Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/671

 HISTORY.] PERSIA 641 the hour and occasion. He has been designated a &quot; robber chief &quot; ; but his antecedents, like those of many others who have filled the position, have redeeming points of melodramatic interest. He was driven to this mode of life by injustice, and raised to consideration above ordi nary banditti by ability as much as by physical force. It was the repute he had thus obtained which caused Saifu d-Din Beg, a general of Shah Tahmasp, and chief of a tribe, to unite his fortunes to Nadir s, and so enable him to rise on the ladder of his ambition. That Nadir misused his advantages by acts of treachery is not to be denied. Such was, unfortunately, one of the visible roads to success in those barbarous times. i A map attached to Krusinski s volumes (see Plate VIII.) illustrates the extent of Persian territory in 1728, or one year before Ashraf was finally defeated by Nadir, and some eight years prior to the date on which Nadir was himself proclaimed king. It shows, during the reign of the Safawfs, Tiflis, Erivan, Khoi, and Baghdad to have been within the limits of Persia on the west, and in like manner Balkh and Kandahar to have been included within the eastern border. There is, however, also shown, as a result of the Afghan intrusion and the impotency of the later Safawl kings, a long broad strip of country to the west, including Tabriz and Hamadan, marked &quot;conquests of the Turks,&quot; and the whole west shore of the Caspian from Astrakan to Mazandaran marked &quot;conquests of the czar of Muscovy&quot;; Makran, written Mecran, is designated &quot;a warlike inde pendent nation.&quot; If further allowance be made for the district held by the Afghan invaders as part of their own country, it will be seen how greatly the extent of Persia proper was reduced, and what a work Nadir had before him to restore the kingdom to its former proportions. But the former proportions had been partly reverted to, and would doubtless have been in some respects exceeded, both in Afghanistan and the Ottoman dominions and on the shores of the Caspian, by the action of this inde fatigable general, had not his sovereign master, Tahmasp II., acting on his own account, been led into a premature treaty with the Turks. Nadir s anger and indignation had been great at this weak proceeding ; indeed, he had made it the ostensible cause of the shah s deposition. He had addressed letters to all the military chiefs of the country, calling upon them for support ; he had sent an envoy to Constantinople insisting upon the sultan s restora tion of the Persian provinces still in his possession that is, Georgia and part of Adarbaijan, and he had threatened Baghdad with assault. As regent, he had failed twice in taking the city of the khalifs, but on the second occasion he had defeated and killed its gallant defender, Topal Othman, and he had succeeded in regaining Tiflis, Kars, and Erivan. 1 Russia and Turkey, naturally hostile to one another, had taken occasion of the weakness of Persia to forget their mutual quarrels and unite to plunder the tottering kingdom of the Safawi kings. A partition treaty had been signed between these two powers in 1723, by which the czar was to take Astrabad, Mazandaran, Gilan, part of Shirwan and Daghistan, while the acquisitions of the Porte were to be traced out by a line drawn from the junction of the Arras and Kur rivers, and passing along by Ardabil, Tabriz, and Hamadan, and thence to Karman- shah. Tahmasp was to retain the rest of his paternal kingdom on condition of his recognizing the treaty. The ingenious diplomacy of Russia in this transaction was manifested in the fact that she had already acquired the greater part of the territory allotted to her, while Turkey had to obtain her share by further conquest. But the combination to despoil a feeble neighbour was outwitted 1 Malcolm. by the energy of a military commander of remarkable 1728-1738. type. Nadir Shah. Nadir, it has been said, was proclaimed Nadir s shah in the plains of Moghan in 1736. Mirza Mahdi corona- relates how this event was brought about by his address to n the assembled nobles and officers on the morning of the Nau-ruz,&quot; or Persian New- Year s Day, the response to that appeal being the offer of the crown. In the spirit of the third English Richard, he refused to accept the high dignity, but eventually suffered his petitioners, on certain conditions, to &quot; buckle fortune on his back.&quot; The conditions were that the crown should be hereditary in his family, that the claim of the Safawis was to be held for ever extinct, and that measures should be taken to bring the Shi ahs to accept uniformity of worship with the Sunnis. The mulla bashi (or high priest) objecting to the last, Nadir ordered him to be strangled, a command which was carried out on the spot. On the day following, the agreement having been ratified between sovereign and people, he was pro claimed emperor of Persia. At Kazvin the ceremony of inauguration took place. Having girt on the royal scimitar and put the crown on his head, he took the accustomed oath. The edict expressing the royal will on the religious question is dated in June, but the date of coronation is uncertain. From Kazvin Nadir moved to Ispahan, where he organized an army for a proposed expedition against Kandahar, then in the possession of a brother of Mahmud, the conqueror of Shah Husain. But before setting out for Afghanistan he took measures to secure the internal quiet of Persia, attacking and seizing in his stronghold the chief of the marauding Bakhtiaris, whom he put to death, retaining many of his men for service as soldiers. With an army of 80,000 men he marched through Khur asan and Sistan to Kandahar, which city he blockaded ineffectually for a year ; but it finally capitulated on the loss of the citadel. Balkh fell to Riza Kiili, the king s son, who, moreover, crossed the Oxus and defeated the Uzbeks in battle. Besides tracing out the lines of Nadirabad, a town since merged in modern Kandahar, Nadir had taken advantage of the time available and of opportunities pre sented to enlist a large number of men from the AbdAli and Ghilzai tribes. It is said that as many as 16,000 were at his disposal. His rejection of the Shi ah tenets as a state religion seems to have propitiated the Sunni Afghans, and it is not to be otherwise wondered at that a man of his war like habits should have succeeded in attaching many of the rough mountaineers to his person. Such a force, in addi tion to his own army, rendered him a truly formidable foe, and the prospect which now opened out before him must have fired his heart and the hearts of his warriors with restless exultation. He had sent an ambassador into Hindustan requesting Invasion the Mughal emperor to order the surrender of certain unruly Afghans who had taken refuge within Indian terri tory, but no satisfactory reply was given, and obstacles were thrown in the way of the return of the embassy. The Persian monarch, not sorry perhaps to find a plausible pretext for encroachment in a quarter so full of promise to booty-seeking soldiers, pursued some of the fugitives through Ghazni to Kabul, which city was then under the immediate control of Nasr Khan, governor of eastern Afghanistan, for Muhammad Shah of Dehli. This function ary, alarmed at the near approach of the Persians, fled to Peshdwar. Kabul had long been considered not only an integral part but also one of the main gates of the Indian empire ; notwithstanding a stout resistance on the part of its commandant, Shir or Shirzah Khan, the place was stormed and carried (1738) by Nadir, who, after slaugh tering the greater part of the garrison, took possession of it and moved on to the eastward. Mirza Mahdi relates XVIII. 8 1