The effect of this invocation of spring, of the Thaberistani poet, is, although in an opposite manner, no less remarkable in martial and literary history, than are the hymns, with which Tyrtæus animated the Spartans to the combat; and, if the Greek poet has been imitated in our own time, in the songs of the Prussian and Austrian soldiery, and with the happiest effect, nevertheless, no siege has ever been raised yet, either by the Pervigilium Veneris, or by Bürger’s imitation of it. This desertion of the siege, by the two commanders, explains its protraction, for full three years; a period, which, without being extended to thirty, appears amply sufficient, since Alamut, the strongest of the Assassin’s fortresses, yielded, on the third day, after being summoned by Hulaku. After the fall of Alamut, the residence of the grand-master, and the centre of the order, Atamelik Jowaini, the learned vizier and historian, asked and obtained from Hulaku, permission to search the celebrated library and archives of the order, for the purpose of saving the works which might be worthy of the khan’s preserving. He laid aside the Koran and some other precious books, and committed to the flames, not only all the philosophical and sceptical works, containing the Ismailite doctrine, and written in harmony with it, but also all the mathematical and astronomical instruments, and thus at once destroyed every source from which history might have derived a more circumstantial account of the dogmas of the Ismailites, and the statutes of the order. Fortunately, in his own history, he preserved the results of the information which he derived from the library and archives of the order, together with a biographical sketch of Hassan Sabah, from which all the more modern Persian historians, as Mirkhond and Wassaf, have collected their stories, and which we ourselves have likewise followed.[259]