MASYAF CASTLE , SYRIA
Home of the Assassins and the "Old Man of the Mountain"

FLAG SYRIA



MAP

The location of
Masyaf Castle
in Syria
"Assassin" is now a common noun in most European languages, but it first came to the West from Arabic around the time of the Crusades, when it was the name of a secretive Muslim sect feared by the Crusaders and the Muslim establishment alike. Bernard Lewis traces the origins of the Assassin sect to the Shiite branch of Islam whereby the Assassins were to the first group to make planned, systematic and long term use of murder as a political weapon. They were history's first terrorists.

Throughout the later centuries, however, the Assassins became hired, secret murderers, of a peculiarly skillful and dangerous kind. Although they were known as among the hazards of the East, they were not explicitly connected with any particular place, sect or nation, nor ascribed any religious beliefs or political purposes to them. They were simply ruthless and competent killers and must be guarded against as such.

As Lewis notes in his book, "The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam", by the thirteenth century, the word Assassin, in various forms, had already passed into European usage in the general sense of hired professional murderer. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, who died in 1348, tells how the lord of Lucca sent "his assassins" to Pisa to kill a troublesome enemy there.

Even earlier, Dante, in a passing reference in the 19th canto of the Inferno, speaks of "the treacherous assassin"; and his fourteenth-century commentator Fancesco da Buti, explaining a term which for some readers at the time may still have been strange and obscure, remarked: "An assassin is one who kills others for money."

Since then "assassin" has become a common noun in most European languages. It means a murderer or, more particularly, one who kills by stealth or treachery, whose victim is a public figure and whose motive is fanaticism or greed.

Of course, as Lewis notes, it was not always so. The word first appeared in the chronicles of the Crusades, as the name of a strange group of Muslim sectaries in the Levant, led by a mysterious figure known as the "Old Man of the Mountain", and abhorrent, by their beliefs and practices, to good Christians and Muslims alike.

One such report quoted by Lewis, of an envoy sent to Egypt and Syria in 1175 by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, states that "this breed of men live without law; they eat swine's flesh against the law of the Saracens, and make use of all women without distinction, including their mothers and sisters.... They have among them a Master, who strikes the greatest fear into all the Saracen princes both far and near, as well as the neighbouring Christian lords."

This "Master" or "Old Man of the Mountain" had struck the imagination of much of Europe so much so that, at one time, he became an anecdote for undying devotion in love and romance. "You have me more fully in your power," says a Provencal troubadour to his lady, "than the Old Man has his Assassins, who go to kill his mortal enemies...." "Just as the Assassins serve their master unfailingly," says another, "so I have served Love with unswerving loyalty." In time, however, it was murder, rather than loyalty and devotion, that made the more powerful impression, and gave the word assassin the meaning that it has retained to the present day.