The Ten Rules of how our new world really works (Rule 2: Gaming Out Lunatics)
Introduction: What power really is
Legend has it that at the height of the Third Crusade (1189-1192), Count Henry of Champagne spoke at length with the mysterious, charismatic “Old Man of the Mountain,” Rashid ad-Din Sinan. The haughty Crusader claimed that he, and not Sinan, had the most powerful army in the Middle East, one that could at any moment defeat the Hashashin, the Old Man’s threadbare supporters. Count Henry went on, pointing out that his massive forces were are least ten times as large as Sinan’s.
Distinctly unimpressed, the Old Man calmly replied that the count was mistaken, and that his unremarkable-looking rabble constituted the most powerful army then fighting. To prove his point, he beckoned for one of his men to come over to him and casually told him to jump off the top of the Masyaf mountaintop fortress in which they were perched atop al-Kahf castle. Without hesitating, the man did so.
Through the many centuries that separate us from Count Henry, the myriad twists and turns of Western politics, culture, and experience that have come between us, there is absolutely no doubt at all that westerners today would share his horrified reaction to what seems to be the unreasoning fanaticism the Old Man of the Mountain had demonstrated to him.
“This guy is totally nuts.”
Political risk analysts have a terrible time getting past this wholly understandable first reaction. Yet to understand the world, it is imperative that they do so. All too often analysts throughout time have written off those with radically different belief systems from their own, lazily giving in and assuming that such people and organisations are simply unknowable. The reason for this is that it is all too easy to write off ‘lunatics,’ complacently saying that the strange, the exotic, the different, simply cannot be understood.
As the example of the Old Man of the Mountain makes clear, this is a fundamental intellectual mistake. While many of the goals of ‘lunatics’ may be otherworldly, wicked, and unattainable, an understanding of their strategic objectives is nonetheless very necessary. For once these ‘irrational’ objectives are taken seriously, the tactics employed to reach them all-too-often can be gamed out, a process that makes ‘lunatics’ suddenly explicable. The problem too often lies in the analyst’s lack of intellectual curiosity, mesmerised as they are by the ‘madness’ of their subjects. But the proper understanding of seemingly irrational behaviour is a vital element in understanding our strange new world.
Rashid ad-Din Sinan and the Benefits of Being Seen as Crazy
Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the mastermind behind the Assassin’s network in Syria at the time of the Third Crusade, was born in either 1132 or 1135 in Basra, in today’s southern Iraq. As a youth, Rashid came to Alamut (in present-day Iran), the centre of the burgeoning Hashashin movement, and was inducted into the mysteries of this secretive religious sect. Specifically, the Hashashin, or the Assassins, were Nizari Ismailis, an offshoot of Shia Islam, a movement that originated in the late eleventh century.
In 1162, the sect’s overall leader, Hassan Ala Dhikrihi Salam, sent Sinan to Syria to assume control of the group’s affairs there. He quickly proved himself a born leader, establishing what amounted to a largely independent operation, with little control being exercised from far-away Alamut. Over time Sinan forged his fidai followers, who came to believe he had semi-divine status, into a wholly new sort of military force, shock troops willing and able to carry out his every command. Based in the Nizari mountain stronghold of Masyaf, Sinan came to control much of eastern Syria.
The single-minded fervour of the Hashashin—their intensity, morale, and absolute commitment to Sinan rather than to the western value of the sanctity of life—terrified the Crusaders at the time and continues to fascinate us in the West to this day.
Operating in what is today Syria and Iran, the Assassins were a secret order determined to protect the relatively new sect, both from the predominantly Sunni Muslim overlords of the time (personified by Saladin, ruler of Egypt and much of Syria and the Holy Land) as well as the invading western Crusaders (personified by Richard the Lion-Heart). While the Assassins, on paper, were far fewer in number than either group, in promulgating the cult of the Assassin, Sinan found a way around his basic political problem, using terror and strategic assassination as weapons to compensate for what he lacked in numbers.
In practice, only an elite of Sinan’s believers known as the fidai—which in Arabic means ‘one who sacrifices himself in the name of a faith or an idea’—actually carried out the assassinations. That they usually attempted to murder their political enemies in public places created an air of invincibility surrounding the Assassins, sowing the seeds of great fear amongst Sinan’s surviving foes.
Assassinations were often carried out with a dagger, which was sometimes dipped in poison. Horrifyingly, to western standards, after completing an assassination, the fidai would often wait at the site of the murder to be caught, exhibiting total contempt for the consequences of their actions, instead wanting to be sure all the world knew it was the Old Man of the Mountain who had struck the decisive blow.
Anther often-used tactic to terrify the Old Man’s foes was to intimidate rather than to kill them. For example, by leaving a dagger with a threatening note on their enemy’s pillow, the Assassins would demonstrate beyond all doubt that they could reach out and kill anyone, anytime they chose.
The western confusion in even naming Sinan’s followers—westerners came to call them the Assassins, supposedly derived from Hashashin, or ‘users of hashish’—conveys a real sense of the horror the sect evoked. In truth, there is little evidence that it was the drug that motivated the Old Man’s adherents to do anything for him, but western minds were hard at work trying to explain what seemed to them inexplicable.
More likely, the term Hashashin, originally coined by the sect’s Sunni enemies, was one of derision, meant to signify that the Old Man’s followers were low-born rabble, losers, outcasts in Islamic society. However, by the time Marco Polo heard the tale a century on, the more literal drug interpretation amounted to a much-needed explanation for westerners as to what motivated the Assassins to kill for Sinan unquestionably.
For the legend of wild-eyed, murdering drug-takers was too good of a story to let go of. Echoing the real criminal career of Charles Manson centuries on, the myth grew that after being drugged, the fidai would be taken to a beautiful, secluded garden, filled with gorgeous doe-eyed maidens, in which they would awaken. Believing themselves to be in paradise, the initiates would come upon the Old Man of the Mountain, who would tell them that this was just a glimpse of the life eternal to come. All they had to do to preserve their place in such a glorious, never-ending world was to follow his orders to the letter.
It’s a lovely story, amounting to a clever, western effort to explain the baffling fervour of their Ismaili foes. Sadly, it’s almost certainly untrue. As such, the two basic Crusader efforts at explaining the Assassins in political risk terms—either that they were crazy and no more thinking was called for, or that they were gullible, drug-addled dupes of the wily Sinan—conceal far more than they reveal, as they don’t being to get at the method behind Sinan’s seeming madness.
In this obtuseness, the Crusaders are far from alone. For more often than not, ‘irrational behaviour’ merely amounts to an ideology that may be radically different from that of the analyst, but nonetheless still contains an internal logic, complete with discernible and overarching strategic goals, tactical gambits, and a battle plan to achieve both.
We cannot let ourselves off the hook so easily by lazily saying that our foes are crazy and therefore don’t need to be studied, because their belief system is different from (and admittedly often wildly alien to) our own. Such a limp intellectual reaction merely deprives us of the incentive to do what we ought to—dig deeper in understanding what at first glance seems entirely incoherent.
Sinan Bests Saladin
The Shakespearean phrase, ‘There’s method to their madness’ is the key lesson to keep in mind in successfully gaming out lunatics. For there is almost always an internal logic to any serious foreign policy actor, however diabolical or seemingly random. The goal must be to study their world view (no matter how twisted), and them treat them as you would any other player on the chessboard: what do they want, how are they prepared to get it, and what is their likely strategy?
We must then take one more intellectual leap forward before we are able to fully go through the analytical looking glass. The ‘irrational’ are almost always politically underrated; in their strangeness, they are too often subconsciously viewed as inherently incapable of actually succeeding on the foreign policy stage.
Yet the final portion of the story of the Old Man on the Mountain would suggest otherwise. The seemingly irrational not only have method to their madness and can be assessed much as any other foreign policy actor can be; they are also entirely capable of winning.
The Third Crusade placed Sinan in an almost impossible strategic position. At the pivotal Battle of Hattin on July 3-4, 1187, the great Saladin decisively defeated the western-oriented Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, routing his foes (and capturing the reigning king, Guy of Lusignan) and securing the Holy Land for Muslim rule. It was in direct response to this cataclysmic shift in the balance of power in the Middle East that the Third Crusade was launched by the West in the first place.
As Sinan watched all this from his mountain hideaway, he must have been gravely concerned. The most likely outcome following Hattin was that his personal fiefdom was likely to become merely the arena where two far greater powers played out their rivalry for control of the Holy Land. It looked as though Sinan and his puny sect would be overwhelmed by one or both of the great powers descending upon him. But Sinan had one ace left up his sleeve: the fanatical devotion of his followers and the inordinate fear that devotion struck in the hearts of his enemies. He immediately set about using this fact to his advantage.
The Old Man set upon Saladin first, well in advance of the Crusade. Even as Saladin marched against Aleppo in Syria, devastating Nizari Ismaili territory, the great sultan had twice managed to escape assassination attempts ordered by Sinan. In 1176, Saladin laid siege to Masyaf itself, but failed to break the will of the of Sinan and the Assassins. Instead, despite a vast numerical advantage, Saladin had quit the field. Why in the world had he done so?
The story goes that one night Saladin awoke to barely make out a dimly lit figure, stealthily retreating into the darkness from his bedroom. Turning, he found a note pinned next to his head, held in place by a poisoned dagger. It proclaimed that though he had been spared this time, the next occasion Saladin would be slaughtered, if he didn’t withdraw his forces immediately.
A terrified Saladin came to believe that it was Sinan himself who had been the man in his bedroom on that fateful night. Whoever actually did the deed, the Assassins’ demonstration of their fanatical commitment to their cause, and their ability to reach out with impunity and directly strike the great leader, deeply terrorised Saladin, which of course was the purpose of the whole exercise. He withdrew his forces from Masyaf immediately and sought to ally himself with the Assassins from then on. Method to their madness, indeed.
Sinan Bests the Crusaders
Having secured his freedom of manoeuvre from Saladin, by first terrorising him and then allying himself with the great man’s empire, Sinan was not about to let a rejuvenated Kingdom of Jerusalem reappear on the scene. For, despite the bickering leadership of Richard the Lion-Heart, Philip Augustus of France, Guy of Lusignan, and Conrad of Montferrat, the westerners were gaining traction in their efforts to restore Christian rule in the Holy Land.
It was the talented Conrad who rallied western forces following the disaster at Hattin. An Italian nobleman brought up in Piedmont in northern Italy, Conrad hailed from a prominent family, being the cousin of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, Leopold V of Austria, and Louis VII of France. Strikingly handsome, intelligent, charming, and courageous, Conrad arrived in the Middle East after the defeat at Hattin and gave new spirit to the demoralised Crusader forces, successfully defending the strategically vital coastal city of Tyre, in today’s Lebanon.
When Conrad came to the city, the Crusader remnant was negotiating its surrender to Saladin’s forces. The story goes that, outraged at their weakness, Conrad threw Saladin’s banners into a ditch and forced the city’s elders to swear direct loyalty to him instead. After successfully holding off Saladin twice in front of the gates of Tyre, Conrad then sent Jascius, Archbishop of Tyre, westwards, in a desperate appeal to the Christian kingdoms of Europe for aid. This plea and the cataclysm at Hattin, which led to Saladin taking Jerusalem, precipitated the Third Crusade.
There is no doubt at all that Conrad was a grimly determined to re-establish the Crusader kingdom as Saladin was to finish it off completely. At the time of his second siege of Tyre, Saladin placed Conrad’s ageing father, William V of Montferrat, who had been captured by Muslim forces at Hattin, before the walls of the city. Seductively, Saladin offered to release him and to make Conrad a very rich man, if he would only open the gates of Tyre and relinquish the city.
Displaying his own courage, William called to his son, imploring him to stand firm in the face of this overwhelming bribe. Impressively, Conrad made it known that William had benefitted from a long life already, and himself aimed a crossbow at his father from the ramparts of Tyre. Saladin’s bluff was called; William was released unharmed and returned to Conrad. This was the mettle of the man who from then on devoted his life to recapturing the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s past glories.
However, Conrad’s path to power as the new King of Jerusalem was not to be easy. In the summer of 1188, Saladin finally released the hapless king, Guy of Lusignan, who had been vanquished at Hattin. For the next few years, both he and Conrad bitterly vied for the throne, with Conrad charging that Guy had forfeited his right to the throne owing to his battlefield ineptitude. Predictably, the great powers of Europe were drawn into this struggle, with Richard of England supporting Guy, while Philip of France and Leopold of Austria sided with their kinsman, Conrad.
In April 1192, the fate of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was put to a vote. To the Lion-Heart’s frustration, the barons of the kingdom unanimously elected the able Conrad as king. In compensation, Richard bought off any more internecine western rivalry by selling Guy the island of Cyprus as a consolation prize. At last the stage seemed set for a glorious revival of the Crusader kingdom’s fortunes.
And that is certainly what it looked like to Sinan as well. The gifted Conrad made for a threatening potential rival, which is the last thing that either the Old Man of the Mountain or his Sunni allies under Saladin desired. Having watched with alarm as Conrad successfully restored the Crusaders’ morale after Hattin, Sinan clearly saw that the talented new king was an ideal candidate for assassination at the hands of his Hashashin, as whoever replaced him was bound to be less able.
Even more temptingly, the many internal feuds that had been finally stilled by Conrad’s ascension to the throne were bound to re-emerge with his death, divisions that could well lead to the end of the western incursions into the Middle East. All this could be strategically achieved by the elimination of just one man.
The Assassins were to succeed in besting Conrad where their mighty ally, Saladin, had failed. For Conrad, having won the coveted prize of the kingship of Jerusalem, was never to be crowned. In the late morning of April 28, 1192, Conrad’s wife—the pregnant Queen Isabella—was late in returning from the Turkish baths to dine with him. Undeterred, the new king went to eat his midday meal at the home of his kinsman and ally, Philip of Beauvais, in the Crusader stronghold of Acre. However, Conrad found that Philip had already eaten, so he began to return to his palace.
Riding back through the city, Conrad was flanked by a pair of his guards. As he turned down a narrow thoroughfare, the king saw two men loitering by the side of the road. As Conrad approached, the two strangers walked over to greet him. One of the men was holding a letter, which seemed to be some sort of official document. Conrad stretched his hand down from his horse, reaching out to grasp the parchment.
Now was the supreme moment for the Hashashin. Striking instantly, the man holding the letter drew a knife and stabbed upwards, its point plunging deep into Conrad’s body. At the same instant, the second assassin leaped onto the back of the king’s horse, stabbing him in the side. Conrad died later that same day. Though Conrad’s guards killed one of the Hashashin and captured the other, it was all too late. He had been King of Jerusalem for less tan a fortnight. The loss of this potentially remarkable leader amounted to the deathblow for western efforts to prevail in the Third Crusade.
While most assassinations do not actually alter matters of state, as policy tends to remain remarkably constant regardless of who is in charge, this was a political killing that mattered in that it changed everything. For the assassination led to the end of the Third Crusade, and on Sinan and Saladin's terms. It is not too much to say that Sinan had astutely assessed what would follow from assassinating Conrad, bringing about the Muslim victory.
Not only had the Old Man of the Mountain managed to remove his most talented foe, but also as Sinan forecast, the politics of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were once more thrown into chaos following Conrad’s death. Militarily, the Third Crusade had already devolved into a stalemate, with Saladin retaining control of Jerusalem, while the Crusaders held the coastal ports of Tyre and Acre, in modern-day Israel, a balance of power that greatly frustrated many of the European kings, such as Philip Augustus of France, who yearned to return to their homelands. Western enthusiasm for the cause was waning even before Conrad’s assassination; his death finished off the Crusades for the next decade.
And just as the Old Man predicted, the surviving Crusader leadership lost no time in quarrelling with one another, opening an irreparable political schism. Under torture, the surviving Assassin—undoubtedly following Sinan’s orders to the last—insisted that Richard the Lion-Heart was the political force behind the killing. It did not help matters that Richard’s nephew, Henry II of Champagne, married Conrad’s widow, Queen Isabella, in unseemly haste just days after his death. As Richard, in contrast to the rulers of France and Austria, had supported Guy’s claim to the throne rather than Conrad’s, there was just enough plausibility to the charges to poison the well of Crusader unity.
A three-year truce was finally agreed on between the Muslims and the Crusaders on September 2, 1192. Saladin kept the jewel of Jerusalem, but agreed to allow a limited number of Christian pilgrims to pray at the Holy Sepulchre, the site recognised as the tomb of Jesus. The Crusaders kept the cities they held on the coastline, from Jaffa to Tyre. In October 1192, the Lion-Heart himself sailed away, never to return, having failed to fulfil his vow of re-taking Jerusalem for Christianity. The Assassins had overcome one of the greatest generals in history and won the Third Crusade. The ‘madman’ had triumphed.
Getting beyond the over-the-top fervour of Sinan’s Hashashin proved an impossibility for the Crusader mindset. However, such an analytical effort would have been worth it. Far from being irrational, the Old Man of the Mountain emerges—even compared to his legendary contemporaries Saladin and Richard—as by far the most astute strategic thinker of the Third Crusade. By personally terrorising Saladin with the threat of assassination, Sinan made an ally of him, succeeding in defending his fortress Masyaf, and successfully fending off Saladin’s efforts to wholly dominate Syria.
Faced with a second existential threat to his power, the Old Man of the Mountain eliminated the one Crusader leader, Conrad of Montferrat, who posed a long-term danger to his security. Better still, in successfully assessing the political schisms that plagued his Crusader opponents, Sinan set in motion the events that led to their dispirited end, once again securing his own power base and the future of his sect. If this amounts to craziness, I can only wish that Sinan were around to bite some of my firm’s analysts.
Sinan did not have live long to savour his improbable victory. He died at al-Kahf castle in Masyaf in Syria in 1192. Following his death, the Nizari Ismaili central order in Iran regained closer control of the Syrian branch of the sect. But Sinan must never be forgotten by modern day political analysts, as his against-the-odds career underlines the need to game out lunatics. Not only is there almost always method to their madness. Sometimes they actually win.