66 tre,

66

of the Christ.

the vast empire was, in the Year Year of course of fifty years, reduced to Hegira.

The feelings of Aurengzebe, in the awful hour of dissolution, are thus described by Major Rennel, (Introd. to his Memoir on the Map of Hindostan, lxiii. note.) "Two letters written by "Aurengzebe to two of his sons, a "few days before his death, furnish "this striking lesson to frail mortality;

66

66

66

that, however men may forget them

selves, during the tide of prosperity, a day of recollection will come

sooner or later. Here we are pre"sented with the dying confession of "an aged monarch who made his

66

1119 1707

way to the throne by the murder of "his brethren and the imprisonment "of his father, and who, after being "in possession of it, persecuted the "most inoffensive part of his subjects, "either through bigotry or hypocrisy;

"here we behold him, in the act of Year Year of

66

of the Christ.

resigning that, to obtain possession Hegira. "of which, he incurred his guilt,

" and presented to us a mere sinful

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66

man, trembling on the verge of eter

nity, equally deploring the past and

dreading the future. How awful “must his situation appear to him, "wherever I look, I

"when he says,

"see nothing but the divinity."

Aurengzebe left four sons; on the ruin of them, Feroskeere, a nephew of Jehaunder, the eldest of them, obtained the throne.

In his reign, the English East-India company received the famous Firman or Grant, regarded as the company's commercial charter in India, while they stood in need of protection from the princes of that country. Nadir Shah, after the conquest of the Persian empire, invaded and conquered Hindustan, in the reign of Mahomet

1125 1712

Shah, a grandson of Shah Aulum. Year Year of

of the Christ.

But Mahomet was left by him in pos- Hegira.

session of the throne, and died, in . . 1154 1741 With him, the Mogul Empire may

be said to have expired.

IV. 7. This leads to the mention of the

Ottoman emperors. At a promontory of Lycia, in Minor Asia, a ridge of mountains begins, which, without much interruption, extends to the Eastern Ocean. In a general sense, the antients gave it the name of the Taurus; but, in a more contracted sense, they gave the name of Taurus to that part of it which extends from Lycia to the part of Armenia, where the Euphrates rises. There, they supposed it was met by a chain of mountains, which, rising in a north-western point of the space between the Euxine and the Caspian, fills the intermediate country and shuts up the Caspian on the south; that, they called the Caucasus; a remoter branch of it, extending to the easternmost of the rivers which flow into

the Ganges, they called the Paropamisus, and its supposed extreme part the Emodus. The Imaus, or Caff, a point of these mountains between Samarcand and Cashgar, calculated, by Mr. Gibbon, to be at the equal distance of two thousand miles from the Caspian, the Jcy, and the Bengal Seas, is the centre of them.

From the skirts of it the Turks, one Year Year of of the most warlike of the tribes, which

inhabited these mountains, issued towards the close of the sixth century,

of the Christ.

Hegira.

and by a succession of victories, sub- 184 800 dued an extensive territory on every

side of their native mountains.

But

they soon lost all their eastern conquests, and were driven from their original settlements near the Imaus: large bodies of them then settled in the country beyond the Gihon or the Oxus, the Sogdiana and Bactriana of the Antients, the Turkestan of the Turks and Tartars, and the Great

of the Christ.

Hegira.

Boucharia of European geographers. Year Year of Seljuk, the leader of one of their tribes, embraced Mahometanism, and by his valour and the valour of his grandson Togrul Bey, became the head of a dynasty, which reigned from the Cas- 545 1150 pian Sea to Damascus, from the Indus

to the Gulph of Persia. On the death of Malek Shah, the great nephew of Togrul Bey, (1052), the possessions of the Seljukian dynasty were divided, after a bloody contest, into the three independent dynasties of Iconium, Aleppo and Persia. On the death of Aladin, the Sultan of Iconium, Othman, the generalissimo of his troops, usurped his throne, and laid the foundation of the empire of the Ottoman Turks; to him Bajazet was third in succession.

He obtained from the Caliph, who, as it has been mentioned, then lived in a humble situation in Egypt, a