Assassins saw themselves as levelers of royal power imbalance

Evidence

The first is from a Persian poet of the early 13th century, himself a supporter, probably a member, of the Assassin order: “Brothers,” he says, “when the time of triumph comes … then by one single warrior on foot a king may be stricken with terror, though he own more than a hundred thousand horsemen.” That expresses, vividly and simply, the self-perception of the political assassin, or, as we might say nowadays, of the terrorist. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 560

Categorization

• XREF: The asymmetry rhetoric — one foot-warrior terrorizing a hundred-thousand-horsemen king — is the medieval Arab-Islamic antecedent of modern terrorist self-justification, relevant to any genealogy of asymmetric warfare discourse.