I. Gesch^elite Jtr KreuiiUge, iv., iH'J.

f kridge. The Syrian bishop, Aboo-'J-Paraj, mentions report of the Assassin who was put to the rack [ iMvio^ laid the guilt on king Richard, but adds Chat the truth eame afterwards to hght. Hugo Plagon, Lfi judicious and impartial writer, sofar from imputing Ihe death of the marquin to king Sichord, assigns the iwuse which moved the Assassin prince to order the itb uf the marquis, namely, the same which we lU presently see stated in the letter ascribed Co the I Man of the Mountain. Rigord, who wrote the istory of Philip Augustus, does not by any means mpute the murder of the marquis to king Richard, Ibough lie says that while Philip was at Pontoise iet- 3 were brought to him Irom beyond sea, warning [1 to be on his guard, as Assassins (^Araacid/E) had ;□ sent, at the suggestion and command of the k King of England, to kill him, " for at that time they I' |l&d slain the king's kinsman, the marquis." Philip, ^^B ["eal, but more probably feigned alarm, immediately ^rrounded his person with a guard of serjeants-at- iBce. The Arabic historian, Ebn-el-Athir, the iend of Saladin, says that the sultan had agreed ith the Old Man of the Mountain, for a sum of ' 10,000 pieces of gold, to deliver him of both king Richard and the marquis, but that Sinan, not think- ing it to be for his interest to relieve the sultan of the English king, had taken the money and only put lite marquis out of the way. This narrative is wholly improbable, for treachery was surely no purt of the character of Saladin ; but it serves to prove the im- partiality which is so justly ascribed to the Arabic writers in general. The testimony of Abiilfeda is as follows: "And in it (the year of the Hejra 588, or A. D. 1192,) was slain the Marquis, Lord of Soor (or 'fyre); may God, wbof^e name be exalted, curse A Balinee, or Assassin (in one cupy Hati-
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We thus see that the evidence in TavDur of the King of England greatly preponderates, not a single writer who was on the apot laying the murder to his charge ; DD the contrary, those who had the best means of beings informed treated the imputation with contempt, as a base calumny devised by the French party, But there is a still more illustrious witness in his behalf, if the testimony ascribed to him be genuine — the Old Man of the Mountain himseif. Brampton gives two letters purporting to have been written by this per- sonage, the one to the Duke of Austria, the other to the princes and people of Europe in general The latter is also given by William of Newbridge, with some variation. Both have been admitted by Rymer into his Fo^dera. Gibbon, who seems to have known only the last, pronounces it to be an "absurd and palpable forgery." Hammer, whose arguments we shall presently consider, undertakes to demonslrate that these epistles are forgeries. Raumer, more prudently, only says that this last is nOt genuine in its present form.
Thefollowingaretranslationsof these documents: —
" The Old Man of the Mountain to Limpold, Duke of Austria, greeting. Since several kings and princes beyond sea accuse Richard, King of England, and lord, of the death of the marquis, I swear by the God who reigneth for ever, and by the law which we liold, that he had no guilt in his death ; for the cause of the death of the marquis was as foUow.s,
" One of our brethren was coming in a ship from Katelia (SalMeya) to our parts, and a tempest chancing to drive him to Tyre the marquis had him taken and slain, and seized a. large sum of money
"luslBmid, lorn, iv., pp. Ii2, 113. lUfniae, 1792.
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which he had with him. But we sent our mes- sengers to the marquis, requiring him to res ore to us the m'>ney af our brother, and to satisfy us respect- ing' the death of our brother, which he laid upon Iteginald. the Lord of Sidon, and we exerted our- selves through our friends till we knew of a truth that it was he himself who had had him put to death, and had seized his money.
"And again we sent to him another of our mes- sengers, named Eurisus, »hom he was minded lo fling into the sea; but our friends made him depart with speed out of Tyre, and he came to ub quickly and told us these things. From that very hour we were desirous lo slay Uie marquis ; then also we sent two brethren to Tyre, who slew him openly, and as it were before all the people of Tyre.
" This, then, was the cause of the death of the marquis :, and we say to you in truth that the lord Richard, King of England, had no guilt in this death of the marquis, and these who on account of this have done evil to (he lord King of England have done it unjustly and without cause.
"Know for certain that we kill no man iu this world for any hire or money, unless he has tirst done us evil.
" And know that we have executed these letters in our house at our castle of Messiat, in the middle of September. In the year from Alexander M. D. & V."
" The Old Man of the Mountain to the princes of Europe and all the Christian people, greeting.
" We would not that the innocence of any one should suffer by reason of what we have done, since we never do evil lo any innocent and gnillless per- son ; but those who have liansgresfed against us we do not, H ith Uod to aid, long suffer to rejoice in the injuries dune to our simplicity.
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" We therefore sig;nify to the whole of you, testify- ing by him through whom we hope to be saved, that that Marquis of Montfermt was slain by no machina- tion of the King of England, but he justly perished, by our will and command, by our agtelQces, for that act in which he transgressed against us, and which, when ftdmonished, he had neglected to amend. For it is our custom first to admonish those who have acted injuriously in anything to us or our friends to give us satisfaction, which if they despise, we take care to take vengeance with severity by our ministers, who obey us with such devotion that they do not doubt but that they shall be gloriously rewarded by God if they die in executiug our command.
" We have also heard that it is bruited about of that king that he has induced us, as hein^ leas up- right and consistent (miniH integros et coniifaitfea), to Hend some of our people to plot against the King of France, which, beyond doubt, is a false fiction, and of the vainest suspicion, when neither he, God is witness, has hitherto attempted anything against us, nor would we, in respect lo our honour, permit any undeserved evil to be planned against any man. Farewell."
We will not undertake to maintain the genuine- ness of these two epistles, but we may be permitted to point out the futility of some of the objections made to them. Hammer pronounces the first of Ihem to be an midoubted forgery because it com- mences with swearing by the law, and ends by being dated from the era of the Seleucides. Both, he says, were equally strange to the Ismai'lites, who precisely at this time had begun to trajnple the law under foot, and hod abandoned the Hejra, the only
1 known in Mohammedan countries, for a n commendug with the reign of Hassan H, He fur-
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ther 8863, in the circumstance of a letter from liie Old Man of the Mountain {Sheikh-al-Jebat) being dated from Massyat, a proof of the ignorance of the Crusaders respecting the true head and seat of the IsmMlite power. These objections are regarded by Wilken as conclusive. They will, however, lose much of their force if we bear in mind that the letters are manifestly translations, and that the chief of Massyat at that time was Sinan, who some years before had offered to become a Christian, and who does not seem at all lo have adopted the innovations of Hassan the Illuminator. Sinan mi been induced by the friends of the King of England, one of the most steady of whom was Henry of Cham- pagne*, who succeeded Courad of Montferrat in the kingdom, to write those letters in his justification, and it is very probable that tlie translations were made in Syria, where the Arabic language was of course better understood than in Europe, and sent either alone or with the originals. The translator might have rendered the title which Sinan gave him- self by Senrx df, Jtfojife, which would be belter under- stood in the west, and he may also have given the corresponding year of the era of the Seleucides (the one in use among the Syrian Christians) for the year of the HeJRi used by the Ismailite chief, or indeed Sinan may have employed that era himself In this case there would remain little to object to the genuineness of the letter to the Duke of Austria. Hammer regards the enpression our simpiicity (Wm- plicitcu noftra) as being conclusive against the genu- ineness of the second letter. We must confess that we can see no force in the objection. Sinan might wish to represent himself as a very plain, simple, innocent sort of person. It might further be doubted • '* An instance of Henry's intimacy with thu Aaauxins has
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if a European forger would venture to represent the prince of the Assassins — the formidable OW Mbq of ihe Mountain — in such a respectable lip;ht as lie appears in these two epistles*.
But there is another atcouut of the death of the Marquis of Montferrat, which is probably much better known to the generiilily of readers thnn any of the pieiedinffones. The far-famed author of " Waverley" lias, in his romnntic tale at ihe " TaUcmau," made Conrail to be wounded and vaniiuished in Ihe li^ts by the son of tlie King of Scotland, the champion of king Richard, and afterwards slain by the dagger, not of the Assassins, but of bis conftderate in villany the Master of the Temple, to prevent his making confession of their common guilt!
Yielding to none in rational admiralion of the genius of Sir W, Scott, we cannot avoid expressing a wish that he had ceasfd to write when he had exhausted that rich field of national feelings and maniierb with which he wus alone familiar, and from which he drew the exquisite delineations of " Wa- verley" and itsSwittish brethren. All his later works, no doubt, exhibit occasional scenes far beyond the power »f any of his imitators; but when his muse quits her native soil, she takes leave of nature, truth, and simplicity. Even the genius of a Scott is inade- quate to painting manners he never witnessed, scenery he never beheld.
The tale of the " Talisman" is a flagrant instance. Topography, chronology, historic truth, oriental man- ners, and individual character, are all tre-ated with a most magnanimous neglect, indeed, even, we might say, with contempt ; for, cnreli-ss, from " security to please," as ibe author is known to have been, his vagaries must sometimes have proceeded from mere • Sir J. Mockiatosh (History of EagUBd, L 187) seems to regard Ibe letten an gemiiue.
tHE ASSASSINS. 12»
wilfulness and caprice. It would, we apprehend, perplex our oriental travellers and geogfraphers to point out the site of the fountain named the Diamond of the Desert, not far from the Dead Sea. and yet lying half-way between the camp of the Saracens and that of the Crusaders, which last, we are told, lay between Acre and Ascalon, that is, on the sea-coast, or to show the interminable sandy desert which stretches between the Dead Sea and the Mediterra- nean. As to historic truth, we may boldly say that there is hardly a single circumstance of the romance in strict accordance with history ; and as to the truth of individual character, what are we to say to the grave, serious, religious Saladin, but the very year before his death, being in the flower of his a^e, ram- bling alone through the desert, like an errant knight, singing hymns to the Devil, and coming disguised as a physician to the Christian camp, to cure the malady of the English fhonarch, whom he never, in reality, did or would see*? We might entimerate many additional instances of the violation of every kind of unity and propriety in this single talef.
Let not any deem it superfluous thus to point out the errors of an illustrious writer. The impressions made by his splendid pages on the youthful mind
* May it not be said that real historic characters should not be misrepresented ? Sir W. Scott was at full liberty to make his Vainfys and his Buis Gill)erts as accomplished vil- lains as he pleased ; he might do as he pleased with his own ; but what warrant had he ftoin history for painting Conrad of Montferrat and the then Master of the Templars under such odious colours as be does ?
f The author invariably writes Montierrat for Montferrat. The former is in Spain, and never was a marqui>ate. As it were tu hhow that it was nu error of the press, it is ttaid, " The shield of the marquis bore, in reference to his title, a serrated and rocky mountaiu.*' We also find naphtha and bitumen con- founded, the Ibrmer being described as the solid^ the latter as the liquid substance.
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are permanent and ineffaceable, and, if not corrected, may lead to errors of a graver kind. The " Talisman" moreover affects a delusive show of truth and accu- racy ; for, in a note in one part of it, the aut|}or (ironically, no doubt) affects to correct the historians on ,a point of history. The natural inference, then, is that he has himself made profound researches, and adhered to truth ; and we accordingly find another novelist, in what he terms a history of chivalry, de- claring the '* Talisman" to be a faithful picture of the manners of the age. Sir W. Scott, however, has himself informed us, in the preface to " Ivanhoe," of his secret for describing the manners of the times of Richard Coeur de Lion. With the chronicles of the time he joined that of Froissart, so rich in splendid pictures of chivalric life. Few readers of these ro- mances perhaps are aware that this was the same in kind, though not in degree, as if, in his tales of the days of Elizabeth and James I«, he had had recourse to the manner-painting pages of Henry Fielding; for the distance in point of time between the reign of Richard I. and that of Richard II., in which last Froissart wrote, is as great as that between the reigns of Elizabeth and George II. ; and, in both, manners underwent a proportional change. But we are in the habit of regarding the middle ages as one single period of unvarying manners and institutions, and we are too apt to fancy that the descriptions of Frois- sart and his successors are equally applicable to all parts of it.
THE ASSASSINS. 131