Amin Maalouf - Samarkand

‘Do you know who is really responsible for Samarkand’s misfortunes, and for all of ours too? It is the man who brought you here!’

‘Omar Khayyam?’

‘Who else? It was khawaja Omar who interceded for Hassan Sabbah on the day I could have obtained his death. He prevented us from killing him. Can he now prevent him from killing us?’

The qadi did not know what to say. Nizam sighed. A short embarrassed silence ensued.

‘What do you suggest doing?’

It was Nizam who was asking the question. Abu Taher already had his idea formulated and he spoke it in the tones of a solemn proclamation:

‘It is time for the Seljuk flag to fly over Samarkand.’

The Vizir’s face lit up and then darkened again.

‘Your words are worth their weight in gold. I have been telling the Sultan for years that the empire should extend to Transoxania and that cities as prestigious and prosperous as Samarkand and Bukhara cannot remain outside the realm of our authority, but it was wasted effort. Malikshah would not listen.’

‘The Khan’s army, mind you, is greatly weakened. Its emirs are no longer paid and its forts are falling into ruin.’

‘We are aware of that.’

‘Is Malikshah afraid of undergoing the same fate as his father Alp Arslan if, as his father did, he crosses the river?’

‘Not at all.’

The qadi asked no more questions, but awaited further elucidation.

‘The Sultan is afraid neither of the river nor of the enemy army,’ stated Nizam. ‘He is afraid of a woman!’

‘Terken Khatun?’

‘She has sworn that, if Malikshah crosses the river, she will ban him from her couch and transform her harem into Gehenna. Let us not forget that Samarkand is her city. Nasr Khan was her brother and Ahmed Khan is her nephew. It is to her family that Transoxania belongs. If the kingdom built up by her ancestors were to collapse she would lose the position she occupies amongst the palace women and the chances of her son one day succeeding Malikshah would be compromised.’

‘But her son is only two years old!’

‘Precisely. The younger he is, the more his mother must fight to keep his trump cards.’

‘If I have understood correctly,’ concluded the qadi , ‘the Sultan will never agree to take Samarkand.’

‘I have not said that, but we must make him change his mind and it will not be easy to find more persuasive arms than those of Khatun.’

The qadi blushed. He smiled politely, without letting himself be deflected from his mission.

‘Would it not suffice for me to repeat to the Sultan what I have just told you and to inform him of the plot hatched by Hassan Sabbah?’

‘No,’ Nizam replied drily.

For a moment he was too absorbed to argue. He was formulating a plan. His visitor waited for him to make up his mind.

‘Now,’ the Vizir pronounced with authority, ‘you will go tomorrow morning and present yourself at the door of the Sultan’s harem and ask to see the chief of the eunuchs. You will tell him that you have come from Samarkand and that you wish to convey news of her family to Terken Khatun. As you are the qadi of her city and an old servant of her dynasty, she will have to receive you.’

The qadi had only to nod his head for Nizam to continue:

‘Once in the tentwork room, you will tell her about the misery Samarkand is in because of the heretics, but you will omit to mention Ahmed’s conversion. On the contrary, you will make sure to tell her that Hassan Sabbah covets her throne, that her life is in danger and that only providence can still save her. You will add that you have been to see me but that I was hardly inclined to listen to you, nay I even dissuaded you from speaking about it to the Sultan.’

The next day the plan worked without the slightest hitch. While Terken Khatun took it upon herself to convince the Sultan of the need to save the Khan of Samarkand, Nizam al-Mulk, who was pretending to be against this, threw himself into making preparations for the expedition. By this make-believe war Nizam was not just trying to annexe Transoxania, and even less was he trying to save Samarkand, but above all to re-establish his prestige which had been slighted by Ismaili subversion. For that, he needed a clear and stunning victory. For years his spies had been swearing to him, every day, that Hassan had been pinned down, and that he was on the point of being apprehended, but the rebel was not up for capture and his troops vanished at the first contact. Nizam was thus seeking a chance to confront him face to face, army to army. Samarkand was just the perfect place.

In the spring of 1089 an army of two hundred thousand men was on the march, with elephants and instruments of siege. The intrigues and lies which instigated its march are insignificant for it was to accomplish what every army must. It began by taking possession of Bukhara without the least resistance and then it headed on towards Samarkand. Arriving at the gates of the city, Malikshah announced to Ahmed Khan in a pitiful message that he had come at last to deliver him from the yoke of the heretics. ‘I have asked nothing of my august brother,’ the Khan replied coldly. Malikshah was astonished whereas Nizam was not at all disturbed. ‘The Khan is no longer a free agent. We must act as if he did not exist.’ In any case, the army could not retrace its steps. The emirs wanted their share of the booty and would not return empty-handed.

In the first days, the treachery of a tower guard permitted the assailants to sweep into the city. They took up position to the west, near the Monastery Gate. The defenders fell back to the souks in the south, around the Kish Gate. According to their faith, one section of the population decided to provide for the Sultan’s troops, feeding them and giving them encouragement and another section embraced the cause of Ahmed Khan. Fighting raged for two weeks, but there was never a second’s doubt of the outcome. The Khan, who had taken refuge with a friend in the district of the domes, was quickly taken prisoner along with all the Ismaili chiefs. Only Hassan managed to escape through a subterranean canal at night.

Nizam had won, it is true, but by dint of playing the Sultan off against the Sultana he had poisoned irreparably his relations with the court. Even if Malikshah did not regret having conquered the most prestigious cities of Transoxania so easily, his self-respect suffered at having allowed himself to be abused. He went so far as to refuse to organize the traditional victory banquet for his troops. ‘It’s out of avarice,’ Nizam whispered spitefully to all and sundry.

As for Hassan Sabbah, he learnt a valuable lesson from his defeat. Rather than try and convert princes, he would forge a fearsome instrument of war which would bear no resemblance to anything which mankind had known until then: the order of the Assassins.

Alamut. A fortress on a rock six thousand feet high in a countryside of bare mountains, forgotten lakes, sheer cliffs and narrow passes. The greatest army could only reach it in single file and the most powerful catapults could not graze its walls.

The Shahrud River, nicknamed the ‘mad river’, dominated the mountains, swelling up in springtime with the melted snow of the Elburz mountains and snatching up trees and stones as it sped down its course. Woe to him who dared approach it! Woe to the army which dared pitch camp on its banks!

Every evening a thick, woolly mist rose from the river and the lakes, stopping half-way up the cliffs. To those who were there, the castle of Alamut was at such times an isle in an ocean of clouds. Seen from below, it was the abode of the jinns.

In the local dialect, Alamut means ‘the eagle’s lesson’. It was told that a prince who wanted to build a fortress to control these mountains released a trained bird of prey. The bird, after flying around in the sky, came to land on this rock. The master understood that no other site would be better.