Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/359

325 Notwithstanding his apparent liberality, Er Reshid was greedy and rapacious and procured the money for his prodigalities by a system of the most unscrupulous robbery and extortion. The legitimate income of the Khalifate is said to have been about twenty-six million dinars, yet so far did the treasures he accumulated, by fair means or foul, under the mask of extravagant liberality, exceed the wealth he flung away upon his caprices that he is said to have left nearly a thousand millions of dinars, besides a fabulous quantity of precious stones and other effects (among the rest, thirty thousand beasts of burden, a hundred camel-loads of jewels and twenty thousand male slaves) representing, in all probability, a much larger sum; and these enormous riches it is evident from the accounts of Arabian chroniclers that he amassed by the vilest and most oppressive means. “He overwhelmed the people,” says a modern historian, “with taxes and imposts and not unfrequently despoiled his generals and governors of the wealth they had gained in his service.” Abdulmelik es Salih, mentioned above, whom, at Jaafer’s prompting, he had appointed governor of Egypt and married to his daughter, he shortly afterward, on pretence of his intention to aspire to the Khalifate, stripped of all his property and cast into prison, where he remained till the death of the tyrant, when the latter’s successor, El Amin, released him and made him governor of Syria, thus manifesting the utter groundlessness of the accusation. Mohammed ben