Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveHistory fact

In 1090 Hasan-i Sabbah, an Ismaili Muslim missionary, took the mountain fortress of Alamut in northern Iran without a battle, after his followers had quietly settled in and around it. By his own account, he paid the departing lord with a draft for 3,000 gold dinars.

Alamut, 1090

History

The story behind the card

Alamut stood on a rocky ridge in the Alborz mountains and was held for the Seljuk sultan Malik Shah by a local lord named Mahdi. Hasan-i Sabbah, born in Qom around 1050, had become a missionary for the Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam. He spent years winning over people in the valleys and inside the garrison before revealing himself and claiming the castle; the draft he gave Mahdi was payable by a Seljuk official. Most details come from Hasan's memoir, the Sargudhasht-i Sayyidna ('the story of our master'), now lost but read and quoted by Juvayni and later Persian historians. Alamut remained the centre of the Nizari Ismaili state, which Hasan led after 1094, until the Mongols took it in 1256.

Türkçe oku
İsmaili davetçi Hasan Sabbah, 1090'da kuzey İran'daki Alamut Kalesi'ni savaşmadan ele geçirdi; önce taraftarlarını kaleye ve çevresine sessizce yerleştirmişti. Kendi anlattığına göre, kaleden ayrılan beye 3.000 altın dinarlık bir ödeme senedi verdi.
Alamut, 1090

Alamut, Elburz Dağları'nda sarp bir kaya sırtının üzerindeydi ve Selçuklu Sultanı Melikşah adına Mehdi adlı yerel bir bey tarafından tutuluyordu. 1050 dolaylarında Kum'da doğan Hasan Sabbah, Şii İslam'ın bir kolu olan İsmaililiğin davetçisi olmuştu. Yıllarca vadilerdeki halkı ve kale muhafızlarını kendi tarafına kazandı; kim olduğunu ancak bundan sonra açıklayıp kaleyi sahiplendi. Mehdi'ye verdiği senedi bir Selçuklu görevlisi ödeyecekti. Bu ayrıntıların çoğu, Hasan'ın bugün kayıp olan anıları Sergüzeşt-i Seyyidnâ'dan (“Efendimizin hikâyesi”) biliniyor; kitabı Cüveynî ve sonraki İranlı tarihçiler okuyup aktardı. Alamut, 1256'da Moğollar kaleyi alana kadar, Hasan'ın 1094'ten sonra önderlik ettiği Nizari İsmaili devletinin merkezi olarak kaldı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Hasan-i Sabbah
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveTechnology

The standard shipping container lets goods travel from ship to train to lorry without being unpacked. Put to work at scale by Malcolm McLean in 1956, it made world trade far cheaper.

Before containers, cargo was loaded piece by piece: sacks, crates and barrels carried aboard by teams of dockworkers, while ships often waited in port for days. Malcolm McLean, an American trucking businessman, had a converted tanker, the Ideal X, carry 58 containers from Newark to Houston in April 1956. He estimated that loading loose cargo cost $5.86 a ton, against about 16 cents a ton by container. In the late 1960s international standards fixed the box sizes and the corner fittings that lock boxes to cranes, trucks and each other, so any port could handle any container. Ports needed far fewer dockworkers, and many cities built new container terminals away from their old harbours.

Smithsonian / National Inventors Hall of FameRead card
DriveArt

Hip-hop began at 1970s block parties in the Bronx, New York, where DJs used two turntables to repeat the drum breaks of records so that people could keep dancing.

Hip-hop is often dated to 11 August 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played at a back-to-school party his sister Cindy held in the community room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc had noticed that dancers went wildest during the break, the short stretch of a record where the singing stops and the drums and rhythm take over. With two copies of the same record on two turntables, he switched from one to the other to stretch the break for minutes. Dancers who waited for it became known as b-boys and b-girls, and MCs began speaking and rhyming over the beat, which grew into rapping. DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa took the ideas further.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureRead card
DriveArt

Motown, the record label Berry Gordy founded in Detroit in 1959, made its records in a converted house called Hitsville U.S.A. Between 1960 and 1969, 79 of its songs reached the American top ten.

Berry Gordy Jr. had worked on a Detroit car assembly line and written songs before he started Tamla Records in January 1959 with an 800-dollar loan from his family; the company became Motown Record Corporation in 1960. In 1959 he bought a former photography studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, turned the back into a small recording studio and moved his family upstairs. Songwriters, producers, the house band later known as the Funk Brothers and coaches who taught stage manners all worked under one roof, and a weekly meeting voted on which recordings to release. The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder came through the house. As a Black-owned label, Motown won huge white audiences at a time when American radio and charts were still divided by race.

GRAMMY Museum / Motown MuseumRead card
WonderHistory

The 'Three Sisters' are maize, beans and squash, planted together by Indigenous farmers of the Americas so that each crop helps the others grow.

All three crops were first domesticated in Mesoamerica, today's Mexico and Central America: squash about 10,000 years ago, then maize and beans over the following thousands of years. Growing them together later spread across much of North America. Each plant has a job. The maize stalk is a pole for the bean vine to climb; bacteria living in small lumps on the bean roots turn nitrogen from the air into a form plants can use, which enriches the soil; and the broad squash leaves shade the ground, keeping it moist and holding back weeds. Among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the north-east, the crops appear in stories as three sisters who thrive only together, and a modern experiment found that their traditional mixed planting produced more food energy and protein than any of the crops grown alone.

Smithsonian Folklife FestivalRead card
WonderTechnology

OpenStreetMap is a free map of the world built by volunteers since 2004. Anyone can add or correct a road, path or building, and anyone can use the data, from phone apps to aid agencies.

Steve Coast started OpenStreetMap in 2004 while studying at University College London. Britain's national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, did not release its data freely, so he cycled round Regent's Park with a GPS tracker and entered the first street himself that December. Volunteers around the world followed, walking and cycling streets or tracing satellite photos. The project proved its worth after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, when volunteers mapped the roads, buildings and camps of Port-au-Prince in about two days, giving aid groups one of the most detailed maps of the city then available. Humanitarian mappers have done the same after many disasters since.

OpenStreetMap FoundationRead card
Next card in the archiveAlamut, a mountain fortress in northern Iran, was built to survive long sieges: its defenders kept water in cisterns cut into the rock, brought more in through channels and grew food on terraced slopes below the walls.Read next →