15. The Scary Assassins Finally Encountered Enemies Who Were Even Scarier: The Mongols
The Order of Assassins was finally destroyed by the Mongols, when they overran the region in the 1250s. The Mongols were an alien people from far away, with no connections to the Middle East. Their leaders were not surrounded by Middle Eastern courtiers, but by their own kind in armed and highly mobile camps in which strangers conspicuously stood out. That neutralized the Assassins’ tactics of patient infiltration and blending in, which had worked so well in a region they knew and whose peoples they understood. Such tactics were useless against the Mongols, whom they neither knew nor understood, and whose ranks they had neither the means nor time to infiltrate.
The Mongols appeared too suddenly, acted too swiftly, and were too alien for the Assassins to get a handle on them or work out strategies and tactics for getting to their leadership. The Mongols’ bloodthirstiness, savagery, speed of action and reaction, and lack of interest in negotiations, was beyond anything the Assassins had ever experienced.