For a long period, the Assassins have only been known to Europe by the accounts of the Crusaders, and recent historians have dated their appearance in Syria later than it really took place. They, however, appeared in Palestine contemporaneously with the Crusaders; for, already, in the first year of the twelfth century of the Christian era, Jenaheddevlet, Prince of Emessa, fell beneath their daggers as he was hastening to the relief of the castle of the Kurds, Hossnal a-kurd, which was besieged by the Count St. Gilles. Four years before,68he had been attacked, by three Persian assassins, in his palace, as he was preparing for his devotions. Suspicion, as the author of this attempt, fell upon Riswan, Prince of Aleppo, the political opponent of Jenaheddevlet, and a great friend of the Assassins, who had gained him over by the agency of one of their emissaries, a physician, who was also an astrologer, and thus doubly qualified to deceive himself and others, without having recourse to the false doctrine of his order. This man died twenty-four days after this first unsuccessful attempt at murder; but the sanguinary views of the order were not extinguished with him. His place was supplied by a Persian goldsmith, one Abutaher Essaigh, who inflamed the Prince of Aleppo, Riswan, to deeds of blood. This chieftain, who was constantly at enmity with the Crusaders,69and his brother, Dokak, Prince of Damascus, favoured the emigration and colonization of the Bateni, or Assassins, as their doctrine was agreeable to him,he being but a bad Moslem, and a free-thinker. He entered into the closest tie of friendship with them, and forgot, in the pursuit of his infidelity and short-sighted policy, the interest of his people and posterity. Sarmin, a strong place, only a day’s journey south of Aleppo,70became the residence of Abulfettah, the nephew of Hassan Sabah, who was his grand-prior in Syria, as were Hossein Kaini, the Reis Mosaffer, and Busurgomid, in Kuhistan, Komis, and Irak. A few years afterwards,71when the inhabitants of Apamea besought the assistance of Abutaher Essaigh, the commandant of Sarmin, against their Egyptian governor, Khalaf; he caused him to be assassinated, and took possession of the town in the name of Riswan, Prince of Aleppo, and remained in command of the citadel.72He could not, however, resist Tancred, to whom the town surrendered, and who, contrary to his promise, carried Abutaher prisoner to Antioch, and only released him on receiving a ransom. The Arabian historian, Kemaleddin, for this reason, accused Tancred of forfeiting his word; and, on the other hand, Albert of Aix, the Christian annalist of the crusades, blames him for granting so vile a ruffian so much as his life. His companions, however, whose lives were secured by no treaty, were delivered up by Tancred to the vengeance of the sons of Khalaf, and Abulfettah himself expired under the anguish of the torture.73Soon after this, Tancred took from the Assassins the strong castle of Kefrlana.
Abutaher having returned to his protector, Riswan, exerted his influence still further in schemes of assassination. Abu Harb Issa (i. e.Jesus, Father of Battles), a rich merchant of Khojend, a sworn enemy of the Bateni, who hadexpended large sums in injuring them, arrived at Aleppo with a rich caravan, consisting of five hundred camels. An Assassin, a native of Rei, by name Ahmed, son of Nassr, had accompanied him from the borders of Khorassan, watching an opportunity to avenge on his person the blood of a brother, who had fallen under the blows of Abu Harb’s people. On his arrival at Aleppo, the murderer had a conference with Abutaher and his protector, Riswan, whom he won the more easily to his purposes, as the richness of the booty, and Abu Harb’s known hostility to the Assassins, invited to vengeance. Abutaher provided Assassins, and Riswan guards, for the execution of the deed. As Abu Harb was, one day, counting his camels, surrounded by his slaves, the murderers attacked him; but before they could pierce their victim’s heart, they all fell themselves under the blows of the brave and faithful slaves, who exhibited their courage and attachment in defence of their master. The princes of Syria, to whom Abu Harb communicated this attack, loaded Riswan with reproaches for this scandalous breach of hospitality. He excused himself with the lie, that he had had no share in the transaction, and added, to the universal horror of his deed, the public contempt which eventually falls to the lot of all liars. Abutaher, in order to escape the daily increasing rage of the inhabitants of Aleppo against the Ismailites, returned into his own country to his sanguinary associates.74
As unsuccessful as their enterprise against Apamea, was the attack of the Bathenites on Shiser, of which they wished to deprive the family of Monkad and subject it to themselves. While the inhabitants of this castle had gone into the town,75to participate in the festivities of the Christians at the celebration of Easter, the Assassins took possession of it and barricaded the gates. On the return of the inhabitants, they were drawn up through the windows with ropes, by their wives, during the night, and drove out the Assassins.
Soon after, Mewdud, the prince of Mossul, fell under their daggers at Damascus, as he was walking with Togteghin, the prince of that city, on a feast day, in the fore court of the great mosque. An Assassin stabbed him, for which he lost his head on the spot.76In the same year77died Riswan, the prince of Aleppo, the great protector of the Ismailites, who made use of their swords and daggers for the defence and extension of his power. His death was the signal of theirs: the eunuch Lulu, who, with Riswan’s son, Akhras, a youth of sixteen, carried on the government, commenced it with condemning to death all the Bathenites; which sentence was executed less in a legal manner than in a promiscuous carnage.
No less than three hundred men, women, and children, were cut in pieces, and about two hundred thrown into prison alive. Abulfettah,—not the one who was tortured to death by the sons of Khalaf, but a son of Abutaher, the goldsmith, and his successor, after his return to Persia, as head of the Assassins in Syria, met with a fate no less horrible and merited than his namesake: after being hewed to pieces at the gate looking towards Irak, his limbs were burnt, but his head was carried about through Syria for a show. The Dai Ismail, brother of the astrologer, who had first brought himself and his sect into credit with Riswan, paid for it with his life; several of the Assassins were thrown from the top of the wall into the moat; Hossameddin, son of Dimlatsh, a newly-arrived Dai from Persia, fled from the popular rage to Rakka, where he died; several also saved themselves by flight, and were dispersed in the towns of Syria; others, to escape the fatal suspicion of belonging to the order, denounced their brothers and murdered them. Their treasures were sought out and were confiscated.78They revenged this persecution variously and sanguinarily. In an audience, granted by the khalif of Bagdad to Togteghin Atabeg, of Damascus, threeconspirators in succession attacked the Emir Ahmed Bal, governor of Khorassan, whom they probably mistook for the Atabeg. They all three fell, together with the emir, who had been selected for their daggers, and who was in reality their sworn foe, and had frequently besieged their castles. The governors of provinces, as being the principal instruments of the state for the preservation of peace and good order, were their natural enemies, and, as such, more than all exposed to their daggers. Bedii, the governor of Aleppo, became their victim,79as also one of his sons, who was on his way to the court of the Emir Ilghasi. His other sons cut down the two murderers, but a third sprang forward and gave one of them, who was already wounded, his death-blow. Being seized, and carried before the princes Togteghin and Ilghasi, he was condemned by them only to imprisonment, but he sought his death by drowning himself.
The following year80Ilghasi received a message from Abu Mohammed, the head of the Ismailis in Aleppo, with a request to put them in possession of the castle of Sherif. Ilghasi, dreading his power, pretended to grant it; but before the envoy could return with this consent, the inhabitants of Aleppo destroyed the walls, filled up the ditches, and united the castle with the town. Ibn Khashshab, who had made this proposition, in order not to increase the power of the Ismailites by the possession of the fortress, paid for it with his blood. A few years afterwards, they made a similar request to Nureddin, the celebrated prince of Damascus, for the possession of the castle Beitlaha; which was, in the same way, apparently granted, and frustrated by a similar stratagem: for the inhabitants, secretly instigated by Nureddin, to prevent the Ismailites obtaining a firm footing, immediately set about destroying their fortifications. So great was the dread in which princes held the order, that they did not dare to refuse them the strong places of their own countries, and preferreddestroying them, to abandoning them for citadels of the power and sovereignty of the Assassins.81
In Persia, also, their vengeance chose the most illustrious victims. Fakrolmulk82(Glory of the kingdom), Abulmosaffer Ali, the son of the grand vizier Nisam-ol-mulk, who had filled the office he inherited from his father, along with his hatred of the Assassins, during the two reigns of the sultans Mohammed and Sandjar, with credit and industry, and Chakarbeg, the son of Mikail, brother of Togrul, grand-uncle of Sandjar, the reigning sultan of the Seljuks, were amongst them.83A sanguinary lesson for the latter, whom the son of Sabah warned by still farther menaces. He found it more adviseable frequently to restrain his powerful enemies by impending danger, and preferred unnerving their arm by terror, to multiplying uselessly avengers by repeated murders. He gained over a slave of the sultan’s, who, while the latter slept, stuck a dagger in the ground close to his head. The prince was terror-struck when, on waking, he espied the murderous weapon but concealed his fear. Some days after, the grand-master wrote to him in the style of the order, brief and cutting like their stilettos: “Had we not been well-disposed towards the sultan, we might have plunged the dagger into his heart, instead of the ground.”
Sandjar, who had despatched some troops against the castles of the Ismailites in Kuhistan, was the more fearful, after this warning, of prosecuting the siege; as his brother Mohammed, who had caused the two strongest fortresses of the Ismailites in Irak, Alamut and Lamsir, to be invested by the Atabeg Nushteghin Shirghir, for more than a year, died at the very moment when, being reduced to extremities, they were on the point of surrendering.84This death was too favourable to the Assassins, not to be considered less the work of accident than of their policy, which, though trustingto the dagger, did not neglect the use of poison. Admonished by this, Sandjar offered to make peace with the Ismailites on three conditions:—1st. They should erect no new fortifications about their castles; 2nd. They should purchase no arms nor ammunition; and, 3rd. That they should make no more proselytes. As, however, the jurists, who had thundered the ban of general condemnation and persecution against the impiety of the order, would hear of no compromise or peace with them, the sultan fell under the popular suspicion of being a secret partisan of their impious doctrines. Peace was, however, concluded between Hassan and Sandjar; and the latter not only exempted the Ismailites from all duties and imposts in the district of Kirdkuh, but even assigned them a certain portion of the revenues of Kumis, as the annual pension of the order. Thus, this society of murderers increased daily in power and authority.
It was not, however, merely since his accession, but twelve or fourteen years earlier, that the Sultan Sandjar had exhibited tokens of forbearance towards the Assassins; for on his journey from Khorassan to Irak, he visited at Damaghan the Reis Mosaffer, venerable both on account of his age and influence, who, as we have already seen, had declared himself an adherent of Hassan Sabah, and had obtained for him, by stratagem, the treasures of the Emir David Habeshi. Some officers proposed to demand them back, but on Mosaffer’s representation, that he had always loaded the inhabitants of the place with favours, as the proper subjects of the sultan, the latter lavished honours upon him. Thus died Reis Mosaffer,85respected and honoured as the patriarch of the new doctrine, at the age of one hundred and one.86
Hassan Sabah survived the most faithful of his disciples, and his nearest relations, to whom the ties of attachment and consanguinity seemed to secure the highest rights to the succession to the sovereignty. His nephew and grand-prior in Syria, Abulfettah, had fallen by the sword of the enemy;Hossein Kaini, grand-prior in Kuhistan, under the dagger of a murderer, probably Ostad, one of the two sons of Hassan: and Ostad and his brother under the hand of their own father, who seemed to revel even in spilling his own blood. Without proof or measure of guilt, he sacrificed them, not to offended justice, but apparently to mere love of murder, and that terrific policy, by virtue of which the order snapped all ties of relationship or friendship, to bind the more closely those of impiety and slaughter.
Ostad (i. e.the master), probably so called because the public voice had destined him as the successor of his father as grand-master, was put to death on the mere suspicion of being concerned in Hossein’s murder; and his brother, because he had drunk wine: the former, probably, because he had, by his crime, which was without orders, interfered with his father’s prerogative; the latter, because he had infringed one of the least essential laws of Islamism, but whose strict observance was part of the system of the order. In the execution of his two sons, the grand-master gave the profane and the initiated a sanguinary example of avenged disobedience to the ordinance of outward worship, and the rules of internal discipline; but probably, besides this apparent motive, the son of Sabah was urged by another, to the destruction of his race; possibly, his sons, disgusted with the long reign of their father, were expecting with impatience to succeed him; it is probable, that on that account he deemed them incompetent, as not having learned to obey, or as being wanting in the necessary princely qualities; or, it is probable, that he set them aside, in order to avoid sinking the order into a dynasty by inheritance, and that the succession of grand-masters might be determined by the nearest relationship of mind and character, irreligion and impiety. Human nature is not usually so diabolical, that the historian must, among several doubtful motives to an action, always decide for the worst; but, in the founder of this society of vice, the establisher of the murderous order of the Assassins, the most horrible is the most likely.
Of the most faithful promulgators of the new doctrine, of whom we have hitherto made mention, there still remained the Dai Kiabusurgomid, who had not quitted the castle of Lamin during the twenty years that had elapsed since he took it, and the Lieutenant Abu Ali, Dai in Kaswin. When the son of Sabah felt his end approaching, he sent for them to Alamut; and, by his last will, divided the government between them in such a manner, that Abu Ali was invested with the external command and civil administration, and Kiabusurgomid, as proper grand-master, with the supreme spiritual power and government of the order. Thus, at a very advanced age, died Hassan Sabah;87for more than seventy years had elapsed, since, as a youth of twenty, he studied with Nisam-ol-mulk, under the Imam Mowasek, in the reign of Togrul. He expired, not on the bed of torture, which his crimes merited, but in his own; not under the poniards, which he had drawn against the hearts of the best and greatest of his contemporaries, but by the natural effect of age; after a blood-stained reign of thirty-five years, during which he not only never quitted the castle of Alamut, but had never removed more than twice, during this long period, from his chamber to the terrace. Immoveable in one spot, and persisting in one plan, he meditated the revolutions of empires by carnage and rebellion; or wrote rules for his order, and the catechism of the secret doctrine of libertinism and impiety. Fixed in the centre of his power, he extended its circumference to the extreme confines of Khorassan and Syria; with the pen in his hand, he guided the daggers of his Assassins. He was, himself, in the hand of Providence, like war and pestilence,—a dreadful scourge for the chastisement of feeble sovereigns and corrupted nations.
END OF BOOK II.
Reign of Kia Busurgomid, and his Son, Mohammed.
Kia Busurgomid, who had been the general and Dai of Hassan, succeeded him in the spiritual power; and trod precisely in the sanguinary steps of the founder of the order. Daggers and fortresses were the foundations of Hassan’s power, and that of his successor rested on the same basis; the most illustrious leaders of the enemy either fell, or were tottering to their fall. New castles were taken or built. Thus, that of Maimundis was erected;88the ruin of which drew with it, in the sequel, the death of the grand-master, and the suppression of the order. Abdolmelek was declared its dehdar, or commandant. These precautions were the more necessary, as the Sultan Sandjar, who had long been deemed a secret protector of the order, now publicly declared himself their enemy. In the month Shaaban, of the same year, also, Atabeg Shirghir, overran the province of Rudbar with an army. The body, which the grand-master sent against him, put the enemy to flight, and carried off a rich booty.89
The war, the year following,90assumed a still more cruel character, when a great multitude of Bathenites were put to the sword, by order of Sandjar; nor was it altered on Mahmud’s succeeding to the throne of Irak, in the place of his nephew, Sandjar.91This sovereign resolved to combat theAssassins with their own weapons of perfidy and murder; a determination unworthy the assertor of a good cause. After being some time at open war with Kia Busurg, the sultan requested, through the medium of his grand falconer, that some one should be sent from Alamut, on the part of the grand-master, to treat of peace. The Khoja Mohammed Nassihi Sheristani was sent: he was admitted to the honour of kissing the sultan’s hand, who addressed a few words to him on the subject of peace. On leaving the presence, the Khoja, or master, and his accompanying Refik (fellow) were savagely butchered by the populace.92
Mahmud despatched an envoy to Alamut, to excuse this action; in which, according to his own asseverations, he had had no share. Kia Busurg made answer to the envoy: “Go back to the sultan, and tell him, in my name, Mohammed Nassihi trusted to your perfidious assurances, and repaired to your court; if you speak truly, deliver up the murderers to justice; if not, expect my vengeance.” Mahmud not attending to this, a body of Assassins came to the very gates of Kaswin,93where they killed four hundred men, and carried off three thousand sheep, two hundred horses and camels, and two hundred oxen and asses. The inhabitants followed them, but the death of one of their chief men interrupted their pursuit.94
The year following,95the sultan captured, though but for a brief period, Alamut itself, the stronghold of the order’s sovereignty;96and immediately after, a thousand men were sent against the castle of Lamsir, who, as soon as they heard that the Refik, or companions of the order, were in advance against them, instantly fled without striking a blow. Immediately after the death of Mahmud, which was most probably caused by the machinations of the Assassins, without, however, any accusation of the kind, the companions of the order made a second irruption into the environs of Kaswin,97and carried offtwo hundred horses, and after killing a hundred Turcomans, and twenty of the citizens, they retired. The forces of Alamut then marched against Abu Hashem, a descendant of Ali, who had usurped the dignity of imam in Ghilan, and invited the people, by manifestos, to recognize him as their legitimate lord. Kia Busurg wrote to him, advising him to desist from his aspiring projects; he, however, replied, with reviling the impious lore of the Ismailites: they made war upon him, beat him in Dilem, took him prisoner, and, after holding a council of war, delivered him over to the stake.98
On the death of Mahmud, when Messud ascended the throne of the Seljukides, Itsis, the prince of Khowaresm, a country lying between the confines of Khorassan, and the mouth of the Oxus, came to him, to communicate the determination he had formed, of exterminating the Ismailites. Although the large province of Khorassan lies between Khowaresm and Kuhistan, or the Highlands, where the Ismailis nestled, like birds of prey, amongst the rocks, yet the sovereign of Khowaresm, not unjustly, dreaded the approach of such dangerous neighbours, whose poniards reached even their most distant foes. Messud, participating in the maxims and designs of Itsis, presented him with the fief which had been held by Berenkish, the grand falconer, who in his irritation, took refuge with Kiabusurg, and sent his wives and children to the castle of Dherkos, which was in the possession of the Ismailites. Although this man, till now their declared enemy, had not only attacked them in open warfare, but also with their own weapons, perfidy and treachery, the grand-master considered it politic to exercise the rights of hospitality towards him, who had now flown to their protection. It was the more advisable to create a new friend to the order, as Khowaresmshah, who had hitherto shown tokens of a friendly disposition, had, all at once, declared himself an enemy. The latter sent the following message to thegrand-master: “Berenkish and his party were heretofore your declared enemies; I, on the other hand, was bound to you by true attachment. Now that the sultan has given me his fief, he has sought an asylum with you; if you will deliver him up to me, our friendship will receive still further increase.” Kiabusurg replied: “Khowaresmshah speaks truly, but we will never surrender our protegés to the enemy.” This was the origin of tedious hostilities between Khowaresmshah and Kiabusurg.99
It was natural that princes, who, for a time, were blinded by the representations of the Dais, and the attractions of the Ismailitic secret doctrine, should have hastened, as friends, to their arms, but should afterwards snatch themselves away, dreading lest the embrace, like that of the Spanish maiden, should be but a form of execution, under which murdering daggers lay concealed. Thus, the Sultan Sandjar, and Itsis, shah of Khowaresm, who were both at first reckoned among the friends and partisans of the order, became their open foes; and we have seen that, at Aleppo, they enjoyed, during the reign of Riswan, the most powerful influence; but, under his son, were extirpated with the sword. Such was their fate also at Damascus; where, during the reign of Busi, they found a powerful protector in the vizier Tahir, the son of Saad of Masdeghan. The Persian Assassin, Behram of Astrabad, who commenced his operations with the murder of his uncle, gained over the vizier, who gave him the castle of Banias, as Riswan had given the more inland fortress, Sarmin, to the nephew of Hassan Sabah.100Banias, the ancient Balanea, signifying the old city seated in the little bay, gave its name to the castle newly erected in A. D. 1162; A. H. 454. It is a farsang, or four thousand paces, distant from the sea, in a fertile, well-watered plain; where, in former times, more than a hundred thousand buffaloes found pasture.101Thevalley, into which numerous rivulets fall, is called Wady ol Jinn (the valley of demons), a place whose very name rendered it worthy of being a settlement of Assassins. From this place,102they became masters of the surrounding castles and towns; and Banias became the centre of their power in Syria, until they transferred it, twelve years afterwards, to Massiat.
Behram had long prosecuted the designs of the order at Aleppo and Damascus, where he was recognised and favoured as Dai, by the princes Ilghasi and Togteghin. When, by the possession of Banias, he had obtained a firm footing in Syria, the power and insolence of the Assassins attained its height. From all sides they hastened to the new point of union, and princes did not venture to protect any one against them. The jurists and theologians, more particularly the Soonnites, those universal victims, were struck dumb with fear of them, and of the disfavour of the princes. Behram did not fall by their vengeance, but by that of the inhabitants of the valley of Taim, an appendage to the district of Baalbek, and inhabited by a mixture of Nossairis, Druses, and Magians. Their brave leader, Dohak, burned to revenge the death of his brother Barak, the son of Jendel, who had been slain by the Assassins, by command of Behram; he united, for this purpose, the warriors of his native vale, with succours from Damascus, and the surrounding towns. Behram hoped to surprise them defenceless, at the head of his Ismailites; he, however, fell into their hands, and was instantly cut in pieces. His head and hands were brought to Egypt, where the khalif presented the bearer with a rich habit, and had them carried about in triumph in Cairo and Fostath. The Ismailis who escaped, fled from the valley of Taim, to Banias, where Behram, prior to the expedition, had committed the command to Ismail, the Persian. The vizier Masdeghani entered into friendly alliance with him, as with his predecessor. Ismail sent to Damascus, one of his creatures, Abulwefa, literally,Father ofFidelity, but, in reality, the model of perfidiousness.103By his intrigues, he succeeded in obtaining, not only the office of Dailkebir, or prior of the Ismailites, but also that of Hakem, or chief judge of the district.
At Cairo, the dignity of grand-master of the lodge (Dail-doat), was frequently united by the Ismailites, with that of chief justice (Kadhi al Kodhat). As the attainment of rule was the object of the order, and as no means were left untried to accomplish it, Abulwefa sought conquest by means of treachery, and greatness by perjury. The Crusaders, whose power was continually on the increase in Syria, appeared to him the most fitting instruments of his ambitious designs. As the enemies of Mohammedanism, they were the natural allies of its most dangerous opponents. The bulwarks of the faith of Mohammed, shaken from without by the tempest of the Crusaders, and undermined from within by the atheistical doctrines of the Assassins, threatened an earlier and a more certain fall; and the pious warriors, in union with their impious allies, promised the sooner to erect the cross and the dagger on their ruins. Abulwefa entered into a treaty with the king of Jerusalem, by which he bound himself, on a certain Friday, to put the city of Damascus in his possession. While the Emir Busi, and his magnates, both courtly and military, were assembled at their devotions in the mosque, all the approaches to it were to be hemmed in by conspirators, and the gates of the city opened to the Christians. In return for this service, the king promised to deliver the city of Tyre into his power.104
Hugo de Payens, the first grand-master of the Templars, seems to have been the principal agent in urging Baldwin II., King of Jerusalem, to this strange alliance of the cross and the dagger. For ten years after its first institution,105thisorder remained in obscurity; fulfilling, besides the usual evangelical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, a fourth, the protection of pilgrims; but still existing only as a private society, without statutes or knightly habits.
By the code of rules given by St. Bernard, and confirmed by Pope Honorius I., it raised itself at once, to the splendour of a powerful chivalric order, for the defence of the holy sepulchre, and the protection of the pilgrims.106According to Miræus, its members consisted of knights, esquires, and lay-brothers, which answer to the companions (Refik), agents (Fedavi), and laymen (Lassick), of the Ismailites, as the priors, grand-priors, and grand-master, did to the Dai, Dailkebir, and Sheikh of the mountain. As the Refik were clothed in white, with red insignia, so the knights wore white mantles with red crosses; and as the castles of the Assassins arose in Asia, so did the hospitals of the Templars in Europe.
The grand-master Hugo, came this year107to Jerusalem, accompanied by a great retinue of knights and pilgrims, who, at his exhortation, had assumed the cross, and taken up arms in defence of the holy sepulchre.108The siege of Damascus was immediately decided upon. After the death of the dreaded Togteghin, which had but lately occurred, his son Taj-ol-Moluk109Busi succeeded him. In his name, the vizier Tahir-ben-Saad exercised the supreme power, and, through him, the chiefs of the Ismailites, first the warrior Behram, afterwards the judge Abulwefa, with whom the treacherous surrender of Damascus, in exchange for Tyre, was agreed upon.
Taj-ol-Moluk Busi having received timely notice of the designs of the Ismailites, caused his vizier, the son of Saad, to be put to death; and then gave orders for a general massacre of all of the order who were in the city. Six thousand fell by the sword, which avenged the victims of the dagger. It was notan execution, but an indiscriminate slaughter. In the meanwhile, a numerous Christian army, certain of the promised surrender of the city, had advanced on the road to Damascus, as far as Marj Safar. Among them, besides many pilgrims of the west, were the king and barons of Jerusalem, with their allies, Prince Bernard of Antioch, Pontius, Count of Tripoli, and Joscelin of Edessa, with many knights and esquires. The soldiery, under the command of the constable, William of Buris, had gone with a thousand knights, to plunder the villages, and collect provisions; marching, however, as was usual with an army of pilgrims, without order and discipline, they were, with many of the knights, almost entirely destroyed, by an attack of a small body of valiant warriors from Damascus. The rest, as soon as they learned the disgraceful defeat of their brethren, flew to arms, and hastened to attack the Damascenes; to wash out with their blood the stain inflicted on the Christian army.
A dreadful darkness, however, came on, interrupted only by the glare of the lightning and howling of the tempest; in the midst of the thunder, the cataracts of heaven poured down rain, and inundated the roads, when suddenly, as if the order of the seasons had at once been changed—as if summer and winter would together have raged in all their severity, the rain and flood were changed to snow and ice. Such rapid mutations of the atmosphere, and sudden vicissitudes of the weather, from one extreme to the other, are not, indeed, rare in those countries; but they astonished the inexperienced wanderers, as extraordinary phenomena of nature.
The author of the present work has, during his travels, more than once experienced this, and in a terribly sublime manner, in the defile of Marmaris; as did the British fleet, and the Egyptian army of occupation. Heavy clouds darkened the approach of night; torrents of rain, which poured from them and from the rocks, carried away arms and tents; the howling of the storm and the roaring of the thunder, drowned the speaking-trumpets of the distressed ships, which weredriving from their anchors. On the cessation of the tempest, which lasted the whole night, and grew calmer towards morning, the first dawn showed the masts dashed to pieces by the wind, and the rocks scathed by the lightning, and covered with a large quantity of snow.
The army of the Gauls, which, in ancient times, under the command of Brennus, sacked the temple of Delphi, experienced a similar contest and alternation of seasons, and an equally violent storm.110And as, at that time, these natural phenomena were deemed a token of the celestial punishment of the sacrilegious presumption of the Gauls, so were they also considered by the Crusaders as a mark of the anger of Heaven at their sins, and their late compact with the Assassins, which blood and perjury could alone confirm. The only advantage which they derived from this monstrous union of piety and impiety, was the possession of the castle of Banias, which the commander, Ismail, fearing lest he should meet the fate of his brethren of Damascus, delivered up to the knight, Rainier de Brus, the same year,111in which the fortress of Alamut surrendered to Sultan Mahmud. Thus fell, at the same time, the two citadels of the order in Persia and Syria, and so near was the risk of its complete annihilation.
A persevering spirit of enterprise, however, overcame the untowardness of events. Both Alamut and Banias soon returned to their former possessors. The latter was re-taken, three years afterwards,112by Ismail, while Rainier de Brus and his soldiery lay before Joppa, with the king of Jerusalem. Among the prisoners who were carried away, Rainier lost a beloved wife; whom, on her release during a truce with Ismail, he received affectionately, but repulsed her on learning that she had neither preserved her faith among the infidels, nor her honour among the impious. She confessed her sin, and retired into a convent of devout females at Jerusalem.113
The less the designs of the Ismailites prospered by the sword, the more successful and persevering were they with the dagger; and, however dangerous to the order the times might be, they were not the less so to its most powerful adversaries. A long series of great and celebrated men, who, during the grand-mastership of Kiabusurgomid, fell by the poniards of his Fedavi, signalized the bloody annals of his reign; and, as formerly, according to the fashion of oriental historians, there follows, at the end of each prince’s reign, a catalogue of great statesmen, generals, and literati, who have either adorned it by their lives, or troubled it with their death; so, in the annals of the Assassins, is found the chronological enumeration of celebrated men of all nations who have fallen the victims of the Ismailites, to the joy of their murderers, and the sorrow of the world. The first, under the grand-mastership of Kiabusurgomid, was Cassim-ed-dewlet114Aksonkor Bourshi, the brave prince of Mossul, feared alike by the Crusaders and the Assassins, as one of their deadliest enemies.115Having fought his last battle with the former, near Maarra Mesrin, he was, on the first Sunday after his return,116attacked by eight Assassins, disguised as dervishes, as he was in the act of seating himself on his throne in the mosque at Mossul: protected by a coat of mail and his natural bravery, he defended himself against the wretches, three of whom he stretched at his feet; but before his retinue could hasten to his assistance, he received a mortal wound, from the effects of which he expired the same day. The remaining Assassins were sacrificed to the vengeance of the populace, with the exception of one young man from the village of Katarnash, in the mountains near Eras, whose mother, on hearing of Aksonkor’s murder,dressed and adorned herself for joy at the successful issue of the attempt, in which her son had devoted his life; but, on his returning alone, she cut off her hair, and blackened her face, with the deepest sorrow, that he had not shared the murderers’ honourable death. To such lengths did the Assassins carry their point of honour, and what may be termed their Spartanism.117
Moineddin, the vizier of Sultan Sandjar, was also murdered118by an Assassin, hired by his enemy, Derkesina, the vizier of Mohammed, and a friend of the Ismailites. In order the better to attain his object, the ruffian entered his service as a groom. One day, as the vizier went into the stable to inspect his horses, the false groom appeared before him without clothes, in order to avoid all suspicion of carrying concealed weapons, although he had hidden his dagger in the mane of the horse, whose bridle he was holding. The horse reared, and under pretence of quieting him with caresses, he snatched his poniard, and stabbed the vizier.119
If Bourshi, Prince of Mossul, stood on the list of the victims of the Ismailites solely because he was the rival of their power; and an obstacle to their greatness, we shall not be surprised at finding the name of Busi, the Prince of Damascus, by whose orders the Vizier Masdeghani, and six thousand Assassins, had been massacred. The slightest pretence was sufficient to cause the blood of princes to flow beneath their stilettos; how much more when their own called as in this latter case, for revenge. To escape was beyond the power of prudence, as they watched for years for time, place, and opportunity. Busi, the son of Togteghin, was, in the second year after the massacre,120attacked by its avengers, and received two wounds, one of which healed immediately; the other was, however, mortal, the following year.121
The vengeance of the Assassins seems to to have descended from father to son: Shems-ol-Moluk (the sun of the king), the son of Busi, and grandson of Togteghin, fell a victim to a conspiracy.122There fell, besides, under the daggers of the order, the judges of the east and the west, Abusaid Herawi, the mufti of Kaswin, Hassan-ben-Abelkassem; the reis of Ispahan, Seid Dewletshah; and the reis of Tebris.123These were the most celebrated of a numerous body of officers of state and jurists, who perished in heaps and unnamed. To drag from amongst the murdered the most splendid victims, is the melancholy and sorrowful duty of the historian of the Assassins.
Hitherto, their attacks had been directed only against viziers and emirs, the subordinate instruments of the khalif’s power; and the throne itself, which they were undermining, had remained unstained by the blood of its possessors. The period, however, was now arrived, in which the order dared to seal their doctrine with the blood of those khalifs, to whom it was so destructive, and to deprive the successors of the prophet not merely of their temporal power, but likewise of their lives. The shadow of God on earth, as the khalifs called themselves, was, indeed, a mere shadow of earthly power; and was, when he would have asserted more, sent, by the dagger of the Assassin to the shades below.
We have seen, that the secret doctrine of the Ismailites derived its origin from the lodge at Cairo, long before the foundation of the order, of the Assassins; and flourished under the protection of the Fatimites, the rivals of the Assassins, and their competitors for the throne. By a just retribution, this protection of a doctrine of irreligion and immorality was avenged on the Fatimites themselves, by the murderous order which sprung from it. The Egyptian khalif, Emr Biahkamillah Abu Ali Manssur,124tenth of theFatimite dynasty (whose founder, Obeidollah, had made the lodge of the secret doctrine a part of his ministerial policy), fell, in the twenty-ninth year of his reign, under the dagger of the Assassin.125
It is not clear whether his death proceeded from the policy of the order, or the private revenge of the family of the powerful Vizier Efdhal.126This emir was equally dangerous to the Christians by the zeal with which he prosecuted the war, and to the khalif, by his colossal power in the state. He was murdered by two Assassins, of whom it is uncertain whether they were the instruments of their superiors, at that time in alliance with the Crusaders, or the hirelings of the khalif. The latter is probable, from the circumstance that Abu Ali, the son of Efdhal, was, immediately after his death, thrown into prison, and on being set at liberty after the murder of the khalif, was invested with his father’s dignity. As, however, Abu Ali himself shortly after fell by the dagger, it appears that these two assassinations proceeded from the profound policy of the concealed fomentors. From this period, Egypt became a scene of disorder and confusion, occasioned by the violent contests between the partisans of the khalif thrones of Cairo and Bagdad. Mostarshedbillah-Abu-Manssur-Fasl, the twenty-ninth Abbasside khalif, sustained himself on the latter for seventeen years, though constantly tottering.
Hitherto, the Seljukide sultans who had, under the pretext of being the protectors of the khalifat of Bagdad, assumed all the temporal power, had, at least, left to the Abbasside khalif the two highest prerogatives of Islamism,—the mint, and prayers from the pulpit on Fridays. If they stamped any coin, it was in the name of the khalif; for whom, likewise, they prayed weekly in the mosques. Messud was the first to appoint the khatibs, or Friday prayer, to be inhis own name; an injury which Mostarshed was obliged, however unwilling, to endure, as he was not strong enough to resent it. A few years afterwards, however, when some dissatisfied chieftains deserted with their troops from Messud to Mostarshed, they persuaded the latter that it would be easy to subdue the sultan; he, in consequence, took the field against him. In the very first engagement, the khalif was abandoned by the greater part of his troops, and taken prisoner by Messud, who carried him to Meragha, on his campaign against his own nephew, David.
A treaty was concluded, by which the khalif engaged to confine himself within the walls of Bagdad, and to pay the sultan an annual tribute. This composition deceived the expectations of the Ismailites, who had hoped that the result of this war, between the sultan and the khalif, would be the destruction of the latter: the grand-master, therefore, resolved to complete what the sultan had begun; and that, though the khalif had escaped the sword, he should not be spared by the dagger. In the camp, two farsangs from Meragha, while Messud was absent, having gone to meet the ambassadors of Sandjar, Assassins put the khalif and his immediate suite to death;127and not content with that foul deed, mutilated the dead, in the most horrible manner, by cutting off the noses and ears; as though they would, to the treason of a khalif’s murder, add insults to his corpse.128
After a blood-stained reign of fourteen years and three days, Kia Busurgomid, feeling his end approaching, named his son, Mohammed, as successor in the grand-mastership of the order; either because he really found none other worthy of the office, or that the natural desire of making the sovereignty hereditary in his family caused him to depart from the spiritof the fundamental maxims of the order, as they had been sketched out by Hassan Sabah. Be that as it may, the office, which, without respect to relationship, ought to have depended on the nomination of the existing grand-master, remained hereditary in the family of Busurgomid to the fall of the order. His death was, at first, a cause of great joy to the enemies of the Ismailites; when, however, they perceived that his son drove the chariot of restless ambition in the bloody track of his father, all Asia again sank into despair. He began, as his father had ended, with regicide; and before the votaries of Islam had time to recover from the consternation, with which the murder of the Khalif Mostarshed had overwhelmed them, their ears were horror-stricken with the intelligence of the fate of Rashid, his successor. The order had hoped, by the violent death of Mostarshed, to succeed in involving the khalifat in confusion and immediately effecting its ruin. This expectation, however, proving fallacious; and Rashid, immediately on taking possession of the vacant throne, and ere he was firmly seated on it, meditating revenge against his father’s butchers, the new grand-master resolved to begin where his predecessor had ended, and to heap murder on murder, crime on crime, and to add regicide to treason.
The khalif went from Ramadan to Ispahan where he had just begun to recover from an attack of illness. Four Assassins, natives of Khorassan, and who had mingled with his retinue, watched an opportunity of stealing into his tent, and poniarded him. He was buried on the spot where he fell; and the troops which he had collected from Bagdad, for the purpose of a campaign against the Ismailites, dispersed. When the news of this successful atrocity, and the frustrated expedition reached Alamut, the residence of the grand-master, public festivals and rejoicings were appointed on the occasion. For seven days and seven nights the kettle drums and cornets echoed from the turrets of the fortress, and published to the surrounding castles the jubilee of crime and the triumph ofmurder. Proofs so cutting as the Assassins’ daggers (to use an expression of Mirkhond) raised their claims beyond the reach of doubts, and imposed the silence of the grave on their opponents.
A terror but too well founded seized the khalifs of the race of Abbas, who, henceforth, did not venture to show themselves in public. The companions of impiety (Refik), and the dedicated to murder (Fedavi), spread themselves in troops over the whole of Asia, and darkened the face of the earth. The castles already in their possession were maintained and fortified, and new ones built or purchased. Thus they obtained in Syria, Kadmos, Kahaf, and Massiat: the two former were sold to them by Ibn Amrun;129the latter they wrested from the commandant of the lords of Sheiser,130and made it the centre of their Syrian power, where, even now, traces of it are to be found.131
While the order was thus aggrandizing itself, and striking its foes with terror, by the acquisition of strong places and the use of the dagger, the fundamental maxim, which separated so completely the secret doctrine of the initiated from the public tenets of the people, was observed to the letter; and the fulfilment of the injunctions of Mohammedanism was the more strictly exacted, the more indifferent the superiors considered faith and morals to be to themselves. The people saw only the effect of their terrible power, without perceiving the moving force, or its instruments. They saw, in the numerous victims of the poniard, only the enemies of the order and religion, which the vengeance of heaven had visited by the arm of a secret tribunal. The grand-master, his priors and envoys, did not preach sovereignty in their own name, or in that of their order, but of the invisible imam, of whom they called themselves the apostles, and who was to appear, at some future period, to assert his right to thedominion of the earth with a conqueror’s power. Their doctrine was enveloped in a veil of the profoundest mystery, and ostensibly its maintainers appeared only as strict observers of the rites of Islamism. A proof of this is afforded by the answer given to the envoy of Sultan Sandjar, who had been sent from Rei to collect official information concerning the Ismailitic doctrines. He was told by the superiors, “Our doctrine is as follows: we believe in the unity of God, and consider that only as true wisdom, which accords with His word and the commands of the prophet; we observe these, as they are given in the holy book of the Koran; we believe in all that the prophet has taught concerning the creation and the last day, rewards and punishments, the judgment and the resurrection. To believe this is necessary, and no one is permitted to pass his judgment on God’s commands, or even to alter a letter of them. These are the fundamental rules of our sect; and if the sultan approves them not, he may send one of his theologians to enter into polemical discussions on the subject.”132
In this spirit, during the reign of Kia Mohammed, which lasted twenty-five years,—that of his father, Kia Busurgomid, of fourteen years,—and that of the founder, Hassan Sabah, of thirty-five, the external rites of Islamism were strictly observed. Kia Mohammed, however, had neither the intellect nor the experience of his predecessors; and it soon appeared what an error Kia Busurgomid had committed, in consulting, in his choice of a successor, the ties of kindred rather than innate talent. From his want of knowledge and capacity, Kia Mohammed was but little esteemed by the people, who transferred their attachment to his son, Hassan. The latter was regarded as a man of great attainments, and he availed himself of the good opinion of the ignorant multitude, not for the general interest of the order, but entirely contrary to its institutions, to serve the purposes of his own privateambition. Initiated into all the mysteries of the secret doctrine, deeply versed in philosophy and history, he stood forward as a popular teacher and expounder, and favoured the report which had begun to be spread abroad, that he was the imam promised by Hassan-ben-Sabah. The companions of the order respected him more and more every day, and rivalled each other in the promptitude with which they executed his behests.
Kia Mohammed, on learning his son’s conduct, and the disposition of the people, convened them, and declaring his disapprobation of the proceedings of the former, said, “Hassan is my son, and I am not the imam, but one of his precursors. Whoever maintains the contrary is an infidel.” Two hundred and fifty of his son’s adherents were put to death, and as many more were banished. Hassan, fearing his father’s anger, himself anathematised the illuminati, and wrote treatises in which he condemned the opinions of his partisans, and asserted those of his father. In this manner he succeeded, by his dissimulation, in preserving his own head, and obliterating all suspicion from his father’s mind. As, however, he was in the habit of drinking wine in secret, and permitted himself to practise what was forbidden, his adherents saw, in these actions, new indications of his mission as the promised imam, whose advent was to abrogate all prohibitory commands.133
About this period, nearly all the Asiatic monarchies were revolutionized by the change of the order of succession; and new dynasties arose on the ruins of their predecessors. As the order of the Ismailites was inimical to all rulers, and treated hostilely by most of them, and as they infused into all governments the envenomed and pernicious influence of murder and sedition, their history stands in close relation with that of all the contemporaneously paramount dynasties; and a glance at the reigning families of Asia will not beout of place here. From the confines of Khorassan to the mountains of Syria, from the Musdoramus to Lebanon, from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, extended the widely spread ramifications of the empire of the Assassins; their centre being the grand-master, in his mountain fort of Alamut, in Irak.
We shall take a cursory glance at these broad regions of Asia, according to the political divisions of the period, and proceeding in natural geographical order, from east to west, our progress will commence with Khorassan and terminate in Syria.
Khorassan, however, first deserves mention not merely on account of its geographical position and its immediate vicinity to Kuhistan, the eastern grand-priorate of the order, but also by reason of the preponderating power of Sultan Sandjar, whose dominion had been founded at the same epoch as that of Hassan Sabah, and whose reign had proceeded contemporaneously with the first three grand-masters, and terminated only with his death, four years earlier than that of Kia Mohammed, the third grand-master.
Moeseddin Abulharess Sandjar, one of the greatest princes of the Seljukide race, and of the east, received, after the demise of his father, the Sultan Melekshah, which, as we have seen, occurred immediately after the occupation of Alamut by Hassan Sabah,134the vice-royalty of Khorassan, which province he governed, for twenty years, in the name of his brothers, Barkyarok and Mohammed, who, as the heads of the Seljuk family, reigned in Irak.
On the death of his brother Mohammed, in the first year of the sixth century of the Hegira,135Sandjar took possession of his states. He made war upon his nephew, Mahmud, who wished to assert his paternal rights, defeated him, and at length, when the sagacity of the vizier Kemaleddin Ali had mediated a peace, allotted him his paternal kingdom, as a fief, upon the following four conditions: 1st. That in the publicprayers in the mosques, on Fridays, the name of Sultan Sandjar should stand before that of Mahmud (the prayers and the mint are the first regal prerogatives of Islam); 2nd. That the latter should have only three curtains to the door of his hall of audience (Sultan Sandjar had four, and the khalif seven; to raise and lower which was the office of the Hajeb, or chief chamberlain); 3rd. That no trumpet should sound on his entrance or exit from his palace (a flourish of trumpets was, at that time, the privilege of sovereigns, as is, at this day, the ringing of bells a mark of distinction for their representatives); 4th. That he should retain in their dignities the officers appointed by his uncle.
Mahmud submitted to these conditions; and as only the name and appearance of rule were left him, he embraced the wise resolution of not involving himself deeper in political matters, but devoting himself entirely to the pleasures of the chase, which, as an exercise and school of war, has, from remote antiquity, been considered, in the east, less as a princely amusement than a royal occupation. (Hence Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord, and Cyrus an arranger of hunting; hence, too, the most ancient monarchs of the Assyrians and Persians are represented on the monuments of Persepolis, and the amulets excavated from the ruins of Babylon, as engaged in an heroic combat with wild animals; hence, in the last Persian dynasty, the cognomen of the “Wild Ass,” was given to Behramgur, one of their bravest and sport-loving princes: and hence, likewise, the immense park or royal chase of Khosru Parwis). In this spirit, Mahmud expended his treasure in the splendour of his hunting equipments; he had a pack of four hundred hounds, with gold collars and housings embroidered with pearls.136
Thirty years after this peace between Mahmud and Sandjar, Behramshah, the last prince but one of the once powerful dynasty of the sultans of Gasna, attempted to shake off theyoke of the Seljukides; feeling, however, the enterprise to be beyond his powers, he sent ambassadors to renew his homage to Sandjar. With him he succeeded, but not so with Hossein Jehansus, the founder of the Indian dynasty of the Gurides, who, about this time,137raised themselves on the ruin of the power of the Gasnewides. Behramshah, the Gasnewide, yielded to the power of Hossein, the Guride, as did the latter to that of Sultan Sandjar, who drove the founder of the Gurides out of Khorassan, and then appointed him his viceroy of the Indian province of Gur (whence the name of the dynasty). The fortune, which had smiled on Sandjar in his enterprises against Mahmud, Behramshah, and Hossein, was not so favourable to him, in his wars against the people of Karakhatai, whom he attacked in the obscurity of their forests; nor against the Turcomans of the race of Oghuz, who invaded Khorassan. He lost, in the battle which he fought with Gurjash, the prince of the former, thirty thousand men, together with his harem; and Tarkhau Khatun, the first of his wives, was made captive by the Karakhtaiyis.
Still worse was his success against the Oghuz Turcomans, whom he wished to compel to an annual tribute of sheep, which they refused. He was taken prisoner by them, and confined, for four years, in an iron cage. The Turkish historians, who relate this unworthy treatment of the great Sultan Sandjar, deny Sultan Bajazet’s having experienced the same from his conqueror, Timur.
Concerning this last, European writers add, that whenever he mounted his horse, he placed his foot on the neck of the Ottoman sultan, as, it is said, the Persian king, Shabur (Sapor), had done a thousand years before, to his captive, the Roman emperor, Valerian. Valerian and Bajazet perished in the captivity of Shabur and Timur; but Sandjar had the good fortune to make his escape from his barbarous conquerors, and returned to Khorassan, where he died the following year,from melancholy, caused by his bad fortune, and the desolation of his states; after a reign of fifty-one years, and a life of nearly a hundred, as he had before he became sole ruler, acted, for twenty-one years, as viceroy of his brothers, in Khorassan. His brilliant exploits, and the encomiums of the poets, have caused his name to shine among those of the most illustrious princes of the east; and have not undeservedly gained him the surname of Alexander the Second. The greatest poets of his time, Selmar and Ferideddin Katib, sang his praise; but, above all, Enweri, the Persian Pindar. Unequalled in his panegyrics, either by his predecessor, Khakani, or his follower, Farjabi, who, with him, form the astral triangle of Persian panegyrists, he raised the name of Sandjar high above the regions of earth in the light of the milky way, and to the highest heavens, in the midst of the music of the spheres. While Enweri thus bestowed immortality on Sandjar in his works, the poet Sabir did him a no less essential service in prolonging his sublunary existence, by protecting him from the murderous dagger.
When Itsis, the governor of Khowaresm, rebelled against Sandjar, the latter sent the poet, one of the most faithful and respected in his court, secretly to Khorassan, as a spy upon the designs of the rebellious governor. He succeeded in ascertaining that Itsis had engaged an Assassin (Fedavi), to murder the sultan, in the mosque, on a Friday. The murderer was discovered, by means of the exact description sent by Sabir to Sandjar, and, after confessing every thing, he was put to death. Itsis, however, who was aware that Sabir had caused his design to fail, had him drowned in the Oxus.138Sabir thus gained an immortal name, in the ranks of great poets and faithful servants, not only by his encomiastic poems, but also by his praiseworthy deeds. Sandjar, who, at first, had been favourably inclined towards the Assassins, seems to have had his eyes opened by this attempt, and tohave been urged to the severity with which, as we have already related, in his latter years, he pursued the order who had caused the irruption of the Turcomans.
Sandjar, if not the most dangerous, was yet, at this period, the most powerful of the enemies of the Ismailites. With the exception of the phantom of spiritual power, which sat on the throne of the khalifat, and whose nominal superiority was acknowledged by the Asiatic princes in their Friday’s prayers, the most powerful sovereigns either held their states in fee, as the vassals of the Sultan Sandjar, or governed them as his lieutenants. As, in the ancient Persian empire, the seven satraps of the distant large provinces, surrounded the throne of the great king as viceroys (like the seven Amshaspande collected round the throne of Ormusd), so the rulers, of seven powerful dignities, acknowledged the Sultan Sandjar as the source of their power; which, indeed, enfeebled by distance, operated less powerfully on the extreme points of the circumference, than in the centre.
The Indian provinces of Multan and Gur, immediately to the south of Khorassan, were governed by the Sultan of the Gasnewides, Behramshah, and him of the Gurides, Hossein Jehansus (world burning). Ahmed, the son of Soleiman, whose frequent rebellions had brought upon him as frequent punishments, ruled in northern Transoxana; and the adjacent province of Khowaresm was held in fief by, first, Kotbeddin, then his son, Itsis, two great court and hereditary dignities, who likewise held the office of chief cup-bearer. In middle Persia, reigned the Sultan Mahmud, the Seljukide, under the guidance of his uncle Sandjar; and in the northern and western provinces, Aserbijan and Irak, the two dynasties of the Atabegs, founded by Amadeddin Ben Senji and the Turcoman Ildigis, acknowledged him as paramount lord. As the two powerful families of the Gasnewides and Seljukides, after reigning more than a century, were nodding to their fall, and the dynasties of the Atabegs were shooting up into multifarious branches, we think a few words relative to the origin of the latter not unsuitable.
Atabeg, notFather of the Prince, as it has been translated, but,Father Prince, orPrincely Father, was an honorary title, first borne by the great Vizier Nisam-ol-mulk, without any claim to unlimited authority, and still less to be hereditary. Under the successors of Melekshah, this title distinguished the highest military dignity of the empire, and was given, at the court of the Bagdad khalif, to the Emir-ol-umera (i. e.prince of princes); and at the court of Cairo, to the Emir-ol-juyush, orprince of the army. But, as at a preceding epoch, the family Buje had exercised the power of the khalifat, under the title of Emir-ol-umera, and in the west that of, the Merovingian race had, under the title ofmaire du palais, passed into the hands of the Carlovingians; so the Atabegs possessed themselves of boundless authority, and raised themselves into dynasties. The principal are, besides that of the Atabegs of Irak, that of Aserbijan, that of Fars, called also the family of Salgar, and that of Loristan; all of which, in the short space of five years, made their claims to unlimited rule available.139
Within this period, disappeared the reigning families of Kakuye, in Fars;140that of the sons of Togteghin, at Damascus;141the family Nedshah, in Yemen;142and that of the Gurides in Khorassan;143in whose stead arose the Seliki, as kings of Erzroum, and the Eyoubides, as princes of Emessa; and, three years before the death of Sandjar, the mightiest prince of his time, a still more mighty one was born,144Jengis Khan, the scourge of the east and the west, who afterwards converted the most fertile territories into a wilderness, and bathed the deserts with streams of blood.
Cotemporaneously with the last ten years of Salgar’s reign in the east in Khorassan, Nureddin Mohammed Ben Amadeddin Sengi, Lord of the Irak Atabegs, ruled in Syria, as one of the greatest princes of the east. He was a cotemporary of Salgar, and the most powerful opponent of the Crusaders; whose historians, unceasingly employed in detailing the mischief which he caused them, cannot refuse him the just praise of his great and noble qualities. “Nureddin,” says the learned William, bishop of Tyre, a man profoundly versed in history, “was a prudent, discreet man, who feared God according to the faith of his people; fortunate and an increaser of his paternal inheritance.”145His budding power sorely oppressed that of the Christians; whose conquests put a term and measure to his. Raymond, Prince of Antioch, and Gosselin, Count of Tripoli, fell as the trophies of his victories; the first at the siege of Anab,146on the battle field; the second, as he was proceeding to the chase, from his residence, Telbasher,147was taken prisoner by a foraging party of Turcomans. The castles of Telbasher, Antab, Asas, Ravendan, Tellkhaled, Karss, Kafsrud, Meraash, and Nehrelhus,148fell into the victors’ hands, with considerable booty.