That the joys of mortal men be not enduring, nor worldly happiness long lasting without lamentations, in this same year a detestable nation of Satan, to wit, the countless army of the Tartars, broke loose from its mountain-environed home, and piercing the solid rocks [of the Caucasus], poured forth like devils from Tartarus, so that they are rightly called Tartari or Tartarians. Swarming like locusts over the face of the earth, they have brought terrible devastation to the eastern parts [of Europe], laying it waste with fire and carnage. After having passed through the land of the Saracens, they have razed cities, cut down forests, killed townspeople and peasants. If, perchance, they have spared any suppliants, they have forced them, reduced to the lowest condition of slavery, to fight in the foremost ranks against their own neighbours. Those who have feigned to fight or have hidden in the hope of escaping have been followed up by the Tartars and butchered . . . For they are inhuman and beastly, rather monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and men, dressed in ox-hides, armed with plates of iron. Short and stout, thickset, strong, invincible, indefatigable, their backs unprotected to prevent retreat, their breasts covered with armour, drinking with delight the pure blood of their flocks, with big, strong horses, which eat branches and even trees . . . They are without human laws, know no comforts, and are more ferocious than lions or bears . . . They have one-edged swords and daggers, are wonderful archers, spare neither age, nor sex, nor condition . . .
From Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora for the year 1240
IN 1251 BATU, THE Mongol Khan of the Golden Horde of Russia, and the sons of the House of Tolui formed an alliance and placed Mongke, Tolui’s eldest son, on the throne of the Great Khans. Batu was paid off by being allowed virtual independence in his own lands, and the branches of the family emanating from Ogedei and Chaghatai were effectively disinherited from any chance of obtaining the throne of Chinggis Khan. Mongke then partied with his supporters for a week, consuming two-thousand wagon loads of wine, three hundred horses and oxen and three thousand sheep, before neatly parcelling out the empire to his three brothers. Qubilai was assigned the conquest of the Song Empire in southern China, while Ariq Boke was given Mongolia. Hulegu was to be dispatched to the west. His mission would be to bring Persia fully under control. His more specific instructions were to ensure that the Abbasid caliph accepted Mongol suzerainty and to destroy, utterly, the Assassins.
A quick recap of the Assassins’ relations with the Mongols in the first half of the thirteenth century shows how the Assassins had, like the caliph, at first found the Mongols to be a convenient counterweight to the Khwarazm shah. Their favourable impression of the new raiders from the East could only have been increased by the Mongols’ sparing of the Assassin centre of Quhistan during their reduction of Khurasan. With the extinction of Khwarazm in 1231, however, relations deteriorated. As we have seen, in the 1240s Assassin ambassadors spent long periods in Qaraqorum, but were not received because of the political confusion of the Mongol state during this period. The Assassins were only one of the many panicked polities of Asia and Europe vying for the Great Khan’s attentions. Lastly, of course, there was the simple reason that the Mongol chiefs feared an Assassin’s blade too much to engage too closely with their emissaries. The Assassins’ reputation, for once, worked against them and they were also let down by an uncharacteristic indiscipline in their ranks.
Despite the rapprochement that had taken place between the caliph, the Sunnis of western Persia and the Assassins, it seems that the war between the Sunni ulama and the fidai’in was still rumbling on in the east – even as close to Alamut as Qazvin. Juvaini wrote of there being a ‘frontier’ of Sunnism against the heretic Ismailis in the 1240s and 1250s. This was despite a redoubling of efforts to live in peace with his Sunni neighbours, especially the Gilanis, by Rukn al-Din. The Mongols became aware of this continued conflict through the qadi of Qazvin; he headed a delegation of several Sunni governors put into their positions by the Mongols before their withdrawal from Khurasan. The deputation complained to the Khan that they had to wear armour all day and night just in order to feel safe from the daggers of the Assassins.
Baiju, the Mongol commander in the Middle East, backed this up with a report to Mongke to the effect that the caliph and the Ismailis were the biggest obstacles to Mongol government in the region. Baiju’s ire against the Ismailis was also stoked by the Assassins’ murder of Chaghatai Qorchi, one of the senior Mongols who had been involved in the destruction of the Khwarazmians in the 1230s.* The Mongols may not have cared too much about the governors and religious judges, but they did care about their own kind and they liked orderly government, because order meant the free flow of revenue. The Assassins’ disturbance of that and their unexplained murder of Chaghatai Qorchi were reasons enough for the Khan to countenance their destruction. But there was worse to follow. In his final years, Ala al-Din had been showing less and less desire for continued deference to Gog and Magog† and one last mission under the old man’s rule had set out for Qaraqorum before his death and the accession of Rukn al-Din. The journal of Friar William of Rubruck briefly records a panic at the Mongol court:
Following the court, we arrived here on the Sunday before Ascension. The next day we were called by Bulgai, first secretary of state and a great judge, as well as the monk and his whole family and all the ambassadors and the strangers who frequented the monk. We were separately brought into the presence of Bulgai and they asked us where we came from, and why, and what we wanted. And they proceeded to question us minutely, because it was reported to Mongke Khan that [four hundred] Assassins had arrived under various disguises to kill him . . . ‡
A later western traveller, Friar Odoric, who wrote of his journey to the East between 1318 and 1330, tells us how this one mission was part of a broader campaign against the Mongols:
When the Tartars had subdued a great part of the world, they came to the Old Man, and took from him the custody of his Paradise, who being incensed by this, sent abroad many desperate and resolute persons and caused many of the Tartar nobles to be slain. The Tartars, seeing this, went and besieged the city where the Old Man was, took him, and put him to a most cruel and miserable death.*
Ultimately, the mission failed, simply because the Mongol security arrangements, as discussed earlier, were so tight that not even the fidai’in could slip through. The attempt was an obvious casus belli, but the fact that the Assassins still maintained independent statelets that were not fully submitted to Mongol rule, was a simple affront to the Khan’s vision of world conquest and was in fact reason enough. Indeed, there is evidence that the Mongols had planned the destruction of the Ismailis several years before Mongke ascended the throne. As noted above, the death of the Khwarazm shah Jalal al-Din in 1231, and the reduction of the Saljuqs in Anatolia in 1243, really meant that the Ismailis were the only power left in the old Saljuq lands who were capable of resistance. Certainly at Guyuk’s coronation in 1246, the envoy of the Ismailis was driven from Qaraqorum and insulted by the Mongols. Guyuk then sent a Mongol force into the vicinity of Alamut to assault the Ismaili castles. The danger, however, passed with Guyuk’s death in 1248, because as we have seen there was then a long interregnum and dispute over the throne that only ended with Mongke’s ascension in 1251.
Mongke was very clear in his plans for the Assassins. They had outlived their usefulness to the Mongols in Persia. In fact, their value had expired once they had used their skills of masquerade and espionage to discover the whereabouts of the Khwarazm shah Jalal al-Din and then to convey this information to the Mongols, back in 1231. Ibn al-Athir tells us how:
An official of the Ismaili Heretics was sent to the Tatars. He made known to them the weakness of Jalal al-Din, with his defeat. He urged [the Mongols] to proceed to him, and follow up on [Jalal al-Din’s] weakness. And [the Ismaili official] guaranteed to them victory over [Jalal al-Din] truly if they proceed to him.†
The Mongols then chased Jalal al-Din to his death in Kurdistan – with his passing, the last effective counterweight to the Mongols’ ambitions in Persia disappeared. Giving up the shah’s whereabouts to the Mongols may very well have secured the Ismailis the right not to supply troops to the Mongols and not to send tribute, but by doing so they also effectively sealed their own fate.
Hulegu’s expeditionary forces began their invasion in 1253, and at this point all the leaders of the Islamic lands were sent letters requiring their submission. Hulegu, however, did not begin marching with his main force until later the same year. He spent the summer of 1254 in Turkistan and then moved across Khurasan. He did not reach Assassin territory until 1256. By this time Rukn al-Din had been grand master for just under a year and he certainly had not had time to bring the Assassins’ organisation fully under his control or to grasp fully the state of affairs in Persia. This might explain the series of errors he made in dealing with Hulegu.
Whilst it is difficult to be exact about the size of the army that Rukn al-Din was going to have to face, we can be sure it was vast. The number of tumen commanders mentioned in the sources is generally about seventeen – this gives a figure of one hundred and seventy thousand men if each tumen was at full strength. This was, however, commonly not the case and there may have been as few as one hundred and twenty thousand Mongols accompanying Hulegu. His ranks would, however, have been swollen by Turkish freebanders and fifteenth-century sources give us a figure of about three hundred thousand men marching west to overwhelm Persia.
Hulegu’s expeditionary forces had faired badly against the small forces available to the Assassins and had been beaten off from Quhistan by a counter-attack. At Girdkuh, his forces failed to make any headway against the castle’s impressive walls and in the absence of any siege engines, they withdrew quickly. The preparations made for the main invasion were obviously influenced by these previous failures:
And he sent to Khitai to fetch mangonel experts and naphtha-throwers; and they brought from Khitai one thousand households of Khitai mangonel men, who with a stone missile would convert the eye of a needle into a passage for a camel, having fastened the poles of the mangonels with sinews and glue that when they aimed from the nadir to the zenith the missile did not return.*
An impressive logistics system was also put in place. Ahead of the army’s move across Mongol, controlled territory pastureland was reserved, bridges were repaired and roads were cleared. Provisioning for the men included wineskins and flour, and Muslim emirs, who either governed Mongol-annexed territory or who were en route in lands still to be conquered, were equally expected to provide provisions for the army’s passing. Hulegu was preparing for a long campaign and it was obvious that he was not going to leave Persia empty-handed.
The Mongol prince moved slowly, however, and enjoyed tiger hunts and countless revels, as well as the spectacle of his troops flattening the city of Firdaus and driving its entire population out into the countryside, before killing every person over the age of ten. These activities were, of course, diversions from his mission against the Assassins, but they also served a purpose in that they brought more and more of the local Turkish lords of eastern Persia to the Mongol standard, either through the attractions of the Mongol prince’s evident wealth and power, or through fear of his army’s obvious brutality. Hulegu’s displays of splendour and of carnage therefore eliminated the need for battle and gathered troops to him for the reduction of the Assassins’ strongholds. Juvaini tells us that, ‘Orders were then given for the fastening of banners and standards [to lances] and the massing of troops for the purpose of making holy war and uprooting the castles of the Heresy. And all the forces in that region, whether Turks or Taziks, put themselves in readiness.’*
Rukn al-Din’s will to fight, as we will see, collapsed quickly upon the approach of the Mongols. It could have been the sight of a multitude of banners and a vast siege train that caused this disintegration of spirit, or perhaps it was the fact that Mongol troopers were so inured to hardship that no siege seemed likely to end with their withdrawal through hunger. William of Rubruck wrote of them,
they feed fifty or one-hundred men with the flesh of a single sheep, for they cut it up in little bits with salt and water, making no other sauce, then with the point of a knife or a fork made specially for this purpose . . . they offer to each of those standing around one or two mouthfuls.†
Even if sheep were in short supply, there were alternatives:
Their food consists of everything that can be eaten, for they eat dogs, wolves, foxes, and horses and when driven by necessity, they feed on human flesh. For instance, when they were fighting against a city of the Khitai, where the emperor was residing, they besieged it for so long that they themselves completely ran out of supplies and, since they had nothing at all to eat, they thereupon took one out of every ten men for food. They eat the filth that comes away from mares when they bring forth foals. Nay, I have even seen them eating lice. They would say, ‘Why should I not eat them since they eat the flesh of my son and drink his blood?’*
Either way, at the very word of Hulegu’s arrival at Quhistan, the grand master of the Assassins opted for negotiation with his adversary, rather than an attempt on his life. He sent to one of Hulegu’s lieutenants a message full of reproach for his father’s hardening of attitude towards the World Emperor, and stated that he was looking for il with the Mongols. The Mongol word il is decidedly double-edged: it means peace but it also means absolute submission – the only way in which one could be at peace with the world conquerors. It is possible that this was exactly what Rukn al-Din planned for his little kingdom. However, despite being told to report in person to Hulegu, Rukn al-Din, in fact, only sent his brother, Shahanshah, to the Mongol prince’s court. It is possible, therefore, that he was just playing for time in the hope that something would come up or that by procrastination he could at least arrange more favourable terms for his realm.
Hulegu seems to have foreseen any such tarrying and decided to speed along Rukn al-Din’s decision about total submission by an invasion of Alamut’s environs in June 1256. This was met by stiff resistance from the mountains around the castle, from both the Assassins and local Daylamite mountain villagers, and the Mongols withdrew after burning Alamut’s croplands. Hulegu then tried a different tack. He sent to Rukn al-Din telling him that he did not hold him accountable for his father’s crimes and would treat him as a vassal ruler, provided that he destroyed all his strongholds and submitted to him in person. The grand master continued to play for time; doubtless he thought that his show of resistance in June had strengthened his hand with the prince. He ordered the dismantling of some of the minor fortresses around Alamut and Mongol emissaries were sent by Hulegu to monitor this, but the main castles of Alamut and Lamasar only suffered cosmetic demolitions of their defences.
Rukn al-Din requested a year’s grace to complete the work before appearing before Hulegu to do homage. He also ordered his lieutenants in Quhistan and east of Rayy to submit to the Mongols fully. However, either through sub rosa instructions from the grand master, or because Rukn al-Din did not have enough authority over the Assassins outside of the Alamut region, this was not fully carried out, and the castle of Girdkuh refused to surrender. Perhaps Rukn al-Din was still playing for time, knowing that winter snows would make any full-scale assault on Alamut impossible, as the valleys below the castle would become impassable. He would have been disappointed in this, however, by the curiously mild winter that settled on Persia that year. Hulegu also used this time to send detachments to the north and west of the Alamut region, to begin an encirclement of the Assassins’ main castles.
Hulegu then ordered Rukn al-Din to come in person to court within five days, or to send his son. The grand master sent a seven year-old, but Hulegu was not convinced of the child’s parentage – Juvaini tells us it was the child of a Kurdish woman and the bastard of Ala al-Din – and perhaps thinking to grab another hostage, he suggested that Shahanshah should be replaced by another of the grand master’s brothers. At this point, Hulegu and his main force were only three days from Alamut and Shahdiz. The great castle south of Isfahan had fallen after only two days to Hulegu’s lieutenant, Kit Buqa. Juvaini tells us that the arrival of Hulegu’s forward troops with his banners had sent Rukn al-Din and all his advisers into a panic and that the grand master had, by September, made up his mind to surrender, only being deflected from this plan by the unwise counsel of women and other ‘short-sighted people’.
Negotiations continued into October, and were hurried along in November by the launching of an all-out assault by Hulegu, despite the doubts of some of his generals over their ability to supply the army high in the mountains with winter coming on. It seems that Hulegu overcame the reservations of his recalcitrant lieutenants by conducting the campaign personally:
The Monarch himself, blessed in action and in counsel, moved forward with an army in full array, of such great numbers that Gog and Magog themselves would have been destroyed by the waves of its battalions . . . And the centre he adorned with men of experience who consider the day of battle the wedding-night, and connect the blades of flashing swords with the cheeks of white-skinned women, and deem the pricks of lances to be the kisses of beautiful maidens.*
Juvaini’s hyperbole aside, the Mongols made reasonable progress towards Alamut through the pass of Hazar-Cham and two castles on the lower slopes of the mountain range, Aluh-Nishin and Mansuriyya, were encircled and cut off. In fact, Hulegu only had to campaign among the peaks of the Elburz for a fortnight. The reported size of his army was enough to sway the Assassins’ leadership towards surrender and in the meantime, the noose was also tightening around Rukn al-Din’s men. The Mongol forces that Hulegu had sent around the Caspian Sea coast during the earlier negotiations, now also closed in and the castles of the Alamut region were completely surrounded.
Rukn al-Din himself was cut off from Alamut and besieged in the castle of Maymundiz by Hulegu in person. Juvaini described the siege. ‘And now the inmates of the castle saw how a people as numerous as ants had, snake-like formed seven coils around it,’* and how the fruit trees of Alamut and Maymundiz were cut down to form the mangonels that the Mongols’ Chinese siege engineers were preparing to bring the castles’ walls down with. There was a response from the Assassins’ own mangonels but the Mongols severely limited the use of the siege engines mounted on the castle ramparts by an almost unending rain of arrows. From wooden towers the Chinese engineers used ballistas to send quarrels, oversized crossbow bolts, flying into the battlements of the castles. Often these bolts were headed by naphtha and many of the castle’s defenders were incinerated during artillery exchanges.
This barrage had the desired effect, and by now the Assassin leadership was split into factions over the simple question of whether to capitulate totally to the Mongols or not. Rukn al-Din totally failed as a general at this point and gave no decisive leadership. He was swayed in the end towards total submission to the Mongols and a hope for mercy. The Sunnis inside Maymundiz, many of whom had fled to Ismaili lands during the initial Mongol invasions, were influential in his choice and the chronicles record how decisive the astrological calculations of the Sunni philosopher al-Tusi were in this. He informed Rukn al-Din how portentous the stars were for such a move, but now the grand master sent an apologetic note to Hulegu saying that, whilst he wished to surrender, many men in the castle would kill him if he was seen to leave.
Hulegu returned to the offensive and gave orders that:
Every one, whoever he was, should advance and join battle with his opponents. And from the whole circumference of the castle, a distance of a parasang or more, the battle cry was blended with its echo; and from the rolling of the boulders hurled from above a trembling fell upon the limbs and members of the mountains. As for the mangonels that had been erected it was as though their poles were made of pine trees a hundred years old and as for their fruit, their fruit is as it were the heads of Satan; and with the first stone that sprang up from them the enemy’s mangonel was broken and many were crushed under it. And great fear of the quarrels from the crossbows overcame them so that they were utterly distraught and everyone in the corner of a stone made a shield out of a veil whilst some who were standing on a tower crept in their fright like lizards into crannies in the rocks. Some were left wounded and some lifeless and all that day they struggled but feebly and bestirred themselves like mere women . . .*
It was enough to break the resolve of those who were holding the grand master back from capitulation. On 19 November 1256 the imam, along with his family and treasure, descended to Hulegu’s camp under the protection of a yarligh, or edict, from Hulegu, drawn up by Juvaini, guaranteeing their safe conduct. Juvaini later recorded how the master’s wealth was not as grand as it had been reported, but it was certainly gratifying for the Sunni writer to see Rukn al-Din kissing the threshold of Hulegu’s audience tent.
Rukn al-Din was, in fact, then well received by the Mongol prince and this was not surprising as Hulegu obviously felt he had in his hands the key to every one of the Assassins’ castles. This was certainly true of almost all the strongholds – following the appearance of the grand master and his calls to abandon and demolish a castle, his orders were generally carried out. Only Lamasar, Girdkuh and Alamut ignored his calls to surrender, although at Maymundiz there was a brief flaring up of resistance from a faction of fidai’in, who, following the grand master’s safe passage to Hulegu’s camp, started once again to work their mangonel. They were silenced forever, after four days of heavy Mongol bombardment.
It has been suggested that the commanders and fidai’in of these castles may have believed that Rukn al-Din was acting in taqiyya.† Such an idea is difficult to countenance, however, given that the grand master had given away almost every asset that would have been required for a return to the fray with the Mongols, in such a very brief period. Given this fact, there is no evidence that Rukn al-Din was dissimulating his beliefs in order to carry on fighting for Ismailism. He had shown himself to have neither the courage, discipline nor even the guile for such a venture. Perhaps it is apt therefore, that two of the great fortresses that refused his calls for surrender were those of the first and greatest of the Assassin leaders, Hasan-i-Sabbah. Hasan had been a man very much the opposite of Rukn al-Din, who now progressed in his career as Hulegu’s lackey to marriage with a Mongol girl and an unusual passion for a certain sport:
And in the cauldron of his fancy he cooked a mania for stallion Bactrian camels and was always discussing them with anyone who had any knowledge about them. One day, accordingly, the king gave him a hundred head of female camels. He refused them saying, ‘How can I wait for them to breed?’ And he asked for thirty stallions because of his mania for watching camels fighting.*
Alamut surrendered in December 1256, and it was obvious that all the fire had gone out of the Assassin cause. The Mongols entered and began the onerous task of attempting to level the walls of the castle. Juvaini entered Alamut before this was undertaken and reported how the Assassins had made galleries and deep tanks for supplies in the cavities of the rock upon which Alamut stood. The tanks were filled with wine and vinegar and one intrepid Mongol had to be saved from a tank of honey into which he had waded, but then found it to be deep enough to try to swim in and easily deep enough to drown in. Juvaini also records how some of the foodstuffs dated from the time of Hasan-i-Sabbah, and that their freshness was taken by the Assassins as evidence of the first grand master’s sanctity.
Juvaini also examined the library, burned its undesirable heretical books, and preserved whatever he felt was of value for his writing of the history of Hulegu’s campaign and that of the Ismailis, including an autobiography of Hasan-i-Sabbah. He also took scientific and astronomical instruments, all of which ended up in the Mongols’ soon-to-be-built observatory in Maragha. Tusi, the astrologer who had convinced Rukn al-Din of the stars’ approval of his surrender, would later find work there under the Ilkhans. The Mongols then attempted to destroy Alamut, though it took them some time to work out how to level walls as their stones were bound together with lead. They finally settled on fire.
Lamasar held out for another year but then quietly submitted. Rukn al-Din sent letters to Syria ordering the dais there to submit to the Mongols, now that Hulegu’s army had moved on to the conquest of that state too, but his orders were generally ignored by the Syrian Assassins. The Syrian mission had a little more time ahead of it yet.
Rukn al-Din had very little time left. His usefulness to Hulegu was now exhausted. At his own request he was dispatched to the Great Khan Mongke, the very man whose attempted killing by the Assassins had brought such ruin to Persia and to Rukn al-Din. He went via Girdkuh, where he failed to negotiate the surrender of the castle, and eventually reached Qaraqorum. After the grand master’s departure, a mass slaughter of the Ismailis began. Many of them had already been concentrated by the Mongols in camps around the city of Jamalabad near to Qazvin. Juvaini tells us that so many men, women and children were slaughtered in the concentration camps that afterwards, ‘sent to Jamalabad’ became common parlance in Persia for meaning someone had been killed.
Mongke Khan’s original orders had called for none of the Ismailis to be spared and this was carried out with aplomb. Even babes in their cradles were not allowed to live. Rukn al-Din’s family were reserved for slaughter by a Mongol named Bulaghan, whose father had been killed by the last desperate attacks of the fidai’in at Maymundiz, who, ironically, were acting against Rukn al-Din’s orders for surrender. Juvaini claims that the Assassins and their supporters were destroyed wherever they were and over one hundred thousand people were probably slaughtered in this holocaust. However, many of the rafiqs, the low-level ordinary adherents of the Assassin cause, managed to flee across Persia to a new homeland in Sind and some higher-ranking members of the organisation even remained in Persia after the Khan’s genocide.
Mongke Khan was disinterested in the grand master and refused him an audience until he had brought Girdkuh and Lamasar to surrender. Indeed, the great Khan seems to have been peeved at Hulegu because of the pointlessness of Rukn al-Din’s journey. The grand master was immediately sent off on a return journey, but he never made it back to Persia. He was led off the road by his escort and there kicked to death and finished off with the sword. His body was never found and the only epitaph to the last Assassin grand master and his Persian followers was hardly an encomium:
Let those who shall come after this age and era know the extent of the mischief they wrought and the confusion they cast into the hearts of men. Such as were on terms of agreement with them, whether kings of former times or contemporary rulers, went in fear and trembling and [such as were] hostile to them were day and night in the straits of prison for dread of their scoundrelly minions. It was a cup that had been filled to overflowing; it seemed as if a wind had died. This is a warning for those who reflect, and may God do likewise to all tyrants.*
Hulegu moved on to the next part of his operation. He arrived just north-east of Baghdad in 1258. Mongol forces that had been stationed just to the east of Anatolia since the 1240s moved down the Tigris. According to Marco Polo, as Hulegu’s forces approached the gates of the city, the Mongol prince
trusted rather to stratagem than to force for its reduction, and in order to deceive the enemy with regard to the number of his troops, which consisted of a hundred thousand horse besides foot soldiers, he posted one division of his army on the one side, and another division on the other side of the approach to the city in such a manner as to be concealed by a wood, and placing himself at the head of the third, advanced boldly to within a short distance of the gate.†
It seems that the caliph’s army was lured out by the prospect of defeating this apparently small force, led by Hulegu. The Mongols then used their usual feigned retreat to draw the caliph’s men about thirty miles away from Baghdad and to lure them into marshy land that inhibited both their manoeuvres and then their attempts to escape encirclement by the other Mongol divisions. They were massacred almost to a man.
The Muslim writer, Abu’l-Faraj, certainly suggests quite strongly that Caliph al-Mustasim was not the brightest Abbasid to have sat on the throne of Baghdad:
He was devoted to entertainment and pleasure, passionately addicted to playing with birds, and dominated by women. He was a man of poor judgment, irresolute, and neglectful of what is needful for the conduct of government. When he was told what he ought to do in the matter of the Tatars, either to propitiate them, enter into their obedience and take steps to gain their goodwill, or else to muster his armies and encounter them on the borders of Khurasan before they could prevail and conquer Iraq, he used to say, ‘Baghdad is enough for me, and they will not begrudge it me if I renounce all the other countries to them. Nor will they attack me when I am in it, for it is my house and my residence.’‡
And of course he was wrong. The Mongols would begrudge him his city and indeed his life and they made preparations to take both from him. The caliph attempted a defence of his city but it was a hopeless attempt at resistance:
Baghdad was defended, and mangonels were set up, with other instruments of defence, which, however, cannot avert any part of God’s decree. As the Prophet said, ‘Caution does not avail against fate’, and as God said, ‘When God’s term comes it cannot be deferred’ . . . The arrival of Hulegu Khan at Baghdad with all his troops, numbering nearly two-hundred thousand fighting men, occurred on Muharram of this year [January 19, 1258] . . . he came to Baghdad with his numerous infidel, profligate, tyrannical, brutal armies of men, who believed neither in God nor in the Last Day, and invested Baghdad on the western and eastern sides. The armies of Baghdad were very few and utterly wretched, not reaching ten thousand horsemen. They and the rest of the army had all been deprived of their iqtas so that many of them were begging in the markets and by the gates of the mosques.*
Even at this calamitous moment, when it seemed that the age of Islam was at an end, the old Shiite–Sunni conflict was very much in evidence. It was said in the streets of Baghdad that the poor condition of the army was due to the scheming of the Shiite wazir, Ibn al-Alqami. The rumourmongers said that the wazir had seen Shiites turned out of their homes the previous year in rioting and street fighting between Sunnis and Shiites, and had decided to betray Baghdad to the Mongols. He had therefore deliberately denuded the army of supplies and money. The fact that he was the first of the ministers to go out to parley with the Mongols after the defeat of the caliph’s army was taken as further evidence of his collusion with the heathens.
The wazir tried to negotiate on the basis of half the land tax of Iraq for Hulegu and half for the caliph, but Hulegu insisted on the caliph coming out of Baghdad to parley with him directly:
The caliph had to go with 700 riders, including the qadis, the jurists, the Sufis, the chief emirs, and the notables. When they came near the camp of Sultan Hulegu Khan, all but seventeen of them were removed from the sight of the caliph; they were taken off their horses and robbed and killed to the very last man. The caliph and the others were saved. The caliph was then brought before Hulegu, who asked him many things. It is said that the caliph’s speech was confused because of his terror at the disdain and arrogance which he experienced.*
The caliph returned to Baghdad with the wazir and also Nasir-al-Din Tusi, who we last met giving appalling astrological advice to Rukn al-Din. He was now in the service of Hulegu and had accompanied him to Baghdad, where he was now about to give more of his, perhaps not entirely unbiased, advice to the caliph. Great quantities of gold and jewels and other treasures were offered to Hulegu for peace, but this display of Baghdad’s wealth only made the Mongols keener to get into the city and begin looting.
The second interview between the caliph and Hulegu was cut short by the Mongol prince calling his guards to take the caliph into custody, then the Mongols
came down upon the city and killed all they could, men, women and children, the old, the middle-aged, and the young. Many of the people went into wells, latrines, and sewers and hid there for many days without emerging. Most of the people gathered in the caravanserais and locked themselves in. The Tatars opened the gates by either breaking or burning them. When they entered, the people in them fled upstairs and the Tatars killed them on the roofs until blood poured from the gutters into the street; ‘We belong to God and to God we return’. The same happened in the mosques and cathedral mosques and dervish convents.†
After witnessing the destruction of his city the caliph was then murdered. Marco Polo describes his end as having a certain poetic justice:
The caliph himself was made prisoner, and the city surrendered to the conqueror. Upon entering it, Hulegu discovered, to his great astonishment a tower filled with gold. He called the caliph before him, and after reproaching him with his avarice, that prevented him from employing treasures in the formation of an army for the defence of his capital against the powerful invasion with which it had long been threatened, gave orders for his being shut up in this same tower, without sustenance and there, in the midst of his wealth, he soon finished a miserable existence.‡
In fact, the unfortunate caliph was wrapped in a carpet and kicked to death. The Mongols never spilt blood in the execution of princes. And so, the Ismailis’ ideological enemy of five centuries was extinguished, but there was no victory in this for them, as by now they too had gone the same way as the sons of Abbas.
Hulegu then withdrew from the city, as the stench of death was said to be too overpowering to stay within the circular walls. Then the vast Mongol army decamped to the pastureland of Azerbaijan, where it remained for over a year, before embarking on a campaign in Syria against Saladin’s descendants, the Ayyubids.
Just as Sunni Islam did not end with the extinction of the caliphate, the history of the Assassins in Persia also did not end with the death of their last grand master. Girdkuh held out until 1270, and legend has it that the garrison only surrendered because their clothes had rotted away to scraps. In 1275, Assassins under the command of one of Rukn al-Din’s sons, called Abu Dawlut, recaptured Alamut, which the Mongols had been unable to destroy, even with fire. The new garrison was finally crushed by the Mongols the next year. Other minor forts in Quhistan fought on in the same way.
From these facts, and from Juvaini’s description of Alamut’s readiness for siege, it seems impossible that the Mongols could have made particularly easy work of reducing Alamut and Lamasar and the other Assassin castles without Rukn al-Din’s compliance. So the question remains, why did the Assassins give in to Hulegu’s men when a unified resistance might well have, at the very least, enabled the Assassins to obtain better terms?
The answer certainly lies partly with the Mongols. They were the irresistible force of the medieval age and their seemingly unstoppable run of success would not be broken until their defeat by the Mamluk sultanate at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Syria, in 1260. Resistance against such a superpower might just have seemed impracticable and futile to the Assassins. The Mongols also used terror in a way that no other invader of Persia had before.
Previous to the Mongols’ irruption into the Middle East, the true end of military activity was the capture of fortified places, deposing of the previous dynasty and exploitation of the state’s resources. Von Clausewitz’s perhaps now somewhat hackneyed declaration that, ‘war is a mere continuation of policy by other means’, is in fact true when applied to the polities that had fought over Persia, previous to the Mongols’ total war. The Mongol war aim was different simply because they were antagonistic against anything of the pre-existing state and were focused on its total destruction. William of Rubruck, who knew them first hand, said of them: ‘When they make peace with any one, it is only to destroy them.’*
Even the Khwarazmians had been Muslims and this had perhaps restrained them from even worse atrocities against their co-religionists than those that are recorded as having been committed by Ala al-Din Muhammad and the other shahs. Juvaini, the panegyrist of Hulegu, occasionally forgets himself and refers to the Mongols as ‘Tartar devils’ and ‘strangers to religion’. The Mongols’ savagery has been recorded by both Islamic and European chroniclers, and the spread of this terror was far ranging, as the Mongols were more numerous than any other previous invader. Ibn al-Athir, a contemporary of the Mongol invasions, wrote in the opening passage of one of his books that:
I have been avoiding mentioning this event for many years because I consider it too horrible. I have been advancing with one foot and retreating with the other. Who could easily write the obituary of Islam and the Muslims? For whom could it be easy to mention it? Would that my mother had not given birth to me. Would that I had died before it happened and had been a thing forgotten. However, a group of friends urged me to record it since I knew it first-hand. Then I saw that to refrain from it would profit nothing. Therefore we say this deed encompassed mention of the greatest event, the most awful catastrophe that has befallen time. It engulfed all beings, particularly the Muslims. Anyone would be right in saying that the world, from the time God created humans until now, has not been stricken by the like. Histories contain nothing that even approaches it. In fact nothing comparable is reported in past chronicles. It may well be that the world from now until its end will not experience the like of it again, apart perhaps from Gog and Magog.†
There were no empty threats from the Khans; they had both the manpower and the will to decimate populations. They were the real terrorists of the Middle Ages, in that they used terror on a vast scale to achieve their goal – the acquisition of territory and wealth. It was no wonder that Juvaini, their apologist, had to cast them in the role of God’s judgment on His sinful people, but he too, then goes on to write of the hopeless desolation to which the conquerors had reduced Khurasan, his homeland. Then there was the fact that the Mongols applied siege warfare in a manner unseen in the Middle East prior to their arrival. They had learnt much from their Chinese campaigns against the great-walled cities of the Jin state and brought expert Khitai and Chinese engineers with them to batter at the walls of the Assassin castles.
This said, and even if we accept that the Mongol army was capable of feeding itself off lice and carrion, there was still the question of fodder, a problem that every cavalry army from Alexander’s to Napoleon’s faced. Juvaini’s rendition of Hulegu’s campaign against the Assassins tells us how the Mongol army had to move from relatively fertile areas after only a month or so, because the pasture had been denuded. Later, the Mongols would face a logistical nightmare in Syria whilst trying to maintain an army in the field against their doughty opponents, the Mamluks.
The fact remains therefore that the Assassins, despite all the problems of facing down the Mongol war machine, should still have been able to hang on longer, simply because the time the Mongol army could spend in one location besieging castles was limited by their horses’ needs.
In the final count, the Assassins of Rukn al-Din did not resist as their predecessors would have, and whilst some of the reasons for Rukn al-Din’s easy surrender to Hulegu doubtless lie with the frightening military ability of the Mongols, along with the grand master’s own weakness of character, this cannot be the whole answer. The neighbours of the Assassins, the Gilanis, maintained their independence from the Mongols until the early part of the fourteenth century. Even when a Mongol army was sent into the jungles south of the Caspian Sea, in an attempt to bring them to heel, it was slaughtered. A subsequent punitive campaign could not make effective contact with an enemy who just kept melting away into the forest. Eventually the Gilanis obtained quite favourable terms from the Mongols for their surrender, and of course the Ilkhanate, the Mongol state of Persia, collapsed in 1336, freeing the Gilanis from their yoke.
What was more important for the Assassins was that they had lost the will to fight on. Under earlier grand masters, they would have maintained themselves in their castles and the fidai’in would have brought about the sort of crises within the Mongol state that the killing of Nizam al-Mulk and of other political luminaries had caused in previous regimes. The Mongols were also, of course, heathens and any action against them by the fidai’in might even have allowed the Assassins to appear as the saviours of all of Islam. They could not save Islam from the Mongol rage – that job would fall to the Mamluks of Egypt. One of the reasons for this was that, under the grand master Jalal al-Din, they had come in from beyond the pale and become good Muslims following the edicts of the Sunni caliph.
In short, the radical fire of the Assassins had been put out by a desire among the later grand masters to join the society of nations and to be seen as kings rather than as revolutionaries. They had sold out for earthly power, whilst what had made the early fidai’in so feared was their rejection of this world and their apocalyptic desire to attain the next. The last Assassins had forgotten what Hasan-i-Sabbah had known so completely – the sirat-i-qiyamat, the bridge from this world into Paradise, is more slender than a hair and sharper than a sword. Absolute discipline and total belief are needed in order to cross it.