POV: Your Life as Every Rank in the Assassins of Alamut

High in the Alborz mountains of northern Persia, on a rock that rises straight out of a green valley, stood a castle its enemies called a nest of devils. From inside its walls, a man who never once stepped outside sent knives into the courts of sultans, viziers and caliphs. Below him, in the terraced fields of the valley, farmers swore oaths to an Imam none of them would ever see. They were the Nizari Isma'ilis, remembered in Europe as the Assassins. Almost everything written about them came from their enemies, and much of what the world believes, the hashish, the secret garden of paradise, comes from legend. Through the chronicles, the work of modern historians and the lives of the men who led them, we trace the real hierarchy behind the most feared name of the medieval world. You begin as a farm boy of the valley when Hassan-i Sabbah takes Alamut without a fight. You become a fida'i, the one who offers himself, and watch as the empire's greatest vizier is killed on the road. You swear the oath of obedience, learn to pass for a soldier or a beggar, and starve through nine summers of burnt harvests. At last you are sent down the mountain as a missionary, and learn exactly how far a farmer's son can rise. Then the story climbs to the men above you: Kiya Buzurg-Ummid, who built the fortress of Lamasar and inherited Alamut; the governors of the eastern desert, who sheltered the scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi; and Rashid al-Din Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, who faced down Saladin from his castles in Syria. Above them stand the chief missionary who recruited a young Hassan in secret, Hassan-i Sabbah himself, ruling as the proof of a hidden Imam, and finally the Imams of Alamut, from the day one of them stepped forward and proclaimed the Resurrection to the day the last of them walked down to the Mongols. Ten ranks. One mountain state. A hierarchy built on secrecy, obedience and fear, and remembered almost entirely by those who destroyed it. From the barley terraces of Rudbar to the burning library of Alamut, discover what it meant to climb the ranks of the Assassins. Chapters 0:00 Rank 1: Fida'i 3:04 Rank 2: Sworn Adherent 5:24 Rank 3: Companion 7:11 Rank 4: Missionary 8:56 Rank 5: Castle Commander (Buzurg-Ummid) 10:49 Rank 6: Governor of Quhistan 12:40 Rank 7: Chief Missionary of Syria (Rashid al-Din Sinan) 14:48 Rank 8: Chief Missionary of Persia (Ibn Attash) 16:50 Rank 9: Proof of the Imam (Hassan-i Sabbah) 18:47 Rank 10: The Imam (Hasan II to Khurshah) 21:25 The Fall of Alamut, 1256