The Assassins (2 page)

B. L.

Princeton, New Jersey

June 2002

The Assassins

The Discovery
of the Assassins

In the year 1332, when King Philip VI of France was contemplating a new crusade to recapture the lost Holy Places of Christendom, a German priest called Brocardus composed a treatise offering the king guidance and advice for the conduct of this enterprise. Brocardus, who had spent some time in Armenia, devoted an important part of his treatise to the peculiar hazards of such an expedition to the East, and the precautions needed to guard against them. Among these dangers, said 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 recognized. 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 recognize 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."

For Brocardus, the Assassins are hired, secret murderers, of a peculiarly skilful and dangerous kind. Though naming them among the hazards of the East, he does not explicitly connect them with any particular place, sect, or nation, nor ascribe any religious beliefs or political purposes to them. They are simply ruthless and competent killers, and must be guarded against as such. Indeed, by the thirteenth century, the word Assassin, in variant forms, had already passed into European usage in this general sense of hired professional murderer. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, who died in 1348, tells how the lord of Lucca sent `his assassins' (i suoi assassini) to Pisa to kill a troublesome enemy there. Even earlier, Dante, in a passing reference in the 19th canto of the Inferno, speaks of `the treacherous assassin' (lo perfido assassin); his fourteenth-century commentator Francesco da Buti, explaining a term which for some readers at the time may still have been strange and obscure, remarks: `Assassino e colui the uccide altrui per danari' - An assassin is one who kills others for money.2 Since then `assassin' has become a common noun in most European languages. It means a murderer, more particularly one who kills by stealth or treachery, whose victim is a public figure and whose motive is fanaticism or greed.

It was not always so. The word first appears in the chronicles of the Crusades, as the name of a strange group of Muslim sectaries in the Levant, led by a mysterious figure known as the Old Man of the Mountain, and abhorrent, by their beliefs and practices, to good Christians and Muslims alike. One of the earliest descriptions of the sect occurs in the report of an envoy sent to Egypt and Syria in i 175 by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. `Note', he says `that on the confines of Damascus, Antioch and Aleppo there is a certain race of Saracens in the mountains, who in their own vernacular are called Heyssessini, and in Roman segnors de montana. This breed of men live without law; they eat swine's flesh against the law of the Saracens, and make use of all women without distinction, including their mothers and sisters. They live in the mountains and are well-nigh impregnable, for they withdraw into well-fortified castles. Their country is not very fertile, so that they live on their cattle. They have among them a Master, who strikes the greatest fear into all the Saracen princes both far and near, as well as the neighbouring Christian lords. For he has the habit of killing them in an astonishing way. The method by which this is done is as follows: this prince possesses in the mountains numerous and most beautiful palaces, surrounded by very high walls, so that none can enter except by a small and very well-guarded door. In these palaces he has many of the sons of his peasants brought up from early childhood. He has them taught various languages, as Latin, Greek, Roman, Saracen as well as many others. These young men are taught by their teachers from their earliest youth to their full manhood, that they must obey the lord of their land in all his words and commands; and that if they do so, he, who has power over all living gods, will give them the joys of paradise. They are also taught that they cannot be saved if they resist his will in anything. Note that, from the time when they are taken in as children, they see no one but their teachers and masters and receive no other instruction until they are summoned to the presence of the Prince to kill someone. When they are in the presence of the Prince, he asks them if they are willing to obey his commands, so that he may bestow paradise upon them. Whereupon, as they have been instructed, and without any objection or doubt, they throw themselves at his feet and reply with fervour, that they will obey him in all things that he may command. Thereupon the Prince gives each one of them a golden dagger and sends them out to kill whichever prince he has marked down."

Writing a few years later, William, Archbishop of Tyre, included a brief account of the sect in his history of the Crusading states: `There is', he said, `in the province of Tyre, otherwise called Phoenicia, and in the diocese of Tortosa, a people who possess ten strong castles, with their dependent villages; their number, according to what we have often heard, is about 6o,ooo or more. It is their custom to instal their master and choose their chief, not by hereditary right, but solely by virtue of merit. Disdaining any other title of dignity, they called him the Elder. The bond of submission and obedience that binds this people to their Chief is so strong, that there is no task so arduous, difficult or dangerous that any one of them would not undertake to perform it with the greatest zeal, as soon as the Chief has commanded it. If for example there be a prince who is hated or mistrusted by this people, the Chief gives a dagger to one or more of his followers. At once whoever receives the command sets out on his mission, without considering the consequences of the deed nor the possibility of escape. Zealous to complete his task, he toils and labours as long as may be needful, until chance gives him the opportunity to carry out his chief's orders. Both our people and the Saracens call them Assissini; we do not know the origin of this name.'<

In 1192 the daggers of the Assassins, which had already struck down a number of Muslim princes and officers, found their first Crusader victim - Conrad of Montferrat, king of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This murder made a profound impression among the Crusaders, and most of the chroniclers of the Third Crusade have something to say about the dreaded sectaries, their strange beliefs, their terrible methods, and their redoubtable chief. `I shall now relate things about this elder', says the German chronicler Arnold of Lubeck, `which appear ridiculous, but which are attested to me by the evidence of reliable witnesses. This Old Man has by his witchcraft so bemused the men of his country, that they neither worship nor believe in any God but himself. Likewise he entices them in a strange manner with such hopes and with promises of such pleasures with eternal enjoyment, that they prefer rather to die than to live. Many of them even, when standing on a high wall, will jump off at his nod or command, and, shattering their skulls, die a miserable death. The most blessed, so he affirms, are those who shed the blood of men and in revenge for such deeds themselves suffer death. When therefore any of them have chosen to die in this way, murdering someone by craft and then themselves dying so blessedly in revenge for him, he himself hands them knives which are, so to speak, consecrated to this affair, and then intoxicates them with such a potion that they are plunged into ecstasy and oblivion, displays to them by his magic certain fantastic dreams, full of pleasures and delights, or rather of trumpery, and promises them eternal possession of these things in reward for such deeds.'S

At first it was the fanatical devotion, rather than the murderous methods, of the Assassins that struck the imagination of Europe. `You have me more fully in your power', says a Provencal troubadour to his lady, than `the Old Man has his Assassins, who go to kill his mortal enemies ...' `Just as the Assassins serve their master unfailingly,' says another, `so I have served Love with unswerving loyalty.' In an anonymous love-letter, the writer assures his lady: `I am your Assassin, who hopes to win paradise through doing your commands.'6 In time, however, it was murder, rather than loyalty, that made the more powerful impression, and gave the word assassin the meaning that it has retained to the present day.

As the stay of the Crusaders in the Levant lengthened, more information about the Assassins became available, and there were even some Europeans who met and talked with them. The Templars and Hospitallers succeeded in establishing an ascendancy over the Assassin castles, and collected tribute from them. William of Tyre records an abortive approach by the Old Man of the Mountain to the King of Jerusalem, proposing some form of alliance; his continuator relates a somewhat questionable story of how Count Henry of Champagne, returning from Armenia in 1198, was entertained in his castle by the Old Man, who ordered a number of his henchmen to leap to their deaths from the ramparts for the edification of his guest, and then hospitably offered to provide others for his requirements: `and if there was any man who had done him an injury, he should let him know, and he would have him killed.' Somewhat more plausibly, the English historian Matthew of Paris reports the arrival in Europe in 1238 of an embassy from some Muslim rulers, `and principally from the Old Man of the Mountain'; they had come to seek help from the French and the English against the new, looming menace of the Mongols from the East. By 1250, when St Louis led a crusade to the Holy Land, it was possible for him to exchange gifts and missions with the Old Man of the Mountain of that time. An Arabic-speaking friar, Yves the Breton, accompanied the king's messengers to the Assassins, and discussed religion with their chief. In his account, through the mists of ignorance and prejudice, one can faintly discern some of the known doctrines of the Islamic sect to which the Assassins belonged. 7

The Crusaders knew the Assassins only as a sect in Syria, and show little or no awareness of their place in Islam, or their connections with other groups elsewhere in the Muslim lands. One of the best informed of crusading writers on Muslim affairs, James of Vitry, bishop of Acre, noted at the beginning of the thirteenth century that the sect had begun in Persia - but seems to have known no more than that.8 In the second half of the century, however, new and direct information appeared concerning the parent sect in Persia. The first informant was William of Rubruck, a Flemish priest sent on a mission by the King of France to the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum in Mongolia, in the years 1253-5. William's journey took him through Persia where, he notes, the mountains of the Assassins adjoin the Caspian mountains south of the Caspian sea. At Karakorum William was struck by the elaborate security precautions, the reason for which was that the Great Khan had heard that no less than forty Assassins, in various disguises, had been sent to murder him. In response he sent one of his brothers with an army against the land of the Assassins, and ordered him to kill them al1.9

The word William uses for the Assassins in Persia is Muliech or Mulihet - a corruption of the Arabic mulhid, plural maldhida. This word, literally meaning deviator, was commonly applied to deviant religious sects, and particularly to the Ismailis, the group to which the Assassins belonged. It appears again in the account of a very much more famous traveller, Marco Polo, who passed through Persia in 1273, and describes the fortress and valley of Alamut, for long the headquarters of the sect.

`The Old Man was called in their language A L o A D I N. He had caused a certain valley between two mountains to be enclosed, and had turned it into a garden, the largest and most beautiful that ever was seen, filled with every variety of fruit. In it were erected pavilions and palaces the most elegant that can be imagined, all covered with gilding and exquisite painting. And there were runnels too, flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water; and numbers of ladies and of the the most beautiful damsels in the world, who could play on all manner of instruments, and sung [sic] most sweetly, and danced in a manner that it was charming to behold. For the Old Man desired to make his people believe that this was actually Paradise. So he had fashioned it after the description that Mallonnimet gave of his Paradise, to wit, that it should be a beautiful garden running with conduits of wine and milk and honey and water, and full of lovely women for the delectation of all its inmates. And sure enough the Saracens of those parts believed that it was Paradise!

`Now no man was allowed to enter the Garden save those whom he intended to be his AsHISHIN. There was a Fortress at the entrance to the Garden, strong enough to resist all the world, and there was no other way to get in. He kept at his Court a number of the youths of the country, from twelve to twenty years of age, such as had a taste for soldiering, and to these he used to tell tales about Paradise, just as Mahommet had been wont to do, and they believed in him just as the Saracens believe in Mahommet. Then he would introduce them into his garden, some four, or six, or ten at a time, having first made them drink a certain potion which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them to be lifted and carried in. So when they awoke, they found themselves in the Garden.