An odd-looking man, bedraggled and deep down weary, rode into the Nizari village at the foot of their castle at Kahf. It was early in the day, before it became too hot, a good time to travel, but he was dressed in a most spectacular and eccentric fashion. People called out, shouting for their families to come and see the stranger. Children ran out excitedly into the street to see what was happening.
They didn’t know that the stranger had been travelling across the Middle East in secret. He had spent months hiding in the shadows, living rough in the countryside, hustled into alleyways, and sleeping in storerooms for his own safety. But today that all ended.
Unprepossessing to our eyes, but designed to make an impact, he turned up at Kahf wearing self-sewn shoes and a striped headdress made of Yemeni wool. He flamboyantly rode a white donkey. There was an undeniable theatricality about the man – the drama was perhaps intuitive but possibly more self-conscious than he would have cared to admit.
He was called Sinan. But he became better known by a nickname: ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’.
The Assassins were facing increasing intimidation by the military orders, and ever more hatred from their Sunni enemies. But they were fortunate in one vital regard – the highly capable Rashid al-Din Sinan, their most famous leader, became ruler of the de facto Nizari Ismaili state in Syria in 1162. Under his guidance, the Assassins were able to stabilise their new network of mountain fortresses and perfect their unique way of dealing with far bigger and more powerful neighbours.
Persecuted in Aleppo and Damascus, they turned in on themselves. Their setbacks, and the hatred which had been directed towards them by their fellow Muslims, confirmed their natural instincts: that they should become ever more separate from those who clearly detested them.
Sinan, decisive as ever, guided this change. He concluded that they should rather make their mark on the world by perfecting the art of fear rather than by love. For a small group, doctrinally and geographically isolated, this was a logical (if not entirely admirable) strategy – it allowed them to survive, and to exert influence far beyond their obvious resources. Most importantly, he made them a force to be reckoned with.
Sinan the Man
Al-Kahf castle in Syria – photo by Nawar Shash / Wikimedia Commons
Like the heroes of so many semi-legendary stories, Sinan’s origins were unprepossessing and mysterious. But there are clues. The twelfth-century historian al-Husayn records a fascinating conversation with Sinan – and on this rare occasion the normally mysterious leader seems to have spoken openly about his early life and his rise to power.
He was born at some point around 1131–1135, into a Shiite family in a village near Basra, in modern-day Iraq. His upbringing was comfortable and his father was said to have been ‘one of its notables’. The young Sinan was going to become a schoolmaster. So far, so ordinary. But he chose to reject a quiet life. He converted to become a Nizari Ismaili.
He argued with his family and was forced to leave quickly. There was a rift that he was happy to leave unclear. ‘Something occurred between me and my brothers, which obliged me to leave them,’ he was later reported to have vaguely said, ‘and I went forth without provision or a mount.’
Showing the traditional fervour of a Nizari convert, he moved to Persia and studied philosophy and religious texts at the sect’s headquarters in remote Alamut. Significantly for the future of the Assassins in Syria, while he was there he became a close confidant of the future reformist imam, Hasan II (r. 1162–1166). The Assassins’ leader at the time, Kiya Muhammad, saw something in Sinan. He raised him as one of his own. As Sinan recalled, ‘he put me in school [to train with his sons, one of whom was Hasan II] and gave me exactly the same treatment as he gave them, in those things that are needful for the support, education, and clothing of children.’
Hasan II took power in 1162. Tellingly, one of his first acts was to send his trusted schoolfriend Sinan to represent his interests in Syria. Hasan and Sinan had a radical reformist agenda to pursue – the mission to Syria was an important one.
Sinan later said that Hasan ‘ordered me to go to Syria. I set forth … and only rarely did I approach any town. He had given me orders and letters.’ The journey was convoluted and secretive. Danger was everywhere. When he finally got to Aleppo, Sinan recounted that he ‘met another companion and delivered him another letter, and he too hired me a mount and sent me on to Kahf.’
Sinan travelled to the Assassins’ huge castle at Kahf, presented his credentials and ‘stayed there until Shaykh Abu Muhammad, the head of the [Assassins in Syria], died in the mountain.’ The sect’s leadership in Syria at this time was in a state of flux and internecine conflict – and it was this chaotic situation which at least partially explained Hasan’s need to put his own man on the spot. Sinan quietly built up a power base of his own.
The successor to Shaykh Abu Muhammad was not approved of by Hasan and his leadership team in Alamut. One of the local Nizaris, a man known as ‘the chief Fahd’ (a local leader, or rais) plotted against the successor ‘and sent someone to stab him to death as he was leaving his bath’. The man who had murdered him was executed, conveniently ensuring his silence. Fahd was arrested for his involvement in the murder but was released from custody suspiciously quickly, on the orders of Alamut. Sinan was conveniently on hand, of course, and stepped in to ensure an orderly transfer of power that was acceptable to Hasan and Alamut.
Even his enemies were impressed by the mysterious and charismatic new leader. As one Sunni commentator later wrote, Sinan may have been hated by his opponents but ‘the Ismaili sect followed him as they had followed no one else, and he was able to achieve what no other had achieved.’
Building the Nizari State in Syria
Sinan depicted in the game Assassin’s Creed
Sinan’s role was not merely doctrinal. There were many difficult practical matters to deal with if the Nizaris’ new home was to be made secure.
The Assassins already had useful castles in the Jabal Bahra but there were tough times ahead. Sinan immediately set out to make them even stronger. As the Sunni historian Kamal al-Din wrote, ‘he built fortresses in Syria for this sect; some were new and some were old ones which he had obtained by stratagems and fortified and made inaccessible.’
But Sinan looked after the human infrastructure as well as the buildings. He made sure that the men were in just as good shape as their castles. Under him the fidai teams became an even more professional and fearsome weapon – more formalised, better trained, and increasingly highly motivated.
The Assassin garrisons and villages were necessarily scattered, given the deliberately inaccessible nature of their castles. But Sinan went to great lengths to ensure that his leadership was seen and felt throughout the Jabal Bahra. Unity within the sect was to be imposed as tightly as possible. A fourteenth-century Ismaili history, for instance, mentions that he used to spend his time travelling between the four castles of Kahf, Masyaf, Qadmus, and Ullayqa. He was said to stop in each place to improve the defences of the castles and, just as importantly, to heal internal frictions within the fractious Syrian Nizari community.
The ruins of Kahf – photo by Nawar Shash / Wikimedia Commons
Improving communications was an essential part of both these tasks. In a charmingly intimate aside, we know that he also set up mountaintop pigeon towers to send messages from one remote fortification to another. Pigeon-post had been used by their Sunni enemies for some time – Zengi and Nur al-Din both adopted such a system. But Sinan used his tiny new messengers to make the already strong network of Assassin castles even better connected.
This was the state-building, rational side of Sinan. But there was another side too.
Sinan as Mystic
It is always tempting to try to create a revisionist view of the Assassins in general, and of Sinan in particular.
We might describe them as being victims of their enemies’ black propaganda, for instance – and that is undoubtedly partly true, regardless of the extent to which they encouraged this process. And we must always query the factual basis of the stories told by their Sunni persecutors. The Assassins had many enemies and, as committed radicals, were not afraid of making new ones. Fear, after all, was their stock in trade.
It is also the case, however much one might try to normalise their reputation, that there was a genuinely mystical, revolutionary, and extremist aspect to much of what made them so unique. Sinan was an extraordinary figure. He was highly intelligent, a great leader and capable of acting with profound strategic insight. But that did not stop him from also being a man of a deeply esoteric, mystical, and some would say even ‘magical’ disposition.
Sinan was always different. Efforts to create a deeply enigmatic persona seem to have dated back to the very beginning of his rule. The main Nizari source for his life, an early fourteenth-century biography, was written by the scholar Abu Firas. While acknowledging that Sinan had been accused of indulging in dark and magical arts, he inevitably goes to some lengths to emphasise his orthodox Islamic credentials. ‘Many common ignorant fools,’ he wrote, ‘think that it is thanks to his knowledge of magic that the Lord [Sinan] practised these marvels. Well, he confounded them all and reduced them to silence, not by science or magic but by the force of truth and conviction, by his demonstrations and by the quotations which he pronounced from Qur’anic verses.’
Severely undermining his own case, however, even Abu Firas could not stop himself from launching into a list of Sinan’s occult achievements. He paints a picture of the Nizari leader as a man who was regarded as mysterious and enigmatic – and, we might suspect, one who went to great lengths to make sure he was seen as such. Abu Firas was proud, for instance, that Sinan was a clairvoyant, and that he had famous powers of telepathy. He could prophesy the future. It was claimed that he could reply to letters before they had been received. Despite being a man whose power rested on the ability to kill, and who was the subject of many murder attempts by his own people, he was said to be so charismatic that he never needed a personal bodyguard.
Stories of telepathy and clairvoyance were repeatedly ascribed to Sinan by Abu Firas – so much so that it is clear that the Old Man’s mystical powers were a central part of his authority and, in the eyes of the twelfth-century Nizaris, something to be extremely proud of. Abu Firas boasted of the way in which Sinan could answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, without the question itself being voiced. In an echo of his close personal connection with the murder squads, he was also said to have known when a fidai had died, long before the news had officially reached the Assassins’ fortresses.
Some of this mystique must have come from his unique personality but much also seems to have been carefully crafted. He was never seen eating, for instance. He did not say much but deliberately adopted strange poses. He would remain motionless for hours, his lips moving mysteriously but making no sound. There were rumours amongst his own people that he did not even cast a reflection when looking into water.
In this context, it is not surprising that Sinan seemed strange to his Sunni enemies, and to Frankish observers – but one cannot help feeling that this was something which he was not too unhappy about. His image of arcane power was a useful tool of intimidation and was at least partly deliberately manufactured.
Sinan died in 1193, at around the same time as Saladin, the man he had tried to kill on multiple occasions. Sinan was not an easy man. But his achievements had been profound. He had joined a small, endangered community with few intrinsic assets, and turned them into something which inspired fear in their enemies.
He had established the Assassins in Syria as a force to be reckoned with – semi-independent of Persia, secure in their mountain fortresses and embedded in a complex network of political relationships with their Muslim and Christian neighbours. Sinan had, to a large extent, invented the legend of the Assassins. He had honed and professionalised the fidai, the tool which gave the sect their unique leverage. The Nizaris might still be hated and detested, but at least they now had a home and status, however ambiguous, in a dangerous world.
And, most importantly, they were feared.
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 true history behind the hugely popular video game Assassin’s Creed and 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
An odd-looking man, bedraggled and deep down weary, rode into the Nizari village at the foot of their castle at Kahf. It was early in the day, before it became too hot, a good time to travel, but he was dressed in a most spectacular and eccentric fashion. People called out, shouting for their families to come and see the stranger. Children ran out excitedly into the street to see what was happening.
They didn’t know that the stranger had been travelling across the Middle East in secret. He had spent months hiding in the shadows, living rough in the countryside, hustled into alleyways, and sleeping in storerooms for his own safety. But today that all ended.
Unprepossessing to our eyes, but designed to make an impact, he turned up at Kahf wearing self-sewn shoes and a striped headdress made of Yemeni wool. He flamboyantly rode a white donkey. There was an undeniable theatricality about the man – the drama was perhaps intuitive but possibly more self-conscious than he would have cared to admit.
He was called Sinan. But he became better known by a nickname: ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’.
The Assassins were facing increasing intimidation by the military orders, and ever more hatred from their Sunni enemies. But they were fortunate in one vital regard – the highly capable Rashid al-Din Sinan, their most famous leader, became ruler of the de facto Nizari Ismaili state in Syria in 1162. Under his guidance, the Assassins were able to stabilise their new network of mountain fortresses and perfect their unique way of dealing with far bigger and more powerful neighbours.
Persecuted in Aleppo and Damascus, they turned in on themselves. Their setbacks, and the hatred which had been directed towards them by their fellow Muslims, confirmed their natural instincts: that they should become ever more separate from those who clearly detested them.
Sinan, decisive as ever, guided this change. He concluded that they should rather make their mark on the world by perfecting the art of fear rather than by love. For a small group, doctrinally and geographically isolated, this was a logical (if not entirely admirable) strategy – it allowed them to survive, and to exert influence far beyond their obvious resources. Most importantly, he made them a force to be reckoned with.
Sinan the Man
Like the heroes of so many semi-legendary stories, Sinan’s origins were unprepossessing and mysterious. But there are clues. The twelfth-century historian al-Husayn records a fascinating conversation with Sinan – and on this rare occasion the normally mysterious leader seems to have spoken openly about his early life and his rise to power.
He was born at some point around 1131–1135, into a Shiite family in a village near Basra, in modern-day Iraq. His upbringing was comfortable and his father was said to have been ‘one of its notables’. The young Sinan was going to become a schoolmaster. So far, so ordinary. But he chose to reject a quiet life. He converted to become a Nizari Ismaili.
He argued with his family and was forced to leave quickly. There was a rift that he was happy to leave unclear. ‘Something occurred between me and my brothers, which obliged me to leave them,’ he was later reported to have vaguely said, ‘and I went forth without provision or a mount.’
Showing the traditional fervour of a Nizari convert, he moved to Persia and studied philosophy and religious texts at the sect’s headquarters in remote Alamut. Significantly for the future of the Assassins in Syria, while he was there he became a close confidant of the future reformist imam, Hasan II (r. 1162–1166). The Assassins’ leader at the time, Kiya Muhammad, saw something in Sinan. He raised him as one of his own. As Sinan recalled, ‘he put me in school [to train with his sons, one of whom was Hasan II] and gave me exactly the same treatment as he gave them, in those things that are needful for the support, education, and clothing of children.’
Hasan II took power in 1162. Tellingly, one of his first acts was to send his trusted schoolfriend Sinan to represent his interests in Syria. Hasan and Sinan had a radical reformist agenda to pursue – the mission to Syria was an important one.
Sinan later said that Hasan ‘ordered me to go to Syria. I set forth … and only rarely did I approach any town. He had given me orders and letters.’ The journey was convoluted and secretive. Danger was everywhere. When he finally got to Aleppo, Sinan recounted that he ‘met another companion and delivered him another letter, and he too hired me a mount and sent me on to Kahf.’
Sinan travelled to the Assassins’ huge castle at Kahf, presented his credentials and ‘stayed there until Shaykh Abu Muhammad, the head of the [Assassins in Syria], died in the mountain.’ The sect’s leadership in Syria at this time was in a state of flux and internecine conflict – and it was this chaotic situation which at least partially explained Hasan’s need to put his own man on the spot. Sinan quietly built up a power base of his own.
The successor to Shaykh Abu Muhammad was not approved of by Hasan and his leadership team in Alamut. One of the local Nizaris, a man known as ‘the chief Fahd’ (a local leader, or rais) plotted against the successor ‘and sent someone to stab him to death as he was leaving his bath’. The man who had murdered him was executed, conveniently ensuring his silence. Fahd was arrested for his involvement in the murder but was released from custody suspiciously quickly, on the orders of Alamut. Sinan was conveniently on hand, of course, and stepped in to ensure an orderly transfer of power that was acceptable to Hasan and Alamut.
Even his enemies were impressed by the mysterious and charismatic new leader. As one Sunni commentator later wrote, Sinan may have been hated by his opponents but ‘the Ismaili sect followed him as they had followed no one else, and he was able to achieve what no other had achieved.’
Building the Nizari State in Syria
Sinan’s role was not merely doctrinal. There were many difficult practical matters to deal with if the Nizaris’ new home was to be made secure.
The Assassins already had useful castles in the Jabal Bahra but there were tough times ahead. Sinan immediately set out to make them even stronger. As the Sunni historian Kamal al-Din wrote, ‘he built fortresses in Syria for this sect; some were new and some were old ones which he had obtained by stratagems and fortified and made inaccessible.’
But Sinan looked after the human infrastructure as well as the buildings. He made sure that the men were in just as good shape as their castles. Under him the fidai teams became an even more professional and fearsome weapon – more formalised, better trained, and increasingly highly motivated.
The Assassin garrisons and villages were necessarily scattered, given the deliberately inaccessible nature of their castles. But Sinan went to great lengths to ensure that his leadership was seen and felt throughout the Jabal Bahra. Unity within the sect was to be imposed as tightly as possible. A fourteenth-century Ismaili history, for instance, mentions that he used to spend his time travelling between the four castles of Kahf, Masyaf, Qadmus, and Ullayqa. He was said to stop in each place to improve the defences of the castles and, just as importantly, to heal internal frictions within the fractious Syrian Nizari community.
Improving communications was an essential part of both these tasks. In a charmingly intimate aside, we know that he also set up mountaintop pigeon towers to send messages from one remote fortification to another. Pigeon-post had been used by their Sunni enemies for some time – Zengi and Nur al-Din both adopted such a system. But Sinan used his tiny new messengers to make the already strong network of Assassin castles even better connected.
This was the state-building, rational side of Sinan. But there was another side too.
Sinan as Mystic
It is always tempting to try to create a revisionist view of the Assassins in general, and of Sinan in particular.
We might describe them as being victims of their enemies’ black propaganda, for instance – and that is undoubtedly partly true, regardless of the extent to which they encouraged this process. And we must always query the factual basis of the stories told by their Sunni persecutors. The Assassins had many enemies and, as committed radicals, were not afraid of making new ones. Fear, after all, was their stock in trade.
It is also the case, however much one might try to normalise their reputation, that there was a genuinely mystical, revolutionary, and extremist aspect to much of what made them so unique. Sinan was an extraordinary figure. He was highly intelligent, a great leader and capable of acting with profound strategic insight. But that did not stop him from also being a man of a deeply esoteric, mystical, and some would say even ‘magical’ disposition.
Sinan was always different. Efforts to create a deeply enigmatic persona seem to have dated back to the very beginning of his rule. The main Nizari source for his life, an early fourteenth-century biography, was written by the scholar Abu Firas. While acknowledging that Sinan had been accused of indulging in dark and magical arts, he inevitably goes to some lengths to emphasise his orthodox Islamic credentials. ‘Many common ignorant fools,’ he wrote, ‘think that it is thanks to his knowledge of magic that the Lord [Sinan] practised these marvels. Well, he confounded them all and reduced them to silence, not by science or magic but by the force of truth and conviction, by his demonstrations and by the quotations which he pronounced from Qur’anic verses.’
Severely undermining his own case, however, even Abu Firas could not stop himself from launching into a list of Sinan’s occult achievements. He paints a picture of the Nizari leader as a man who was regarded as mysterious and enigmatic – and, we might suspect, one who went to great lengths to make sure he was seen as such. Abu Firas was proud, for instance, that Sinan was a clairvoyant, and that he had famous powers of telepathy. He could prophesy the future. It was claimed that he could reply to letters before they had been received. Despite being a man whose power rested on the ability to kill, and who was the subject of many murder attempts by his own people, he was said to be so charismatic that he never needed a personal bodyguard.
Stories of telepathy and clairvoyance were repeatedly ascribed to Sinan by Abu Firas – so much so that it is clear that the Old Man’s mystical powers were a central part of his authority and, in the eyes of the twelfth-century Nizaris, something to be extremely proud of. Abu Firas boasted of the way in which Sinan could answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, without the question itself being voiced. In an echo of his close personal connection with the murder squads, he was also said to have known when a fidai had died, long before the news had officially reached the Assassins’ fortresses.
Some of this mystique must have come from his unique personality but much also seems to have been carefully crafted. He was never seen eating, for instance. He did not say much but deliberately adopted strange poses. He would remain motionless for hours, his lips moving mysteriously but making no sound. There were rumours amongst his own people that he did not even cast a reflection when looking into water.
In this context, it is not surprising that Sinan seemed strange to his Sunni enemies, and to Frankish observers – but one cannot help feeling that this was something which he was not too unhappy about. His image of arcane power was a useful tool of intimidation and was at least partly deliberately manufactured.
Sinan died in 1193, at around the same time as Saladin, the man he had tried to kill on multiple occasions. Sinan was not an easy man. But his achievements had been profound. He had joined a small, endangered community with few intrinsic assets, and turned them into something which inspired fear in their enemies.
He had established the Assassins in Syria as a force to be reckoned with – semi-independent of Persia, secure in their mountain fortresses and embedded in a complex network of political relationships with their Muslim and Christian neighbours. Sinan had, to a large extent, invented the legend of the Assassins. He had honed and professionalised the fidai, the tool which gave the sect their unique leverage. The Nizaris might still be hated and detested, but at least they now had a home and status, however ambiguous, in a dangerous world.
And, most importantly, they were feared.
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
Top Image: Detail from a 12th-century manuscript – Bodleian Library MS. Marsh 144 p. 101
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