I first heard this explanation in my college days and even then it seemed odd to me. For one thing, hashish doesn’t normally increase aggressiveness, quite the opposite. I kept having an image of giggling men in dark cloaks gliding through palaces, stopping to admire the colors of the gardens and fountains as they hunted down their target. However, most historians today think that the name was given the Nizari as a term of contempt, implying that they were as worthless as those who succumbed to drugs.
It is interesting that, as with the stories of the Templars, the legends of the Assassins are better known than their actual history.
THE ASSASSINS AND THE TEMPLARS
William of Tyre wasn’t particularly concerned with the Assassins, as they rarely attacked Christians. As a matter of fact, the Syrian Assassins sometimes allied themselves with crusader lords to fight their mutual enemies. In 1128 the Assassins living in the town of Banyas were threatened by the city of Damascus. Their leader and a few others were crucified on the battlements of the wall of Damascus, “in order that it might be seen how God had dealt with the oppressors and brought signal chastisement upon the infidels.”13 Rather than let the town of Banyas fall to the Damascenes, the Assassins turned the town over to Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem.14
From about 1152, the Assassins in Syria paid tribute to the Templars of two thousand bezants a year.15 This may have been brought about in retribution for the assassination of Count Raymond of Tripoli in that year, but the facts aren’t certain. Soon after, the Hospitallers, now in possession of the fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, on the border of Assassin territory, also demanded two thousand bezants a year.
This leads to another story from William of Tyre, one of the most puzzling concerning the early days of the Templars.
According to William, the leader of the Assassins, whom he called “the old man of the mountain,” wished to make an alliance with the crusaders. He sent a representative named “Boabdelle” to Almaric, king of Jerusalem, asking for instruction in Christianity. The catch was that conversion hinged on the remission of the two thousand bezants that the Assassins paid the Templars each year. Almaric was open to the idea, but the Templars were against it. They waylaid the emissary on his way back to Syria and murdered him.16
William continues to describe the anger of the king. Almaric tried to put the leader of the attackers, William of Mesnil, in prison. The Templars would have none of this and appealed the matter to the pope. Where it would have gone from there is hard to say, for Almaric died. One of the regents for his son, Baldwin IV, was Raymond, son of the murdered count of Tripoli. He was not interested in punishing those who killed Assassins. So the Assassins remained Moslem and the tribute continued to be paid.
Historians have puzzled over this for many years. Some think William made the whole story up. It’s not found in any other records from the time. It seems strange that the Assassins would suddenly wish to convert just to save money. It seems equally strange that the Templars, knights of God, would want to lose the chance to bring so many souls to baptism. William believed that their greed overcame their piety and used this episode as proof of how far the order had fallen since its humble beginnings.
Unless new documents turn up, the truth will never be known. William’s story was believed in his own time and it reflects the mixed feelings people had begun to have about the Templars.
The Assassins were still paying tribute in the middle of the thirteenth century when they again tried to have it ended by sending an envoy to King Louis IX of France, who was then in Acre on his crusade.
One theory as to why they felt compelled to pay this tribute instead of fighting was that their normal method of eliminating troublesome leaders wouldn’t work with the military orders. The biographer of Louis, Jean de Joinville, explains, “for neither the Templars nor the Hospitallers had any fear of the Assassins, since their lord knew well that if he had either the Master of the Temple or of the Hospital killed, another, equally good, would be put in his place; therefore he had nothing to gain by their death. Consequently, he had no wish to sacrifice his Assassins on a project that would bring him no advantage.” 17
King Louis refused to eliminate the tribute and the masters of the Temple and the Hospital threatened the envoy. He soon returned with gifts for the king in an effort at conciliation.18Louis sent gifts in return along with a Syriac-speaking priest, Yves le Breton, who failed to convince the Assassins to convert.19
Eighty years after William of Tyre, Joinville saw the Templars as heroes and defenders of the faith in their relations with the Assassins.
While the Christians do not seem to have understood the differences among the sects of Islam, they did have the idea that the Assassins were not Moslem. Joinville says that they did not follow Mohammed but his uncle, Ali.20Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish Jew, also assumed that the Assassins were a group apart. In his tale of his travels through the Middle East in 1169, Benjamin states, “it is four days to the land of Mulahid. Here lives a people who do not profess the Mohammedan religion, but live on high mountains, and worship the Old Man of the land of the Hashishim. And among them there are four communities of Israel who go forth with them in war-time. They are not under the rule of the king of Persia, but reside in the high mountains, and descend from these mountains to pillage and to capture booty, and then return to the mountains, and none can overcome them.”21
“Mulahid” is a word that Christian commentators also used for the land of the Assassins. They learned it from the Moslems. It means “heretic.”
The belief that the Assassins could strike everywhere and anywhere spread throughout the Christian and Moslem world. The French chronicler Guillaume de Nangis tells of how the Old Man of the Mountain sent an assassin to France to kill King Louis IX (Saint Louis). “But, in the course of their journey, God changed his heart, inspiring him to think of peace instead of murder.”22
The Assassins stopped paying tribute only after the fall of the Hospitaller fortress of Krak des Chevaliers in 1271.23
Despite the Western fascination with the sect, the Assassins were much more concerned with the establishment of their theology among other Moslems than they were with the Christians. Eventually, the Assassin strongholds were conquered and the people dispersed during the Mongol invasions of the fourteenth century.
In their time, the Assassins managed to spread terror throughout the Islamic world. No one knew when or where they would strike. Stories were told of the fanaticism of the Assassins and of the immoral lives they led. One frequently repeated tale is of the mother who heard that her son’s party had succeeded in assassinating a sultan. She rejoiced that he was now a martyr. When she discovered that he had survived, she put on mourning.
All through history there have been cadres of people who try to change the world through judicious removal of key leaders. The killing of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife is a good example. It resulted in the First World War. Of course, it’s not clear if that was what the assassins intended.
It might be noted that Assassins, while prepared to die in the execution of their duty, did not practice random killing but prided themselves on only eliminating their main target. Their history is a complex one composed of faith, altruism, fanaticism, mysticism, and pragmatism.
In many ways, they were not that different from the Templars.
1Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 2001) p. 38.
2Quoted in Lewis, op. cit.
3Lewis, pp. 26-27.
4Quoted in Lewis, p. 39.
5This is a very quick outline. For more complete information please consult your local librarian.
6J. J. Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1965) p. 127. The idea that a secret savior is waiting in the wings is a very old one.
7Lewis, p. 39; Saunders, p. 127.
8Marshall G. S. Hogan, The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Isma’ ilis Against the Islamic Wo
rld (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005; reprint of 1955 ed.) p. 77.
9Ibid., pp. 110-13; Lewis, pp. 47-54.
10Quoted in Lewis, p. 48.
11William of Tyre, 20, 29. “In provincial Tyrensi . . . est quondam populus, castella decem habens cum surburanis suis, estque numerus eorum, ut sepius audivimus, quasi as sexaginta milia vel amplior. . . . Hos tam nostril quam Sarraceni, nescimus unde nominee deducto, Assissinos vocant.”
12Hogan, pp. 134-37; Lewis, pp. 11-13. Both authors point out the flaws in this theory.
13Ibn al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicles of the Crusades, tr. H. A. R. Gibb (London, 1932) p. 193. Here the Assassins are called “Batani.”
14Ibid., p. 194.
15Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood (Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 103.
16William of Tyre, 20, 29 and 20, 30, pp. 953-54.
17Joinville, Life of St. Louis, tr. Margaret R. B. Shaw (Penguin, 1963) p. 277.
18Reginald of Vichiers was probably the Templar master at this time. William de Chateauneuf was master of the Hospitallers.
19Joinville, p. 278.
20Ibid. Since the Assassins were an offshoot of the Shi’ite and it was the Sunni who followed the rule of Ali, Joinville had it backward, as well as not understanding that all the Moslems followed the teachings of Mohammed.
21Benjamin of Tudela, Travels in the Middle Ages, tr. A. Asher (Malibu: Pangloss Press, 1983; reprint of 1840 ed.) p. 110. I have read nowhere else of Jewish forces fighting with the Assassins. If anyone finds a reference, please let me know.
22Guillaume de Nangis, Chroniques capétiennes Tomes 1. 1113-1270, tr. François Guizot (Paleo, 2002) p. 169.
23Alain Demurger, Jacques De Molay: Le crepuscule des templiers (Paris: Biographie Payot, 2002) p. 73.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Hospita lers
As their name implies, the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Hospitallers, began as a charitable group, intended to assist pilgrims to Jerusalem who were in need of care and shelter. They seem to have been started sometime in the late eleventh century by some merchants from the Italian town of Amalfi. I say, “seem to” because there are no records of the foundation and because, like the Templars, the Hospitallers invented a mythology of their own in which, in some versions, the order was founded before the time of Christ and the parents of John the Baptist had once been associated with it.1
In the 1070s, the most likely time of establishment, Jerusalem was under the control of the Fatimid caliph of Egypt. He allowed pilgrims from the West to come to the city to visit the sites of Jesus’ life. The canons of the Holy Sepulcher were Syrian Orthodox Christians, under the control of the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. Pilgrims from Italy felt the need of a place for pilgrims to rest and be cared for where there would be people who spoke their language and practiced their religious rites.2
The military side of the hospitallers may have started as an additional service for the pilgrims, especially those going to the Jordan River to wade in the water where Jesus had been baptized. The Hospitallers set up a hostel known as the Red Cistern where pilgrims could get water and stay the night in safety on their way to the river.3 Naturally, the cistern needed to be protected from raiders and one thing led to another until the Hospitallers had a contingent of knights. However, they never gave up the tradition of hospitality and often stressed that this was their main function.
By the late twelfth century the Templars and the Hospitallers were often spoken of in pairs, as if they were interchangeable. Rulers would send one member from each order on diplomatic missions. But there were several differences between the orders. From the early days of both, the Templars were largely drawn from French-speaking areas and theirs was solely a military order, whereas the Hospitallers were mostly Spanish- and Italian-speaking and focused on the care of the sick and the protection of pilgrims. As the Hospitallers grew, the order attracted more French speakers until it was largely French-speaking.
It’s clear that the military side of the order began early. In 1144, Raymond, count of Tripoli, gave the Hospitallers the fortress known as the Krak des Chevaliers. Eventually the Hospitallers acquired more property in the crusader kingdoms than the Templars.4
The Templars and Hospitallers are often seen as rivals, even enemies. I think of them more as brothers. Sometimes they got along fine, supporting each other against the rest of the world. Sometimes they were on opposite sides of a question and fought each other bitterly. In the end, the gallant death of the Templar master William of Beaujeu at the siege of Acre is mourned by the Hospitaller Grand Master, “On that day the Master of the Temple also died of a mortal wound from a javelin. God have mercy on his soul!”5
Many donation charters gave property equally to the Templars and Hospitallers. The most astonishing of these is that of Alfonso I, king of Aragon and Navarre, made in 1131 in which he left his entire kingdom to the Templars, Hospitallers, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.6 They weren’t allowed to keep the kingdom; the heirs that Alfonso had ignored protested and a settlement was arranged. But it shows dramatically how even at that early date, the two orders were united in popular thinking and connected with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It didn’t help in telling them apart that both the Templars and the Hospitallers often built their churches with a round nave, in imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.7
The Hospitallers even loaned money, just as the Templars did. On the Second Crusade, Louis VII of France borrowed from the French Templar master, Everard de Barres, and also the Hospitaller master, Raymond du Puy.8
The Hospitallers also came in for their share of criticism, especially from that late-twelfth-century defender of the secular clergy, Walter Map. He was furious at the privileges granted to both the Templars and the Hospitallers at the Third Lateran Council. Walter saw both orders as equally wicked. “By many tricks they supplant us and keep us from the churches.”9 He felt that they lured impoverished knights into joining the orders by refusing to give them money unless they signed up. In that way they kept donations from coming to local parishes. There is no evidence that this charge was true.
Even popes would occasionally chide the Hospitallers. In 1209, Innocent III scolded them for keeping concubines and “shamefully involving themselves in secular affairs as if they were laymen.”10
There is a general belief that the Templars and Hospitallers were constantly in competition and rarely on good terms. While they did have their differences, particularly over land, on the whole they seem to have worked together quite well. During the crusade of Richard the Lionheart the Templars and Hospitallers switched each day from the rear guard to the vanguard of the army.11 Also the Rule of the Temple makes it clear that, in a pinch, the Templar knight should make for the nearest unit of Hospitallers:
Rule 167. “And if it happens that any brother cannot go towards his banner because he has gone too far ahead for fear of Saracens who are between him and the banner, or he does not know what became of it, he should go to the first Christian banner that he finds. And if he finds that of the Hospital, he should stay by it and should inform the leader of the squadron.”12
The main issues that divided the two orders were political. Although in theory they were supposed to be outside of local squabbles, in reality it was impossible not to get pulled into them. One of the nastiest was when the orders became involved in the constant rivalry between the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. The city of Acre was largely divided among the military orders and the Italians, with a small area for other religious groups and the English. In a struggle that went on between 1256 and 1258, over some property that was owned by the monastery of St. Sabas, the Hospitallers supported the Genoese and the Templars the Venetians.13 This more than once led to blows between the knights.
The most dramatic divisions had to do with the several conflicts over who was to inherit the crown of Jerusalem. One of these took place later in the history of the Latin kingdoms, long after Jerusalem ha
d been lost. In 1277, the claimants were Hugh III, king of Cyprus, descended from Sybilla, the sister of Baldwin IV, and Charles of Anjou, the brother of the king of France, who had bought rights to the throne from Maria of Antioch, Hugh’s cousin.14 The Hospitallers supported Hugh; the Templars supported Charles. One reason the Templars did this is that the Grand Master, William of Beaujeu, was related to Charles.
The Hospitallers had one edge over the Templars: when the criticism got too hot, they could retreat into their hospices. They seem to have done this after the debacle of the Second Crusade, although they don’t seem to have played a large military role in the expedition in any case.15
The idea that the Templars and the Hospitallers were much the same was emphasized in the way they were viewed by chroniclers. “So the Hospitallers and the Knights Templar armed themselves taking with them a great many very strong Turcopoles.”16King Richard orders “the Templars and the Hospitallers to come to him.”17“Count Raymond of Tripoli wanted the fortresses and castles to be in the keeping of the Temple and the Hospital.”18 The Templars and Hospitallers are given joint custody of the town of Messina, until it can be decided who should have it.19
The Real History Behind the Templars Page 17
