The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (19 page)

As a group, the Ismailis (or Hashishim or Assassins) became a very powerful secret society, replete with all the paraphernalia one would expect of such a group. They had their own system of oaths and a highly pronounced hierarchy, organized into rigid sub-groups based upon each member's initiation into the secrets of the society. The organization of the sect as a whole was known as
da'wa,
which in translation means ‘mission', with those involved in the
da'wa
referred to as
da'is
or ‘missionaries'. These
da'is
were then sub-divided and graded by rank, the highest echelons of which consisted of teachers and preachers. Beneath these came the
mustajibs
, who made up the lowest rank of initiates, but above everyone came the
hujja
or senior
da' i,
whose role was basically that of an elder.

It was murder, however, rather than any form of religious practice, that was the Assassins' foremost claim to fame and it is no exaggeration to say that the Ismailis were probably the first group of people in history truly to transform the act of murder into an ideology – one that was largely focussed against those Muslim rulers who would not tolerate their extreme unorthodoxy. The Ismailis planned their murders in meticulous detail, all the while trying to eliminate the possibility of killing anyone who wasn't a ‘legitimate' target. Typically, they would approach their victims while dressed in disguise so as not to alert suspicion. Their weapon of choice was the dagger because this was easily hidden in clothing and, if used correctly, allowed for the swift dispatch of the victim. Indeed, the use of a dagger – as opposed to poison or strangulation, which for certain murders would have been either easier or safer – seems to have been of the utmost importance to the Assassins. They viewed their killings not only as acts of extreme piety, but also as sacramental rituals.

Another fundamental feature of the Assassins' art was that under no circumstances would they commit suicide, preferring instead to be killed by the enemy. Indeed, survival was not generally an option where an Assassin was concerned, for no self-respecting Hashishim would either wish, let alone expect, to carry on living after he had murdered his target.

Hasan-i Sabbah laid down all the above rules and regulations according to his own creed and the Hashishim saw many successes under his rule. By May 1124, however, the Old Man of the Mountain lay seriously ill. Knowing the end was near, he chose an heir from among his loyal followers, a man by the name of Buzurgumid. The appointment came not a moment too soon, for on May 23, 1124, Hasan-i Sabbah died. It was the end of a remarkable era, for Sabbah had been a man of tremendous talent. Writing about him shortly after his death, one biographer described him as being learned not only in arithmetic, astronomy and geometry but also in magic, while another historian points out Sabbah's unique asceticism, which in its most concrete form meant that during his thirty-five-year tenure of Alamut, nobody was permitted to drink or keep drink on the premises.

But since Hasan-i Sabbah was dead, what of his successor Buzurgumid? Had he enough strength to prevent all that his predecessor had built up from being vanquished by the Seljuq? The answer came two years after Sabbah's death when, in 1126, the Seljuq launched a full-scale offensive against the Ismailis. Two major successes were achieved: the conquest of an Ismaili-held village called Tarz where the entire population was executed, and another raid, this time on a village called Turaythith, where, again, many of the civilian population were killed.

Naturally, the Ismailis did not wait long to exact their revenge. In true Hashishim style, Buzurgumid sent two of his most skilled men to seek employment as grooms in the house of the local Seljuq vizier. This task accomplished, on March 16,1127, when the Vizier summoned the two grooms to help him choose a couple of Arab horses to be sent as a gift to the Sultan, he was deftly assassinated. During Buzurgumid's tenure as leader of the Ismailis, although he did not order as many killings as Hasani Sabbah had done, the list of victims was considerable. Bernard Lewis, in his book
The Assassins
, mentions a handful of such cases including ‘[…] a prefect of Isfahan, a governor of Maragha […], a prefect of Tabriz, and a mufti of Qazvin.'
⁸

Buzurgumid's reign as leader of the Ismailis continued until his death on February 9, 1138, at which point he was succeeded by his son, Muhammad who swiftly put into practice all he had learnt from his father in the art of killing. His first victim was the ex-Caliph al-Rashid, who was in Isfahan in Persia suffering from a minor illness when Muhammad's men found and assassinated him on June 6, 1138. After his death, it is said that celebrations were held at Alamut to mark the new Ismaili leader's first so-called ‘victory'.

Fourteen assassinations then followed al-Rashid's, with one of the most notable victims being the Seljuq Sultan Da'ud, who was murdered by four Syrian assassins in Tabriz (north-western Persia) in 1143. But if a tally of fourteen seems large, in comparison with the number of assassinations committed during Hasan-i Sabbah's reign it was paltry. A shift had occurred or, to be more precise, over the years the Ismailis appear to have lost some of their religious fervour. Instead, they began to concentrate on more mundane matters such as cattle rustling and border disputes. Yet there were still some among them who longed for a return to the ‘good old days', the days when Hasan-i Sabbah had ruled and when religious matters had inspired them to commit bold deeds. This group began to congregate around a new leader, Muhammad's son, Hasan, but it wasn't until Muhammad's death in 1162 that Hasan eventually took over and began to reinvigorate his followers.

Two years after he was crowned leader, in the middle of the fasting month that is Ramadan, Hasan announced the dawning of a new Millennium. There are several accounts of this momentous occasion – first and foremost within texts belonging to the sect themselves, which describe the event in detail down to the color (white, red, yellow and green) of the banners that were erected around the pulpit from which Hasan spoke. The positioning of the pulpit itself (facing west) was also of great significance, meaning that Hasan's entire congregation had to stand with their backs towards Mecca. Hasan then entered the scene dressed in white robes, with a white turban on his head. Standing in the pulpit, he spoke to the crowd and declared that from this moment forward they were free from the rules of Holy Law. He declared himself their spiritual leader or ‘Living Proof' who must be obeyed in all religious and worldly matters. Hasan's message was that of the Imam – ‘His word is our word'.
⁹
Directly after this address, Hasan then declared that everyone should join him in a banquet, thus breaking Ramadan. This, together with the congregation standing with their backs to Mecca, symbolized, for them, nothing less than, for them, an end to Shari'a law.

Most Ismailis celebrated and embraced the new era; however, there were still a few who refused to break with tradition and dispense with the old ways. Hasan dealt with them severely.

Hasan maintained, both by implication and by clear declaration, that just as in the time of the Law if a man did not obey and worship but followed the rule of the Resurrection that obedience and worship are spiritual, he was punished and stoned and put to death, so now in the time of the Resurrection if a man complied with the letter of the Law and persisted in physical worship and rites, it was obligatory that he be chastised and stoned and put to death.
¹⁰

Yet, although Hasan's proposals were radical, ironically, given that he had just declared himself the closest thing there was to the hidden Imam, shortly after his declaration at Alamut he was killed by his brother-in-law, who had refused to relinquish the old ways.

If at this point the Ismailis were undergoing turbulent times, it was in the last years of the eleventh century that they succeeded in setting a firm hold in Syria where they converted a Seljuq prince of Aleppo called Ridwan ibn-Tutush. By the mid-twelfth century they had also succeeded in capturing the hill fortress of Masyad as well as several other citadels in northern Syria, including al-Qadmus and al-Kahf. But it was at Masyad that one of the most famous Assassin leaders resided – Rashid-al-Din Sinan.

As a young boy, Sinan had been educated at Alamut alongside Hasan who, on taking over from his father Muhammad, ordered Sinan to go into Syria and spread the word throughout that region. This Sinan did to great effect, although perhaps his most notorious action during the period was the assassination of the Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, King of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in Tyre, who was taking part in the Third Crusade. The two assassins whom Sinan chose for the job are said to have disguised themselves as Christian monks and inveigled their way into the confidence of the Marquis before stabbing him to death. Sinan appears to have instilled in his followers an extraordinary degree of devotion. This account by the German chronicler Arnold of Lübeck illustrates the power he wielded over his acolytes:

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.
¹¹

As well as killing those whom he saw as politically opposed to his point of view, Sinan (and those who followed in his footsteps) also discovered a means of turning their evil reputation as ruthless killers to another advantage, that of exacting large pay-outs from their adversaries. One contemporary source has it that the Emperor Frederick II (the Holy Roman Emperor and German King as well as the King of Jerusalem from 1229–50), who had traveled to Palestine on a Crusade, brought with him a whole bevy of servants carrying gifts worth over 80,000 dinars to give to the Assassins. Ironically, this new-found method of financing their organization also spelt the beginning of the end of their cult, for as the Crusades continued over a long period of time, it was only natural that more and more information about the Assassins gradually became available. A small handful of Europeans even began to meet up with a few of their number, to discuss their religion and their politics, to the point that the Templars and the Knights Hospitaller (an order first founded in the eleventh century and originally dedicated to providing sick-bays for Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem, but later to become a military order as well) even managed to establish some sort of influence over them. Eventually these orders were to demand an annual tribute from the Assassins, rather than the other way round.

In 1228 the English historian, Matthew of Paris, reported that a delegation of Muslims had arrived in Europe seeking advice and help from both the English and French, because of the imminent threat of a Mongol invasion of Syria from the east. This really was the end for the Syrian Assassins, who were not only facing this Mongol invasion, but were also being squeezed hard by the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Baybars. Baybars was himself under threat from the Mongols as well as the Christian Franks, and was not prepared to tolerate the presence of a highly dangerous clique of heretics within Syria's midst. Assigning all the Assassins' lands and property to one of his generals, he further diminished their power by collecting taxes from them and confiscating all the gifts of money they received from the various princes in the region. All of this weakened the Assassins considerably, and it is said that in March 1271 Baybars arrested two Assassins who had been sent to murder him. After being questioned the two suspects were released, but only after two Ismaili leaders had relinquished hold of their castles. Humiliated, broken, vanquished, by the thirteenth century all mention of the Assassins disappears and any small pockets of Ismailism that survived probably did so for only a very short time, never again to achieve the kind of political importance they had once so enjoyed.

Before the Ismailis, many other sects whose main purpose was dissent from mainstream thinking existed, but according to several commentators on the period, none were as effective or as systematic in the use of terror as the Assassins. In fact, it is safe to say that this group of fanatics were the world's first terrorists. Hasan-i Sabbah knew this instinctively. Without stating it openly, he realized that preaching alone could not combat Sunni Islam or the armies of the Seljuq. Only by forming small, self-disciplined units of trained killers could he hope to have any effect on those forces whose manpower and weaponry far outstripped his own. And, with a handful of notable exceptions, including the murder of the Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, the Assassins' victims were almost entirely made up of Sunni Muslims – the ruling elite. It was their strong hold over the region – political, military and religious – that so incensed and angered the Ismailis, for they rarely targeted the Shi'ites and they barely posed any threat to the native Christians, Jews or, contrary to what is commonly assumed, to the Crusaders either.