PERSIA 323 in tales of his palaces, his superb thrones, his immense treasures, his unrivalled poets and musicians, his 50,000 Arab horses, and his 3,000 beautiful women, the most lovely of whom | was Shirin or Irene, a Greek and a Christian, I whose beauty and whose love form the sub- ject of a thousand poems. The latter years of his reign were unfortunate and inglorious. The emperor Heraclius, suddenly rousing from the sloth and self-indulgence which had hith- erto marked his life, invaded Persia with a powerful army, and in six years Chosroes was stripped of all his foreign conquests, his fa- mous palace at Dastagerd was plundered and burned, and finally he himself was dethroned and murdered by his eldest son Siroes or Shi- rueh in 628. From this time till the acces- sion of Yezdegerd III. in 632, Persia was giv- en up to anarchy. The Mohammedan Arabs were already attacking the empire, and Yez- degerd in vain attempted to stem the tide of armed fanatics that poured from the adjacent deserts. Two battles, one fought at Cadesia in 636, and the other on the plains of Nehavend in 641, where 100,000 men are reported to have fallen, decided the fate of Persia. The defeated monarch, flying from the field, took refuge in his eastern provinces, where for sev- eral years he wandered a fugitive till in 651 he was murdered by a miller, and with him ended the line of the Sassanian kings and the religion of the magi. After horrible massacres the peo- ple, persuaded by the sword, embraced Mo- hammedanism, only a small, obscure, and per- secuted remnant daring to adhere to the an- cient faith of Persia. (See^ GUEBKES.) For the next two centuries Persia was subject to the caliphs. But in 868 an adventurer named Soffar, who had been a pewterer and afterward a bandit, gathered a native force and expelled the viceroys of the caliph. He founded a dy- nasty known as the Soffarides, of which three more princes maintained a precarious authority, till in the beginning of the 10th century Persia was divided between the families of Samani and Dilami, the first of which reigned over eastern Persia and Afghanistan, and the second over the rest of the country. Under these dy- nasties Persia fell beneath the yoke of the Sel- juks, and was ruled by Togrul Beg, Alp Arslan, and Malek Shah, all of whom were conquerors greatly celebrated in oriental history. Their dynasty declined and perished in the 12th cen- tury, and after a long period of anarchy Persia was overrun and conquered by the Mongols led by Hulaku Khan, the grandson of Genghis (1258), who established the seat of his empire at Maragha in Azerbijan. The next important event in the history of Persia was the conquest and devastation by Tamerlane toward the end of the 14th century. Under his successors civil war almost continually prevailed, until in the beginning of the 16th century Ismail, a de- scendant of a famous saint, Sheik Suifi, suc- ceeded in making himself master of the king- dom and founded the Suffavean dynasty. He died in 1523, and was succeeded by his son Tamasp, whose reign of 53 years was eminently prosperous. Abbas, who ascended the throne about 1587, was a still greater sovereign, though to his own family he proved a sanguinary ty- rant. After his death in 1628 the Suffavean dynasty gradually declined, and was at length overthrown by the Afghans, who conquered Persia in 1722, and ruled it for seven years with horrible tyranny, till they were expelled by the celebrated Nadir Shah, who in 1736 himself as- cended the throne. His reign was memorable for success over foreign enemies and for bloody cruelty to his family and people. After his death in 1747 a series of revolutions occurred from conflicting claims to the throne, and order was not fully restored till toward the close of the century, when Aga Mohammed, first of the reigning dynasty of Kadjars, became shah. His successors have been Feth-Ali (1797-1834), Mohammed (1835-1848), and the present shah, Nasr-ed-Din, who ascended the throne in 1848, being then 18 years old. Persia has been in- volved in three wars since the accession of this dynasty. Of these, two were with Russia, the first of which terminated in 1813 and the second in 1828, both of them disastrously to Persia, which lost successively the provinces of Georgia, Mingrelia, Erivan, Nakhitchevan, and the great- er part of Talish, the Russian frontier being ad- vanced to Mt. Ararat and the left bank of the Aras ; and the third was a war with England, which began in 1856, having originated in a se- ries of disputes between officials of the Persian government and the British minister at Teheran. After repeated victories of the English troops in the south of Persia under the command of Generals Outram and Havelock, it was brought to an end on March 4, 1857, by a treaty signed at Paris, favorable to the demands of Great Britain. In 1860 a terrible pestilence and fam- ine devastated parts of the country ; and a still greater famine, due to the exceptionally light fall of snow and rain in 1870 and 1871, is be- lieved to have caused the death of two millions of human beings. In the summer of 1873 the shah Nasr-ed-Din made a tour through Europe, visiting Vienna, Paris, and London, his diary of which has been published in English (Lon- don, 1874). See Sir J. Malcolm's "History of Persia" (2 vols., London, 1815) ; Rawlinson's "Five Great Monarchies" (4 vols., 1862-'7); " History of Persia from the Beginning of the 19th century," by R. Grant Watson (1866); Spiegel'ss Eranische AlterthumsTcunde (2 vols., 1871-'3); "A General Sketch of the History of Persia," by Clements R. Markham (1874) ; "Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia," by Lady Sheil (1856) ; " A Journal of Two Years' Travel in Persia," by Robert B. M. Binning (2 vols., 1857); "Journal of a Diplomate's Three Years' Residence in Persia," by Edward B. Eastwick (2 vols., 1864); and "A Journey through the Caucasus and Interior of Persia," by Augustus H. Mounsey, of the British lega- tion at Teheran (1872).
