“So when the Old Man would have any prince slain, he would say to such a youth, ‘Go thou and slay So-and-so, and when thou returnest my angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And shouldst thou die, natheless even so will I send my angels to carry thee back into Paradise.’ So he caused them to believe, and thus there was no order of his that he would not affront any peril to execute, for the great desire that they had to get back into that Paradise of his. And in this manner the Old One got his people to murder any one whom he desired to get rid of. Thus, too, the great dread that he inspired all princes withal made them become his tributaries, in order that he might abide at peace and amity with them.”

The blind obedience of these Fidá'ís, who, as will have been gathered from the above quotation, were chosen with special Blind obedience of the Fidá'ís. regard to this quality, combined with courage and adroitness, and were not initiated into the philo­sophical conceptions of the higher degrees of the Order, is well illustrated by an anecdote preserved to us by Fra Pipino and Marino Sanuto:—

“When, during a period of truce, Henry, Count of Champagne (titular King of Jerusalem), was on a visit to the Old Man of Syria, one day, as they walked together, they saw some lads in white sitting on the top of a high tower. The Shaykh, turning to the Count, asked if he had any subjects as obedient as his own; and, without waiting for a reply, made a sign to two of the boys, who immediately leaped from the tower and were killed on the spot.”

The Fidá'ís, though unlearned in the esoteric mysteries of their religion, were carefully trained not only in the use of arms, the endurance of fatigue, and the arts of disguise, but also, in some cases at any rate, in foreign and even European languages; for those deputed to assassinate Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, were sufficiently conversant with the Frankish language and customs to pass as Christian monks during the six months which they spent in the Crusaders' camp awaiting an opportunity for the accomplishment of their deadly errand. It was seldom, of course, that they survived their victims, especially as they were fond of doing their work in the most dramatic style, striking down the Muslim Amír on a Friday in the mosque, and the Christian Prince or Duke on a Sunday in the church, in sight of the assembled congregation. Yet so honourable a death and so sure a way to future happiness was it deemed by the followers of Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ to die on one of the “Old One's” quests, that we read of the mothers of Fidá'ís who wept to see their sons return alive.

Sometimes they only threatened, if thus they could compass their end. The leader who marched to attack one of their strongholds would wake up some morning in his tent to find stuck in the earth beside him a dagger, on which was trans­fixed a note of warning which might well turn him back from his expedition; as is said (but not, I think, on good authority) to have happened to Maliksháh, and later to Saladin. And a theological professor, confronted by a quasi-student, whose diligent attendance and close attention to his lectures had favourably attracted his notice, with a choice between a purse of gold and a dagger as alternative inducements to him to cease reviling the “heretics” of Alamút, wisely chose the former; and thereafter, when rallied on his avoidance of all disrespectful allusion to them, was wont to reply, with some humour, that he had been “convinced by arguments both weighty and trenchant” that he had been wrong to indulge in such uncharitable utterances.

Until the final destruction of their strongholds in Persia, and the capture and execution of their eighth and last Grand Master, Ruknu'd-Dín Khursháh, by the Mongols in the middle of the thirteenth century, about the same time that the Caliphate of Baghdád was also extinguished, the Assassins were very active, and will be repeatedly mentioned in these pages, so that it is essential that the reader should have a clear idea of their principles, their organisation, and their relation to the parent sect of the Isma'ílís of Egypt, in the history of which the “New Propaganda” instituted by Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ, with the new element of physical violence and terrorism which it involved, marks an important epoch. Of the Syrian branch, which made the Order famous in Europe and enriched our language with a new word, and whose political power dates from the seizure of the Castle of Banias about A.D. 1126, we shall not have much occasion to speak; but no one interested in their history should fail to read Stanislas Guyard's most fascinating paper in the Journal Asiatique for 1877, Un Grand Maître des Assassins. This true and judicious account of the remarkable Shaykh Ráshidu'd-Dín Sinán, who for a while rendered the Syrian branch of the Order independent of the Persian, rivals in interest the most thrilling romance, and supplies a mass of detail concerning the history, achievements, and methods of the sect which I am compelled to omit in this place. Even at the present day the remnants of this once power­ful body are widely, though sparsely, scattered through the East, in Syria, Persia, East Africa, Central Asia, and India, where the Ághá Khán—a lineal descendant of Ruknu'd-Dín Khúrsháh, the last Grand Master of Alamút, who himself claimed descent through Nizár, the son of al-Mustanṣir, the Fáṭimid Caliph, from Isma'íl, the Seventh Imám, and great-great-great-grandson of the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, 'Alí b. Abí Ṭálib— is still honoured as the titular head of this branch of the Isma'ílís.

In following the career and examining the achievements of Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ we have wandered away from his earlier co- Náṣir-i­Khusraw. religionist, Náṣir-i-Khusraw, who, from the purely literary point of view, is of greater importance; since, while of the writings of the former we possess no thing (so far as is at present known) except the extracts from the Sar-guzasht-i-Sayyidná cited in the Jahán-gushá and the Jámi'u't-Tawáríkh, of the latter we possess numerous works of the highest value and interest, both in verse and prose, several of which have been the objects of very careful study by Bland, Dorn, Ethé, Fagnan, Nöldeke, Pertsch, Rieu, Schefer, and other eminent scholars. With these and with their author—one of the most attractive and remarkable per­sonalities in Persian literary history—we shall deal in the next chapter, which will be devoted to the literature of the same period whereof we have sketched in this chapter the outward political aspect.