The marches of Tartar, Turk, Afghan, and Mogul belong to a distant period. The march of Russia began in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Peter the Great had been humiliated by Turkey on the banks of the Pruth, and looked to Persia for compensation. Persia was on the brink of ruin. In 1722 the Afghans had advanced to Ispahan; and the Czar and the Sultan prepared to divide her remaining territory. Turkey took the western provinces, whilst Russia occupied the provinces along the south of the Caspian. The Caspian was a base for an advance on India, and had Peter lived he would have found his way to India. The road was easy _viâ_ Meshed to Herat, and the Mogul empire would have fallen into his hands like an over-ripe plum. The British at Calcutta were a little hive of traders, who would have been helpless to resist a Russian invasion. Most probably they would have preferred Russia to the Mogul, and would have sent a deputation to the Russian camp to pray for the protection of the Czar. [Sidenote: Checkmated by Nadir Shah, 1727.] But Peter the Great died in 1727, and Nadir Shah, the last of the "world stormers," stepped in and snatched Persia from Russia. Nadir Shah was a Turk of the noble tribe of Afshar; a brigand in his youth, but destined to be as great a general as Cyrus or Napoleon. In 1727, the very year that Peter the Great died, Nadir Shah joined the dethroned Shah of Persia, drove the Afghans back to their own territories, and conquered Khorassan as far as Herat. Eventually he imprisoned the Shah, and usurped the throne of Persia. He compelled Turkey to retire from the western provinces, and Russia to retire from the provinces on the Caspian. [Sidenote: Persian invasion of India, 1738-39.] In 1738 Nadir Shah captured Candahar, invaded the Punjab, and entered Delhi in triumph. His battalions of Persians and Turkomans, trained and disciplined under picked officers, were irresistible against Afghans and Moguls. He did not want to conquer India, but only to plunder it. He carried off the treasures of Delhi, the spoil of Hindustan, and the peacock of jewels which had blazed for a hundred years over the throne of the Great Mogul. Thus, within twelve years of the death of Peter the Great, the parade of jewels, which might have adorned the Kremlin, became the prize of Nadir Shah. [Sidenote: Nadir Shah and his Persian officers.]