seriously ill, but his sickness eventually turned out to be serendipitous. He had been ill for about a month and none of the leaders of Alamut could decide how to proceed. It seemed impossible to depose Ala al-Din, especially now that his heir was gravely sick, and none of them could bring themselves to contemplate regicide. In the end, the affair was settled by Hasan, who appears to have been unable to endure any more beatings from his elderly lover.
One evening towards the end of the year, in one of his shepherd’s huts, Ala al-Din and Hasan started a drinking session with with some slaves and fellow shepherds. The grand master fell into a drunken stupor and the next morning his decapitated body, complete with the head neatly placed beside it, were found outside the hut. A tribunal was set up and all the grand master’s drinking companions were questioned. Eventually the blame worked its way round to Hasan, chiefly through the admission of Hasan’s wife, who had also been Ala al-Din’s mistress, that her husband had beheaded the imam.
Rukn al-Din had Hasan quietly done away with. He sent him out to tend his father’s now sherperdless sheep and sent a fidai after him armed with the large double-headed axe that the Assassins always carried when on guard duty. The fidai struck Hasan from behind, and took his head off cleanly in one quiet stroke. His son and two daughters were also put to death, and so the whole affair was neatly closed. Only the accusations of Rukn al-Din’s mother and sisters, that he had actually murdered his father, disturbed the peace. It was but an small episode of blood-letting, restricted only to a small mountain state, and was as nothing compared to the carnage that was to come, so very soon, to the whole of Persia.