At Cairo, the dignity of grand-master of the lodge (Dail-doat), was frequently united by the Ismailites, with that of chief justice (Kadhi al Kodhat). As the attainment of rule was the object of the order, and as no means were left untried to accomplish it, Abulwefa sought conquest by means of treachery, and greatness by perjury. The Crusaders, whose power was continually on the increase in Syria, appeared to him the most fitting instruments of his ambitious designs. As the enemies of Mohammedanism, they were the natural allies of its most dangerous opponents. The bulwarks of the faith of Mohammed, shaken from without by the tempest of the Crusaders, and undermined from within by the atheistical doctrines of the Assassins, threatened an earlier and a more certain fall; and the pious warriors, in union with their impious allies, promised the sooner to erect the cross and the dagger on their ruins. Abulwefa entered into a treaty with the king of Jerusalem, by which he bound himself, on a certain Friday, to put the city of Damascus in his possession. While the Emir Busi, and his magnates, both courtly and military, were assembled at their devotions in the mosque, all the approaches to it were to be hemmed in by conspirators, and the gates of the city opened to the Christians. In return for this service, the king promised to deliver the city of Tyre into his power.[104]
Hugo de Payens, the first grand-master of the Templars, seems to have been the principal agent in urging Baldwin II., King of Jerusalem, to this strange alliance of the cross and the dagger. For ten years after its first institution,[105] this order remained in obscurity; fulfilling, besides the usual evangelical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, a fourth, the protection of pilgrims; but still existing only as a private society, without statutes or knightly habits.
By the code of rules given by St. Bernard, and confirmed by Pope Honorius I., it raised itself at once, to the splendour of a powerful chivalric order, for the defence of the holy sepulchre, and the protection of the pilgrims.[106] According to Miræus, its members consisted of knights, esquires, and lay-brothers, which answer to the companions (Refik), agents (Fedavi), and laymen (Lassick), of the Ismailites, as the priors, grand-priors, and grand-master, did to the Dai, Dailkebir, and Sheikh of the mountain. As the Refik were clothed in white, with red insignia, so the knights wore white mantles with red crosses; and as the castles of the Assassins arose in Asia, so did the hospitals of the Templars in Europe.
The grand-master Hugo, came this year[107] to Jerusalem, accompanied by a great retinue of knights and pilgrims, who, at his exhortation, had assumed the cross, and taken up arms in defence of the holy sepulchre.[108] The siege of Damascus was immediately decided upon. After the death of the dreaded Togteghin, which had but lately occurred, his son Taj-ol-Moluk[109] Busi succeeded him. In his name, the vizier Tahir-ben-Saad exercised the supreme power, and, through him, the chiefs of the Ismailites, first the warrior Behram, afterwards the judge Abulwefa, with whom the treacherous surrender of Damascus, in exchange for Tyre, was agreed upon.
Taj-ol-Moluk Busi having received timely notice of the designs of the Ismailites, caused his vizier, the son of Saad, to be put to death; and then gave orders for a general massacre of all of the order who were in the city. Six thousand fell by the sword, which avenged the victims of the dagger. It was not an execution, but an indiscriminate slaughter. In the meanwhile, a numerous Christian army, certain of the promised surrender of the city, had advanced on the road to Damascus, as far as Marj Safar. Among them, besides many pilgrims of the west, were the king and barons of Jerusalem, with their allies, Prince Bernard of Antioch, Pontius, Count of Tripoli, and Joscelin of Edessa, with many knights and esquires. The soldiery, under the command of the constable, William of Buris, had gone with a thousand knights, to plunder the villages, and collect provisions; marching, however, as was usual with an army of pilgrims, without order and discipline, they were, with many of the knights, almost entirely destroyed, by an attack of a small body of valiant warriors from Damascus. The rest, as soon as they learned the disgraceful defeat of their brethren, flew to arms, and hastened to attack the Damascenes; to wash out with their blood the stain inflicted on the Christian army.
A dreadful darkness, however, came on, interrupted only by the glare of the lightning and howling of the tempest; in the midst of the thunder, the cataracts of heaven poured down rain, and inundated the roads, when suddenly, as if the order of the seasons had at once been changed—as if summer and winter would together have raged in all their severity, the rain and flood were changed to snow and ice. Such rapid mutations of the atmosphere, and sudden vicissitudes of the weather, from one extreme to the other, are not, indeed, rare in those countries; but they astonished the inexperienced wanderers, as extraordinary phenomena of nature.
The author of the present work has, during his travels, more than once experienced this, and in a terribly sublime manner, in the defile of Marmaris; as did the British fleet, and the Egyptian army of occupation. Heavy clouds darkened the approach of night; torrents of rain, which poured from them and from the rocks, carried away arms and tents; the howling of the storm and the roaring of the thunder, drowned the speaking-trumpets of the distressed ships, which were driving from their anchors. On the cessation of the tempest, which lasted the whole night, and grew calmer towards morning, the first dawn showed the masts dashed to pieces by the wind, and the rocks scathed by the lightning, and covered with a large quantity of snow.
The army of the Gauls, which, in ancient times, under the command of Brennus, sacked the temple of Delphi, experienced a similar contest and alternation of seasons, and an equally violent storm.[110] And as, at that time, these natural phenomena were deemed a token of the celestial punishment of the sacrilegious presumption of the Gauls, so were they also considered by the Crusaders as a mark of the anger of Heaven at their sins, and their late compact with the Assassins, which blood and perjury could alone confirm. The only advantage which they derived from this monstrous union of piety and impiety, was the possession of the castle of Banias, which the commander, Ismail, fearing lest he should meet the fate of his brethren of Damascus, delivered up to the knight, Rainier de Brus, the same year,[111] in which the fortress of Alamut surrendered to Sultan Mahmud. Thus fell, at the same time, the two citadels of the order in Persia and Syria, and so near was the risk of its complete annihilation.
A persevering spirit of enterprise, however, overcame the untowardness of events. Both Alamut and Banias soon returned to their former possessors. The latter was re-taken, three years afterwards,[112] by Ismail, while Rainier de Brus and his soldiery lay before Joppa, with the king of Jerusalem. Among the prisoners who were carried away, Rainier lost a beloved wife; whom, on her release during a truce with Ismail, he received affectionately, but repulsed her on learning that she had neither preserved her faith among the infidels, nor her honour among the impious. She confessed her sin, and retired into a convent of devout females at Jerusalem.[113]
The less the designs of the Ismailites prospered by the sword, the more successful and persevering were they with the dagger; and, however dangerous to the order the times might be, they were not the less so to its most powerful adversaries. A long series of great and celebrated men, who, during the grand-mastership of Kiabusurgomid, fell by the poniards of his Fedavi, signalized the bloody annals of his reign; and, as formerly, according to the fashion of oriental historians, there follows, at the end of each prince’s reign, a catalogue of great statesmen, generals, and literati, who have either adorned it by their lives, or troubled it with their death; so, in the annals of the Assassins, is found the chronological enumeration of celebrated men of all nations who have fallen the victims of the Ismailites, to the joy of their murderers, and the sorrow of the world. The first, under the grand-mastership of Kiabusurgomid, was Cassim-ed-dewlet[114] Aksonkor Bourshi, the brave prince of Mossul, feared alike by the Crusaders and the Assassins, as one of their deadliest enemies.[115] Having fought his last battle with the former, near Maarra Mesrin, he was, on the first Sunday after his return,[116] attacked by eight Assassins, disguised as dervishes, as he was in the act of seating himself on his throne in the mosque at Mossul: protected by a coat of mail and his natural bravery, he defended himself against the wretches, three of whom he stretched at his feet; but before his retinue could hasten to his assistance, he received a mortal wound, from the effects of which he expired the same day. The remaining Assassins were sacrificed to the vengeance of the populace, with the exception of one young man from the village of Katarnash, in the mountains near Eras, whose mother, on hearing of Aksonkor’s murder, dressed and adorned herself for joy at the successful issue of the attempt, in which her son had devoted his life; but, on his returning alone, she cut off her hair, and blackened her face, with the deepest sorrow, that he had not shared the murderers’ honourable death. To such lengths did the Assassins carry their point of honour, and what may be termed their Spartanism.[117]