The word assassin may owe nothing to the drug it seems named after
Assassin comes, via Italian and French, from hashshashin, a label pinned on a medieval Ismaili order and linked to hashish. The popular story says its killers were drugged. Many Eastern writers and a growing number of Western historians doubt that drug use had much to do with the name at all.
The Order of Assassins, founded by Hassan-i Sabbah, operated in the Near East from the eleventh to the thirteenth century and targeted members of the Abbasid, Seljuk and Fatimid elites as well as Crusader leaders, for political and religious ends. Medieval Latin had a verb for the deed by the mid-1200s. In printed English the verb first shows up in a 1600 pamphlet by Matthew Sutcliffe, five years before Shakespeare used it in Macbeth.
The practice is far older than the word. The Egyptian pharaoh Teti, of the Sixth Dynasty in the twenty-third century BC, may be the earliest known victim, though the evidence is thin. The records are firmer for later kings: Amenemhat I was reportedly killed by his own palace guards, and court documents describe a failed coup against Ramesses III in 1155 BC. Seven Achaemenid Persian kings were murdered between 550 and 330 BC, and the Chinese treatise The Art of War discussed the tactic's merits.
Political thinkers treated it as a tool of statecraft. In India, Chanakya analysed it at length in the Arthashastra, and his pupil Chandragupta Maurya used it against rivals. Philip II of Macedon fell in 336 BC and Julius Caesar in 44 BC, and three successive Rashidun caliphs died this way during early Muslim civil conflicts. Organised groups existed too: the sicarii of 6 AD predated both the medieval Assassins and Japan's shinobi by centuries.
Legal opinion slowly turned. Tyrannicide was common in Renaissance Europe, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries jurists began condemning the killing of foreign leaders. Balthazar Ayala is called the first prominent lawyer to do so, and Alberico Gentili argued in 1598 that it was against rulers' own interest, since it enraged successors. Modern history shows the stakes: the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 is blamed for igniting the First World War.
Source: Assassination
