The curse of the evil eye did not tarry in doing away with the new heir. He died as suddenly as his brother of a fever which was just as suspect.
The Chinese woman had a last son whom she asked the Sultan to designate as heir. The affair was trickier this time, since the child was only a year-and-a-half old and Malikshah was the father of three other boys who were all older. Two of them were born to a slave girl, but the eldest, named Barkiyaruk, was the son of the Sultan’s own cousin. What pretext could he use to brush them aside? Who better than this prince, who was doubly Seljuk, to be elevated to the rank of heir to the throne? Such was the view of Nizam, who wanted to interject some order into the Turkish squabbles, who had always been eager to institute some form of hereditary dynasty and who had insisted, with the best arguments in the world, that Malikshah’s eldest son should be designated heir, but with no success.
Malikshah dared not go against Terken, and as he could not nominate his son by her, he nominated no one preferring to risk dying without an heir, like his father and all his clan.
Terken was not satisfied and would not be until her lineage was duly assured – that is to say that more than anything in the world she desired to see Nizam, the obstacle to her ambitions, fall into disgrace. In order to obtain his death warrant, she was ready to use intrigue or issue threats, and day after day she followed the negotiations with the Assassins. She had accompanied the Sultan and his vizir on their journey to Baghdad. She was keen to be there for the execution.
It was Nizam’s last meal. The supper was an iftar, the banquet which marks the break of the fast of the tenth day of Ramadan. Dignitaries, courtiers and emirs of the army were all unusually abstemious out of respect for the holy month. The table was laid inside a huge yurt. Slaves carried torches to enable people to choose their food. Sixty ravenous hands stretched toward the huge silver platters, the best piece of camel or lamb and the choicest legs of partridge, skimming off flesh and sauce. They divided the food, ripped it apart and devoured it. If someone found himself in possession of a particularly toothsome item, he would offer it to a neighbour he wished to honour.
Nizam was eating little. That evening he was suffering more than usual. His chest was on fire and his insides felt as if they were being churned by the hand of an invisible giant. He was making an effort to hold himself upright. Malikshah was at his side, munching everything his neighbours passed to him. From time to time he was seen to look at his vizir out of the corner of his eye, thinking that he must be afraid. Suddenly he stretched his hand toward a plate of black figs, selected the plumpest and offered it to Nizam who accepted it politely and bit into it. What savour could figs have when one was three times condemned, by God, the Sultan and the Assassins?
By the time the iftar was over, it was already night. Malikshah jumped up, in a hurry to go and join his Chinese woman and tell her about the vizir’s grimaces. Nizam leant on his elbows and hoisted himself up with some effort. His harem’s tents were not far off and his old female cousin would have prepared a concoction of myrobalan to provide him some ease. He only had to take a hundred steps to be there. Around him was the inevitable confusion of royal camps with its soldiers, servants and wandering tradesmen. Now and then he could hear the stifled laugh of a courtesan. How long the path seemed, and he was dragging himself along it alone. Usually he was surrounded by a group of courtiers, but who now wished to be seen with an outlaw? Even the beggars had fled – what could they hope to obtain from a disgraced old man?
However someone was approaching him, a decent-looking man clothed in a patched coat. He muttered some pious words and Nizam felt for his purse and retrieved three pieces of gold. This unknown man who would still approach him ought to be rewarded.
There was a flash, the flash of a sword and everything happened very quickly. Hardly had Nizam seen the hand move before the dagger pierced his clothing and skin and the point worked its way between his ribs. He had not even shouted out, but just made a dazed movement and gasped a last breath. As he was dying, he may have seen again, in slow motion, the blade, the arm stretching out and withdrawing and the nervous mouth which spat out: This present comes to you from Alamut!’
Then cries went up. The Assassin had run off but had been tracked from tent to tent and found. Hurriedly they slit his throat and dragged him barefoot to be thrown on to a fire.
In the years and decades to come, innumerable messengers from Alamut would meet the same death, the only difference being that they would not attempt to flee. ‘It is not enough to kill our enemies,’ Hassan taught them. ‘We are not murderers but executioners. We must act in public as an example. By killing one man we terrorize a hundred thousand. However, it is not enough to execute and terrorize, we must also know how to die, for if, by killing, we discourage our enemies from undertaking any action against us, by dying in the most courageous fashion, we force the masses to admire us, and from their midst men will come to join us. Dying is more important than killing. We kill to defend ourselves, but we die to convert, and to conquer. Conquering is the aim we are seeking; defending ourselves is only a means thereto.’
Assassinations generally took place on Friday in the mosque, at the moment of solemn prayer and in front of the assembled people. The victim, be he vizir, prince or religious dignitary, would arrive surrounded by an imposing guard. The crowd would be impressed, submissive and admiring. The emissary from Alamut would be there somewhere in the most unexpected of disguises – as a member of the guard, for example. At the moment when everyone’s gaze was on the victim, he would strike. The victim would die and the executioner would not move, but would yell out a formula he had learnt and with a smile of defiance would wait to be set upon by the furious guards and then ripped limb from limb by the frightened crowd. The message had been delivered; the successor to the person who had been assassinated would make himself more conciliatory toward Alamut, and there would be a score, or two score conversions amongst those present.
So unreal were these scenes that it was often said that Hassan’s men were drugged. How otherwise could it be explained that they went to their deaths with a smile? Some credence was given to the assertion that they were acting under the influence of hashish and it was Marco Polo who popularized this idea in the West. Their enemies in the Muslim world would contemptuously call them hash-ishiyun, ‘hashish-smokers’; some Orientalists thought that this was the origin of the word ‘assassin’, which in many European languages has become synonymous with murderer. The myth of the ‘Assassins’ was more terrifying yet.
The truth is different. According to texts which have come down to us from Alamut, Hassan liked to call his disciples Assassiyun, meaning people who are faithful to the Assass, the ‘foundation’ of the faith. This is the word, misunderstood by foreign travellers, which seemed similar to hashish.
Hassan Sabbah indeed had a passion for plants and he had a miraculous knowledge of their curative, sedative or stimulative characteristics. He himself grew all sorts of herbs and looked after his adepts when they were ill, knowing what potions to prescribe for them to revive their constitution. Thus we know of one of his recipes which was intended to stimulate his disciples’ minds and render them more adept at their studies. It was a mixture of honey, pounded nuts and coriander and was considered a very agreeable medicine. However, we must go by the evidence, in spite of the tenacity and allure of tradition: the Assassins had no drug other than straightforward faith, which was constantly reinforced by the intense instruction, the most efficient organization and the strictest apportionment of tasks.
At the top of the hierarchy sat Hassan, the Grand Master, the Supreme Preacher, the possessor of all the secrets. He was surrounded by a handful of missionaries, the da’is amongst whom there were three commissioners; one for eastern Persia, Khorassan and Kuhistan and Transoxania; one for western Persia and Iraq and one Syria. Immediately under them were the companions, the rafiks, the cadres of the movement. After receiving adequate instruction, they were entitled to comman
d a fortress and to lead the organization at the city or province level. The brightest would one day be missionaries.
Lower down the hierarchy were the lassek, literally those who were attached to the organization. They were the rank and file believers, with no particular predisposition to studies or violent action. They included many shepherds from the Alamut region and a number of women and old men.
Then came the mujibs, the ‘answerers’, who were in fact the novices. They received some preliminary teaching and then, according to their capability, they were directed toward deeper studies in order to become companions, toward the body of the believers or toward the category which symbolized in the eyes of the Muslims of the time the real power of Hassan Sabbah, the class of the fida’is, ‘those who sacrifice themselves’. The Grand Master chose them from among the disciples who had huge reserves of faith, skill and endurance, but little aptitude for study. He never sent to his death a man who could become a missionary.
The training of a fida’i was a delicate task to which Hassan devoted himself with a passion. The fida’i would learn how to keep his dagger hidden, how to unsheathe it with stealth and plunge it into the victim’s heart, or into his neck if he was wearing a coat of mail; how to handle homing pigeons, and memorize codes to be used for rapid and secret communication with Alamut; sometimes the fida’i would have to learn a dialect or regional accent, or how to infiltrate a foreign environment and be part of it for weeks or months, lulling all distrust while awaiting the most propitious moment to strike; he would learn how to stalk his prey like a hunter, making a careful study of his behaviour, his clothing, his habits and at what time he went out and returned; sometimes, when the victim was an exceptionally well-protected personage, he would have to find a means to be employed by him, to get near to him and form a bond with some of his circle. It was told that in order to execute one of their victims, two fida’is lived for two months in a Christian convent, passing themselves off as monks. Such a remarkable talent for disguise and dissimulation could in no way have gone hand in hand with the use of hashish! Most importantly, the disciple had to acquire the necessary faith to confront death and a faith in a paradise which the martyr would earn at the very moment when his life was taken from him by the raging crowd.
No one could stand up to Hassan Sabbah. He had succeeded in building up the most feared killing machine in history. Nonetheless, another arose, at the bloody turn-of-the-century – that of the Nizamiya, which out of loyalty to the assassinated Vizir, went on to sow death with different methods which were perhaps more insidious, certainly less spectacular but whose effects were to be no less devastating.
CHAPTER 20
While the crowd was attacking the remains of the Assassin, five officers gathered around the still warm body of Nizam. They were in tears and stretched out their right hands as they mouthed in unison: ‘Rest in peace, master. None of your enemies will live!’
But where would they begin? The list of outlaws was long, but Nazam’s orders were clear. The five men almost had no need to consult each other. They muttered a name and stretched out their hands anew. Then they kneeled down and together raised up the body which had been emaciated by illness but was now weighed down by death, and carried it in a cortege to his quarters. The women had already assembled to wail and the sight of the cadaver renewed their ululations, arousing the ire of one of the officers: ‘Do not cry while he is still unavenged!’ The women were afraid and broke off their crying to look at the man who was already making his way off. Then they started up their noisy lamentations again.
The Sultan arrived. He had been with Terken when the first cries reached him. A eunuch who had been sent out for the news came back trembling. ‘It’s Nizam al-Mulk, master! A killer jumped on him. He has given you the rest of his life!’ The Sultan and Sultana exchanged a glance and then Malikshah arose. He put on his long cloak of karakul, patted his face in front of his spouse’s mirror and then ran off to see the deceased, feigning surprise and a state of the gravest affliction.
The women stepped aside to allow him to approach the body of his ata. He leant over, uttered a prayer and some appropriate phrases before returning to Terken for some discrete celebrations.
How curiously Malikshah behaved. One would have thought that he would have profited from his tutor’s disappearance to take complete control over the affairs of his empire, but not so. He was so happy at finally being rid of the man who checked his passions, that he frolicked – and there can be no other word for it. Every meeting was cancelled as a matter of course, as was every reception for an ambassador and the Sultan’s days were given over to polo and hunting while his nights were spent in bouts of drinking.
Yet more serious was the fact that upon his arrival in Baghdad he had sent a message to the Caliph, saying: ‘I intend to make this city my winter capital. The Prince of Believers must decamp post haste and find another residence.’ The successor of the Prophet, whose ancestors had been living in Baghdad for three and a half centuries, requested a month’s grace in order to put his affairs in order.
Terken was worried by this frivolity which was little worthy of a thirty-seven-year-old sovereign who was master of half of the world, but her Malikshah was what he was so she let him fool around and took the opportunity this gave her to establish her own authority. It was to her that emirs and dignitaries had recourse and it was her trusted men who replaced Nizam’s acolytes. Between trips and drunken binges the Sultan gave his agreement.
On 18 November 1092 Malikshah was in the north of Baghdad hunting wild ass in a woody and swampy area. Only one of his previous twelve arrows had missed its target. His companions were singing his praises and none of them dreamed of matching his feats. The trip had made him hungry – a feeling he expressed in oaths. The slaves set to it. There were a dozen of them brought along to dismember, skewer and gut the wild beasts which were to be roasted in a clearing. The meatiest leg was for the sovereign who took hold of it and ripped it to pieces hungrily while treating himself liberally to some fermented liquor. From time to time he munched on fruit preserved in vinegar which was his favourite dish and huge vessels of which were carried everywhere Malikshah went by his cook so that he would never have to do without.
Suddenly he was beset with violent stomach cramps. Malikshah screamed in pain and his companions trembled. He threw down his goblet and spat out what he had in his mouth. He was bent double, he threw up everything he had eaten, became delirious and then fainted. Around him dozens of courtiers, soldiers and servants trembled as they watched him with disbelief. No one would ever know whose hand slipped the poison into his liquor, or was it in the vinegar, or the game? Nonetheless everyone made their calculations: thirty-five days had passed since Nizam’s death. He had said ‘less than forty’ and his avengers were on time.
Terken Khatun was in the royal camp, an hour away from the scene of the drama. The Sultan was carried in to her inanimate but still alive. She hurriedly sent away all onlookers, keeping by her only Jahan and two or three other trusted courtiers as well as the court doctor who was holding Malikshah’s hand.
‘Might the master recover?’ the Chinese woman inquired.
‘His pulse is weakening. God has blown on the candle and it is flickering before going out. Our only hope is prayer.’
‘If such is the will of the Almighty, then listen to what I am going to say.’
This was not the tone of a widow-to-be, but of the mistress of an empire.
‘No one outside this yurt must know that the Sultan is no longer with us. Merely say that he is recovering slowly, that he needs to rest and that no one may see him.’
What a fleeting and bloody epic was that of Terken Khatun. Even before Malikshah’s heart had ceased beating, she demanded her handful of faithful courtiers to swear loyalty to Sultan Mahmoud, whose age was four years and a few months. Then she sent a messenger to the Caliph to announce the death of her spouse and to ask him to confirm her son’s succession; in exchange the Prince of
Believers would no longer have cause for concern in his capital and his name would be glorified in the sermons of mosques throughout the empire.
When the Sultan’s court set off again for Isfahan, Malikshah had been dead for some days but the Chinese woman continued to keep the news from the troops. The cadaver was laid out on a large chariot pulled by six horses and covered by a tent. However, the charade could not last indefinitely for a corpse which has not been embalmed can not linger amongst the living without its decomposition betraying its presence. Terken chose to be rid of it and thus Malikshah, ‘the revered Sultan, the great Shahinshah, the King of the Orient and the Occident, the Pillar of Islam and of the Muslims, the Pride of the World and of the Religion, the Father of Conquests, the Steadfast Support of the Caliph of God’, was hastily interred by night at the side of the road in a place which no one has ever been able to find. ‘Never,’ said the chroniclers, ‘has there been told of such a powerful sovereign dying without anyone to pray or weep over his corpse.’
News of the Sultan’s disappearance finally got out, but Terken had no trouble justifying her actions: her first concern had been to hide the news from the enemy since the army and the court were far from the capital. In fact the Chinese woman had won the time she needed to place her son on the throne and to take up the reins of power herself.
The chronicles of the time make no mistake. When speaking of the imperial troops, they henceforth say ‘the armies of Terken Khatun’. When speaking of Isfahan, they point out that it is Terken’s capital city. As for the name of the child-Sultan, it would be as good as forgotten, and he would only be remembered as the ‘son of the Chinese woman’.
The officers of the Nizamiya were nevertheless opposed to the Sultana. Terken Khatun was second on their list of outlaws, just after Malikshah, to whose eldest son, Barkiyaruk aged eleven, they gave their support. They surrounded him, advised him and led him off to battle. The first skirmishes left them with the advantage and the Sultana had to fall back on Isfahan which was soon under siege. Terken, however, was not a woman to admit defeat and to defend herself she was willing to use tricks which would long be famous.