Killed by a Watermelon? Royal Iranian Caprices… June 12, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Even by the standards of oriental despots Mohammad Khan Qajar was a pretty nasty piece of work. He had himself survived as a young man because the then ruler of Persia had decided only to castrate MKQ instead of having him killed, a decision he would soon regret. MKQ was not apparently a sadist. But he recognized that cruelty impressed his subjects and sometimes brought him other benefits: for example, he had one rival, Shahrukh Shah Afshar, slowly tortured to death, to discover where certain royal treasures were buried; and he ordered the slaughter of Christian Tblisi as a warning to renegade neighbours. The most curious legend about MKQ was though over this death and here his consistent violence worked against him.
Legend claims that MKQ died because of a watermelon. He had eaten a number of slices of water melon, which he greatly enjoyed, and warned his servants that were they to eat any of those remaining it would be off with their heads. One of the servants forgot, ate a slice, and all three then felt obliged to kill their master to avoid the inevitable repercussions. A legend? Well, this unpleasant sounding-story does apparently have some kind of a basis in fact.
16 June 1797 (18 June by some accounts), while he had been campaigning, MKQ had been disturbed by two servants fighting over some missing money: Sadeq and Khodadad-e Esfahani (a Georgian Christian slave). MKQ was so furious, he had been sleeping when the argument began, that he ordered that both be immediately executed, but he then put off the execution as it was Friday evening and Friday was a holy day. The servants were, incredibly, sent back to work and told, matter-of-factly, that they would be executed the next morning. Knowing that their master did not forget and that he never forgave, they patched up their own arguments and, with the help of a friend, killed their sixty-three year old boss by sneaking into his tent in the night with blades. In a sense the water melon is a degeneration of a true and better story.
MKQ had failed to learn the lesson dealt out to him an a young man, don’t castrate when you can kill. He passed on Iran to his dynasty and more particularly to his nephew Baba Khan but lost the Caucasus to an expanding Russia. Any other pay-back deaths through unlikely mercy: drbeachcombing at yahoo dot com Beach predicts that none will be this good.
