The infamous Nizari Ismaili Assassins were a Shia religious sect created by a missionary named Hassan as-Sabbah (c.1034-1134) in the late eleventh century. With religious origins dating to the time of the prophet Muhammad (c.570-632), the sect of Ismailism grew in influence during the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt (909-1171), with the Nizari sect eventually splitting off in the late eleventh century and as-Sabbah setting up a training facility at Alamut Castle in the heart of the rugged Alborz Mountains in northern Persia.  Over time, additional Assassin strongholds would be built near in the rough terrain near Alamut and further west in Syria (Masyaf and Qadmus). The term “assassin” comes from these well-trained killers, being derived from an Arabic word for hashish, a drug supposedly used by the sect, though its usage is absent from the primary sources. However, a more appropriate term would be fida’i for “one who risks his life voluntarily” or sometimes “redeemer,” from the Arabic word for “sacrifice.”  It is from the plural form of this Arabic word that we get the present-day fedayeen or Arabic fighter willing to die for a cause. More commonly referred to as Assassins in the Christian West, these dedicated killers might spend months or even years infiltrating an enemy camp in order to achieve intimate access to their target. Assassins used asymmetrical warfare to overcome their opponent’s superiority in troops, number of fortifications, and territory held, frustrating the ambitions of great regional princes.

Many of the Shia Assassins first targets were leaders of the invading Seljuk Turks, a steppe people converted to Sunni Islam who created a large empire stretching from Persia to Anatolia, seizing the Abbasid capital of Baghdad in 1055 and forcing the caliph into a purely figurehead role. The Great Seljuk Empire (1037-1194) had designs on Fatimid Egypt, bringing them in direct conflict with a regional Shia power and the secret sect of Ismaili Assassins. Under Toghril Beg (r.1055-1063) and Alp Arslan (r.1063-1072) Seljuk fortunes continued to rise, especially after the defeat of the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 that opened the Anatolian peninsula to Turkish invasion and settlement. After Alp Arslan’s death his Persian vizier, Nizam al-Mulk (1018-1092) continued to expand Seljuk territory into the Caucasus Mountains, contained the Ghaznavids in Khorasan, rolled back the Fatimids in Syria, all while keeping the Abbasid caliphs under Seljuk suzerainty. Even at the height of his power, he was unable to protect himself from the long reach of the Assassin grand master, Hassan as-Sabbah. Nizam al-Mulk was stabbed to death in 1092 by a killer disguised as a Sufi who approached his litter while on Hajj traveling between Isfahan and Baghdad.

Eight decades later, the growing power of the Sunni Ayyubid Sultanate in Egypt and Syria (1171-1260), the successor to the Shia Fatimid Caliphate, brought its leader Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub or “Saladin” in the West (r.1174-1193) to the Assassins’ attention. Rising to prominence in the campaigns of his uncle Shirkuh in Egypt between 1164-1168, Saladin assumed control of Cairo after his uncle’s death in 1169 and established his sultanate two years later. Saladin quickly consolidated Islamic territory in Syria under his Sunni banner, putting him in direct confrontation with the Shia Assassins and their new leader, Rashid al-Din Sinan (c.1132-1192), the master of a Syrian sect of Assassins based at Castle Masyaf in the mountains southwest of Aleppo. The location of Sinan’s headquarters gave him the title “Old Man of the Mountain” and his willingness to insert himself into both Islamic and Latin affairs made him a leading figure in the history of the crusades.

Saladin’s first direct contact with the Assassins came when he was sieging the rival Muslim city of Aleppo. During the first week of January 1175, Sinan dispatched a murder gang who infiltrated Saladin’s camp outside of Aleppo, making their way to the entrance of the sultan’s tent before their disguises were pierced and the Assassins were cut down. The twelfth century German chronicler Arnold of Lübeck (d. c.1214) describes the impact the “Old Man of the Mountain” had on the imaginations of western Europeans:

"This Old Man has by his witchcraft, so bemused the men of his country that they neither worship nor believe in any God but him. He entices them with promises of an afterlife in which they will enjoy eternal pleasure and so he makes them prefer death to life. He only has to give the nod and they will jump off a high wall, breaking their skulls and dying miserably. The truly blessed, so he tells them, are those who kill others and are themselves then killed. Whenever any of his followers choose to die in this way, he presents them with knives which are, so to speak, consecrated to murder. He then gives them a potion which intoxicates them, plunging them into ecstasy and oblivion. Thus, he uses his magic to make them see fantastic dreams, full of pleasures and delights. He promises them that they will live in such dreams forever if they die when killing at his command."

A year later in May 1176 while the Saladin was sieging nearby Azaz, Assassins again attacked the Ayyubid sultan while napping, this time in the tent of a staff officer. The assailant’s knife blow glanced off the mailed coif worn under his turban, however a second strike cut through the collar of the thick riding tunic before being stopped by his mail shirt. Saladin’s attendant grabbed the knife blade, cutting his own fingers to the bone before killing the Assassin. Moments later two more would-be killers attacked inside the tent before being dispatched by the guard. Later, an inquiry remarked that all three Assassins enrolled and advanced in the sultan’s bodyguard, a testimony to the reach of the “Old Man of the Mountain.” Undeterred, Saladin laid siege to the Assassin leader’s mountain fortress at Masyaf hoping to set a trap. When Sinan agreed to a meeting, Saladin sent his troops to kill or capture him, only to return empty handed with frightened tales of sorcery. Growing paranoid, the sultan slept in a specially constructed wooden tower bunker erected in his tent and placed chalk dust and cinders around his encampment to record an Assassin’s approach. Despite these precautions, Saladin woke one night a few days into the siege to find a shadowy figure leaving his tent. Beside him on his pillow was still hot bread and a poisoned dagger pinning a note threatening the sultan’s life. The next day Saladin raised the siege for no identifiable military reason, and never drew the attention of Assassins again during his reign.

The Assassins would continue to influence Muslim, Latin, and even Mongolian politics over the next century. In the Crusader states, an Assassin’s dagger would murder the soon-to-be elected king of Jerusalem, Conrad Montferrat (1145-1192), only days before his coronation in 1192, with the English king Richard I (r.1189-1199) implicated in the killing, successfully fermenting division among the crusaders at a time when they were trying to retake the holy city of Jerusalem. Despite the descriptions of assassinations and assassination attempts noted above, the main objective of the Nizari Assassins throughout their history was the disruption and destruction of the Sunni Islamic sect across the Near East. Most Sunni victims of the Assassins belong to two main categories: princes, officers, ministers and imams and other religious dignitaries in important urban areas like Damascus, Homs, and Mosul. These killings were usually done in public for maximum political effect, murders designed to frighten, weaken, and overthrow Sunni rule. To this end, Assassins did not normally attack their fellow Shias, nor did they attack native Christian or Jewish communities. In fact, there were few attacks on the invading crusaders unless it met greater political or military objectives, such as the murder of a commanding officer threatening Ismaili territory or killing the occupants of a stronghold they wished to acquire.  

Top photo: Artwork of Nizam al-Mulk’s assassination. Miniature from the Jami' al-tawarikh of Rashid al-Din Hamadani. Source: Wikipedia. In the Public 

Middle photo 1: Sculpture of Saladin in the Egyptian Military museum in Cairo. Source: Wikipedia. In the Public 

Middle photo 2: Masyaf Castle in Syria. The headquarters of the “Old Man of the Mountain.” Source: Wikipedia. In the Public 

Bottom photo: Muslim illustration of Alamut besieged. The last Grand Master of the Assassins at Alamut Imam Rukn al-Din Khurshah (1255–1256) was executed by the Mongols. National Library of France, Paris. Source: Wikipedia. In the Public 

The Nizari Ismaili Assassins faced their greatest threat with the expansion of the Mongols into the Near East in the early thirteenth century. As Islam was embroiled with its counter-crusade against the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, a new, more ominous threat was emerging from the East. Subduing local Tartar, Turkish and Mongol tribes, Chinggis Khan (r.1206-1227) built up an army of loyal tribesmen and their armies and conquered northern China and Korea by 1216, then spread westward across Central Asia to invade Persia. Between 1219 and 1221, Genghis Khan crushed the Islamic Khwarazm Empire in Transoxiana and Persia. His armies moved west and invaded the Ukrainian steppes in 1223. Chinggis Khan died in 1227 having created the largest contiguous land empire yet seen in human history. After his death, his empire was divided into four states, called khanates, with one of the lines of his descendants taking charge of each of the regions. However, years of succession problems had disrupted the momentum of Mongol conquests, and the western Eurasian khans were anxious to spread Mongol hegemony into Islamic Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt.   

Using successful tried-and-true methods in disrupting the crusaders and Sunni states in the Levant, the Assassin leadership proposed a bold plan to disrupt Mongol interference in their affairs. In 1253, four hundred Assassins disguised as merchants, mendicant preachers, and traveled east along the Silk Road towards the Mongol capital of Karakorum to kill Möngke Khan (r.1251-1259), the newly elected Great Khan and Chinggis Khan’s grandson. This plot was foiled by the Mongol’s own good intelligence and special security precautions taken to protect their leader. The Mongols, expanding rapidly westward along the Eurasian steppes, recognized the two greatest obstacles to their Near Eastern conquest lie in the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and the Nizari Ismaili Assassins who operated from the seemingly impregnable mountain fortresses in northern Persia. Möngke Khan’s cousin, Hülegü Khan (r.1256-1265) was tasked with destroying both the Abbasid Caliphate and the Nizari Ismaili of Persia. Hülegü Khan entered Persia in 1256 with an army of over 100,000 men and a very substantial siege train manned by crews of Chinese engineers.  The Ismaili mountain fortresses were his first objective. As the Mongol military machine reduced castles in Lamassar, Maimum-Diz, and Alamut, the last grand master of the Assassins, Rukn ad-Din Khurshah (1255-1256), threw himself on the mercy of Möngke Khan, journeying to the court in Karakorum, only to be denied an audience. He was murdered on the way back to Persia by his Mongol escorts. By February 1257 over a hundred of the Ismaili’s castles had been demolished, their inhabitants, including women and children, slaughtered. The Persian historian Ata Malik Juvaini (1226-1283) claims the Mongols systematically depopulated the region, exterminating over one hundred thousand people to break the back of the Assassin sect. The Mongols had accomplished in mere months what the Islamic world had tried to do for two centuries: end the Ismaili Assassins’ reign of terror as a regional player, although the remnants of the sect would continue in Syria as contract killers for the next regional Sunni power, the Egyptian Bahri Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517). The Mongols continued west and defeated the Abbasid Caliphate, sieging and razing Baghdad in 1258, but were stopped from adding the Levant to their imperium by a Mamluk victory at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1261.

With the Mongols retreating from Syria, the Mamluks turned their attention to finally ridding the Holy Land of crusaders. In 1272, an Assassin’s knife nearly ended the life of the future English king Edward I in Acre while the prince was fulfilling his crusading vow during the Ninth Crusade (1271-1272), the last of the numbered crusades to the Levant. The attack took place in June, probably instigated by Edward’s resistance to signing a truce with the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. A messenger from the Mamluk sultan, who had previously visited Edward on four occasions, slipped a hidden dagger from his belt and attacked. Edward, a veteran thirty-three-year-old knight, blocked the blade with his arm, and then knocked the Assassin down, grasping the knife and stabbed his assailant in the chest before the prince’s bodyguard beat the would-be killer to death with a foot stool. Poisoned by the dagger, Edward immediately fell sick, but recovered enough to be seen on horseback two weeks later. Edward stayed in Acre through the summer and into the fall, overseeing the strengthening of the city’s defenses and the building of a new tower. Finally, in September, Edward departed for Sicily having done little to expand the territories of the Latin Kingdom and failing to secure the return of the Holy City to Christendom. Prince Edward learned of his father Henry III’s death on his journey home, and as King Edward I (r.1272-1307), he vowed to return to the Holy Land, but never did, instead using his kingdom’s martial energy to subdue northern Wales and campaign in Scotland, earning the title of “Hammer of the Scots.” The Latin occupation of the Levant would only last for another two decades before the Egyptian Mamluks sieged and stormed the final Catholic outpost in the region, the city of Acre, in 1291, ending the crusades to the Latin East.

For the nearly entire duration of the Latin occupation of the Levant the Nizari Ismaili Assassins used fifth column infiltrations and selective political killings to shape the political destiny of the Near East. Unable to meet their enemies on the battlefield, the Assassins used their unique form of terror tactics to overcome their opponent’s military advantages (superiority in troops, number of fortifications, and territory held), while forging an international reputation that reached far beyond the Holy Land and the medieval period.

Suggested Readings:

Primary sources

Ata Malik Juvaini, The History of the World-Conqueror. Translated by John Andrew Boyle. Harvard University Press, 1958.

Richards, D.S. The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh. Part 2: The Years 541–589/1146–1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin. Ashgate, 2006. 

Secondary sources

Hindley, Geoffrey. Saladin: Hero of Islam. Pen and Sword Military, 2007.

Humphreys, Stephen R. From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260. State University of New York Press, 1977. 

Lewis, Bernard. The Assassins: A Radical Sect of Islam. Oxford University Press, 1967.

Prestwich, Michael. Edward I. Yale University Press, 1997.

Waterson, James. The Ismaili Assassins: A History of Medieval Murder. Frontline Books, 2008.