Annotated Copy of Persia and the Persian Question by George Curzon, with Inserted Papers [‎84r] (174/1814)

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Kazvin
extensive vineyards and orchards that encircle the once populous
city of Kazvin.
Kazvin, which is reported to have 40,000 inhabitants, but has
probably not much more than two-thirds of that total, is the first
large town which the newcomer will have seen in Persia ;
and \jt will supply him with some idea of the typical
Persian city, of which he will encounter so many analogous
samples later on. Like many of them, it has been a capital city
in its day, sharing this distinction with Isfahan, Shiraz, Teheran,
Tabriz, Suleimanieh, Ardebil, Nishapur, and Meshed. Like most
of its compeers, however, the suii of its glory has now set, and de
serted spaces and crumbling remains mark the spot that once
teemed with busy life and glittered with the pageantry of royal
rule. Said to have been founded by Shapur II. (Zulaktaf), 1 it was
one of the places that were captured in 1078 A.D. by Hasan Sabah,
the celebrated chief of the so-called Assassins, known in Europe,
from a paraphrase by the Crusaders of his Arabic title, Sheikh-
el-J ebel, as the Old Man of the Mountains, whose original method
of recruiting his band is so agreeably related by Marco Polo, and
whose impregnable stronghold of Alamut (i.e. Eagle’s Nest) was
only about thirty miles distant in the mountains. 2 It was not,
however, till the rise of the Sefavi dynasty that Kazvin attained
the zenith of its renown. By the second sovereign of that line,
Tahmasp I. (1524-1576 a.d) it was made the seat of government, s
the change being variously attributed by historians to the inability
of that monarch to defend Tabriz against the Turks, and to his
anxiety to remove to some distance from Ardebil, where the humble
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■ bones to blestl
age here and*
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1 Eastwick (vol. i. p. 212) says in 150 a.d. ; but the reign of Shapur II. was
310-379 A.D. Others relate that the founder was Shapur I. (241-272 A.D.). For
mention of Kazvin in early historians, vide Istakhri ( Vice regnorum, p. 211);:
Yakut (Dictionnaire Geograjjhique, pp. 441-445) ; Nasiri Khosru (Sefer NameK).
M. Ch. Schefer, in his edition of the latter work (p. 12), has given a list of the
native historians of Kazvin, of whom some attained considerable eminence. Vide
also B. de Meynard, Descript. Hist, de la ville de Kazvin, 1857.
2 The Castle of Alamut (which must have been rebuilt after its capture and
destruction by the Mongol Hulaku Khan) was used in later times under the Sefavi
kings as a prison for disgraced persons of high rank. When their continued
existence was found irksome they were pitched off the high rock upon which it
stands. Chardin (edit. Bangles), vol. ix. p. 115. For a modern account of Ala
mut, vide Sir J. Shell’s ‘ Teheran to Alamut in 1837,’ in the Journal of the It. G.
S., vol. viii. p. 430.
3 Vide Milton’s Paradise Lost, x. 433-6.
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