Assassins targeted Sunni elites, not Crusaders, despite popular belief.

Evidence

Contrary to a widespread but erroneous belief, the Assassins were not pri­ marily concerned with war against the Crusaders, and comparatively few Cru­ saders fell to their daggers. Their enemy was the Sunni establishment, and their purpose was to frighten, weaken, and finally overthrow it. Their victims were the princes and officers of the Sunni state, and the qadis and other dignitaries of the Sunni religious hierarchy. Their emissaries, with negligible exceptions, made no attempt to escape, but died in the accomplishment of their mission. This was indeed part of the mission, and added greatly to the terror which they struck. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1440

Categorization

• XREF: Corrects the Crusader-centric framing of the Assassins that shaped their Western reception — connects to Bernard Lewis’s broader project of tracing how European images of Islam formed. — connects to: The medieval Assassins killed mostly Muslims, not Crusaders
• SEED: The Assassins story is a case study in how a word (‘assassin’) and its legend detached from the actual target politics — usable in the Islam-West representation cluster as an example of mediated misrepresentation.