In April 1192, on a Wednesday evening that was most likely cool and dry, the Marquis Conrad de
Montferrat set off on the return road to his palace. Montferrat, who had been crowned the Crusader
King of Jerusalem earlier that year, had grown impatient waiting for his wife to get out of the bath, and
decided to go to the Bishop of Beauvais’s house for dinner. But the bishop had already eaten, and
Montferrat started back down the small streets of Tyre, a city fifty-one miles south of Beruit. He was
promptly knifed by two young fidaiins – assassins - who for six months had posed as Christian monks,
in what has become an infamous murder by an even more infamous order, the Ismaili Assassins.
“In a narrow street two monks, whom he knew to be Christian converts, accosted him with a letter,”
according to Enno Franzius’s account in his “History of the Order of Assassins.” “As he reached for it,
they stabbed him. One of fidais was seized. The other fled to a church, where he hid. By chance
Montferrat’s attendants carried him to the same church to dress his wounds.” According this account,
the fidai flew out of the shadows to deliver the final blow, and killed the Marquis.
Historian Charles Nowell, in his recounting, points out that it is when they initially stab him that the story
starts to change, depending on who your source is. One version has him taken to the church where one
fidai was hiding, as recounted above, another has him taken to his house where he dies, and another
says “that the Assassins, or at least one of them, lived long enough to confess that the Old Man of the
Mountain had sent them on their errand.”
Terrorism expert Walter Laqueur notes that the “success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely
on the amount of publicity it receives.” On that score, the Ismaili Assassins did incredibly well. A Shi’ite
subsect, they were called Ismailis due to their belief in Isma’il as the legitimate Iman, “while the rest of
the Shi’a recognized his brother Msa.”
The murder of Montferrat remains the Assassins’ most famous, and one that helped catapult them to
fame (fortune, they already had) throughout Europe and the Middle East, leading the courts of kings and
queens to whisper of their involvement in murders and assassinations even when there was no evidence.
The sect also helped to sow chaos by taking credit for assassinations they didn’t commit. “The
frequency with which the Old Man of the Mountain was brought into European political intrigues in
which he could not have had the remotest interest, shows how he was regarded in the West. He had
such a reputation for conducting a mediaeval ‘murder incorporated’ that a favorite method of throwing
discredit on anyone was to accuse that person of being connected with the Old Man.”
But who were the Assassins and their leader? There were, in fact, two branches of the killer sect: one in
Syria and the main one, based in Persia, where Alamut, their mountain fortress, was located. Each was
led by an “Old Man of the Mountain,” and while a man named Hassan Sabbah was the original, it was
Syria’s Rashidu’d-Din Sinan, after he took over in 1168, who gained wider notoriety across Europe and
the larger Middle East after he achieved independence from Alamut. “[Europeans] knew next to nothing
about the Persian headquarters of the sect until the Assassin power had vanished,” according to Nowell.
As historian Bernard Lewis pointed out in his 1952 article, “The Sources for the History of the Syrian
Assassins,” “[f ]rom William [the Archbishop] of Tyre onwards most of the western chroniclers of the
Crusades have something to say about the Assassins, and a few striking events like the murder of the
Marquis Conrad de Montferrat in Tyre in 1192 spread the fame and terror of ‘The Old Man of the
Mountain’ far beyond the confines of Syria.”
Counting ten fortresses, William of Tyre wrote, “I have often heard their number [of men] estimated at
higher than sixty thousand. These people have the custom of choosing the ruler who governs them, not
by virtue of hereditary right but only on the basis of merit. He is called the Old Man, to the exclusion of
all other titles of dignity. They are so submissive and obedient to him that there is nothing too difficult or
dangerous for them to undertake eagerly at his command… The ones who receive the order go at once
to carry it out, not stopping to inquire what the consequences will be or whether they will be able to
escape.” The Syrian Ismaili Assassins, like their Persian brethren, “reserved their daggers for the rich
and powerful, not stooping to attack the humble and the poor.” And while both branches originally killed
for religious and political purposes, over the years their policies generally changed, moving from
religiously motivated murders to ones for money, coming in line with the current definition of the word
“assassin,” the etymology of which their acts spawned, as we know it today. It was this move, away
from religion, and away from their original purpose of undermining Sunni Islam (which makes up the
largest group in bi-furcated Islam, with its belief that the first four caliphs were the rightful successors
to the Prophet Muhammed), that may have helped lead to their eventual decline. As with its rise, the
decline of the Persian branch started with a Hassan, nearly forty years after the original died in 1124.
“He claimed divine honors for himself, saying he was the Imam for whom all Ismailites had been
waiting. He actually seceded from the religion of Islam and declared that with him a new dispensation
had begun,” Nowell wrote. “It so weakened the Persian Assassins that they never recovered their
former prestige. They lasted for almost another century and the later grand masters [as the Old Men
were also called] nominally adhered to Islam or not as they individually chose. But the Syrian branch of
the order, which had been started in the lifetime of Hassan Sabbah, now became the more active and
was in fact, if not in theory, the leading one.”
So in the murder of Montferrat, it was clear who had orchestrated the murder. “[T]he real question was
who had been the instigator. It has never been answered with certainty,” Nowell says. But Franzius
writes that under torture, the fidai who survived said it was Richard the Lionhearted who paid Sinan to
do the deed. Franzius cautioned “[i]t might be remembered however, that fidais’ confessions were not
noted for their accuracy. Moreover, Montferrat had recently put to death a stranded Assassin,
confiscated his property, and had not heeded Sinan’s demands for compensation.”
The other suspect was Saladin - the warrior Kurd of the Crusades - who was said to have asked Sinan
to kill not only Montferrat, but Richard as well. (Saladin had previously threatened to kill Montferrat’s
father if he didn’t turn over Tyre to him; Montferrat’s response was that “the old gentleman had already
lived long enough.”) But Sinan apparently did not want to touch Richard, which may have helped lead to
the rumours that he had something to do with the Marquis’s death (and the fact that Richard was said to
be on the outs with Montferrat). Others believed Sinan too shrewd to want to kill both, and “while
Rashidu’d-Din agreed [with Saladin] in the case of Montferrat, he would take no action against Richard,
since he feared that Saladin would become too powerful if both his enemies were killed.” Even Arabic
sources conflict over who ordered it. One, citing a letter from a Muslim envoy to Montferrat, said that
Richard the Lionhearted had done it. Another said they were “renegade Isma’ilis.” And another said it
was Saladin, naming the price. If it was indeed Saladin who ordered the Marquis’s death, then Sinan’s
shrewdness appeared to have paid off: “Four months after the murder of Conrad a truce was signed
between Richard Coeur de Lio and Saladin in which, at Saladin’s request, the Assassin territories were
included,” writes Laurence Lockhart, a Persian scholar.
The Syrian Assassins did not just focus on one side: they liked to hit up both the Christians and the
Muslims for murder and money. In fact, the Crusades were probably the best thing to happen to the
Assassins, allowing them to play both sides off each other. They saw the religious wars as an “excellent
opportunity to fish in troubled waters,” according to Lockhart. “[Hassan] immediately despatched [sic]
emissaries to Syria who, after gaining many partisans among the Ismailis there and seizing a number of
mountain fortresses, established the Syrian branch of the Order.” Attempts were said to be made on
Richard’s life, after Sinan’s death, including one in 1195, allegedly with fifteen people. They were
caught and arrested, and confessed they were Assassins hired by Philip Augustus of France. “If these
were Fida’is, it is the only known case where a group as large as fifteen was used on one mission,”
according to Nowell. The reverse rumor also spread: that Richard had called upon Assassins to kill
Philip.
On the other side of the Crusades, prior to their alleged arrangement to murder Montferrat, Sinan made
at least two attempts to kill Saladin. Both attempts had a Blake Edwardian flavor: while resting alone in
his tent in May 1176, Saladin was attacked by one of his bodyguards, who tried to put a knife through
his head. Saladin’s helmet, it turned out, had chain mail underneath. “The fidai then slashed at the Sultan’
s throat. Saladin, a skillful polo player, reached quickly for his wrist and deflected the blade,” according
to Franzius, as another bodyguard rushed in and grabbed the knife. The Assassin, clearly having an
incredibly bad day, was killed, as two other Assassins jumped into the tent, only to be run through by
the other guards. Two months later, the second attempt had an Assassin dive-bombing out of a walnut
tree at Saladin while he was riding to lay siege to Masyaf, a castle the Syrian Assassins had captured in
the 1130s. Franzius writes: “But he landed on the steed’s rump, fell to the ground, and was dispatched
by Saladin’s bodyguards.” Coming to the realization that a siege on Masyaf would be too time-
consuming when he had other matters on his plate, Saladin appeared to have buried the hatchet - or
dagger in this case - with Sinan, agreeing that he “would thereafter avoid Assassin territory, while Sinan
would cease endeavoring to send him to the other world.”
The end of the Assassins’ reign of terror finally came in 1257, at the hands of the notorious Mongol
hordes. Mangu, the Great Khan, had heard of the Assassins through a traveler he received in his court,
who wore chain mail to protect himself against the Assassins’ poison daggers. By 1255, “the Mongols,
under Hulaku Khan, the brother of Mangu, were on their way to Persia with strict orders from the Great
Khan to exterminate the Assassins before proceeding further west to attack Baghdad and overthrow the
‘Abbasid Caliphate.’” The fifty castles soon fell against the hordes. The Syrian branch faded away,
“becoming in 1265 tributaries of the Egyptian Sultan Baibars.”
Hassan, the first Old Man of the Mountain, and his followers truly were the original terrorists, as Lewis
notes. Like a terrorist group we now know well, they too had roots in religion. Napoleon once said
religion is good stuff for keeping the common people down. Apparently, it’s also good stuff for the
fundamentalists to feed on, especially those who believe they’ll be martyred and sent to heaven to meet
many virgins, or believe that rock and roll is the work of Satan. But back to the mediaeval times, when
superstition had a strangle-hold: they were “without precedent—in the planned, systematic and long-
term use of terror as a political weapon. The stranglers of Iraq [who came before the Order of
Assassins] had been small-scale and random practitioners, rather like the thugs of India, with whom
they may be connected. Previous political murders, however dramatic, were the work of individuals or
at best of small groups of plotters limited in both purpose and effect,” Lewis writes. Osama Bin Laden
and his group of followers, who want to create a “radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to
Indonesia,” could be seen as the modern-day equivalent of the original Old Man in the Mountain and his
Order of Assassins.
Hassan, whom Lewis alternately calls a “revolutionary of genius” and possessing “political genius in
perceiving weakness of Islamic monarchies” that could be exploited by terrorism, came more than close
to creating such an empire, quite literally a nation of terrorists. “Hasan found a new way, by which a
small force, disciplined and devoted, could strike effectively against an overwhelmingly superior enemy.
‘Terrorism’, says a modern authority, ‘is carried on by a narrowly limited organization and is inspired
by a sustained program of large-scale objectives in the name of which terror is practiced.’ This was the
method that Hasan chose—the method, it may well be, he invented.”
XXX
"Medieval Murder, Incorporated: The First Terrorists" |
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