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Historic Groups that Started Innocent then Took an Evil Turn

Khalid Elhassan November 8, 2020 32 min

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14. The Mongols Reduced the Assassins From Terrifying to “But a Tale on Men’s Lips“

Hulagu leading a charge. Assassins Creed

In the runup to their invasion of the Middle East, the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu, began attacking and seizing Assassin fortresses. 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. It was a thorough bloodletting that broke the Assassins’ power for good. It reduced the cultists, according to a contemporary historian, to “but a tale on men’s lips and a tradition in the world“.

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.