The Assassins of Alamut

The Ismailis are a branch of Shi‘i Islam who follow a line of imams descended from the Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali. In the eleventh century their main state was the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. When the caliph al-Mustansir died in 1094, a dispute arose over his successor. Those who supported his elder son Nizar, especially in Iran, broke away and became known as Nizaris.

Their leader in Iran was Hasan-i Sabbah, an educated missionary, or da‘i, who had already seized the mountain fortress of Alamut in 1090. From there the Nizaris gained control of a chain of castles in northern and eastern Iran and later in the mountains of Syria. These formed an unusual state without a single territory, held together by religious loyalty and a common leadership. It survived for more than a century and a half against the much larger Seljuq Turkish empire, crusaders and other rivals.

In Syria the most famous leader was Rashid al-Din Sinan, whom crusaders called the Old Man of the Mountain. The Nizari state in Iran ended when the Mongols destroyed Alamut in 1256, and in Syria the Mamluk sultan Baybars took the last castles by 1273. The Nizaris were not simply a military organisation. They were a religious community of farmers, townspeople and scholars living around their fortresses, who regarded their imam as the rightful guide of all Muslims and who developed their own rich theology. After the Mongol conquest the community survived, often in concealment, in Iran, Central Asia and South Asia.

The Nizaris did use assassination as a political weapon. Volunteers called fida’is, those ready to sacrifice themselves, killed sultans, viziers, commanders and religious officials, usually in public and with daggers, often expecting to die in the attempt. The murder of the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk in 1092 was attributed to them, and in 1192 two agents killed Conrad of Montferrat, who had just been chosen as king of Jerusalem. Such killings were a means for a small community to deter much larger enemies, and the practice was not unique to them in the politics of the time.

The Nizaris were also a community of learning. Alamut had a notable library, and the scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi worked in Nizari fortresses before the Mongol conquest. Much of what was long believed about them came from hostile Sunni chroniclers and from crusader writers who did not know their beliefs. Since the twentieth century, historians such as Farhad Daftary have used surviving Ismaili texts to give a fuller picture.

The word hashishiyya was used of the Nizaris by some opponents as an insult, roughly meaning rabble or low people. Historians find no reliable evidence that they used hashish to prepare for their missions.

European crusaders heard of the Nizaris as a mysterious sect that killed on command, and garbled the Arabic insult into words such as assassini. The most famous story appears in the travel account of Marco Polo, written around 1300. It describes a beautiful hidden garden where the Old Man of the Mountain drugged young men and made them believe they had visited paradise, so that they would kill in hope of returning. Polo could not have visited Alamut, which had already fallen, and his tale draws on rumour.

In 1809 the French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy explained that the word assassin derived from hashish, and this helped fix the drug legend in European scholarship. By then assassin had long become an ordinary word for a political murderer in several European languages, and the Nizaris had become a byword for fanaticism.

The legend lives on in novels such as Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut and in the video game series Assassin’s Creed, which borrows the setting and the leap of faith from older tales. Meanwhile the Nizari Ismailis themselves, now a global community led by the Aga Khan, are known for education, development and cultural work, a reminder of the gap between legend and living people.