Warfare is deception. If you find a tithe collector, kill him. Go in the name of God and in God and in the religion of the Prophet of God! Do not kill the very old, the infant, the child, or the woman. Bring all the booty, holding back no part of it. Maintain order and do good, for God loves those who do good. Accept advice to treat prisoners well. Looting is no more lawful than carrion. He who loots is not one of us. He has forbidden looting and mutilation. He has forbidden the killing of women and children. He who flees is not one of us. The bite of an ant is more painful to the martyr than the thrust of a weapon, which is more desirable to him than sweet, cold water on a hot summer day.
Attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in the writings of Al-Muttaqi*
THE FALL OF EDESSA to Zangi in 1144 sparked panic in the petty Muslim states of Syria, as well as Europe. The European response would come in the form of the Second Crusade. Meanwhile, the Damascenes reached out to the Crusaders to seal a mutual defence policy against the new threat from the Jazira, whilst remaining officially non-aligned. The Assassins of Syria fell back on their well-tried tactic of withdrawal to their castles in the mountains of Jabal Bahra and Jabal al-Summaq to await events.
By the time the Crusade reached the Holy Land in 1148, Zangi had already been dead for two years and his possessions had been shared out equally between his two sons, as Turkish tradition required. Nur al-Din inherited Aleppo, whilst his brother, Sayf al-Din Ghazi, was bequeathed Mosul. The generally friendly relationship that endured between the two went very much against the grain of the normal deadly sibling rivalry of Turkish princes. The division did, however, weaken Nur al-Din’s ambitions in Syria because he could not draw, as his father had, on the military and economic reserves of Mosul. He still had the core of his father’s Mamluks and the askaris of his emirs, as well as the Turcoman irregulars, but it was obvious that he needed more men if he was ever to be able to bring Damascus under his dominion. He therefore employed the Kurdish clan of the Ayyubids, and with these forces he was able to crush a Crusader attempt to retake Edessa in 1147.
Nur al-Din had secured his physical possessions in readiness for the challenge of the coming Crusade. However, he knew he also needed to rekindle the union of the Sunni-Syrian population’s religious and civilian leaders with the Turkish men of the sword that had taken place during the reign of Zangi. He therefore abolished the Shiite prayer formula, previously used to call the faithful to prayer in Aleppo, and began a furious propaganda assault on the populace of Damascus, identifying himself as the champion of jihad and the only hope for Muslim Syria against the coming infidel assault.
He almost did not need to bother with the war of words. The Second Crusade did more to push Damascus into Nur al-Din’s arms than any number of epistles could ever have managed. The whole venture had started to unravel, with a heavy defeat of the German knights by Turcoman forces as they crossed Anatolia. The few knights that continued their journey into Syria soon found that their efforts would be wasted by leaders who had no experience of the complex politics of the region. The problem was that King Fulk had died in 1143, and his son Baldwin III was very much under the control of his mother. His weakness on the throne meant that he could not secure control over the new Crusaders. Moreover, the counsel of the Palestinian knights was ignored by the knights of Europe, who decided to attack Damascus – the one Muslim city in Syria on which they could rely for alliance and even assistance. The resulting Crusader siege of the city, and its break-up before the advance of Nur al-Din’s forces, effectively finished the Second Crusade and also killed the hope that Muslim Syria would never unify against the Franj. By their own blundering, the Crusaders had effectively forced the Damascenes to abandon their policy of non-alignment.
The Assassins looked down from their castles’ ramparts in horror. Their own policy of hindering any extension of Turkish rule in Syria had been completely ruined by the Crusaders’ actions. Nur al-Din’s removal of the Shiite rite in Aleppo also gave them full warning that the Sunni drive on Jerusalem and beyond to the Mediterranean, hailed by Nur al-Din as the aim of his jihad, also had them very much in its sights. The presence of Nizari troops, led by a Kurd named Ali ibn Wafa, in the forces that Prince Raymond of Antioch brought to his campaign against Aleppo in 1149, is therefore not surprising. Unfortunately for the Assassins, both Wafa and Raymond were killed at the Battle of Inab in 1149. Nur al-Din rewarded the takers of the heads of the Crusader prince and the Assassin leader with handsome gifts.
Damascus came over to Nur al-Din bloodlessly in 1154, and things looked grim for Franks and Assassins alike. Then in August 1157, as rumours circulated in Damascus that Nur al-Din was readying himself to take Jerusalem, nature disturbed all the plans of men, as an immense earthquake devastated all of Syria. Nur al-Din had to concentrate all his energies on just repairing the fabric of his cities.
In October of the same year he was taken seriously ill. Ibn al-Qalanasi tells us how serious this was for Muslim Syria:
The armies of the Muslims dispersed, the provinces were thrown into confusion, and the Franks were emboldened. They proceeded to the town of Shaizar, entered it by assault, and slew citizens, took prisoners, and plundered. Then there assembled from various parts a great host of the men of the Ismailis amongst others, and these defeated the Franks, slew a number of them, and drove them out of Shaizar.*
So why were the Ismaili Assassins now defending one of Nur al-Din’s possessions against the Franj? Put simply, in their attempts to solidify borders against the now-united Muslim state of Syria, the Franks were coming into conflict with the Assassins’ ambitions for independence from all powers. In 1152, because of just such a boundary conflict, Count Raymond II of Tripoli fell to the fidai’in’s daggers at the gates of his own city. Ralph of Merle and another knight, who were with the Count, tried to save him and also perished. King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, who was also in Tripoli at the time, ordered a majestic funeral for Raymond and let loose a frenzy of retaliation on local Muslims. A large number were massacred by Tripoli’s Christians and the king then sent the Templar Knights into the Jabal Bahra to raid croplands and Ismaili villages. This destruction eventually forced the Nizaris to parley, and start paying the Templar Order an annual tribute of some two thousand gold pieces.
All this is highly ironic, given that much has been written on the great similarity between the Assassins and the knights of the Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Orders. Many writers have suggested that the Templars’ organisation, in particular, replicated both the Assassins’ hierarchy and their ‘uniform’. White gowns were certainly used by both orders, with the Templars substituting a red cross for the Assassins’ red dagger emblazoned on their breasts. It has even been suggested that the military orders were formed as a direct response to the religious brotherhood of the fidai’in that Crusaders had encountered in Syria.
Such a hypothesis seems extremely unlikely, however, given that medieval Europeans remained almost completely ignorant of Shiism and its structure – let alone that of the secretive Ismailis – and its differences to Sunnism. Even William of Tyre, one of the best informed of the Crusader chroniclers, summed up his knowledge of the distinction between the two creeds in 1180, by declaring that, according to the Shiites, God had intended to give the message of Islam to Ali, the only true Prophet, but the angel Gabriel had mistakenly handed the message to Muhammad.*
The reasons for the formation of the military orders undoubtedly lie elsewhere. There is an almost universal tendency among writers from all eras, including our own, to label the Assassins as religious fanatics. In the long view of history, this seems a rather odd position to take. The chroniclers recording the deeds of the pilgrim soldiers of Europe were, in fact, recording an action largely built on religious fanaticism. The creation and success of the First Crusade and later of the military orders, was both built on, and then developed further, a union between the Church and the men of the sword. Later, this would lead to the bloody extinguishing of the Albigensians in the Crusades against Christians in southern France, as well as the Teutonic Knights drive to the East in the thirteenth century.
This union required the production of religious fervour within European society, particularly among the knights, upon who the papacy relied during the conflict between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors over investitures in the eleventh century. During this conflict, knights were invested by the pope as Milites San Petri, or ‘soldiers of Saint Peter’. The union was achieved partly through the blessing of battle banners and weapons, just as the fidai’in’s daggers were consecrated by their grand master. The Milites San Petri were initially a small movement, but one can see the seeds of the later ‘pilgrim in arms’ of the First Crusade and military orders in this organisation. Tales, such as the expulsion of the emperor’s antipope’s forces from Rome by the crusading Prince Hugh of Vermandois, who fought under the banner of Saint Peter, were highly influential, in the same way that Alamut’s fidai’in roll of honour was, in creating a lore of sacrifice. The battle cry Deus lo volt! or ‘God wills it!’, and Holy Banners such as the Vexillum San Petri (Banner of Saint Peter) and the Vexillum Cruces (Banner of the Cross) were central to the identity of a Crusader and Templar. The Assassin guards’ axes and their consecrated daggers worked in the same manner.
The link between faith and war therefore developed rapidly in the late eleventh century in Europe. The process of ‘Christianising’ the bloody business of war was chiefly undertaken through the granting of indulgences that ensured a safe passage to Heaven without the soldier’s soul having to traverse Purgatory or risk Hell as his destination. Church-sanctioned murder – killing for the faith – guaranteed a direct passage to Heaven, just as the Assassin masters promised Paradise to the fidai’in.
The Templars were also, in theory, only answerable to the pope, not to kings. From the Council of Clermont and Urban’s call for the liberation of the Holy Land onwards, there was a willingness among much of the nobility of Europe to see the pope, rather than the emperor, as the leader of ‘the army of the faithful’. Such attachment to a spiritual leader, even when undertaking the bloody business of earthly war, connects the men of the knightly orders once again with the fidai’in, but attachment to faith leaders was not unique to the Ismailis in Islam. There was a long history of ghazis – these fighters for the faith would leave safe homelands to fight on the borders of the Dar al-Islam against the Turks or Byzantines, and live together as communities in ribats, fortified Muslim monasteries. In eleventh- and twelfth-century Syria there were also futuwwa, or brotherhoods, such as the Nubuwiyya, whose central principle was the eradication of Shiism from the region. These brotherhoods were associations of young men, with distinct ranks and rites to mark the attainment of manhood. Most were followings of holy men and had cult practices; they were deeply mistrusted by orthodoxy, just as the Templars would be at the close of their history.
The discipline that the Templars showed within their strict hierarchy was directly related to the religious nature of their brotherhood. This reflected the ecclesiastical discipline based on celibacy and rejection of worldly honours and desires that had been instilled by Urban II into the church, and by the Cluniac philosophy of Gregory the Great. The monkish lifestyles of the grand masters would have recommended itself to the clerics of Cluny and the monks might even have understood the dual nature of existence that Ismaili theology described. The dualism of Ismaili teaching, that described the presence of the heavenly in everyday things, has a strong parallel in the ideal Crusader – he fought to free the Holy Land but also retained a higher ideal of the ‘other’ Jerusalem, the celestial city that existed above the ordinary gore and dross of this earth.
Whilst parallels between the Templars and the fidai’in are not hard to uncover, the only real link between the Templars and the Assassins was that the weapon of assassination was ineffective against the Templars. Even the murder of their grand master would only lead to a small and short-lived level of disorganization. He could be immediately and easily replaced by a fellow knight. The Assassins would face the same problem in the thirteenth century, when they found the one-generation nobility of the Mamluk sultanate similarly impossible to intimidate.
With the payment of tribute to the Templars, and Nur al-Din’s recovery, the Assassins in Syria were undoubtedly in trouble. However, they were then saved by the appearance of a man who, according to the chroniclers, arrived at Masyaf castle on a white donkey, in 1162. The writers chose to have Rashid al-Din Sinan arrive on a white donkey because, of course, this historically had been the colour of resistance for all Shiites, being the opposite to the Abbasids’ black. Sinan was to become the very epitome of resistance, both to the Sunni jihad, and to the Crusaders, who gave him another title; ‘Old Man of the Mountain’. He was to make the Syrian mission very much his own, and whilst there was certainly lip service paid by this redoubtable man to Alamut, there can be no doubting that under Sinan, the Syrian Assassins’ operation became very much a personality cult. A traveller through the region between 1160 and 1173, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, tells us that:
Under Mount Lebanon . . . reside the people called Assassins, who do not believe in the tenets of Mohammedanism, but in those of one whom they consider like unto the Prophet . . . They fulfil whatever he commands them, whether it be a matter of life or death. He goes by the name of Sheikh al-Hashishin, or their Old Man, by whose commands all the acts of these mountaineers are regulated. The Assassins are faithful to one another by the command of their Old Man, and make themselves the dread of everyone, because their devotion leads them gladly to risk their lives, and to kill even kings when commanded. They are at war with the Christians, called Franks, and with the Count of Tripoli . . .*
Sinan came to Masyaf as a representative of the Persian grand master, Hasan II. He is recorded as having been a handsome individual with astonishingly dark, almost hypnotic, eyes. More important than his physical make up, however, was his learning, eloquence and innate intelligence; he claimed to be the son of a noble Shiite of Basra. He was probably born around 1130, and among the other trades assigned to him by the writers of the time, he was listed as an alchemist. After a family quarrel he left home penniless and travelled to Alamut. Sinan continues the tale of his early life as recorded by Kamil al-Din, the chronicler of Aleppo:
I made my way until I reached Alamut and entered it. Its ruler was Kiya Muhammad, and he had two sons called Hasan and Husain. He put me in school with them, and gave me exactly the same treatment as he gave them, in those things that are needful for the support, education, and clothing of children. I remained there until Kiya Muhammad died, and was succeeded by his son Hasan. He ordered me to go to Syria. I set forth as I had set forth from Basra, and only rarely did I approach any town . . . I entered Mosul and halted at the mosque of the carpenters and stayed the night there, and then I went on, not entering any town, until I reached Raqqa. I had a letter to one of our companions there. I delivered it to him; he gave me provisions and hired me a mount as far as Aleppo. There I met another companion and delivered him another letter and he too hired me a mount and sent me on to Kahf. My orders were to stay in this fortress, and I stayed there until Sayh Abu Muhammad, the head of the Mission, died on the mountain.*
It is possible that Sinan was in Syria as early as 1157 and was lamed by a rock fall, during the terrible earthquakes of that year. However, his activities until his arrival at Masyaf, in 1162, are unknown. In 1169, Sinan is said to have come to the chief dai of Syria, Abu Muhammad, and apprised him of the fact that he was about to die. He then showed Abu Muhammad a letter from Alamut. The letter was from seven years earlier and appointed Sinan to replace Abu Muhammad as chief dai in Syria. Abu Muhammad soon died, just as Sinan had predicted, but Hwaga Ali Ibn Masud succeeded him without Alamut’s approval. He was, however, killed shortly after, as he left his bath, by men sent by Abu Muhammad’s nephew. Orders then came from Alamut, that those involved in the conspiracy against Masud should be arrested and put to death. A further message came with the order ratifying the position of Sinan as grand master in Syria.
There was a backlash against Alamut’s imposition of a master by some members of the Syrian mission, which was already showing a degree of independence from its Persian parent. Plots were formed against Sinan, but he had already developed an internal network of informers inside Masyaf and the putsch planned against him was discovered easily enough. His handled and gathered information so skilfully that upon discovering that they had been exposed, many of the plotters assumed Sinan to have supernatural powers. Some even submitted to him without waiting for evidence of their guilt to be produced. Sinan also appears to have worked hard to create an illusion of preternatural powers.
His Ismaili biographer, Abu Firas, rehashed tales of Hasan-i-Sabbah’s deeds and applied them to Sinan, but Sinan also seems to have adopted a persona that invited tales to be created about him. He lived his public life as a pious ascetic dedicated to prayer and good works. He also made sure he was seen fervently conversing with invisible beings and claimed to know the secrets of the afterlife. He even prevented his fidai’in guards from killing a large snake one day, because he said it was the soul of an Assassin who had died recently. Another tale, genuinely believed at the time, was that one day, after he spoke gently to a horse it dropped dead. Sinan claimed that, through Allah’s intercession, he had released the horse, a princess in a previous life, from a harsh master. Sinan’s telepathic powers were also recounted as being so powerful that he could read thoughts and unopened letters.
It seems, however, that not all his contemporaries were convinced of his unnatural abilities. Complex tales of fraud were recorded, including one of a fidai’s apparently decapitated head on a gold tray chatting with the grand master whilst really being quite fully attached to a body hidden below the floor. Kamal al-Din’s verdict was that whilst Sinan was undoubtedly ‘an outstanding man’, he was also little more than a juggler, ‘with power to incite and mislead hearts’, who used ‘the vile and the foolish for his evil purposes’.*
Sinan showed his loyalty to the Persian mission by recognising the Resurrection that Hasan II had proclaimed from Alamut. There were, however, too many excesses carried out in Syria in celebration at the end of the law. Assassins were recorded, not surprisingly by Sunni writers, as defiling their mothers, sisters, and daughters during the Qiyama. Even if these accusations are exaggerated there does appear to have been an acute breakdown in the Ismaili order resulting from the Resurrection. In 1176 Sinan had to carry out a campaign of virtual extermination against factions in the Jabal al-Summaq that were ignoring all calls for a return to discipline. The Resurrection and its aftermath made Sinan favour a fuller break from Persian control, and in the 1170s there were any number of attempts on his life by Assassins sent from Alamut, but every one failed and every Assassin sent was either killed or switched to Sinan’s patronage.
Sinan’s position at the head of the Syrian mission was now secure. His external policy was complex but retained his personal stamp, which is undoubtedly why he became the archetypal Assassin for the Crusader historians, and the stuff of legend in Europe. Indeed, his recognition as a man of great importance in the Levant was not limited to Christian writers. The Muslim traveller, Ibn Jubayr, recorded during his journey through Syria in 1185 that
a sect has diverged from Islam, and which claims that the divinity resides in a human being. A demon with a human face, called Sinan, has appeared among them. They acknowledge him as their god whom they worship, and on whose behalf they are ready to sacrifice their lives. So completely have they become accustomed to obeying his orders, that if he orders someone to throw himself from the top over the precipice he does so at once.*
Between the two powers of the region, the Crusaders and Nur al-Din, the main contest was over Egypt. The Crusaders had realised that there could be no attempt to reclaim their losses against Zangi and Nur al-Din without the resources of Egypt, and Egypt looked ready to fall. Indeed, the Assassins’ murder of Caliph al-Amir had, as we saw earlier, brought the Fatimid Dynasty virtually to its knees, and ended Egypt’s ability to act as a regional power. In the 1150s and 1160s, the throne and the office of the wazir had been fought over by numerous candidates, and so weak was the kingdom that it began to pay tribute to the Franks. In 1163, an ousted wazir, Shawar, fled to Nur al-Din’s court to seek aid against his successor. Amalric, the King of Jerusalem, invaded Egypt and would have taken Cairo, if he had not been halted by the city’s defenders cutting dykes to release the Nile floods.
Nur al-Din’s resources were stretched at this time, but he sent the Ayyubid, Shirkuh, with only a small force, to attempt to take Cairo. Shirkuh and his nephew, Saladin, were surprisingly successful and put Shawar back in office. However, Shawar then double-crossed Shirkuh and Saladin and called Amalric to his aid. Amalric advanced towards Cairo again, but Nur al-Din recommenced operations in Palestine and this was enough to force Amalric to conclude an armistice, based on the withdrawal of both the Crusaders’ and Shirkuh’s forces from Egypt. It was only a temporary ceasefire, however, and Shirkuh returned to Egypt in 1167. Shawar again appealed to Jerusalem and Amalric came in force, but was defeated by Shirkuh at al-Babayn, in March. The Franks also besieged Alexandria and its new governor, Saladin, managing to force a stalemate that saw both armies evacuate Egypt once again. Amalric was left in a slightly better position, in that the tribute paid to him by the Fatimids was increased, and he had troops and a military attaché garrisoned in Cairo itself.
In 1168 Amalric attempted to bring Egypt under full control and invaded once more. He took Bilbays on the Cairo road and it looked as if the capital would fall. Shawar opened protracted negotiations with the king, but also sent to Nur al-Din once again for aid. Shirkuh set out in December 1168 from Syria and the arrival of his forces in Egypt was enough to force the withdrawal of the Frankish army, which was suffering from disease. Shirkuh took the position of wazir and executed Shawar. Shirkuh’s death soon after left Saladin at the helm of the Egyptian state, but in a tricky position. He was wazir to a Shiite-Ismaili caliph and had only a small body of Syrian troopers to counter the still large, if virtually unmanageable, forces of the Fatimid army. Fortuantely Saladin was a mature thirty year old, and was already a seasoned warrior and politician. Despite all his later great achievements, what he managed to do in Cairo, in these early years, may have been Saladin’s finest deeds in terms of simple political acumen. He started by seizing lands and properties from senior Fatimid emirs, whilst still maintaining his loyalty to the Fatimid caliph. He then used the funds and property he garnered from this to both buy the services of Turkish Mamluks, and to supply his own men with iqtas in Egypt. By these actions, he both increased his own forces and tied the troops to his personal fortunes.
In 1169, he was able to meet and suppress a revolt among the Black troops of the Fatimid army, and by 1171 he simply had to wait for the sickly Fatimid caliph al-Adid to die in order to bring Egypt fully under his own control. Nur al-Din meanwhile, was placing increasing pressure on his lieutenant to finish the Fatimid line and impose Sunnism, and adherence to the Abbasid caliph, on Egypt. It has been suggested that Saladin could not bring himself to kill the young al-Adid, but it is obvious that he was also attempting to ensure that Egypt remained very much under his own control as a satellite to, rather than a province of, Nur al-Din’s sultanate. Then, without warning, in September 1171, a citizen of Mosul, who was visiting Cairo, entered a mosque, climbed the pulpit ahead of the Ismaili preacher, and said the khutba in the name of the Abbasid caliph. There was no protest from the congregation, or riots, or insurrections over the following days. The Fatimid-Ismaili cause seemed to have died quietly, as did its last caliph, in his sleep, only a few days later.
Saladin then began to play a clever game: he assisted Nur al-Din in the sultan’s campaigns against the Franks in Jordan, in 1171 and 1173, but during both campaigns he withdrew early from the conflict, citing concern over Cairo’s politics – effectively allowing the Franks to escape serious defeats. Doubtless the ruler of Egypt realised that the Crusaders were effectively both distracting Nur al-Din from a march on Egypt and dividing Muslim Syria from Saladin’s state. He also realised how dangerous this game was, and in February 1174, he sent his brother to Yemen to secure a bolt-hole for the Ayyubid family, should the whole empire-building project in Egypt come to nothing. Incidentally, this action pushed the Ismaili community, who had controlled Yemen since the tenth century, out of the country – they departed for India, where today they are known as the Bohoras.
The Ayyubid safe-haven plan certainly seems wise as the very next month a grand conspiracy against Saladin was discovered. It involved the now-disbanded Black troops of the former caliphal guard, Armenian Mamluks and diehard Fatimid Ismailis. The plotters had also opened negotiations with the Franks and, if a letter from Saladin to the caliph is to be believed, with Sinan, who, Saladin suggested, was colluding with the Franks over the future of Egypt at this time. In the end, a Christian agent in Saladin’s secret service brought all the details of the plot to him and, acting quickly, he was able to round up all the ring leaders and have them crucified.
The Yemen bolt-hole plan might have been needed again later in the same year, when Nur al-Din sent an inspector to Egypt to check whether Saladin had been remitting tribute proportional to Egypt’s revenue to Damascus. The inspector submitted a far-from-glowing report about the sultan’s man in Cairo. The report was damning enough for Nur al-Din to begin mustering his forces in May 1174 for an expedition to Egypt, when fortunately for Saladin, he died on the fifteenth of the month after a fit of apoplexy brought on by a rather over-vigorous polo match.
The Assassins’ daggers had been sheathed all this time. The Qiyama and the anarchy it caused were doubtless factors in this, but the focus of the main powers in Syria on Egypt had also meant there was a period of peace for Sinan to work on the infrastructure of his little kingdom. He established an efficient carrier pigeon service between the castles and improved the fortifications at all of the key strongholds. In 1173, in a decidedly strange episode, Sinan also seems to have opened negotiations with King Amalric on a possible conversion of the Assassins to Christianity. It could be that, by undertaking such negotiations, Sinan simply hoped that the king would force the Templars to revoke the annual tribute they had been paid by the Assassins since 1152. The talks may also, however, have been linked to possible assistance from the Assassins in the Egyptian plot.
The Templars, however, scuppered all these negotiations by ambushing and massacring Sinan’s envoys, as they returned from an audience with the king. The Assassins continued quietly paying the Knights for peace, but their contact with Amalric gave William of Tyre an opportunity to study the sect reasonably thoroughly. The picture he has left us is one of a small but powerful state with a healthy population size and a very effective if intellectually lacking foreign policy:
In the province of Tyre in Phoenicia and in the diocese of Tortosa there lives a tribe of people who possess ten fortresses with the villages attached to them. Their number, as we have often heard, is about sixty thousand or possibly more. It is the custom of this people to choose their ruler, not by hereditary right, but by the prerogative of merit. This chief, when elected, they call the Old Man, disdaining a more dignified title. Their subjection and obedience to him is such that they regard nothing as too harsh or difficult and eagerly undertake even the most dangerous tasks at his command. For instance, if there happens to be a prince who has incurred the hatred or distrust of this people, the chief places a dagger in the hand of one of or several of his follower; those thus designated hasten away at once, regardless of the consequences of the deed or the probability of personal escape. Zealously they labour for as long as may be necessary, until at last the favourable chance comes which enables them to carry out the mandate of the chief. Neither Christians nor Saracens know where this name, the Assassins, is derived from.*
With Nur al-Din’s death, however, there was a new opportunity for expansion in Muslim lands, as the state created by the ‘Saint King’ was rapidly breaking up. Senior officers of Nur al-Din’s government fought each other as they sought to control Nur al-Din’s heir, al-Salih Ismail, who was only eleven at the time of his father’s death.
Saladin also saw an opportunity to bring the former dominions of Nur al-Din into his possession and this remained his main aim in the years between 1174 and 1186. By his desire to re-unify and rule all of Syria he made himself number one on Sinan’s most-wanted list. In addition, there was the fact that when the lands of the Assassins were raided by ten thousand Nubuwiyya, in one of their anti-Shiite operations, Saladin took advantage of the destruction of al-Bab and Buzaa and the Nubuwiyya’s killing of as many as thirteen thousand Ismaili supporters in the two centres, to raid Sarmin and Jabal al-Summaq on his way up to Aleppo.
In October 1174, Saladin was virtually invited by the emirs of Damascus to take possession of the city. Al-Salih Ismail was taken by his atabeg, Gumushtigin, to Aleppo. The atabeg then contacted Sinan and it seems very likely that the Assassins were paid to make an attempt on Saladin’s life. A group of fidai’in were dispatched to Saladin’s camp, but they were challenged by an emir as they attempted to enter his tent. They stabbed the emir and one Assassin got into the tent, only to have his head slashed off by a guard’s sabre. The other fidai’in then forced their way into the tent, but were met by a rapidly increasing number of Saladin’s entourage, who killed them to a man.
In April 1175, Saladin crushed the combined forces of Mosul and Aleppo at the Battle of the Horns of Hama, near the River Orontes, and then concluded a truce, leaving him in undisputed possession of Damascus and a large part of northern Syria, including Homs, Hama and Baalbak. He fought the Mosul–Aleppo allies again, a year later at Tall al-Sultan and again routed them. Then in May 1176, as he was preparing to once again besiege Aleppo, while he was resting alone in the tent of one of his emirs, a fidai rushed in and struck at him with his dagger. Saladin was saved by the mail coif covering his head and neck. The Assassin slashed at his throat, but Saladin, obviously a powerful man, struck his attacker’s wrist and deflected the blow. An emir rushed in and grabbed at the dagger and the Assassin was overpowered and killed. Then another attacker hurtled into the tent and attacked Saladin. By this time though the tent was full of emirs and the Assassin was literally hacked to pieces. It was only after the event that it became clear that both of the fidai’in were members of Saladin’s close personal bodyguard.
It was almost certainly in revenge for this last assault that Saladin set out to besiege Masyaf, after closing the siege of Aleppo in August 1176 through negotiation with al-Salih Ismaili’s minders. As he approached Masyaf, however, and was riding under a walnut tree, a fidai dropped from the tree to murder him. Fortunately for Saladin, the Assassin’s timing was out and he landed on the horse’s rump, fell backwards to the ground, and was trampled and hacked to death by Saladin’s bodyguard who were riding close behind. Saladin was not dissuaded from pressing the siege of Masyaf by the free-falling fidai, and he and his men settled in to starve the impressive fortress’s garrison out.
Sinan’s response was certainly worthy of any modern psychological operations unit. Whilst there is controversy over the reasons for Saladin’s eventual raising of the siege, it seems highly likely that the tactics employed by Sinan against the new strongman of Syria played a major part in the withdrawal of Saladin’s forces from Masyaf. First, there were letters between the two and one of Sinan’s replies was recorded by Kamal al-Din:
O you who threaten me with strokes of the sword, May my power never rise again if you overthrow it! The dove rises up to threaten the hawk. The hyenas of the desert are roused against the lions! He tries to stop the mouth of the viper with his finger, let the pain his finger feels suffice him. We have read the gist and details of your letter, and taken note of its threats against us with words and deeds, and by God it is astonishing to find a fly buzzing in an elephant’s ear and a gnat biting statues. Others before you have said these things and we destroyed them and none could help them . . . If indeed your orders have gone forth to cut off my head and tear my castles from the solid mountains, these are false hopes and vain fantasies, for essentials are not destroyed by accidentals, as souls are not dissolved by diseases. We are oppressed and not oppressors, deprived and not deprivers.
The common proverb says: ‘Do you threaten a duck with the river?’ Prepare means for disaster and don a garment against catastrophe; for I will defeat you from within your own ranks and take vengeance against you at your own place, and you will be as one who encompasses his own destruction . . .*
The duck and its water that Sinan referred to was the fidai and his love of death, and if such notions did not put fear in Saladin’s heart, then he must, after reading the phrase ‘from within your own ranks’, at least have looked warily through the register of his own askari. The fact was that Saladin had increased his standing bodyguard’s size, with the purchase of Turkish Mamluks, and the permanent employment of Turcoman irregulars. Among the Turkish tribes continuing to enter Syria there were many who had been affected by extremist Shiite propaganda in the East.
Saladin, at this point, had a tall wooden tower built, in which he would sleep at night and he was never seen without mail during the day. Even these precautions, however, did not make him feel completely safe, so when he received an ambassador from Masyaf in his tent, he took the extra precaution of ringing the emissary of the Assassins with his most trusted bodyguards. The envoy was searched for weapons, and only then allowed to approach Saladin. When he refused to deliver his message in the presence of so many outsiders, Saladin acquiesced, but retained two Mamluks who he had raised from boyhood in his own household. Still, the emissary insisted on a one-to-one meeting. Kamal al-Din tells us that the resulting exchange went like this:
Saladin said. ‘These two do not leave me. If you wish deliver your message do so, and if not go’.
He said. ‘Why do you not send away these two as you sent away the others?’
Saladin replied. ‘I regard these two as my own sons, and they and I are as one’.
Then the messenger turned to the two Mamluks and said. ‘If I ordered you, in the name of my master, to kill this sultan would you do so?’
They answered yes and drew their swords, saying. ‘Command us as you wish’.
Sultan Saladin [God have mercy on him] was astounded, and the messenger left, taking them with him. And thereupon Saladin [God have mercy on him] inclined to make peace with him and enter into friendly relations with him. And God knows best.*
There were certainly other reasons for Saladin’s rapprochement with the Assassins. The Franks’ invasion of the Biqa Valley and advance towards Baalbak called the sultan away from the siege of Masyaf. Many of Saladin’s troops were also weary and wanted to return home to enjoy their booty. Ibn al-Athir also tells us that Sinan threatened to murder ‘all the people of Saladin’ if Saladin’s kinsmen did not encourage him to withdraw.*
From the world of myth we have been given one final reason for Saladin’s change of heart. The story goes that one night Saladin awoke in his tower and witnessed Sinan shining like a glow-worm and gliding above the ground and out of the door of the tower. Looking down to his bedside the sultan then saw a dagger pinning a leaf of paper to the floor. The page apparently carried the lines ‘We acquaint you that we hold you, and that we reserve you till your reckoning be paid.’ The creator of this story, Abu Firas, Sinan’s Ismaili biographer, at least had the decency to state that he had only heard of this episode of levitation, as he was absent from Masyaf at the time.
Through the mediation of the emir of Hama a modus vivendi was reached between Saladin and Sinan. The secretive nature of the agreement allowed Saladin to complain to the caliph that the Zangid leaders of Aleppo were trying to derail his holy mission of ejecting the Franks from Syria. He claimed that the Aleppans had sent Assassins to attack him while he was in fact employing these same blades against Zangi and Nur al-Din’s household. The former wazir of Nur al-Din was murdered on 31 August 1177 in Aleppo. The Assassins, when captured, stated under torture that they had been sent by Gumushtigin, who was still using the boy-sultan al-Salih Ismaili as a puppet on the throne. It is likely that the Assassins were told by Sinan that Gumushtigin was their ‘employer’ but Saladin was in fact the paymaster. Looked at in its simplest terms, there was nothing for Gumushtigin to gain from the murder whilst Saladin could only profit from increased confusion and mutual distrust within the house of Zangi.
Sinan carried out his own personal feud with the Zangids too. In 1180, Assassins infiltrated Aleppo and set fire to the great bazaar in reprisal for the seizure of some of their villages. Such targeting of economic assets of enemies was exceptional and the fact that every fidai returned from the mission was highly novel too.
Saladin continued his conquest of Muslim Levant by acquiring Aleppo in 1183, and imposing his suzerainty on Mosul in 1186. The Crusaders faced, once again, a unified Syria, but now the sultan had the additional resources of Egypt fully under his control. The King of Jerusalem, Guy, should at this point have taken a leaf from the Assassins’ book of political survival by retiring to his fortified places to await events. Muslim history had shown again and again that even polities as apparently strong as Saladin’s was now, would soon enough break down. Indeed, the king’s predecessors, despite their constant manpower shortages, and through their judicious use of their field army and superb understanding of castle strategy, had been reasonably successful in the Levant, until Guy recklessly sacrificed the flower of Jerusalem’s chivalry on the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187.
It has been suggested that Assassins fought with Saladin against the army of the Franks at the battle, and given their continued payment of tribute to the Templars, it is possible that Sinan might have sent a force to aid the sultan. If he did, however, he might soon enough have regretted it since the Assassins homeland was essentially in the hinterland between the Muslims and Christians. Saladin’s great victory very nearly put an end to the existence of any such no-man’s land. The sultan quickly took Acre and Jerusalem and it seemed likely, for a time, that the Latin state was going to be pushed into the Mediterranean. Soon only Tyre, saved by the skilled and brave defence of Conrad of Montferrat, as well as Tripoli and Antioch, remained in Christian hands.
Whilst the pope hurriedly preached a Crusade and the Norman King of Sicily sent a fleet to supply the beleaguered cities, it was 1190 before the first Crusader army under the German Emperor Barbarossa marched eastward. The emperor drowned in Anatolia, whilst fording a river, but his son Frederick of Swabia was at least able to bring a thousand men down to Acre, where he joined King Guy, who had obviously crossed his fingers whilst swearing to Saladin that he would never again bear arms against the sultan after his capture at Hattin.
Guy was now engaged in besieging the city, whilst being surrounded himself by Saladin. Between April and June 1191, the King of France, Philip Augustus, and the King of England, Richard Couer de Lion, arrived at the siege. The squeeze was now really placed on Saladin’s Acre garrison and they capitulated in July. Richard then marched south to relieve the coastal ports, after beheading the three thousand men of the garrison, and then defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf. He went on to take Jaffa and twice struck towards Jerusalem, at one point coming within only a few miles of the city.
Despite Saladin’s success in capturing Jerusalem, it seems at this point that there was a very real chance that he would lose everything. The sultan’s health was failing and so was his revenue. Things were looking grim and negotiations were started with Richard through Saladin’s brother. The princes of the Jazira began to desert, and despite continued calls for assistance to Iraq, no new help came. Al-Fadil wrote, ‘tongues are generous with advice but hands are miserly with help,’* and Saladin spoke to his troops of the situation: ‘Only our army is facing the army of infidelity. There is none among the Muslims who will come to our succour and there is none in the lands of Islam who will help us.’
Perhaps the sultan exaggerated a little, however, since there was one group of Muslims who would strike against the Crusaders, and whose hands carried daggers that in the past had proved to be more effective than any amount of talk. They struck on 28 April 1192, right at the centre of the Latin government, with the murder of the Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, hero of the defence of Tyre, and the man awaiting coronation as the new king of the Crusader kingdom:
One day the marquis was returning from an entertainment given by the bishop of Beauvais, at which he had been a guest. He was in a very cheerful and pleasant humour and had just reached the customs house when two young men, without cloaks, approached him. These Assassins suddenly rushed upon him with poniards, which had been concealed in their hands. Stabbing him to the heart, they turned and fled away at full speed. The marquis instantly fell from his horse and rolled dying on the ground; one of the murderers was immediately slain, but the second took shelter in a church. In spite of this sanctuary, he was captured and condemned to be dragged through the city until his life should be extinct. Before he expired, he was closely questioned to discover at whose instigation, and for what reason, they had done the deed: he confessed that they had been sent a long time before, and had done it by command of their superior, whom they were bound to obey. This turned out to be true; for these young men had been some time in the service of the marquis, waiting for a favourable opportunity to complete the deed. The Old Man of Masyaf had sent them over to assassinate the marquis within a certain space of time; for every one the Old Man judged deserving of death, he caused to be assassinated in the same manner.
The Old Man of Masyaf, according to hereditary custom, brings up a large number of noble boys in his palace, causing them to be taught every kind of learning and accomplishment, and to be instructed in various languages so that they can converse without the aid of an interpreter in any country of the known world. Cruelty of the greatest degree is also inculcated with profound secrecy; and the pupils are carefully and anxiously trained to follow it up. When they reach the age of puberty, the senior calls them to him and enjoins on them, for the remission of their sins, to slay some great man, whom he mentions by name; and for this purpose he gives to each of them a poniard of terrible length and sharpness. From their devoted obedience, they never hesitate to set out as they are commanded; nor do they pause until they have reached the prince, or tyrant, who has been pointed out to them; and they remain in his service until they find a favourable opportunity for accomplishing their purpose, believing that by so doing they shall gain the favour of heaven.*
Other versions of the killing say that the Assassins offered the marquis a letter for his attention before slaying him and that they were able to approach him easily, because they had been living for over six months in the Crusaders’ camp, disguised as Christian monks. This seems unlikely given that the Assassins were certainly not trained in foreign languages. However, such fabrications, and the fact that the daring murder had taken place in the heart of the Crusaders’ new capital in daylight, would soon enough carry the Assassins’ fame in poems and tales to all the courts of Western Europe. Other chroniclers wrote that the marquis was only going to dine with the bishop because he was fed up with waiting for his wife, who was taking too long in the bath. While it might seem de rigueur for the medieval monks who were the recorders of events to blame a woman for the marquis’s death, the fact remains that Conrad’s murder has left us with an intriguing medieval whodunit because, whilst Sinan’s men were undoubtedly responsible for the killing, a number of other respectable individuals, including his wife, were likely accessories to the fact.
The ‘tidiest’ explanation for the marquis’s murder is that given by Ibn al-Athir, an admittedly hostile historian of Saladin’s time, who claimed that the sultan commissioned Sinan to have both Conrad and Richard killed, but that Richard’s murder had proved impossible. Certainly, given the apparent near exhaustion of Saladin’s resistance to Richard and the fact that Conrad had been the saviour of the Latin Kingdom by his resistance at Tyre, such a plan would have been appealing, and as we have seen, a modus vivendi had already been reached between the sultan and Sinan. Ibn al-Athir also claims to know the amount the Assassins were paid for the planned double murder. Ismaili sources state, unconvincingly, given the history of the sect in the cities of Syria, that Sinan was promised houses of propaganda in Aleppo and Damascus by the sultan. A later Syrian source, as well as other Crusader writers, also identify that Sinan had his own reasons for assassinating Conrad. The marquis had offended Sinan by seizing a ship laden with a rich cargo belonging to the Assassins, and could only have increased the grand master’s fury by then drowning its crew.
This is the simplest explanation of the killing, but Acre was a complex place in the late twelfth century. Suspicion also fell on Henry of Champagne, who had been a rival of Conrad for the throne of Jerusalem. He had certainly had extensive contact with the Assassins, and had even enjoyed Sinan’s hospitality, during which, the writer who continued William of Tyre’s history claimed, he witnessed two fidai’in showing their dedication to their master, by leaping from one of Masyaf’s battlements to their deaths. The same story had, of course, been applied to Hasan-i-Sabbah a century before, and such a display was, according to Kamal al-Din, also laid on by Sinan for the benefit of Muslim emissaries. Historians never let a good story go to waste, but the fact remains that Henry married Conrad’s widow within the week of the killing and was acclaimed King of Jerusalem in May 1192.
Even this explanation, of one man killing another for the throne and his wife, common though it is in history and Shakespearean in its telling, does not, however, reveal fully the fault lines that ran through Outremer, just as they had through the Muslim empires and states that the Assassins’ daggers had previously brought down. Henry was just one man, but there were larger forces at play in the city. The orientalised Latins of Outremer, such as the Templars and Hospitallers, had a vested interest in keeping Conrad from the throne. They favoured Guy re-ascending the throne. He had already proved himself to be a weak king who was easily led by the military orders, whilst Conrad came from a powerful Crusading ‘dynasty’. Conrad’s brother was also a Palestinian baron and his nephew, Boniface, would later be a leading participant in the Fourth Crusade.
There was also the competition between the Italian maritime republics over the trade of the Levant, which continued right through to the Crusader kingdom’s final extinction in 1291. The Genoese had favoured Conrad’s claim to the throne, whilst their rivals, the Pisans, favoured Guy. An anonymous and contemporary chronicle of the Third Crusade tells us how at Acre, just before Conrad’s murder:
The Pisans were favourers of King Guy, whilst the Genoese were on the side of the marquis chiefly on account of the oath of fidelity by which he was bound to the King of France. Hence arose discords which ended in bloodshed and mutual attacks, and the whole city was in a state of confusion. As they had been approaching the city the French had heard a great uproar, and the noise of the people exhorting each other to fight; upon which they, and the duke of Burgundy, in full armour, hastened to give succour to the Genoese. For all that the Pisans, when they saw them coming, went forth boldly to meet them. Falling upon the duke of Burgundy they surrounded him, and having pierced his horse with a lance, threw him to the ground; then they retreated to the city and closed and bolted the gates as a precaution against any unforeseen accidents which might happen. For they had heard that the Genoese had sent to the marquis to ask him to come as quickly as possible and seize the city of Acre, which they promised to deliver over to him. The Pisans, therefore, took every precaution against this faction, for their safety and for that of the city.
The marquis, without a moment’s delay, came to Acre with a large number of armed men, in the hope of seizing the city unawares. On their arrival, the Pisans attacked him with mangonels and, confiding in their own valour and the justice of their cause, they fought bravely and sent a message to King Richard [he was at Caesarea] to inform him of the state of affairs, bidding him come with all speed . . .*
So now we have Richard and Philip, King of France, involved in the succession dispute. Suspicion for instigating the murder of the marquis later therefore fell on Richard, as Conrad had taken service under Philip, whilst Guy was a vassal of Richard:
In the confusion which now prevailed amongst the people, it was whispered by certain of the French who sought to veil their own wickedness by such a falsehood, and infused it into the minds of all the people that King Richard had vilely brought about the death of the marquis, and that he had hired these men from the Assassins for that purpose. Nor were they content with defaming the character of King Richard in those quarters, but also sent a warning to the King of France to be on his guard against the satellites of the Old Man of Masyaf . . .†
Indeed, in a further French version of the killing of Conrad, one fidai fled to the same church that the marquis’s attendants had carried Conrad to, in order to dress his wounds. The fidai, seeing that his intended victim was not yet dead, emerged from his refuge and plunged his poniard into Conrad’s body once more. The writer goes on to say how, when tortured with slow fire and flaying, the Assassin claimed that he had acted on behalf of Richard Couer de Lion. English versions of the murder however, have the marquis dying in the arms of his wife, who presumably had, by now, finished her bath. In these versions of the story the marquis enjoined his wife to resign his possession, the city of Tyre, to no one save King Richard and, as noted above, within a week she had wed Richard’s nephew, Henry.
The English writers also invented two letters supposedly written by Sinan: one sent to Leopold of Austria, who captured and held Richard for ransom as the king was travelling home across Europe; the second to the other princes of Europe, clearing Richard’s name. They also wrote of how the king was reconciled with the marquis just before Conrad’s murder, because the Crusader army had entreated him to do so, as well as asking to give them Conrad as their king before Richard’s departure for England.
Richard’s admirers worked hard to exonerate the king, but the fact remains that Philip had already left Acre for France to try to grab Flanders from its now-dead count. Along with Prince John of England’s conspiring with the French king, this placed Richard’s domain of Normandy in jeopardy, and required his rapid return to Europe. He could not secure the accession of his candidate, Guy, for the throne before his departure, so it seems extremely likely that he arranged for the Assassins to remove a tricky political problem for him with their daggers. This accusation was made by Muslim writers, as well as many of the Christian chroniclers.
This does not remove the likelihood that Saladin may have had a hand in the killing too. The death of Conrad certainly would have made Richard’s departure from the Holy Land more likely and Saladin would have known that the king’s leaving would effectively bring the Crusade to a close. It is possible then that Saladin, or rather his brother Sayf al-Din, known to the West as Saphadin, might have expedited the king’s return to Europe by removing a prickly political problem for him. Certainly Saphadin and Richard grew close during their protracted negotiations. On Palm Sunday, Richard, amid much splendour in Acre’s cathedral, girded Saphadin’s son with the belt of knighthood. Perhaps this honour was bestowed on Saphadin’s family for allowing Richard to profit from the working relationship that Saladin, and thereby Sayf al-Din, had with the Assassins. Back in France, Philip spread rumours that he was to be killed by a group of Assassins who had come from the Middle East at the instigation of Richard.
Richard took care of his other business in the Levant in a more orthodox fashion. The contest with Saladin had reached a stalemate and in August 1192 an accord was signed which left the coastal cities as far south as Jaffa to the Christians and gave access to Jerusalem for pilgrims. In March 1193, Saladin died in Damascus and later the same year Sinan took his knowledge of Conrad’s murder with him to the grave.
Sinan had died after a rule of thirty years. He had been as a king, perhaps even a demigod, among his followers, and it is notable that with his passing, full control of the Syrian mission quickly reverted back to Alamut. His successor was a Persian named Nasr, but with the passing of Sinan and the adoption of Alamut’s policy of alliance with the Sunni caliphate of Baghdad in 1211, the glory years in Syria were most definitely over. From the death of Sinan until their eventual extinction, the Assassins in Syria had none of the religious fervour and discipline that had held the mission together through the trials of the twelfth century. At many points in the thirteenth century they were to be little more than knives for hire.