142 DESTINY DISRUPTED
were Franj knights on loan from King Baldwin of Edessa, who had a ri-
valry going with Tancred.^5 And this was typical.
On the Muslim side, the absence of unity was breathtaking. It stemmed
partly from the fact that the Muslims saw no ideological dimension to the
violence, at first. They felt themselves under attack not as Muslims but as
individuals, as cities, as mini states. They experienced the Franj as a horri-
ble but meaningless catastrophe, like an earthquake or a swarm of snakes.
It's true that after the carnage at Jerusalem, a few preachers tried to
arouse Muslim resistance by defining the invasion as a religious war. Sev-
eral prominent jurists began delivering sermons in which they used the
word jihad for the first time in ages, but their harangues fell flat with Mus-
lim audiences. The word jihad merely seemed quaint, for it had fallen out
of use centuries earlier, in part because of the rapid expansion of Islam,
which had left the vast majority of Muslims living so far from any frontier
that they had no enemy to fight in the name of jihad. That early sense of
Islam against the world had long ago given way to a sense of Islam as the
world. Most wars that anyone could remember hearing of had been fought
for petty prizes such as territory, resources, or power. The few that could be
cast as noble struggles about ideals were never about Islam versus some-
thing else, but only about whose Islam was the real Islam.
Given the turmoil of the Muslim world, perhaps some disunity was in-
evitable: when the Franj dropped into this snake pit, fractious Muslims
simply incorporated them into their ongoing dramas. Not all the disunity
was spontaneous, however. The Assassins were busy behind the scenes,
sowing turmoil, and quite successfully.
Just before the Crusades began, Hassan Sabbah had established a sec-
ond base of operations in Syria, run by a subsidiary master whom the Cru-
saders came to know as the Old Man of the Mountains. By the time the
Crusades began, virtually everyone who wasn't an Assassin hated the As-
sassins. Every power in the land was trying to hunt them down. The As-
sassins' enemies included the Shi'i, the Sunnis, the Seljuk Turks, the
Fatimid Egyptians, and the Abbasid khalifate. As it happened, the Cru-
saders were making war against the same gallery-the Shi'i, the Sunnis,
the Seljuk Turks, the Fatimid Egyptians, and the Abbasid khalifate. The
Assassins and Crusaders had the same set of enemies so, inevitably, they
became de facto allies.