7. The Bloody End of Frightful Murderers
In the runup 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. 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 genocide that broke the Assassins’ 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 and survived into the following century before it vanished forever into the mists of history.
