The History of the Assassins, Derived from Oriental Sources

by Freiherr von Joseph Hammer-Purgstall

He, who possesses the advantage of drawing from these oriental sources, which, for the most part, remain concealed from the western world, will be astonished at the richness of the treasures still to be brought to light. There lie open before him—the sovereignty of the great monarchies converging into one point; the power of single dynasties, shooting out into a thousand rays; the fabulous chronologies of the most ancient, and the exact annals of the most modern empires; the period of ignorance anterior to the prophet, and the days of knowledge that succeeded; the wonders of the Persians; the feats of the Arabs; the universally ravaging and desolating spirit of the Mongols; and the political wisdom of the Ottomans. Amidst such an abundance, the miner’s strength appears too small, and his life too short, to enable him to avail himself of all: and moreover, the very excess of riches renders selection difficult. Which vein is he first to open, and from which mass is he first to extract the ore for the manufacture of historic art? Nowhere in the labyrinthine treasury of the east will he find a perfect work, but only rich materials for the construction of his edifice. His choice is determined by accident or predilection. What is new and important always finds a sale; and the market is never glutted with building materials, at a time when architecture flourishes.

An Arabian proverb says, “The building stone is not left lying in the road.” If it be indifferent to the historical investigator, who is eager for knowledge, and to whom sources are accessible, with what and to what end he begins his labour, it is by no means so with the conscientious historian, who only works with pleasure where all known sources are at his command, and when accuracy may, for the future, spare him the charge of incompleteness. In this point of view, the serried ranks of oriental histories are thinned at once. Where, either in the west or the east, is the library, which contains the works so necessary to the complete treatment of the most important oriental epochs,—works which, as yet, are known only by their names, and not by their contents? Who, for example, could precisely and circumstantially describe the history of the Khalifat, the dominion of the families Ben Ommia and Abbas, and their capitals, so long as he had not read the History of Bagdad, by Ibn Khatib, and that of Damascus, by Ibn Assaker,—the former in sixty, the latter in eighty volumes? Who could write the History of Egypt, if he has not at hand, besides Macrisi, the numerous works which he consulted?

Still greater difficulties beset the writer of Persian history, whether it be of the fabulous times of mythology, or of the middle period, where the stream of the Persian monarchy, till then restrained in one bed, flows into the numerous branches of cotemporary dynasties; or of the most modern, where it has long been lost in the desert of wild anarchy. More than one generation must pass, ere the literary treasures of the east will be completed in the libraries of the west, either by the patronage of princes, or the industry of travellers; or become more accessible, by a more extended knowledge of languages, and by translations; and ere thus, the venerable witnesses of antiquity will be assembled, all of which it is the first duty of the historian carefully to examine. An exception to this want of accumulated authorities, which has hitherto been so sensibly felt in Europe, and which checks the writer of oriental history in the midst of his career, is exhibited by that of the Ottomans. Its original sources, the eldest of which scarcely boast an antiquity of five hundred years, might (although not without considerable expenditure both of money and trouble) even now, be all procured, and moreover, might be completed and corrected from the contemporary histories of the Byzantines and modern Europeans.

A history is, however, the work of years; and the severity of the task demands strength, prepared by previous exercise. In addition to the immense importance of the subject, we were induced to impose upon ourselves the present work in preference to others, by the consideration, that being in the possession of all the before-mentioned original authorities, touching the History of the Assassins (besides which none are known in the east), we might deem the examination of historical witnesses concerning this important epoch, almost as closed. Their depositions are certainly sparing and meagre; but the barrenness of the subject in splendid descriptions of battles, expeditions, commercial enterprise, and monuments, is compensated by the deeply engrossing interest of the history of governments and religions. The Assassins are but a branch of the Ismailites; and these latter, not the Arabs generally as descendants of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, but a sect existing in the bosom of Islamism, and so called from the Imam Ismail, the son of Jafer. In order, therefore, to understand their doctrinal system, and the origin of their power, it is necessary to treat, at some length, of Islamism itself, its founder, and its sects.

In the seventh century of the Christian era, when Nushirvan, the Just, adorned, with his princely virtues, the imperial throne of Persia, and the tyrant Phocas stained with his crimes that of Byzantium;—in the same year, in which Persia’s host, for the first time, fled before the Arabian troops of the insurgent viceroy of Hira, and Abraha, the Christian king of Abyssinia, the Lord of the Elephants, who had hastened from Africa, in order to destroy the sacred house of the Kaaba, was driven back by that scourge of heaven, the small-pox, which commencing there, has since raged over the whole of the old continent—(birds of celestial vengeance, says the Koran, stoned his army with pebbles, that they fell); in this year, so important to Arabia, that from it began a new era—that of the year of the Elephants,—in the same night, when the foundations of the palace of Chosroes at Medain, which had baffled the attacks of time, or the builders of Bagdad, were overturned by an earthquake; when, by the operation of the same agent, lakes were dried up, and the sacred fire of Persia was extinguished by the ruins of its temple,—Mohammed first saw the light of the world, the third part of which was so soon to submit to his faith. His biography has been written in many volumes, by the historians of those nations who believe in him. From thence Maracci,[1] Gagnier,[2] and Sale,[3] have derived the accounts which they have given to Europe. The first is embued with the fanatical zeal of his church, the second is the most fundamental and complete, the third the most unprejudiced. Voltaire,[4] Gibbon,[5] and Müller,[6] have painted the legislator, conqueror and prophet; after them, it is difficult to add anything concerning him. Hence, in this case, we shall be brief, and shall only state what is necessary, and what has remained untouched by those three great historians, or that portion of his tenets which stands in the nearest connexion with those of the Ismailites, and by which, in the sequel, they were undermined.

Mohammed, the son of Abdallah, and grandson of Abdolmotaleb, was descended from a family of the highest rank among the Arabians, that of Koreish, in whose custody were the keys of the sacred house of the Kaaba. He felt himself called to lead back his countrymen, who were sunk in idolatry, to the knowledge of the only true God, and, as prophet and legislator, to complete the great work of purifying natural religion from the dross of superstition; a task which so many had previously, at different times, attempted. Arabia was divided among the religions of the Christians, the Jews, and the Sabæans. To combine these three into one, by the union of that which flowed from principles common to all, for the attainment of political liberty and greatness, was the aim of his life, which had been so long spent in meditation, and only late in years was roused to active exertion. From his infancy, his mother, Emina, who was a Jewess, and in early youth, during a journey in Syria, the Christian monk, Sergius, imbued him with the religious tenets of Moses and Jesus, and exhibited, in the full light of its infamy, the idolatrous worship of the Kaaba, where three hundred idols demanded the adoration of the people.

The Jews were expecting the Messiah as the Saviour of Israel, the Christians looked for the advent of the Paraclete, as their comforter and mediator, when, in his fortieth year (an age which, in the east, has always been considered as that of a prophet), Mohammed felt within him the voice of divine inspiration, enjoining him to read in the name of the Lord,[7] the commands of heaven, and by their promulgation, to prove himself to his people, the prophet and apostle of God. Nature had formed him a poet and an enthusiastic orator, by endowing him with an astounding power of language, a penetrating ardour of imagination, a dignity of demeanour, commanding the profoundest reverence, and a captivating suavity of manners. Valour, magnanimity, and eloquence, qualities prized by every nation, and by none more than the wild son of the desert, were the three great magnets which drew to him the hearts of his people, who had long been wont to do homage to the heroic and munificent, and more especially to the great poets, whose noble productions were hung in the Kaaba, written in golden letters, and as the immediate gifts of heaven, deemed worthy of divine adoration.

Of all Arabic poetry, the Koran is the master-piece; in it the lightning of sublimity gleams through the dreary obscurity of long prosy traditions and ordinances, and the energetic language rolls like the thunder of heaven, reverberating from rock to rock, in the echo of the rhyme; or pours on like the roaring of the wave, in the constant return of similar sounding words. It stands the glorious pyramid of Arabic poetry; no poet of this people, either before or since, has approached its excellence. Lebid, one of the seven great bards, whose works were called al-moallakat, the suspended, because they hung on the walls of the Kaaba for public admiration, tore his own down, as unworthy of the honour, the moment he had read the sublime exordium of the second sura of the Koran. Hassan, the satirist, who lampooned the prophet, on which verses of the Koran descended from heaven, was forced, at the conquest of Mecca, to confess the irresistible power of his word and his sword; and Kaab, the son of Soheir, paid him spontaneous homage, in a hymn of praise, for which the prophet gave him his mantle, which is still preserved among the precious articles of the Turkish treasury; and is annually, during the month Ramadan, worshipped and touched, in the most solemn manner, by the Sultan, accompanied by his court and the great officers of state. Mohammed’s lofty destiny, in changing from poet to prophet, has induced many later Arabian poets and beaux esprits to attempt the like; the consequences of which have either been nugatory, or fraught with their own destruction. Moseleima, a cotemporary of Mohammed, and, like him, the poet of nature, nevertheless, soon became dangerous to him, as the unattainable divinity of the Koran had not yet received the sanction of ages. Ibn Mokaffaa, the elegant translator of the Fables of Bidpai, who shut himself up for whole weeks, to produce a single verse which might bear a comparison with the lofty passage of the Koran, on the deluge,—“Earth, swallow thy waters! Heaven, withhold thy cataracts!”—earned by his fruitless labours nothing but the reputation of a free-thinker; and Motenebbi, whose name signifies the “prophecying,” gained, indeed, the glory of a great poet, but never that of a prophet. Thus, for twelve centuries, the Koran has maintained, undisturbed, the character of an inimitable and uncreated celestial Scripture, as the eternal Word of God.

The word of the prophet is the Soonna, that is, the collection of his orations and oral commands, which, no less than in the written Koran, by vivid fancy, energy of will, power of language, and knowledge of mankind, manifest the genius of the great poet and legislator. The former has never been estimated in the view we have just taken of it: the latter will be considered in the sequel.