Assassins were named after hashish? Historians aren't so sure.

The story is almost too good: a medieval cult of killers so devoted to their leader that they carried out murders in a drug-fueled stupor, high on hashish. It is the version Marco Polo popularized, and it has stuck to the word 'assassin' ever since. The problem is that the people it describes almost certainly never told it about themselves.

The word traces to the Arabic 'Asasiyyun' — members of the Nizari Ismaili order, a Shia Muslim sect active from the 11th century onward, centered at the mountain fortress of Alamut in present-day Iran. Their enemies, chiefly Sunni chroniclers and later Crusader writers, called them 'hashishiyya,' a term scholars now read less as a factual description and more as a slur — the medieval equivalent of calling someone a degenerate.

Etymonline notes the 'hashish-eaters' etymology directly but flags that the connection is disputed: the label may have been pure propaganda, designed to discredit a politically inconvenient sect. The Nizaris were disciplined, theologically sophisticated, and operated a network of agents across the Islamic world — not the profile of a band of stoned zealots.

The word entered French as 'assassin' by the 13th century, then English shortly after, carrying the drug legend with it. The legend outlived the Nizari order's fortress by centuries. Today the word means simply 'one who kills for political or ideological reasons' — the hashish long gone, the slander quietly immortalized.