Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/673

 HISTORY.] a sense of their former fame, and restored Persia to her independence as a nation. &quot; During the reign of Nadir an attempt was made to establish a British Caspian trade with Persia. The names of Jonas Hanway and John Elton were honourably con nected with this undertaking ; and the former has left most valuable records of the time and country. thirteen years in the greater part of Persia as it existed under Shah Abbas. No sooner had the crime become known than Ahmad Khan, chief of the Abdali Afghans, marched off rapidly with his men to Kandahar and took possession of that city and a certain amount of treasure. The chief of the Bakhtiaris, Rashid, also with treasure, fled to the mountains, from which his people had been drawn prior to the Indian expedition ; and the conspirators who had done the murderous deed invited Ali, a nephew of the deceased monarch, to ascend the vacant throne. By the action of Ahmad Abdali, Afghanistan was at once lost to the Persian crown, for this leader was strong enough to found an independent kingdom. The Bakhtiari encouraged his brother, Ali Mardan, to compete for the succession to Nadir ; and the nominee of the disaffected party hastened from Sistan to Mashhad to take advantage of his nomina tion. The prince was welcomed by his subjects ; he told them that the murder of his uncle was due to his own instigation, and, in order to conciliate them towards him in a practical manner, remitted the revenues of the current year and all extraordinary taxes for the two years following. Taking the title of Adil Shah, or the &quot;just &quot; king, he commenced his reign by putting to death the two princes Riza Kuli and Nasr Ullah, as well as all relatives who could, in his estimation, be considered his competitors, with the exception of Shah Rukh, son of Riza Kuli, whom he spared in case a lineal descendant of Nadir should at any time be required by the people. His calculations proved, however, no wiser than beneficent. He had not removed all dangerous members of the royal house, ,nor had he gauged the temper of the times or people. Adil Shah was soon dethroned by his own brother, Ibrahim, and .ah he in his turn was defeated by the adherents of Shah Rukh, ikh. w ho made their leader king. This young prince had a better and more legitimate title than that of the grandson of Nadir, whose usurpa tion was too recent an occurrence to have eradicated and supplanted a comparatively ancient dynasty of national kings. He was also grandson, on the mother s side, of the Safawi Shah Husain. Amiable, generous, and liberal- minded, and of prepossessing exterior, he proved to be a popular prince. But his friends and supporters had done well to have left him in honourable obscurity ; for he was neither of an age nor character to rule over a people led hither and thither by turbulent and disaffected chiefs, ever divided by the conflicting interests of personal ambition. No sooner had his claim to succession been admitted than his authority was subverted. Sa id Muhammad, son of Mirza Daiid, a chief mulla at Mashhad, whose mother was the reputed daughter of Sulaiman, collecting a body of men, and assuming the name of his maternal grandfather, declared himself king, and imprisoned and blinded Shah Rukh. Yiisuf All, the general command ing the royal troops, came to the rescue, defeated and slew Sulaiman, and replaced his master on the throne, reserving to himself the protectorship or regency. A new combina tion of chiefs, of which Ji afir the Kurd and Mir Alam the Arabian are the principal names handed down, brought about the death of Yiisuf All and the second imprisonment of Shah Rukh. These events were followed by a quarrel terminating in the supremacy of the Arab. At this June- 643 ture Ahmad Shah Abddli reappeared in Persian Klrarasan 1747-175 from Herat ; he attacked and took possession of Mashhad, slew Mir Alam, and, pledging the local chiefs to support the blinded prince in retaining the kingdom of his grand father, he returned to Afghanistan. But thenceforward this unfortunate young man was a mere shadow of royalty, and his purely local power and prestige had no further influence whatever on Persia as a country. The land was partitioned among several distinguished Further persons, who had of old been biding their opportunities, confu- or were born of the occasion. Foremost among these was Slon&amp;lt; Muhammad Hasan Khan, hereditary chief of those Kajars who were established in the south-east corner of the Caspian. His father, Fath All Khan, after sheltering Shah Tahmasp II. at his home in Astrabad, and long acting as one of his most loyal supporters, had been put to death by Nadir, who had appointed a successor to his chiefdom from the &quot;Yukari&quot; or &quot;upper&quot; Kajars, instead of from his own, the &quot; Ashagha,&quot; or &quot; lower.&quot; 1 Muhammad, with his brother, had fled to the Turkmans, by whose aid he had attempted the recovery of AstrAbad, but had not succeeded in regaining a permanent footing there until Nadir had been removed. On the murder of the tyrant he had raised the standard of independence, successfully resisted Ahmad Shah and his Afghans, who sought to check his progress in the interests of Shah Rukh, and eventually brought under his own sway the valuable pro vinces of Gilan, Mazandaran, and Astrabad, 2 quite a little kingdom in itself. In the large important province of Adarbaijan, Azad Khdn, one of Nadir s generals, had established a separate government ; and All Mardan, brother of the Bakhtiari chief, took forcible possession of Ispahan, empowering Shah Rukh s governor, Abu 1-Fath Khan, to act for the new master instead of the old. Had Ali Mardan declared himself an independent ruler he would have been by far the most important of the three persons named. But such usurpation at the old Safawi capital would have been too flagrant an act for general assent ; so he put forward Isma il, a nephew of Shah Husain, as the representative of sovereignty, and himself as one of his two ministers, the other being Karim KhAn, a young chief of the Zend Kurds. Shah Isma il, it need scarcely be said, was a mere nominal king, and possessed no real authority; but the ministers were strong men in their way, and the Zend especially promised to be useful in his generation, for he had many high and excellent qualities. After a time Ali Mardan was assassinated, and Karim Khan became the sole living power at Ispahan. The story of the period is thus told by Watson. &quot;The three rivals, Karim, Azad, and Muhammad Hasan, pro- Struggle ceeded to settle, by means of the sword, the question as to which of of the them was to be the sole master of Persia. A three-sided war then three ensued, in the course of which each of the combatants in turn rivals, seemed at one time sure to be the final conqueror. Karim, when he had arranged matters at Ispahan, marched to the borders of Mazandaran, where the governor of that province was ready to meet him. After a closely-contested battle victory remained with Muhammad Hasan ; who, however, was unable to follow up the foe, as he had to return in order to encounter Azad. That leader had invaded Gilan, but, on the news reaching him of the victory which the governor of Mazandaran had gained, he thought it prudent to retrace his steps to Sultanfyah. Karim reunited his shattered forces at Tehran, and retired to Ispahan to prepare for a second campaign. When he again took the field it was not to measure himself once more with the Kajar chief, but to put down the pre tensions of Azad. The wary Afghan, however, shut himself up in Kazvm, a position from which he was enabled to inflict much in jury on the army of Karim, while his own troops remained unharmed 1 There were three branches of the Kajar tribe, i.e., the Suldus, Tuugkut, and Jalaiyar. The last, according to Watson, became settled in Iran and Turan, and seem at first to have given their name to all the tribe. 2 Watson. Malcolm says that Gflan was under one of its own chiefs, Hidaivat Khan.
 * riod of From Nadir Shah to the Kajar Dynasty. After the
 * archy. death of Nadir Shah something like anarchy prevailed for