Alp Arslán lingered on for a day or two after he had received his death-blow, long enough to give to his faithful Alp Arslán's dying words and dispositions. minister, the Nidhámu'l-Mulk, his dying instruc­tions. His son Maliksháh was to succeed him on his throne; Ayáz, another son, was to have Balkh, save the citadel, which was to be held by one of Maliksháh's officers; and his brother, Qáwurt, was to con­tinue to hold Kirmán and Fárs. * He died with the utmost resignation. “Never,” said he, “did I advance on a country or march against a foe without asking help of God in mine adventure; but yesterday, when I stood on a hill, and the earth shook beneath me from the greatness of my army and the host of my soldiers, I said to myself, ‘I am the King of the World, and none can prevail against me’: wherefore God Almighty hath brought me low by one of the weakest of His creatures. I ask pardon of Him and repent of this my thought.” * He was buried at Merv, and some poet composed on him the famous epitaph:—

Sar-i Alp Arslán dídí zi rif'at rafta bar gardún:
Bi-Marw á, tá bi-khák andar sar-i-Alp Arslán bíní!

“Thou hast seen Alp Arslán's head in pride exalted to the sky; Come to Merv, and see how lowly in the dust that head doth lie!”

Maliksháh was only seventeen or eighteen years of age when he was called upon to assume control of the mighty Accession of Maliksháh. empire which his great-uncle and his father had built up, and his reign opened with threats of trouble. Altigín, the Khán of Samarqand, seized Tirmidh and routed the troops of Ayáz, the King's brother; Ibráhím, the Sulṭán of Ghazna, took prisoner his uncle 'Uthmán, and carried him and his treasures off to Afghánistán, but was pursued and routed by the Amír Gumushtigín and his retainer Anúshtigín, the ancestor of the new dynasty of Khwárazmsháhs, whereof we shall have to speak in another chapter; and, worst of all, another of Maliksháh's uncles, Qáwurt Beg, the first Seljúq king of Kirmán, marched on Ray to contest the crown with his nephew. The two armies met near Hamadán, at Karaj, and a fierce fight ensued, which lasted three days and nights. Finally Qáwurt's army was routed, and he himself was taken captive and put to death, while his sons Amíránsháh and Sulṭánsháh, who were taken with him, were blinded, but the latter not sufficiently to prevent him from succeeding his father as ruler of Kirmán. The Nidhámu'l-Mulk, for his many and signal services at this crisis, received the high, though afterwards common, title of Atábek.*

The following year saw the death of the Caliph al-Qá'im and the succession of his grandson al-Muqtadí. A year later his Fáṭimid rival succeeded in re-establishing his authority in Mecca, but only for a twelvemonth, while as a set-off to this he lost Damascus. In the same year (A.D. 1074-75) Malik-sháh established the observatory in which the celebated 'Umar Khayyám ('Umar ibn Ibráhím al-Khayyámí) was employed with other eminent men of science * to compute the new Jalálí Era which the Sulṭán desired to inaugurate, and which dates from the Naw-rúz, or New Year's Day (March 15th) of the year A.D. 1079. About two years later Maliksháh gave his daughter in marriage to the Caliph al-Muqtadí, and in the same year lost his son Dá'úd, whose death so afflicted him that he would scarcely suffer the body to be removed for burial, and could hardly be restrained from taking his own life. Time, however, and the birth of another son (Sanjar, so called in allusion to his birthplace, Sinjár, near Mawsil) three years later, gradually mitigated his grief. About this time (A.D. 1082-83) the curse uttered against the Nidhámu'l-Mulk and his sons bore, as it might seem, its first fruits. Jamálu'l-Mulk, the Premier's eldest son, was of a proud and vindictive disposition, and hearing that Ja'farak, the King's jester, had ridiculed his father, he hastened from Balkh, where he was governor, to the Court, dragged the unfortunate jester from the King's presence, and caused his tongue to be torn out through an incision in his neck, which cruel punishment proved instantly fatal. Maliksháh said nothing at the time, but shortly afterwards secretly ordered Abú 'Alí, the 'Amíd of Khurásán, on pain of death, to poison Jamálu'l-Mulk, which, through a servant of the doomed man, he succeeded in doing.

Maliksháh twice visited Baghdád during his reign. The first visit was in A.H. 479 (March, 1087), when, in company with the Nidhámu'l-Mulk, he visited the tombs of the Imám Músá (the seventh Imám of the Shí'a), the Ṣúfí saint Ma'rúf al-Karkhí, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, and Abú Ḥanífa. He also sent costly presents to the Caliph al-Muqtadí, and, on the day after his arrival, played in a polo match. About the same time he gave his sister Zulaykhá Khátún in marriage to Muḥammad b. Sharafu'd-Dawla (on whom he bestowed ar-Raḥba, Ḥarrán, Sarúj, Raqqa, and Khábúr in fief), and his daughter to the Caliph; while his wife, Turkán Khátún, bore him a son named Maḥmúd, who was destined to play a brief part in the troublous times which followed his father's death; for Aḥmad, another son whom Maliksháh designed to succeed him, died at Merv at the age of eleven, a year after Maḥmúd's birth, about the same time that an alliance was concluded with the House of Ghazna by the marriage of another of Maliksháh's daughters to the young King Mas'úd II.

Maliksháh's second visit to Baghdád took place in October, 1091, only a year before his death. Since his last visit he had Extent and splendour of Maliksháh's Empire. conquered Bukhárá, Samarqand, and other cities of Transoxiana, and had received at distant Káshghar the tribute sent to him by the Emperor of Constantinople. Never did the affairs of the Seljúq Empire seem more prosperous. The boatmen who had ferried Maliksháh and his troops across the Oxus were paid by the Nidhámu'l-Mulk in drafts on Antioch, in order that they might realise the immense extent of their sovereign's dominions; and at Latakia, on the Syrian coast, Maliksháh had ridden his horse into the waters of the Mediterranean and thanked God for the vastness of his empire. He rewarded his retainers with fiefs in Syria and Asia Minor, while his army, numbering 46,000 regular troops whose names were registered at the War Office, pushed forward his frontiers into Chinese Tar­tary, * and captured Aden on the Red Sea. He supervised in person the administration of justice, and was always accessible to such as deemed themselves oppressed or wronged. His care for religion was attested by the wells which he caused to be made along the pilgrim route, and the composition which he effected to relieve the pilgrims from the dues hitherto levied on them by the Warden of the Sacred Cities (Amíru'l-Ḥara-mayn ); while his skill in the chase was commemorated by minarets built of the skulls and horns of the beasts which he had slain. His love of the chase was, indeed, one of his ruling passions, and he caused a register to be kept of each day's bag, which sometimes included as many as seventy gazelles. The author of the Ráḥatu'ṣ-Ṣudúr (ff. 56-57) had himself seen one of these registers (called Shikár-náma) in the handwriting of the poet Abú Ṭáhir al-Khátúní, who com­posed in Persian one of the oldest biographies of Persian poets (now, unfortunately, as it would appear, no longer extant) entitled Manáqibu'sh-Shu'ará. Yet, as Ibnu'l-Athír tells us (X, 74), he felt some scruples about his right to slay so many innocent creatures. “Once,” says this historian, “he slew in the chase a mighty bag, and when he ordered it to be counted it came to ten thousand head of game. And he ordered that ten thousand dínárs should be distributed in alms, saying, ‘I fear God Almighty, for what right had I to destroy the lives of these animals without necessity or need of them for food?’ And he divided amongst his companions of robes and other valuable things a quantity surpassing computation; and there­after, whenever he indulged in the chase, he would distribute in alms as many dínárs as he had slain head of game.” Of the many cities of his empire, Iṣfahán was his favourite residence, * and he adorned it with many fine buildings and gardens, including the fortress of Dizh-Kúh, which a few years later fell into the hands of a notorious leader of the Assassins, Ibn 'Aṭṭásh.

During all these prosperous years the wise old Nidhámu'l-Mulk, now nearly eighty years of age, was ever at the young The Nidhamu'l­Mulk's fall. King's elbow to advise and direct him. In his leisure moments he was occupied in superintend­ing or visiting the colleges which he had founded at Baghdád and Iṣfahán, conversing with learned doctors (whom he ever received with the greatest honour), and com­posing, at the request of Maliksháh, his great Treatise on the History and Art of Government (properly entitled Siyásat-náma, but often referred to by Persian writers as the Siyaru'l-Mulúk or “Biographies of Kings”), one of the most remarkable and instructive prose works which Persian literature can boast, now rendered accessible to all Persian scholars in the late M. Schefer's edition, and to a wider circle by his French translation. Of his twelve sons, all, or nearly all, held high positions in the State, and the achievements of himself and his family seemed to recall and rival the Barmecides * of old. But the same cause—Royal jealousy excited by envious rivals —which brought about the fall of the House of Barmak (and which has caused, and will probably continue to cause, the fall of every great Minister whom Persia has produced) was at work to compass the overthrow of the Nidhámu'l-Mulk. His chief enemy was Turkán Khátún, the favourite wife of Maliksháh, over whom she exercised a great influence. Her chief ambition (in which she was seconded by her Minister the Táju'l-Mulk) was to secure to her little son Maḥmúd the succession to the throne, while the Nidhámu'l-Mulk was known to be in favour of the elder Barkiyáruq, then a boy of twelve or thirteen. The immediate cause of the catastrophe was the arrogant conduct of one of the Minister's grandsons (son of that Jamálu'd-Dín who had been poisoned some ten years before by the Sulṭán's orders), who was Governor of Merv. One who had suffered at his hands laid a complaint before Maliksháh, who sent an angry message to the Nidhámu'l-Mulk, asking him ironically whether he was his partner in the throne or his Minister, and complaining that his relations not only held the richest posts under Government, but, not content with this, displayed an arrogance which was intolerable. The aged Minister, angered and hurt by these harsh and ungrateful reproaches from one who owed him so much, answered rashly, “He who gave thee the Crown placed on my head the Turban, and these two are inseparably connected and bound together,” with other words of like purport, * which he would hardly have employed in calmer moments, and which were reported, probably with exaggerations, to the Sulṭán. The Nidhámu'l-Mulk was dismissed in favour of Abu'l-Gha-ná'im Táju'l-Mulk, the protègè of Turkán Khátún above mentioned, and this was accompanied by other ministerial changes not less unwise and unpopular, Kamálu'd-Dín Abu'r-Riḍá being replaced by Sadídu'l-Mulk Abu'l-Ma'álí, and Sharafu'l-Mulk Abú Sa'd by Majdu'l-Mulk Abu'l-Faḍl of Qum, who is coarsely satirised for his miserliness in one of the few Persian verses of Abú Ṭáhir al-Khátúní which time has left to us. * Another contemporary poet, 'Bu'l-Ma'álí Naḥḥás, condemns these changes of Ministers in the following lines:—*