Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [245]
My first sources were the same ones in which the earliest accounts of the Templars appeared, from Gerard of Strasbourg to Joinville. The Templars had come into contact—into conflict, sometimes, but more often into mysterious alliance—with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain.
The story was complicated and began after the death of Mahomet, with the schism between the followers of the ordinary law, the Sunnis, and the supporters of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, Fatima’s husband, who saw the succession taken from him. It was the enthusiasts of Ali, the group of adepts called the Shiites, who created the heretic branch of Islam, the Shi’ah. An occult doctrine, which saw the continuity of the Revelation not in traditional meditation upon the words of the Prophet but in the very person of the Imam, lord, leader, epiphany of the divine, theophanic reality, King of the World.
Now, what happened to this heretic Islamic branch, which was gradually infiltrated by all the esoteric doctrines of the Mediterranean basin, from Manicheanism to gnosticism, from Neopla-tonism to Iranian mysticism, by all those impulses whose shifts and development in the West we had followed for years? It was a long story, impossible to unravel, partly because the various Arab authors and protagonists had extremely long names, the texts were transcribed with a forest of diacritical marks, and as the evening wore on we could no longer distinguish between Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn ‘AH ibn Razzam al-Ta I al-Kufi, Abu Muhammad ‘Ubayd Allah, and Abu Mu’inl ‘Abd Din Na-sir ibn Khusraw MarvazI Qubadiyanl. But an Arab, I imagine, would have the same difficulty with Aristoteles, Aristoxenus, Aristarchus, Aristides, Aristagoras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anacreon, and Anacharsis.
But one thing was certain: Shiism in turn split into two branches, one called the Twelvers, who await a lost and future imam, and the other, the Ismailis, born in the realm of the Fa-timids, in Cairo, who subsequently gave rise to reformed Is-mailism in Persia through a fascinating figure, the mystical and ferocious Hasan as-Sabbah. Sabbaty set up his headquarters to the southwest of the Caspian, in the impregnable fortress of Ala-mut, the Nest of the Raptor.
There Sabbah surrounded himself with his devotees, the fidalyln or fedayeen, those faithful unto death; and he used them to carry out his political assassinations, to be instruments of the jihad hafi, the secret holy war. The fedayeen later gained an unfortunate reputation under the name Assassins—not a lovely word now, but for them it was splendid, the emblem of a race of warrior monks who greatly resembled the Templars; a spiritual knighthood.
The fortress or castle of Alamut: the Rock. Built on an airy crest four hundred meters long and in places only a few meters wide, thirty at most. From the distance, ‘o one arriving along the Azerbaijan road, it looked like a natural wall, dazzling white in the sun, bluish in the purple dusk, bloody at dawn; on some days it blended with the clouds or flashed with lightning. Along its upper ridge you could just make out what seemed a row of flint swords that shot upward for hundreds of meters. The most accessible side was a treacherous slope of gravel, which arche-ologists even today are unable to scale. The fortress was reached by a secret stairway bitten out of the rock, like the spiral peel of a stone apple, and a single archer could defend it. Dizzying, a world elsewhere. Alamut could be reached only astride eagles.
Here Sabbah ruled, and his successors after him, each to be known as the Old Man of the Mountain. First of them was the sulfurous Sinan.
Sabbah had invented a method of dominion over his men, and to his adversaries he declared that if they did not submit to him, they would die. There was no escaping the Assassins. Nizam al-Mulk, prime