13. The Old Man of the Mountain and His Followers
The eleventh century saw the emergence of The Order of Assassins, an Islamic politico-religious cult led by a shadowy figure known as “The Old Man of the Mountain”. Despised as heretics by most Muslims, relatively few, and geographically dispersed, the Assassins punched far above their weight. They wielded considerable power and influence throughout the medieval Middle East by terrorizing the region for generations.
The Assassins’ origins can be traced back the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, there had been a rough balance of power. The more numerous Sunnis were led by the waning Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq, while less numerous Shiites were championed by the smaller but rising Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. 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. Defeated militarily, the Fatimids resorted to clandestine warfare, using assassination as a political tool against the Sunni leadership.
