نسخة مذيلة من "بلاد فارس والشأن الفارسي" بقلم جورج كرزون، مع أوراق مدرجة [و‎‎٤‎١‎٠] (١٨١٤/٨٢٢)

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THE ARMY
Upon muster the Persian King can march 300,000 horse and 70,000
foot or musquetoons. Such force as he can readily advance but seldome
exceeds 50,000, enough to find forage or provant in such barren
countreys.
So rapid, however, was the decline in military strength and
efficiency under the nerveless rule of the later Sefavi sovereigns,
that Chardin, who was present at a review held before Shah Abbas
II. in 1666, said that the same troops passed and repassed from
ten to twelve times* and that a Persian naively remarked to him.
‘ h&ve a good army for reviews, but a bad one for war. 5 How
bad a one did not fully appear till the -Afghan invasion earlv in
the following century, when the whole flower of the Persian army,
over 50,000 strong, allowed itself to be worsted, and Isfahan to be
beleaguered and ultimately taken, by less than half the number
of Afghans, ill—eqmpped and exhausted with long marching and
fatigue. On this occasion the Persian artillerymen are said to
have discharged 400 shots from each of 400 cannon, and not to
have killed 400 Afghans in all.
Less than twenty years after this disaster we are confronted
with the astonishing spectacle of a Persian conqueror overrunning
The army 0entral Asia > upsetting, kingdoms and empires, and in
of Nadir the eighteenth century presenting the phenomenon in
Asia that Europe owed to Napoleon in the nineteenth.
Hanway, who saw the army of Nadir Shah on the march, said that
it consisted of 200,000 men, the cost of maintaining whom, officers
included, was 100 crowns, or 251., a year apiece ; so that the total
military outlay was 5,000,000^. annually. It was, indeed, by
exceptional generosity to his soldiers that Nadir ensured their
enthusiastic loyalty, just as it was to his own military genius, to the
terror of his name, and to the contemptible inferiority of the
majority of the foes whom he encountered, that must be attributed
his victorious career. I think it would be an unfair inference to
draw from the conquests of Nadir, that the Persians only 150 years
ago were the possessors of qualities which they have since entirely
lost or abandoned. The bulk of his army were not Persians, but
were drawn from the warlike tribes of his vast dominions, from
Kurdistan and Georgia to Afghanistan and Belnchistan. The
overthrow of the Mogul Empire, long tottering to its fall, was in
no way a remarkable military achievement; and that, where his
cavalry could not operate with advantage, the generalship or the