Assassins: The Medieval Murder Cult That Terrorized the Middle East

16. The Sunni-Shiite Split Birthed the Assassins Cult

The origins of the Order of Assassins can be traced back to Islam’s Sunni-Shiite split. For much of the medieval era, there had been a rough balance of power between Islam’s two main branches. The less numerous Shiites were championed by the smaller but rising Fatimid Caliphate based in Egypt. The Sunnis, while more numerous, were led by the waning Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq. That balance was upset when the Seljuk Turks, who had recently adopted Sunni Islam, fell upon the Fatimids with all the zeal of the recently converted and broke their power between 1056 – 1060. The Fatimids, defeated militarily in the field of battle, responded with clandestine warfare and turned to assassination as a political tool against the rival Sunni leadership.

15. The Founder of the Order of Assassins

Sheik Hasan al Sabbah (1034 – 1124) was the architect of the Fatimid assassination campaign. A shadowy and exotic Islamic scholar, he led a radical Shiite faction, the Nizari Ismailis, and founded the Assassins cult. Al Sabbah grew up in Rayy, Persia, a city noted at the time for a tradition and history of radical Islamic thought. There, he swore allegiance to the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo, and dedicated his life to the Nizari Ismaiíli cause. In 1090, with financial support from the Fatimids, al Sabbah seized Alamout Castle in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea in Persia. From that base, he expanded his sway and established a series of remote mountain fortresses in the highlands of Persia and Syria. That earned him the moniker of Old Man of the Mountain, a title that was passed on to his successors.

14. From Somebody Else’s Political Arm to Independent Killers

From his mountain holdfasts, the Old Man of the Mountain sent suicide squads of killers known as fida’is (“self sacrificers”) against prominent leaders throughout the Middle East. Initially, the deadly campaign hewed to the goals of al Sabbah’s sponsors, and the targets were prominent Sunni opponents of the Fatimids. However, the Assassins soon asserted their independence. Although they retained a degree of Fatimid financial support, they began to kill on their own hook in order to further their own agenda and goals. The result was nearly two centuries of terror. Throughout that span, fear of the Assassins was an ever-present concern for medieval Middle Eastern leaders and prominent figures of all faiths and denominations thereof.

13. From Hashish to Hashashin to Assassins

The Assassins were fanatically loyal to their leader, the Old Man of the Mountain. On one occasion, to impress a visitor with his followers’ dedication, he ordered some of them to jump to their deaths from a castle wall, and others to fatally stab themselves. They instantly obeyed. Such dedication was the end of result of one of history’s most innovative recruitment and indoctrination strategies, whose end result was Assassins convinced that their Sheik held the keys to paradise. Potential recruits were summoned to an Assassin fortress, where they were housed in bare cells, and received daily religious lectures and education. Gradually, it was hinted that Sheik Hassan al Sabah or his successors held the keys to paradise. One day, the more promising young men would be drugged and plied with hashish, which earned the group the Arabic name “Hashashin” – rendered into “Assassins” by Europeans.

12. A Trip to Heaven

An alternative origin for the “Assassins” name is that the group referred to themselves as Asasiyun, Arabic for “Foundational People”. Whatever the word’s origin, when an Assassin recruit came to, high on hashish, he awoke to find himself amidst carefully landscaped orchard gardens, through which clear streams meandered between rows of vines heavy with grapes, and trees ripe with fruit. Cute animals such as lambs and tame deer frolicked about. Peacocks wandered around, and ruffled and spread their gorgeous tails. Brightly colored birds flitted through the branches above, and trilled and filled the air with their songs. Amid the breathtaking surroundings of Assassin pleasure gardens were breathtakingly beautiful women, there to seduce the recruit, cater to his physical desires, and satisfy his sexual whims. They plied the youth with wine, kept him high on hash, and fed him delicacies that most recruits never knew existed, let alone tasted.

11. Instilling in Recruits a Desperation to Return to “Paradise”

The temptresses convinced the besotted young man that he was in paradise, and that his seductresses were the houris promised those who made it into Heaven. After days in which the drugged recruit wallowed in delights and indulged in heavenly pleasures, he would be drugged senseless once more, and removed from the gardens. He would awake to find himself back in his bare cell and austere surroundings. He would then be informed that he had been in paradise, sent there by the grace of the Old Man of the Mountain, who held the keys to heaven. The recruit would then be told that he could return to paradise – provided that he died while killing the Sheik’s enemies. It proved highly effective: suicide squads of horny young fanatics, high on hash and desperate to die while killing the cult’s enemies, descended from the Assassins’ mountain holdfasts to terrorize the Middle East.

10. Terrorizing the Mighty

The Order of Assassins’ first significant victim was Nizam al Mulk, a grand vizier who had held absolute power in the Seljuk Empire for two decades years before the Assassins got him in 1092. He would not be the cult’s only prominent victim. During their centuries of operations, the cult’s suicide squads killed many powerful Middle Eastern figures. Their numbers included numerous sultans, viziers, generals, Crusader higher ups such as a King of Jerusalem, and at least two Caliphs. In his youth, King Edward I of England was grievously wounded and barely survived an attack from an Assassin who had snuck into the royal tent when Edward was in the Holy Lands on Crusade.

9. Carefully Selected Hitmen

The Assassins were terrorists who often willingly – or even eagerly – sacrificed themselves in order to accomplish their missions. However, there were some key differences between them and modern suicide bombers. The latter are crude human instruments of terror, who typically need little more by way of tactical skill other than the ability to press a detonator. By contrast, the Assassins’ suicide hitmen were carefully selected and well trained in combat and disguises. Aside from the requisite physical fitness, they had to be swift on the uptake, well read, intelligent, patient, calculating, and cold. They also needed to possess significant charisma in order to infiltrate their opponents’ defenses, and to gain access to and come within striking distance of their target.

8. Medieval “Propaganda of the Deed”

The Assassins can be described as early believers in and practitioners of “propaganda of the deed”, a modern concept of direct action meant to serve as an example and as a catalyst for possible revolution. Whenever possible, Assassins were not content to simply murder their victims. Instead, they sought to kill in as dramatic and public a manner as possible. Especially when it came to targets who had enveloped themselves in the heaviest layers of protective security. By public killings in front of as many horrified witnesses as possible, they aimed to advertise their cult’s reach. To strike fear into the hearts of important men, the Assassins fostered the perception that those whom they targeted were dead men walking, no matter the precautions taken.

7. The Assassins Went to Great Lengths to Get Their Targets

Assassin killer squads were usually meticulous as they studied the routines of a targeted leader. They would then lay in wait for him at a heavily attended public event, such as a festival or Friday prayers at the mosque. At a signal given at an opportune moment, they would leap into action to stab and slash their victim, while shouting the name of their cult’s leader and whatever offense the victim had given. Stories also abound of Assassin sleepers who diligently worked their way for years up the ranks and into the inner circle of a given court. There, they patiently awaited instructions that might take decades to arrive, if ever. In some instances, a victim would discover in the final moments of his life that one or more of his bodyguard were members of the Order of Assassins.

6. Intimidation Served the Assassins Just as Well as Murder

Murder was not the Assassins’ only go-to tactic. It was always an option, but they frequently resorted to intimidation instead. One example is that of the Seljuk Sultan Sanjar, who had rebuffed ambassadors from the cult. He changed his mind after he woke up one morning to find a note pinned to the ground near his bed by a dagger. It informed him that if the Assassins wished him ill, the dagger stuck into the hard ground could have easily been stuck into his soft breast instead. As a result, peace reigned between Seljuks and Assassins for decades. The Old Man of the Mountain was paid protection money, face-savingly described as a “pension”, and was permitted to collect tolls from travelers who passed near his fortresses.

5. Scaring Saladin

Another whom the Assassins intimidated was Sultan Saladin, leader of the revived Islamic resistance against the Crusades. After he recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, Saladin went after the Assassins, who had murdered his predecessor, and sought to end the cult once and for all. However, while encamped near their holdfasts in the mountains of northern Syria, Saladin awoke in his tent one morning to discover that the Assassins had bypassed all his bodyguards and layers of protection. They left a menacing letter pinned to his pillow by a poisoned dagger, advising Saladin that they could kill him whenever and wherever they wanted. Saladin turned his army around, abandoned the campaign, and sent officials to negotiate an understanding with the current Old Man of the Mountain. Via such means, grudging live-and-let-live relationships were developed between the Assassins and the region’s powers.

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.

3. Mongol Savagery Was Too Much for These Medieval Murderers

The Mongols, led by Hulagu, appeared too suddenly, acted too swiftly, and were too alien for the Assassins to get a handle on them or work out viable strategies and tactics to get to their leadership. The Steppe warriors’ bloodthirstiness, savagery, speed of action and reaction, and lack of interest in negotiations, was unlike anything that the Assassins had ever experienced. Even before they committed fully to their invasion of the Middle East, the Mongols began to attack and seize Assassin fortresses in 1253. As a preliminary to his conquest of the region, Hulagu took a detour in 1256 to storm the cult’s strongholds in Persia. He captured the last Old Man of the Mountain, and forced him to order the other Assassin fortresses in Persia to surrender. Forty of them, including the cult’s main fortress of Alamout Castle, did so, and the Mongols razed them to the ground.

2. Breaking the Assassins

After he destroyed the Assassins’ strongholds, Hulagu sent the last Old Man of the Mountain in chains to the Grand Khan in Mongolia, who had him executed. The Mongols then slaughtered all whom they could lay their hands on of the Nizari cult to which the Assassins belonged, along with their families. It was a thorough genocide that broke the Assassins’ power once and for all. It reduced them, in the words of a contemporary historian, to “but a tale on men’s lips and a tradition in the world“.

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)