Two episodes of the Mystery Babylon series deal with the medieval order Western writers have called the Assassins, MB10 and MB11: The Assassins and The Templars, and the group occupies a structural position in the series’ lineage argument as a bridge between the ancient initiatory material and the medieval European orders. This page sets out what is documented about the historical group, which is a good deal, and traces where the more colourful elements of its Western reputation actually came from, which turns out to be a specific and traceable literary history.
This page documents the historical record. It is background for listeners of the Mystery Babylon series, not an endorsement of the series’ interpretation of it. Where the broadcasts and mainstream scholarship diverge, that divergence is stated plainly. For the series itself, start with the complete episode guide.
The Nizari Ismailis
The group in question was not called the Assassins by its own members. It was a branch of Ismaili Shia Islam, itself a branch of Shiism distinguished by its line of imams, which split in 1094 over the succession to the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir. The faction supporting the claim of his son Nizar became the Nizari Ismailis, and it is this community whose Persian and Syrian strongholds Western chroniclers encountered during the Crusades.
The Nizari community did not end with the medieval period, and this is the single most important fact for reading older Western accounts critically. It continues today as a living branch of Islam with several million adherents worldwide, led by the Aga Khan. Nineteenth-century European writing about the medieval order was produced almost entirely without reference to that community’s own literature and traditions, and modern scholarship, above all the work of Farhad Daftary, has substantially rewritten the picture by using Ismaili sources alongside the hostile Sunni and Crusader ones.
Hassan-i-Sabbah and Alamut
Hassan-i-Sabbah, a Persian missionary of the Ismaili cause, took control of the mountain fortress of Alamut in the Alborz range in 1090 by converting its inhabitants rather than by siege, and made it the centre of a territorially scattered polity that endured for a hundred and sixty-six years. He died in 1124. The state he founded held a string of fortresses in northern Persia and later in the Syrian mountains, surrounded by vastly more powerful Seljuk and later Mongol enemies.
Its distinctive military method followed from that asymmetry. Unable to field armies, the Nizaris made systematic use of targeted killing of political and religious leaders, carried out by individuals who accepted near-certain death, often in public and often in mosques. The first and most famous target was the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk in 1092. The strategy was effective as deterrence out of proportion to the resources behind it, and it is the origin of the word assassin entering European languages as a term for that kind of killing.
Alamut was also a centre of learning with a substantial library, which matters for the end of the story. The Mongols under Hulagu took the fortress in 1256 and destroyed the library. Much of what a historian would most want to read about the order was burned at that point, which is why hostile external accounts have carried so much of the interpretive weight ever since.
Where the Hashish Story Came From
The best-known element of the Western legend is that recruits were drugged with hashish and shown a staged garden paradise to convince them of the reward awaiting them, and that the group’s name derives from hashish-user, hashishiyya. Both parts of that story have a traceable and largely literary provenance.
The garden narrative reaches the West principally through Marco Polo’s account, written well after the fall of Alamut and reporting what he had heard rather than seen, in a text that presents a number of comparable marvels. Similar tales circulated in other medieval accounts, and the motif of the deceptive paradise has close analogues in earlier storytelling. No Ismaili source describes the practice, and no archaeological or documentary evidence for the staged garden has been produced.
The etymology has a different problem. The Arabic term hashishiyya was indeed applied to the Nizaris by their Sunni opponents, but in medieval polemical usage it functioned as an insult connoting low-class rabble or irreligious riff-raff rather than as a literal description of drug use, comparable to calling an enemy faction degenerates. The nineteenth-century orientalist Silvestre de Sacy identified the Arabic root correctly and thereby settled the linguistic question, but the literalising interpretation, that the men were actually drugged, was already established and survived the correction. Practical considerations also tell against the operational story, since hashish is a poor preparation for the sustained composure required by the killings that are actually documented.
The Templar Connection
The claimed relationship between the Assassins and the Knights Templar is central to the lineage argument, so it is worth separating what is documented from what is inferred.
What is documented is contact and pragmatic dealing. The two orders held fortresses in the same Syrian region, and the record shows tribute payments, negotiations, truces and at least one embassy, alongside episodes of violence. Medieval Crusader-state politics involved constant shifting alliances across religious lines, and both orders participated in that normal traffic. The structural resemblance sometimes noted between them, hierarchical, secretive, militarily specialised, geographically dispersed, is real as a resemblance.
What is not documented is doctrinal transmission: an inner teaching passing from Alamut to the Temple and onward into later European initiatory bodies. That claim depends on the resemblance itself plus the accusations levelled at the Templars during their suppression from 1307, and those accusations were extracted under torture in a proceeding driven by the French crown’s fiscal and political interests. Using confessions obtained that way as evidence of an actual inherited doctrine is the weak joint in the chain, and it is a weakness independent of any view about the Templars themselves.
Where the Series and Scholarship Diverge
The Mystery Babylon framework treats the Nizaris as a stage in a continuous initiatory transmission, one of the links set out on the lineage chart, carrying material forward from the older mystery schools to the medieval and then modern European orders. Modern Ismaili studies reads the same group as a specific Shia community in a specific political predicament, whose religious content is continuous with Ismaili Islam rather than with Egyptian or Babylonian antiquity, and whose fearsome Western reputation is substantially the product of enemies writing after the fact and Europeans embroidering what those enemies wrote.
The two readings are not equally easy to test. The Nizari case is unusually favourable ground for checking, because a living community preserves its own literature, because Daftary and others have published extensively from it, and because the specific legendary elements can be traced to identifiable texts. A listener working through MB10 and MB11 can compare the series’ sources against that scholarship directly; the source map lists what the broadcasts worked from and the bibliography gives the full list.
