Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The Realm of the Assassins February 10, 2016

This particularly forgotten kingdom was to be found in a small area of medieval northern Syria near Antarados (marked on white on the map above). At its height it included ‘ten strong castles with the villages and environs’ and perhaps 60,000 citizens: its real centre was at Kadmous and Masyad. So what, thinks the reader, another feudal satrapy, Islamic or Christian, it hardly matters which? But, no, this bounded territory had not been carved out by broadsword or scimitar: it had been seized with daggers and cannabis for this was the land of the ‘Assassins’ (literally the takers of hashish).

The Assassins are one of the most curious sects known to history. They flourished in the late eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth century in northern Syria. The leader of this small kingdoms was known as ‘the old man of the mountain’ and he was chosen according to one bemused Christian writer by merit not by blood. ‘The Old Man’ brooded in his castle and sent out his men to destroy those who had crossed him or, by the later twelfth century, were paid marks. In this way the Assassins altered the course of history. They wrecked the Seljuk empire just as the first crusade was beginning… They almost killed Saladin a century later.

It is often said that it is easy to assassinate someone, even someone closely guarded: the problem is getting away alive. This was the Assassins’ secret. They weren’t interested about escaping with their lives. They moved in on their victim, often taking weeks or months, then out came the dagger and a supernova of blood as a Christian or Muslim magnate fell to the floor. Their hits were to be found throughout the Middle East, but there is good evidence that they also worked in Europe and there was a credible attempt to kill a Mongol Khan on the Steppes.

The Assassins were famously loyal to their leader and disinterested in life. There is an extraordinary account of Henry of Champagne visiting the Assassin’s duchy and the Old Man, who had agreed to show the Christian hospitality, shouting at those on the ramparts to jump to their deaths to prove their obedience. Two men immediately stepped from their high sentry positions into the air. Folklore or fantasy, reality or exaggeration? drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com There are a number of similar stories in medieval texts that, whatever else they demonstrate, reflect a Christian fascination with Islamic discipline: recent studies have emphasized the religious foundations of Assassin beliefs.

The Assassins were fundamentally an Islamic group, then. The Old man owed his loyalty to the Shiite ‘heresy’ of Ishmael, and one Assassin leader (based in Persia) even declared himself the Imam, or Ishmaelian messiah and the originator or a new dispensation. (The idea of an assassin chief being the next Christ or Muhammad is a worrying one.) The followers were apparently given hashish, though it is not clear why. Their iron discipline seems to have depended on their religious beliefs and their conviction that they were obeying one of God’s anointed on earth: and, of course, that ample virgins and sherbert awaited them in paradise.

Marco Polo, who visited the wreck of the Persian branch of the franchise in the thirteenth century peddled a strange legend that trainee Assassins were drugged and brought into an artificial paradise: of ripe fruits, dancing women and delicious music. They were kept there for several days, drugged again, and then brought out and told to kill: something they readily did, as only by dying would they return to the paradise in which they had so enjoyed themselves and out of which they had been so rudely awakened. This is almost certainly a mangled Christian version of the truth: that the Assassins believed that having died on a mission they would get to visit paradise to get their seven virgins plus in a flying-carpet afterlife.

This geo-political accident – a small territory that existed to kill the rulers of larger neighbours – could hardly survive. But while it did how did it actually operate? Was it the Assassins themselves who went out and collected taxes and rode through the streets at festivals? The same perhaps who furtively slipped out of the great keep at dawn, riding through fruit trees and irrigated fields, to go and kill and be killed at the court of a Christian, Islamic or Jewish neighbour. The Assassins were nothing if not ecumenical.

29 Feb 2016: The great Mike Dash writes in: On that strange story of the assassins’ use of drugs, backed up by real gardens and real dancing girls, to convince new acolytes to train for a brief career in murder in exchange for the promise of an eternity in paradise: it certainly does sound more like myth than reality, but there is one curious aside. Jack Weatherford (who has some academic form, being a one-time professor of anthropology at a Minnesota liberal arts college) says in his Genghis Khan and the Remaking of the Modern World that precisely the same story also appears in Arabic, Chinese and Persian sources. That’s a claim that it would be interesting to research; were all these chroniclers, writing in such far-flung places, basing themselves on one challengeable source, or were they all hearing different versions of events from different people? Whatever the truth, it’s certainly the case that the Assassins were strange enough and fearsome enough to inspire a potent folklore in their own day. Weatherford is again the source for a rather odd tale (not repeated in Bernard Lewis’s classic study of the sect) that when the Mongol Ilkhan, Hülegü, captured the last Old Man of the Mountain (1256), he kept the old fanatic pliant by indulging his “obsessive interest in watching camels fight and mate.” It’s certainly also the case – so Lewis tells us – that in 1158, when Frederick Barbarossa was besieging far-distant Milan, a supposed Assassin was arrested in the imperial camp, having apparently been sent to kill him; and in 1195, no fewer than 15 alleged Assassins were picked up by Richard the Lionheart’s men during his siege of Chinon, in France; under interrogation, these men apparently claimed they had been hired by the King of France to kill him. It’s very hard to imagine such wild tales have any rooting in reality (at least, what did the Assassins care for the political affairs of Europe?), but they are at least telling examples of how widely the sect was feared and how effective its operatives were supposed to be. So many comparisons suggest themselves to the events of today… Another post another day? I hope so.

Bruce T. I’ve been studying them on and off for over forty years. They’re still around and sending money to their head, the Aga Khan, but they no longer are an order of killers, just Ismailis. For the past few years I’ve been toying with idea of looking into the roots of the Alawite tradition to see if there is a true Nizari/Ismaili connection as some speculate, or if it’s pure B.S. The old Assassin state in Syria is in the heart of modern Alawi territory and the Alawi arise from the Shia tradition at around the time the Ismailis were put down in Syria. Both sects, Alawi and Ismaili still have a bit of a heretic taint in the Muslim world. Saladin had a couple of run-ins with them, the most notable while on campaign near their territory. According to Ismaili sources, they left a dagger and a note on the sleeping Saladin’s pillow in his heavily guarded tent while he was on campaign. It scared the crap out of the great man and put him off the chase. Saladin was a Kurd, the people the Assassins drew from were the local Nizari Ismaili population in areas adjacent to Kurdish territory in both Persia and Syria. There was no love lost between the groups. Saladin would have known they had him any time they wanted him. The thing I always found remarkable about the Assassins is they would go underground for years to get to a target. The religious scholar that killed Seljuq Vizier, Nizr Al Mulq, is said to have been working in the Vizier’s employ as adviser for a decade. There are a lot of crazy claims surrounding the Assassins. The sources are there if anyone cares to go looking. Hassan ibn Sabah laid out his rules for the order while he was in residence at the University of Cairo in the late 11th century, and why he created it, before leaving for Persia, as means to avenge the deposing and death in battle of the Fatimid heir, Nizar, in a dynastic struggle, and restore Nizar’s son, the rightful Imam. (The Ismailis are unique in they trace an unbroken line of Imam’s starting with Muhammad and to the present day with the current Aga Khan.) The man you need to look at in regards to the Syrian Assassin state is Rashid ad Din Sinan, Sabah’s protege. Sabah sent Sinan from the Alamut in Persia to Syria to set up the Nizari/ Assassin state. You see the “Assassins” weren’t contract killers, they were warriors fighting for the Nizari claim in a dynastic war and defending the members of their sect, which was and is large. They operated more as spies and political assassins ala’ the Ninja of feudal Japan. Find more out about Rashid, the original “Old Man Of The Mountain” and you’ll find out more than you want to know about the Assassin state in Syria. Researching the Assassins is akin to eating the large salad at a chain restaurant, the more you dig in and consume, the more there is. Good luck!

KMH ‘What is interesting about the assassins is that their tactic was so surprisingly  effective that it is currently in use by today’s suicide bombers, who don’t seem to need any special incentive to accomplish their mission, and are concerned with mass murder, not targeted individuals. The assassins belonged to the Ismaili branch of the Shias, which at that time were present in Syria, but the assassins actually began their order earlier in Persia. Today all the suicide bombers are Sunnis. The usual tactic of the assassins was to seize the fortresses of a given area in order to gain control of the entire country. Besides the zakat, a tax of 2.5 percent collected for the poor by religious authorities, it doesn’t look like other official taxes would have been collected by civil authorities, although unofficial collections (commandeering) might not be ruled out. Hopefully, no one will be concocting a drug today which would give users the impression they have visited paradise – at least a third of the species would become quickly addicted.

Southern Man, meanwhile, contributes this song