The Ismaili Assassins

A History of Medieval Murder

James Waterson

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781783461509
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"A fascinating history... The Medieval conflict between Christians and Muslims has many similarities to the Middle East today."—Firetrench The Ismaili Assassins were an underground group of political killers who were ready to kill Christians and Muslims alike with complete disregard for their own lives. Under the powerful control of an enigmatic grand master, these devoted murderers often slayed their victims in public, cultivating their terrifying reputation. They assumed disguises and their weapon of choice was a dagger. The dagger was blessed by the grand master and killing with it was a holy and sanctified act; poison or other methods of murder were forbidden to the followers of the sect. Surviving a mission was considered a deep dishonor and mothers rejoiced when they heard that their Assassin sons had died having completed their deadly acts. Unsurprisingly, their formidable reputation spread far and wide. In 1253, the Mongol chiefs were so fearful of them that they massacred and enslaved the Assassins' women and children in an attempt to liquidate the sect. The English monarch, Edward I, was nearly dispatched by their blades and Richard the Lionheart's reputation was sullied by his association with the Assassins' murder of Conrad of Montferrat. The Ismaili Assassins explores the origins, actions and legacy of this notorious sect. Enriched with eyewitness accounts from Islamic and Western sources, this important book unlocks the history of the Crusades and the early Islamic period, giving the reader entry into a historical epoch that is thrilling and pertinent. "An inherently fascinating, deftly written, and impressively informative read from beginning to end."— Midwest Book Review

1

A HOUSE DIVIDED

THE ORIGINS OF THE ISMAILI ASSASSINS

The Prophet said: A man will come out of the East who will preach in the name of the family of Muhammad, though he is the furthest of all men from them. He will hoist black flags which begin with victory and end with unbelief. He will be followed by the discards of the Arabs, the lowest of the mawali, slaves, runaways, and outcasts in remote places, whose emblem is black and whose religion is polytheism, and most of them are mutilated.*

IN 1253, AT THE command of an adored imam, four hundred men left remote castle strongholds in the high mountains of northern Persia and set off to travel across Asia to the Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. They were an army of murderers, disguised as merchants, mendicant preachers and messengers; their intention was to assassinate Mongke, the Great Khan and grandson of Chinggis Khan. Each man’s plan would have been simple. They would get close to the Khan and then strike him down with a consecrated dagger before the Mongol bodyguard hacked them to pieces. The assassin would certainly be killed – tortured and killed more likely – after striking down Mongke, but that was part of the divine plan too. For the man who struck down the Khan of the Mongols would be assured a place in the highest Garden of Paradise, there to be attended by virgins for eternity.

Ultimately, this army of killers failed, but such was the fear that their poniards, of terrible length and sharpness, placed in the hearts of Mongol chiefs that body armour was worn both day and night by every man of importance in the Khan’s dominions. The response of the Mongols, the superpower of the Middle Ages, to these men began with enslavement and massacre of their women and children and ended with a brutal invasion of Persia and an ensuing genocide that even today, eight hundred years later, still resonates in the consciousness of Iranians.

In 1092 a man from the same sect, armed only with a sanctified blade, had effectively destroyed a great Islamic empire with one political killing. This single murder divided and weakened the Muslim states of Iraq and Syria to such a degree that it gave the knights of the First Crusade the chance they needed to be able to take Jerusalem and create the Latin Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Later, in a violent and ironic twist of fate they acted as a catalyst for the Islamic jihad that would eventually eradicate the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem.

These were the Assassins of the Nizari Ismailis, Muslims whose emergence into the religious and political landscapes of Persia and Syria was viewed by the rest of Islam as a trumpet blast heralding the Last Days. Their devotees eradicated whole political dynasties in Persia through campaigns of assassination and numbered caliphs among their victims. Even Saladin, the most famous leader of the Holy War against the infidel Crusaders, lived in fear of their ability to penetrate a sultan’s close bodyguard and to infiltrate royal households. The Ismaili grand masters never left the safety of near-impenetrable castles in Persia and Syria and yet no man of importance, from Cairo in the west to Samarqand in the east, could consider himself beyond the reach of their disciples’ knives.

Their infamy did not end, however, at the borders of the Dar al-Islam. Beyond the lands of the Muslims the Assassins’ assaults on the Crusaders of Syria led to warnings travelling as far as the royal court of France. It was believed that there were agents planted in every king’s household ready to undertake political murder at the word of the grand master. The life of Edward I of England was very nearly ended by the Assassins’ blades and Richard the Lionheart’s reputation as the avatar of chivalry was sullied by association with them after they murdered Conrad of Montferrat, the hero of the Crusader resistance to Saladin, in the streets of Acre.

The Assassins operated as a military power, not through direct confrontation but through their skilled and selective political killings and by fifth-column infiltration. Their selection of these tactics was due to the requirements of the asymmetrical wars they were forced to fight against numerically superior, militarily advantaged and logistically dominant enemies who could not be met on the battlefield with any real hope of success. In these uneven wars the Nizari Ismaili Assassins maintained an impressive record of frustrating the ambitions of great princes and their mission to slay the Khan drew on chameleonic skills of concealment learned over the course of a century and a half of eliminations and intimidation and was driven by an unswerving devotion to their grand master.

Had they been able to kill the Khan, the Assassins might just have been able to save Islam from the Mongol rage that was soon to engulf it. As it was, their failure only hastened the galloping horses of the coming Apocalypse.

Such was the action during the waning of the golden age of Islam. To uncover why the Ismaili Assassins came about, and how their methods evolved we have to go back to the seventh century, when Islam was just beginning its incredible journey of conquest, and to the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Muhammad’s death left the Muslim Arabs with a succession dilemma as the Prophet had always insisted that he was not divine but just a man. Therefore succession to his leadership could not logically be based on being God’s anointed as the enthronements of Byzantine emperors and western kings were. This meant that although Ali was both the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet he was only equal to other lifetime companions and comrades of Muhammad in the right to succession. The succession crisis was solved in the short term by the creation of the position of khalifah or caliph. The word simply means deputy, in this case to the Prophet, and was neutral enough to avoid any idea of divine right of succession by any man or of continued descent of the title through one family. This decision also has to be viewed against the pre-Islamic traditions of the Arab tribes, where leadership was by election and based on success or ability rather than by consanguinity.*

The problem was that there was a faction within the new nation that felt that Ali, despite the denial of personal divinity by the Prophet, had a better claim than other candidates of the Quayrash, the leading tribe of the Arab Muslims. The admittedly apocryphal statement of a deputy of Mecca as quoted by Gibbon,† ‘I have seen the Chosroes of Persia and the Caesar of Rome, but never did I behold a king among his subjects like Muhammad among his companions,’ at the very least gives credence to the fact that any relative of the man who had brought the Arabs a unifying faith of their own and a sense of nationhood was going to attract at least some supporters who believed in a God-given right to rule for Muhammad’s direct descendants through his daughter Fatima.

Furthermore, at this time politics and the religion of Muhammad were indivisible. The Prophet’s religious revelation was what had unified the early Arab converts and what had set them on their road to conquest. The series of documents that have been called the Medina Agreement* very definitely show how Muhammad’s social and political message was bound up in the new faith. The actions of a Muslim towards fellow believers and towards unbelievers are expressed very clearly in the Medina papers: ‘Believers are patrons and clients one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders.’ The hadith or customs and sayings of the Prophet, which found expression in the Medina Agreement, were what regulated Muslim society after Muhammad’s death and the same religio-social message can be found in the Quran. The emphasis was on social justice and the redistribution of riches throughout the Muslim community and the nature of Islam was such that it required a change of consciousness in the individual, from viewing himself in the singular or in terms of family or tribal ties to viewing himself rather as part of the umma, a community of the faithful.† Therefore, whilst Muhammad’s message was ostensibly religious, it could not be implemented without large-scale social and political change; in this way religion, society and politics were indivisible. This synthesis of faith and government was an immediate cause of strength for the nascent Arab-Muslim state, as it would later be for the Assassin Missions, but it would soon enough ensure immense difficulties in securing a stable and progressive Islamic polity.

In only a short period of time, the faction backing Ali had become definable enough to be recognised as the Shia-tu Ali, or the party of Ali, later known as the Shia. At this point, however, there was no true religious schism in Islam as there would be later. The Shia were simply the political supporters of Ali for the top job. In this, they were immediately disappointed as, in what was perhaps not an altogether open or fair election, the close companions of the Prophet put up Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, as the new leader without consulting the tribes – according to one tradition, whilst Ali was preparing the Prophet’s body for burial. Later Shiite radicals would claim that it was at this point that, whilst Ali and his supporters followed the commandments of the Quran, the rest of the people, ‘went astray like a blind camel’.*

Ali finally succeeded to the caliphate only after two other caliphs had occupied the throne. This period of the four Rashidun or ‘rightly guided’ caliphs was, on the surface, a hugely successful one for the Arab-Muslim community. By 651 Egypt, Syria, Iraq, the central lands of Persia and parts of North Africa had all come under Arab control either by conquest or by treaty, and in 654 there was even a naval victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of the Masts. There were, however, also portents of what was to come for so many caliphs and sultans in the future as three of the four Rashidun caliphs died bloodily. The second caliph, Umar, was killed by a Persian Christian slave; his successor, Uthman, was murdered by Muslim mutineers; and Ali was slain by a religious fanatic who was supposed to be on his side in Ali’s civil war against the Umayyad clan – a distant branch of the Prophet’s family tree. It was with Ali’s death and the victory this gave to the Umayyads in Islam’s first civil war that the Shia began the transformation from being simply a political faction to being a discernable religious division within Islam. Some of its adherents were of course Arabs, but it was among the mawali, non-Arabs who would soon begin converting to Islam in newly conquered Persia, that it made its greatest appeal.

Islam’s conquests were so rapid, in part at least, because the long war between Sassanian Persia and the Byzantines (603–28) had totally exhausted both of western Asia’s main powers. It had only drawn to an end with the Emperor Heraclius’s forces driving the Persians from the very gates of Constantinople and forcing their retreat from Egypt and the Holy Land. The later Byzantine sack of Ctesiphon, deep in Persian territory, had effectively ended the conflict but at enormous cost to the Byzantine Empire and to its reputation in the Levant. Sassanian Persia collapsed into near anarchy after the higher lords of the state had slowly shot their monarch King Chosroes to death with arrows as a punishment for his folly in attacking the Greeks and in order to appease Heraclius. All this left a power vacuum that the now unified and well-organised Arab forces were able to fill. This said, there was still hard fighting to be done for the Muslims in the Sassanian heartland around Fars, where loyalties to the old order died the hardest.

Antipathy towards Greek Orthodox Byzantium came from its hard-taxed and religiously persecuted Syrian and Egyptian subjects, who were chiefly Aramaic and Coptic Christians, and from the Jews of Palestine who were being punished by Byzantium for their support of the Persians in the long war. This undoubtedly also assisted the Arabs in their rapid conquest of the Byzantine dominions in the Middle East.

The only hiatus in this seemingly unending catalogue of success was the civil war that began with the murder of the third caliph, Uthman, in 656. The murder of one man essentially threw the entire empire into chaos and this peculiar feature of medieval polity is worth noting at this juncture, as we start to determine both the use and effectiveness of assassination as a policy. In a period where an individual was not just the leader of a state but also essentially embodied the state, then his removal would almost certainly cause the state to stumble and even in certain cases to disintegrate entirely. What is also worth noting, politically, is that Uthman’s murder was almost a direct result of his favouring of his own clan – the Umayyads, a leading family of the Quayrash. The Quayrash were the old elite of pre-Islamic Mecca and Uthman gave them preference over other groups with longer histories of conversion to Islam and loyalty to the Prophet. Muhammad had in fact been of the Quayrash himself but from one of its less aristocratic branches and he had never therefore been part of the more exclusive pre-Islamic aristocracy. This nepotism went against the equality professed in early Islam and set off a series of small revolts in the armies against what was seen as a hijacking of the Islamic Arab nation by the Umayyad family.

Uthman’s murderers came from the Arab army stationed in Egypt and they killed him in Medina where they had travelled ostensibly to discuss dissatisfaction within the Egyptian forces. A desire for social justice, and the perceived lack of it in the Islamic polity was a major cause of the later formation of radical Shiite sects that ultimately led to the birth of the Assassins. It was also a primary factor in the later ability of the Ismaili Assassin sect to recruit abundant numbers of lay supporters and devotees with their ‘New Preaching’ or dawa jadida, which appealed strongly to townsfolk, low-ranking military men and peasants.

The murder of Uthman brought the much-delayed ascension of Ali to the caliphate, but his apparent lack of either remorse for Uthman’s bloody death or desire for revenge on the perpetrators prevented a smooth succession. It was even suggested in higher political circles that the new caliph had a vested interest in the death of his predecessor and soon enough rebellion was brewing again. Furthermore, by taking into his government men of Kufa, a garrison city of Iraq, who were clearly implicated in the murder, Ali only worsened matters.

The role of women is not large in recorded Islamic history, but at this juncture the opposition of the Prophet’s widow Aisha to Ali was decisive as she called for war against the fourth caliph. The Umayyads of Syria took the opportunity of the political chaos this war cry caused in Medina and Mecca to bring Syria fully under their dominion and break away from the empire. Ali defeated Aisha’s forces at the Battle of the Camel, so named because the majority of the action took place around the dowager’s camel, in 656 near Basra. The lady was soon enough sent back to Mecca and Ali was in control of Arabia and Iraq, at least for a little while.

The Battle of the Camel, by its very nomenclature, sounds like a small-scale battle and it might indeed have been, as ‘pure’ Arabian warfare was based on a principle of avoiding unnecessary loss of life. The limited manpower available in the peninsula precluded large-scale engagements and there was an accepted code of conduct in warfare that the sort of ‘absolute war’ described and decried by von Clausewitz so many centuries later should not take place. Razzia or raiding was the most common tactic employed by the Arabs in this early period and it was used against both the Byzantines and Persians with great effectiveness, to make the holding of territory by the two empires untenable. The Assassins also found themselves disadvantaged in terms of simple numbers against all their foes, their selection of methods of both attack and defence reflecting this disparity, as did those of the early Arab conquerors.

There was also a degree of ‘chivalry’ present in warfare in Arabia, even before the advent of Islam. Single combat was not uncommon between champions of either side and Abu Bakr had laid out the rules of war in 632:

O people! I charge you...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Timeline of Key Events
• Genealogical and Succession Tables
• A Note on Transliteration, Titles and Dates
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 A House Divided: The Origins of the Ismaili Assassins
• 2 Statehood and Separation: The Assassins are Born
• 3 Whetting the Blade: Assassination as War
• 4 New Blood in a New Land: The Assassins in Syria
• 5 The Gathering Tempest: New Enemies for the Persian Mission
• 6 The White Donkey and the War Charger: Sinan and Saladin
• 7 Destruction in the Homeland: The Mongol Conquest of Persia
• 8 Mamluks, Mongols and Crusading Kings: The End of the Syrian Mission
• 9 Both Forgotten and Remembered: The Meaning and The Myth of the Assassins
• Further Reading
• Notes