CHAPTER IX

THE ASSASSINS
The Ismaeleeh or Ismaelis are a heretical sect of Moham¬ medans which arose about the year a.d. 863. Their prime heresy consisted in their belief that Ismael, the son of Djaafar, was the seventh Imam, an office which possessed the spiritual jurisdiction over Islam; but not only did their heresies increase in the course of the years, so did the additional heretical sects that sprang from them, such as the Karmathians in the ninth century, and at the close of the eleventh one much more famous. This was the sect known to Arab historians as the Eastern Ismaeleeh and to the Christian as the Assassins.
The founder of this movement was Hassan-ben-Sabah, a native of Khorassan, who was educated at a famous school of Nishapur with Omar Khayyam, the astronomer poet, and Nizam-ul-mulk, who subsequently became Grand Vizier. The story is well known to every reader of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat how the three schoolfellows promised to help one another when any one of them should be in a position so to do. Nizam-ul-mulk faithfully fulfilled his promise, and obtained employment for Hassan under the Caliph Melekshah, but his conduct led to his disgrace and exile to Egypt. Here he became an Ismaeli, and was at first welcomed at the court in Cairo as a convert and because of his general ability, until this ability involved him in such a network of intrigue that he was obliged once more to become a fugitive.
Hassan then returned to Persia, and in the year 1090 gained possession by force and stratagem of the strong castle of Alamut, in the north of that country. By pre¬ tending to be the Huddjah, or incarnation of the Imam, he
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THE ASSASSINS
57
collected followers from among the Ismaelis and other heretical sects. His power rapidly grew, and he seized castle after castle in Persia, choosing in preference those in hilly districts, whence his subsequent title of Old Man of the Mountain ( Sheikh al Jebal). He never assumed the dignity of king or prince, nor did his successors. He also got a footing in Syria about the time that the Crusaders were appearing there; and at the end of the century held ten castles in the Ansariyeh Mountains north of the Lebanon range. Though he never left Alamut throughout his whole life, and but seldom appeared in public even there,1 from Syria to Kuhistan his power was felt and feared.
His weapon was assassination. His instruments the devoted followers whom he bound to his purpose by fanaticism and by the hypnotic power of a drug, hashish (Indian hemp), whence the word assassin.
The founder of the sect of Assassins died in the year 1124 aged about ninety, and was succeeded in the chiefdom by his general, Kia Busurgomid, for Hassan had killed both his own sons. The succession of the children of Kia Busur¬ gomid till the extinction of the sect “is one awful tale of suspicion and murder on the part of the father, or parricide on the part of the son. While they caused the blood of others to flow like water, they did not spare that of their nearest relations.”2 The Assassins of Persia were finally suppressed as an organized body in 1257, and their last Grand Master put to death. In Syria the Egyptian Sultan Beybars ultimately subdued them and took all their castles in 1272.
Their residence in Syria made the Assassins the near neighbours of the Knights Templars, who possessed many castles to the south of the Ansariyeh Mountains, and proved very troublesome neighbours. Thus when the Assassins in 1 152 murdered Raymond I. Prince of Tripoli, in the church of the city of Tartus, the Templars invaded and ravaged their territory, until they were forced to agree to pay a yearly tribute of 2,000 pieces of gold. The Templars seem
1 Silvestre de Sacy, La dynastie des Assassins, 1818.
2 Samuel Lyde, The Asian Mystery, i860.
58 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
to have kept the upper hand, for William of Tyre, the historian of the Crusades, tells of an embassy sent to the King of Jerusalem by the Assassins about 1173, promising to become Christians if the tribute annually paid to the Templars were abolished; and he goes on to say that the ambassador was slain on his journey home by a Templar, who was protected by the Grand Master and Order who had heard of the suggested treaty and wished to wreck it.
Other noteworthy contemporary references depict them as heretics from Islam, eaters of hashish (Edrisi, 1154); that their Sheikh lives in the city of Kadmoos, and exacts implicit obedience from them, “whether it be a matter of life or death” (Benjamin of Tudela, 1163); that they exceed 40,000 in number, and have “a certain hidden law, which it is not lawful for anyone to reveal, except to their children when they come to adult age,” and that if any son were to reveal the law to his mother he would be killed without mercy (Jacob de Vitriaco, 1213); while the Spanish Arab Ibn-Djubair, writing in 1183, says, “in the mountains behind Lebanon are castles of the impious Ismaeleeh, a sect who have seceded from Islam, and claimed divinity for a certain man-devil, who has deceived them by vanities and false appearances, so that they have taken him as a god and worship him, and give their lives for him; and they have arrived at such a pitch of obedience as to throw themselves down from a precipice at his command.”1
This last report refers, of course, to the well-known story first told by Marco Polo, that Assassins were quite ready to commit suicide at the command of their Sheikh, thinking that they would thereby obtain paradise. Hassan, it is said, prepared a delightful valley near his fastness, to which neophytes would be conveyed while unconscious from the effects of bhang, and here they would spend several days in sensual delights, when having been drugged again and carried back to the Sheikh he would inform them that they had been granted a foretaste of the paradise that would be theirs after death. Hence his ascendancy over his fol¬ lowers. It seems hard to credit that such a device should
1 These references quoted from Lyde, Op. ci .
THE ASSASSINS
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have been employed for well nigh two centuries without becoming known to, at least, the seniors of the Order; so it may be presumed that the official assassinations, and they were many, had to be carried out by those poor dupes who had not risen very high in this hierarchy of crime.
Von Hammer has given an account of the grades of importance among the Assassins, amounting to seven in all: the Sheikh, the Grand Master; the Dai-il-Kebeer, the Grand Recruiters, his lieutenants in the three provinces Gebal, Syria, and Kuhistan; the Dais, religious nuncios and political emissaries; the Rafeek, Fellows of the Order; the Fedavee, guards, warriors and murderers; the Lasik, lay brethren; and lastly, the profane.
There was also, according to the same author, a seven¬ fold, gradation in the spiritual hierarchy, according to the doctrines of the Ismaelis, namely: (i) the divinely appointed Imam; (2) the Huddjah, the proof designated by him; (3) the Dthoo Massah, who received instructions from the Huddjah; (4) the Dais or missionaries; (5) the Mad- thomeem, who were admitted to the solemn promise of an oath; (6) the Umhellabeeh, who sought out subjects fit for conversion; (7) the Moomeneen, the believers. In this hierarchy the Sheikh represented the Huddjah, and so on in a descending scale.
For the Dais or missionaries a particular rule of conduct was imposed, consisting of seven points. By the first they were taught to gain a knowledge of mankind ; by the second, to win over candidates by flattering their inclinations and passions; in the third, to involve them in a maze of scruples and uncertainty about the exact meaning of the Koran; in the fourth, to bind the acolyte by oath to inviolable silence and submission; in the fifth, to fire him by examples of great and powerful men who professed the tenets of the sect; in the sixth, to recapitulate all that had preceded in order to confirm and strengthen the learner’s faith; and after all this came, in the seventh place, the allegorical interpretation as opposed to the literal sense, in consequence of which “articles of faith and duty became mere allegories, the external form merely contingent, the inner sense alone
60 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
essential; the observance or non-observance of religious ordinances and moral laws equally indifferent; consequently all was doubtful and nothing prohibited.”1
It should be noted that the number seven which runs through all this code was sacred in the Ismaeli sect, and the matter will be referred to again when treating of the rise of that Islamic heresy.2
The modern descendants of the Assassins in Syria, the Ismaelis, have retained little or nothing of all this theo¬ logical subtlety, if the accounts of modern travellers are to be credited, and have sunk very low in belief and in practice too. They are said to worship the pudendum muliebre, and to mix on certain days of the year in promiscuous debauchery. “They seem to use what they worship as a symbol of Mother Earth, and are reported to say, ‘From it we came, and to it we return.’”3 From which, if true, one might argue a survival of the Syrian nature worship of the Great Mother.
The tenets of the Assassins while in the noon of their power is a matter of some importance, because the theory is still widely held that they taught their doctrines to the Templars, and that the suppression of the latter was due to the corruption introduced into their ranks from this source. The question has been discussed in the chapter on the Templars, and it will be enough to point out here one noteworthy fact. While the Templars and Assassins were undoubtedly near neighbours, and may have been supposed to have learnt a good deal about one another’s ceremonies, there is nothing in the practices of the Assassins analogous to the general charges laid against the Templars at their prosecution. Whether or not the latter were guilty of the crimes laid to their charge, there is no scintilla of proof that such crimes were likely to be learnt from the followers of Hassan, from whom they took life or gold, as occasion served, but hardly a theological system, itself intrinsecated, but yet deeper enmeshed in the complexities of a strange and difficult language.
1 Von Hammer, History of the Assassins, Wood’s translation.
2 Vide p. 331 ■
3 Lyde, Op. cit.