Expand Assassin entry with medieval manuscript images

*Assassin* is the one European word that a story about cannabis put into everyday use. It comes from *ḥashīshiyya*, a name some medieval Arab writers gavean Arabic term of abuse for the Nizari Ismailis of Syria, a Shiʿi community whose agents killed princesrulers and officials in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. CrusadersEuropean observers carried the name home, and in Italian, French and English it came to mean anyonea killer, especially one who killsstrikes by stealth or for pay.[@1,4,6,9] That the name had something to do withThe Nizaris did carry out political killings. The claim that [hashish](/culture/language/hashish/) drove them is likely. That the Nizaris killed under the drug is a later story. The first texts that use the name never explain itEuropean legend, not a record of Nizari practice. That legend was repeated by Marco Polo and gained scholarly authority when Silvestre de Sacy explained the account that made the link famous was writtenword’s etymology in Paris in 1809. In 1937 it returned in American cannabis propaganda as “assassin of youth”.[@18,59,10,11] ## An insult without an explanation The oldest text known to use the word is a decree of the Fatimid caliph al-Āmir, written in 1122–1123 against the Nizaris, who had split from the caliphate. Its appendix, sent to the caliph'’s agents in Damascus, calls them *al-ḥashīshiyya*. The historian Farhad Daftary notes that it does so ", “without any explanation"”, as Farhad Daftary notes.[@1,11] Twelfth-century Seljuq chroniclers used the word interchangeably withalongside *bāṭiniyya* ("“those of the hidden meaning"”) and *malāḥida* ("“heretics"”). The Egyptian historian Ibn Muyassar wrote thatrecorded the same people were called *ḥashīshiyya* in Syria, *bāṭiniyya* and *malāḥida* at Alamut in Persia, and *taʿlīmiyya* in Khurasanlabels below.[@1] The Polish orientalist Jerzy Hauziński reads it*ḥashīshiyya* as a jibe at the low social standing of the Syrian followers: "“simple and fanatic"” people.[@1] TheDaftary and the Turkish encyclopedia of Islam draws the line plainly: the whole community shouldagree that it meant “low-class rabble” or people of lax morality, not be thoughta description of as hashish usersdrug use.[@4,11] | Where | What the Nizaris were called, according to Ibn Muyassar | |---|---| | Syria | *ḥashīshiyya* | | Alamut, Persia | *bāṭiniyya*, *malāḥida* | | Khurasan | *taʿlīmiyya* | ## What the Nizaris actually did Under Hasan Sabbah (d. 1124) the Nizaris built a state centred on the mountain fortress of Alamut in Persia, with a subsidiary in Syria. Their fidaʾis killed prominent political and military enemies, as a policy meant to intimidate. Daftary describes young volunteers acting from religious conviction, often waiting patiently for an opportunity. No contemporary source says hashish was used to motivate them.[@11] The state fell to the Mongols in 1256. The community survived as a Shiʿi minority; modern Nizaris, scattered across more than 25 countries, acknowledge the Aga Khan as their imam.[@10,11] ## The Old Man and his garden The name reached Europe throughFrom the Crusader stateslate twelfth century, whereWestern observers explained the Nizari leader in Syria was known asfidaʾis’ self-sacrifice by an intoxicating drug: the “Old Man of the Mountain”, their name for the Nizari leader, supposedly controlled them with a potion and a secret garden of paradise.[@210,411] The Crusaders’ “Old Man” was the Syrian leader Rashid al-Din Sinan (d. 1193), not Hasan Sabbah.[@9] Marco Polo's book of travels told the story that fixed the legend gave it its most influential form. The Old Man, he said, kept a walled garden made to look like paradise. Youths from twelve to twenty were given "“a certain potion which cast them into a deep sleep"” and carried in; woken among its wine and music, they believed they had been towere in paradise and would die to return. Polo calls them the Old Man's *Ashishin*.[@2] Polo and does not say what the potion was. Daftary called these medieval legends "fabricated by uninformed writers and the enemies of the sect".[@72] Meanwhile the word had lost its sectThe picture above, painted in Paris about 1410–1412, comes from a manuscript of Polo’s travels. ByIts rubric reads “Cy parle du viel de la montaigne et de son estat” (“Here it speaks of the early fourteenth century Dante could writeOld Man of "lo perfido assessin", the treacherous assassin, withMountain and his estate”). It names no Syria in viewHasan Sabbah and shows music and pleasure, not a training camp.[@312] ![A fourteenthcrowned ruler gestures as an attendant holding a golden vessel offers a cup to three young men inside a fortress, in a medieval manuscript illumination](../../src/assets/culture/assassin-century commentator on Dante definedlegend-drugging-livre-des-merveilles.jpg "A later folio of the *assassino*same manuscript imagines the legendary drugging: a crowned Nizari leader watches as an attendant offers a cup to young men. No contemporary source describes such a practice. | Maître d’Egerton, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al%C3%A2_al_D%C3%AEn_Muhammad_droguant_ses_disciples.jpeg"one who kills others for money") Daftary called the tales “fabricated by uninformed writers and the enemies of the sect”; modern scholarship has found no evidence that hashish was used systematically on the fidaʾis.[@711] The legend says more about Europe than Nizari practice. ## The 1809 etymology The explanation now repeated everywhereever since was the work of [Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy](/history/france-sacy-assassins-lecture-1809/), the leadinga French orientalist of his day. In a lecture at the Institut de France in 1809, published in full in 1818, he rejected earlier guesses and showed that the Crusader and European forms of *assassin* came from the Arabic *ḥashīsh*, as he had found the word in theciting Abū Shāma’s thirteenth-century chronicle of Abū Shāma.[@111] He took it to mean "“hashish-eater"”, the name of a sect of drugged killers.[@5,11] The historian drugging story was already centuries old; de Sacy supplied the etymology and the appearance of learned proof. He accepted that the Nizari chief used hashish, though sparingly rather than habitually, to give his followers dreams of paradise. His authority fixed the link in European scholarship.[@10,11] David Guba traces how that reading tied hashish to the Orient and to violent madness in Fr … h-moreau/) and the [Club des Hashischins](/culture/traditions/club-des-hashischins/), and much later in French drug law.[@5] ## From the Old Man to "“assassin of youth" ” By the early fourteenth century Dante could write of “lo perfido assessin”, the treacherous assassin, with no Syria in view.[@3] A fourteenth-century commentator defined the *assassino* as “one who kills others for money”.[@7] By the nineteenth century the drugged Assassin was familiar in Orientalist scholarship; by the twentieth, the association could be turned against cannabis itself.[@5,11] In July 1937, as Congress debated the Marihuana Tax Act, *The American Magazine* published "“[Marijuana, Assassin of Youth](/history/us-assassin-of-youth-1937/)"”, associated with the narcotics commissioner [Harry Anslinger](/culture/people/harry-anslinger/). Its stories made cannabis itself the killer, a cause of violence and of theyouthful ruin of young people.[@8] A [film of the same name](/history/us-assassin-of-youth-film-1937/) followed the same year.  An insult from a twelfth-century quarrel over the imamate had become part of the case for prohibition.

A medieval Arabic insult for the Nizari Ismailis of Syria, ḥashīshiyya, that reached Europe as abecame the European word for a hired killer. The story that they killed under hashish dates from 1809Medieval legends of drugged killers, and fromrepeated by Marco Polo's tale and given scholarly authority in 1809, later helped make cannabis itself an “assassin of a sleeping potionyouth”.

opusdeepseek-5v4.51-flash

The Institute of Ismaili Studies — Assassin The Institute of Ismaili Studies — Farhad Daftary, Introduction to The Assassin Legends (1994) The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismaʿilis Bibliothèque nationale de France — Livre des merveilles, Français 2810 (catalogue notice; manuscript dated 1410–1412) 8 unchanged

src ../../src/assets/culture/old-man-of-the-mountain-livre-des-merveilles.jpg · alt A bearded old man in a white robe and red cloak stands in a walled garden while four young people sit on the grass, two of them playing music · caption “The Old Man of the Mountain” and his legendary paradise garden, imagined in a 15th-century French manuscript of Marco Polo’s travels. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 2810, fol. 16v. · credit Attributed to the Maître de la Mazarine, Bibliothèque nationale de France, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons · credit url https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hassan-i_Sabbah-1.jpg