The Assassins
The Crusades, which began in the late 11th century, established four small nations in the Holy Land, called the “Latin” or the “Crusader” states, or even by their own French name for it Outremer.

They lasted two centuries, from about 1098 until the fall of the city of Acre, the last Crusader stronghold, in 1291. Meanwhile, the founder of the Assassins in Persia established a separate colony of Assassins, with their own Old Man of the Mountain in Syria.

It was here, on the border between the Latin State of Antioch and Syria, that the explosive contact between the two was made, and the legend of the Assassins was born in the West.

Hassan as Sabbah
The Assassins were founded around 1090 AD by an Ismaili imam and holy man named Hassan as Sabbah, a name with many and various spellings, but a singular ability to strike fear into the heart of both East and West. (An imam is a holy leader, to Shiites, one chosen by God.) By the time Hassan was through, powerful kings as far away as Britain and France and the Holy Roman Empire quivered in their shoes at the thought of ending up a target of the Assassin leader who was called “the Old Man of the Mountain” by the Christians, derived from his Arabic title Shaykh al Jabal, the Prince of the Mountain. The first of these princes, Hassan, was born in Persia (Iran) in 1056 to a family of “Twelver” Shiites, the dominant sect of Shiite Islam, but he later converted to Ismailism, a smaller and more mystical, esoteric form of Shiite Islam that was just about to have its greatest flowering in history; the Fatamid Dynasty that ruled Egypt at this time was Ismaili.

Hassan left his homeland to be educated at the university in the new capital of Cairo. The city, and its famous college, had been founded by the Fatamids, who ruled Egypt, North Africa, and parts of Saudi Arabia from the 10th to the 12th century. Soon Cairo rivaled Baghdad as the intellectual center of Islam. It was there, at the Al-Azhar University (which still exists and is one of the oldest universities in the world), that Hassan learned the secret rituals of the nine levels to the attainment of enlightenment, as well as mystical and occult secrets of other beliefs, from Kabbalism to Neoplatonism.

At the time of Hassan, the majority of the world’s Muslims were Sunnis, as they are today. The split between Sunni and Shiite began as a dynastic argument over who would follow the Prophet Mohammed. Later it degenerated into other arguments, one of them being that Shiite sects are often more oriented to mysticism, ecstatic faith, and divine revelation than are Sunni Muslims.

Eventually Hassan left the university and set out to form his own Ismaili sect, actively seeking followers, which he found on his journey back to Persia. He made his sect’s new home in a magnificent mountain fortress called Alamut, famous for its gardens, its libraries, and its inaccessibility to an invading army. Hassan liked the mystical number of seven, and so instituted seven ritual levels to admission, similar to those he learned in Cairo. In an amazingly brief time he became a real power in Iran. Hassan’s sect would one day be called “Nizari Islam.” Like the parent Ismaili sect itself, Nizari arose out of a disagreement over the line of the caliphate.

The Fatimid Dynasty ended and the Nizari sect was born in the same event the death of the eighth Fatamid caliph, al-Mustansir, in 1094. His elder son, named Nizar, was to follow him. But he was in Alexandria when his father died, and a powerful clique in the military double-crossed him. Their leader, General Al-Afdar, decided that Nizar’s younger brother, Mustali, would be a lot easier to handle. So he married off his daughter to Mustali, and then hustled him onto the throne. This raised a clamor all over the Muslim world, and many important men refused to accept Mustali as caliph. Of these, the most important was Hassan as Sabbah. Thus he became the spiritual father of “Nizari” Islam. Hassan would have his vengeance fairly soon and in the fashion that made him famous. In 1130, as the Fatamids grew ever weaker, an Assassin sent out from Alamut killed the son of Mustali, al-Amir, in the name of al-Nizar.

Ismailism
Of course, the Nizaris were only the latest sect at the end of a very, very long line. At the time Hassan founded the Assassins, the Near East was an overheated stewpot, with wars large and small, religious and political, boiling over everyplace. You had the major and minor Islamic sects, the Christians, the mighty Seljuq Empire of newly-converted Sunni Turks, the Jews, the pagan Mongols, the Druze, important sects of Gnostic Christians, and all the various military orders, kings, and warlords of both Islam and Christianity. Still, Hassan managed to come up with something fresh. In his new sect of Ismailism, Hassan became an imam with the unquestioned loyalty of his followers, who believed him to be holy and infallible. He would live into his 90s, never again leaving the mountain fastness of Alamut, and in that time he fashioned this secret society in his own image.

Playing mind games
For Hassan, one of the most important aspects of the faith was the willingness to both kill and die in Allah’s service, without question. He invented tactics that gave to him the absolute, blind devotion of his followers. Hassan had an entire bagful of tricks he used for this, many of which are used in the religious cults of today.

He liked to get recruits young to make a bigger impact. He moved the best recruits into Alamut, cutting them off from any friends or family who might contaminate them with the teeming outside world of other beliefs. And he liked to play mind games on them; this became an Assassin trademark. According to legends, when the Old Man felt that a candidate was just about ready to be sent out on a mission, he had the man drugged into unconsciousness. The candidate awoke to find himself in the private gardens of Alamut. Milk, spring water, and even wine, which was forbidden in their daily life, flowed from various fountains, surrounded by every sort of greenery and flower imaginable. The garden was also filled with beautiful and really friendly women, who would spend the next three days introducing this young man, born in poverty and accustomed to an incredibly grim life, to every sort of sensual pleasure imaginable. These accommodating ladies would feed the young man honey cakes, pouring him as much wine as he could hold, and basically drop grapes into his mouth like something out of an old Warner Brothers’ cartoon.

When he awoke once more, the candidate found himself in the receiving hall, on the floor before the Old Man of the Mountain. When he was asked where he’d been, he replied that he’d been in Paradise. Small wonder. Then Hassan promised him that, if he fulfilled his mission, and if he were killed, he would spend eternity in that pleasure garden. Especially considering the harshness of everyday life in the desert, its little wonder they agreed to give up their lives in the cause without question. Hassan played a lot of other tricks, as well, to prove to his followers that he had a personal pipeline to Allah, like the Jim Jones of medieval Persia. One favorite was to place a follower into a hole in the floor of the receiving chamber. Then, with only his head exposed above the floor, Hassan placed a large platter that had been cut in two on either side of his neck. They splashed some animal blood all over it, and then called in the troops. When the head spoke, answering Hassan’s questions about what life was like in Paradise, the whole room was awestruck. Of course, after the room was cleared, Hassan was left with one small annoyance. So the man was then pulled out of the hole in the floor and beheaded, his head hung on a spike outside the entrance to the hall, as a reminder that Hassan had the divine power to call back the dead to speak.

The position of the Old Man of the Mountain passed from father to son. Of course, Hassan couldn’t pass the office on to a son, because he’d had them both murdered, but never mind that. The rule held after his death.

Assassin methods and targets
The terrifying part about the Assassins was that they’d put out a hit on anybody who crossed them, of any kingdom or faith. The even scarier part was that they weren’t striking goatherds and milkmaids, or even the petty nobility they were killing imams and kings, princes and potentates, anyone perceived as an enemy of their faith who was high enough to be worth the bother.

That was Hassan’s motto whenever possible, don’t fight the whole army, just kill the king or general leading it. Sometimes, just the threat was enough. One Seljuk sultan who put Alamut under siege awoke to find a dagger stuck in the ground beside his bed. A messenger arrived and said that had the Old Man of the Mountain wanted him dead, the dagger wouldn’t be in the hard ground, but rather buried in his soft breast. The Turks all went home.

The Assassins didn’t like the Christians any better. Their first Christian victim was a powerful and respected figure, Raymond II, count of Tripoli. Soon after came Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem. Though some said the Assassins were paid by King Richard the Lion-Heart, it was more likely revenge for Conrad’s attack on Assassin shipping. But this sort of thing was still shocking to royal sensibilities, particularly in the way it was done.

The Assassins always wore white, and struck with their sacred golden (and sometimes poisoned) dagger. They liked to hit their target in a very public place; they especially liked the emotional shock of killing a victim in a church or mosque. No one was above an Assassin blade the young Prince Edward, later the mighty King Edward I of England, was nearly killed by a poisoned Assassin’s dagger in 1271 when he was on crusade, simply because he made overtures of peace to the Assassins’ deadliest enemy, the Mongols. This is why the Assassins struck fear into royal hearts as far away as Europe. It wasn’t just the Crusaders and their fiercest warriors, the Knights Templar, who ended up by calling the game a draw where the Assassins were concerned.

The other figure of Crusader myth, Saladin, the greatest general the Islamic world has ever known, was also checkmated by the Assassins. Saladin was a Kurd and a devout Sunni who defeated both the Christians and Fatamid Egypt. But when he attempted to conquer the Assassins of Syria, he was undone. After three nearly successful attempts on his life, Saladin came to an agreement with the Assassins and just went around them, like everyone else in the East at that time. Yet, the Assassins finally endured two fatal blows in the 13th century the Mongols overran and destroyed most of the fortress of Alamut, and in 1273 the Mamluks, who also defeated the Crusaders, did the same to the Syrian Assassins in Masyaf. Surviving Assassins wandered for a time, trying to hold their identity together.

Some even hired out their skills to their Mamluk conquerors. But their real survival came with carrying Nizari Islam underground, hiding in Iran disguised as everything from tailors to Sufi Muslim mystics. It’s probable that the success of their underground network can be seen today, in the fact that Iran is the only nation of the East to be overwhelmingly Shiite. They finally reappeared openly in the 19th century to claim their right to a spiritual identity.

SHALOM.

Good research.

Are you familiar with WILLIAM COOPER'S Series on THE MYSTERY SCHOOLS, where he also went over this topic?

His entire archive is on Peer-to-Peer- or WAS...

According to HIS version, HASSAN used drugs to render a recruit unconscious. When he awoke, it was to an elaborate SET with rivers of PURE WATER, MILK, and HONEY- and PROSTITUTE-ACTRESSES, to make him believe he was in Heaven, and would return when he died in Hus Imam's Service.

Some of these poor fools promptly committed SUICIDE- so he had to debug that programme with a line that they ONLY got to go to Paradise if they died IN HASSAN'S SERVICE.

In William Cooper's version of the siege, there were TWELVE daggers around the Sultan's head not just one. I believe HE said that they were in his PILLOW.

It boggled the poor guy's BRAIN that he had TWELVE Traitors, and NO IDEA who they were!

oaroloye:
SHALOM.

In William Cooper's version of the siege, there were TWELVE daggers around the Sultan's head not just one. I believe HE said that they were in his PILLOW.

Tanks for the correction

EyeHateGod:

Tanks for the correction

I just told you William Cooper's version; it doesn't mean that it is a correction.

Maybe yours is the correct version.

How can twelve people plant daggers in a man's pillow as he slept, when the plan depended on not waking him up?

(The Cook is No.1. Suspect .)

You might still go to a Torrent Site, and search for the WILLIAM COOPER Archive?

oaroloye:



You might still go to a Torrent Site, and search for the WILLIAM COOPER Archive?

Nah it doesn't matter