The Assassins (3 page)

`When therefore they awoke, and found themselves in a place so charming, they deemed that it was Paradise in very truth. And the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their hearts' content, so that they had what young men would have; and with their own good will they never would have quitted the place.

`Now this Prince whom we call the Old One kept his Court in grand and noble style, and made those simple hill-folks about him believe firmly that he was a great prophet. And when he wanted one of his Ashishin to send on any mission, he would cause that potion whereof I spoke to be given to one of the youths in the garden, and then had him carried into his Palace. So when the young man awoke, he found himself in the Castle, and no longer in that Paradise; whereat he was not over well pleased. He was then conducted to the Old Man's presence, and bowed before him with great veneration as believing himself to be in the presence of a true prophet. The Prince would then ask whence he came, and he would reply that he came from Paradise! and that it was exactly such as Mahommet had described it in the Law. This of course gave the others who stood by, and who had not been admitted, the greatest desire to enter therein.

`So when the Old Man would have any Prince slain, he would say to such a youth: "Go thou and slay So and So; and when thou returnest my angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And should'st thou die, nevertheless even so will I send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise." So he caused them to believe; and thus there was no order of his that they would not affront any peril to execute, for the great desire they had to get back into that Paradise of his. And in this manner the Old One got his people to murder any one whom he desired to get rid of. Thus, too, the great dread that he inspired all Princes withal, made them become his tributaries in order that he might abide at peace and amity with them.

`I should also tell you that the Old Man had certain others under him, who copied his proceedings and acted exactly in the same manner. One of these was sent into the territory of Damascus, and the other into Curdistan."o

In speaking of the Ismailis of Persia as Assassins, and of their leader as the Old Man, Marco Polo - or his transcriber - was using terms already familiar in Europe. They had, however, come from Syria, not from Persia. The Arabic and Persian sources make it quite clear that `Assassin' was a local name, applied only to the Ismailis of Syria, and never to those of Persia or any other country.' I The title `Old Man of the Mountain' was also Syrian. It would be natural for the Ismailis to speak of their chief as Old Man or Elder, Arabic Shaykh or Persian Pir, a common term of respect among Muslims. The specific designation `Old Man of the Mountain', however, seems to have been used only in Syria, and perhaps only among the Crusaders, since it has not yet come to light in any Arabic text of the period.

The use of these terms, for both the Syrian and Persian branches of the sect, became general. Marco Polo's description, followed some half century later by a similar account from Odoric of Pordenone, deepened the impact which the Syrian Assassins had made on the imagination of Europe. The stories of the gardens of paradise, the death-leap of the devotees, the superlative skill of the Assassins in disguise and in murder, and the mysterious figure of their chief, the Old Man of the Mountain, find many echoes in the literatures of Europe, spreading from history and travel into poetry, fiction, and myth.

They had their effect on politics also. From quite an early date there were some who detected the hand of the Old Man in political murders or attempts at murder even in Europe. In 1158, when Frederick Barbarossa was besieging Milan, an `Assassin' was allegedly caught in his camp; in i 195, when King Richard Coeur de Lion was at Chinon, no less than fifteen so-called Assassins were apprehended, and confessed that they had been sent by the King of France to kill him. Before long, such charges became frequent, and numerous rulers or leaders were accused of being in league with the Old Man and of employing the services of his emissaries to destroy an inconvenient enemy. There can be little doubt that these charges are baseless. The chiefs of the Assassins, in Persia or in Syria, had no interest in the plots and intrigues of Western Europe; the European needed no help from outside in the various arts of murder. By the fourteenth century, the word assassin had come to mean murderer, and no longer implied any specific connection with the sect to which that name had originally belonged.

The sect continued however to arouse interest. The first Western attempt at a scholarly investigation of their history seems to be that of Denis Lebey de Batilly, published in Lyons in 1603. The date is significant. The pagan ethics of the Renaissance had brought a revival of murder as an instrument of policy; the wars of religion had elevated it to a pious duty. The emergence of the new monarchies, in which one man could determine the politics and religion of the state, made assassination an effective as well as an acceptable weapon. Princes and prelates were willing to hire murderers to strike down their political or religious opponents - and theorists were forthcoming to clothe the naked logic of violence in a decent covering of ideology.

Lebey de Batilly's purpose was modest; to explain the true historic meaning of a term which had acquired new currency in France. His study is based exclusively on Christian sources, and does not therefore go much beyond what was known in Europe in the thirteenth century. But even without new evidence there could be new insights. These must have come easily to the generation that had seen William of Nassau shot by a hireling of the King of Spain, Henry in of France stabbed by a Dominican friar, and Elizabeth of England hard pressed to escape her consecrated would-be murderers.

The first really important advance towards solving the mystery of Assassin origins and identity was a product of the early Enlightenment. It came in 1697, with the publication of Bartholome d'Herbelot's great Bibliotheque orientale, a pioneer work containing most of what orientalist scholarship in Europe could at that time offer on the history, religion and literature of Islam. Here for the first time an enquiring and undogmatic Western scholar made use of Muslim sources - the few that were then known in Europe - and tried to situate the Persian and Syrian Assassins in the broader context of Islamic religious history. They belonged, he showed, to the Ismailis, an important dissident sect, and itself an off-shoot of the Shia, whose quarrel with the Sunnis was the major religious schism in Islam. The heads of the Ismaili sect claimed to be Imams, descendants of Ismail ibn Ja`far, and through him of the Prophet Muhammad by his daughter Fatima and his son-in-law Ali. During the eighteenth century other orientalists and historians took up the theme, and added new details on the history, beliefs and connections of the Assassins and their parent sect, the Ismailis. Some writers also tried to explain the origin of the name Assassin - a word generally assumed to be Arabic, but not as yet attested in any known Arabic text. Several etymologies were proposed, none of them very convincing.

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw a new burst of interest in the Assassins. The French Revolution and its aftermath had revived public interest in conspiracy and murder; Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt and Syria brought new and closer contacts with the Islamic orient, and new opportunities for Islamic studies. After some attempts by lesser men to satisfy public interest, Silvestre de Sacy, the greatest Arabic scholar of the time, turned his attention to the theme, and on 19 May 18og read a memoir to the Institut de France, on the dynasty of the Assassins and the etymology of their name.12

Silvestre de Sacy's memoir was a landmark in Assassin studies. In addition to the handful of oriental sources used by previous scholars, he was able to draw on a rich collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, including several of the major Arabic chronicles of the Crusades hitherto unknown to Western scholarship; his analysis of the sources wholly superseded the efforts of earlier European writers. Certainly the most important part of the memoir was his solution, once and for all, of the vexed problem of the origin of the word `Assassin'. After examining and dismissing previous theories, he showed conclusively that the word came from the Arabic hashish, and suggested that the variant forms Assassini, Assissini, Heyssisini etc. in the crusading sources were based on the alternative Arabic forms hashishi and hashshdsh (colloquial plurals, hashishiyyin and hashshdshin). In confirmation of this he was able to adduce several Arabic texts in which the sectaries were called hashishi, but none in which they were called hashshdsh Since then, the form hashishi has been confirmed by additional texts that have come to light - but there is still, as far as is known, no text in which the Ismailis are called hashshdsh. It would therefore seem that this part of Silvestre de Sacy's explanation must be abandoned, and all the European variants derived from the Arabic hashishi and its plural hashishiyyin.

This revision raises again the question of the significance, as distinct from the etymology, of the term. The original meaning of hashish in Arabic is herbage, more particularly dry herbage or fodder. Later it was specialized to denote Indian hemp, cannabis sativa, the narcotic effects of which were already known to the Muslims in the Middle Ages. Hashshash, a more modern word, is the common term for a hashish-taker. Silvestre de Sacy, while not adopting the opinion held by many later writers that the Assassins were so called because they were addicts, nevertheless explains the name as due to the secret use of hashish by the leaders of the sect, to give their emissaries a foretaste of the delights of paradise that awaited them on the successful completion of their missions. He links this interpretation with the story told by Marco Polo, and also found in other eastern and western sources, of the secret `gardens of paradise' into which the drugged devotees were introduced.

Despite its early appearance and wide currency, this story is almost certainly untrue. The use and effects of hashish were known at the time, and were no secret; the use of the drug by the sectaries is attested neither by Ismaili nor by serious Sunni authors. Even the name hashishi is local to Syria, and is probably a term of popular abuse. In all probability it was the name that gave rise to the story, rather than the reverse. Of various explanations that have been offered, the likeliest is that it was an expression of contempt for the wild beliefs and extravagant behaviour of the sectaries - a derisive comment on their conduct rather than a description of their practices. For Western observers in particular, such stories may also have served to provide a rational explanation for behaviour that was otherwise totally inexplicable.

Silvestre de Sacy's memoir opened the way for a series of further studies on the subject. Certainly the most widely read of these was the History of the Assassins of the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer, published in German in Stuttgart in 1818 and in French and English translations in 1833 and 1835. Hammer's history, though based on oriental sources, is very much a tract for the times - a warning against `the pernicious influence of secret societies ... and ... the dreadful prostitution of religion to the horrors of unbridled ambition'. For him, the Assassins were a `union of impostors and dupes which, under the mask of a more austere creed and severer morals, undermined all religion and morality; that order of murderers, beneath whose daggers the lords of nations fell; all powerful, because, for the space of three centuries, they were universally dreaded, until the den of ruffians fell with the khaliphate, to whom, as the centre of spiritual and temporal power, it had at the outset sworn destruction, and by whose ruins it was itself overwhelmed'. In case any of his readers miss the point, Hammer compares the Assassins with the Templars, the Jesuits, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the regicides of the French National Convention. `As in the west, revolutionary societies arose from the bosom of the Freemasons, so in the east, did the Assassins spring from the Ismailites ... The insanity of the enlighteners, who thought that by mere preaching, they could emancipate nations from the protecting care of princes, and the leading-strings of practical religion, has shown itself in the most terrible manner by the effects of the French revolution, as it did in Asia, in the reign of Hassan II.' 13

Hammer's book exercised considerable influence, and for about a century and a half was the main source of the popular Western image of the Assassins. Meanwhile scholarly research was progressing, especially in France, where much work was done in discovering, editing, translating and exploiting Arabic and Persian texts relating to the history of the Ismailis in Syria and Persia. Among the most important were the works of two Persian historians of the Mongol period, Juvayni and Rashid al-Din; both of them had access to Ismaili writings from Alamut, and, by using them, were able to provide the first connected account of the Ismaili principality in Northern Persia.

An important step forward was made possible by the appearance of material of a new kind. The use of Muslim sources had added much to the knowledge derived from mediaeval European works - but even these were mainly Sunni; though far better informed than the Western chroniclers and travellers, they were if anything even more hostile to the doctrines and purposes of the Ismailis. Now, for the first time, information came to light which reflected directly the point of view of the Ismailis themselves. Already in the eighteenth century travellers had noted that there were still Ismailis in some villages in Central Syria. In 181o Rousseau, the French consul-general in Aleppo, stimulated by Silvestre de Sacy, published a description of the Ismailis in Syria in his own day, with geographical, historical, and religious data.14 The sources are not given, but appear to be local and oral. Silvestre de Sacy himself provided some additional explanatory notes. Rousseau was the first European to draw on such local informants, bringing to Europe for the first time some scraps of information from the Ismailis themselves. In 1812 he published extracts from an Ismaili book obtained in Masyaf, one of the main Ismaili centres in Syria. Though it contains little historical information, it throws some light on the religious doctrines of the sect. Other texts from Syria also found their way to Paris, where some of them were later published. During the nineteenth century a number of European and American travellers visited the Ismaili villages in Syria, and reported briefly on the ruins and their inhabitants.