'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎392] (445/714)

The
Kajar
Dynasty
PERSIA
and can be reduced to impotence or beggary in the twinkling of
an eye. The ministers are elevated and degraded at the Royal
pleasure. The sovereign is the sole executive, and all officials are
his deputies. No civil tribunals are in existence to check or modify
his prerogative. Enormous, therefore, is the importance attaching
to the character of the individual in whose person is concentrated
such a wealth of plenary powers.
Nasr-ed-Din Shah, as 1 have before said, is not a Persian, but
a Turk, by descent, and is the fourth sovereign of the Kajar
Dynasty which has occupied the throne of Persia for close
upon one hundred years. The Kajars. whose family history
has been written by more than one Persian biographer,
and has even been translated into English, 1 are not content with
any more modest descent than from Japhet, the son of Noah.
Even if we question the authenticity of so illustrious a pedigree, it
is yet indisputable that for 700 years the Kajar tribe have been
heard of in history. A chieftain of that race ruled the country
from Rhey to the Oxus, as deputy for one of the Mongol descendants
of Jenghiz Khan. Timur in said to have banished them to Syria,
but afterwards to have suffered them to return. Later on they
espoused the cause of the Sefavi Shahs and assisted in raising them
to the throne, in return for which service they were included in the
Kizil-bash or seven lled-Head tribes, so called from the scarlet
head-covering which they were permitted to wear. According to
one account the mother of Shah Ismail himself was of Kajar blood. 2 "
Under his successor, Shah Tahmasp, we hear of a Kajar governor of
Kandahar, and of a Kajar ambassador to the Porte, demonstrating
the prominence to which the tribe had already attained; whilst in
the reign of Abbas the Great their power had become so consider
able that that monarch found it expedient to divide them into three
branches, whom he settled respectively in Merv and Khorasan
to fight against the Tartars, in Georgia to fight against the
Lesghians, and on the Gurgan and at Astrabad to fight against
the Turkomans. The latter became the main Persian settlement
1 The Dynasty of the Kajars, translated from an Oriental Persian MS. by Sir
Harford Jones Brydges, 1833. Compare Morier, Journal of the II. G.S., vol. vii.
p. 231.
2 So says Mr. Watson in his History of Persia ; but I have always understood
that the mother of Shah Ismail was Martha, the daughter of Uzun Hasan, chief
tain of the White Sheep, and his Christian wife Despoina, who was a daughter of
Kalo Johannes Emperor of Trebizond.