IN PERSIA—BUSHIRE AND SHIRAZ, 1811
The Persia to whose seven millions of people Henry Martyn was the first in modern times to carry the good-news of God, was just the size of the India of his day. The Mohammedan majority of its scattered inhabitants, in cities, in villages, and wandering over its plains and deserts, had never been, and are not yet, as Shi’ahs, rigid members of Islam, fanatically aggressive against all others, like the orthodox Soonnis. After the apparent extinction of the cult of Zoroaster and the flight of the surviving remnant of Parsees to India, the successive ruling dynasties were liberal and tolerant in their treatment of Christians compared with other Moslem powers; more liberal than Christian Russia is to the Jews and the non-‘orthodox’ sects. When those cultured and enterprising brothers, Sir Anthony and Sir Thomas Sherley,[46] went from Oxford to the court of Persia, then in all its magnificence under Shah Abbas the Great, two centuries before Henry Martyn, that Shah sent one back as Persian envoy to the Christian powers of Europe, to establish an alliance for the destruction of the Turks. Shah Abbas made over Gombroon to them, calling it by his own name, Bunder Abbas, which it still retains, and his Majesty’s grant used such language as this: ‘Our absolute commandment, will, and pleasure is that our countries and dominions shall be from this day open to all Christian people and to their religion.... Because of the amitie now ioyned with the princes that professe Christ, I do give this pattent for all Christian merchants,’ etc. Only the intolerance of the Portuguese, who, under Albuquerque, took the island of Ormuz, and so dominated the Persian Gulf till driven out by the English, led this great Asiatic monarch to except the power which Prince Henry the Navigator alone redeems from historical contempt to the present day.
The Suffavian dynasty gave place to the Afghan, and that to the short-lived but wide-spreading empire of Nadir Kooli Khan, from Delhi to the Oxus River and the Caspian Sea. Out of half a century’s bloody revolutions, such as formed the normal course of the annals of Asia till Great Britain pushed its ‘Peace’ up from the Southern Ocean, Aga Mohammed Khan, of the Kajar clan, founded the present dynasty in 1795. His still greater nephew succeeded on his death three years after. Futteh Ali Shah became for the next thirty-eight years the close friend of the British Crown and the East India Company. Shah-in-Shah, or king of the four kings of Afghanistan, Georgia, Koordistan, and Arabistan, the ruler of Persia had now incorporated Arabistan in his own dominion, and had lost Afghanistan. But he still claimed the allegiance of the two subject-sovereigns of Georgia and Koordistan. His uncle had avenged on the people, and especially the beautiful women of Georgia, the transfer of the country by its Wali to the Russian Catherine II. Placed in the commanding centre of Western Asia, Futteh Ali almost immediately found himself the object of eager competition by the representatives of the Christian powers at Teheran. His revenue was estimated by so competent an authority as Sir John Malcolm at nearly six millions sterling. The crown jewels, chief of them the Sea of Light, or Derya-i-Noor, a diamond weighing 178 carats, were then the most valuable collection in the world; for though the Koh-i-Noor had remained with the Afghans, whence through the Sikhs it came to a greater Shah-in-Shah, the Queen-Empress of Great Britain, he still possessed not a little of Nadir’s plunder of Delhi.
Sir Robert Ker Porter describes him about the time when Martyn reached his capital, as ‘one blaze of jewels,’ at the New Year festival of Norooz. On his head was a lofty tiara of three elevations, ‘entirely composed of thickly-set diamonds, pearls, rubies, and emeralds, so exquisitely disposed as to form a mixture of the most beautiful colours in the brilliant light reflected from its surface. Several black feathers, like the heron plume, were intermixed with the resplendent aigrettes of this truly imperial diadem, whose bending points were furnished with pear-formed pearls of an immense size. The vesture was of gold tissue nearly covered with a similar disposition of jewelry; and crossing the shoulders were two strings of pearls, probably the largest in the world. But for splendour nothing could exceed the broad bracelets round his arms and the belt which encircled his waist; they actually blazed like fire when the rays of the sun met them. The throne was of pure white marble raised a few steps from the ground, and carpeted with shawls and cloth of gold. While the Great King was approaching his throne, the whole assembly continued bowing their heads to the ground till he had taken his place. In the midst of solemn stillness, while all eyes were fixed on the bright object before them, which sat indeed as radiant and immovable as the image of Mithras itself, a sort of volley of words bursting at one impulse from the mouths of the mollahs and astrologers, made me start, and interrupted my gaze. This strange oratory was a kind of heraldic enumeration of the Great King’s titles, dominions, and glorious acts. There was a pause, and then his Majesty spoke. The effect was even more startling than the sudden bursting forth of the mollahs; for this was like a voice from the tombs—so deep, so hollow, and, at the same time, so penetratingly loud.’[47]
That was the man to whose feet the French Emperor Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander, King George III. and the greatest Governor-General of the East India Company, the Marquess Wellesley, sent special embassies; the man from whom they sought secret treaties, lavishing on his courtiers more than royal gifts. To arrest the march of the Afghan invader, who a few years before had reached Lahore on his way to set up again at Delhi the house of Timour, and in order to foil the secret embassy sent by Napoleon, who had resolved to give England its death-blow through India, a young Scotsman, Captain Malcolm, was deputed to Teheran in 1801, following up a native envoy who had been most successful just before. This soldier diplomatist, who was afterwards to help Henry Martyn to a very different success, ‘bribed like a king,’ and returned with two treaties, political and commercial, but still more with the knowledge which fitted him to write his classic history, and make his second ambassage. For England failed to carry out the first so far as to help the Shah against Russia, and from that hour Persia has seen province after province overwhelmed by the wave from the north.
Taking alarm a second time, just before and after the Peace of Tilsit, both the Crown and the Company appointed plenipotentiaries to Teheran. It was Lord Minto’s wise policy to protect our Indian empire ‘by binding the Western Frontier States in a chain of friendly alliance.’ Hence the Governor-General’s four missions, to Sindh, to Lahore, to Cabul, and again to Persia under Sir John Malcolm. Sir Harford Jones appeared as ambassador from the Crown after Malcolm had left Teheran, and took advantage of a change in the political situation to secure the preliminary treaty of 1809, which renewed the pledge of its predecessor to assist the Shah with troops or a subsidy if any European forces should invade his territories. In a modified form this became the definitive treaty of March 14, 1812 (further altered in that of 1814), to arrange which Sir Gore Ouseley was sent out, superseding both Malcolm and Jones.[48] Sir Gore Ouseley became Henry Martyn’s friend. Commended by Sir John Malcolm to his personal friends among the Persians, and officially encouraged by the British plenipotentiary, the Bengal chaplain seeking health had all the facilities secured to him that were possible to pursue the God-given mission of the apostle of Christ to the peoples of Persia and Arabia.
The strong and wise rule of Futteh Ali Shah kept Persia itself at peace, but he could not get the better of Russian intrigue and attack, even with the friendly offices of the British Government. Up till Martyn’s arrival these vast regions had been wrested from the Shah-in-Shah: Georgia, Mingrelia, Daghistan, Sherwan, Karabagh, and Talish. During his presence in the country the negotiations with Russia were going on, which ended in 1813 in the Treaty of Gulistan, surrendering to the Tsar all he had taken, and apparently stopping his advance by a line of demarcation. But as its exact direction had to be settled by commissioners Russia has ever since continued steadily to strip Persia of its northern lands, and only the presence of the British Navy has kept it as yet out of the Persian Gulf.[49]
Such were the historical and political conditions amid which the missionary chaplain of India became a resident in the cities, and a traveller through the villages of Persia and Turkey at the age of thirty. He went there as the friend of Malcolm Sahib, whose gracious dignity and lavish gifts had made him a hero among the officials and many of the people of Persia. He went with letters of introduction from the Governor-General of India and the Governor of Bombay to the new British ambassador, who had lived at Lucknow, and must have known well of his work in the neighbouring station of Cawnpore. He went with the reputation of a man of God in the Oriental sense, and of a scholar who knew the sacred books of Mohammedans and Christians alike, and who sought the good of the people. The Armenian colonies at Calcutta and Bombay had commended him to the many members of their Church in Persia.
Bushire, or Abu Shahr, at which he began his mission to Persia, is the port of that province of Fars from which the whole empire takes its name. Its mixed Persian and Arab population, now numbering some fifteen thousand, its insanitary position on a spit of sand almost surrounded by the sea, and the filthy narrow streets hardly redeemed by the Char Burj or citadel, and the British Residency, do not attract the visitor, and he soon learns that the humid heat of its climate in summer is more insupportable than that even of the Red Sea. From Reshire, close by, in the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-7, General Havelock shelled the town when he pitched the camp of the force to the south of its gate. Henry Martyn was there in the worst season of May and June, when the thermometer rises to 100° in the shade, and sometimes 106°. He became the guest of an English merchant and his Armenian wife, and was received by the Armenians as a priest of great sanctity. His Journal describes his receptions and daily occupations.
1811, May 23.—Rode out with a party in the evening, or rather in the afternoon, for the heat of the sun made me ill.