'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎36] (67/714)

PERSIA
36
■^....stances of his family were known. After fifty years of me
tropolitan supremacy Kaz.vin was itself superseded by Isfahan,
Uil, Abbas the Great finding in the southern cap.tal a more con-
venLt cenle for his extensive dominions. Pietro della Valle, the
travelled Italian, was here in 1618, during the lifetime of Shah
Abbas, but found in it 'nothing to satisfy the expectations of
a roval residence, and only two things worthy of observation, the
crate of the King's palace and the grand meidan or square. On
the other hand. Sir Thomas Herbert, the quaint historian of the
embassy of Sir Dodmore Cotton from Charles I. to Abbas the
Great who accompanied Sir Robert Sherley and the English envoy
hither after their bootless interview with the Persian monarch at
Ashraf in 1627, reported of Kazvin that it was ' equal for grandeur
to auv other city in the Persian Empire, Spahawn (i.e. Isfahan)
excepted;' 1 that its walls were seven miles in circuit, and its
population 200,000. Here poor Sir Robert Sherley, fretting
at his rebuff and at the inconstancy of princes, died on July 13,
1627, and was buried under the threshold of the door; 2 and here,
only ten days later, his companion. Sir D. Cotton, stricken down
with dysentery, followed him to the grave. 3 Chardin, who was at
Kazvin half a century later, in 1674, describes its walls as then m
ruins, the town having ' lost all those perquisites that set forth the
pomp and grandeur of a sumptuous court ;' but says that it
nevertheless contained 12,000 houses and 100,000 inhabitants, and
that its chief feature was the palaces of the grandees, which had
passed for generations from father to son. 4 It was taken by the
1 Herbert was phonetic rather than accurate in his spelling. Thus he con
verted Julfa into Jelphea, Teheran into Tyroan, Larijan into Larry John, and
the Padishah, or title of the sovereign, into Pot Shaw. In the previous century
the English factors in Gilan generally transliterated Shah Tahmasp into Shaw
Thomas, which had not a very regal sound.
2 I cannot resist quoting the quaint language of Herbert: ' And hence came
those discontents, nay, that arrow of Death that arrested him; for upon tie
13th of July he gave this transitory world an ultimum vale in his great climac
teric'.— Some YeaTCS Tvavel (• > >rd edit.), p. 212.
3 ' Like discontents, long conflict with adverse dispositions, and fourteen da) s
consuming of a flux (occasioned, as I thought, by eating too much fruit, or
sucking in too much chill air upon Taurus), brought that Religious Gentleman,
Sir Dodmore Cotton, our Ambassadour, to an immortal home. The 2: > )rd of July
he bade the world Adieu.'—p. 213.
1 Travels, pt. ii. pp. 378-382. Vide also a description of Kazvin in 1600 by-
John Cartwright, Preacher, Purchas' Pilgrims, vol. ii. lib. ix. cap. 4; and in 167
by John Struys, Voyages, vol. iii. cap. xxiv.