During the siege he was, a second time, attacked by an Assassin, who wounded him in the head. Salaheddin seized his hand in time, and struck him down. Another immediately rushed forward, but was cut down by the guards; two others followed with no better success.[196] Having before their eyes the example of their three precursors, who had fallen in a similar attempt, they hoped the better to attain their object by rushing on successively, and, by throwing the sultan and his guard into consternation, succeed in taking his life. The first part of their plan was more successful than the last. Salaheddin, terrified by these repeated attacks, retired to his tent, mustered his army, and drove away all strangers.[197]
The following year,[198] however, as soon as he had concluded a peace with the lords of Mossul and Aleppo, he attacked the territory of the Ismailites, ravaged it, and blockaded the fortress, Massiat. He would have carried it, and would have annihilated the power of the Ismailites in Syria, had not his uncle, Shehabeddin, Lord of Hama, moved by the entreaties of the grand-prior, Sinan, interposed, and induced his nephew to make peace, on condition that he should, in future, be secured from the Assassin’s dagger; and, in fact, Salaheddin reigned fifteen years afterwards, carried on his campaigns in Egypt and Syria, and captured the strongest places of the Crusaders, even Jerusalem itself, without experiencing another murderous attack.
Whether it was that the double failure of the Assassins, restrained them from a third attempt, or that the order considered it necessary to preserve Salaheddin, the greatest enemy of the Crusaders, as a counterpoise to the growing power of the latter; or, lastly, that, contrary to the fundamental maxims of the order, some idea of the sanctity of a treaty floated in the mind of the grand-prior, though most improbably,—all the ties of religion and morality having been loosened, and the mysteries of impiety publicly divulged by the grand-masters, Hassan and Mohammed; it nevertheless appears, that Rashideddin Sinan struck out a path for himself, both in respect of doctrine and policy; one, too, which varied somewhat from that of his predecessors, and of the reigning grand-master. The former, as we have seen above, were the secret friends of the order of the Templars, the latter trampled on all religion. Sinan’s faith and policy, however, took another direction, as is clearly shown in the unanimous accounts of cotemporary historians of the Crusaders.[199]
What William, Bishop of Tyre, and James, Bishop of Acca, on the occasion of an embassy, despatched from the Old Man of the Mountain to the king of Jerusalem, in the year 1172, relate concerning the origin, system, and discipline of the Assassins, agrees very well with that which we have derived from oriental sources, and presented to our readers in the former books: “The Assassins,” say they, “were formerly the strictest observers of the laws of Mohammedanism, till the epoch when a grand-master of genius and erudition, and intimately acquainted with the Christian tenets, and doctrine of the Gospel, abolished the prayers of Mohammed, annulled the fasts, and allowed all, without distinction, to drink wine and eat pork. The fundamental rule of their religion, consists in blind submission to their abbot, by which alone they could attain eternal life. This lord and master, who is generally called the Old Man, resides in the Persian province, lying beyond Bagdad (Jebal or Irak-Ajemi). There (at Alamut) young men are educated in secret tenets and pleasures, instructed in various languages, and then sent, armed with their daggers, throughout the world, to murder Christians and Saracens without distinction; either from hatred, as being enemies of their order, or to please its friends, or for the sake of a rich reward. Those, who had sacrificed their lives in the fulfilment of this duty, were adjudged to greater happiness in paradise, as being martyrs; their surviving relations were loaded with gifts, or, if slaves, set at liberty. Thus was the world overrun by these miserably misled youths, who, devoted to murder, issued joyfully from their brethren’s convent, to execute the sanguinary commands they had received; appearing in different forms and disguises, sometimes as monks, sometimes as merchants; in fact, in such a variety of shapes, and with so much prudence and caution, that it was impossible for the destined victims to escape their daggers. The low and mean mob of the people are safe, inasmuch as the Assassins deem it beneath their dignity to assail them; but for the great, and for princes, no remedy remains but to ransom their lives at a heavy price; or to be constantly armed and surrounded by their guards, and exist in a continued state of alarm.”
On an attentive comparison of these passages, in the works of the two learned bishops, which agree in point of meaning, with the narratives of oriental writers, much is found wanting, but nothing erroneous. The strict observance of the duties of Islamism at first, the abrogation of all commandments under the last grand-masters, Hassan II., and Mohammed II., the vow of blind obedience, the bands of Assassins devoted to death, their noviciate, the institution of the order, and its murderous policy, are here comprised in a few words. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how European historians, who, hitherto, drew from no other sources than the Byzantine and Crusading annalists, how such orientalists as D’Herbelot and Deguignes, could have regarded the Assassins as an usual dynasty of princes; whereas, here, every thing points to an order, inasmuch as they clearly speak of the abbot, convent, grand-master, rule of the order, and religion; as we should concerning the Knights-Hospitallers, the Teutonic knights, and the Templars. Every thing harmonizes with the contents of the preceding books of this history: one circumstance only, that of the superior, who sent the embassy, being inclined to Christianity, and desirous of conversion, does not agree with the systematic plan of irreligion of the then reigning grand-master. Either the Crusaders deceived themselves with the pious error, that because the grand-master had abjured Islamism, he must assent to Christianity; or, his policy induced him to preserve the king of Jerusalem in this opinion, and, consequently, as the friend of the order; or, lastly, what appears more probable than either of these conjectures, this mission did not proceed from the grand-master at Alamut, but from the grand-prior of the order in Syria, Rashideddin Sinan, Lord of Massiat.
It must have been the latter, and not the former, who paid the Templars the annual tribute, to effect the removal of which was the chief object of the embassy; and what gives our opinion the highest degree of probability, is the contents of Rashideddin’s writings, which are to this day preserved in Syria, by the remainder of the Ismailites.[200] In them appear evident traces of Christianity, and of an acquaintance with its sacred books.[201]
Rashideddin Abulhasher Sinan, son of Suleiman of Basra, pretended that he was himself an incarnation of the Deity.[202] He never shewed himself but in coarse dresses of hair; he was never seen to eat, or drink, or sleep, or spit. From the top of a rock, he preached to the people, from sunrise to sunset, and was long considered by his audience as a superior being. When, however, they discovered that he limped, from having been wounded by a stone in a great earthquake,[203] he was near losing both the sanctity of his character, and his life, the people wishing to murder him as an impostor. He exhorted them to patience, descended from the rock, where he had preached so long as a Stylite, invited his hearers to a banquet, and succeeded, by the power of his eloquence, in inducing them unanimously to swear obedience and fealty to him as their superior.[204] He seized the moment when the grand-master of the Ismailites in Persia had exposed all the mysteries, and by that means sapped the foundations of the order, to envelope himself in the halo of an apostle, and confirm his dominion in Syria.
For this reason, he is unanimously considered by oriental historians as the chief of the Ismailitic doctrine in Syria;[205] and even to this day, his writings are esteemed canonical by the Ismailites still remaining in that country. They consist of a shapeless chaos of contradictory articles of faith, which probably are all to be understood only allegorically; a host of mutilated passages from the Koran and the Gospels, hymns, litanies, sermons, prayers, and ritual ordinances. These can hardly have been preserved in their original purity, but must have descended to us intermixed with the superstition and ignorance of later centuries, like the books of the Druses, who, now as little acquainted as the Ismailites with the spirit of their founder, possess but a very imperfect knowledge of their original dogmas, and have lost the tradition of the allegorical doctrine.
It was Rashideddin Sinan, therefore, the grand-prior of Massiat, and not the cotemporary grand-master of Alamut, who sent, in the latter years of the reign of Amaury, King of Jerusalem, the envoy Behaeddewlet, a skilful, prudent, and eloquent man, with the secret offer, that he and his followers would undergo baptism, providing the Templars, their nearest neighbours on the mountains, would release them from the annual sum of two thousand ducats, and live in brotherly and peaceful union with them. King Amaury received the envoy with joy, promised to pay the Templars, out of his own purse, the two thousand ducats from which they begged to be released, and sent him, after keeping him for some time, back with guides and an escort, as far as the Ismailite confines. They had already crossed the territory of Tripoli, and had, therefore, arrived in the vicinity of their first castles, which are situated on the mountains in the environs of Tortossa, or Antoradus, when suddenly a body of Templars rushed from an ambuscade, and killed the envoy.[206]
Thus, these knights, who were suspected of being secretly allied to the Ismailites, and followers of their doctrine, openly proclaimed themselves likewise as Assassins: the religion of both had a bond of union in the guilt of wilful murder. The actor of this tragedy was Walter de Dumesnil, a vicious, one-eyed man; who, however, did not perform this act of atrocity from motives of private malice, but with the knowledge of the brethren, and by the command of the grand-master, Odo de St. Amand, and to avenge the order. The inducement seems to have been no other, than the Assassins having endeavoured to relieve themselves from the annual tribute of two thousand ducats to the Templars, either to purchase peace with the neighbours, or for the recompense of services performed: as, for example, as is mentioned in its place, their refusal to participate in the campaign against the Egyptian sultan, their natural protector.[207]