by Dan Davis
The wealth that had been left to the vizier by the Mongols was in the form of gold, silver, and gem stones locked in the much-reduced treasure room to be used for rebuilding the city. All that treasure, we stole, packing it into bags shared between two dozen horses that we rode and led out from the ruins of Baghdad without being challenged once, nor even pursued.
A mercenary act on the face of it, perhaps, but I needed a large amount to buy horses and equipment, to find places for us to live, and to pay for slaves to serve us and to provide blood for my people. And I had to pay vast sums for information on the whereabouts and activities of Hulegu while we planned our assault on his palace and the final assassination of him and his men.
It took us seven years.
But then, in early AD 1265, we were ready for the final assault on Hulegu Khan and his immortals.
Part Six – Maragha ~ 1265
I was the first one to climb the border wall of Hulegu’s palace compound, my fingers clinging to the cracks between the dark stone in the black moonless night. The compound was within a city, and there were thousands of people in homes and in the streets all around us, and guards and servants within the palace walls. My weapons were wrapped tight so they could not make a sound, and I wore no armour. Dressed in a close-fitting tunic in the Persian style, with a rider’s trousers beneath and a Mongol hood and coat over it all, I was able to move swiftly in relative silence. Beneath me, hanging suspended from my belt, was a heavy sack and the sound that it made brushing against the stone as I climbed seemed loud enough to wake the dead. I prayed that it would alert no one, as the rest of my company scaled the wall behind me or waited their turn to mount the wall in the shadows below.
Years of planning and preparation had preceded my scaling of that wall, and I was just about as nervous as I had ever been in my life. It seemed to me that anyone within fifty feet would be able to hear the thumping of my heart and I had to remember to breathe in and out or else I would have suffocated myself from apprehension. I felt like a weak-kneed squire riding toward my first battle.
A chunk of mortar broke off beneath my fingers and I crashed against the wall, cursing under my breath. The sack I was carrying bounced off the wall and the contents jostled inside. From somewhere below, I heard the nervous hissing of my comrades.
Stealthiness had never been my forte. Always, I had been made for the direct approach and the intricacies and timings of our infiltration had me rattled. If the slightest thing went wrong, we would be assaulted on all sides by numbers that we could never hope to overcome. Gathering myself, I climbed on.
On the other hand, if everything went according to plan, then it would end in an orgy of tremendous violence all the same.
And that was something I was familiar with.
As my hands reached the top of the wall, I pulled myself up and peeked over into the cluster of service buildings with yellow lamplight glowing from windows and doors, and the marble mass of the grand palace itself.
It was quiet below and so I whistled faintly and listened as my companions began their climbs. Sliding over the top, dragging the sack carefully behind me, I slithered down into the shadows and waited for the others to join me.
How we came to be scaling that wall on a cold night in early 1265 involves an assassination, the Mongol Empire’s first great defeat, and a massive civil war.
***
So much had happened since Baghdad fell. So much had changed.
After sacking Baghdad and massacring its people, Hulegu Khan intended to go on and conquer the rest of the Mohammedan lands and then to subdue Anatolia and destroy Constantinople. Once that great bastion of civilisation on the edge of Europe was gone, there would be nothing stopping them pouring across Christendom all the way to the Atlantic coast. The knowledge of those plans, won through interrogation of captured soldiers and bribed merchants and diplomats, instilled in me both a terrible fear and a determination to stop the khan at all costs, even if it meant my own life. But I knew that I must be patient, for I would get only one chance to put an end to him and his men.
Hulegu left three thousand Mongols in Baghdad to rebuild it but without the Vizier in charge, they accomplished nothing. I had seen their greatest city, and Karakorum was a pathetic, barbarian place. For all the wealth they had plundered, for all the multitudes of engineers and artisans from civilised peoples that they had pressed into slavery for them, the Mongols remained incapable of building anything of note, let alone rebuilding the greatness and beauty of Baghdad. In fact, even a hundred years later it remained mostly a ruin. And the people living around the city could no longer even be supported, as the Mongols had destroyed the intricate irrigation systems around the city and they were never rebuilt. Armies bring diseases and eat up the land like locusts, and vile plagues and famine remained after the Mongols left.
Other Mohammedan princes witnessed this destruction of Baghdad from afar, and it certainly appeared as though they felt any resistance to the Mongols to be hopeless. After Baghdad, Hulegu led his armies north to Tabriz to regroup and the remaining princes of Syria and Anatolia came one by one to offer their submission. For a time, we intended to assault him there but he remained on a war footing, with hundreds of thousands of men surrounding him and so instead we watched and waited.
After a period of consolidation lasting almost a year, Hulegu resumed his advance, this time towards the coast and Aleppo. His immortal second in command, a Mongol lord named Kitbuqa, commanded the vanguard and Hulegu himself commanded the centre of three grand armies. On his way to the coast, Hulegu finally subdued upper Iraq, where there were still holdouts. The Mongols reached Aleppo in January 1260 and took the city in mere days, although the town's citadel held out for another month. In that campaign, Hulegu was assisted by the King of Lesser Armenia and Crusader Bohemond VI of Antioch and Tripoli. The Mongols extended their power south into Palestine and it appeared to everyone that the entire Mediterranean coast would fall to them.
Watching it all happen from afar made me feel sick to my stomach. Most appalling of all was the relative weakness of those who attempted to stand against him and the ease with which Hulegu’s forces overran them. I wondered with dread whether even the Kingdom of France and her allies could resist such a relentless onslaught. How long would Paris stand? Would Rome even take up arms?
But in truth, the Mongols were a long way yet from Europe and not all the Saracens had fallen. The great Sultan of Syria and the Mamluks of Egypt represented the only remaining chance for the Mohammedans. Hassan, even though they would have considered him as a dangerous heretic, wanted us to help the Mamluks just as we had hoped to help the Abbasids.
I said no.
We were done with that. Done with attempting to ally with the enemies of Christ and done with relying on anyone other than each other. Thanks to the Vizier’s treasury, we had wealth enough to survive and to bide our time, and I told Hassan in no uncertain terms that is what we would do. Hassan grumbled but came to agree. Though his thirst for vengeance was as powerful as any of ours, the Assassins were well-versed in patience.
And then, across the world in the East, the Great Khan Mongke died.
It was many months before all Mongols heard and none of them knew that this death would signal the beginning of the end of a unified Mongol Empire.
The Great Khan had taken up the assault on the great nation of Cathay. News took a long time to travel, of course, but I heard eventually that he had died assaulting some Cathay fortress. There were a dozen whispered stories about how he had come to his end. We paid merchants for news and some told me that Mongke died of cholera during the siege. Another said he had shit himself to death in an endless bloody flux. Another told us that Mongke had drowned in a warship in the high seas while his armies besieged an island fortress. Another story said he was crossing a river, another swore he was being transported across a lake in a barge, and the vessel was destroyed by enemy fire, or it was a simple accident. A Hungarian silversmith fleeing his Mong
ol masters swore that Mongke had been killed by an arrow shot by an archer during an attack on an eastern castle, and then later the Hungarian’s wife said the Great Khan had been incinerated by an explosive bomb launched from a trebuchet.
But I knew the truth.
William had killed him.
The timing was too perfect for it to be otherwise. By my calculations, it would have taken about a year and a half for William to travel from Baghdad all the way to the Mongol assault on China. There, he had somehow managed to poison Mongke. Poison was a method of murder familiar to him and no doubt the Great Khan’s lifelong abuse of wine had thoroughly weakened his constitution. And surely the number and sheer variety of stories indicated that the Mongols spread misinformation to cover up what they must have known to be a shameful assassination that demonstrated a terrible failure in state security. Or perhaps they believed Mongke had simply drunk himself to death. Thousands of other Mongols had gone the same way before.
But I was sure. It was a remarkable assassination, and one perhaps greater than any Ismaili Assassin had ever achieved, though Hassan insisted that it had to have been one of his own four hundred fedayin who had finally succeeded in their mission.
Why, Hassan had challenged me, would William have done this thing?
“Chaos,” I said.
Following the death of the Great Khan, once again the worldwide campaigns of the Mongols came to quite a sudden halt. Chaos ensued.
And chaos was what William thrived on. Mongke's death in 1259 led to a four-year civil war between two of his brothers, Kublai and Ariq Boke. William had told me in Baghdad that he meant to throw in with Kublai, and with William’s support, Kublai eventually won the succession war.
Although he never sought the position of Great Khan for himself, the struggle for the succession took Hulegu away from Syria and Persia, and he left his subordinates in charge. I was sure that Hulegu now knew that he and his core group of bodyguards and lords were immortal and he could afford to take his time. It was clear that he meant to become lord of all lands from Persia to France, and so he left the Middle East and headed home with most of his armies.
One of his immortals was named Kitbuqa. This man was left in command of a single tumen of about ten thousand men and, with this small force, he made the fatal mistake of attacking the Mamluks.
The Mamluks were newly in power in Egypt and were the vanquishers of the King of France in his dismal failure of Louis’ crusade eight years earlier. Those Mamluks were not like the other Mohammedans the Mongols had faced. In fact, they were a slave army taken mostly from the steppe people of the north, especially the Kipchaks. These former steppe people understood Mongol tactics, and even employed them against the Mongols. Not only that, the Mamluks had the advantage of being equipped with the highest quality Egyptian armour and weapons and had much finer and more powerful horses than the Mongols did.
The Mamluks were led by a man named Baibars, under the Sultan Qutuz. Baibars would be remembered as a great leader of the Egyptians, though he was, in fact, a tall, fair-skinned and light-haired former slave stolen from his Kipchak people near the Black Sea when only a boy. Baibars knew that the great Hulegu and his officer corps had gone to the East and so they baited the Mongols into attacking by doing the one thing that was guaranteed to draw them in. They beheaded the Mongol envoys, which as any horse nomad could tell you, is how you categorically declare war on the steppe.
In September 1260, the two forces clashed in what came to be known as the Battle of Ain Jalut. The site was known as the Spring of Goliath, and it was the very place that King David flung his stone at the Philistine champion.
It was an appropriate coincidence.
Strangely enough, although my companions took no part in it, we were not very far away when it happened, as the battle took place in Galilee and we were only thirty miles from there, on an estate near Acre. When the armies met, the first to advance were the Mongols, supported by men from the Kingdoms of Georgia and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, both of which had submitted to Mongol authority. The two armies fought for many hours, with Baibars provoking the Mongols with repeated attack and retreat, without committing and losing too many of his men. It was said that Baibars had laid out the overall strategy of the battle since he had spent much time in that region as a fugitive earlier in his life. When the Mongols carried out another heavy assault, Baibars and his men feigned a final retreat, drawing the Mongols into the highlands to be ambushed by the rest of the Mamluk forces concealed among the trees.
The Mongol leader Kitbuqa, already provoked by the constant fleeing of Baibars and his troops, committed a grave mistake. Instead of suspecting a trick, the foolish Kitbuqa decided to march forwards with all his troops on the trail of the fleeing Mamluks. I believe that Kitbuqa’s immortality had gone to his head and it led him to make rash decisions. Whatever the reason for his foolishness, when the Mongols reached the highlands, the hidden Mamluks charged into the fray and the Mongols then found themselves surrounded on all sides.
The Mongol army fought very fiercely to break out but it was too little and too late. Kitbuqa and almost the entire Mongol army perished.
“One of our immortal enemies, Hulegu’s right hand, Kitbuqa, has fallen,” I said to my companions when we heard the news.
“I do not understand,” Khutulun kept saying, for it was the first time that the Mongols had lost a battle. “I do not understand.” Orus likewise scratched his head. All they had ever known their whole lives was Mongol victory, from one end of the Earth to the other.
“They can be beaten, then,” Thomas said to me later. “It is possible.” For all his hatred of them, he seemed almost disappointed. I think that, in his mind, he had made them into something like demons and now he found that they were men after all.
But Hulegu would soon return and we all expected him to crush the Mamluks. In the Mongol civil war, Hulegu supported his brother Kublai and then returned through Persia to take up his war against the Mohammedans.
Knowing this, my companions and I prepared to kill Hulegu as he approached through the lands of Palestine. I spent considerable wealth in exploring a number of potential ambush sites in the hills, and even hired a few desperate mercenaries to help us scout likely areas. It was a dangerous place to be roaming around, with bands of Mamluks, Mongols, and brigands clashing on the borders.
But Berke, brother of the deceased Batu and the leader of the Golden Horde of Mongols on the steppes of Russia, had recently converted and now called himself a Mohammedan. After Baghdad fell, Berke was angry at the insult to his new faith and he moved to attack Hulegu, who had to make his way up to Azerbaijan to defend against this new enemy.
Which took Hulegu far away from us once more.
The presence of a serious threat from fellow-Mongols on his northern flank boxed Hulegu in, and he settled down once more and decided to wait out his cousin Berke, who was already old and who Hulegu, being immortal, would easily outlive. In the cities he had won along the Tigris and Euphrates, Hulegu put his viceroys into power, and rewarded some of the helpful Shiites. Thus establishing his vast dominion, Hulegu declared himself to be the Ilkhan, and his empire as the Ilkhanate. This word il-khan meant subordinate khan. The term had been agreed to by Hulegu, in exchange for in practice having complete autonomy from Kublai. It was said by those we bribed that, behind closed doors, Hulegu laughed that Kublai was concerned with appearances where Hulegu cared only for real power. And Hulegu ruled his vast Ilkhanate not from Iraq but from western Persia and the city of Maragha.
Maragha was up north, near the Caspian Sea. Northeast of Mosul, northwest of the ruined Alamut and south of Armenia and close to the enormous saltwater Lake Urmia. The lake had a number of large islands, the largest of which was about six miles long. An island that I would later visit.
The city of Maragha was situated in a narrow, north-south valley at the eastern extremity of a fertile plain between the valley and Lake Urmia just twenty miles to the west. The lan
d all around in fact was rich with vineyards and orchards, all well-watered by canals led from the river, and producing great quantities of fruit.
It was no wonder that Hulegu was content to wait out the Mongol civil wars and the Mamluk power grab in such surroundings. It was not only the great abundance of the land but the strategic location of the city that allowed him to cover any attacks from the Golden Horde to the north, as well as govern his Persian subjects to the southeast and control his newly-conquered peoples to the southwest in Iraq and Syria.
We knew that the time for us to kill the Ilkhan was approaching. He was ruling from one city and most of his armies were disbursed hundreds or thousands of miles away.
And yet the Hulegu was very careful with his security. Such a conqueror had made thousands of enemies, even millions. And it was not only the Ismailis who were capable of poisoning their enemies or murdering them in their beds. And so we watched from afar as he ruled and, under Hassan’s guidance, we slowly and carefully built a network of spies. Slave traders, merchants, musicians. The jugglers and acrobats. Physicians and masons. Anyone who would travel through the region, first of all. Then we found people who could approach or even enter the city and provide information on the layout of the streets, the important people, and so on. Eventually, we bought off a man named Enrico of Candia who provided a steady stream of slaves to the rulers of Maragha and so could provide a wealth of insider information.
Enrico was a Venetian by birth, though he claimed to have left as a boy, never to return. He had grown rich transporting slaves across the Black Sea in all directions and had grown fat and enormously wealthy ever since coming under the protection of Batu Khan. Since Batu’s death, he had come over to Hulegu’s side following a falling out with Batu’s brother Berke. Hassan and Stephen, both devious men by nature and in practice, believed that Enrico had feigned this conflict with Berke and was, in fact, spying for him. We were therefore concerned about trusting him in any way.