Order of Assassins: Hasan-i Sabbah and Alamut Castle

The Order of Assassins is the name given in Europe to the Nizari Ismailis, a Shi’i Muslim community that in 1090 seized the castle of Alamut in the mountains of northern Iran under the leadership of Hasan-i Sabbah. From a network of fortresses in Iran and later Syria they held out against the Seljuk Turks and others for more than 160 years, and became notorious for the targeted killing of enemy leaders. Much of what Europeans long believed about them, from drugged killers to secret paradise gardens, comes from hostile legends rather than evidence.

Background: the Ismailis and the Seljuks

The Ismailis are a branch of Shi’i Islam who follow a line of imams descended from the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali. In the tenth century an Ismaili dynasty founded the Fatimid Caliphate in North Africa and Egypt, which sent missionaries, called da’is, across the Islamic world.

In Iran these missionaries worked under the rule of the Seljuk Turks, who championed Sunni Islam and persecuted Ismailis. Hasan-i Sabbah, born in Qom in the mid-eleventh century and raised in Rey, converted to Ismailism as a young man. He travelled to Fatimid Cairo around 1078 and returned to Iran as a missionary.

The seizure of Alamut

Alamut stands on a rocky ridge in the Alborz mountains, in the region of Rudbar north-west of Qazvin. It was hard to reach and easy to defend. Hasan’s agents converted members of the garrison, and in 1090, traditionally on 4 September, he took control of the castle with little or no fighting. Its former commander was reportedly paid for it.

Hasan made Alamut the centre of an Ismaili state that spread through mountain castles in Rudbar, in Quhistan in eastern Iran and around Girdkuh. These were not a single territory but islands of control in Seljuk lands.

When the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir died in 1094, the Fatimid court in Cairo chose his younger son al-Musta’li as successor. Hasan and the Iranian Ismailis instead recognised the elder son Nizar, which is why they are called Nizaris. This broke them away from Cairo.

Targeted killings

Unable to match Seljuk armies in the field, the Nizaris used a weapon of the weak: the killing of selected leaders by devoted agents, known as fida’is, meaning those ready to sacrifice themselves. Agents often worked in disguise and attacked with daggers in public places, and many did not survive.

The vizier Nizam al-Mulk, stabbed in 1092, is usually counted as their first famous victim. Others included the Abbasid caliph al-Mustarshid in 1135 and, in Syria, Conrad of Montferrat, the newly chosen ruler of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, in April 1192. Two attempts were made on Saladin in the 1170s. The number of killings was modest compared with the wars of the time, but their psychological effect was great.

Life in the fortresses

Alamut and the other castles were not only military strongholds. The Nizaris built cisterns, storerooms and terraced fields, and Hasan-i Sabbah is credited with planting trees and improving irrigation in the valley below Alamut. Communities could hold out for long sieges, and the Seljuks repeatedly failed to starve them out.

The castles were also centres of learning. Alamut’s library was famous, and the Nizaris supported scholars of theology, philosophy and astronomy. The great scientist Nasir al-Din al-Tusi spent many years in Nizari castles in Quhistan and at Alamut before joining the Mongols after 1256, and wrote some of his important works there.

The Nizari state minted coins, collected taxes and conducted diplomacy. Its leaders made agreements with neighbouring rulers, received envoys and, at times, sent embassies as far as the court of the crusader kings and of the Mongols. Historians such as Farhad Daftary emphasise that this was a functioning state, not simply a secret society of killers.

Hasan-i Sabbah and his successors

Hasan lived austerely at Alamut and, according to the sources, did not leave the castle for some thirty-four years. He is said to have executed both of his sons for breaking the community’s strict rules. He died in 1124.

Under his successors the Nizari state survived Seljuk sieges and the decline of the Seljuks themselves. In 1164 the lord of Alamut, Hasan II, proclaimed the qiyama, a spiritual resurrection that declared the outward rules of religious law no longer binding. A later leader, Jalal al-Din Hasan III, reversed this policy in 1210 and drew closer to Sunni neighbours.

In Syria the Nizaris acquired castles such as Masyaf from the 1130s and 1140s. Their most famous leader there, Rashid al-Din Sinan, who led them from about 1162 to 1193, was known to the crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain.

The Mongol destruction

In the 1250s the Mongol prince Hulagu, brother of the Great Khan Möngke, marched west with orders to destroy the Nizari castles and then the Abbasid caliphate. The young Nizari leader Rukn al-Din Khurshah negotiated and finally surrendered in November 1256. Alamut surrendered soon after and was dismantled.

The Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvaini, who served Hulagu, examined Alamut’s famous library. He saved some works of science and history but burned books he regarded as heretical. Khurshah was put to death in 1257 on a journey to Mongolia. The campaign led directly to the founding of the Ilkhanate. In Syria the Mamluk sultan Baybars took the remaining Nizari castles by 1273.

Myths and facts

Several popular ideas about the Assassins are legends. Marco Polo, writing around 1300, described an Old Man who drugged young men and placed them in a paradise garden to make them obedient killers; he never visited Alamut, which had already fallen. The link between the word assassin and hashish was popularised by the French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy in 1809, but the name hashishi was an insult and no reliable source shows Nizari agents using drugs. Historians such as Farhad Daftary trace these stories to enemies and to European imagination.

Another myth is that the Nizaris were simply hired killers who would murder for anyone who paid. Their killings were aimed at people they saw as direct threats to their community, such as commanders besieging their castles or officials who persecuted Ismailis. Crusader writers sometimes claimed that rulers bought Nizari services, and contemporaries readily blamed them for any unexplained murder, but such accusations were often political and are rarely provable.

Finally, the surviving ruins of Alamut are modest. Little remains on the summit beyond foundations, cisterns and fragments of walls, because the Mongols deliberately dismantled the castle. Archaeological work since the early 2000s has studied the site, which is now a popular destination for visitors to the Alamut valley.

Timeline

• c. 1078: Hasan-i Sabbah travels to Fatimid Cairo.
• 1090, 4 September: Hasan takes Alamut.
• 1092, 14 October: Nizam al-Mulk is assassinated.
• 1094: Nizari–Musta’li split after the death of al-Mustansir.
• 1124: Death of Hasan-i Sabbah at Alamut.
• 1164: Hasan II proclaims the qiyama.
• 1192, 28 April: Conrad of Montferrat is killed at Tyre.
• 1256, November: Rukn al-Din Khurshah surrenders to Hulagu; Alamut falls.
• 1273: Baybars takes the last Nizari castles in Syria.

Why it matters

The Nizari state at Alamut showed how a small religious community could survive for generations against great empires through fortresses, organisation and fear. Its enemies’ stories gave European languages the word assassin, and separating that legend from history remains a lesson in how reputations are made.