The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

With successes like this, we might assume that Hasan would become master of Persia, possibly even the new Caliph in Cairo. In fact, everything went against him. When the Caliph died, it was the younger brother of Nizar – Hasan’s candidate – who came to the throne, and Nizar and his sons were killed in the squabbles that followed. Ismailis infiltrated the armies of the new Turkish sultan Berkyaruq, who had formed an uneasy alliance with Hasan; in self-defence, he began to persecute the Ismailis. When Hasan’s other major stronghold was taken and the Ismaili leader flayed alive, it had to be all-out war – a war Hasan was bound to lose. During the last thirty years of his life, he watched his empire crumble. The assassinations continued – he even extended his arm as far as Syria and Egypt – yet his situation remained basically unchanged; he was virtually taking on the whole Arab world. And the sequel to one of his last assassinations reveals the extent of that failure. In 1121, Hasan finally succeeded in getting his revenge on the vizier al-Afdal, the man who had frustrated Nizar’s chances of becoming Caliph. Oddly enough, the new Caliph was delighted – he had grown tired of the vizier’s overbearing manners. So he sent Hasan a letter asking him why he did not return to the fold. In addressing such a suggestion to a man of Hasan’s fanatical conviction he might be seen as inviting a rebuff. Yet Hasan seized on the idea with relief. In a sense, it was his admission of defeat. The reconciliation never took place – the new vizier assured the Caliph that he was next on the assassination list, which was almost certainly untrue, since Hasan had no motive for killing a man who was offering him friendship. But it served to make the Caliph change his mind. Hasan died three years later, in 1124, at the age of ninety. The sect continued in existence and established a base in Syria – one of its most spectacular successes was the murder of the crusader Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem, in 1192; but eventually they were stamped out – in Persia by the Mongols, in Syria by the Sultan of Egypt, Baybars.

Hasan’s greatest mistake was to order the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk. This was the real turning point in his career. For a man who kills by stealth cannot be trusted. He inspires the same kind of exaggerated horror as a poisonous snake or spider. And the comparison establishes precisely why the terrorist method carries the seed of its own downfall. The snakes developed poison because they are among the most defenceless of creatures. Anyone who has ever kept snakes will know that they are, in fact, rather amiable and unaggressive creatures who do not deserve their reputation as vicious monsters. But a poisonous snake will strike if stepped upon or frightened, so human beings cannot afford to lose their fear of snakes. Once a man has placed himself in this category – labelled ‘dangerous and untrustworthy’ – he can abandon all hope of achieving his aims by normal means. If he is a politician, he has guaranteed his own failure. The story of the assassins is a parable in how not to go about achieving power.

But the lesson of the assassins goes beyond the mere question of ends and means and allows us to grasp the basic question of the nature of criminality. Hasan was, by any definition, a Right Man. His religious sincerity is not in question; but he placed his grimly obsessed ego at the service of his religion. He was personally convinced that he was right; everything else followed. Those who opposed him were wrong and deserved to die. It is a moot point whether it made the slightest difference whether Nizar or his younger brother became Caliph; it is even a moot point whether it makes the slightest difference that a believer refers to his deity as Jehovah, Allah or Ahura Mazda. But even this is not the issue. The issue is that man is capable of reaching out towards a freedom that transcends his everyday limitations, and that saints and prophets, poets and artists, scientists and philosophers, all share this aim to a greater or lesser degree. The greatest enemy of this transcendence is the ego with its petty aims and convictions. It is true that we cannot live without the ego; a person without an ego would be little more than an idiot. Another name for ego is personality, and in artists, saints and philosophers, the personality is a most valuable tool. Neither St Francis nor Beethoven nor Plato would have achieved much impact without their personalities. But the personality is a dangerous servant, for it has a perpetual hankering to become the master. Every time we are carried away by irritation or indignation, personality has mastered us.

And this, we can see, is the basic theme of history, its most constant pattern. Civilisation was the outcome of man’s religious urge – for the first cities grew up around temples. Religion has continued to be perhaps the most dominant theme in human history. Yet practically every major religious movement has changed its nature as its followers have fought amongst themselves. Why could those early city-dwellers not have lived in peace and prosperity, tilling the ground and worshipping their gods? They had what all animals crave most – security. But sooner or later, some minor squabble would blow up between small groups of rival citizens, and then all their fellow citizens would feel outraged to hear about the affront; every ego would rise up on its hind legs and cry out for revenge. (Rabelais satirises it in Gargantua when a war flares up over a quarrel between shepherds and bakers about cakes.) And the human ability for sympathy and communication instantly becomes a disadvantage as everyone feels that he himself has personally received the insult. Nothing heals more slowly or festers more persistently than a bruised ego. New resentments supplement the old ones, and soon both sides are convinced that the only answer lies in the total humiliation of the other.

The Assassins furnish a typical example, but the history of Christianity could offer a thousand more. As soon as Pépin gave the popes a basis of power by making them a present of the first Papal States, the popes became as violent and predatory as any emperor. Two and a half centuries later, the German emperor Otto the Great set out to create the Holy Roman Empire and pope and emperor instantly came into head-on collision; the pope lost, and was deposed by Otto, who replaced him with his own man. The struggle with the popes was continued by Otto’s successors. A century later, a pope named Hildebrand – Gregory VII – came to the throne with the conviction that the pope should be the temporal as well as the spiritual head of Christendom, and that he ought to choose emperors rather than vice versa. He could, said Gregory, interfere as he liked with the laws of any Catholic country, and his papal decrees should automatically overrule any decree of king or emperor. He sent messengers to all the European courts informing the kings and emperors of these new rules. Henry IV of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor, was outraged by this presumption. He called a synod of German bishops at Worms and informed Gregory that he had been deposed. Whereupon Gregory used the most formidable weapon in his armory: excommunication. In the Middle Ages, it was the most terrifying penalty the Church could impose. For the medieval intellect was curiously static (this was before the crusades); every Christian accepted without reservation that the wicked would suffer an eternity of horrible torments in hell, and also that if a man sinned, only the Church could remove the burden of sin and guarantee that he would still get to heaven. This was not regarded as philosophy or speculation or religion, but simply as fact, like the wetness of water. And since priests spent a great deal of time telling their congregations about the unpleasantness of hell, most people were terrified of the idea, and duly grateful to the Church for guaranteeing that they would avoid it. To be governed by an excommunicated king was almost the equivalent of being governed by the devil. The nobles began to plan Henry’s overthrow. He had no alternative than to climb down, swallow his pride and humbly beg the pope’s forgiveness. Gregory was spending January in a castle at Canossa, near Parma. Henry went there in the garb of a pilgrim, barefoot, to beg forgiveness. The pope kept him waiting in the snow for three days before he let him in and granted absolution. To add insult to injury, the pope gave his support to a Swabian duke who had revolted against Henry. This was too much. Henry fought the duke and killed him, then marched to Rome with an army; Gregory was forced to flee to Salerno, where he died in exile. Henry replaced him with his own candidate.