When we were children we went to the Master for a time,
For a time we were beguiled with our own mastery;
Hear the end of the matter, what befell us:
We came like water and we went like wind.
Omar Khayyam*
THE DEATH OF SALADIN broke up Sunni Muslim unity in Syria and Egypt, just as the Assassins’ daggers had in the past. The patrimonial share-out of the sultan’s possessions, once again, put brother against brother and uncles against nephews. Syria was parcelled out among Saladin’s relatives. Egypt, at least, remained intact as a state, but independent of Syria. It could have been a wonderful time to be an Ismaili Assassin, but there were troubles ahead. As discussed briefly at the end of chapter six, in 1211 the Syrian Assassins had adopted the policy of the Persian grand master Hasan III, that of alliance with the Abbasid caliph. The fast of Ramadan was enforced by the compliant new chief dai and there would be no leaders worthy of the title of grand master in Syria after Sinan’s passing.
Alamut’s control over the Syrian mission was now very much in evidence, a Syrian Assassin inscription records how:
In that year 608 [1211] an ambassador of Hasan, the grand master of Alamut came, to announce that they were liberated from Batinism, that they had built mosques and prayer houses and re-established worship and prayer meetings and the fast of Ramadan. The public and the caliph felt great joy at this. The princess daughter of Hasan undertook the pilgrimage and received a warm welcome from the caliph.*
Saladin’s truce with Sinan and the above accord between the Assassins and the caliphate seems to have been enough to maintain fairly friendly relations between the Ayyubids and the Syrian Nizaris. The Ayyubid princes found themselves in a similar situation to that which the Turkish princes of Syria had found themselves in 1099 – petty princes controlling only one city or province and surrounded by suspicious neighbours. Stirring up a hornet’s nest by attacking Assassin possessions would have been unwise. Likewise the Assassins turned away from the killing of Muslims and towards the murder of Crusaders in this period. This was not undertaken for ideological reasons, but simply because the Crusader princes of the Levant were now placing more and more pressure on the Assassin territories.
In 1213 Raymond, the son of Prince Bohemond IV of Antioch, was killed in the main church of Tortosa during prayers, and the response of his father is not all that surprising. He sent an expedition to the nearest Assassin castle of al-Khawabi and began a fierce assault on it, then settled in for a siege. The Assassin leaders called for assistance from the Ayyubid prince of Aleppo. When this was not sufficient to push the Franks from their position surrounding the castle, a further appeal was made to Damascus. The Franks were finally turned away from the fortress in 1215.
There was nothing of jihad in all this – the Ayyubids competed with the Franks for trade routes and croplands in Syria, but there was no ideology evident in the warfare of early thirteenth-century Syria, and this extended to the Assassins and the military orders. The Knights Hospitallers managed, through raiding of Ismaili villages and destruction of their agriculture, to force the Syrian Assassins to pay them tribute, as they did already to the Templars. In 1230, presumably as an attempt to pay them in kind and to vent their spleens against Bohemond, the Assassins sent a military force along with the Hospitallers of Crak des Chevaliers, who were raiding Bohemond’s lands as part of a long-running feud that the order had been pursuing against the lord of Antioch. Bohemond’s relationships with his fellow Crusaders were fairly appalling generally, and he was excommunicated in 1208 by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. His feud with the Hospitallers also suggests that the Assassins might have had some encouragement from the Knights for their killing of Raymond.
Considering the degree of contact the Assassins had with the Hospitallers in this period, it should be noted, once again, that the weapon of assassination was ineffective against the military orders. Murdering the grand master of the Hospitallers would just lead to one of the knights replacing him from the hierarchy below. The Templar and Hospitaller Orders of knighthood were institutions built on hierarchy and non-familial loyalty. Medieval Muslim polities generally had neither of these qualities. They were centralised, autocratic states based on personalities and transient ties. As the Lord De Joinville described it:
At that time he [the chief dai] used to pay tribute to the Temple and the Hospital; for they feared the Assassins not at all, seeing that the Old Man of the Mountain had nothing to gain by having the master of the Temple or Hospital put to death; for he knew very well, that if he had one of them killed, he was immediately replaced by another just as good; and for that reason he did not want to waste his Assassins in a quarter where he had nothing to gain by it.*
The eventual nemesis of the Assassins in Syria, the Mamluk Dynasty, was the Muslim equivalent of these non-aristocratic military brotherhoods. It was made up of slave soldiers without parentage whose ties to each other were based on a barracks culture and a military code.
In order to make their payments to the Knights Hospitallers and Templars, the Assassins, in a very businesslike manner, turned to offering asylum for a price to political dissidents from the petty states of Syria, as well as simple extortion. Minor Muslim and Christian lords were shaken down for protection money, and in 1228 they even tried it on, to good effect, with an emperor. Frederick II came on Crusade and sent gifts totalling some eighty-thousand dinars to Majd al-Din, the chief dai, to guarantee his safe conduct, whilst he visited the holy sites of Palestine. The Crusade itself was curiously bloodless, with the qadi of Jerusalem being so friendly towards Frederick that the muezzins were told to hold their evening call to prayers for fear of disturbing the emperor’s sleep. Frederick also managed to negotiate with al-Kamil, the most powerful of the Ayyubid princes and de facto sultan, for Jerusalem to return bloodlessly to Christian control. His success and efforts in the Holy Land were not viewed warmly, however, by the pope back in Rome, who still seemed to be of the opinion that the only good Muslim was a dead Muslim. Besides, Frederick had been excommunicated prior to his departure on Crusade and was therefore ineligible to wear the Cross.
Majd al-Din failed to send the Holy Roman Emperor’s treasure on to Alamut, because he claimed the roads had become too dangerous. There was at least a scrap of validity in this assertion – ever since the complete destruction of the Khwarazm shah’s empire by the Mongols in the 1220s, unemployed bands of Khwarazmian soldiers had been turning up in Syria and making trouble for just about everyone. They then exceeded even their own normally high standards of brutishness in 1244, while they were supposed to be working for the new Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, al-Salih, in Syria. They entered the open city of Jerusalem, slayed at least two thousand of its Christian residents, destroyed the tombs of the Latin Kings of Jerusalem and only then moved on to join their employer’s army in Egypt. Their act of desecration was enough to bring the largest army that Outremer had put in the field since Hattin, to Egypt’s frontier. The Crusaders pulled troops from every part of the kingdom and allied with the Ayyubids of Syria, who had also suffered at the hands of al-Salih’s Khwarazmian mercenaries. Al-Salih’s Mamluk army and his Khwarazmians met the allies in battle at Harbiyya.*
The allied forces outnumbered their enemy, but the Egyptian Mamluks stopped the Crusader charge dead, and the Khwarazmians, from a position out to the right of the Mamluks, swung down upon the Syrian Ayyubids and smashed into their flank. There was panic among most of the Syrian Muslims, who fled and left only the men of Homs and the Crusaders on the battlefield. The Khwarazmian drive pushed the Crusaders and their few remaining allies into the arms of the Mamluks, who proceeded to massacre them with bow, mace and axe. At least five thousand Crusaders were killed and eight hundred taken prisoner. It was a defeat on the scale of Hattin, and it triggered renewed calls for Crusade in Europe.
The new Crusade came in the summer of 1249, under the pious King of France, Louis IX. Louis aimed to wrest Egypt from Islam – the logic for this being that Egypt was in fact the key to the Holy Land, as without Egypt’s economic and agrarian resources, Syria’s interior lands were extremely difficult to defend and maintain, especially as the Crusaders still retained the Syrian coastline. The same kind of amphibious attack as Louis contemplated had been tried in 1218, and had very nearly succeeded. It was only when the Crusader advance from al-Mansura had been halted by Nile floods that the Egyptians had been able to encircle them and then cut them off totally, by bringing down river dams to flood the area to their rear.
Louis’s endeavour, however, failed, after al-Salih’s Mamluks defeated his army at al-Mansura, just north of Cairo, cut it off from its supply route up the river Nile, and let disease and starvation force the king to surrender himself and his forces. As an aside to all this, al-Salih died during the Crusade and his Mamluks then rebelled against his heir. A junior emir named Baybars killed the Ayyubid prince as he tried to escape across the Nile and the Mamluk Dynasty was born on the river’s muddy banks.
Louis was eventually ransomed and sailed for Acre, where he spent some four years strengthening the city’s defences and carrying on a long-distance negotiation with the Mongols, who had by now conquered Anatolia, and obviously had designs on the whole of the Middle East. The king was also an enticing target for extortion by the Assassins. There were already tales circulating in Europe that Assassins had been sent to Europe to kill King Louis when he was a child but these were just a by-product of the slanders against Richard Couer de Lion, that claimed he had brought fidai’in back from the Levant with him to kill kings for him. Now, however, Louis faced emissaries of the Assassins in his own quarters:
Whilst the king was dwelling in Acre, there came to him messengers from the Old Man of the Mountain. When the king returned from mass, he made them come before him. The king made them be seated in the following order. In front was an emir, well dressed and well equipped; and behind this emir was a youth well equipped, grasping three knives in his hand; so that if the emir had been rejected, he might have offered these three knives to the king, in token of defiance. Behind him who held the three knives, there was another that carried a sheet wound around his arm, which he too would have presented to the king for a shroud to wrap him in, had he refused the request of the Old Man of the Mountain.*
The emir then asked the king if he knew of his master and Louis replied calmly that he had heard of him. He obviously did not appear impressed enough for the emissary:
Then since you have heard of my lord, I marvel greatly, that out of your possessions you have not sent him such gifts as would have secured him for your friend; even as the Emperor of Germany, the King of Hungary, the sultan of Egypt, and the rest do every year; because they know for certain, that they can only live as long as it shall please my lord. And if you do not choose to do this, then let him receive quittance of the tribute that he owes to the Hospital and the Temple, and he will consider your score cancelled.†
The king had obviously acquired a very acute understanding of the mechanics of Palestinian politics, because he asked the emissary to attend on him later the same day. The Assassin entourage did so but when their chief entered the king’s salon:
He found the king seated thus: the master of the Hospital on one side, and the master of the Temple on the other. Then the king bade him repeat what he had said to him in the morning; and he replied that he had no mind to repeat it, save before those who had been with the king in the morning.
Then the two masters said to him: ‘We command you to speak it’. And he said, that, since they commanded him, he would repeat it to them. Then the two masters caused him to be told in Arabic, that he was to come and speak with them the next day at the Hospital; which he did. Then the two masters said to him that his lord was a very bold man, to dare to send such harsh language to the king.‡
The counter-threat from the two masters was very obvious and there were no attempts on the king’s life while he was at Acre. The only gift the Assassins ever received from him was reciprocated by the chief dai, and tribute continued to be paid to the Templars and Hospitallers. As if all this was not bad enough, in 1256 word came of the destruction of the Assassins in Persia. Despite the ‘interregnum’ of Sinan, there had always been an umbilical connection to Persia for the Syrians. There is even evidence of Assassin activity as far north as Azerbaijan, and as discussed earlier, through a corridor between north-west Persia and Northern Syria that passed through Mosul. The killings in the Azerbaijan region seem to have been an elemental part of the attempt to keep communications open between Alamut and its colony. There were certainly a number of unresolved murders of princes of Azerbaijan and Mosul, but whether the Ismailis operated through allies or directly in this region, we shall probably never know. There are no known Assassin fortresses between Persia and Syria and very little in the chronicles beyond an ambiguous reference in the writings of Benjamin of Tudela, and a vague mention by Marco Polo who wrote ‘He [the grand master] had also constituted two deputies or representatives of himself, of whom one had residence in Damascus, and the other in Kurdistan; and these two pursued the plan he had established for training their young dependants.’* This connection was strong right up until the moment the Mongols extinguished Alamut. And whilst the Syrians refused Rukn al-Din’s calls for them to surrender, there must have been an awful feeling of isolation descending on the Assassin castles of Syria in the last years of the 1250s.
The Mongol invasion of Syria began in January 1260 with Aleppo’s bloody fall. Damascus then capitulated rapidly, and probably wisely, upon the approach of Hulegu’s army. The Mongols then proceeded to disestablish Islam as the official religion of the area. The Christians of Damascus drank openly during Ramadan, and it is to be wondered whether the Syrian Assassins, so long committed to the idea of the destruction of the Baghdad caliphate, but now wedded to the corpse of its caliphate, might possibly have thought of celebration too. This, however, seems unlikely. With the Mongol conquest of Damascus, the Assassins’ castles were now flanked on two sides, and to their rear Bohemond VI, of Antioch and Tripoli, made submission to Hulegu. Four of the Assassin castles in the Jabal al-Summaq were besieged by the Mongols and they surrendered. Only Egypt, a few isolated cities and castles in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula were now left to Islam in its historic heartland. Hulegu sent envoys to Kutuz, the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, demanding his surrender, but once Kutuz had had the envoys cut in half and placed their heads on the gates of the city, he started to mobilise his troops for battle in Syria. It was to be a battle that would essentially decide the fate of the Islamic world.
News reached Syria that Mongke Khan had died, of natural causes, while on campaign in China with his brother Qubilai – this sowed the seeds of a great Mongol civil war. This was just what Ala al-Din Muhammad had tried to effect by his abortive dispatch of four hundred fidai’in to Mongke Khan’s court in 1253. Certainly, there had been previous divisions and conflict within the House of Chinggis Khan over the succession. Upon the death of Mongke, however, the rifts between the Mongol princes became so great and irreparable that the death knell of the Mongol Empire was struck in 1259. Hulegu was distracted from his coming conflict with the Mamluks by the death of his brother and its sequelae, far to his east. His brothers Qubilai and Ariq Boke were both prepared to undertake war on each other for the succession. Hulegu never really seems to have counted himself as a candidate, but he did have concerns about the outcome of the contest. Ariq Boke was backed by most of the Chinggisid family in Mongolia and, most importantly for Hulegu, by the Golden Horde’s Khan Berke. Qubilai, meanwhile, held the support of most of the generals of the Mongol army, and, what was more, he held China – the Mongols’ most prized possession.
What would really have concerned Hulegu was that Berke’s forces lay directly to his north in the Caucasus region. As was discussed earlier, Batu Khan had been made virtually independent ruler of this area by the agreement that brought Mongke to the throne in 1251, and there were unresolved issues over rights of conquest in Persia between Hulegu and Berke, Batu’s successor. Moreover, Hulegu had now conquered Anatolia, which had originally been part of the sphere of influence of the Golden Horde and Berke had also converted to Islam, whilst Hulegu had been persecuting that same religion since his arrival in the Middle East. Hulegu was then caught between wanting to support his brother Qubilai for the throne, but having very real concerns over upsetting his powerful neighbour, who had already sent to Hulegu, claiming ownership of the pasturelands and silver trade routes of Azerbaijan, which formed the border of their territories.
Hulegu, therefore, never really committed himself to the support of either candidate for the throne, although he was viewed by members of the Ariq Boke faction as very much pro-Qubilai. The evolving Mongol conflict then had immediate consequences for the Muslims of Syria when Hulegu went to Maragha to be in a good position to meet any invasion of the Golden Horde. For the Mamluks, he was far enough away to give them at least a chance against the remainder of his force, which he had left behind to mop up Syria under Kit Buqa, one of his most experienced and trusted lieutenants.
The Mamluks met the Mongol army at Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath, at the foot of Mount Gilboa on 3 September 1260 and in a bloody battle, that lasted from dawn till midday, completely defeated them. Kit Buqa was killed, and as a result of the battle, the Mongols had to evacuate Damascus, Hama and Aleppo. Syria was saved, but Kutuz, the sultan who had won the battle, did not survive to see the real fruits of his victor – he was killed by the emir Baybars, now twice a regicide, who took the throne.
The Mongols suffered a further defeat at the hands of a mixed Mamluk– Ayyubid army at Homs in December 1260, and by now Syria was firmly welded to Egypt, under the firm control of Baybars. The Assassins must, of course, have been overjoyed at the Mongols’ defeat, but it soon became very obvious that Baybars was not content with pushing just one group of infidels from Syria. He now embarked on the same kind of Sunni jihad that had led Zangi, Nur al-Din and Saladin on their journeys of conquest. The Franks were the obvious target for Baybars’ new Holy War, but it again became very obvious that any such project required the suppression of all heresy within the state, and that there be no other loyalties, other than to the new Sunni sultan. To drive this point home, Baybars had also found himself a puppet caliph – a refugee from the Abbasid family had been placed on a new caliphal throne of Cairo, and the Mamluks would maintain the caliphate as a tool of their legitimacy, until their eventual conquest by the Ottomans in 1517.
Baybars’s war against the Crusaders was also fought to preclude any Mongol–Crusader alliance that would require him to fight a war on two fronts, and he began it with aplomb. Mamluk raids on Antioch brought it close to collapse in 1261, and in 1262 its port was looted. 1263 saw the fall of Nazareth and the encirclement of Acre. Caesarea fell in 1265, as did Haifa, along with practically all the inland Crusader castles. In 1271, the White Castle of the Templars and Crak des Chevaliers, as well as the castles of Gibelcar and Beaufort, fell to the Mamluks’ siege engines. Christian Armenia was also devastated in 1266.
During all this, Baybars found time to send his lieutenants, between 1265 and 1273, to effectively put the Assassins out of business. Baybars had revolutionised siege warfare in Syria, just as the Mongols had in Persia. Gone were the long desultory encirclements of cities that attempted to starve out garrisons. The Mamluks became experts at delivering rapid destruction to bastions and strongholds. The cavalry would appear suddenly at the walls of a fortification and begin the attack with a hail of arrows and Greek Fire, thrown from hand slings. Then the light artillery of arradas and wheel-crossbows would be added, while the heavy artillery of counterweighted mangonels were being constructed; these would then be added to the assault. The whole thing gave defenders the impression of an ever-increasing spiral of violence.
At the same time the defenders also had to worry about the ground dropping out from under their feet, as the Mamluks were also adept at both sapping and filling in moats under cover of moveable shelters or dabbaba, which were similar to the Romans’ testudo. Added to this was the simple fact that the Mamluks were the most highly disciplined troops of the medieval world, fired with jihad. They were quite prepared to storm castles and cities without waiting for the artillery to do its work, as they did at Caesarea, when they made ladders from their horses’ tack to scale the city’s walls. The Assassins would also have been distracted by the constant and morale-sapping beating of huge paired drums, carried on the backs of up to three hundred camels, that attended Mamluk siege warfare. Several castles fell, and the Assassins soon enough made it clear that they were willing to take suzerainty under the sultan.
In 1266 Baybars also, however, made his conclusion of a truce with the Knights Hospitallers, who were also desperate for some respite from the Mamluk war machine, dependant on them forgoing the payment of tribute from the Assassins. In this way he effectively offered the Assassins protection, and made it clear to them that they were his subjects. His solution to the Assassin problem was therefore a twofold one: he brought them to heel, but did not plan their total extinction. By this policy he both received the tribute that the Assassins formerly paid to the Holy orders, and gained the benefit and convenience of deploying Assassins for his political killings as required, and the sultan had plenty of work for them.
Just how tame the Assassins were is difficult to assess. Certainly as early as 1260 Baybars granted iqtas to some of his emirs based on the revenue drawn from Assassin lands, and in 1265 he garnered taxes from the money that the Assassins continued to extort from Crusader princes and minor Muslim emirs. All this was accepted without a murmur from the cowed chief dai, Najm al-Din. In 1270, Baybars dismissed the chief dai from his post and, at this point, seems to have literally taken over from Alamut as the Assassins’ parent. However, his new appointee, Sarim al-Din, double-crossed him and, through trickery, managed to eject the Mamluk garrison from Masyaf castle and reoccupy it, before raising the banner of rebellion against the sultan. The revolt was short-lived and soon enough Baybars had reappointed Najm al-Din as chief dai, with his son Shams al-Din as his heir, dependant on an increased payment of tribute. He then had Sarim al-Din imprisoned in Cairo, tortured a little and then poisoned.
All this time, Baybars was also preparing to meet the threat of a new Crusade by Louis IX, that had been in preparation since 1267. Louis’s reputation had been enough to bring even the kings of Aragon and England into the project and he had also been corresponding with Hulegu, and then with Abagha, the new Khan of Persia following Hulegu’s death in 1265. Baybars therefore had to prevent the Crusade from finding any friendly disembarkation point. He responded to calls for a truce from Acre with an agreement allowing a temporary cessation of operations against the city, and then completely demolished Ascalon, rendering it useless as a port for the Crusade. Despite the truce, he still arranged for the Assassins to eliminate the leading baron of Acre, Philip of Montfort, in 1270, to ensure that the local Franks would be leaderless if King Louis’s forces should arrive. In the event, the Crusade was a disaster, and following its diversion to Tunisia, on the rather odd assumption that the sultan there was a likely convert to Christianity, King Louis and many of his men died of dysentery whilst fighting on the North African coast.
Perhaps in revenge for the murder of Philip, and for his loss of Antioch to Baybars in 1268, Bohemond VI of Tripoli employed two fidai’in to assassinate the sultan, but the men were discovered and arrested by Baybars in March 1271. Shams al-Din was also arrested and charged with complicity in the crime. Such collusion was, however, unlikely as by this point the movement seems to have lost virtually all cohesion. Indeed, the fidai’in had come from a castle no longer under the full control of the dai. The charge was convenient, however, for Baybars, and though Shams al-Din was released after his father had pleaded his innocence, both men were made to reside, not in their castles, but in Cairo where they could be watched. Baybars also sent messages to Bohemond in April, threatening him with a fate identical to that which the count had planned for the sultan.
The freedom of action that Baybars enjoyed in this period was entirely due to the ongoing dissent among the Mongol princes. By 1264, Qubilai had decisively defeated Ariq Boke, but there was still a vast amount of dissatisfaction within Mongolia proper towards the new Great Khan. This discontent was lead by Qaidu, from the line of Ogedei, who managed to maintain a great deal of control over the Central Asian lands and obtain de facto leadership of the Chaghatai Horde, in what is today roughly Uzbekistan. The Chaghatai branch of the family had lost out in the first round of succession disputes, after the death of Chinggis Khan, and retained a vehement hatred for the house of Tolui, from which Mongke Khan, Qubilai Khan and Hulegu sprang. From 1264 onwards, Hulegu had had to endure raids and conflict on his northeastern border, as Qaidu used the Chaghatai Horde to strike at Qubilai through Hulegu.
In the spring of 1266, the Golden Horde invaded Persia and the fighting continued into the summer. Abagha Khan was distracted, once again, from Syrian affairs by an extensive invasion of Khurasan by the Chaghatai Mongols in 1270, who he defeated at the Battle of Herat in July of the same year. In 1271, as a reprisal, he sent a large division of his forces into the Chaghatai Horde’s lands to sack and burn Bukhara. The Pax Mongolica was slowly but surely falling apart.
Baybars next employed his Assassins against his Mongol enemies. Juvaini, on whose writing most of our understanding of Hulegu’s campaign against the Assassins of Persia is based, was the object of an unsuccessful attack by fidai’in in Baghdad in 1271. Certainly his polemics against the Assassins would have been reason enough for them to wish his end, but in his position as governor of Baghdad, he was also an important part of the Mongol administration, and Baybars’s cold war against the Persian Khans was built on such acts. Espionage, the poisoning of water sources and the ‘turning’ and double-crossing of Mongol officials were second nature to Baybars.
Given Baybars’s skills for intrigue, then, it is more than a little surprising that he was caught napping by Shams al-Din in June 1271. The junior chief dai requested permission to leave Cairo and to return to the castles in the Syrian mountains to deal with some minor points of administration. He was allowed to do so, but once there he began to organise a revolt against the sultan. Baybars got to hear of the uprising early on in its planning and the Mamluks’ siege engines were quickly employed again against Shams al-Din’s bolt-hole. Shams al-Din was given surprisingly good treatment by the sultan – even after Baybars discovered further plots to assassinate several of his emirs, he did no more than return Shams al-Din to house arrest in Cairo. Perhaps Baybars enjoyed the fear his domesticated Assassin inspired in others and he was already planning new operations for the dai’s followers.
Prince Edward, the future King of England, had arrived in the Holy Land in June 1271. His Crusader army had reached Tunisia only after Louis’s death and, not wanting to return empty-handed to Europe without having fulfilled his Crusading vows, he had sailed to Cyprus and then on to Acre. Baybars was concerned that Edward might be preparing to use his, admittedly small, Crusading army, in conjunction with the Latin army and navy of Cyprus, in a concerted attack on Muslim Syria with the Mongols. His fears seemed well founded: Edward struck into the Plain of Sharon near Mount Carmel, and Abagha sent a Mongol force of ten thousand troopers from Anatolia to Syria, at the prince’s behest.
The Mamluk garrison of Aleppo fled under Baybars’s orders as he wanted to try to draw the Mongols further into Syria, closer to his main force at Damascus. As the Mongols advanced towards Maarat al-Numan, Baybars started to move north with his heavy cavalry, but the Mongols denied him battle by quickly evacuating Syria. The Mongol incursion had been too brief for Edward to be able to achieve anything, but it did bring Baybars to the negotiating table. He decided to grant a truce to Acre in order to reduce the risk of future Mongol–Crusader operations against him. The peace was signed on 22 May 1272 and negotiated to last ten years, ten months, ten days and ten hours, the standard timeframe for hudna – the truce that can interrupt jihad, if there is an advantage to be gained by the Muslims from a cessation of hostilities against the infidel.
As a further guarantee of peace from Edward in the future, Baybars sent a fidai to assassinate him. The Mamluk governor of Ramla sent to Edward, intimating that he was prepared to betray the sultan. He then sent him a messenger with gifts for both himself and his wife. The messenger was admitted several times to Edward’s presence as the negotiations progressed – on his fifth visit, on 18 June, the fidai took his chance. After being searched for weapons he was permitted to see the prince. Edward, suffering in the Syrian heat, was wearing only a light tunic and was resting on a couch. He took the emir’s letter from the messenger who, as he bent towards the prince to answer a question, drew a thin dagger from the inside of his belt and struck a blow at his intended victim. Edward caught the blow on his arm, and, knocking the Assassin to the ground, jerked the dagger from his grasp and stabbed him with his own blade. The prince’s servants came running and battered the fidai’s brains out with a foot stool.
Edward seemed to have survived the attack relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, the dagger was poisoned and over the next few days Edward became seriously ill. There is a story of Eleanor, Edward’s young wife, trying to suck the poison from her husband’s wound, but not surprisingly, this seems to have been a romantic Italian invention of later years. The master of the Temple gave him what was felt to be the antidote, but his condition continued to deteriorate and the wound on his wrist began to suppurate. The prince only began to recover once all the dead flesh from around the original stab mark was excised by a surgeon. Fifteen days later he was seen on his horse in the streets of Acre. As soon as he was well enough he departed for England. It is to be wondered what effect this brush with the Assassins had on Edward. Certainly as King of England he gained a reputation as being both calculating and distant.
The story leads credence to the idea that by this stage the Assassins were little more than hit men. A poisoned blade would never have been contemplated by the devotees of the past. They were now the compliant tools of the Mamluk sultan, who by 1273 had occupied all their castles. Even after the death of Baybars in 1277,* they continued in the service of the Mamluk sultans. The fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta wrote of their servile existence:
When the sultan wishes to send one of them to kill an enemy, he pays them the price of his blood. If the murderer escapes after performing his task, the money is his; if he is caught his children get it. They use poisoned knives to strike down their appointed victims. Sometimes their plots fail and they themselves are killed.†
In 1400, the Mamluk sultan, Faraj, dispatched Assassins to kill the new invader from the East, Tamerlane, as he besieged Damascus, but they were caught and returned without either ears or noses to their employer. Tamerlane brought terror to Syria and Persia on a scale unimaginable, even under the Mongols. Compared to Tamerlane’s slaughter of men, women, children and the still to be born, the killings of the Assassins – a sect of supposedly bloodthirsty demons – pale into insignificance.