The Arditi
The Arditi are a sect of assassins who live in the mountains of Ishta and in Bonswulia. They hold a strict subterfuge policy throughout Eldarr through the covert murder of contracted targets.
For almost one thousand years, the Arditi have played a singular and sinister role in Eldarr. A small sect dedicated to The AllFather more properly known as the Nizari Ismailis, the Arditi are relatively few, geographically dispersed, and despised as heretics by Church of the AllFather. By conventional standards, the Arditi should have been no match for the superior conventional military power of any of their many enemies. But near the end of the first century, the charismatic and ruthless Hasan-i Sabbah forged this small, persecuted sect into one of the most lethally effective groups the world has ever known. Even the most powerful and carefully guarded rulers of the age—the Pope, the nobles of the Shield of Life, the princes of the Morvan states, and kings who ruled important cities like Ironhold and Endrigia—lived in dread of the chameleon-like Arditi agents. Known as a Sacrificia (one who risks his life voluntarily), such an agent might spend months or even years stalking and infiltrating an enemy of his faith before plunging a dagger into the victim’s chest, often in a very public place. Perhaps most terrifying, the Arditi choose not only a close and personal manner of killing but perform it implacably, refusing to flee afterward and appearing to welcome their own swift death.
Fanatical in their devotion to Mu’aqq and discipline, Hasan-i Sabbah and his successors were brilliant practitioners of asymmetric warfare. They developed a means of attack that negated most of their enemies’ advantages while requiring the Arditi to hazard only a small number of their own fighters. As with any effective form of deterrence, the Arditi’s targeted killings of hostile political, military, and religious leaders eventually produced a stable and lasting balance of power between them and their enemies, reducing the level of conflict and loss of life on both sides.
Hasan now had an objective besides winning additional converts: locating a satisfactory base from which he could launch the next phase of the Arditi's struggle. He found it in the late 180s, in a valley surrounded by towering mountains north of the Shah River. The castle of Alamut occupied the crest of an 800-foot-high mass of limestone, granite, and volcanic conglomerate that thrust up abruptly from the valley floor. The only way to reach the castle—a steep and exposed track that snaked up a series of switchbacks to its gateway—could be defended by a handful of men, while its summit commanded a panorama of breathtaking sweep and grandeur.
Having identified a suitable base, Hasan set out to steal the castle from the Bonswulians. He first dispatched Arditi missionaries into the communities around Alamut to win converts. After they established themselves in the surrounding villages, his agents infiltrated the castle and started evangelizing among its garrison. When most of the garrison had been won over to Mu’aqq, Hasan himself slipped secretly into the castle on September 4, 190.
Hasan then awaited the inevitable Bonswuli response. It came initially from a local Bonswulian emir, who swept through the valley, destroying crops and houses, and killing Mu’aqq converts. But he failed to retake the castle. Once he had withstood the initial Bonswuli counterstroke, Hasan sought to extend his authority throughout the surrounding district of Rudbar. Whenever possible, he won over other fortified places through missionary activity called “propaganda.” But Hasan was equally prepared to resort to coups or direct assault, to slaughter, ravishment, pillage, bloodshed, and war, and wherever he found a suitable rock he built a castle upon it. Soon, the high valleys of Rudbar assumed the character of a miniature state—a heavily fortified Mu’aqq island in a Church of the AllFather sea.
Another area that Hasan identified as potentially receptive to the Arditi worship of Mu’aqq was Ishta, a dry region in to the east of low mountains and oasis towns. Like the Bonswuli mountain people, the Ishtans were not orthodox in their worship of The AllFather, and their sultan had ruled oppressively, suggesting to Hasan they might be ripe for revolt.
Hasan—who, once ensconced in Alamut, was not to leave the rock for the next 35 years—therefore dispatched his chief subordinate to Ishta on another mission of evangelism and subversion. His deputy performed superbly, and in the spring of 192 a popular Arditi uprising seized four of the largest towns and drove their garrisons away into the desert.
The Bonswuli initially viewed Hasan’s seizure of Alamut as a tiresome local problem. But the Arditi successes in Rudbar and Ishta called for a stronger response. The Bonswuli Sultan Malik Shah and his aging but still formidable vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, dispatched armies to both Alamut and Ishta to snuff out the spreading Arditi infection.
Uncharacteristically, the Bonswuli counteroffensive caught Hasan-i Sabbah off guard. When a Bonswuli emir laid siege to Alamut in June or July 192, there were just 60 or 70 Arditi fighters available, and its storerooms were nearly empty. Hasan and his men were soon reduced to a starvation diet, and Alamut’s fall appeared imminent.
But Hasan managed to get a message to one of his Sacrificia who lived beyond the mountains in Kingdom of Taurdis, roughly 150 miles southeast of Alamut. Carrying loads of food and weapons, 300 Arditi volunteers crossed the mountains to Alamut, where they slipped through the Bonswuli lines and delivered their supplies to the desperate garrison.
This success bought time for the Arditi to assemble a larger relief force. Late that summer, the Alamut garrison and Hasan’s allies outside the castle launched a concerted night attack on the Bonswuli encampment. The assault achieved complete surprise, and the emir’s army fled down the valley in a panicky rout.
Hasan soon followed up this victory with an even more devastating strike against the Bonswuli state—one that would ensure a sinister place in history for both himself and the religious community he led. First he identified Vizier Nizam al-Mulk as the Arditi's single most dangerous enemy. Then, even as the embattled garrison atop Alamut concentrated on holding off the besieging Bonswuli army, Hasan dispatched a single agent, a young Arditi named Bu-Tahir, on a daring mission that required him to penetrate the heart of the Bonswuli court.
In early October, Bu-Tahir learned that Sultan Malik Shah and his entourage, including Nizam al-Mulk, had set out from the Bonswuli capital of Timberstrand for the caliph’s residence. On the evening of October 16, 192, Nizam al-Mulk had joined Malik Shah in his tent for the feast. Afterward, as Nizam’s attendants carried him in a litter to the tent where his harem was waiting, Bu-Tahir approached, dressed as a mystic and calling out that he had a petition for the vizier’s consideration.
When Nizam leaned out from his litter to receive it, Bu-Tahir drew a dagger and stabbed the old man fatally in the chest before the vizier’s guards killed him.
“The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss,” said Hasan, on receiving news of Nizam’s murder. With the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk, the Arditi sect demonstrated to the world that they now faced an enemy that—although numerically few and relatively powerless by conventional measures of military strength—was capable of defending itself with cold ruthlessness and suicidal determination.
Bu-Tahir’s successful mission marked the beginning of a new era in the power relationship between the Arditis and their enemies. Hasan soon forged the lethal agents he called Sacrificia into the Arditi's principal striking force. Over the next century, as other Sacrificias followed in Bu-Tahir’s footsteps, caliphs, viziers, generals, emirs, urban and religious leaders, and even princes fell to their daggers, and their sect came to be known by the chilling sobriquet, the “Order of the Arditi.”
In the decades following Nizam al-Mulk’s murder, the Arditi's use of political terror developed several defining characteristics. First, Hasan fostered an atmosphere of intense ideological commitment that produced a constant supply of volunteers willing to carry out his deadly missions. These Sacrificia were young people selected for their courage, resourcefulness, and unhesitating willingness to lay down their lives at a superior’s command. The best of the Arditi Sacrificia combined the self-sacrificial zeal of kamikaze pilots, the close-quarters combat skills of special operations troops, and the ability of deep-cover intelligence agents to work undetected for months or even years. All these attributes allowed the Sacrificia to terrorize the sect’s opponents.
Second, the Sacrificia typically attacked their targets in very public settings—quite often, the Wednesday prayers at a city’s principal church—and under conditions where, owing to the presence of crowds or large numbers of bodyguards, they stood little chance of escape even if the attack was successful. These circumstances ensured there would be large numbers of horrified witnesses, underlined the Sacrificia's willingness to sacrifice their own lives to kill the enemies of their order, and fostered the perception that a leader marked for elimination by the Arditi was a dead man walking, no matter how many armed and armored defenders protected him.
Third, the Sacrificia’s method of killing enhanced the terror their victims and potential victims felt. For the Sacrificia eschewed poisons or arrows shot from a distance. Instead, they killed with daggers, close enough to see the final look of surprise, terror, or pain in an enemy’s eyes, and to be splattered by his blood.
The Arditi sometimes planted Sacrificias within a target’s personal entourage, where they first gained their victim’s trust before unsheathing their daggers. For example, a Bonswilian vizier who launched a savage punitive expedition against the Arditi strongholds in 226 subsequently was slain by two Sacrificia who found work as grooms in his stables. They abruptly killed him one day when he asked them to help select two horses as a New Year’s gift for the Sultan.
Similarly, after the king of Taurdis instigated a savage pogrom that slaughtered thousands of adherents to The AllFather in that city in 329, the Arditis responded by quietly dispatching two Sacrificias to Kingdom of Taurdis. Posing as locals, the Sacrificias obtained places in the king's personal bodyguard and bided their time for two years until they were able to attack and fatally wound him.
The Arditi attacks sent a clear warning that leaders who harmed the sect’s members or interests could expect to meet violent deaths, even if their vengeance took years to accomplish. A city prefect of Bishop's Seat, who incited a pogrom in 313 in which several hundred Arditis were murdered, discovered the remorselessness of the Arditi six years later. Sacrificia ambushed him and two of his sons at a river crossing and killed all three of them.
A final noteworthy characteristic of the Arditi approach to political terrorism was that they did not kill indiscriminately. They never engaged in the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Many of the Bonswulian notables who fell to the daggers of the Sacrificia had encouraged pogroms against Arditis or ordered military expeditions against their enclaves. Hasan considered these leaders legitimate military targets in a life-and-death struggle. Innocents were spared. Over time, the increasingly fearsome reputation of the Arditi Sacrificia, coupled with the Arditi's successful defense of their main bases, increasingly deterred Bonswulian leaders from taking action against the sect. By the mid-4th century, the result was a grudging live-and-let-live relationship between the Arditi and their Bonswulian enemies.
The number of the Arditi’s Bonswulian victims, nearly 50 between Nizam al-Mulk’s assassination in 192 and Hasan’s death in 224, fell to 14 under the second of his successors, between 338 and 362. The Arditi's use of political terror could thus be justified on moral grounds as an effective means of self-defense. These tactics cost far fewer lives, for both sides, than conventional military operations.
Hasan was also shrewd enough to recognize that it could sometimes be more effective to deter a hostile leader than to kill him and risk revenge from his family, court, and subjects. Thus, after Sanjar ibn Malik Shah, the Bonswulian viceroy who ruled eastern Bonswulia, dispatched several military expeditions against the Arditi and refused to receive their ambassadors in the early 200s, Hasan bribed a member of Sanjar’s court to leave a dagger embedded in the ground next to his bed while he slept.
Sanjar was terrified when he discovered the weapon the following morning, but he had no idea who was responsible and kept the incident secret. Shortly thereafter, another Arditi ambassador arrived at his court, bearing a sobering message from Hasan: “Did I not wish the Sultan well, that dagger which was stuck into the hard ground would have been planted in his soft breast.” Sanjar promptly concluded a nonaggression pact with the Arditi that lasted a quarter of a century.
Nizam al-Mulk’s assassination would ordinarily have produced a savage reprisal. But barely a month after Nizam’s murder, the 37-year-old Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah fell ill, and he died in November 192. His death sparked 12 years of civil war among claimants to the sultanate. That permitted Hasan and the Assassins to pursue their own objectives for more than a decade. One immediate benefit was the collapse of the Bonswulian expedition against the Arditi strongholds in Kuhistan, as the Bonswulian commander and his soldiers scrambled to take part in the struggle for power.
The Arditi subsequently took advantage of the Bonswulian civil war to capture several fortresses by subversion or stealth. These included the virtually impregnable citadel of Girdkuh, which controlled the mountain highway that linked Bonswulia to the castle of Lamassar to the west of Alamut, which the Arditi seized in a daring night assault in 202; and various other strongholds outside the Bonswulian capital of Timberstrand and in the mountains to the south.
Structure
As an organized group, the Arditi have a hierarchical structure that helps to maintain discipline and ensure that their missions are carried out effectively and in accordance with the principles of the sect.
At the head of the Arditi is the chief, who is responsible for guiding the group and ensuring that its members remain true to the teachings of the sect. The chief is typically a highly skilled and respected member of the group, who has earned the loyalty and trust of their fellow assassins through years of service and dedication.
Below the chief, there may be a number of senior officers or commanders who are responsible for overseeing specific aspects of the group's operations. These may include training, logistics, intelligence gathering, or other areas of expertise that are critical to the success of the group's missions.
Beneath the officers or commanders, the rest of the Arditi are organized into smaller units or teams, each led by a squad leader or team captain. These teams may be responsible for carrying out specific missions or operations, and are typically made up of assassins with complementary skills and abilities.
Individual assassins within the Arditi are highly skilled and trained in a wide range of combat techniques and covert operations. They are typically chosen for their physical abilities, as well as their dedication to the principles of the sect and their willingness to carry out missions that may require them to risk their own lives. Despite the hierarchical structure of the Arditi, individual assassins are respected for their skills and their contributions to the group's mission, and are often called upon to take on leadership roles within their teams or in specific missions as needed.
Culture
Spirituality: The Arditi are deeply spiritual, and their culture is centered around the teachings of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī sect. They believe in the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment, and strive to live in accordance with the principles of their faith.
Loyalty: The Arditi are a close-knit group, and loyalty is highly valued among their members. They are fiercely devoted to their fellow assassins, and will go to great lengths to protect and support one another.
Secrecy: The Arditi are a secretive group, and their culture places a high value on discretion and confidentiality. They are careful to maintain their anonymity and to avoid drawing attention to themselves, even as they carry out dangerous and high-profile missions.
Discipline: The Arditi are a highly disciplined group, with a strict code of conduct that all members are expected to follow. They are trained to be precise and efficient in their work, and to carry out their missions with professionalism and attention to detail.
Skill: The Arditi are renowned for their skills as assassins, and their culture places a high value on physical prowess and combat training. Members of the group are trained to be masters of stealth and deception, as well as skilled fighters and marksmen.
Courage: The Arditi are not afraid to take on difficult or dangerous missions, and their culture places a high value on bravery and courage in the face of adversity. They are willing to risk their own lives to accomplish their goals, and are known for their willingness to take on seemingly impossible challenges.
Overall, the culture of the Arditi is one of dedication to a higher purpose, skillful execution of their tasks, and unwavering loyalty to their fellow assassins.
Type
Guild, Assassins
Alternative Names
Sacrificians, Nizari Ismailis
Demonym
Arditis
Location
Controlled Territories
Related Species
Related Ethnicities
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