Mahmoud was now king of Persia. But, some time after, fearing a revolt of the people of Isfahan, he invited all the nobles of the city to a feast, and the moment they arrived, a signal was given, and they were all massacred. Their amount was three thousand! not so many as one escaped. Their bodies were exposed in the streets, that the inhabitants might behold and tremble. But an equal tragedy was yet to be performed. He had taken three thousand of the late king's guards into his pay. These men he directed to be peculiarly well treated; and, as a mark of favour, he commanded that a dinner should be dressed for them in one of the squares of the palace. The men came; sat down; and the moment they had done so, a party of the tyrant's troops fell upon them, and not a single soul was allowed to escape! This, however, was not the close of things, but the beginning. A general order was now issued, to put every Persian to death, who had in any way served the former government. The massacre lasted 15 days! Those who survived were made to leave the city, with the sole exception of a small number of male youths, whom the tyrant proposed to train in the habits and usages of his own nation. Nor does this terminate the history of his atrocities. He soon after massacred all the males of the royal family. These victims he caused to be assembled in one of the courts of the palace; when attended by two or three favourites, he commenced, with his own sabre, the horrid massacre. Thirty-nine princes of the blood were murdered on this dreadful occasion. The day of punishment, however, was at hand. He soon after died in a state of horrific insanity! His body was buried in a royal sepulchre; but when Nadir Shah afterwards took Isfahan, he caused it to be taken from the sepulchre and abandoned to the fury of the populace; and the place where he had been interred was converted into a common sewer to receive the filth of the city. This was in the year 1727. Isfahan never recovered these dreadful events. Mr. Hanway tells us, that in the time he visited it, a Persian merchant assured him, that in all Isfahan there were not more than five thousand inhabited houses. It has been, since, several times taken and retaken by tyrants and revolters. It was last taken by Aga Mohamed Khan (A.D. 1785); who dismantled the walls. Its present condition is thus described by Sir Robert Ker Porter:--"The streets are everywhere in ruin; the bazaars silent and abandoned; the caravanserais are equally forsaken; its thousand villages hardly now counting two hundred; its palaces solitary and forlorn; and the nocturnal laugh and song, which used to echo from every part of the gardens, succeeded by the yells of jackals and shouts of famishing dogs."