Prince `Abbás Mírzá, worsted in the field by the Russians, now tried to provide his country with a modern army and engaged British instructors. As in the past, Ṭihrán gave him little help. Yet he was under constant pressure to resume hostilities. The divines, particularly, were urging it.[I] Yet Russia had no desire to fight; nor had Fatḥ-`Alí Sháh: war was too expensive. Prince Menchikov arrived from St. Petersburg (the present-day Leningrad) not to dictate but to negotiate. But the demands of those who sought war—the clerics and the powerful court faction of Alláh-Yár Khán[J]—proved irresistible; Menchikov returned to St. Petersburg.
In the war that soon followed the Persians were soundly beaten and Russian forces surged forward to occupy the city of Tabríz. The first to abandon the field was a group of clerics, who, with raised standards, had accompanied the army. By the Treaty of Turkumancháy (1828), onerous and humiliating in the extreme, Írán was excluded from the Caucasus. In addition to the payment of heavy indemnities, she lost her rights in the Caspian Sea and the frontier between Russia and Írán was fixed on the river Aras.
Prince `Abbás Mírzá was now a sad and broken man. Rash actions forced upon him had brought total desolation. His modern army was shattered. Because he knew of the intrigues that plagued his father's court, and to make certain that his eldest son would not be left undefended, he asked for guarantees from the Tsar, which were readily given. After this ordeal of defeat and submission Prince `Abbás Mírzá did not live long. He died at the age of forty-five, and a year later his father followed him to the grave.
The eldest son of `Abbás Mírzá, named heir-apparent by Fatḥ-`Alí Sháh, came into his heritage by a combination of the assured support of Britain and Russia, and the wise strategy of Qá'im-Maqám. Sir John Campbell, the British Minister in Ṭihrán, and Sir Henry Lindesay Bethune, who took command of the forces loyal to the son of `Abbás Mírzá, brought him safely from Tabríz to Ṭihrán. Qá'im-Maqám, in the meantime, secured the backing of influential men in the capital, where another son of the late king had styled himself `Adil Sháh[K] and was claiming the throne. But his reign was brief, and soon Muḥammad Sháh, the heir-apparent, was well entrenched in Ṭihrán, for Sir Henry Lindesay Bethune (whom a Persian historian calls Mr. Lenzi) easily routed other pretenders.[8]
Muḥammad Sháh did not wish to seem beholden to the British officials who had helped him to his throne, nor did he show much gratitude to Qá'im-Maqám, the architect of his victory. Within a year he contrived the death of that great minister who had served him and his father so well. By the death of Qá'im-Maqám, treacherously designed, Írán sustained a tremendous and irreparable loss. Qá'im-Maqám was not only a brilliant statesman, but also a master of prose whose style rescued the language from encrusted artificialities.[L]
His successor as the Grand Vizier was Ḥájí Mírzá Áqásí, a man ignorant and devoid of all graces, affecting deep piety. This is how Sir Henry Layard[9] saw him in 1840:
We waited upon the Prime Minister, the Haji Mirza Agasi, who was then the man of the greatest influence, power and authority in Persia. The Shah had committed to him almost the entire government of his kingdom, occupying himself but little with public affairs, aware of his own incapacity for conducting them. 'The Haji'—the name by which he was familiarly known—was, by all accounts, a statesman of craft and cunning, but of limited abilities. He was cruel and treacherous, proud and overbearing, although he affected the humility of a pious mulla who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and the holy shrines of the Imaums. The religious character which he had assumed made him intolerant and bigoted, and he was known to be a fanatical hater of Christians. He had been the Shah's tutor and instructor in the Koran, and had acquired a great influence over his pupil, who had raised him to the lofty position which he then held. He had the reputation of being an accomplished Persian and Arabic scholar, but he was entirely ignorant of all European languages. His misgovernment, and the corruption and general oppression which everywhere existed had brought Persia to the verge of ruin. Distress, misery, and discontent prevailed to an extent previously unknown. He was universally execrated as the cause of the misfortunes and misery from which the people and the State were suffering. We found him seated on his hams, in the Persian fashion, on a fine Kurdish carpet spread in a handsome hall. Before him was a large tray filled with ices and a variety of fruit.... He was a man of small stature, with sharp and somewhat mean and forbidding features, and a loud shrill voice. His dress was simple—almost shabby—as became a mulla and a man devoted to religious life.... It was evident that the Haji suspected that we were spies and agents of the British Government. However, he declared that the Shah was willing that we should visit any part of his territories where we could travel in safety, and that orders had been issued for the preparation of our farman [royal decree]; for his Majesty had said that we belonged to a friendly nation, and his quarrel was not with England but with Lord Palmerston, who had treated Persia ill, and had recalled the Queen's Ambassador[10] without sufficient cause....
Nor was Írán on good terms with the Ottomans. Layard's book, Early Adventures, indicates the considerable extent of the incursions which the Turks had made into Iranian territory. The meeting between Layard and Ḥájí Mírzá Áqásí in 1840 took place in Hamadán, not far from the frontier, where Muḥammad Sháh was encamped with his army. The relations between the Ottoman and Iranian governments were further strained by the storming and sacking of Karbilá in January 1843, where the chief sufferers were Persian. We have seen how the Persian princes living in Karbilá at the time of its investment by the troops of Najíb Páshá took a hand in negotiations. They were exiles and fugitives who had contested with Muḥammad Sháh and offended him, and senior among them was `Alí-Sháh, the Ẓillu's-Sulṭán.
Yet another issue reared its ugly head to exacerbate relations between Írán and the Ottoman Empire, that of Shí`ah against Sunní. Sheil, the British Minister in Ṭihrán, reported to the Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Aberdeen: