5 – Assassins
Christians certainly do not have a monopoly on secret societies. One of the most notorious secret organization of all time sprung up around the same era as the Knights Templar but was very much on the other side of the argument as far as the Crusades were concerned.
The Assassins, now known as the Nizari, are one of the oldest sects within Islam and boast around 15 to 20 million adherents worldwide. Nowadays, they are known for their tolerance, their reasoned approach to religious study and their commitment to social justice, but in the maelstrom of the medieval Middle East, they were widely revered and feared as masters of killing and psychological warfare. Indeed, they gave the English language the word “assassin”, so they must have been quite good at it.
It would be inaccurate to label all Assassins as, well, assassins. The sect, known in Arabic as al-Hashashin, was just one of many competing groups in the early days of Islam, but it was a subsection of their number that gave the whole group the notoriety. The Fedayeen were the military wing of the sect and those tasked with the actual dirty work of killing their enemies. Fedayeen, literally translating as “those willing to sacrifice themselves for God” were drawn from the lower orders of society and were seen by the hierarchy of the Nizari movement as largely expendable, but were trained in the arts of assassination, using subversion, precision and theatre to maximize the political weight of their attacks.
The reasoning behind it was simple. The Nizari lacked a standing army of note and a dispersed territory: they would have stood no chance of surviving a conventional war, either with the other Muslim groups that inhabited the Middle East or with the crusading Christians. Thus, it behooved them to organize a way of fighting that hit right to the heart of their enemy’s fear. It was one thing for a Sultan, Caliph or Pope to send their army into battle in a far-off land, but another indeed to have the war brought to them on such a personal level. Assassins could sneak into the centers of power, undetected by all and trusted by many, before striking their blow – often in public, so that everyone would know who did it. They managed to account for two Caliphs, a litany of viziers, sultans and Christian knights over their three centuries of operation, so their capabilities were undoubted.
They prioritized linguistics – one had to learn a language to successfully go undercover – and cultural knowledge, as well as practical skills that assisted their attacks. Secrecy was of course paramount. The Assassins survived for hundreds of years despite defying almost all rules of conventional Mediaeval warfare and gained a practical influence in the Holy Land that vastly outstripped their numbers and territories, before falling to the Mongols in the 13th century.