These exotic and foreign Nizari figures were often portrayed as incredibly dedicated to their cause and leader known in Western texts as the Old Man. This figure according to the scholarship of Farhad Daftary and Meriem Pages in their contemporary reevaluation refers to Hassan-i Sabbah or Rashid al-Din Sinan, the leader of the Nizari Ismailis in Syria. These fantastic images of the dedicated soldier are often accompanied by descriptions of their supposed usage of hashish, a drug related to cannabis, and their desires to reach a “garden of paradise.” It is important to note that the usage of hashish is not referenced throughout Ismaili texts of this period. Sunni polemic texts known as “black legends” adopted the terms Hashishiya and malahida to describe their supposed devotion to this drug and their status heretics according to many Sunni Muslim medieval scholars. These fictitious accounts focused on the “sinister objectives, immoral doctrines and libertine practices” of the Ismaili communities in Syria and Persia and aimed to discredit their devotion to Islam and their connections to Imam Ali through his marriage to Fatima. In the light of these findings, this study contends that the Assassin legends, especially those based on the hashish connection and the secret ‘garden of paradise’, were actually fabricated and put into circulation by Europeans. It seems that the occidental observers of the Nizari Ismailis, especially those who were least informed about Islam and the Near East, generated these legends (initially in reference to the Syrian Nizaris) gradually and systematically, adding further components or embellishments in successive stages during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this process, the westerners, who in the Crusaders’ times had a high disposition towards imaginative and romantic eastern tales, were greatly influenced by the biases and the general hostility of the non-Ismaili Muslims towards the Ismailis, hostility which had earlier given rise to the anti-Ismaili ‘black legend’ of the Sunni polemicists as well as some popular misconceptions about the Ismailis. In all probability, such popular misconceptions also circulated about the Nizaris in the non-literary local circles of the Latin East during the Crusaders’ times; they would have been picked up by the Crusaders through their contact with rural Muslims working on their estates and the lesser educated Muslims of the towns, in addition to whatever information they could gather indirectly through the oriental Christians. In this connection, it is significant to note that similar legends