Part 11

The facts stated in this letter are not contradicted either by Persian of Indian historians; though the latter find reasons for the great defeat of their countrymen suffered at Karnal, in the rashness of some of their leaders and the caution of others; and they state that even after the victory the conqueror would have returned to Persia on receiving two millions sterling, if the disappointed ambition of an Indian minister had not urged him to advance to Delhi. But it is not necessary to seek for causes for the overthrow of an army who were so panic-struck that they fled at the first charge, and nearly twenty thousand of whom were slain with hardly any loss to their enemies; and our knowledge of the character of Nadir Shah forbids our granting any belief to a tale which would make it appear that the ultimate advantages to be obtained from this great enterprise, and the unparalleled success with which it had been attended, depended less upon his genius than upon the petty jealousies and intrigues of the captive ministers of the vanquished Mahomet Shah.

The causes which led Nadir to invade India have been already stated; nor were they groundless. The court of Delhi had certainly not observed the established ties of friendship. It had given shelter to the Afghans who fled from the sword of the conqueror; and this protection was likely to enable them to make another effort to regain their lost possessions, and consequently to reinvolve Persia in war. The ambassadors of Nadir, who had been sent to make remonstrances on this subject, had not only been refused an answer, but were prevented from returning, in defiance of the reiterated and impatient applications of that monarch. This proceeding, we are told, originated more in irresolution and indecision than from a spirit of hostility; but it undoubtedly furnished a fair and justifiable pretext for Nadir's advance. Regarding the other motives which induced him to undertake this enterprise, we can conjecture none but an insatiable desire of plunder, a wish to exercise that military spirit he had kindled in the Persians, or the ambitious view of annexing the vast dominions of the sovereign of Delhi to the crown of Persia. But if he ever cherished this latter project he must have been led by a near view of the condition of the empire of India, to reject it as wholly impracticable. We are, however, compelled to respect the greatness of that mind which could resolve, at the very moment of its achievement, upon the entire abandonment of so great a conquest; for he did not even try to establish a personal interest at the court of Delhi, except through the operation of those sentiments which his generous conduct in replacing him upon his throne might make upon the mind of Mahomet Shah.

Nadir claimed, as a prize which he had won, the wealth of the Emperor and a great proportion of that of his richest nobles and subjects. The whole of the jewels that had been collected by a long race of sovereigns, and all the contents of the imperial treasury, were made over by Mahomet Shah to the conqueror. The principal nobles, imitating the example of their monarch, gave up all the money and valuables which they possessed. After these voluntary gifts, as they were termed, had been received, arrears of revenue were demanded from distant provinces, and heavy impositions were laid upon the richest of the inhabitants of Delhi. The great misery caused by these impositions was considerably augmented by the corrupt and base character of the Indian agents employed, who actually farmed the right of extortion of the different quarters of the city to wretches who made immense fortunes by the inhuman speculation, and who collected, for every ten thousand rupees they paid into Nadir's treasury, forty and fifty thousand from the unhappy inhabitants, numbers of whom perished under blows that were inflicted to make them reveal their wealth; while others, among whom were several Hindus of high rank, became their own executioners rather than bear the insults to which they were exposed, or survive the loss of that property which they valued more than their existence.

The approach of Nadir Shah to Delhi had filled the inhabitants of that city with dread; but the strict discipline which his troops observed on their first arrival restored confidence to all. This, however, was but of short duration. The monarch himself had occupied a palace in the city, and had sent some troops to different quarters of it to maintain tranquillity and to protect the inhabitants from insult and injury. The conqueror entered the capital on March 8th, and on that and the two succeeding days all was quiet; but on the night of the 10th it was reported that Nadir was dead. This report, which was first circulated by some designing persons, instantly spread, and a thoughtless mob made a furious assault upon the Persians who were scattered about the town as safeguards. These, who were divided in small parties, and quite unsuspicious of attack, were almost all murdered; and we must cease to cherish any general sentiments of pity for the depraved nobles of Delhi, when assured by concurring authorities that most of those at whose palaces troops were stationed for their protection gave them up without effort to the fury of the populace, and even in some instances assisted in their destruction.

Nadir, when he first heard of this tumult, sent several persons to explain to the populace their delusion and their danger; but his messengers were slain. He remained with all the Persians he could assemble in the palace which he occupied till the day dawned, when he mounted his horse and rode forth to endeavor, by his presence, to quell the tumult. But his moderation only inflamed the insolence and fury of those whom, even Indian historians inform us, it was his desire to spare; and he at last gave his troops, who had arrived from their encampment near the city, orders for a general massacre. He was too well obeyed: the populace, the moment the Persians began to act, lost all their courage; and from sunrise till twelve o'clock Delhi presented a scene of shocking carnage, the horrors of which were increased by the flames that now spread to almost every quarter of that capital.

Nadir, after he had issued the fatal orders, went into the small mosque of Roshin-u-dowlah, which stands near the centre of the city, and remained there in a deep and silent gloom that none dared to disturb. At last the unhappy Mahomet Shah, attended by two of his ministers, rushed into his presence, exclaiming, "Spare my people!" Nadir replied, "The Emperor of India must never ask in vain," and he instantly commanded that the massacre should cease. The prompt obedience which was given to this command is remarked by all his historians as the strongest proof of the strict discipline which he had introduced into his army.

The number of persons slain on this occasion has been differently estimated, and from the nature of the scene it could not be correctly ascertained. An author who has been often referred to conjectures that about one hundred twenty thousand perished; while another European writer nearly doubles this amount. But an Indian historian of respectability reduces this exaggerated estimate to the moderate calculation of eight thousand persons: and there is every reason to conclude that his statement is nearer the truth than any of those which have been mentioned. Two nobles who were supposed to have caused the riot fled, with conscious guilt, to a small fortress near Delhi. They were pursued, taken, and put to death with those who were deemed their accomplices, who amounted to about four hundred persons.

A very few days after the occurrence of these events, a marriage was celebrated between the second son of Nadir and a princess of the imperial house of Timur; and the succession of festivities that attended these nuptials gave a color of joy to scenes which abounded with misery; but the majority of the inhabitants of Delhi appear to have been of a light and dissolute character. We are indeed told by an Indian author that numbers regretted the departure of the Persians. The drolls and players of the capital began, immediately after they went away, to amuse their countrymen with a ludicrous representation of their own disgrace; and the fierce looks and savage pride of their conquerors, which had been so late their dread, became in these imitations one of their chief sources of entertainment.

Nadir remained at Delhi fifty-eight days (1739). Before he quitted it, he had a long and secret conference with Mahomet Shah, in which it is supposed he gave him such counsel as he deemed best to enable him to preserve that power to which he was restored. To all the nobles of the court he spoke publicly, and warned them to preserve their allegiance to the Emperor, as they valued his favor or dreaded his resentment. To those who were absent he wrote in similar terms; he informed them that he was so united in friendship with Mahomet Shah that they might be esteemed as having one soul in two bodies; and, after desiring them to continue to walk in the path of duty to the imperial house of Timur, he concluded these circular-letters in the following words: "May God forbid! but if accounts of your rebelling against your Emperor should reach our ears we will blot you out of the pages of the book of creation."

The conqueror had behaved with considerable moderation and kindness toward the chief omrahs of the court of Delhi; but he must have despised their luxurious and effeminate habits. We, indeed, learn his sentiments from a remarkable anecdote. When speaking one day to Kummer-u-din, who was then vizier, he demanded how many ladies he had? "Eight hundred fifty," was the reply. "Let one hundred fifty of our female captives," said Nadir, "be sent to the vizier, who will then be entitled to the high military rank of a _mim-bashee_, or commander of a thousand."

The march of Nadir from India was literally encumbered with spoil. The amount of the plunder that he carried from that country has been estimated variously. The highest calculation makes it upward of seventy millions sterling; the lowest is considerably more than thirty. A great part of this was in precious stones, of which Nadir was immoderately fond. When on his march from India he was informed that several of the most valuable crown-jewels had been secreted by some of his followers, he made this a pretext for searching the baggage of every man in his army, and appropriating all the jewels that were found to himself. The soldiers murmured, but submitted; and their not resisting this despotic act is an extraordinary proof of the subordination which he had established. He was, however, in general kind and liberal to his troops: he had given to each man a gratuity of three months' pay at the fall of Kandahar; he gave them as much more after the victory of Karnal; and they received a still greater bounty before he marched from Delhi.

The troops of Nadir, we are told, suffered much in their retreat from India by the intense heat to which they were exposed. Their passage over the rivers of the Punjab and the Indus was delayed by accidents to the temporary bridges which he had constructed, and in one instance by the threatened attack of the mountaineers of Kabul, whose forbearance the proud conqueror did not disdain to purchase; and when we consider the nature of the country through which he had to pass, the immense train of baggage with which his army was accompanied, and the danger that might have arisen from the slightest confusion, we cannot blame the prudence with which he acted upon this occasion.

The greatest expectation was excited in Persia at the prospect of the return of their victorious monarch. The inhabitants of that country had already felt the benefit of his triumphs. He had commanded that all taxes should be remitted for three years: and they began to anticipate scenes of unheard-of joy and abundance. The most exaggerated reports were circulated of the vast riches which their sovereign and his soldiers had acquired; and all conceived that Nadir was disposed to enjoy himself, from the number of artificers and musicians which he brought from India. Curiosity, too, was eager to behold the train of elephants which attended his march. That noble animal had become a stranger to the plains of Persia; and the natives of that country were only familiar with its shape from seeing its figure represented in the sculpture of ancient times. Sanguine minds were led, by a natural association of ideas, to believe that their present ruler was the destined restorer of their country to its former glory; and the conqueror was hailed, at his return, as a hero whose fame had eclipsed that of a Sapor or a Nushirwan.

The soldiers of Nadir were, we are informed, after the expedition to India, most anxious for repose; but that Prince was too well acquainted with the consequences of this indulgence to permit them to enjoy it. He had, after he passed the Indus, led them through the deserts of Sind to the attack of a feudatory chief, who had established himself in the government of that province. This ruler had courted Nadir Shah when he first threatened the invasion of India, as he deemed such a measure favorable to his views of independence; but when his possessions were made over to the Persian monarch he changed his policy; and, lodging all his treasure and property in the fortress of Amerkote, made a feeble attempt at opposition; but his capital was taken and plundered, and he was compelled to surrender himself to the mercy of the conqueror; who, however, satisfied with his submission and the possession of his wealth, restored him to the government of the province, which he agreed henceforth to hold as a tributary to the crown of Persia.

After this expedition Nadir marched to Herat, where he made a proud display of the jewels and plunder he had acquired in India; among which the most remarkable was the celebrated throne of the Emperor of Delhi, made in the shape of a peacock, and ornamented with precious stones of every description. This gorgeous exhibition took place on June 4, 1740; and on that day and several others the court, army, and populace were amused with pageants, shows, and entertainments of every kind; but Nadir, though satisfied that this public celebration of triumph was calculated to raise his fame with his subjects and to gratify the vanity of his soldiers, appears always to have dreaded the danger of inaction. He moved his army from Herat; and after meeting his son, Reza Kuli, and bestowing valuable presents upon him and the other princes of his family, he moved toward Bulkh, where he had ordered preparations to be made for his crossing the Oxus to punish the sovereign of Bokhara, who, unmindful of his established alliance, had taken advantage of his absence in India to make inroads into the province of Khorasan.

The motives which induced Nadir to proceed upon this expedition were soon apparent. He had no desire to extend the boundary of his empire in a direction where he knew it could not be maintained, but he wished to visit upon the inhabitants of this part of Tartary those calamities which they were in the annual habit of inflicting upon the frontier provinces of Persia. Abul Fyze Khan, who was the ruler of the Usbegs at this period, boasted a lineal descent from Genghis; but he appears to have inherited none of the spirit of his great ancestor. He was terrified into submission at the approach of Nadir, and sent his vizier to deprecate the wrath of that monarch. The minister was well received, but told that his master must immediately surrender if he desired to save himself from destruction and his country from ruin. While these negotiations were carried on the Persian army advanced by rapid marches to Bokhara, and on August 23d, five days after they had crossed the Oxus, encamped within twelve miles of that capital, where his short expedition was brought to a close by the personal submission of Abul Fyze Khan, who, attended by all his court, proceeded to the tents of Nadir Shah, and laid his crown and other ensigns of royalty at the feet of the conqueror, who assigned him an honorable place in his assembly; and a few days afterward restored him to his throne on the condition that the Oxus should remain, as it had been in former periods, the boundary of the two empires. This treaty was cemented by an alliance between the daughter of the ruler of Bokhara and the nephew of his conqueror; and after its conclusion a great number of Tartars were, with the concurrence of their own monarch, enrolled in the Persian army, whose commander probably esteemed the services of these hardy warriors as of more consequence to the peace of his own dominions and the fulfilment of his future views of ambition than all the wealth he had brought from India.

The arms of Nadir were next directed against the kingdom of Khaurizm, which is situated to the westward of Bokhara, and stretches along both banks of the Oxus to the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Prince of this country, whose name was Ilburz, neither merited nor received such human treatment as Abul Fyze Khan. He had committed frequent depredations upon the Persian territories; and, conceiving that the strength of his fortresses would secure him from vengeance, he resolved on resistance. The King of Bokhara had sent a mission to advise him to submit to the arms of Nadir: he not only treated this friendly counsel with disdain, but, in violation of laws which the most savage nations respect, he slew those through whom it was conveyed. This conduct greatly irritated the monarch of Persia, who, after he had defeated his army and made him prisoner, doomed him and twenty of his chief officers to death. The possessions of Ilburz were bestowed upon Taher Khan, a cousin of the sovereign of Bokhara, and consequently a direct descendant of the celebrated Genghis.

When the winter of this year was far advanced, Nadir marched to Khelat, to which place he continued from his most early years to be much attached. He had directed that its fortifications should be improved, that a palace should be built, and that aqueducts should be constructed to improve the fertility of its fields. He had also ordered that all his treasures should be carried thither; and a peaceful retirement to this cherished spot, after the toils and dangers of war were at an end, was one of the most innocent of those dreams which amused the fancy of this indefatigable conqueror.

After a short residence at Khelat Nadir proceeded to Mushed, which he made the capital of his empire; and during three months that he remained in this city his time was passed in constant festivities. Five monarchs had been subdued in five years. The empire of Persia had not only been rescued from a foreign yoke, but its limits had been extended as far as the Oxus to the north and the Indus to the east; and the hero by whom all this had been accomplished promised his exulting subjects that the Turks should soon be driven from the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates; but honor required that, before any other expedition was undertaken, Nadir should revenge the blood of his brother, Ibrahim Khan, who had been slain in an attack of the Lesghis.

When the army was on its march to Daghestan an event occurred which cast a dark cloud over all the fair prospects that dawned upon Persia, and exhibited in the strongest view the miserable condition of those empires whose fate hangs upon the disposition and talents of a despotic sovereign. An advanced corps, chiefly composed of Afghans, had, by their extraordinary valor, gained the greatest advantages over the Lesghis; and Nadir was hastening by the way of Mazandaran to their support, when, pursuing his march through one of the forests in that country, a ball from an assassin, who had concealed himself behind a tree, wounded him in the hand and killed his horse. The Prince, Reza Kuli, who was near him, galloped toward the spot from which the shot had been fired; but neither his efforts nor those of his guards that aided him could succeed in the attempts to seize the fugitive, who, favored by the thickness of the wood, effected his escape. He was afterward taken; and the historian of Nadir asserts that he was the agent of a chief of a barbarous tribe who cherished a secret resentment against the conqueror.

This accident, though it made a deep and indelible impression upon the mind of Nadir, did not prevent his proceeding to attack the Lesghis; but he never engaged in an enterprise of more hazard. These mountaineers defended themselves with the most desperate bravery; and the rugged nature of the whole country of Daghestan, which they inhabit, made it almost impossible to subdue them. The bravest troops of the Persian army were worn out with the fatigue of this harassing war; and the preparations which the Russians began to make at Astrakhan, though dictated by a fear that Nadir meant to invade their country after he had subdued the Lesghis, gave the latter every encouragement to persevere in their resistance; and the Persian monarch was compelled to retire from this expedition with very partial success and very great loss.

Nadir had, from the day on which his life was attempted, entertained suspicions of his eldest son, Reza Kuli. He summoned him to his presence. The Prince instantly obeyed, and was on his arrival made prisoner and deprived of sight. A respectable European writer, who went to Persia two years after this event, asserts that the assassin who fired at Nadir in the wood of Mazandaran was employed by the prince Reza Kuli; who, he informs us, though brave and able, was violent and oppressive. He had, this author asserts, on hearing that Nadir was dead when on his expedition to India, declared himself king, and at the same time put the unfortunate Shah Tamasp, who was confined at Subzawar, in Khorasan, to death. The same writer assures us that Nadir, though convinced of the guilt of his son, addressed him in the mildest and most human terms, and offered him complete pardon if he would only confess his crime and promise repentance; but that the fierce youth rejected this offer, and said he gloried in the attempt he had made to rid the world of a tyrant, and provoked his fate by the coarsest abuse of his father and sovereign. It is probable that this author received the account which he has given of this transaction from some person who was desirous of palliating the guilt of a reigning tyrant; but we are compelled to refuse our credit of this statement.