24. From Innocent Missionary to Not at All Innocent Old Man of the Mountain
The Fatimids, defeated militarily by the Seljuk Turks, responded with clandestine warfare, using assassination as a political tool against the Sunni leadership. That campaign was eventually led by Sheik Hassan al Sabbah (1034 – 1124), a shadowy Islamic scholar who began as a relatively innocent Shiite missionary. He did not stick with innocent pursuits for long, and eventually came to lead a radical Shiite faction, the Nizari Ismailis, as a prelude to founding the Assassins cult.
In 1090, with Fatimid funding, Sheik Hassan seized Alamout Castle in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea in Persia. From that base, he and his followers expanded their reach and established a series of remote mountain fortresses in the highlands of Persia and Syria. That earned al Sabbah the moniker of Old Man of the Mountain, a title that was passed on to his successors. From those holdfasts, he sent suicide squads of killers known as fida’is (“self-sacrificers”) against prominent leaders throughout the Middle East.