Crusaders and “Assassins”: A Murder-Mystery in the Medieval Levant
Conrad of Montferrat, the monarch of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the primus inter pares of the four Crusader Principalities, was assassinated in Tyre on 28 April 1192 by the Nizari Ismailis, the legendary Assassins. The event received a lot of interest in its own time and since in the Christian world—and fuelled the various myths about the Nizaris either being focused on the Crusaders (the Nizaris’ war was always with the Sunni order) or operating in Europe (which they never did). There has always been speculation about a third party having sponsored the Nizaris’ murder of Conrad, and not without reason.
THE MEDIEVAL LEVANT
An outbreak of plague in the 540s AD derailed the attempt of Emperor Justinian (r. 527-65) to recover the Western Roman Empire and structurally weakened Byzantium by the time the generational war with Sassanid Persia arrived (610-28). Seizing the moment in the early 630s, Arab Ishmaelites, motivated by a revivalist Biblical monotheism, invaded and ultimately conquered all of Persia. Byzantium survived—just—but it was a shadow of its former self, permanently losing the rich, ancient Christian lands of Syria-Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. The Ishmaelite Empire, inheriting a stupefying scale of wealth, financial and intellectual, entered a “Golden Age” under the Abbasid dynasty after 750, and by the ninth century its Imperial ideology was crystallising into Islam as we know it now.
Political turmoil racked the Abbasid realm by the middle of the ninth century and intellectual stagnation set in—both trends only getting worse over time. The Ismailis, a radical Shi’i splinter, incubating in the shadows for a century, prepared to make its move. The Fatimids, as the Ismailis called themselves, proclaimed a counter-Caliph in North Africa in 909 and by 969 had conquered Egypt, western Syria, and the Haramayn, the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. In the face of this ideological, as well as military, challenge, the Abbasid Caliphs were literally powerless: prisoners of their Turkish Praetorians since no later than the 860s, they had become puppets of an Iranian Shi’a dynasty, the Buyids, after the capture of Baghdad in 946, the terminus of any embers of the “Golden Age”.
Granted breathing room by the chaos in Islamdom, Byzantium was on the upswing in the late tenth into the eleventh century, but this was brought to a crashing halt in the confrontation with the Seljuk Turks, the new standard-bearers of Islam, at Manzikert in 1071. The Byzantine civil strife that followed exacerbated the trouble and opened further space for Turkic infiltration of Anatolia. The waves of westward Turkic migration from Central Asia, institutionalised in the Seljuk Empire, had already brought Iran under Turkish rule and displaced the Buyids in Baghdad in 1055.
The Fatimid Empire, meanwhile, was in terminal decline. The fire and magnetic vitality was gone from “official” Ismailism, and with the fall of the Buyids it was the end of the “Shi’a Century”. The same process that had afflicted the Abbasids, of the Caliphs becoming ciphers for military officers, was completed in Fatimid Cairo in 1074. However, unlike the Abbasids, who had decisively subordinated the utopian factions they had ridden to power, the Fatimids’ struggle with their “permanent revolution” wing had been a feature, intermittently violent, of the Empire all the way along. And unlike the contiguous Abbasid Imperium, the Fatimids had established an outpost in Iran—headquartered at the Alamut Castle on the Caspian coast—that now served as a protective base for the radicals.
The dissatisfaction of the Persian Ismailis with developments in Cairo boiled over during a dynastic dispute after the Fatimid Caliph’s death in January 1094: those who stuck with the military’s chosen successor were named after him, Mustali Ismailis, and the Persian objectors were named for the claimant whose legitimacy they insisted upon: Nizari Ismailis. The Nizaris had already begun terrorism against the Sunni order in 1092, striking down Nizam al-Mulk, the archetypal vizier, for twenty years the effective ruler of the Seljuk Empire from Isfahan. The Nizaris’ assassinations were ritualised: always at close quarters with a dagger—in an era when bows and poisons were available—and little attempt was made to escape afterwards. There is some evidence Nizari assassins viewed it as shameful to survive. Persian Nizaris were soon dispatched to Syria, covertly establishing a bridgehead under Alamut’s command that would bring the Mustalis within range of the assassins. (Some might detect a modern parallel in zealot terrorist movement taking hold in Iran, before establishing a colony in the Levant that remains entirely controlled from the nerve-centre in Iran.)
Amid internal turmoil, the Levant was soon to be impacted by a force that had heretofore been far from imagination, namely the Christians on the western fringe of the Eurasian landmass. This area had been a backwater after the shocks of Roman collapse and the rise of the Arab Empire.1 Something of a recovery had begun by the ninth century and the turning point came in the eleventh. The Roman Bishopric, rising from its lowest moment of corruption and scandal, was seized by reformers in 1048, and soon repudiated the authority of the Patriarch in Constantinople. The Latin Church, long a plaything of secular rulers, was to be freed of such contamination, and the Christian people as a whole rescued from error, a societal baptism of what was to become a distinctive Latin Christendom. Norman warriors blessed by the Church hierarchy brought England under the dispensation of this Papal Revolution, and pushed back the armies of Islam in Italy. In 1077, the Holy Roman Emperor was humbled at Canossa before the avatar of reformation, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-85), and in 1085 Christian troops recaptured Toledo in central Spain, setting the stage for the ultimate reversal of the Islamic occupation of Iberia and reclaiming the lost knowledge that fed into the universities, the motor of the twelfth-century Renaissance that remade the intellectual-legal landscape of Latin Christendom.
The logic of reformation meant the Christian Holy Land could not be left under infidel rule; the escalating persecution of Christians, desecration of churches, and the appeals from the Byzantine Emperor added to the impetus. In 1095, the Roman Pope summoned Christians to an “armed pilgrimage”, what we call the First Crusade, and in July 1099, after 450-plus years of Muslim occupation, Jerusalem was recovered for Christendom. Of note, “it aroused very little interest in the region. Appeals by the local Muslims to Damascus and Baghdad for help remained unanswered, and the newly established Crusader Principalities from Antioch to Jerusalem soon fitted into the game of Levantine politics, with cross-religious alliances … between and among Muslim and Christian Princes.” The Turkish atabeg (governor) in Mosul extended his writ to Aleppo in the 1120s and, after he was killed in 1146, his son, Nooradeen Zengi, set out to cleanse and reunify the Sunni world, which brought about the first Muslim clashes with the Crusader States.
The Crusaders’ remained largely secondary to Nooradeen’s program, though: his focus was uprooting the Shi’is and offshoot sects like the Ismailis from his dominion, which by 1154 included Damascus. The Syria-based Nizaris had assassinated the tenth Fatimid Caliph in 1130, before Nooradeen drove the Nizaris underground, and not even the Mustali Ismailis recognised the four Fatimid rulers after that as their Imam. When the last of these Fatimids died in 1171, Nooradeen’s deputy, Saladin, was already in Cairo—sent there in 1164 ostensibly to guard against the Crusaders—and a prayer was read out in the name of the Abbasid Caliph, abolishing the Fatimid Caliphate, establishing the Ayyubid dynasty with Saladin as its first Sultan, and returning Egypt to the Sunni fold after two centuries of estrangement “amid the almost total indifference of the population”, who helped load the heretical Ismaili books onto bonfires. Nooradeen died in 1174 and—after the requisite power-struggle—Saladin had emerged as his successor. For contested reasons, Saladin almost immediately scaled back pressure on the Nizaris, but otherwise continued Nooradeen’s design, knitting together Egypt, the Haramayn, Syria, and northern Iraq.
As with Nooradeen, the Crusaders were of no special concern to Saladin—until they made a fatal mistake. Raynald of Chatillon, a subsidiary official in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, ruling a fiefdom in what is now southern Jordan as the Lord of Oultrejordain from 1176, had been raiding the hajj pilgrimage routes and in 1183 constructed a naval fleet that threatened Mecca and Medina, the Islamic Holy Land. Saladin was determined that the penalty should be the eviction of the Christians from their Holy Land. Declaring a jihad, the Crusaders’ hold on Jerusalem was shattered in 1187. Saladin’s famous magnanimity—which included releasing the captured King of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan (r. 1186-87)—was set aside for Raynald, who was beheaded by Saladin personally.
The Third Crusade (1189-92) managed to prevent the collapse of the Crusader States and even reversed some important gains of Saladin’s jihad. The Crusaders recovered Acre in July 1191, but failed to retake Jerusalem in November-December 1191. As exhaustion set in on both sides, it became clear there would be a negotiated outcome. There were still some months of fighting left, however, particularly a Muslim offensive against Jaffa and a second Crusader run at Jerusalem, to decide the exact nature of the terms. Defences held in both cities and by September 1192 the war was over. The treaty in effect recognised the Latin States’ new borders: the loss of Jerusalem was a bitter pill for the Christians, but the existential danger was over (for now) and safe passage to Jerusalem was guaranteed for Christian pilgrims.
THE ASSASSINATION
In the spring of 1192, with the Crusader States’ survival assured, the Christian leaders began giving consideration to the structure of the post-war government. Acre had become the new capital and, on 16 April 1192, Conrad of Montferrat was elected King. A messenger was sent to Tyre and Conrad was informed of his election on 24 April. Conrad’s skill had retained the Christian foothold in Tyre at the height of Saladin’s jihad, giving the Third Crusade a launchpad to expand upon in re-establishing the Jerusalem Kingdom, albeit without Jerusalem.
Though the political wrangling was complicated, the only real rival to Conrad was Guy of Lusignan, who had been King of Jerusalem for about a year before the Muslim conquest in October 1187. Guy was supported by England’s King Richard I (“the Lionheart”) and nobody else. Inter alia, everyone remembered that the avaricious Raynald of Chatillon, the proximate cause of the catastrophe, was one of Guy’s allies.
Conrad would never be crowned King. On 28 April 1192, Conrad was killed by two Nizaris. There is little agreement about who the two Nizari killers were; they both acted the part of Christians and were within Conrad’s entourage for several months before the assassination, though whether as servants, monks, or otherwise is unclear. Regardless, the assassination conformed to stereotype: the murder was carried out with daggers on a very public business street where the Nizaris could not have escaped if they wanted to. One of the Nizaris was killed on the spot by the knights accompanying Conrad; the other took refuge in a nearby church before being captured, briefly interrogated, then executed by being dragged through the streets.
Henry of Champagne, a distant relative of Conrad’s and the nephew of both Richard I and France’s King Phillip II—the two primary organisers and leaders of the Third Crusade—was married to Conrad’s widow, Queen Isabella I, and became the King of Jerusalem. Henry only ruled for five years: he fell out of a window in September 1197—there is no suggestion it was anything other than a genuine accident—and was dead as soon as he hit the ground, aged 31.
As an aside, in two senses, Conrad’s assassination contrasts sharply to that of Raymond II (d. 1152), the Count of Tripoli, the only other Crusader leader the Nizaris cut down. First, there was long-term, elaborate planning for Conrad’s murder, while Raymond was stabbed to death at the gates of his city in a hasty, opportunistic assault (probably because he was encroaching on the independence of the Nizari statelet on the Syrian coast). Second, where Raymond’s assassination attracted little attention, the slaying of Conrad was a sensational interest in Christendom almost immediately and has been, in various forms and at various intensities, ever since.2
It is unclear what accounts for this difference. Perhaps it is the difference in rank between Conrad and Raymond. Perhaps it reflects the hyper-intense Christian focus on the Holy Land in 1192, amid the ongoing Third Crusade. The Second Crusade had only just ended when Raymond was killed, but that campaign largely failed, whereas the Third had the great drama over Jerusalem and Christian warriors securing a semi-victory after a near-death experience for the Latin States. There is perhaps another reason that comes, so to speak, from the other side.
When Raymond was killed, the Nizaris were effectively underground, shielding themselves and their doctrines, and they had been that way for about two decades.3 The Crusaders were at best hazily aware of the Nizaris in 1152 and essentially nobody in the Christian world beyond that knew who the Nizaris were. All was changed by 1192. The Persian founder of the Nizaris, Hassan-i-Sabbah, had died in 1162 and in Syria the Nizari mission passed into the hands of Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad.4 In 1164, the Nizaris proclaimed the Resurrection that ended the Holy Law and involved the behaviours that caused such outrage among (and fed the legends from) the Sunnis. These goings-on attracted the attention of the Christians in the Latin States, who had the most contact with the Nizaris during this period, whether in alliance or tension. This is also the timeframe where the Nizaris’ pace of assassinations was fastest.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
There have been suggestions that the Nizaris killed Conrad at the behest of somebody other than themselves nearly from the moment it happened, and a paper by Patrick A. Williams examines this issue.5
Traditionally, says Williams, there are five suspects given.
Sinan, the Nizari Imam, is less a “suspect” than an admitted perpetrator. Williams does not contest that Sinan gave the order that sent the Nizaris to infiltrate Conrad’s Court. The question is whether Sinan had a co-conspirator. Williams clearly believes the ultimate responsibility does not rest with Sinan, and there are general reasons to agree with this, among them that the Nizaris generally did not target the Crusaders. But Williams’ reasoning beyond that is frankly non-existent; he does not even mention the clear evidence of other Nizari assassinations sponsored by a third party.6 What Williams does mention is a letter purportedly written by Sinan expressing outrage at Conrad for impounding a Nizari ship, mistreating its crew, and refusing to pay reparations—and then notes that the letter is an obvious forgery, since the Nizaris had no navy and the date on the letter is after Sinan died in 1193. The letter proves nothing one way or the other; it certainly doesn’t by itself exculpate Sinan.
The obvious candidate for a co-conspirator with Sinan is Guy of Lusignan. The problem is that all available evidence says Guy was resigned to having lost the throne in Jerusalem, aware he had no confidence among the barons, and King Richard had arranged for him to rule Cyprus as a pleasant consolation. Guy had left by May 1192 and showed no signs of trying to re-enter the running once Conrad was out of the way.
King Richard is the next most obvious candidate. Indeed, under torture, the captured Nizari named Richard as the party responsible. This has some weight, Williams explains, since Conrad had been conspiring with Saladin to work against Richard until the news had come through that Richard had accepted Conrad as King of Jerusalem. Had Richard found out about this conspiracy, the argument goes, he could have acted to kill Conrad, and the fact Richard’s nephew replaced Conrad as King of Jerusalem, would seem to add to this case.
Williams adumbrates the counter-arguments about Richard’s upfront nature and desire to return to England that are sometimes invoked against this; one can take or leave them. The most clear-cut evidence against the idea Richard had Conrad killed, Williams notes, is that he had just surrendered to the barons’ demand for Conrad to be made ruler and sent his own candidate to Cyprus: if he was going to kill Conrad, the moment was before ratifying his claims to the throne. One can add, relatedly, that the Nizaris were in place for months: whoever killed Conrad was able to pick the timing with some precision—and if Richard had wanted to eliminate Conrad, the timing would have been considerably earlier than April 1192.
This fact that Conrad was in warm contact with Saladin seems to rule him out. Saladin had every reason to expect reasonable terms with Conrad going forward. Williams is less convincing, though, in invoking the Nizari assassination attempts against Saladin from fifteen years earlier. There is every indication that after the second of those attempts, in 1176, and after the Nizari fida’i meeting in Saladin’s tent that revealed to him that his two closest bodyguards were Nizari agents, that a modus vivendi was reached that at times included coordination.
The final suspect is another Crusader leader, Humphrey of Toron, though he seems fairly self-evidently innocent; his “issue”, that Conrad had “stolen” his wife, was finished years earlier, and there were many simpler ways he could have avenged himself rather than this months-long set-up and the specifically-timed murder.
NEW SUSPECT
Williams suggests that Henry of Champagne, the man who replaced Conrad as King of Jerusalem, might have been the culprit who had Conrad murdered, and it must be conceded that the evidence he marshals is intriguing.
First is the obvious: the cui bono question points squarely at Henry.
Next, Henry acted in a deeply suspicious manner in the run-up to the assassination and just afterwards. Henry had been dispatched by Richard as emissary to tell Conrad he had been elected King, but he delayed at least a week in delivering this message. Conrad was murdered immediately after Henry conveyed this message in Tyre and left for Acre. Henry was then back in Tyre, married to Conrad’s widow Queen Isabella (a necessary condition for the throne), and had been unanimously selected by the barons by 30 April. Henry told the barons he had married Isabella at Richard’s insistence, while sending a letter to Richard asking permission to wed Isabella. Of course this could suggest no more than opportunism, but it does highlight deception and draws attention to how well-placed Henry was, at just the right time, to control the situation after Conrad’s murder.
Possibly the most interesting fact Williams points to is the 1194 visit by Henry to the Nizari stronghold in the mountains of the Syrian coast where he met the new Nizari leader after Sinan died. It is from this meeting that the legend derives that the Nizari chief simply had to wave his hand and two devotees jumped down a mountain to their deaths. Traditionally, this meeting is interpreted as Henry restoring relations between Christians and the Nizari sect in the face of Sunni pressure, but if it is assumed he conspired with the Nizaris to eliminate Conrad then it looks very different. It could also be interpreted as a meeting renewing Henry’s supplication, a reminder for Henry that he was in his position thanks to the Nizaris—and that if they could remove one King, they could remove another.
Finally, Williams points to Henry never having once, in five years in power, signed a document as “King”. Was it guilt? A mark of his subordination to the Nizaris? A possibility that Williams does not note is theological. The first Christian ruler of Jerusalem after the city’s recovery, Godfrey of Bouillon, is said to have refused the title of “King”, leaving that to Jesus Christ alone, and styled himself the Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre. The evidence on this is contested, though it does seem Godfrey refused to wear “a crown of gold in the place where Christ had worn a crown of thorns”. What is uncontested is that by the time Henry was in power, the title “King” was uncontroversial, so Henry’s refusal to ever use his title on official documents is strange. More tellingly, if Henry was doing this as some kind of statement, by definition there should be some mention in the records of his reason(s), and there is none. It is curious and something beyond coincidence that needs an explanation.
AFTERMATH
The idea there was something more to the Nizari assassination of Conrad bedded down quickly. England’s King Richard I, departing the Latin States in October 1192, was arrested in the Holy Roman Empire a few days before Christmas 1192 and handed over to the Duke of Austria, Leopold V (r. 1177-94), a cousin of Conrad’s, who accused Richard of being behind Conrad’s murder. It is unlikely Leopold believed this. The likeliest explanation for Leopold’s rage is that after Acre was liberated in July 1191, Leopold had demanded recognition of the German contingent as equivalent to the French and English; the latter two both objected, and Richard cast down the Austrian standard that Leopold had set on the walls of the city. Leopold left the Holy Land in a strop and waited for his chance for revenge, which arrived when Richard was shipwrecked. (Richard had fallen out with the French King, and angered the Byzantine Emperor by annexing Cyprus, so he could not get home overland or using French ports.) Having essentially kidnapped Richard near Vienna, Leopold’s ransom bled England white to get her Sovereign back at last in February 1194.7 The details and verdict about Leopold’s charges against Richard faded, but the sense that there was something mysterious and conspiratorial about Conrad’s death remained.
The Crusader States themselves, during Henry’s rule and for several decades after his death in 1197, went through a period of recovery. In 1229, Jerusalem, a city Muslims paid little attention to after reconquering it, was given back to the Crusaders as part of the diplomatic settlement between Saladin’s successors and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II that ended the Sixth Crusade. The Crusaders were ejected in 1244 after they tried to purge the city of Muslims.
The Mongol invasion of the region began just over a decade after the Crusaders lost Jerusalem for the last time, and upended regional politics. The Nizari headquarters was destroyed as the Mongols swept through Iran, and Baghdad was sacked in 1258, destroying the Abbasid Caliphate, which would be nominally restored in Cairo three years later under the guard of the Mamelukes. It was the Mamelukes who took the lead in this new situation, first by halting the Mongol tide with some help from the remaining Nizaris in Syria, then liquidating the Nizaris, and subsequently dealing the final blows to the Latin States, taking Acre in 1291.
The next time Jerusalem was in Christian hands was 1917. The efforts to rekindle the Holy Land Crusades fizzled: demoralised by defeat, the practicalities of finding the men and money to start again from scratch were daunting; the Church’s enthusiasm for the project had waned; Latin Christendom became pre-occupied with internal issues, not least the Black Death, through the fourteenth century; and by the time the Crusader spirit returned it was needed to deal with the more immediate problem of the second Islamic advance into Europe, this time from the Ottoman Turks.
A version of this article was originally published on my old blog in August 2020.
NOTES
The Roman collapse in the West in the fifth century and Rome’s attempted restoration in the sixth had been devastating to what is now Western and Central Europe, and a de facto siege was imposed in the seventh century by the Arabs, cutting the Latin-speaking world off from its old cultural and economic hinterland in Christian North Africa. The Mediterranean, swarming with Arab pirates, was not only impassable; the corsairs had swept inland, occupying Sicily and southern Italy, taking slaves on a scale that would have impressed the Romans, and as late as 846 raided Rome. Still, to the west, a line had been drawn at Tours in 732, containing the Arab invaders to Iberia, and to the north, a dissolute paganism had been replaced with Christianity. Through the ninth century, despite a fragmentation of the Carolingian realm into what would become France and the Holy Roman Empire (later Germany), there were indicators of a cultural recovery, as well as increasing political stability and power on the Continent. By the dawn of the tenth century, England was unified.
The phenomenal popularity of a computer game like Assassin’s Creed is unimaginable without the cultural memory left by Christendom’s reaction to Conrad’s murder 900 and more years ago.
The Nizaris in Syria were largely hidden from view after their expulsion from Aleppo in 1124 and Damascus in 1129, only reappearing in history again in the 1160s. The main exception was the Nizaris’ assassination of the Abbasid Caliph, Al-Mustarshid, in 1135, their greatest ever “success”: this reverberated in Islamdom, though even there it seemed like a last act of desperation, but Christians barely noticed. The next time the Nizaris emerged was very briefly, in 1149, a few years before Raymond was killed, to fight alongside the Crusaders against Nooradeen. There is no sense in the documents that the Crusaders had any deep understanding of their temporary, tactical ally.
Sinan is better known as Rashid al-Din Sinan or the Old Man of the Mountain (Shaykh al-Jabal).
The paper is entitled: ‘The Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat: Another Suspect?’ (1970).
The Nizaris ended their existence, from 1270 onwards, as an instrument in the hands of the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt, Baybars. The Nizari assassination attempt against England’s Edward II in Acre in June 1272 was ordered by Baybars, for instance. But long before that time of desolation there are cases in the record where the evidence suggests the Nizaris (or at least their Imam) acted at the request of others. For example, one of the earliest Nizari assassinations in Syria, of the Homs ruler Janah ad-Dawla in 1103, was likely ordered by his rival, the emir of Aleppo, who was acting as something of a patron for the Nizaris. The 1177 assassination of the Aleppine vizier Shihab al-Din ibn al-Ajmi is less clear-cut, but only because there are two suspects for the Nizaris’ sponsor.
Richard I was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 3 September 1189, the day he became King, and left the country to go on Crusade in December 1189. Richard stayed in England about two months after he was freed from captivity, long enough to be crowned a second time in March 1194 as a message that his independence had not been compromised, before he left again to keep the French in line as they encroached on his Angevin Empire. Richard never saw England again, dying in the south of France in April 1199. Richard thus spent about four months of his reign in England.