“It was through Abú 'Alí and Abú Riḍá and Abu Sa'd,
O King, that the lion came before thee like the lamb.
At that time every one who came to thy Court
Came as a harbinger of triumph with news of victory.
Through Abu'l-Ghaná'im and Abu'l-Faḍl and Abu'l-Ma'álí
[Even] the grass of thy kingdom's soil grows up as stings.
If thou wast tired of Nidhám and Kamál and Sharaf,
See what hath been done to thee by Táj and Majd and
Sadíd!”
The Nidhámu'l-Mulk, however, did not long survive his
disgrace. While accompanying Maliksháh from Iṣfahán to
Assassination of
the Nidhámu'lMulk.
Baghdád, he halted on the 10th of Ramaḍán,
A.H. 485 (=October 14, 1092), near Naháwand,
a place memorable for the final and crushing
defeat there sustained by the Zoroastrian soldiers of the last
Sásánian monarch at the hands of the followers of the
Arabian Prophet, about the middle of the seventh century.
The sun had set, and, having broken his fast, he was proceeding
to visit the tents of his wife and family, when a
youth of Daylam, approaching him in the guise of a suppliant,
suddenly drew a knife and inflicted on him a mortal
wound. The supposed suppliant was, in fact, a member of
the redoubtable order of the Fidá'ís or Assassins, at this time
newly instituted by Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ and other chiefs of the
“New Propaganda”
*
of the Isma'ílí sect; and this, it is
generally said, was their first bold stroke of terror, though
Ibnu'l-Athír (X, 108-9)
*
mentions the earlier assassination
of a mu'adhdhin at Iṣfahán, and supposes that the execution
of a carpenter suspected of being an accomplice in
this murder by the Nidhámu'l-Mulk exposed him to the
vengeance of the Order. Apart from this, however, or of
that personal animosity which, according to the well-known
and oft-told tale, Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ bore against the Minister,
the openly expressed detestation in which the latter held all
Ráfiḍís or Shí'ites, and most of all the “Sect of the Seven,”
those formidable champions of the Isma'ílí or Fáṭimid Anti-
The Nidhámu'l-Mulk was deeply mourned by the vast majority of those whom he had ruled so wisely for thirty years, and though a fallen Minister is seldom praised by Eastern poets, many, as Ibnu'l-Athír (X, 71) tells us, were the elegies composed on him, of which the following graceful Arabic verses by Shiblu'd-Dawla * are cited:—
“The Minister Nidhámu'l-Mulk was a peerless pearl, which the
All-Merciful God esteemed as of great price,
But, precious as it was, the age knew not its value, so in
jealousy He replaced it in its shell.”
The author of the Chahár Maqála * says that an astrologer called Ḥakím-i-Mawṣilí, in whom the Minister had a great belief, had told him that his patron's death would follow his own within six months. This astrologer died in the spring of A.D. 1092, and when news of this was brought to the Minister from Níshápúr, he was greatly perturbed, and at once began to make all his preparations and dispositions for the death which actually befell him in the following autumn.
Ibnu'l-Athír (X, 72) alludes to the numerous stories about
the Nidhámu'l-Mulk which were current even in his time
(the thirteenth century), and of which later writers, as we
shall see, are yet more prolific. One of these apocryphal
narratives, which too often pass current as history, relates that
as the Minister lay dying of his wound he wrote and sent to
the Sulṭán Maliksháh the following verses:—
*
“Thanks to thy luck, for thirty
*
years, O Prince of lucky birth,
From stain of tyranny and wrong I cleansed the face of earth.
Now to the Angel of the Throne I go, and take with me
As witness of my stainless name a warrant signed by thee.
And now of life when four times four and four-score years have
fled
Hard by Naháwand doth the hand of violence strike me dead.
I fain would leave this service long, which now for me doth
end,
Unto my son, whom unto thee and God I now commend!”
I have elsewhere pointed out * that the last of these verses, in a slightly different form, was undoubtedly written by Burhání, Maliksháh's poet-laureate, to recommend his son Mu'izzí, who succeeded him in this office, to the Royal favour, and that the three first verses are obviously spurious. For firstly, we know, on the authority of the Chahár Maqála, that the Nidhámu'l-Mulk “had no opinion of poets, because he had no skill in their art”; secondly, that he was only about seventy-five years old at the time of his death, not ninety-six; and thirdly, that his numerous sons, as previously mentioned, had already obtained more lucrative posts in Maliksháh's domains than most people outside their family deemed at all necessary or desirable. I wish to emphasise this because it well illustrates the remarkable tendency of all peoples, but especially the Persians, to ascribe well-known anecdotes, verses, sayings, and adventures to well-known persons; so that, as already pointed out, the quatrains of a score of less notable poets have been attributed to 'Umar Khayyám, and, as we shall shortly see, stories are told about Náṣir-i-Khusraw and Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ which are borrowed from the biographies of other less notable or less notorious men.
Maliksháh only survived about a month the Minister whose long and faithful service he had rewarded with such ingrati- Death of Maliksháh. tude. On November 6, A.D. 1092, less than three weeks after the Nidhámu'l-Mulk's death, he went out hunting, and either caught a chill or ate something which disagreed with him, and, though he was bled, a fever supervened which proved fatal on November 19th. On this the poet Mu'izzí has the following well-known verse:—
“One month the aged Minister to heaven did translate;
The young King followed him next month, o'erwhelmed by
equal Fate.
For such a Minister alas! Alas! for such a King!
What impotence the Power of God on earthly power doth
bring!”
On the dismissal of the Nidhámu'l-Mulk in favour of his rival the Táju'l-Mulk, the same poet had already composed these lines:—
“The King, alas! ignored that lucky fate
Which granted him a Minister so great;
O'er his domains he set the cursed Táj,
And jeopardised for him both Crown and State!”*
Maliksháh was born in A.H. 445 (A.D. 1053-54) according
to the Ráḥatu'ṣ-Ṣudúr, two years later according to Ibnu'l-
Thus far we have spoken of such facts in the life of the Nidhámu'l-Mulk as are recorded by the earliest and most sober The legend of the Nidhámu'l-Mulk, Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ, and 'Umar Khayyám. historians, but some of the “many legends” concerning him to which Ibnu'l-Athír alludes are so celebrated and have in later times obtained so general a credence, both in Asia and Europe, that they cannot be altogether ignored in a work like the present. Of these legends at once the most dramatic and the most widely-spread is that which connects his earliest days with the formidable organiser of the “New Propaganda,”*
Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ, who is on more solid grounds associated with
his violent death. This legend, familiar to every admirer of
Chronological
difficulties
involved.
'Umar Khayyám,
*
involves chronological difficulties
so serious that, so long as the chief authority
which could be quoted in its favour was the
admittedly spurious Waṣáyá,
*
or “Testamentary Instructions,”
of the Nidhámu'l-Mulk, it was unhesitatingly repudiated by
all critical scholars, since its fundamental assumption is that
two eminent persons (Ḥasan-i-Ṣabbáḥ and 'Umar Khayyám)
who died at an unknown age between A.H. 517 and 518
(A.D. 1123-24) were in their youth fellow-students of the
Nidhámu'l-Mulk, who was born in A.H. 408 (A.D. 1017).
Now, the chances against two given persons living to be a
hundred years of age are very great; and, even if we assume
this to have been the case, they would still have been considerably
younger than the Nidhámu'l-Mulk, who, moreover,
appears to have finished his education and entered public life
at an early age.
*
This objection has been forcibly urged by
Houtsma in his preface to al-Bundárí (p. xiv, n. 2); and he
very acutely suggests that it was not the famous Nidhámu'l-