10 Medieval Assassins That Terrorized The Ancient World

10 Medieval Assassins That Terrorized The Ancient World Number ten: Hassan-i Sabbah and the Founding of the Assassins. Picture yourself standing at the base of a mountain in northern Persia in the year ten ninety. Above you, carved into the rock face of the Alborz range at an altitude that makes the air thin and cold, sits a fortress so impregnable that local people call it the Eagle's Nest. Alamut. The word means, roughly, eagle's teaching. You have been travelling for weeks to reach it, summoned by a man whose name is spoken in whispers across the Islamic world, a man who has never raised an army, never commanded a battlefield, never led a cavalry charge, and yet has somehow become one of the most feared individuals alive. His name is Hassan-i Sabbah. He is sitting inside that fortress. He will never leave it again. But the men he is training, the men he is shaping with terrifying patience and ideological precision, will go everywhere. They will enter courts and palaces and military encampments. They will make friends with guards and servants and advisors to the powerful. And then, at a moment of their master's choosing, they will kill.