or the victim, of great national disasters. Fetteh Ali was attached to the Mahomedan religion, but he was by no means a fanatic, nor did he evince any dislike to the society of those who were not of Islam. He was unremitting in his attention to the discharge of the business of the state, and if in reading the history of his reign we find some acts of barbarity recorded, we must make due allowance for him on account of the character and customs of his subjects; the unsettled nature of the times on which he was cast, and the necessity of making himself feared by those who would have wished to ascend his throne. The Shah's body was conveyed from Ispahan to the tomb which he had caused to be prepared at Koom.
Koom is a city which was built in the year of the Hejira 203,[1] and which lies about eighty miles to the south of Tehran, on the road from that place to Ispahan. It at one time[2] possessed a considerable population, but it owes, in modern times, its celebrity to the mosque of Fatima, which makes it a favourite place of burial. In one of the finest of the gardens adjacent to the city was the mausoleum of Rustem Khan, a prince of the royal house of Georgia, who had embraced the tenets of the Mahomedan religion in order to obtain the viceroyalty of his native country. In the time of the Sefaveeans, Koom boasted of handsome quays along either side of its river, a well-built bridge across it, and large bazaars for the transaction of commerce, both wholesale and retail; also of commodious caravanserais and beautiful mosques. It was, however, subsequently almost completely destroyed
- ↑ Macdonald-Kinneir’s Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire.
- ↑ See Chardin’s Travels, vol. ii.
