'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎372] (425/714)

S72
PERSIA
history, and in the campaigns of Alexander, may be traced by
reference to the title Hyrcania in a Classical dictionary. In the
Christian Era they appear only at fitful epochs upon the public
stage. During the Sassanian period and the first centuries of
Islam, Mazanderan formed part of Tapuristan, the modern Taberi-
stan. About the year 900 a.d . Mazanderan was given by the
Khalif Mutadhid (or Mutazzid) to Ismail Samani, the founder of
the Samanid dynasty of North Persia and Bokhara, as a reward
for his services in conquering the rebellious Amr bin Leith, the
brother and successor of Yakub bin Leith, already mentioned in the
chapter on Seistan. In the fourteenth century we find an inde
pendent Seyid dynasty ruling in Mazanderan. When Anthony
Jenkinson and his fellow pioneers opened the British Caspian
trade with Persia in the middle of the sixteenth century, they
speak of a king of Gilan, who was only in nominal dependence
upon the Sefavi Shahs. This state of halting subjection developed
into actual rebellion in the reign of Shah Abbas, who, in 1593,
ordered a general massacre in Gilan. Mazanderan. however, as his
mother's birthplace, was a special favourite with Abbas. Here he
built a series of magnificent palaces, whose wasting ruins I shall
presently describe; here, in sight of the Caspian and in a retreat
where no enemy could either follow or disturb him, he loved, when
not at Isfahan, to reside. So anxious was he to raise the maritime
border to a higher level of prosperity and cultivation, that here, as
elsewhere, he pursued his favourite policy of colonisation on a
gigantic scale; transplanting 30,000 families of Christians from
the Turkish border in order at one and the same time to depopulate
the regions which were yearly ravaged by the Ottomans, and to
apply a fresh and vigorous industry to the most neglected part of
his dominions. Chardin gives the following quaint description of
the aptitudes of the country for the novel immigrants :—
It is sayd to be a perfect right country for the Christians; it
abounds with wine and hog's flesh, two things which they mightily
like ; they love to go to sea, and they will traffick with their brothers,
the Muscovites, by the Caspian Sea. 1
Abbas, however, had failed to reckon with the Mazanderani
climate, which quarrelled as fatally with the new comers as it did
with the worthy English ambassador, Sir Dodmore Cotton; for, as
1 Travels (edit. Lloyd), vol. ii. pp. 8-11.