Nomads by Anthony Sattin

Author:Anthony Sattin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Tears Will Tell You

About the time Friar William left Europe on his long journey east, one of Mongke’s younger brothers, Hulagu, rode out of Karakorum at the head of a large army of nomads. Their mother had been a Christian and Hulagu was later to adopt Buddhism, but for now he was a nomadic animist out of the Orkhon Valley. Mongke, it was reported, had seen signs on his brother’s forehead that told of conquest, sovereignty, royal majesty and fortune. Perhaps it was to keep him away from Karakorum that Mongke set Hulagu the task of asserting Mongol power over western Asia and Mesopotamia, just as he sent away another of their brothers, Kubilai, to subdue China. And if the promise of glory and the Mongol reputation in war were not enough to spur Hulagu to victory, he was also fighting for his own future, since Mongke had agreed that Hulagu could rule whatever land he conquered.

Hulagu’s first significant engagement was in north-west Persia with Nizari Isma’ilis. This radical Shi’a sect was led by a Grand Master who was said to drug his followers and promise them entry to paradise and the attention of nubile virgins before sending them to kill political opponents. The adepts were popularly known as hashishin, Arabic for people who smoke hashish, although it is more likely they acted out of religious devotion. For more than a century the hashishin, whom we know as the Assassins, operated as an independent force in the Middle East, at times fighting alongside Crusaders, at others standing with their Muslim adversaries. Their actions were directed neither by religious nor racial preferences but by political expediency: they simply fought for their survival. Their independent highland state was serene, secured by some fifty castles or strongholds, while the world around them became increasingly unstable and bloody, in part made more so by Assassin blades or poison, which claimed the lives of a Christian king and a patriarch in Jerusalem, Crusader knights including Raymond of Tripoli, two caliphs in Baghdad, the sultan in Cairo, another in Damascus and the qadi (judge) of Isfahan. Death was not inevitable, however, as the Crusader Edward ‘Longshanks’ discovered when he survived a poisoned Assassin dagger blow and went on to become King of England, where he reigned for thirty-three years. Even the tent of Saladin, the great Arab leader, was infiltrated and a message left pinned by a poisoned dagger to a table near where he slept. The Mongols also knew all about the Assassins – that was why Friar William was frisked before being allowed into the Great Khan’s presence. If Hulagu was to establish Mongol supremacy in the former Persian Empire, he would have to eliminate these stealthy killers.

The Assassins had built bases in some of Syria and Iran’s most remote places, none more so than near Qazvin in the Elborz Mountains, in north-west Persia. Alamut Castle was fashioned out of the summit and saddle of a huge rock that stands like a lone tooth on the edge of a fertile valley.

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