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To this Prince Nadir had sent an envoy, demanding that the Turks should evacuate the province of Azerbaijan; and Shah Tamasp had sent another with what a Persian historian indignantly terms "a sweet-scented letter of congratulation" upon his elevation to the throne.
He directed that his army should be paid in coin brought from the province of Khorasan, and that it should be struck in his own name, which virtually amounted to an assumption of the independent sovereignty of that country. The armies of the Turks occupied some of the finest parts of the province of Irak and all Azerbaijan.
Mozuffer-ed-Din Mirza had with him for a long time as Kaimakam, or Vazir, the well-known Amir-i-Nizam, who was virtually Governor-General of Azerbaijan, for the Shah held him personally responsible for the administration of the province. He was a man of strong character, and had great influence in Azerbaijan.
Their plan was to get rid of all the non-Turkish peoples which separate the Turks of Anatolia from the Turks of Baku and Azerbaijan, and this was the second motive of the Armenian deportations, which they put in hand a month or two after their military projects had failed. The Turkish Irredentists propose, in fact, to gain their ends by bloodshed and terrorism.
There were said to be twenty thousand Persians, from the provinces of Azerbaijan and Hamadan, working last summer on the new railway from Tiflis to Alexandropol and Kars, now being built, and doubtless many of them will permanently settle on the line. It is said that there are half a million thus located and working out of Persia, but I think that this is an exaggerated estimate.
On the death of Agha Mohamed Shah in camp with his army on the Northern frontier, General Sadik Khan, chief of the Shekaki tribe in Azerbaijan, seized the opportunity to gain possession of the Crown jewels and treasure, and quitted the camp with his men; but the rest of the troops marched at the command of the strong Prime Minister Haji Ibrahim, to the capital, which by his orders was held by the Kajar chief, Mirza Mohamed Khan, for the legitimate heir of the Shah.
The late Shah had three breeding establishments: one in the vicinity of Tehran, another near Hamadan, and the third at Maragha, in Azerbaijan, where the pasture is good. In each of these there are said to be about one thousand mares and foals. There is no part of the establishment of a monarch of Persia to which more attention is paid than his horses.
He was at Tabriz, holding the post of nominal Governor-General of Azerbaijan, which was the customary position assigned to the Vali Abd, when his grandfather died, and I have in a previous chapter told of the part taken by British officers in defeating the Pretenders, who attempted to dispute his right to the throne.
Playing upon the nascent class-consciousness of this urban proletariat, the Bolshevik agents made a coup d'état in the spring of 1920, overthrew the nationalist government, and, with prompt Russian backing, made Azerbaijan a Soviet republic.
It was agreed that prisoners on both sides should be released; that Persian pilgrims going to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina should be protected; and that the whole of the provinces of Irak and Azerbaijan should remain with Persia, except an inconsiderable territory that had belonged to the Turkish government in the time of Shah Ismail, the first of the Suffavean kings.
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