4. The Arrival of the Mongols Ushered the End of the Assassins
The Assassins were finally destroyed by the Mongols when they overran the region in the 1250s. Unlike the locals whom the cult had intimidated for generations, the Mongols were largely immune from the sect’s methods. The Steppe warriors were an alien people from far away, with no connections to the region. Mongol leaders were not surrounded by Middle Eastern courtiers, any of whom could be a potential Assassin sleeper, but by their own kind. They dwelled not at court in fixed and relatively accessible palaces, but in armed and highly mobile camps in which strangers conspicuously stood out. That negated the cult’s tactics of patient infiltration and blending in, which had worked so well in a region they knew and whose peoples they understood. Such methods were useless against the Mongols, whom the Assassins neither knew nor understood, and whose ranks they had neither the means nor time to infiltrate.
