The Fortress of Alamut

In 483 AH (1090 CE) Hasan-i Sabbah seized the mountain fortress of Alamut, an isolated rock summit in the Elburz range of northern Iran, and made it the head of the Nizari Isma'ili state. The Nizaris were a branch of the Isma'ili Shi'a who broke from the Fatimid line over the succession and who stood opposed to the Seljuk Sunni sultanate that then dominated Iran. Lacking the numbers to fight the Seljuks in the open, Hasan-i Sabbah built instead a network of all-but-impregnable mountain castles, of which Alamut was the centre, and a disciplined community that could hold out for years behind cliff walls, cisterns, and granaries. He was also a man of learning, and Alamut housed a famous library, which survived until the Mongols destroyed the castle and burned its books in 1256. From these fortresses the Nizaris waged their struggle not by armies but by the targeted killing of commanders, viziers, and rivals, a tactic that terrified the powerful and gave rise, in the accounts of outside writers both Muslim and European, to a lurid legend of the Old Man of the Mountain and his devoted killers, the word Assassin itself descending from European garblings of a name for the sect. Modern scholarship treats most of that legend, including the famous tale of a secret garden and intoxication, as later embellishment rather than sober history. This scene depicts the fortress itself rather than any deed: a sheer crag in the high Elburz, a castle built along the rock with its single zigzag path and watch-post, the cisterns and library and granaries of a self-sufficient mountain community, and the terraced valley far below that fed it. It is set in the age of the Seljuk sultanate, the Sunni order the Nizari mountain state was built to resist, and the framing is sober and historical, the stronghold of a sect, not the theatre of a myth.