The Assasin Assassin Corps can become synonymous with Assassins in Western culture, not a waste of time, they have distinct organizational characteristics.
The first is an assassination success rate of almost 100 percent. At that time, it was widely believed that as long as it was included in the assassination list of the Assasin Assassin Regiment, the assassination would be a foregone conclusion. The only uncertainty is the time and place of the assassination, or even the mere rumor that someone has a grudge with the Assasin organization or has been dragged into the assassination blacklist, is enough to make the person feel frightened and desperate. Because the people on the list could hardly survive, many princes and nobles paid huge "protection fees" every year to pray that the elderly in the mountains would not include them in the "list".
The second is the extreme concealment of assassinations. The Assasin Assassins would often pretend to be devout believers and mingle in the crowd, unknowingly approaching the target and suddenly launching an attack. For example, on his way back to the palace, the Sultan's Prime Minister, Nizam, was killed by an Assassin Assasin disguised as an Islamic trust monk who stabbed him in the heart with a short sword. Another Arab governor, who had been heavily guarded, was eventually assassinated while praying at the mosque, because the guards never expected anyone to offend Allah kill people in the sacred mosque. Another case is that two Assasin Assassins assassinated a Crusader Marquis, during which one Assassin was killed and the Marquis was wounded, while the other Assassin escaped temporarily. He did not abandon the plan, but hid in the chapel, because although he was a Muslim, he knew from years of training that the marquis would come to the chapel to thank God for his good fortune. Sure enough, the wounded marquis arrived as scheduled, and as he knelt down to pray, he was quietly killed by the surviving assassin...
In order to make the assassinations seamless, the Assasins often set up spy networks in advance, and they would send trained assassins to a certain place to live with ordinary people, lurking as ordinary people for a period of time, sometimes for several years. The Assassins would fully integrate into local society, even marrying and having children, but once they received an assassination order one day, they would immediately tear off their disguised cloaks and strike decisively, quickly and accurately, without anyone's suspicion.
Finally, there is the world-renowned spirit of absolute obedience among the members of this organization. All the Assasin Assassins, once they had completed their assassination purpose, would lay down their weapons and wait to be captured, would not have any doubts even in the face of death, and seemed to be very much looking forward to death. This strange behavior stemmed from the fact that the leader of the organization had told them that believers who died by carrying out the leader's orders would ascend to heaven. For these Assassins, there was no fear of even death, let alone threats or torture. It is said that once the old man in the mountain, in order to show his supreme authority to the sultan's envoys, nodded his head to a young believer, and the man immediately drew his knife and killed himself; and nodded again, and another young believer immediately jumped from the city wall. The envoy was shocked, and the elder of the mountain leisurely said that he still had sixty thousand such warriors, who could obey his orders unconditionally like this at any time and anywhere.
The "Eagle's Nest" of the headquarters of Assasin in a 15th-century Persian document
The first assassination of the Sassin Assassins, which is well documented, was carried out in 1092 by an Assassin named Bu Tahir Arani, and the debut of the Assasins became an example of their subsequent assassinations. Disguised as a Sunni believer, he went to assassinate the Sunni leader, Vizr Ali Murk, and while pretending to be a confession to Vizl, he suddenly drew a hidden dagger and stabbed the key point with one blow, kicking off the next assassination.
In 1187, the great Egyptian Sultan Saladin decisively defeated the main Crusader forces at the Battle of Harding, and later successfully captured the holy cities of Jerusalem and Acre. It is said that Pope Urban III died of fright when he heard the news. The major Western powers launched the Third Crusade to retake the Holy City at the call of the new Pope. One of the leading figures is Richard I, the Lionheart king of England. After a battle in which the two sides won and lost, the Lionheart and the Crusaders regained some of the lost territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (but not Jerusalem itself). In 1192 AD, Conrad of Montferra was elected King of Jerusalem by the nobility and approved by Richard I (albeit somewhat reluctantly). At this time, Conrad, full of spirit, rubbed his fists and was ready to make a final attempt to retake the Holy City.
Saladin accepted the surrender of the Crusaders
The tomb of Richard I the Lionheart
However, before Conrad could be officially crowned, an accident changed history forever. On the morning of April 28, Conrad's pregnant queen, Isabella, was preparing to have lunch with her husband, but on the king's way back to the palace, two Christian pilgrims "met him unexpectedly" and bowed respectfully to Conrad and drew a cross on his chest. Such a pious act made both the king and his guards let their guard down. When the two pilgrims walked up to Conrad, they suddenly drew their short swords from under the placket, and in a flash of cold light, two sharp blades, one piercing Conrad's back and one piercing his ribs. The method is like slaughtering livestock, cruel, precise and ruthless. By the time the guards reacted, the king of Jerusalem had fallen into a pool of blood. After killing one Assassin and capturing another alive, they discovered that the young Assassins were not Christians at all, but devout Muslims, well-known Assasin Assassins. According to a long tradition of punishing the felonies of the king, the Assassins would be tortured by two kinds of torture, skinning and slow frying to death, but during the execution, the Assasins suffered in silence, neither wailing nor begging for forgiveness, but smiling at death, their eyes shining brightly, as if expecting something. This scene made the nobles and people watching the execution shudder. Perhaps jealous of the Assasin Assassins, or perhaps because of the excessive attrition on the battlefield, the Lionheart chose to negotiate peace with Saladin, allowing muslims to preserve the Holy Land and Christians to receive the right to make a peaceful pilgrimage.
King Conrad of Jerusalem, who was poisoned by the Assasinites
The list of similar successful assassinations is endless. Of course, the Assasinites also know how to yield without a fight. In the case of absolute superiority, they are also happy to achieve their goals through intimidation. For example, after the Assasin Assassins assassinated Nizam Mulk's son, the father angrily vowed that he would lead an elite force that was unique in history to the Eagle's Nest, the residence of the Assasin Assassins, to destroy the territory and all its inhabitants in one fell swoop. After a long journey, one night they finally saw the castle towering over the hill, so Nizam Mulek ordered a camp at the foot of The Arbots for renovation, after which he went to sleep in his tent. He was convinced that when he woke up the next morning, he would be able to lead his soldiers in a righteous revenge against the Assasins that had never been seen before, and to wipe them out and eradicate a cancer in the world. But when he woke up the next day, he found a bright dagger in the sand next to the bed, only the handle of the knife was exposed, and under the dagger was a note warning that what awaited him and his army would be a terrible massacre.
Nizam. None of Mullek's entourage nor his bodyguards could explain how the dagger and the note had been put into the tent, and none of them had ever seen outsiders approaching the tent. As a result, the whole army was in disarray, and everyone was in hysterical fear. Nizam Mulk pretended to be calm, but he also had palpitations. After weighing the situation, he decided to cancel the attack and told the army not to enter the area in the coming days. As a result, the Assasin faction defused the situation without a single soldier, and after that, it was even more fearless.
But when the moon is full, it is a loss, and there is no feast in the world. The Assasin Assassins' rule of terrorism in the Middle East continued into the thirteenth century. After Hassan's death, his sons and loyal followers came to power, and at least three generations of his descendants inherited his unfinished business. But the Assasins were in decline by the thirteenth century, as the Mongols, who had been fearful assassins, could not resist their more ferocious and brutal opponents, the Mongols.
In the thirteenth century, hordes of Mongols came from the east like a tidal wave, and their toughness, cold-bloodedness, and brutality terrified the Assasin Assassins. The Mongolian Iron Horse swept like a whirlwind across the Iranian plateau, the Middle East, the Near East, and even Eastern Europe. Faced with a common strong enemy, the Shiites and Sunnis finally put an end to their previous suspicions and began to discuss a joint battle. But it was too late to wake up.
At that time, the Mongol Khan Möngke sent his brother Hulegu to lead the Mongol army to the west, and was invincible along the way. The Assasins tried to save the Islamic world by plotting to assassinate Möngke, but failed under the strict mongol defense. This completely angered the Mongol Empire, which regarded the Assasins as a confidant. The Assasins had many castles with dangerous terrain, and they believed that they could protect themselves, but they did not know that Hulagu was prepared, and that his Western Expeditionary Army had a 10,000-man engineering force from China. These engineers would build ingenious and flexible pulley chariots, and could disassemble huge siege equipment, transport them up the hill piece by piece, and assemble them one by one under the fortress. In 1256, Hulagu's army crossed the Amu Darya River and approached fort Alamite. It is said that the last Assasin sect leader Rukridin Kusha also offered peace to the Mongols, but was categorically refused. Eventually, after a long siege, in December 1256 the Eagle's Nest opened its doors and surrendered to the Mongol army, which heralded the end of the glorious history of the Assasins.
Hulagu and the Empress
The Mongol army besieged the Eagle's Nest
As for the destruction of the Assasins, Marco Polo made a rough record in concise language in his travelogue "The Chronicles of Marco Polo": "In 1252, after the birth of Christianity, the Monarch of Eastern Tatars, Hule Day, heard of the great evil of this old man (that is, the elder of the mountain) and wanted to destroy it. He chose a general and ordered a large army to besiege the fort. The fort was very strong, and it was besieged for three years and could not be overcome. If they have food to eat, they will never be able to overcome it. However, after three years, there was a shortage of food and he was taken prisoner. Elder Shan and his men were slaughtered. There will be no other elders thereafter, and the evil will be covered. ”
The Persian historian Dzophini described the fierce war in more vivid terms in his History of the Conquerors of the World: "The Mongol army, with his morning drink, played the harp of war, and was bent on destroying the enemy's defenses, and they were ready to fight with stone shooters and stones." At the same time, the defenders of the fort, after preparing for battle at night and handing over their towers to their accomplices, began to fight; they erected the shelves of the stone shooters and fired a row of fierce stones. 'You tighten your ropes and attack bravely; if you don't make a mistake in the end, how good it would be. On the other side, the young soldiers also split the silk with spear-like arrows, while they themselves did not flinch in front of the arrows. Arrows, the deadly spears of death, flew toward the gangsters, flying like hailstones through the sieve clouds. The arrows pass through the armor like a spring wind blowing through the petals. When the Sun withdrew the Shadow Shield in front of him, they stopped fighting, but on the fourth day, it was their life-or-death moment, and the evidence of truth was clear. At the dawn of the day, there were roars and shouts, and on both sides, they were involved in the path of war. Crossbows shoot flying arrows from the walls, and when nothing can be done, a Gammanigfu with a range of 2,500 steps made by the Khitan craftsmen (referring to the Chinese) is used to shoot the fools; among the demonic pagans, many soldiers burn the arrows of the shooting stars. From the castle, the stones also fell like leaves, but no one was injured. After tasting the majesty of the Mongols that day, they stopped fighting, and the defenders of the castle knocked on the gates of peace after a fierce battle. ”
The Mongol army, with its deceitful, cruel and powerful military might, was on the rise. Under his leadership, more than a hundred large and small castles belonging to the Assasin faction surrendered one after another, but there were still some radicals who stubbornly resisted, and it took more than two years for the Hulagu army to wipe them all out and completely destroy them. After disarming the Assasinites, the Mongols destroyed all the castles without leaving a trail of their own, and hassan's orchestrated paradise on earth was destroyed by them. Moreover, Hulagu broke his promise to the Assasins and ordered that all of Assasin's people be killed, especially the yamao's family. The Assasins were too loyal, too fanatical, and too numerous to be completely wiped out for a while, even as the Mongol massacres swept through many areas like a tsunami. Subsequent Mongol armies killed all the Ismailis in Kuhistan on the pretext of recruiting militias, and the Ismailis elsewhere could not escape the fate of this huge massacre. The assassination organization that had shocked the Western Regions for a hundred years had thus collapsed.
Ruins of Assasin Castle in Syria
Although Assasin has withdrawn from the stage of history as a tight organization, its influence has continued for many centuries. The first generation of sect leader Hassan established a concentric circle power structure for the assassination group, compared with the traditional pyramid structure, because its core internal mechanism is hidden, and the number of circles is uncertain, which means that people outside the center of the circle can never figure out how far away they are from the real power "circle center". The design of the Assasins was very suitable for the operational principles of the secret organization, and even if the organization was partially destroyed, there was no danger of total collapse, so their organizational model and structure gradually became the object of imitation by various spies and secret organizations in later generations. One of the most famous examples is the Masonics, who drew organizational inspiration from the Templar Order, a prominent ally of the Assasins during the Crusades.
One of the most extreme and trusted followers and successors of the Assasins eventually formed the non-Dyne clique, a name that still has a close relationship with the fanatical followers of Islam, who defend against all enemies against the Prophet, whether they are infidels in the West or Followers of Islam who are on the "wrong path." Such extreme jihadist thinking, and the idea of striking the enemy through unconventional secret warfare forms, is still active in all corners of the world today. From the Chechen human bomber "Black Widow", to the civil aviation flight that hit the World Trade Center in 911, to the roadside explosions in Baghdad and Jerusalem, the influence of the Assasins is still lingering. For most of them, the purpose of this is the same as the promise of the "old man in the mountains": to be able to enter the paradise of bliss after death and enjoy endless joy and happiness.