A Criminal History of Mankind (45 page)

In September 1298, a few years after the end of the ninth crusade, there was a sea battle between two fleets belonging to the rival trading ports of Genoa and Venice. It ended in the humiliating defeat of the Venetians - the commander committed suicide by dashing his head against a bench - and the capture of their fleet. Among the captured sailors was a man named Marco Polo, who was thrown into jail in Genoa. There he found himself sharing a cell with a Pisan called Rusticiano, who had been there since some earlier battle. Rusticiano was a writer of romances, and when Marco Polo began telling him stories of his extraordinary travels in China - the land of the great Kubla Khan - Rusticiano begged him to write it down. So Marco sent for his travel notebooks and, with the aid of Rusticiano, wrote an account of his adventures. He took the manuscript with him when he left prison, and - in spite of the fact that printing had not yet been invented, and books had to be copied by hand - it was soon being read from end to end of Italy.

Regrettably, it was not read for educational reasons. No one believed Marco’s tales of his travels with his father and uncle; his contemporaries assumed it was a novel. Marco was called sarcastically ‘Marco Millions’, because his book mentioned such vast distances and huge sums of money; the book itself became known as
The Million
. On his deathbed a quarter of a century later, Marco’s friends begged him to admit that the book was mostly lies. ‘I have not told half of what I saw,’ he said irritably. And in carnivals thereafter, there always appeared a clown called Marco Millions who told preposterous lies. It was many centuries before scholars recognised that Marco Polo was a painstakingly truthful man.

One of Marco’s least credible stories concerned a sinister being called the Old Man of the Mountain. This old man, whose name was Aloadin, lived in Persia, and was regarded by his people as a prophet. He inhabited a fortress at the head of a valley, and was rich enough to turn the valley into an enormous and beautiful garden, full of pavilions and palaces, trees bearing every kind of fruit and brooks flowing with wine and milk as well as water. The pavilions were inhabited by beautiful dancing girls. It was, in fact, a very passable imitation of the paradise promised by the prophet Mahomet.

When the Old Man wanted somebody killed - Marco Polo does not explain why - he would order one of his followers to carry out the assassination, promising that his reward would be an eternity in paradise. And the man would unhesitatingly sacrifice his life to carry out the order; for he was convinced that he had already tasted paradise. The cunning old man had all his trainee assassins drugged and carried into the garden; when they woke up they found themselves surrounded by beautiful girls, who plied them with food and wine and offered their favours. After a few days, the young man was drugged and carried back to the castle. He would now be impatient to sacrifice his life to regain paradise...

The would-be killers, says Polo, are called ‘Ashishin’, and that word provides the clue to the real identity of Aloadin, the Old Man of the Mountain. The castle really existed; it was called Alamut, meaning Eagle’s Nest, and is perched on a rock in the Elburz Mountains of Iran. There was probably some form of landscaped garden below the castle, in the valley, for a narrow slit in the rock of Alamut leads to a green enclosure with a spring. The Old Man of the Mountain was called Hasan bin Sabah, and it was through him that the word ‘assassin’ entered the European vocabulary. It is derived from ‘hashishim’, for it was also widely believed that his followers nerved themselves to kill - and be killed - by smoking hashish.

Hasan bin Sabah was born about the year 1030, in the town of Rayy, near modern Teheran; his family were Shi’ite Muslims - that is, Muslims who believed that the prophet’s cousin Ali should have become the first Caliph instead of Abu Bekr. Hasan was deeply interested in religion, and became involved with a sect called the Ismailis who had broken away from the Shi’ites.

We have seen that the Abbasids - who were orthodox Muslims -had gained power by promising to support a Shi’ite Caliph, then failed to redeem the promise. By the year 1000, the Shi’a and the Sunnites - orthodox Muslims - were no longer so bitterly opposed. The real opposition came from the Ismailis, who had set up their own rival dynasty, the Fatimids, with its own Caliph. (Fatima, the prophet’s daughter, had been killed in the massacre of Shi’ites in 680 A.D.; but a sick boy named Ali ibn Husayn had survived to carry on the line). By the time of Hasan bin Sabah’s birth, it looked as if the Ismailis were going to be the winners in the Islamic power struggle - but this was before the Seljuk Turks appeared on the scene and lent their support to the Abbasids.

Hasan seems to have been a late developer. He was in his thirties when a serious illness made him decide to become an Ismaili; he took the oath of allegiance in 1072. Four years later, he had to leave his home town - no doubt for preaching Ismaili doctrines - and made his way to the newly-built Ismaili capital, Cairo. There he became a supporter of the Caliph’s eldest son - and presumptive heir - Nizar. Political - and/or religious - intrigues led to his expulsion from the capital. One biography says that he was sentenced to death, but that just before his execution one of the towers of the city collapsed; it was seen as an omen and he was exiled instead. The ship on which he was deported ran into a violent storm; Hasan stood calmly on the deck and declared that he could not possibly die until he had fulfilled his mission. In fact, the ship was wrecked in Syria, but Hasan escaped. He finally arrived back in Persia in 1081. By now in his late forties, he had become an impressive figure, a man with a ravaged face, burning eyes and a tone of total conviction. For the next nine years he travelled and preached, gaining an increasing horde of followers. And in 1090 he came to the castle of Alamut and decided that this was the fortress he was looking for. If political intrigues prevented Nizar from becoming the next Fatimid Caliph - as seemed likely - then Hasan would need a firm base from which to conduct his own campaign.

He achieved his aim with remarkable ease. The castle was owned by an orthodox Muslim. Hasan’s preaching converted the surrounding villages, then his preachers became guests at the castle and converted the servants. Hasan was smuggled into the Eagle’s Nest in disguise. One morning, the owner woke up to be told that he had been dispossessed. He was politely shown the door and handed a generous sum in compensation.

Hasan ruled like a patriarch. His followers seldom saw him. The rule was strict. One of his sons was caught drinking wine and executed. Hasan lived frugally, wrote books, and plotted how to overthrow the Abbasids in Baghdad. The first problem was to undermine the Seljuk Turks who supported them, and who were now the masters of Persia. Little by little, Hasan extended his religious empire. He proved to be as good a general as the prophet himself - his greatest ally being the hatred of the Persians for the Turks. His preachers - called
dais
- won over the surrounding villages. He extended his influence to an area called Quhistan in the south-east, and the Turks were overthrown in a popular uprising. The Turks besieged him in Alamut, but it was impregnable - as he had known it would be.

As a general he had one major problem. His followers were devoted - fanatically so - but they were few in number compared to the Turks. In 1092 he decided upon the answer: to strike down his enemies one by one, making use of the total obedience of his disciples.

We have seen that the Seljuks established their power when they defeated the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert in 1071; but their leader, Alp Arslan, died a year later and his son Malik Shah came to the throne. Malik’s Grand Vizier was a man called Nizam al-Mulk - who, as it happened, had been at school with Hasan bin Sabah, as well as with the mathematician and poet, Omar Khayyam. Nizam had set Omar to the task of revising the calendar. The Arab chroniclers tell a story to the effect that when Nizam became Vizier in 1073, both Omar and Hasan came to him asking for jobs, and Hasan was given a position at court; but his thirst for power soon became apparent, and Nizam sacked him. It is just possible, for in 1073, Hasan had not yet set out on his travels to Cairo.

Twenty years later, Nizam was Hasan’s most dangerous enemy, the man he would most like to see dead. In October 1092, during Ramadan, Nizam had finished giving audience to various suppliants and was carried out of the tent towards the tent of his womenfolk. A man in the garb of a Sufi - a holy man - came forward and was allowed to approach the litter. He pulled a knife from his clothes and drove it into Nizam’s heart. A few moments later, he was himself killed by Nizam’s guards. When Hasan heard the news, he chuckled with elation. ‘The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.’

It seems likely that when Hasan planned the murder he had no other aim in view than to get rid of a ‘traitor’, but that now he suddenly realised that he had an infallible method of extending his power. Marco Polo was no doubt mistaken: it was unnecessary to persuade his followers to kill with a ‘glimpse of paradise’. They were delighted to offer their lives for their prophet.

Hasan’s assassins (or, of course, as they called themselves, Ismailis) were the first terrorists. To their enemies, they were vicious criminals trying to overthrow society; to their supporters and converts, they were a small but highly trained army, overthrowing oppression by the only means at their disposal. And in the years that followed, the list of victims was a long one, and included anyone who had dared to speak openly against their doctrines - princes, governors, generals and religious opponents. A point came where no one in authority dared to go out without armour under his robes. One victim was stabbed as he knelt in the mosque at prayers surrounded by his bodyguards. A chief opponent woke from a drunken sleep to find a dagger driven into the ground close to his head, and a note saying ‘That dagger could just as easily been stuck in your heart.’ He decided to reach an understanding with Hasan.

With successes like this, we might assume that Hasan would become master of Persia, possibly even the new Caliph in Cairo. In fact, everything went against him. When the Caliph died, it was the younger brother of Nizar - Hasan’s candidate - who came to the throne, and Nizar and his sons were killed in the squabbles that followed. Ismailis infiltrated the armies of the new Turkish sultan Berkyaruq, who had formed an uneasy alliance with Hasan; in self-defence, he began to persecute the Ismailis. When Hasan’s other major stronghold was taken and the Ismaili leader flayed alive, it had to be all-out war - a war Hasan was bound to lose. During the last thirty years of his life, he watched his empire crumble. The assassinations continued - he even extended his arm as far as Syria and Egypt - yet his situation remained basically unchanged; he was virtually taking on the whole Arab world. And the sequel to one of his last assassinations reveals the extent of that failure. In 1121, Hasan finally succeeded in getting his revenge on the vizier al-Afdal, the man who had frustrated Nizar’s chances of becoming Caliph. Oddly enough, the new Caliph was delighted - he had grown tired of the vizier’s overbearing manners. So he sent Hasan a letter asking him why he did not return to the fold. In addressing such a suggestion to a man of Hasan’s fanatical conviction he might be seen as inviting a rebuff. Yet Hasan seized on the idea with relief. In a sense, it was his admission of defeat. The reconciliation never took place - the new vizier assured the Caliph that he was next on the assassination list, which was almost certainly untrue, since Hasan had no motive for killing a man who was offering him friendship. But it served to make the Caliph change his mind. Hasan died three years later, in 1124, at the age of ninety. The sect continued in existence and established a base in Syria - one of its most spectacular successes was the murder of the crusader Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem, in 1192; but eventually they were stamped out - in Persia by the Mongols, in Syria by the Sultan of Egypt, Baybars.

Hasan’s greatest mistake was to order the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk. This was the real turning point in his career. For a man who kills by stealth cannot be trusted. He inspires the same kind of exaggerated horror as a poisonous snake or spider. And the comparison establishes precisely why the terrorist method carries the seed of its own downfall. The snakes developed poison because they are among the most defenceless of creatures. Anyone who has ever kept snakes will know that they are, in fact, rather amiable and unaggressive creatures who do not deserve their reputation as vicious monsters. But a poisonous snake will strike if stepped upon or frightened, so human beings cannot afford to lose their fear of snakes. Once a man has placed himself in this category - labelled ‘dangerous and untrustworthy’ - he can abandon all hope of achieving his aims by normal means. If he is a politician, he has guaranteed his own failure. The story of the assassins is a parable in how
not
to go about achieving power.

But the lesson of the assassins goes beyond the mere question of ends and means and allows us to grasp the basic question of the nature of criminality. Hasan was, by any definition, a Right Man. His religious sincerity is not in question; but he placed his grimly obsessed ego at the service of his religion. He was personally convinced that he was right; everything else followed. Those who opposed him were wrong and deserved to die. It is a moot point whether it made the slightest difference whether Nizar or his younger brother became Caliph; it is even a moot point whether it makes the slightest difference that a believer refers to his deity as Jehovah, Allah or Ahura Mazda. But even this is not the issue. The issue is that man is capable of reaching out towards a freedom that transcends his everyday limitations, and that saints and prophets, poets and artists, scientists and philosophers, all share this aim to a greater or lesser degree. The greatest enemy of this transcendence is the ego with its petty aims and convictions. It is true that we cannot live without the ego; a person without an ego would be little more than an idiot. Another name for ego is personality, and in artists, saints and philosophers, the personality is a most valuable tool. Neither St Francis nor Beethoven nor Plato would have achieved much impact without their personalities. But the personality is a dangerous servant, for it has a perpetual hankering to become the master. Every time we are carried away by irritation or indignation, personality has mastered us.