Io stava come frate che confessa
Lo perfido assassin . . .
I stood there like the friar who takes
Confession from the treacherous assassin . . .*
IN 1291, ACRE FELL to the Mamluks and the Crusaders were pushed out of the Levant. In 1322, the Mongols of Persia, exhausted from both their attempts to wrest Syria from the Mamluks, and from wars with their kinsmen, signed a peace treaty with the slave soldier dynasty. The Ilkhanate, the Mongol state of Persia, collapsed in 1336. Thus, two of the Assassins’ most inveterate enemies both died out shortly after the fidai’in’s own disintegration into hired killers. There could be no comfort in this however for the refugees of the Assassin states: victory over both had been achieved by a state that was, however nominally, under the spiritual guidance of a Sunni caliph.
Whilst the Abbasids of Cairo were certainly little more than puppets to the Mamluk sultans, the sultans themselves were a direct product of the fusing together of Sunni jihad with military men. The Mamluk sultanate was in its essence an orthodox Sunni state, run by Turks. The seeds of this state had been sown by the reaction of Sunni jurists in Aleppo and Damascus, back in the first decades of the twelfth century. The call for jihad, that the qadis of Syria made, was a direct reaction, not only to the Crusaders’ presence in the Holy Land, but also to the unholiness of the fidai and the disgust and fear that their killings brought to Sunnis. In many ways then, the Assassins were not only responsible in large part for the success of the First Crusade, with their killing of Nizam al-Mulk, which shattered the unity of the Saljuq Empire. They were also responsible for the counter-Crusade that brought Zangi, Nur al-Din and Saladin to the fray with the Crusaders, and ultimately led to the Mamluk war machine that finished Outremer’s existence.
The Franks had been a potent military force whose courage, religious fervour, unity and sense of purpose were key elements in their successful exploitation of the situation in the Middle East in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. They rapidly established a strong state, with much of its security indebted to impressive fortifications. The parallels between the early pilgrim soldiers of the expeditio and the early Assassins are obvious, and both states fell only when they lost their unifying sense of mission and their enemies united.
Equally the Assassins were, along with the Abbasid caliph’s refusal to undertake Mongol suzerainty, the direct cause of Hulegu’s destruction of Persia, but they might also just have been Persia’s only hope of avoiding the Mongol rage. It is easily arguable that the Mongols were coming to pillage and conquer in Persia anyway, whatever the fidai’in and the caliph did. Expansionism was a basic tenet of the Mongol world view, as their continued attempts to bring Japan and Syria into their empire make obvious. Furthermore, when Mongke did die, there was a falling apart of the Mongol Empire that would see even China revert to native rule, under the Ming, by 1368. Just one fidai breaking through the Mongol guards around the Khan might have caused just the same result before Persia was ruined and the Assassins would have been the saviours of their nation. Perhaps Chinggis Khan had foreseen all this when:
One day he called his sons together and taking an arrow from his quiver he broke it in half. Then he took two arrows and broke them also. And he continued to add to the bundle until there were so many arrows that even athletes were unable to break them. Then turning to his sons he said: ‘So it is with you also. A frail arrow, when it is multiplied and supported by its fellows, not even mighty warriors are able to break it but in impotence withdraw their hands there from. As long, therefore, as you brothers support one another and render stout assistance to one another, though your enemies be of great strength and might, yet shall they not gain victory over you.*
In the end, of course, the fidai’in failed to cause the bundle to break apart early enough to save Persia, and in an ironic twist, the Mongols, before their extinction in Persia, converted to Islam – though not the Shiite form the Assassins had killed and died for. Like the Saljuqs before them, they took up the Sunni creed and it seemed that a wave of orthodoxy had flowed smoothly over all the Islamic lands. Indeed, Persia would remain Sunni until the birth of another personality cult on a par with that of Hasan-i-Sabbah, when the enigmatic Shah Ismail gathered devoted Turcoman tribesmen around him in the sixteenth century. Even then, however, it would be the Twelver Shiite tradition that would triumph in Persia.
The Assassins place in history then is a largely forgotten one, but they have certainly obtained a place in myth. In 1332, King Philip VI of France was advised, during his planning of a Crusade to retake the Holy Land, by a German priest called Brocardus:
I name the Assassins, who are to be cursed and fled. They sell themselves, are thirsty for human blood, kill the innocent for a price, and care nothing for either life or salvation. Like the devil, they transfigure themselves into angels of light, by imitating the gestures, garments, languages, customs and acts of various nations and peoples; thus, hidden in sheep’s clothing, they suffer death as soon as they are recognised. Since indeed I have not seen them, but know this of them only by repute or by true writings, I cannot reveal more, nor give fuller information. I cannot show how to recognise them by their customs or any other signs, for in these things they are unknown to me as to others also; nor can I show how to apprehend them by their name, for so execrable is their profession, and so abominated by all, that they conceal their own names as much as they can. I therefore know only one single remedy for the safeguarding and protection of the king, that in all the royal household, for whatever service, however small or brief or mean, none should be admitted, save those whose country, place, lineage, condition and person are certainly, fully and clearly known.*
Brocardus tells us that he only knew of the Assassins’ ways from ‘true writings’ and that must have been how Dante had come to hear of them too. Indeed, there were many ‘true writings’ circulating in Europe at this time, feeding an audience hungry for tales of the mystical East. We have already met Marco Polo’s description of the Old Man of the Mountain’s gardens of Paradise. His description was no more ridiculous than Dante’s Assassin confessing to a friar, and at least showed a little less invention than the anonymous author of a chronicle of the Third Crusade. This writer tells us that the ‘Vetus de Montanis’, Sinan the Old Man of Masyaf, brought up a large number of noble boys in his palace who were then taught every kind of learning and accomplishment and instructed in various languages before being called before the grand master at pubescence. At this audience the boys would then be told that for the remission of their sins they would have to slay some great man. The writer then tells us that the youth was then given a poniard of terrible length and sharpness and would, in order to complete his mission, remain in a prince’s service until he found an opportunity for killing him. The anonymous writer’s tale was certainly designed to inspire fear in his audience.
Friar Odoric’s tale however was created, like Marco Polo’s, to dazzle his untravelled audience:
I arrived at a certain country called Melistorte, which is a very pleasant and fertile place. And in this country there was a certain aged man called the Old Man of the Mountain, who round about two mountains had built a wall to enclose them. Within this wall there were the fairest and most crystal fountains in the whole world: and about the fountains there were most beautiful virgins in great number, and goodly horses also, and in a word, everything that could be devised for bodily pleasure and delight, and therefore the inhabitants of the country call the same place by the name of Paradise. The Old Man, when he saw any proper and valiant young man, would admit him into his Paradise. Moreover, by certain conduits he makes wine and milk to flow abundantly. This Old Man when he has a mind to revenge himself or to slay any king or baron, commands him that is governor of the said Paradise, to bring there one of the youths, permitting him a while to take his pleasure therein, and then to give him a certain drug of sufficient force to cast him into such a slumber as should make him quite void of all sense, and so being in a profound sleep to convey him out of his Paradise, who being awaked, and seeing himself thrust out of the Paradise would become so sorrowful that he could not in the world devise what to do, or whither to turn. Then would he go to the Old Man, beseeching him that he might be admitted again into his Paradise, who says to him: ‘You cannot unless you will slay such or such a man for my sake, and if you will give the attempt only, whether you kill him or no, I will place you again in Paradise, that there you may remain always’. Then would the youth without fail put the same in execution, endeavouring to murder all those against whom the Old Man had conceived any hatred. And therefore all the kings of the East stood in awe of the Old Man, and gave him great tribute. *
Listing the luxuries of the lands of the East was a staple for medieval European writers and this is not entirely surprising. Compared to the merchandise available in the West, the imported products of Islam were fine beyond all measure, and this is reflected in the number of Persian words that made their way into European languages along with these goods of desire – jasmine, crimson, taffeta, musk, candy, saffron and the ultimate extravagance, pyjamas.
Marco Polo’s description, however, gave only ‘the most beautiful women and girls’ to the fidai’in, but Odoric trumped that with the much more erotic and romantic idea of virgins. Romance was central to the tales. In the western medieval mind, that is where the Assassins belonged – in a world of romance and eroticism, fringed with dark acts and violence. By the fourteenth century, they were both perfect material for, and an inspiration to, the poets.
The troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan wrote to his lady, ‘You have me more fully in your power than the Old Man his Assassins, who go to kill his mortal enemies, even if they were beyond France.’ Blind obedience in love was obviously seen as a virtue, part and parcel of chivalry – that knightly ideal that had done so much to create the myths of the Crusade, and of Saladin and Richard. Love was to be obeyed without regard for consequences, ‘just as the Assassins serve their master unfailingly, so I have served Love with unswerving loyalty,’ as the troubadour Bernart de Bondeilhs would have it. An anonymous troubadour even went as far as to say to his lady, ‘I am your Assassin who hopes to win Paradise through doing your commands.’ While Aimeric de Peguilhan, who seems to have fallen in love with his theme as much as with his lady, likened his heart to an Assassin, since it kills him for his Lady’s sake, Giraut de Bornelh, hopefully as a compliment, describes his desire for his lady thus: ‘My Lady’s love is an Assassin, which kills me.’*
All of this was, of course, very far from the truth, and Ismailis, although their communities survived the passing of the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia, continued an extremely unromantic struggle against enemies such as the Zaydites, who, like the Ismailis, were leftovers from the old days of Shiite radicalism. In 1378 Zaydites, under their leader, Ali Kiya, fought the Ismailis of the Caspian region and beheaded their chief in battle. Refugees from the battle settled in Qazvin, until they were pushed from there and suffered a further massacre at the hands of Tamerlane’s troops. And yet the sect remained quite visible in Persia, right up until the sixteenth century.
A son of Rukn al-Din had survived the Mongol onslaught and went on to sire the line of imams now titled the Aga Khans, as the Ismailis scattered over eastern Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia and southern Pakistan. In these places, they survived as a peaceful underground sect with the old days of the fidai’in behind them. Similarly in Syria, small communities survived the destruction of the Mamluks and were still to be found in the late Ottoman Empire, dotted along the coastal mountains of Syria.
In the nineteenth century, the Aga Khan led a revolt against the Shah of Persia, but the rising was unsuccessful. After a brief stay in Afghanistan, he decamped to India. He finally settled in Bombay, where oddly enough it was a British law court that decreed him to be the true head of the Ismaili sect, to whom all the various sects of the faith should pay dues. He had been taken to court by a group of Ismailis, who claimed that he had no right to interfere in their religious business. The Aga Khan, in response, showed the court evidence of his descent from the imams of Alamut. In December 1866 an organisation that had previously settled such disputes with rather more pointed arguments, listened quietly to the verdict of a British judge. The judgement was that the Indian Ismailis were entirely subject to the spiritual authority of the Ismaili imams, the latest of whom was the Aga Khan. The judge had inspected the Aga Khan’s genealogy and found him to be descended from the Lords of Alamut, and by virtue of that, from the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt, and so, ultimately, from the Prophet Muhammad.
The nineteenth-century British judge certainly showed more interest in Islamic history than did the Assassins’ medieval contemporaries and this accounts for much of the mythologising of the Assassins. Western knowledge of Islam in the medieval period was scant, despite the Crusades and the daily contact that had existed between Europeans and Muslims in both Spain and Sicily. The Quran was translated into Latin by Robert of Ketton in 1143, as were the philosophical treatises of al-Kindi and al-Farabi. Ibn Sina, or Avicenna as he was known in the West, an early sympathiser with Ismailism, was also translated by Gerard of Cremona.
Generally, however, westerners were not interested in gathering accurate information about the Muslims’ religion or civilization. Of course there were exceptions, such as De Joinville, who at least noted that there was a schism between Sunnis and Shiites, although he assumed that Sunnis were followers of Muhammad, and that Shiites followed only Ali. He also believed that the law of Ali was that when a man died in executing his lord’s commands his soul passed into a ‘happier body’. He suggested that this was why the Assassins were happy to lay down their lives when their lord commanded it. This was a reasonable assumption given the report of a certain Brother Ives who visited Sinan and then reported back to De Joinville:
Brother Ives found a book at the head of the Old Man’s bed, in which were written several sayings of Our Lord to Saint Peter, when he walked on earth. And Brother Ives said to him, ‘Ha! For God’s sake, Sir, read this book often for these are passing good sayings’.
The Old Man told him that he often did so. ‘For I hold my lord St. Peter very dear for in the beginning of the world, the soul of Abel, when he was slain, passed, into the body of Noah and when Noah died, it returned in the body of Abraham and from the body of Abraham when he died, it passed into the body of Saint Peter, when God came upon earth.’*
However, it seems even Brother Ives had an eye for the sensational, and like the troubadours and adventurers who gave their audiences gardens of Paradise, hashish-addicted devotees and murderers lurking in every throne chamber, ready to strike down kings, Brother Ives gave his readers the grand master in all his majesty riding forth like Death, the final Horseman of the Apocalypse, across a landscape of fear:
When the Old Man went riding, a crier went before him, carrying an axe with a long handle all covered with silver, and stuck full of knives, who kept crying out. ‘Make way before him who bears the death of kings in his hands!’†