For 150 years, the Assassins in Syria had survived by their use of bluster, intimidation and the tangible threat of violence. In Baybars, however, they were dealing with someone who was prepared to face them down.
The first few years of Baybars’ reign (1260-77), while he was consolidating his position, were deceptively calm. The balance of power had been irredeemably altered, however. The Nizaris had survived in part because of their position on a warring frontier. They had been irritating but, as a buffer state against the Franks, they fulfilled a useful function for their much bigger Sunni neighbours. Now even that usefulness was gone. As the Franks were forced back to their last enclaves on the coast, the Assassins looked increasingly anomalous – a Shi’ite nuisance in the midst of victorious Sunni orthodoxy.
The Assassins’ fate increasingly lay in the hands of a ruthless killer who was dedicated to the destruction of anyone who threatened himself or Sunni Islam – this included the Mongols, the crusaders and, most ominously for the Nizaris, heretics. Tellingly, soon after his bloody accession Baybars was reported to have assigned the future income from the Assassins’ lands to one of his generals, the lord of neighbouring Hama, as a bribe to gain his support. The ultimate agenda may not have been made public, but it was already clear in the sultan’s mind.
Baybars and the Mamluk Menace
Bronze bust of Sultan Baybars in Cairo, at the National Military Museum – photo by Ahmed yousri elmamlouk / Wikimedia Commons
By the time that a new Old Man of the Mountain, Najm al-Din, took over as leader of the Assassins in 1261-1262, the military situation reflected their political weakness. Khariba had been lost and their network of fortifications in the Jabal Bahra seems to have been reduced to only eight castles – Kahf, Masyaf and Qadmus, alongside Ullayqa, Qulay‘a, Khawabi, Rusafa and Maniqa.
Surviving fragments of a letter written by Baybars in c.1265 show the contempt in which he held them. ‘This Assassin trash…’, he wrote, ‘failed to realise that riding well-bred horses is better than [hiding] in mountain peaks, and that sheets of metal are a better protection than sheets of paper’. He despised them and their increasingly hollow threats.
Power was ebbing away from the Assassins. In 1266 and 1267 Baybars drew up treaties with the Hospitallers in which he forced them to not only relinquish the money they received from their Sunni Muslim tenants, but to also include the Assassins in the new arrangement – they would, it was said, no longer be required to give the Hospitallers 1,200 dinars each year, alongside quantities of wheat and barley.
This was not to benefit the Nizaris, however. The tribute was merely being transferred to their new master, Baybars. The Assassins’ diplomats knew what they had to do and, grudgingly, ‘messengers from the Ismailis came [to Baybars], bringing with them a quantity of gold. They said: “This is the money which we used to contribute as a toll to the Franks and we have now brought it to the treasury of the Muslims that it may be spent on those who are fighting in the holy war.” ’
The identity of the bully had merely changed. The Assassins were still being squeezed.
Baybars Tightens His Grip on the Nizaris
After this Baybars took over control of Nizari internal politics. He seems to have been able to dismiss and appoint their leaders at will – he was in de facto command of the Assassins. In 1270 Baybars deposed the Old Man, Najm al-Din, because of his uncooperative attitude. Najm al-Din had made the mistake of not presenting himself quickly enough in person to pay homage to Baybars. The sultan was not amused. Misreading the situation and compounding his mistake, Najm al-Din sent envoys to the sultan soon afterwards to try to reduce the tribute they paid to him.
Baybars appointed another man, Sarim al-Din, in his place, while simultaneously confiscating the vital castle of Masyaf. The new Old Man was instructed not to take up residence there, but, disappointingly from Baybars’ perspective, he disobeyed in spectacular fashion – instead of handing over the castle, he took control of Masyaf and killed those who had been collaborating with the Mamluks. Sarim was eventually captured and taken to Cairo, where he was imprisoned and poisoned. Najm al-Din, now suitably chastened, was allowed to take back his position as Old Man, alongside his son Shams al-Din, but, inevitably, only on the condition that they paid tribute to Baybars.
They were on a collision course, however. Baybars suspected that the Assassins were scheming with the Franks, providing them with military information and plotting to kill him. In February or March 1271, while Baybars was besieging the Hospitaller castle of Crac des Chevaliers, two fidais from Ullayqa were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder the sultan. The Nizari leaders, Najm al-Din and his son, had to come in person to secure their release. The two fidais were freed suspiciously easily.
Baybars was not known for his affability, particularly where matters of personal security were concerned. Their quick release almost certainly implies that the fidais were innocent – it seems likely that this was really a case of hostage-taking and intimidation, and that they were just pawns with which to bully the Nizari leadership. But Baybars’ plan succeeded. The Assassins were forced to surrender their castles to the sultan and Najm al-Din was taken away as a ‘guest’ to Cairo – he died in exile there in 1274.
Shams al-Din realised that the end was near. He managed to get to the Nizari castle of Kahf and started to organise resistance. But it was all far too late. Baybars captured Ullayqa in May 1271 and Rusafa a few weeks later. Shams al-Din surrendered and he and his household were sent, like his father, into exile in Cairo. Khawabi was taken by the Mamluks soon after. By the spring of 1273 Qulay‘a, Maniqa and Qadmus had also surrendered. Kahf, the last of the Assassins’ castles fell in July.
Assassins for Hire: Baybars’ Weapon of Intimidation
Coin issued by Baybars in 1263 A.D. – Wikimedia Commons
While the Nizari state was being dismantled, the Assassins were browbeaten into supplying money and the precious services of the fidais as the price of their continued, albeit stunted, existence. This gave Baybars a new weapon of intimidation, and he used it to the full.
The chronicle of Qirta al-‘Izzi tells a vague story of a Frankish lord from the county of Tripoli named Arnaud of Gibelet who had made the mistake of allying himself with the Mongol forces of Hulegu and raiding Muslim lands in conjunction with them. Baybars got his revenge by having his Assassin squads murder him in c.1265. As a strange aside, the sultan allegedly then tried to arrange for the Templars to provide a boat to take the successful fidais to safety.
In 1270 Baybars ordered his Assassins to attack Philip of Montfort, the lord of Tyre, who was stabbed to death by a ‘Muslim convert’ outside his own chapel. And in April 1271, he felt confident enough of his new creatures to threaten the count of Tripoli with assassination. He was clearly enjoying using the Assassins’ services.
Extraordinarily, the same simple methodology used to kill Philip of Montfort continued to deliver results for the Assassins. A small squad of fidais would be sent in. They would ask for conversion and employment. Then, when the target was at his most vulnerable, they would strike with daggers.
The Attempt on an English Prince
Edward and the Assassin – lithograph by Gustave Doré (1832–1883)
Only two years later, on 18 June 1272, an almost identical plot emerged, this time involving the heir to the English throne. Once again, the Christians, short of manpower and desperate to take mercenaries of any ethnicity into their service, were seduced into making a major mistake.
Prince Edward of England (later better known as King Edward I, ‘Longshanks’) had led a small army on crusade to the Holy Land. The numbers of troops involved were far too small to make a significant military difference. But Baybars knew a good general when he saw one. He did not want Edward to come back with a bigger army – and the Assassins could make sure that would not happen.
The final arrangements for the hit were organised by the governor of Ramla, a certain Ibn-Shawar. He inserted an Assassin, ‘who courted [Edward’s] friendship’, into the Christian camp. When a Turkic cavalryman appeared at Acre, apparently looking for work, the English prince was only too eager to oblige.
The mercenary had extremely valuable local knowledge and language skills. To further increase his appeal, he had pretended to be an apostate. The Assassin asked to change his religion and was duly ‘baptised at Acre’. He was engaged as a Turcopole light cavalryman, and, more appropriately than anyone knew, as a spy – the man was so trusted that ‘the Lord Edward had made him into a Christian, and retained him in his own quarters’. As his sponsor, he probably also became the Assassin’s godfather.
The fidais waited for the signal to be activated and to murder the prince. ‘One night’, wrote the anonymous chronicler we now refer to as the ‘Templar of Tyre’, the Assassin ‘came to the chambers where the Lord Edward was sleeping…and let it be known that he had just come from spying and that he wanted to speak to the Lord Edward’.
Edward opened the door to his bedroom ‘dressed only in an undershirt and braie [a loose-fitting pair of trousers].’ The prince was off-guard, unarmoured and unarmed. The fidais seized his chance and lunged forward. But he couldn’t land a killer blow. Instead, he cut the prince ‘on the hip with a dagger, making a deep, dangerous wound’ – presumably Lord Edward had made a reflex blocking action, and moved the dagger downwards. With an impressively quick recovery, Edward ‘struck the Saracen a blow with his fist, on the temple, which knocked him senseless to the ground for a moment’.
These were violent times and, luckily for Edward, he had a weapon of his own near to hand. Before his attacker had time to get up, he ‘caught up a dagger from the table which was in the chamber, and stabbed the Saracen in the head and killed him.’
There is another near contemporary version of events. William of Tripoli, a Dominican friar who was in Acre at the time, wrote an account of the incident for Pope Gregory X. In it he corroborated most of the details set out by the Templar of Tyre, with one main exception – he claimed, entirely plausibly, that Edward had grabbed the Assassin’s knife from him while he lay stunned on the floor (rather than picking up his own bedside weapon), and killed his assailant with it.
Tellingly, just a few hours after the attack, and presumably as soon as Edward was well enough to articulate his wishes, he made his will (dated 18 June 1272). It was witnessed by, amongst others, ‘brother Thomas Bérard master of the Temple’, who attached his seal to the document. Perhaps there were still concerns that he might die of the after-effects of the wound inflicted by the poisoned dagger. Or perhaps he had just had an all-too dramatic reminder of his own mortality. But, either way, Edward and his men had had enough. Most of the English crusaders returned home soon afterwards. They were glad to be on their way.
The deposition of Najm al-Din in 1271 had taught the Assassins that they needed to be fully cooperative with their new master if they were to survive in any form at all. Even with their active submission to their new masters, Nizari Ismailism from this time on was reduced to the status of a minor heresy which survived only at the whim of their Mamluk overlords. Echoes of this strange master-servant relationship eventually entered folklore. The Sira of Baybars, an Egyptian folk epic constructed by professional storytellers, portrays the Assassins as his trusty cat-burglars, sidekicks eager to help Baybars in any criminal enterprise – this was a sad parody but, in spirit, close to the truth.
Even more anticlimactically than their co-religionists in Persia, the Syrian Assassins went out with a compliant whimper rather than a bang. Unlike their comrades in Persia, they were not wiped out. Instead, they proved they still had value, and were allowed to survive. They traded blood for their continued existence. It is interesting to see that the entire group were now sometimes referred to in Sunni texts as ‘fidais’. This was technically incorrect of course, but perhaps understandable – delivering death, albeit in someone else’s interests rather than their own, was now their only remaining value, and at the heart of what kept their community in existence. The Assassins’ ‘brand’ was now unhelpfully boiled down to its essence.
The Assassins bought their freedom of worship with other people’s lives. Baybars’ successor, the Sultan al-Malik al-Mansur, was blatant in the way he used them as tame contract-killers to threaten his neighbours. In establishing a treaty with Margaret, the Lady of Tyre, in 1285 he made sure to tell her that although he would not murder her himself, he reserved the right to send in his fidais hit squads to do the job for him.
Ironically, the Assassins were now reduced to a role which strangely presaged their distorted image in modern popular culture – they were hired killers who launched near-suicidal attacks for money.
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
For 150 years, the Assassins in Syria had survived by their use of bluster, intimidation and the tangible threat of violence. In Baybars, however, they were dealing with someone who was prepared to face them down.
The first few years of Baybars’ reign (1260-77), while he was consolidating his position, were deceptively calm. The balance of power had been irredeemably altered, however. The Nizaris had survived in part because of their position on a warring frontier. They had been irritating but, as a buffer state against the Franks, they fulfilled a useful function for their much bigger Sunni neighbours. Now even that usefulness was gone. As the Franks were forced back to their last enclaves on the coast, the Assassins looked increasingly anomalous – a Shi’ite nuisance in the midst of victorious Sunni orthodoxy.
The Assassins’ fate increasingly lay in the hands of a ruthless killer who was dedicated to the destruction of anyone who threatened himself or Sunni Islam – this included the Mongols, the crusaders and, most ominously for the Nizaris, heretics. Tellingly, soon after his bloody accession Baybars was reported to have assigned the future income from the Assassins’ lands to one of his generals, the lord of neighbouring Hama, as a bribe to gain his support. The ultimate agenda may not have been made public, but it was already clear in the sultan’s mind.
Baybars and the Mamluk Menace
By the time that a new Old Man of the Mountain, Najm al-Din, took over as leader of the Assassins in 1261-1262, the military situation reflected their political weakness. Khariba had been lost and their network of fortifications in the Jabal Bahra seems to have been reduced to only eight castles – Kahf, Masyaf and Qadmus, alongside Ullayqa, Qulay‘a, Khawabi, Rusafa and Maniqa.
Surviving fragments of a letter written by Baybars in c.1265 show the contempt in which he held them. ‘This Assassin trash…’, he wrote, ‘failed to realise that riding well-bred horses is better than [hiding] in mountain peaks, and that sheets of metal are a better protection than sheets of paper’. He despised them and their increasingly hollow threats.
Power was ebbing away from the Assassins. In 1266 and 1267 Baybars drew up treaties with the Hospitallers in which he forced them to not only relinquish the money they received from their Sunni Muslim tenants, but to also include the Assassins in the new arrangement – they would, it was said, no longer be required to give the Hospitallers 1,200 dinars each year, alongside quantities of wheat and barley.
This was not to benefit the Nizaris, however. The tribute was merely being transferred to their new master, Baybars. The Assassins’ diplomats knew what they had to do and, grudgingly, ‘messengers from the Ismailis came [to Baybars], bringing with them a quantity of gold. They said: “This is the money which we used to contribute as a toll to the Franks and we have now brought it to the treasury of the Muslims that it may be spent on those who are fighting in the holy war.” ’
The identity of the bully had merely changed. The Assassins were still being squeezed.
Baybars Tightens His Grip on the Nizaris
After this Baybars took over control of Nizari internal politics. He seems to have been able to dismiss and appoint their leaders at will – he was in de facto command of the Assassins. In 1270 Baybars deposed the Old Man, Najm al-Din, because of his uncooperative attitude. Najm al-Din had made the mistake of not presenting himself quickly enough in person to pay homage to Baybars. The sultan was not amused. Misreading the situation and compounding his mistake, Najm al-Din sent envoys to the sultan soon afterwards to try to reduce the tribute they paid to him.
Baybars appointed another man, Sarim al-Din, in his place, while simultaneously confiscating the vital castle of Masyaf. The new Old Man was instructed not to take up residence there, but, disappointingly from Baybars’ perspective, he disobeyed in spectacular fashion – instead of handing over the castle, he took control of Masyaf and killed those who had been collaborating with the Mamluks. Sarim was eventually captured and taken to Cairo, where he was imprisoned and poisoned. Najm al-Din, now suitably chastened, was allowed to take back his position as Old Man, alongside his son Shams al-Din, but, inevitably, only on the condition that they paid tribute to Baybars.
They were on a collision course, however. Baybars suspected that the Assassins were scheming with the Franks, providing them with military information and plotting to kill him. In February or March 1271, while Baybars was besieging the Hospitaller castle of Crac des Chevaliers, two fidais from Ullayqa were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder the sultan. The Nizari leaders, Najm al-Din and his son, had to come in person to secure their release. The two fidais were freed suspiciously easily.
Baybars was not known for his affability, particularly where matters of personal security were concerned. Their quick release almost certainly implies that the fidais were innocent – it seems likely that this was really a case of hostage-taking and intimidation, and that they were just pawns with which to bully the Nizari leadership. But Baybars’ plan succeeded. The Assassins were forced to surrender their castles to the sultan and Najm al-Din was taken away as a ‘guest’ to Cairo – he died in exile there in 1274.
Shams al-Din realised that the end was near. He managed to get to the Nizari castle of Kahf and started to organise resistance. But it was all far too late. Baybars captured Ullayqa in May 1271 and Rusafa a few weeks later. Shams al-Din surrendered and he and his household were sent, like his father, into exile in Cairo. Khawabi was taken by the Mamluks soon after. By the spring of 1273 Qulay‘a, Maniqa and Qadmus had also surrendered. Kahf, the last of the Assassins’ castles fell in July.
Assassins for Hire: Baybars’ Weapon of Intimidation
While the Nizari state was being dismantled, the Assassins were browbeaten into supplying money and the precious services of the fidais as the price of their continued, albeit stunted, existence. This gave Baybars a new weapon of intimidation, and he used it to the full.
The chronicle of Qirta al-‘Izzi tells a vague story of a Frankish lord from the county of Tripoli named Arnaud of Gibelet who had made the mistake of allying himself with the Mongol forces of Hulegu and raiding Muslim lands in conjunction with them. Baybars got his revenge by having his Assassin squads murder him in c.1265. As a strange aside, the sultan allegedly then tried to arrange for the Templars to provide a boat to take the successful fidais to safety.
In 1270 Baybars ordered his Assassins to attack Philip of Montfort, the lord of Tyre, who was stabbed to death by a ‘Muslim convert’ outside his own chapel. And in April 1271, he felt confident enough of his new creatures to threaten the count of Tripoli with assassination. He was clearly enjoying using the Assassins’ services.
Extraordinarily, the same simple methodology used to kill Philip of Montfort continued to deliver results for the Assassins. A small squad of fidais would be sent in. They would ask for conversion and employment. Then, when the target was at his most vulnerable, they would strike with daggers.
The Attempt on an English Prince
Only two years later, on 18 June 1272, an almost identical plot emerged, this time involving the heir to the English throne. Once again, the Christians, short of manpower and desperate to take mercenaries of any ethnicity into their service, were seduced into making a major mistake.
Prince Edward of England (later better known as King Edward I, ‘Longshanks’) had led a small army on crusade to the Holy Land. The numbers of troops involved were far too small to make a significant military difference. But Baybars knew a good general when he saw one. He did not want Edward to come back with a bigger army – and the Assassins could make sure that would not happen.
The final arrangements for the hit were organised by the governor of Ramla, a certain Ibn-Shawar. He inserted an Assassin, ‘who courted [Edward’s] friendship’, into the Christian camp. When a Turkic cavalryman appeared at Acre, apparently looking for work, the English prince was only too eager to oblige.
The mercenary had extremely valuable local knowledge and language skills. To further increase his appeal, he had pretended to be an apostate. The Assassin asked to change his religion and was duly ‘baptised at Acre’. He was engaged as a Turcopole light cavalryman, and, more appropriately than anyone knew, as a spy – the man was so trusted that ‘the Lord Edward had made him into a Christian, and retained him in his own quarters’. As his sponsor, he probably also became the Assassin’s godfather.
The fidais waited for the signal to be activated and to murder the prince. ‘One night’, wrote the anonymous chronicler we now refer to as the ‘Templar of Tyre’, the Assassin ‘came to the chambers where the Lord Edward was sleeping…and let it be known that he had just come from spying and that he wanted to speak to the Lord Edward’.
Edward opened the door to his bedroom ‘dressed only in an undershirt and braie [a loose-fitting pair of trousers].’ The prince was off-guard, unarmoured and unarmed. The fidais seized his chance and lunged forward. But he couldn’t land a killer blow. Instead, he cut the prince ‘on the hip with a dagger, making a deep, dangerous wound’ – presumably Lord Edward had made a reflex blocking action, and moved the dagger downwards. With an impressively quick recovery, Edward ‘struck the Saracen a blow with his fist, on the temple, which knocked him senseless to the ground for a moment’.
These were violent times and, luckily for Edward, he had a weapon of his own near to hand. Before his attacker had time to get up, he ‘caught up a dagger from the table which was in the chamber, and stabbed the Saracen in the head and killed him.’
There is another near contemporary version of events. William of Tripoli, a Dominican friar who was in Acre at the time, wrote an account of the incident for Pope Gregory X. In it he corroborated most of the details set out by the Templar of Tyre, with one main exception – he claimed, entirely plausibly, that Edward had grabbed the Assassin’s knife from him while he lay stunned on the floor (rather than picking up his own bedside weapon), and killed his assailant with it.
Tellingly, just a few hours after the attack, and presumably as soon as Edward was well enough to articulate his wishes, he made his will (dated 18 June 1272). It was witnessed by, amongst others, ‘brother Thomas Bérard master of the Temple’, who attached his seal to the document. Perhaps there were still concerns that he might die of the after-effects of the wound inflicted by the poisoned dagger. Or perhaps he had just had an all-too dramatic reminder of his own mortality. But, either way, Edward and his men had had enough. Most of the English crusaders returned home soon afterwards. They were glad to be on their way.
The deposition of Najm al-Din in 1271 had taught the Assassins that they needed to be fully cooperative with their new master if they were to survive in any form at all. Even with their active submission to their new masters, Nizari Ismailism from this time on was reduced to the status of a minor heresy which survived only at the whim of their Mamluk overlords. Echoes of this strange master-servant relationship eventually entered folklore. The Sira of Baybars, an Egyptian folk epic constructed by professional storytellers, portrays the Assassins as his trusty cat-burglars, sidekicks eager to help Baybars in any criminal enterprise – this was a sad parody but, in spirit, close to the truth.
Even more anticlimactically than their co-religionists in Persia, the Syrian Assassins went out with a compliant whimper rather than a bang. Unlike their comrades in Persia, they were not wiped out. Instead, they proved they still had value, and were allowed to survive. They traded blood for their continued existence. It is interesting to see that the entire group were now sometimes referred to in Sunni texts as ‘fidais’. This was technically incorrect of course, but perhaps understandable – delivering death, albeit in someone else’s interests rather than their own, was now their only remaining value, and at the heart of what kept their community in existence. The Assassins’ ‘brand’ was now unhelpfully boiled down to its essence.
The Assassins bought their freedom of worship with other people’s lives. Baybars’ successor, the Sultan al-Malik al-Mansur, was blatant in the way he used them as tame contract-killers to threaten his neighbours. In establishing a treaty with Margaret, the Lady of Tyre, in 1285 he made sure to tell her that although he would not murder her himself, he reserved the right to send in his fidais hit squads to do the job for him.
Ironically, the Assassins were now reduced to a role which strangely presaged their distorted image in modern popular culture – they were hired killers who launched near-suicidal attacks for money.
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: 14th-century depiction of Baybars on a medallion, now at the Louvre – Wikimedia Commons
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