Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/435

 Judging from the dates, the town on the site just mentioned was the Nishapur visited by Ibn Batutah, about the year 1355, when he described it as ' a little Damascus, so called because of its fruits, its gardens, and its beauty ; four canals traverse it, and its bazars are fine and large ; its mosque is admirable, being situated in the midst of the market-place and adjoining four collegiate madrasahs, which are well supplied with water and attended by a large number of students, who devote themselves to law and learn the Kuran ; these four madrashas are among the most beautiful in the province.'

The city must have been found in like condition by the Spanish envoy Clavijo a half century later, for he wrote that he and his fellow-ambassadors arrived *on Saturday, the 26th of July, [1404] ... at a great city which is called Nishapur. . . The city of Nishapur is in a plain, and is surrounded by gardens and very handsome houses. . . .This city is very large and well supplied with all things. It is the chief city of Media, and here they find turquoises, and, though they are met with in other places, those of Nishapur are the best that are known.' This town, however, was doomed to destruction by still another earthquake in 1405, when the city of Nishapur on the modern site came into being.

The present settlement, five hundred years old, appears to have been more free from seismic shocks than its immediate predecessors, but it has hardly been more exempt from the ravages of war. The Turkomans have at all times been ready to follow the lead of their marauding ancestors in pillaging the province; the Uzbegs from Transoxiana plundered the city in the latter part of the sixteenth century; and the two Afghan invasions in the eighteenth (the first, which brought the downfall of the Saffarid dynasty, in 1722; the second in 1749, after the death of Nadir Shah) left nothing more than horrors to relate. Yet the city renewed its vigor again under Abbas