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This turmoil, so ravaging, so distressing, had hardly subsided when another conflagration, even more devastating than the two previous upheavals, was kindled in Zanjan and its immediate surroundings. Unprecedented in both its duration and in the number of those who were swept away by its fury, this violent tempest that broke out in the west of Persia, and in which Mulla Muhammad- 'Aliy- i- Zanjani, surnamed Hujjat, one of the ablest and most formidable champions of the Faith, together with no less than eighteen hundred of his fellow- disciples, drained the cup of martyrdom, defined more sharply than ever the unbridgeable gulf that separated the torchbearers of the newborn Faith from the civil and ecclesiastical exponents of a gravely shaken Order. The chief figures mainly responsible for, and immediately concerned with, this ghastly tragedy were the envious and hypocritical Amir Arslan Khan, the Majdu'd- Dawlih, a maternal uncle of Nasiri'd- Din Shah, and his associates, the Sadru'd- Dawliy- i- Isfahani and Muhammad Khan, the Amir- Tuman, who were assisted, on the one hand, by substantial military reinforcements dispatched by order of the Amir- Nizam, and aided, on the other, by the enthusiastic moral support of the entire ecclesiastical body in Zanjan. The spot that became the theatre of heroic exertions, the scene of intense sufferings, and the target for furious and repeated assaults, was the Fort of Ali- Mardan Khan, which at one time sheltered no less than three thousand Babis, including men, women and children, the tale of whose agonies is unsurpassed in the annals of a whole century.
(44:1)
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