portion of Asia. Another army wrested Syria from the hands of the Fatimides, and the black flag of the Abbasides floated once more from the ramparts of Jerusalem. The broken fragments of the Asiatic Empire of Islam were reunited after a fashion; but the combining power was no longer Arabian, but Turkish. It was an entire and radical change of dominion.

The new state of things brought with it no pledge of permanence. The germs of decay and dissolution were implanted, from the first, deep in its constitution. These Turkish conquerors were still, as they had always been, utter barbarians. They brought with them no principles of government; they founded no institutions; they acknowledged no duties towards the subject populations. The courts of Alp Arslan and Malek Shah blazed, it is true, with barbaric splendour; but they were never more than the leaders and kings of a horde of marauders. The position of these Turks in Asia resembled that of the Mahrattas in India, when at the height of their power. Like them, they did not govern a province, but merely encamped upon it; like them, they were a multitude of rapacious robbers spread over the richest provinces of Central Asia to eat up the fat of the land. At the head of each horde was a chief, nominally dependent upon Malek Shah, but virtually independent, and waiting only for an opportunity to assume that position in name as well as in fact. So long as Malek Shah lived, the commanding genius of his prime minister, Nizam al Mulk held these discordant elements together.

But that minister knew that the task was beyond the power of any other living person; and only a few days before his death he predicted that his death and the disruption of the Seljukian Empire would be simultaneous. He spoke truly. In the year 485 (A.D. 1093) Nizam al Mulk was stabbed to death by an emissary of Hasan ibn Saba, the first Grand Master of the Assassins; and his master, Malek Shah followed him to the grave a few weeks afterwards. Then came the immediate breaking up of the Seljukian Empire into a number of independent principalities. Syria, Palestine, and all Asia Minor, were partitioned among a dozen different Turkish Emirs. Khorasan and Irak became the scene of a fierce civil war, extending over several years, between two sons of Malek Shah, Barkiaroc and Muhammad. Drought was added to the horrors of war; the people perished by thousands of famine; the incessant marching and counter-marching of the hostile armies destroyed the remnant of food which had survived the want of rain. To crown all, from the borders of Christendom a fresh scourge was beheld preparing for Islam. The hosts of the Red Cross passed the Bosphorus, and fought their way knee-deep in blood to the walls of Jerusalem. The capture of the Holy City struck like the point of a poisoned dagger to the heart of every true Moslem. There is a story in Saadi's "Gulistan," which tells more than pages of rhetoric could do, of the profound terror and suspicion, with all their attendant cruelty, which at this time possessed the minds of men. Two durweshes, he tells us, travelling together came to a certain city; they

were suspected by the townspeople of being spies, cast into a small cell, and bricked up. Saadi makes not the smallest commentary on the apparent irregularity of this summary proceeding. He merely goes on to say that a few days after, finding they were not spies, the citizens unburied them. One was dead; the other, a man accustomed to long fasts, was still living; from which circumstance Saadi draws the appropriate moral of the extreme utility of abstinence as a preservative in case of being buried alive. What a glimpse is here of a world sunk back into chaos!

In such a world, a sect like that of "the Assassins would find its appropriate home. Hasan ibn Sabah extended his power far and wide; and in Persia or Asia Minor-wherever disorder is highest-we see amid the noise and confusion the gleam of his daggers as they strike some illustrious victim to the grave. The Assassins were the last and most fearful outcome of centuries of misrule. They could not have wielded the power which they did for a single year, had there been anywhere a really hearty and honest desire to suppress them; but there was not. The times were out of joint; centuries of wanton and pitiless war had seared the consciences and petrified the hearts of men. There was always some prince who needed an assassin to rid him of a rival he feared or a friend he distrusted, and who was ready to pay for the serviceable crime with his purse and his protection. And thus, though he never put an army into the field, the Grand Master of the Assassins never lacked an ally. As for the great body of the common people, they were, in

general, indifferent; though now and again they broke out in fits of fanatical fury against these impious heretics. They looked upon the Grand Master as only one more potentate by means of whom, as with plague and famine, blight and earthquake, the Master of the blessed Prophet harassed and tormented them. His daggers were not specially directed against them. Why should they specially endeavour to rid the world of him? And so it came to pass that a power based upon the practice of assassination was enabled to flourish, well-nigh unmolested, for nearly two hundred years.

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CHAPTER III.

THE SECT OF THE ASSASSINS.

A.D. 1093-1214.

THAT might gives right is, perhaps, the strongest conviction of the Asiatic. Submission to the established fact is his great guiding principle of conduct. And this principle he clings to, not upon a prudential calculation, but with the fervour of religious faith; for, in truth, he perceives and acknowledges the presence of the earth's supreme ruler in every manifestation of victorious Force. Victorious Force is, in his eyes, the most convincing demonstration of the will of God which human nature can arrive at. Both convictions are embodied in the teaching of Muhammad. The religion of Islam and the religion of submission are synonymous expressions. But it was by its victorious, aggressive power that the religion of Islam was to demonstrate its Divine origin. Absolute submission was required of the believer, but it was submission to a power, armed with a sharp sword, which went forth conquering and to conquer.

Nothing can be conceived more alien to the speculative tendencies of the populations of Syria and