‘We are oppressed and not oppressors’ ~ Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain to Saladin
During the Crusades the winning formula was to put enormous amounts of money and energy into acquiring big armies. All the major players did it. The huge quantities of young, reckless men that this required were the underlying drivers for two centuries of war and criminality. They were also the basic building blocks upon which (almost) all power structures were built.
But if the major players struggled to build these voraciously expensive and disruptive armies, how did the minor players, the ones without big budgets or pulling power, survive?
The short answer is that in most cases they did not. The majority of the smaller Turkic players and their city-states gradually got rolled up into the bigger political entities that were forming around them – superstates such as Saladin’s Ayyubid Empire or its Mamluk successors. The old ruling families survived as long as they could, but only as vassals. Before long almost all of them were swept away. Almost, but not all.
Playing A Different Game
Templars depicted by Matthew Paris
The Assassins and the Templars often had an extremely fractious relationship. They had ostensibly nothing in common. They had vastly different reputations and cultural backgrounds. And yet in some ways they were strikingly similar.
Both groups, though they would not have deigned to recognise it, had a bizarrely similar cultural underpinning—overlapping objectives, similar strategies and strangely parallel defining characteristics.
Each was outnumbered. Each was surrounded. And each possessed no significant technological advantage over their enemies. They had to resort to fanaticism, focus and reckless bravery to redress the balance.
Both groups had some of the characteristics which we normally associate with being a ‘cult’. As we shall see, both of these ‘cults’ were formed around the promise of death. And both embodied the liberation, commitment and finality that accompanied such an acceptance. They looked for the death of their opponents and, although not wilfully suicidal, embraced the strong possibility of death themselves. Death was their promise and that promise lay at the heart of their power.
Each group also found a vital role as ‘state-builders’. This was an essential life raft for religious minorities in an often intolerant age – the Christian communities of the Middle East and the Nizari Ismaili Shi’ite minority, both nestling in the shadow of a potentially overwhelming Sunni empire, were always vulnerable. Both sects, Templars and Assassins alike, had, in effect, ambitions to create a state within a state.
In 2007, Ubisoft released the game Assassins Creed, which pitted the Assassins and Templars as mortal enemies. Photo by Michel Ngilen’ / Flickr
Vitally for their image and the methodology of fear that they eventually became famous for, both were unusually structured – unlike most political entities in that time and place, they were corporations rather than the more typical ‘family-run businesses’. They knew that the death of a carefully chosen individual (a successful leader, say, a wife or a beloved child) would have a profound effect on the dynastically-centred states of their enemies, while they themselves were impervious to such threats.
These ostensibly opposite but strangely parallel groups kept bouncing off each other over a period of two centuries – and, up to the present day, they have become endlessly conjoined in our memories. Their reputations have each taken a similar arc, morphing from hard-nosed reality into absurd legends, and from champions of their communities into pantomime villains.
The methodologies they invented were different but parallel. The Assassins’ threat was death when you least expected it – poisoned daggers in the mosque, hidden murderers emerging from the shadows. The Templars’ threat was death exactly when you did expect it – when you saw them charging straight at you there was no bluster, no war cries, just the power of death on horseback speeding onwards like an implacable force of nature.
The tactics might be different, but the message, and the fear it provoked, was the same. Whether facing the Assassin hit squads (the elite fidais) or a squadron of Templar knights, you knew you had a problem – these were people you needed to take far more seriously than their numbers would otherwise warrant.
Assassins – From Fragile to Fearsome
Amongst the minor groups that most contemporaries in the medieval Middle East would initially have nominated as ‘least likely to succeed’ were a small, unpopular band of Shi’ite religious enthusiasts. For most of their early history in the Holy Land they lacked a clear territorial or political base. They were small in number and without obvious economic assets. And they were widely despised by their powerful Sunni Muslim neighbours as heretics and traitors.
This obscure, and presumably doomed, breakaway sect later became known, by their enemies at least, as the Assassins.
Assassination of Nizam al-Mulk in 1192 depicted in a medieval manuscript – Topkapi Palace Museum, Cami Al Tebari TSMK, Inv. No. H. 1653, folio 360b
The word ‘Assassin’ is the name most readily recognised by Western readers, particularly in the context of the period of the crusades. Al-Hashishiyya (that is, ‘Assassins’) has often been used in a deliberately derogatory manner, particularly by the sect’s opponents. Here, of course, it has no negative or defamatory intent. Other terms used to describe them by Muslim contemporaries, who were generally hostile sources, included, with varying degrees of negative connotation, religious terms such as Batiniyya, Ta’limiyya, or Malahida. The more formal, and most correct, descriptor for the sect is Nizari Ismailis.
Whatever we choose to call them, however, the Assassins were the militant underdogs of the Crusades. Surrounded by danger, they chose to transform themselves into a community of unique threat, rather than meekly succumb to the more overt violence of their enemies.
Against all the odds, the Assassins survived – and they did so by refusing to play the same game that everyone else was so swept up in. They knew that they could not raise big armies. The regional demographic arms race was pitched at such a level that they could not even begin to compete. So, rather than fail in doing the same as everyone else, they focused instead on succeeding by doing something very different.
The Assassins instinctively grasped a profound but not always obvious truth. And they pursued that truth through to its logical conclusion. The concept behind their strategy of targeted murder was simple but powerful. As one anonymous Nizari poet wrote:
‘By a single warrior on foot, a king may be struck with terror, though he may own more than 100,000 horsemen.’
The delivery of death by an individual was a political act which bypassed the necessity of large armies or riches. It was the perfect means of projecting political will for those who were too weak or too poor to do so in more traditional military ways.
Armies are threatening. They can occupy ground, defeat other armies or capture cities. But they are hugely disruptive for all concerned. Their employers require vast amounts of money, food and land to attract and sustain them. And they have to be prepared for the social pressures which these restless bands of armed strangers exert upon the communities they find themselves in. Even more importantly, these armies are, until the critical moment, rather abstract and impersonal. They are the playing pieces in longer-term campaigns – the generality of violence rather than its pinpoint application.
What the Assassins understood was that they needed to project power in a way which was far more personal. And in a way which did not require the services of tens of thousands of irritatingly disruptive foreign soldiers.
Their solution was murder. Unstoppable murder. And with that, the legends began
.
Steve Tibble, an honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, has a new book out – Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood – from Yale University Press. It tells the story of the medieval world’s two most extraordinary organisations, tracing their origins, strategies, violent clashes, and enduring legacy in myth and memory.
You can get your copy of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood through
By Steve Tibble
‘We are oppressed and not oppressors’ ~ Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain to Saladin
During the Crusades the winning formula was to put enormous amounts of money and energy into acquiring big armies. All the major players did it. The huge quantities of young, reckless men that this required were the underlying drivers for two centuries of war and criminality. They were also the basic building blocks upon which (almost) all power structures were built.
But if the major players struggled to build these voraciously expensive and disruptive armies, how did the minor players, the ones without big budgets or pulling power, survive?
The short answer is that in most cases they did not. The majority of the smaller Turkic players and their city-states gradually got rolled up into the bigger political entities that were forming around them – superstates such as Saladin’s Ayyubid Empire or its Mamluk successors. The old ruling families survived as long as they could, but only as vassals. Before long almost all of them were swept away. Almost, but not all.
Playing A Different Game
The Assassins and the Templars often had an extremely fractious relationship. They had ostensibly nothing in common. They had vastly different reputations and cultural backgrounds. And yet in some ways they were strikingly similar.
Both groups, though they would not have deigned to recognise it, had a bizarrely similar cultural underpinning—overlapping objectives, similar strategies and strangely parallel defining characteristics.
Each was outnumbered. Each was surrounded. And each possessed no significant technological advantage over their enemies. They had to resort to fanaticism, focus and reckless bravery to redress the balance.
Both groups had some of the characteristics which we normally associate with being a ‘cult’. As we shall see, both of these ‘cults’ were formed around the promise of death. And both embodied the liberation, commitment and finality that accompanied such an acceptance. They looked for the death of their opponents and, although not wilfully suicidal, embraced the strong possibility of death themselves. Death was their promise and that promise lay at the heart of their power.
Each group also found a vital role as ‘state-builders’. This was an essential life raft for religious minorities in an often intolerant age – the Christian communities of the Middle East and the Nizari Ismaili Shi’ite minority, both nestling in the shadow of a potentially overwhelming Sunni empire, were always vulnerable. Both sects, Templars and Assassins alike, had, in effect, ambitions to create a state within a state.
Vitally for their image and the methodology of fear that they eventually became famous for, both were unusually structured – unlike most political entities in that time and place, they were corporations rather than the more typical ‘family-run businesses’. They knew that the death of a carefully chosen individual (a successful leader, say, a wife or a beloved child) would have a profound effect on the dynastically-centred states of their enemies, while they themselves were impervious to such threats.
These ostensibly opposite but strangely parallel groups kept bouncing off each other over a period of two centuries – and, up to the present day, they have become endlessly conjoined in our memories. Their reputations have each taken a similar arc, morphing from hard-nosed reality into absurd legends, and from champions of their communities into pantomime villains.
The methodologies they invented were different but parallel. The Assassins’ threat was death when you least expected it – poisoned daggers in the mosque, hidden murderers emerging from the shadows. The Templars’ threat was death exactly when you did expect it – when you saw them charging straight at you there was no bluster, no war cries, just the power of death on horseback speeding onwards like an implacable force of nature.
The tactics might be different, but the message, and the fear it provoked, was the same. Whether facing the Assassin hit squads (the elite fidais) or a squadron of Templar knights, you knew you had a problem – these were people you needed to take far more seriously than their numbers would otherwise warrant.
Assassins – From Fragile to Fearsome
Amongst the minor groups that most contemporaries in the medieval Middle East would initially have nominated as ‘least likely to succeed’ were a small, unpopular band of Shi’ite religious enthusiasts. For most of their early history in the Holy Land they lacked a clear territorial or political base. They were small in number and without obvious economic assets. And they were widely despised by their powerful Sunni Muslim neighbours as heretics and traitors.
This obscure, and presumably doomed, breakaway sect later became known, by their enemies at least, as the Assassins.
The word ‘Assassin’ is the name most readily recognised by Western readers, particularly in the context of the period of the crusades. Al-Hashishiyya (that is, ‘Assassins’) has often been used in a deliberately derogatory manner, particularly by the sect’s opponents. Here, of course, it has no negative or defamatory intent. Other terms used to describe them by Muslim contemporaries, who were generally hostile sources, included, with varying degrees of negative connotation, religious terms such as Batiniyya, Ta’limiyya, or Malahida. The more formal, and most correct, descriptor for the sect is Nizari Ismailis.
Whatever we choose to call them, however, the Assassins were the militant underdogs of the Crusades. Surrounded by danger, they chose to transform themselves into a community of unique threat, rather than meekly succumb to the more overt violence of their enemies.
Against all the odds, the Assassins survived – and they did so by refusing to play the same game that everyone else was so swept up in. They knew that they could not raise big armies. The regional demographic arms race was pitched at such a level that they could not even begin to compete. So, rather than fail in doing the same as everyone else, they focused instead on succeeding by doing something very different.
The Assassins instinctively grasped a profound but not always obvious truth. And they pursued that truth through to its logical conclusion. The concept behind their strategy of targeted murder was simple but powerful. As one anonymous Nizari poet wrote:
‘By a single warrior on foot, a king may be struck with terror, though he may own more than 100,000 horsemen.’
The delivery of death by an individual was a political act which bypassed the necessity of large armies or riches. It was the perfect means of projecting political will for those who were too weak or too poor to do so in more traditional military ways.
Armies are threatening. They can occupy ground, defeat other armies or capture cities. But they are hugely disruptive for all concerned. Their employers require vast amounts of money, food and land to attract and sustain them. And they have to be prepared for the social pressures which these restless bands of armed strangers exert upon the communities they find themselves in. Even more importantly, these armies are, until the critical moment, rather abstract and impersonal. They are the playing pieces in longer-term campaigns – the generality of violence rather than its pinpoint application.
What the Assassins understood was that they needed to project power in a way which was far more personal. And in a way which did not require the services of tens of thousands of irritatingly disruptive foreign soldiers.
Their solution was murder. Unstoppable murder. And with that, the legends began
.
You can get your copy of Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood through
Yale University Press website
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
To learn more about Steve, please visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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