The so-called 'Assassins' are one of the most spectacular legends of medieval history. In the popular imagination they are drug-crazed fanatics who launched murderous attacks on their enemies, terrorising the medieval world. Since the tales of Marco Polo and others, the myths surrounding them have been fantastically embellished and the truth has become ever more obscure. Universally loathed and feared, they were especially frightening because they apparently had no fear of death.
Bartlett's book deftly traces the origins of the sect out of the schisms within the early Islamic religion and examines the impact of Hasan-i-Sabbah, its founder, and Sinan - the legendary 'Old Man of the Mountain'. This popular history follows the vivid history of the group over the next two centuries, including its clash with the crusaders, its near destruction at the hands of the Mongols, and its subsequent history. Finally, and fascinatingly, we discover how the myths surrounding the Assassins have developed over time, and why indeed they continue to have such an impact on the popular imagination.
The so-called 'Assassins' are one of the most spectacular legends of medieval history. In the popular imagination they are drug-crazed fanatics who launched murderous attacks on their enemies, terrorising the medieval world. Since the tales of Marco Polo and others, the myths surrounding them have been fantastically embellished and the truth has become ever more obscure. Universally loathed and feared, they were especially frightening because they apparently had no fear of death.
Bartlett's book deftly traces the origins of the sect out of the schisms within the early Islamic religion and examines the impact of Hasan-i-Sabbah, its founder, and Sinan - the legendary 'Old Man of the Mountain'. This popular history follows the vivid history of the group over the next two centuries, including its clash with the crusaders, its near destruction at the hands of the Mongols, and its subsequent history. Finally, and fascinatingly, we discover how the myths surrounding the Assassins have developed over time, and why indeed they continue to have such an impact on the popular imagination.
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Overview
The so-called 'Assassins' are one of the most spectacular legends of medieval history. In the popular imagination they are drug-crazed fanatics who launched murderous attacks on their enemies, terrorising the medieval world. Since the tales of Marco Polo and others, the myths surrounding them have been fantastically embellished and the truth has become ever more obscure. Universally loathed and feared, they were especially frightening because they apparently had no fear of death.
Bartlett's book deftly traces the origins of the sect out of the schisms within the early Islamic religion and examines the impact of Hasan-i-Sabbah, its founder, and Sinan - the legendary 'Old Man of the Mountain'. This popular history follows the vivid history of the group over the next two centuries, including its clash with the crusaders, its near destruction at the hands of the Mongols, and its subsequent history. Finally, and fascinatingly, we discover how the myths surrounding the Assassins have developed over time, and why indeed they continue to have such an impact on the popular imagination.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752496146 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/20/2009 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Assassins
The Story of Medieval Islam's Secret Sect
By W.B. Bartlett
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 W.B. BartlettAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9614-6
CHAPTER 1
The Early Years of Islam
In the middle of the first millennium following the birth of Christ, a great storm came out of the Arabian desert. Irresistible, unstoppable, it overwhelmed the lands of the Middle East and then spread outwards across the world, consuming all who dared to stand in its path. It seemed that no one could resist its power, which inexorably overcame all resistance. Those obstinate, or misguided, enough to resist were broken like saplings in the path of a whirlwind. Its advance was unprecedented and hard to credit, given the longevity of the regimes that perished in the storm. Yet for all its force, all the fear it inspired in the hearts and minds of those exposed to its effects, in the remains of the cultures that were subsumed by it, new civilization took root. A new world order was born, one in which art and science would hold an exalted place. The storm had conquered old beliefs and ways of life so that they could be replaced with something far better.
But this new and vibrant force was, from early on, hampered by its own internal difficulties. The storm, which was Islam, unleashed powers that it itself found difficult to control. In common with many great religions, it was soon divided by internal dissent as men argued that theirs alone was the one way to religious truth. In the dissent fomented by these disputes, new factions would gestate, groups with, in their opponents' eyes, strange and heretical codes of belief.
No study of the so-called 'Assassins' can be complete without first of all attempting to explain the religious and political environment in which the movement was born, for the early years of Islam shaped and moulded its beliefs. Those early years were momentous in terms of their future effects. The Middle East is a region that has known more than its fair share of turbulence in its time, but there can have been few more uncertain periods in its history than the centuries that immediately preceded the creation of the group most properly known as the Nizaris. The new forces unleashed by the birth of Islam dramatically amended the structure of the Middle East, and indeed the regions beyond. They would be re-shaped by a series of invasions and political and religious re-alignments. It was in a much-changed Middle Eastern region that the Nizaris would ultimately establish themselves.
The new religion evolved in Mecca, in the early years of the seventh century AD. Before the arrival of Islam in the region, the city was already a sacred place. Within its walls was to be found the Ka ba, literally 'The Cube', the site where Ismail, the eldest son of Abraham, had set up his first home after being sent away by his father. It was here that a merchant named Muhammad, husband to a rich wife, received a revelation in the year 610. As a consequence of this divine inspiration, he developed a new creed. It owed much to other religions, namely Judaism and Christianity. Muhammad believed that there was much that was right in the Christian creed. He accepted that Christ was not only a prophet, but was in fact one of the foremost of all holy men. He had no difficulty even in accepting the principle of the miraculous Virgin birth. What, however, he would not countenance was the concept of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. To him, it implied that there was more than one God and this he would not accept. Primarily, his new religion was based on what he regarded as pure, monotheistic principles and in his pantheon there was only room for one deity.
Inevitably, as these doctrines developed during the formative years of his new creed, they began to impinge on political and social issues. That Islam was first and foremost a religious force need not be doubted; but, as it matured, it inevitably impacted in other spheres. This meant that a clash with those of the established order who held opposing views was more or less inevitable. It was merely a question of when such tensions would lead to outright confrontation.
Naturally enough, at the outset there was not a huge groundswell of support for Muhammad's beliefs. His first followers were his wife Khadija, and his cousin and son-in-law Ali, a man who would assume an important role in the development of Islam. But, in a small way at first, his creed took root. His immediate neighbours came to accept his doctrines, and by the year 619 he had gathered around him in Mecca a small but loyal group of followers.
However, in that year his life was to veer off in a new direction, as Muhammad began a literal and spiritual journey that would not only transform his own being but also that of millions of others subsequently. He had been fortunate to have at the outset a powerful patron in Mecca, his uncle Abu Talib, who acted as his protector. However, when Abu Talib died Muhammad felt himself to be dangerously exposed, surrounded by strong and determined enemies. The threat seemed so great that he fled to Medina.
During his subsequent time in Medina, the green shoots of Muhammad's creed blossomed to full fruition. There was a large and influential Jewish community in the city, and Muhammad experimented with many of their beliefs. For a while, his personal creed appeared to be moving ever closer to Judaism. But something happened to alter his course. Muhammad's house in Medina became the first mosque of the new religion. Symbolically, the main entrance of this building had been placed to face towards Jerusalem. But after a time the direction of the entrance was changed so that it faced Mecca. It was a symbolic assertion that the focus of the new faith had shifted towards the latter city. In 625, the relationship between the Jewish community in Medina and the supporters of Muhammad tangibly disintegrated. Some of the Jews were expelled from the city, others were slain.
Muhammad's new religion was not merely a passive, contemplative creed. The development of Islam was accompanied by an increasing militarization of the community around the Prophet. For this was an approach to religion that judged that, if persuasion would not work as a means of converting the heathen to the one true way, then force would do just as well. This was not to say that warfare was the sole policy available to, or used by, Muhammad. The sagacious use of peace treaties with potential opponents proved an invaluable tactic. But Muhammad also frequently employed military options.
From Medina, in 624 Muhammad began to attack Mecca. Raids were launched by Muhammad's supporters, focussing particularly on the trade caravans that criss-crossed the desert lands of Arabia towards Mecca, with great frequency. Relying on the income from such trading, the inhabitants of the city felt the resultant losses very keenly. No doubt disconcerted by this loss of income, by 628 the inhabitants of Mecca had reached a peace agreement with Muhammad, under the terms of which the pilgrimage route to the Ka\ba in Mecca was re-opened. In 630, an army of 10,000 of his supporters made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
The influence of the new religion quickly spread both north and south from its birthplace. By this period in history, many of the existing religions were becoming increasingly complicated. As one example, Christianity had long been involved in an ongoing dispute concerning the nature of Christ, and whether He was wholly human, wholly divine or a combination of the two. That these differences were keenly felt by those who held one view or another is not seriously in doubt; the Monophysite controversy that scarred the late fifth century and the period beyond is evidence enough of that. But although such doctrinal niceties gave the intelligentsia great intellectual satisfaction, to other elements of society they seemed little more than sophistry. To these it appeared that the spiritual imperatives of religion were being subsumed by an excessive concentration on a debate that appeared to have become increasingly academic. In contrast to the tortuous, endless arguments that marked the development of Christianity in the first half of the first millennium, Islam offered a return to older, simpler beliefs. The attraction of this so-called 'new' religion was that it was based on traditional and conservative values.
In contrast to the complications that came to characterize parts of Christianity, the early doctrines of Islam were not complex. There were five basic precepts, 'The Five Pillars' as they came to be known, that formed the bedrock on which the creed was based.
The first of these 'Pillars' was that the religion was monotheistic. It was expressed early on in the development of the religion in the phrase 'There is no God but God: and Muhammad is the messenger of God'. Thus was the ultimate and unchallenged position of Allah stated, along with an assertion of the importance of Muhammad, His Prophet, to the religion. On this basis alone, the legitimacy of Christianity was challenged and rebutted: the confusing status of the Trinity, as the followers of Muhammad saw it, in itself made Christianity a distortion of the true way to God.
Giving support to this primary precept, the other 'Pillars' exemplified how the true believer should behave. The importance of prayer was especially emphasized, and the necessity of setting aside certain times of the day as moments when prayer to Allah was to be engaged in was developed. Such moments were times of great ritual, when the community would join together and offer their prayers both corporately and individually. These occasions fostered a bond of community, which welded the people of Islam together, giving them a powerful impetus that other, more divided communities found difficult to resist.
Fasting was also important in Islamic doctrine. It was already a part of the other religions that pre-dated Islam in the region. Muhammad would have been particularly aware of the emphasis placed on the Feast of the Passover by the Jewish inhabitants of Medina. He built on the importance of this festival but expanded it significantly. The followers of Islam would fast for a month, during the period that would become known as Ramadan.
It would also be important for the true believer to give overt expression to his beliefs by undertaking pilgrimages to the places that were held important by the faith. Such pilgrimages, known as the hajj, were not only acts that gave the participants a sense of vicarious connection with individuals such as Abraham – and eventually Muhammad himself – who were important to their faith, they were again corporate undertakings which fostered the community spirit of the religion. Finally, Islam also emphasised the importance of almsgiving. As Allah had honoured individuals with the wealth that they held, then in return those individuals should honour Him by offering back a proportion of what they had been blessed with materially. Thus, a fixed proportion of income was to be offered back to Him, equating to one tenth of the wealth of individuals.
These Five Pillars, that is monotheism, the emphasis on prayer, the importance of fasting, the requirement for believers to participate in acts of pilgrimage and the necessity for almsgiving, were supported by a sub-stratum of other beliefs, known as 'good practices'. One of these was to become very important in its own right. This was the concept of jihad, the armed struggle undertaken by believers to conquer those who did not share their beliefs.
This is not to say that all other religions were treated with disrespect; the reverse was in fact often the case. Although Islam preached that both Judaism and Christianity were flawed distortions of the true faith, there was nevertheless an acceptance that some elements of both religions were doctrinally sound. Christians and Jews were described as 'People of the Book', referring to the fact that many of their writings, the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible for example, found echoes in the Islamic holy book, the Qur an. Both religions would therefore be treated with a degree of tolerance (though over the course of the centuries the tide of such understanding would ebb and flow on occasion) and were normally allowed to practice their religions unmolested, albeit with certain curbs on their freedom. For those people who did not belong to either of these faiths however there was a much greater degree of intolerance exhibited.
Despite the use on many occasions of peaceful tactics in the formative years of Islam, more aggressive measures were also employed. The consequences of the forces unleashed by the development of Islam, both military and idealistic, particularly evidenced in the strong sense of unity that it inspired among its believers, were profound and rarely rivalled for their effects at any other point in the course of human history. When the faith of Muhammad made its way up through the desert wastes of Arabia and into the Middle East, then the centre of civilization, its progress was astounding.
Islam was fortunate in that it timed its appearance to perfection. The West, traditional repository of the balance of power in Rome for the past 700 years, was at the time in a state of constant, bewildering flux. Much of Europe had been overrun as Rome lost its dominance and retreated into a state of irrevocable decline. New cultures were even now taking its place but they were as yet only in their formative years and had much maturation to go through before their promise reached fruition.
Despite the decline of Rome itself, the city's former Empire lived on, though in a much changed and Hellenistic form, in Constantinople, where the Emperor of Byzantium had inherited the title of Imperator from the Caesars of old. The balance of power shifted markedly to the east. The sixth century had seen some remarkable periods of reconquest by Byzantium. Parts of the Italian peninsula itself were occupied once more (they had been lost to a series of barbarian invasions in the previous century) although in the long run it would be shown that they could not be held. A vibrant successor to Rome appeared to have been established.
In the far east of its empire however Byzantium did not have things all its own way. Here it came into contact with the other great power in the region at that time, the Persian Empire. Although, arguably, the golden age of Persia had come and gone a thousand years before, it was still a force to be reckoned with. Given the close proximity of the two empires, the one Byzantine, the other Persian, it was inevitable that there would often be friction. Ironically, at the same time that Byzantium was winning great victories in Italy and North Africa, the Persians themselves were resurgent.
During the opening years of the seventh century, Persia and Byzantium were constantly at each other's throats. As far as Islam is concerned, the real importance of this extended period of warfare between Byzantium and Persia revolves around a coincidence of timing. For, at the same time that the Muslim faith was being established in the Arabian Peninsula, which had up until now generally been on the periphery of world affairs, the two traditional great powers in the immediate area were exhausted by the long campaigns that each had been waging against the other. When the forces of Islam moved northwards up the Arabian Peninsula soon after the death of Muhammad from a fever in 632, the nations bordering the Arabs were much weakened by the exertions of the decades immediately past. Their emaciation heralded in a period of extraordinary success for the emergent Islamic religion. The forces of this new creed burst forth from the desert and advanced on Syria. Caught off guard, the Byzantine defences in the region were overrun.
It must have come as an enormous shock when Damascus, at that time held by Byzantium, fell to these Muslim warriors. Certainly, the city's loss prompted a huge counter-attack. A force of some 80,000 men marched out of Constantinople and across Asia Minor to drive away the forces of Islam. The two armies eventually met near the River Yarmuk in Palestine in 636. At a critical moment in the battle a sandstorm blew up in the faces of the Byzantine troops. Taking advantage of the chaos that ensued, the Islamic forces charged ferociously at the Byzantines. Overwhelmed by the vigour of their attack, the Byzantines started to crack and then broke completely. In a defeat of cataclysmic proportions, their army was overrun. It was a reverse of enormous magnitude.
Jerusalem itself fell soon after and for a time the Muslim tide seemed unstoppable. Having conquered Palestine and Syria, the Islamic forces then turned their attention to Persia. The Sassanid dynasty in Persia proved no more capable of resisting the Muslims than the Byzantines had. The Persians suffered two massive defeats at the Battles of Qadisaya (637) and Nihavand (642). The ruling dynasty was overthrown. Persia was then incorporated into the rapidly expanding Islamic Empire.
This was not the end of this procession of conquest. Egypt fell into Islamic hands. The Muslim armies then advanced across Asia Minor and in 673 they threatened Constantinople itself, though the great walls of the mighty city were too powerful for them to breach, as they were still inexperienced in siege warfare. The Muslim tidal wave then swept across North Africa, engulfing the frail Byzantine territories in the region. From here, they made the short crossing from Africa to Europe across the Straits of Gibraltar. The ruling Visigoth dynasty in Spain was overwhelmed. It was not until the Islamic forces were within two hundred miles of the English Channel that their progress was finally halted by the Franks in 732 under their warrior-king, Charles Martel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Assassins by W.B. Bartlett. Copyright © 2013 W.B. Bartlett. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Prologue,
1 The Early Years of Islam,
2 The Rise of the Isma'ilis,
3 The Visionary,
4 The Division,
5 The Legacy of Hasan-i Sabbah,
6 The Syrian Dimension,
7 The Resurrection,
8 The Old Man of the Mountain,
9 Re-integration,
10 Nemesis,
11 Syrian Sunset,
12 From History to Legend,
13 The Twilight Years,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,