Khalifa Mustansir, to whom he became counsellor. But his
intrigues once more involving him in disgrace, he fled to Aleppo and
laid the foundations of his new sect. After enlisting proselytes in
Bagdad, Ispahan, Khusistan, and Damaghan, he succeeded in obtaining by
strategy the fortress of Alamut in Persia on the Caspian Sea, where he
completed the plans for his great secret society which was to become for
ever infamous under the name of the Hashishiyin, or _Assassins_.

Under the pretence of belief in the doctrines of Islam and also of
adherence to the Ismaili line of succession from the Prophet, Hasan Saba
now set out to pave his way to power, and in order to achieve this end
adopted the same method as Abdullah ibn Maymun. But the terrible
efficiency of Hasan's society consisted in the fact that a system of
physical force was now organized in a manner undreamt of by his
predecessor. As von Hammer has observed in an admirable passage:

Opinions are powerless, so long as they only confuse the brain,
without arming the hand. Scepticism and free-thinking, as long as
they occupied only the minds of the indolent and philosophical,
have caused the ruin of no throne, for which purpose religious and
political fanaticism are the strongest levers in the hands of
nations. It is nothing to the ambitious man what people believe,
but it is everything to know how he may turn them for the execution
of his projects.[132]

Thus, as in the case of the French Revolution, "whose first movers," von
Hammer also observes, "were the tools or leaders of secret societies,"
it was not mere theory but the method of enlisting numerous dupes and
placing weapons in their hands that brought about the "Terror" of the
Assassins six centuries before that of their spiritual descendants, the
Jacobins of 1793.

Taking as his groundwork the organization of the Grand Lodge of Cairo,
Hasan reduced the nine degrees to their original number of seven, but
these now received a definite nomenclature, and included not only real
initiates but active agents.

Descending downwards, the degrees of the Assassins were thus as follows:
first, the Grand Master, known as the Shaikh-al-Jabal or "Old Man of the
Mountain"--owing to the fact that the Order always possessed itself of
castles in mountainous regions; second, the Dail Kebir or Grand Priors;
third, the fully initiated Dais, religious nuncios and political
emissaries; fourt