Nizari Ismaili texts have portrayed different relationships between the Fatimid dāʿi (summoner) Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. after 1071) and the dāʿī Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ (d. 1124) — founder of the Nizari polity (fl 1090-1256) in Iran. Ḥasan’s (auto)biography, the Sarguẓasht-i Sayyidnā (Biography of Our Master), embedded in the Ilkhanid era (fl 1256-1353) chronicles mentions Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s unsuccessful missionary activities in Iran on behalf of the Fatimid imam-caliph al-Mustanṣir (d. 1095); a previously unstudied twelfth century tract, Ḥikāyat-i Nāṣir-i Khusraw (The Account of Nāṣir-i Khusraw), creates linkages between the two where Nāṣir precedes Ḥasan both in chronology and authority; whereas, several centuries later, the Kalām-i Pīr inverts this relationship by making Nāṣir a disciple of Ḥasan. After almost a millennium, while Nāṣir-i Khusraw is central to the foundation narratives of present-day Badakhshani Nizari Ismaili communities and his poetry and teachings indelibly mark their culture, Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ — save for the recognition of his role in history and advocacy of the Shiʿi doctrine of taʿlīm (authoritative teaching) of the imam — is no longer present in the religious consciousness of the Nizari communities he was instrumental in founding. This paper examines the shifting biographies and constructions of the chronological and the anachronic master and protégé relationships between the two Ismaili dāʿis in different phases of the development of Nizari Ismaili Shiʿism. How did the authors imagine their communities? What notions of authority and identity were being negotiated over time? What wider factors prompted these constructions and reconstructions in different geographic and socio-political contexts? The content, functions and purposes of the texts are used to derive understandings of the respective communities over time and their needs to accord primacy, authority and charisma to the legacy of one of the two while setting the other to play second fiddle.