It Took the Mongols to Break the Assassins
The cult was finally broken by the Mongols, under Hulagu, when they overran the region in the 1250s. The Mongols were an alien people from far away, with no connections to the Middle East, and their leaders were not surrounded by Middle Eastern courtiers, but by their own kind in armed and highly mobile camps in which strangers conspicuously stood out. As such, 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, were useless against the Mongols whom they neither knew nor understood, and whose ranks they had neither the means nor time to infiltrate.
The Mongols 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 for getting to their leadership. The Mongols’ bloodthirstiness, savagery, speed of action and reaction, and lack of interest in negotiations, simply went beyond anything the Assassins had ever experienced.
In the runup to their invasion of the Middle East, the Mongols began attacking and seizing Assassin fortresses in 1253, and 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 remaining Assassin fortresses in Persia to surrender. Forty of them, including the main fortress of Alamout Castle, did so, and the Mongols razed them to the ground. Hulagu then sent the 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, in a thorough genocide that broke their power once and for all, and reduced them, according to a contemporary historian, to “but a tale on men’s lips and a tradition in the world“.
Remnants of the Assassins survived in Syria, which lay outside the Mongols’ control, until the Egyptian Mamelukes first reduced them 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, surviving into the following century before vanishing into the mists of history.
