HISTORY OF JULPHA. 
423 
the discomfiture of his master. But the councils of the King were 
filled with weakness and treachery; he was betrayed in every 
step he took ; the people of the city were consigned to famine, 
or the sword; and the suburb of Julpha, deprived by these evil 
counsellors of its arms, was abandoned, with all its inhabitants, 
to be the first prey in the bloody and rapacious hands of the 
Afghans. Death, then, slew to the right and to the left; and 
as the noblest and the best always throw themselves in front 
in these assaults, few survived, of a character to maintain the 
good old name of the Armenian merchant of Julpha. In vain we 
look amongst these ruins of a town, and its people, for any 
thing like the true spirit of commerce; a miserable principle of 
chicane, and over-reaching, appears in every transaction ; and, 
as a man can seldom cheat any but a fool more than once, the 
wretched trafficker of his honour and his conscience is soon 
left to starve ; or, if he amass money by these base methods, 
he spends it as worthlessly, as he gained it unworthily. But this 
vast change in the respectability of a Persian Armenian, since 
the fall, or extinction of the house of Sefi, is not to be attributed 
solely to their depopulation and sufferings under the Afghans. 
None of the succeeding native princes, have attempted to restore 
these grafted subjects to their former useful rank in the empire; 
and persons of delegated authority, too often increase the evils 
of neglect, by those of oppression. The ways and means of 
such restoration, and its amply repaying consequences, may 
easily be learnt from recurring to the conduct of Shah Abbas, 
at the time he transplanted this industrious people into his 
kingdom. Some, who had saved themselves from pillage by a 
judicious surrender, brought substance along with them to 
continue their various manufactures and traffic: but to those 
