Historical Context: Mongols and Assassins

In preparation for our time in Mongolia, we’ve listened to the audio book of “Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men” by Harold Lamb and have almost finished reading “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford. Both are great books, though I would recommend Weatherford’s over Lamb’s. That may be due in part to the fact that Lamb’s was the audio book and the narrator was not the greatest in my opinion. Also, Mongol names often sound very foreign and at times it became difficult to remember who was who without seeing the names written down – but that may just be me.

That said, one of the brief, but amazing topics in Weatherford’s book was this:

“For Hulegu (one of Genghis’ grandsons) the ultimate prize was to conquer the Arab cultural and financial capital of Baghdad, but to get there he had to reassert Mongol authority over several rebellious areas en route. The most difficult of these was to conquer the strongholds of the Nizari Ismailis, a heretical Muslim sect of Shiites.”

“Despite the lack of a conventional army, the Ismaili sect exercised tremendous political power through a highly sophisticated system of terror and assassination, and the secrecy and success of the group bred many myths, making it, still today, difficult to factor out the truth. The cult apparently had one simple, and effective political strategy: kill anyone, particularly leaders or powerful people, who opposed them in any way. The cult recruited young men who were willing to die in their attacks with the assurance that they would achieve instant entry into paradise as martyrs of Islam. The Chinese, Persian, and Arabic sources all relate the same account of how young men were lured by ample quantities of hashish and other earthly delights that awaited them in the special gardens of the cult’s castles and fortresses. (They were trained and controlled) with a steady supply of hashish to keep them obedient and make them fearless. Supposedly, because of the importance of narcotics for the Ismailis, the people around them called them hashshashin, meaning “the hashish users.” Over time, this name became modified into the word assassin.”

Tagged as: History, Mongolia