The History of the Assassins, Derived from Oriental Sources

by Freiherr von Joseph Hammer-Purgstall

Loosened the bands of the law.

Blessed be his name.”

Hitherto, the grand-masters had always represented themselves as only the precursors of the imam, as his missionaries and envoys, and severe censors of observance of the rules of Islamism. Hassan, however, now at once asserted that he was himself the imam, in whose hand all power lay to loosen the band of the law. By abolishing them he accredited himself with the blind multitude as lawgiver and khalif.

In this character, he wrote to the presidents and envoys of the different provinces. His letter of credentials to Reis Mosaffer, the grand-prior of Kuhistan, as his namesake had been in Irak, under the founder, Hassan Sabah, was of the following tenor: “I, Hassan, tell you that I am God’s vice-gerent on earth; and mine, in Kuhistan, is the Reis Mosaffer, whom the men of that province are to obey, and whose words they are to listen to as mine.” The reis caused a pulpit to be erected in the castle of Muminabad, the residence of the grand-prior of Kuhistan, from which he read the letter of the grand-master to the people. The majority of the inhabitants heard the perusal with joy. They played the pipe and drum, danced and drank wine at the foot of the pulpit, and made known their contempt of law, and their libertinism in every possible way. Some few, who remained true to the doctrines of Islamism, emigrated; others, who could not resolve upon this step, stayed, and shared with the rest the reputation of impiety.

Thus the standard of the freest infidelity and most daring libertinism floated on all the castles of Rudbar and Kuhistan, as the insignia of the new doctrine; and instead of the name of the Egyptian khalif, that of Hassan resounded from all the pulpits, as that of the true successor of the prophet. Since prejudices are often more deeply rooted in the breast than religious rites and moral laws, it was easier for Hassan to assume the character of legislator than that of imam, whom the people hitherto only acknowledged in the Egyptian khalif.

In order to support his pretensions to this title, he at length found it necessary to deduce his descent in blood from the Fatimite khalifs; and although he had, in the public assembly of the 17th Ramadan, called himself the son of Mohammed Ben Busurgomid, he endeavoured to prove, partly by dark intimations, partly by ambiguous writings, the opinion that he was a son of Nesar’s and grandson of the Khalif Mostanssur, during whose reign the founder, Hassan Ben Sabah, had been at Cairo, and had, in the political dissensions of the Ismailites, espoused the party of Mostanssur’s elder son against his younger brother, Nesar; on which account he had been compelled by the generalissimo, Bedr Jemali, to quit Egypt, as we have before related more at length. The rumour which his adherents dispersed abroad in confirmation of his descent was to this effect. A certain Abulhassan Seide, a confidant of the Khalif Mostanssur, had come from Egypt to Alamut a year after his patron’s death, and had brought with him a son of Nesar’s, whom he confided to the care of Hassan Ben Sabah, who received the envoy with great respect, and had assigned to the young imam a village at the foot of the castle as a residence, where he, after a time, married, and gave his son the name, “Blessed be his Memory.”

At the same time that the imam’s wife was delivered of this child, the wife of the grand-master, Mohammed, son of Busurgomid, was in her accouchement. A confidential female servant carried the young “Blessed be his Memory” into the castle, and substituted him in the place of the son of Mohammed. As this tale was too absurd to meet with easy credence, and as, according to their pure doctrine, that all was indifferent and nothing forbidden, the assertors of this genealogy were not ashamed subsequently to maintain that the young imam had had clandestine intercourse with Mohammed’s wife, the fruit of which was the reigning grand-master, imam, and khalif, Blessed be his Memory. Thus, Hassan preferred being thought a bastard of the blood of the khalifs, to being deemed his father’s legitimate child. The honour of the mother was sacrificed to the ambition of the son; and because adultery afforded grounds to his pretensions, the sanctity of the harem was forced to give place to the merit of ambition.

The Ismailites, who, in this manner, made Hassan a descendant of Nesar, the son of Khalif Mostanssur, were called Nesari, a name considered synonymous with the Impious or the Assassins. They gave Hassan the name of Kaimolkiamet (i. e. Lord of the Resurrection), and called themselves the sect of the Resurrection or Revelation; for, by the epoch of the resurrection they understood the time when the one about to rise (Kaim, i. e. the imam), should bring them near to God by the removal of all laws. This period had, according to their pernicious opinion, occurred during the imamat of Hassan, who, on that account, emancipated the people from all legal obligations. Thus were the bounds of duty and morals at once and openly violated. Undismayed, and with heads erect, Vice and Crime stalked over the ruins of Religion and social order; and Murder, which hitherto had felled the destined victims under the mask of blind obedience, and as the executioner of a secret tribunal, now raged in indiscriminate massacres.[165]

Hassan, as might have been expected, died a martyr to his new doctrine. In the fourth year of his licentious reign, he fell at the castle of Lamsir, by the dagger of his brother-in-law, a descendant of the family Buyeb. In this murder, the historian views not so much the visitation of celestial wrath on so many crimes (which, indeed, both his predecessors and successors had better merited), as the natural punishment of insulted prudence, which, in the ordinary course of human affairs, is sooner or later avenged equally with the greatest viciousness. It was the height of imprudence in Hassan, the learned explainer, to surrender the most recondite doctrines of the order to the many-headed hydra, the people; and he sealed with his own blood the universally accorded liberty of murder.

Reign of Mohammed II., Son of Hassan II.