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Very little is known about the man whom Marco Polo dubs the "Old Man of the Mountain". Indeed, much of the West's perception of Rashid ad-Din Sinan is caked in the fantastical legends Polo described in his travels, and the online sphere doesn't exactly help clear up the biography of the infamous leader of the Assassins, but I'll try my best. He was born in a small village just outside of Basra, either in 1133 or 1135, and that's about all we know about his life prior to joining the Assassins. Wow, good job Ava, already off to an enlightening start, aren't we? At some point in his early years, he must've come under the tutelage of the future Nizari imam, Hassan II (no relation to Hassan-i Sabbah, the founder of the historical Assassins, I often see them confused in Sinan's biographies), because in 1160, Sinan completed his education at Alamut, and was assigned as chief da'i (missionary) in Basra. Evidently, he was one of Hassan II's top students, because in 1162 he was reassigned to Syria to act as the leader of all major Assassin strongholds in the Western portion of the Middle East. There was just one small hiccup: the Assassins already had a leader in the region, Abu Muhammad, and this old fart stubbornly refused to die. Sinan was forced to just kind of stew in the castle of Masyaf for the next seven years, until Abu Muhammad finally kicked the bucket. The last chunk of that sentence is a lot of fun to say out loud. Once the position was open, Sinan took his place at Al-Kahf Castle, the less famous sister city to Masyaf, which was actually more of the administrative center of the Nizari state in the region.

Almost immediately, Sinan found the Syrian Assassins to be in pretty rough shape. Their castles were in a state of disrepair, the Templars were still kinda pissed off at them for killing Raymond II of Tripoli, and their own men had fallen to internal bickering under the incompetence of Abu Muhammad. There was also this little punk named Khawaja 'Ali who was pretty confident that he should be Abu Muhammad's successor instead, but uh… he met a… rather swift "accident", shall we say. We're talking Assassins here, I'm sure you can use your imagination. This firm hand used in quelling agents of disorder really defined Sinan's reformation of the organization. Indeed, we have very few records of continued correspondence between Sinan and his superiors at Alamut, meaning that Alamut either trusted his firm hand, or they knew well enough not to cross it. Some go so far as to propose that Sinan had claimed to be an imam himself, ascending to near-godhood in the eyes of his followers. It's possible this dynamic is what got twisted into Marco Polo's myth of a man who was so charismatic he could command his acolytes to fling themselves over castle walls without fear of death, drugging them up so high they saw visions of the heaven they'd be rewarded with. This telling is highly distorted from what we know of the historical Assassins, though, and I'm not really convinced Sinan proclaimed himself imam. While it is true that contemporary poets give Sinan flattering titles usually reserved for imams, none of them are technically exclusive to imams, and it's only in 14th century chronicles that we first see the outright accusation take form, not contemporary documents. That's honestly enough for me to take the claim with a grain of salt, because claiming to be imam would be a pretty damning thing for rivaling Shiite powers to latch onto. But hey, maybe he just had anyone who connected the dots… you know.. assassinated. We may never know.

Regardless of the veracity of these rumors, Sinan first made himself infamous in the historical record through his rivalry with the renowned Ayyubid sultan, Saladin. Saladin's meddling in Fatimid Egypt and Syria inevitably led to conflict with the Assassins, and Sinan first put out a hit after the sultan's capture of Aleppo in 1174. The first assassination attempt failed, so Sinan tried again when Saladin was besieging Azaz in 1176. Bit of a miscalculation though: Saladin was wearing chainmail, so not much stabbing was able to occur. Womp womp. By July, Saladin had literally shown up at the Assassins' doorstep at Masyaf, so Sinan had to pull out the badass tactics. Taking a page from Hassan-i Sabbah's book, Sinan sent out one of his fida'i to infiltrate Saladin's camp in the middle of the night. Saladin thus woke up the next morning in his perfectly safe and well-guarded tent only to find a dagger pinned just inches from his head, with a threatening letter signed by Sinan himself attached. As I think we all would do after shitting ourselves, Saladin promptly decided it would be best for his health to make peace agreements with the Assassins there and then. The Isma'ilis themselves claim that relations with Saladin actually skyrocketed after this, helping the sultan win his spectacular victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, and tending to his prisoners of war. Thus, we start to transition into the juicy bits: Sinan's rivalries with the Crusaders.

An interesting dynamic emerged during Sinan's feud with Saladin. The pissed off Templars I mentioned earlier had laid siege to the Assassin castles after the murder of Raymond, and forced them to pay tribute to the Order well into Sinan's administration. As the Templars, technically speaking, answered to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Sinan approached King Amalric to negotiate the end of this extortion. If medieval chronicler William of Tyre is to be believed, Sinan even offered to convert to Christianity as collateral. I… severely doubt this, but I can't pretend that putting pretty words on the table like that wouldn't entirely be out of Sinan's character. Nonetheless, Amalric found Sinan persuasive enough, and released the Assassins from their tribute in 1174. The Templars weren't all too happy about this arrangement, and had one of Sinan's ambassadors murdered on his way home. Dick move, and one which soured relations with the Templars for the rest of Sinan's tenure. It's possible this is even what influenced the truce with Saladin, the enemy of my enemy and all that.

When he wasn't playing musical allies, Sinan of course put the Assassins to work being, you know, assassins. His most infamous kill is also one of the most controversial. In 1192, two Assassins disguised as Christian monks approached the new King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, and when he let his guard down, they stabbed him in the street. One assailant was cut down on the spot, the other was tortured for information. The one who was tortured revealed some… interesting insights into the murder, specifically that it was none other than King Richard the Lionheart who had orchestrated the hit. Richard did everything he could to shift the blame onto Sinan, and Sinan obliged by sending the Crusaders a handwritten letter saying "yep, that was me, I totally killed him". Awfully convenient, especially considering that this letter was sent in 1193, around the same time that Sinan keeled over and died. Believe me, there's an entire conspiracy that can be unraveled from this incident, but it's beyond the scope of this blurb. As I said, the Old Man of the Mountain was at last laid down in the mountain's soil, and he was succeeded by an obscure figure named Nasr al-'Ajami, whom history has little to record beyond being an "ignorant person". Harsh. Don't worry, Nasr, that'll probably be on my gravestone too.

Design notes, I could only find two historical images purporting to depict Sinan. The one that comes up more often online is an unprovenanced headshot, which might instead be a drawing of the scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. The internet can't make up its mind, and without an actual citation, I'm at a loss to say which is which. The other image I came across was a 1966 illustration from a Lebanese book about Saladin and the Third Crusade. I'm… just sort of trusting German Wikipedia on this, because trying to search the book's title just gets me a wall of Arabic text, and sadly I only remember enough Arabic from my college classes to ask where the bathroom is. I used to also remember how to profess my love to my girlfriend, but now I'm single and depressed so romantic Arabic poetry hasn't done me much good for a while. Either way, neither of these images were really tickling my fancy (though I did roll with the basic headshot), so most of this design is just extrapolated from my previous Assassin concepts. I'm still experimenting, and I do like what I've produced so far, but man these colors do not like to cooperate with me. I love them, but they do not love my scanner. That green in particular is especially troublesome for some reason. The colored pencil warps my paper and really doesn't like to go into the little detail crevices. Very unfortunate, because little geometric details are literally the entire appeal of Islamic art. Ah well, hopefully I'll figure it out as I go along.

Description
Very little is known about the man whom Marco Polo dubs the "Old Man of the Mountain". Indeed, much of the West's perception of Rashid ad-Din Sinan is caked in the fantastical legends Polo described in his travels, and the online sphere doesn't exactly help clear up the biography of the infamous leader of the Assassins, but I'll try my best. He was born in a small village just outside of Basra, either in 1133 or 1135, and that's about all we know about his life prior to joining the Assassins. Wow, good job Ava, already off to an enlightening start, aren't we? At some point in his early years, he must've come under the tutelage of the future Nizari imam, Hassan II (no relation to Hassan-i Sabbah, the founder of the historical Assassins, I often see them confused in Sinan's biographies), because in 1160, Sinan completed his education at Alamut, and was assigned as chief da'i (missionary) in Basra. Evidently, he was one of Hassan II's top students, because in 1162 he was reassigned to Syria to act as the leader of all major Assassin strongholds in the Western portion of the Middle East. There was just one small hiccup: the Assassins already had a leader in the region, Abu Muhammad, and this old fart stubbornly refused to die. Sinan was forced to just kind of stew in the castle of Masyaf for the next seven years, until Abu Muhammad finally kicked the bucket. The last chunk of that sentence is a lot of fun to say out loud. Once the position was open, Sinan took his place at Al-Kahf Castle, the less famous sister city to Masyaf, which was actually more of the administrative center of the Nizari state in the region.

Almost immediately, Sinan found the Syrian Assassins to be in pretty rough shape. Their castles were in a state of disrepair, the Templars were still kinda pissed off at them for killing Raymond II of Tripoli, and their own men had fallen to internal bickering under the incompetence of Abu Muhammad. There was also this little punk named Khawaja 'Ali who was pretty confident that he should be Abu Muhammad's successor instead, but uh… he met a… rather swift "accident", shall we say. We're talking Assassins here, I'm sure you can use your imagination. This firm hand used in quelling agents of disorder really defined Sinan's reformation of the organization. Indeed, we have very few records of continued correspondence between Sinan and his superiors at Alamut, meaning that Alamut either trusted his firm hand, or they knew well enough not to cross it. Some go so far as to propose that Sinan had claimed to be an imam himself, ascending to near-godhood in the eyes of his followers. It's possible this dynamic is what got twisted into Marco Polo's myth of a man who was so charismatic he could command his acolytes to fling themselves over castle walls without fear of death, drugging them up so high they saw visions of the heaven they'd be rewarded with. This telling is highly distorted from what we know of the historical Assassins, though, and I'm not really convinced Sinan proclaimed himself imam. While it is true that contemporary poets give Sinan flattering titles usually reserved for imams, none of them are technically exclusive to imams, and it's only in 14th century chronicles that we first see the outright accusation take form, not contemporary documents. That's honestly enough for me to take the claim with a grain of salt, because claiming to be imam would be a pretty damning thing for rivaling Shiite powers to latch onto. But hey, maybe he just had anyone who connected the dots… you know.. assassinated. We may never know.

Regardless of the veracity of these rumors, Sinan first made himself infamous in the historical record through his rivalry with the renowned Ayyubid sultan, Saladin. Saladin's meddling in Fatimid Egypt and Syria inevitably led to conflict with the Assassins, and Sinan first put out a hit after the sultan's capture of Aleppo in 1174. The first assassination attempt failed, so Sinan tried again when Saladin was besieging Azaz in 1176. Bit of a miscalculation though: Saladin was wearing chainmail, so not much stabbing was able to occur. Womp womp. By July, Saladin had literally shown up at the Assassins' doorstep at Masyaf, so Sinan had to pull out the badass tactics. Taking a page from Hassan-i Sabbah's book, Sinan sent out one of his fida'i to infiltrate Saladin's camp in the middle of the night. Saladin thus woke up the next morning in his perfectly safe and well-guarded tent only to find a dagger pinned just inches from his head, with a threatening letter signed by Sinan himself attached. As I think we all would do after shitting ourselves, Saladin promptly decided it would be best for his health to make peace agreements with the Assassins there and then. The Isma'ilis themselves claim that relations with Saladin actually skyrocketed after this, helping the sultan win his spectacular victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, and tending to his prisoners of war. Thus, we start to transition into the juicy bits: Sinan's rivalries with the Crusaders.

An interesting dynamic emerged during Sinan's feud with Saladin. The pissed off Templars I mentioned earlier had laid siege to the Assassin castles after the murder of Raymond, and forced them to pay tribute to the Order well into Sinan's administration. As the Templars, technically speaking, answered to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Sinan approached King Amalric to negotiate the end of this extortion. If medieval chronicler William of Tyre is to be believed, Sinan even offered to convert to Christianity as collateral. I… severely doubt this, but I can't pretend that putting pretty words on the table like that wouldn't entirely be out of Sinan's character. Nonetheless, Amalric found Sinan persuasive enough, and released the Assassins from their tribute in 1174. The Templars weren't all too happy about this arrangement, and had one of Sinan's ambassadors murdered on his way home. Dick move, and one which soured relations with the Templars for the rest of Sinan's tenure. It's possible this is even what influenced the truce with Saladin, the enemy of my enemy and all that.

When he wasn't playing musical allies, Sinan of course put the Assassins to work being, you know, assassins. His most infamous kill is also one of the most controversial. In 1192, two Assassins disguised as Christian monks approached the new King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, and when he let his guard down, they stabbed him in the street. One assailant was cut down on the spot, the other was tortured for information. The one who was tortured revealed some… interesting insights into the murder, specifically that it was none other than King Richard the Lionheart who had orchestrated the hit. Richard did everything he could to shift the blame onto Sinan, and Sinan obliged by sending the Crusaders a handwritten letter saying "yep, that was me, I totally killed him". Awfully convenient, especially considering that this letter was sent in 1193, around the same time that Sinan keeled over and died. Believe me, there's an entire conspiracy that can be unraveled from this incident, but it's beyond the scope of this blurb. As I said, the Old Man of the Mountain was at last laid down in the mountain's soil, and he was succeeded by an obscure figure named Nasr al-'Ajami, whom history has little to record beyond being an "ignorant person". Harsh. Don't worry, Nasr, that'll probably be on my gravestone too.

Design notes, I could only find two historical images purporting to depict Sinan. The one that comes up more often online is an unprovenanced headshot, which might instead be a drawing of the scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. The internet can't make up its mind, and without an actual citation, I'm at a loss to say which is which. The other image I came across was a 1966 illustration from a Lebanese book about Saladin and the Third Crusade. I'm… just sort of trusting German Wikipedia on this, because trying to search the book's title just gets me a wall of Arabic text, and sadly I only remember enough Arabic from my college classes to ask where the bathroom is. I used to also remember how to profess my love to my girlfriend, but now I'm single and depressed so romantic Arabic poetry hasn't done me much good for a while. Either way, neither of these images were really tickling my fancy (though I did roll with the basic headshot), so most of this design is just extrapolated from my previous Assassin concepts. I'm still experimenting, and I do like what I've produced so far, but man these colors do not like to cooperate with me. I love them, but they do not love my scanner. That green in particular is especially troublesome for some reason. The colored pencil warps my paper and really doesn't like to go into the little detail crevices. Very unfortunate, because little geometric details are literally the entire appeal of Islamic art. Ah well, hopefully I'll figure it out as I go along.