Page:Historyofpersiaf00watsrich.djvu/265

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FRESH TROUBLES.
245

a signal service on the part of Sir John Macdonald to extricate his Government from such an obligation, and the necessities of Persia made the receipt of 200,000 tomans of peculiar value to her at that crisis. But for the payment of that sum, General Paskiewitch would have continued to hold Azerbaeejan.

In the meantime troubles arose in several parts of Persia. The Turkomans, as might have been anticipated, rose in rebellion. The people of Yezd drove the Shah's son, their governor, from that city, and took possession of his effects. The inhabitants of Ispahan refused the payment of the revenue due by them, and the great province of Kerman presented a scene of open revolt; to crush which the Prince Hassan Ali Meerza was now sent at the head of an army. The crown-prince at this time intended to proceed in the autumn of the same year upon an embassy to Russia; and in the month of May he visited Tehran, to consult personally with the Shah, over whom he regained all that influence which had been dormant for a time in consequence of the events of the late war. The king now conferred upon him the governments of Kermanshah and Hamadan, in addition to that of Azerbaeejan, which he had up to this time held, and he triumphed over his late colleague Allah-yar Khan, the Asef-ed-Dowieh, who was dismissed from the post of prime minister and publicly degraded by receiving the punishment of the bastinado. It was the Shah's command that the prince should superintend the infliction of this chastisement, and it is illustrative of the anger with which the recollection of the ex-Vizeer's pusillanimity filled him, that the prince inflicted with his own hand several blows on the feet of the prostrate man.