such, they revolved around the recruitment and training of the youthful devotees. The legends developed in stages from the time of Sinan and throughout the thirteenth century. Soon, the seemingly blind obedience of the fida’is to their leader was attributed, by their occidental observers, to the influence of an intoxicating drug like hashish. There is no evidence that suggests that hashish or any other drug was used in any systematic fashion to motivate the fida’is; contemporary non-Ismaili Muslim sources that are generally hostile toward the Ismailis remain silent on this subject. In all probability, it was the abusive name hashishi that gave rise to the imaginative tales disseminated by the Crusaders. The work of Farhad Daftary, most notably his The Assassin Legend: Myths of the Ismailis, contends with discrediting these fabrications. The Nizari Ismaili community centered around Alamut and founded by Hassan-i Sabbah engaged in guerilla warfare against their hostile neighbors, the anti-Shi'i Turko-Persian Seljuk Dynasty and the Sunni Caliphate of the Abbasids in Baghdad. Daftary argues that Western and Sunni discourses of the Middle Ages overlooked the intellectual environments and spiritual developments of the Nizari Isma'ilis. As a result, Western and Sunni literature discussing the Nizari Ismailis of the Alamut Period tended to overemphasize this community’s military strategies and its aspirations of overthrowing the Seljuk Dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphates by specifically focusing on the Nizari fida’is. The Nizari fida’is utilized the methodology of assassination as a key procedure in killing any major religious and political advisories; however, the fanfare surrounding this policy is not new as the Nizari Isma'ili community was not the first nor the last to make use of this strategy for political gain. There is evidence to suggest that the Nizar Ismaili fidai’is may have killed “fewer than five Frankish personalities during the entire period of the Crusaders’ presence at Outremer” which is the name known for the Crusader States of the Levant that lasted from 1098-1291 AD. The spectacle nature of the Nizari fida’is eventually led the term “Assassins” to become synonymous through the writings of Western figures including William of Tyre, Walter Map, and Marco Polo.<ref>Pagès, Meriem, From Martyr to Murderer: Representations of the Assassins in the Twelfth and Thirteenth-Century Europe, 184.</ref> Marco Polo’s travelogue entitled the Travels of Marco Polo is the most prominent work to use this trope for embellishing his narrative and providing a more intriguing experience for his readers.