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Assassins: The Medieval Murder Cult That Terrorized the Middle East

Khalid Elhassan January 23, 2025 14 min

Assassins - The Old Man of the Mountain and his followers, as depicted in the TV series 'Al Hashashin' — The Old Man of the Mountain and his followers, as depicted in the TV series 'Al Hashashin'. TMDB

1. The End of the Order of the Assassins

For a while, some remnants of the Order of Assassins survived in Syria, which lay outside the Mongols’ control. Eventually, the Egyptian Mamelukes first reduced the cult’s survivors to vassalage in the 1260s, and finally forced them to surrender their last fortresses in 1273. They were suffered to live and kept on retainer as contract killers, but their independence was forever gone. In that final iteration of contract killers, the steadily dwindling cult existed for a few decades more, and survived into the following century before it vanished forever into the mists of history.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Daftary, Farhad – The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis (1995)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Who Were the Assassins?

History Collection – Dramatic Assassination Plots From History

Hodgson, Marshall Goodwin Simms – The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Ismaílis Against the Islamic World (2005)

Ivanov, Vladimir – Alamut and Lamasar – Two Medieval Ismaiíli Strongholds in Iran, an Archaeological Study (1960)

Lewis, Bernard – The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (2013)

Setton, Kenneth M., et al (eds.) – A History of the Crusades, Volume I: The First Hundred Years: The Ismailites and the Assassins (1969)

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.