Assassinus

Critical Literature

No critical literature available

The inset story appears in the following manuscripts

Manuscript	Language	Siglum (Version)	Language Group within Version
Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 573		M ('Male Marastre')	French

The inset story appears in the following versions and secondary versions

Version	Original Language	Branch of Tradition	Adapted from
M ('Male Marastre')	Old French	West	A (Seven Sages)

The Assassins (or, 'Li examples des Hakesin qui l'omme ocist')

This story recounts the fable of the garden of the assassins, or the Hakesins. Set in an unidentified Islamic country, the story tells of children who are raised entirely in dark, underground or lightless enclosures, such as cisterns or cellars. They know no joy or pleasure of any kind, and are kept in darkness until they are old enough to speak; then, they are shown a beautiful pleasure-garden, full of fruit trees, flowers, and happy knights and ladies laughing and playing in the sunlight. When the children ask who these happy people are, they are told that these are those who have killed Christians. The children are inspired to become assassins, and when they have trained and grown, they are sent to Jerusalem to kill Christians in the hopes of one day being admitted to the garden-paradise.

This story closely resembles the widespread medieval narrative of 'The Old Man of the Mountain', popularised by the travelogues of Marco Polo, William of Tyre, and John Mandeville (among others); Nishimura notes the correspondence, and cites the Thompson Motif Index number K1889.3, 'The False Paradise' (2001). These fictionalised accounts of the so called 'Order of Assassins' were likely inspired by the Nazari Ismaili community, founded by Hasan ibn Sabah, that lived in the mountains of Syria and Persia in the 11th and 12th centuries. Like many of their contemporaries, they were known to engage in politically and/or religiously motivated assassination of their enemies, in particular the Seljuks, and at least amongst their opponents, they developed a particular reputation for these actions. However, scholarship cautions against a too-easy identification of historical 'truth' in the narratives about the 'Order of Assassins'. For example, in Geraldine Heng's article 'Sex, Lies, and Paradise: The Assassins, Prester John, and the Fabulation of Civilizational Identities' (differences, 23.1, 2012, pp. 1-31), Heng lays out the modern misappropriations of the medieval narrative, untangling medieval and modern islamophobic readings and reiterations from what we might understand as reflections fo historical reality.