8. The Perfect Assassins Killers
The Order of Assassins was finally broken by the Mongols under Hulagu, when they overran the region in the 1250s. Unlike the local powers whom the cult had intimidated for generations, the Mongols were largely immune from the murderous sect’s methods. The Steppe warriors were an alien people from far away, with no connections to the region. Mongol leaders were not surrounded by Middle Eastern courtiers, but by their own kind, and dwelled not at court in fixed palaces, but in armed and highly mobile camps in which strangers conspicuously stood out.
That negated the cult’s tactics of patient infiltration and blending in, which had worked so well in a region they knew and whose peoples they understood. Such methods were useless against the Mongols, whom the Assassins 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 viable strategies and tactics to get to their leadership. The Mongols’ bloodthirstiness, savagery, speed of action and reaction, and lack of interest in negotiations, simply went beyond anything that the Assassins had ever experienced.