These are only a few of the many writers and travellers whose works throw light on this period. I have mentioned The later Ṣafawí period not calcu­lated to inspire Persian his­torians. them because they are the ones I have chiefly used, but a long and serviceable account of a much larger number will be found in Schefer's Introduction to his edition of le Père Raphaël du Mans mentioned above. The European writers are here, for reasons well set forth by Sir John Malcolm, * more in­structive and illuminating than the Persian historians, for whom, as he says, “we can hardly imagine an era more unfavourable. A period of nearly a century elapsed without the occurrence of any one political event of magnitude; and yet the extraordinary calm was productive of no advantage to Persia. The princes, nobles, and high officers of that kingdom were, it is true, exempt from the dangers of foreign or internal war; but their property and their lives were the sport of a succession of weak, cruel and debauched monarchs. The lower orders were exposed to fewer evils than the higher, but they became every day more unwarlike; and what they gained by that tranquillity which the State enjoyed lost almost all its value when they ceased to be able to defend it. This period was distinguished by no glorious achieve­ments. No characters arose on which the historian could dwell with delight. The nation may be said to have existed on the reputation which it had before acquired till all it possessed was gone, and till it became, from the slow but certain progress of a gradual and vicious decay, incapable of one effort to avert that dreadful misery and ruin in which it was involved by the invasion of a few Afghan tribes, whose conquest of Persia affixed so indelible a disgrace upon that country that we cannot be surprised that its historians have shrunk from the painful and degrading narration.”

Shaykh 'Alí Ḥazín * takes precisely the same view. “Many ages having now elapsed,” says he, “since civilization, tran­quillity, and the accomplishment of all worldly blessings had attained a state of perfection in the beautiful provinces of Îrân, these were become a fit object for the affliction of the malignant eye. * The indolent King and princes, and the army that sought nothing but repose and for near a hundred years had not drawn the sword from the scabbard, would not even think of quelling this disturbance, * until Maḥmúd * with a large army marched into the provinces of Kirmán and Yazd, and, having committed much plunder and devastation, proceeded on his route to Iṣfahán. This happened in the early part of the year 1134/1721.”

Jonas Hanway * speaks in a similar strain. “Persia never enjoyed,” says he, “a more perfect tranquillity than in the beginning of the present [i.e. the eighteenth] century. The treaties she had concluded with her neighbours were perfectly observed and secured her against any foreign invasions; whilst the effeminacy and luxury of her inhabitants, the ordinary consequences of a long peace, left no room to apprehend any danger from the ambition of her own subjects. This monarchy, which had suffered so many revolutions in past ages, seemed to be settled on a solid foundation when the news of its subversion surprised the whole world. The authors of this amazing catastrophe were a people hardly known even to their own sovereigns, and have now acquired a reputation only by the fame of those nations which they brought under their subjection. These people…are com­prised under the general denomination of Afghans.”*

The policy of Sháh 'Abbás the Great has been described above as wise and far-sighted, but this statement needs some Defects of the policy of Sháh 'Abbás. qualification; for, while it greatly strengthened the power of the Crown, it undoubtedly con­duced in the end to the weakening of the nation and the degeneration of its rulers. Previous kings had been embarrassed chiefly by ambitious relatives, powerful tribal chiefs, and turbulent townsmen; and for all these things Sháh 'Abbás set himself to provide remedies. Instead of allowing his sons to hold high administrative posts and take a prominent part in wars, he either blinded them or put them to death, or immured them in the ḥaram, where, as Krusinski well explains, * they lead a life of hardship and privation rather than of luxury and pleasure, while receiving a very imperfect education, and falling under the influence of the palace eunuchs, who ended by becoming the dominant power in the State. To his destruction of the great nobles and tribal chiefs, and his creation of the Sháh-sevens as a counterpoise to the seven tribes to whom his predecessors owed their power, allusion has already been made. * A more extraordinary example of his application of the maxim Divide et impera was his deliberate creation in all the large towns of two artificially antagonized parties, named, ac­cording to Krusinski, * Pelenk and Felenk, who indulged at intervals in the most sanguinary faction-fights, they being, as Krusinski puts it, “so opposite, and so much enemies one to the other, that people in different States, in arms against one another, do not push their aversion and enmity farther.” He adds (p. 92) that “though they fought without arms, because they were not supposed to make use of anything else but stones and sticks, it was with so much fury and bloodshed that the King was obliged to employ his guards to separate them with drawn swords; and hard it was to accomplish it, even with a method so effectual, insomuch that at Ispahan in 1714 they were under a necessity, before they could separate the combatants, to put about three hundred to the sword on the spot.”

Besides the eunuchs, there grew up and attained its full development under “Mullá Ḥusayn,” the last unhappy Domination of the Mullás, typified by Mullá Muḥammad Báqir-i-Majlisí. though well-meaning occupant of the Ṣafawí throne at Iṣfahán, another dominant class whose influence hardly made for either spiritual unity or national efficiency, namely the great ecclesiastics who culminated in the redoutable Mullá Muḥammad Báqir-i-Majlisí, the persecutor of Ṣúfís and heretics, of whom we shall have to speak at some length in a future chapter. His admirers * call attention to the fact that his death, which took place in 1111/1699-1700, * was followed in a short time by the troubles which culminated in the supreme disaster of 1722, and suggest that the disappearance of so saintly a personage left Persia exposed to perils which more critical minds may be inclined to ascribe in part to the narrow intolerance so largely fostered by him and his congeners.