The Alamut Library

The collection it solved

Everything known about it comes from a hostile witness, and this entry is largely about that problem.

Juvayni served the Mongols, wrote the history of their conquests, and detested the Ismailis. His account says the library was substantial, that it contained Qur'ans he thought worth keeping and instruments he thought worth taking, and that the remainder was doctrinal material he classified as heresy and burned.

He also used the library before destroying it. His history of the Nizari state — the fullest account anyone wrote — draws on Ismaili chronicles he found at Alamut, including a life of Hasan-i Sabbah that he quotes and paraphrases. So the principal source for the community exists because a man read their archive and then set fire to it.

What the collection held beyond that is inference. Nizari Ismailism was intellectually serious; Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the greatest scientist of the age, spent years at Alamut and wrote there, including his Ismaili works. A community that could host him had a working scientific library, and the astronomical instruments Juvayni removed support that.

The doctrinal literature is the great loss. Ismaili thought of this period survives mainly through what the Tayyibi communities in Yemen and India preserved, and through what hostile authors quoted in order to refute it.

The `figures` field says none. Nobody counted, and the only man who could have did not.

Al-Tusi's own position is worth noting carefully. He wrote Ismaili works at Alamut and later disavowed them, saying he had been under compulsion. Both his Ismaili writings and his disavowal survive, and historians have argued about which to believe for seven hundred years.

There is one further category the sources imply: the Nizari state's own administrative records, kept over 166 years across a network of castles. Juvayni used them and nothing survives.

The room and the rules

A castle on a narrow rock ridge at about 2,100 metres, approached by a single path, with the valley visible for miles in every direction.

The site has been surveyed and partly excavated. Cisterns, storage chambers cut into the rock, and the remains of walls survive; the buildings themselves are largely gone. Where the library sat is not known.

The choice of site is the entry's physical argument. Alamut was chosen because it could not be taken by assault, and for a century and a half it was not. The Nizari state survived encirclement by the Seljuks, repeated campaigns, and its own reputation, because its centres were on rocks.

That is a preservation strategy of a kind, and it failed in the only way it could: Alamut surrendered. The last imam, Rukn al-Din Khurshah, negotiated with the Mongols and gave up the castles, and the library was handed over rather than stormed.

Access was `scholars` in the sense the community itself defined. Alamut was the doctrinal centre of a religious movement with an initiatory structure, and its library served the leadership and the scholars it maintained. Al-Tusi's years there — whether as an honoured guest or, as he later claimed, effectively a captive — indicate the level of intellectual activity.

The destruction was thorough. Juvayni's own account is the closest thing to an inventory, and it is a paragraph.

The surrender is also why anything was described at all. A stormed castle burns with its contents unexamined; a negotiated one is inventoried by the victors, and the inventory is what we have.

The cisterns and rock-cut chambers that do survive also indicate a garrison provisioned for long sieges, which is consistent with a fortress that was never taken by force and finally gave up on terms.

Alamut's position also explains why the collection had to be handed over rather than hidden. A castle on a ridge with one path has nowhere to evacuate books to, and the surrounding valley was already held by the besiegers.

What followed

It is this section's clearest case of a collection known only through the person who destroyed it.

That situation is not unique — hostile sources describe many losses — but the combination is: Juvayni examined the books, took what he valued, used the rest as material for his own history, and burned it. The community's account of itself survives filtered entirely through an enemy who had read the originals.

The consequences for Ismaili studies were long. For seven centuries the Nizaris were known in Western and Sunni scholarship principally through Juvayni, through Crusader-era travellers' tales, and through the Assassin legend that grew out of both — the hashish, the garden of paradise, the fanatical devotees, none of which has any support in Ismaili sources.

That began to change only in the twentieth century, when Ismaili manuscripts held privately in Yemen, India and Central Asia became available to scholars. The community's own literature, preserved outside the reach of the people who suppressed it, is now the basis of the field.

Al-Tusi is the other survival. He left Alamut with the Mongols, persuaded Hulagu to fund an observatory at Maragha, and produced the astronomical work that corrected Ptolemy and that Copernicus later used. The scientist who had worked in the Alamut library went straight into the service of the man who burned it.

For this section, the entry makes a point about evidence that applies well beyond it. A collection destroyed by people who wrote nothing leaves a silence. A collection destroyed by a literate enemy leaves a description, and the description is the problem.

The Assassin legend is worth naming as a case study in how a destroyed library gets replaced by a story. With no Nizari sources available, Marco Polo's garden of paradise filled the gap for six centuries and is still doing so in popular culture.

The `figures` field says none for the same reason the collection is famous. Juvayni counted nothing, and the one man with the opportunity had no interest in the question.