SeriesThis update is dedicated to my friend Martin Courchesne and Corto Maltese who both got me into the story of the assassins.
The story of the assassins of Alamut is fascinating: a tale of political manipulation and assassinations. It starts with a religious sect called the Nizaris who were created after a schism with the Ismailis (of Shiite Muslim faith) in the late 1000's. The sect was ruled by Hassan Sabbah, also know as the old man of the mountain. He ruled over his flock from the castle of Alamut, about 200km NW of Tehran, in the mountains that border the Caspian Sea. At this time Persia was ruled by the Seljuk Turks, who were hostile to Ismailism.
Hassan Sabbath started as a Ismaili missionary who travelled Persia converting people to his faith. His sect was very secretive due to persecution from the Seljuks. In 1090 Sabbath and a few of his men infiltrated the garrison of the castle of Alamut and captured it, without shedding blood.
I will start by telling the more romantic version of this story... There was a magnificent garden in Alamut, and Hassan Sabbah would take promising young men there and provide them with wine, drugs and women (Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll sounds familiar to anyone?). They had a vision of what paradise would be like; I mentioned that the old Farsi word for garden — paridaïza — gave us the word paradise. One day the young men would wake up in a prison cell, and were told that in order to regain paradise they had to fulfill a mission for the old man: usually infiltrate the court or household of somebody powerful and wait for further instructions.
These men were called Hashashiyun, which came from the word Hashishi, which in old Persian meant: user of opium or user of hashish; interpretations differ. In English and French it gave us the word assassin. If you look it up in a dictionary of etymology, they do mention that assassin comes from the word hashish.
Hassan might eventually send word to his infiltrated men to assassinate someone in a public manner, which would be performed with the assassin not trying to escape. They would usually be put to an uneasy death and hence return to paradise. The power of the assassins derived partly from the publicity of these stunts. The sect of the assassins was feared from Europe to India. In 1192 — during the Crusades — the Marquis Conrad of Montferrat was murdered in Tyre by men disguised as monks, and it is generally supposed that these were Assassins.
Eventually the Mongols invaded Persia and Hulagu (Ghengis Khan's grandson) captured and destroyed Alamut in 1256, officially marking the end of the Nizaris. There is a rumor that the descendents of Hassan Sabbah lived secretly Azerbaijan after the fall of Alamut. By the middle of the fifteenth century they would had left this area and settled in Anjudan, near the city of Arak, Iran.
More than likely, the stories about drugs and women in the castle are part of the legend... This romanced version of the story of the assassins had first been told by Marco Polo, who visited Alamut soon after his destruction by the Mongols. Looking at the news today, it is obvious that people do not need drugs to perform acts of violence while scarifying their lives. The assassins of Alamut were probably motivated on purely religious grounds.
Bibliography:
My visit to Alamut seemed compromised before I even headed out the door. It is winter and the road to get there is know to be bad even in summer; the site is closed for an undetermined amount of time due to renovations, and no-one in Tehran (including travel agents) was willing to take me there. But that was not enough to wear me down... I headed out to the nearby town of Qazvin, and found a Land Rover that I could charter for the day. The only problem was the weather: when I was there it was raining, the clouds were low and visibility was very poor. There was no use to go up into the mountains in such weather. I could barely see across the street, let alone a half-destroyed castle on the top of a mountain. But my determination is not diminished in the least, I will attempt the trek again as soon as the weather clears up. I am in Iran for another week. Hopefully I will be able to share the photos by then.
Update: On Dec 9 2003 I returned to Alamut under a bright blue sky.