A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins
But the young Hasan did more than most of his kind for—
apparently out of his o\vn inventiveness—he brought a new
idea into the political science of his day and treated murder
as the suffragette the hunger strike, turning it into an avowed
political weapon.
Even in his own lifetime it brought him power which
spread from north Persia to the Mediterranean. The secret
garden where he drugged and attached to himself his
followers became known through the Crusaders' chronicles
in Europe, giving us our word of Assassin, or Hashishin.
He was the fear and execration of Ms neighbours. Unable
to touch him, they reacted against the whole family of the
Isma'ilians, who had further added to their crimes by develop-
ing a bloodthirsty branch of Carmathians in east Arabia.
The perfunctory censure of the orthodox turned to denunci-
ation as the movement became more dangerous. The parent
sect in Egypt, together with the Fatimite caliphs who repre-
sented it, now a feeble crew, paid for the unpopularity of
their offspring and for their own degeneracy by going
down altogether before the Seljuks and the family of Saladin.
The Assassins themselves, however, continued to prosper.
They had taken over some Isma'ilian and other strongholds
in Syria, which they governed as semi-independent colonies
from Persia, and they there came into contact with the
crusading princes. It has never beea made clear how much
the organization of the great Christian fighting orders owed
to this unchristian confraternity. It has been suggested
that the Order of the Templars was based in some degree
on that of their opponents: a comparison of the hierarchy
and general administration of the two shows them to be
curiously identical; and this may have lent a certain colour
to rumours and accusations which brought about the
Templars* downfall when, later on, their riches tempted the