The ignominious campaign of 1861 was the last organised effort put forward by Persia to protect her northern provinces. Secure in a splendid strategic position,[609] the Tekkes extended their devastations far and wide. When, in 1871, a fearful famine[610] more than decimated the population of Khorāsān, bands of Tekke horsemen took advantage of their neighbours’ weakness to sweep the entire province with their marauding parties. It would have been an easy task to check the aggression which depopulated the richest province of Persia and caused incredible misery to the people. But so utterly corrupt was the administration of the Shāh that the governing class found its account in encouraging the perpetrators. Troops were paid for by Government which existed only on paper, and the local authorities shared in the Tekkes’ booty. The first effectual blow struck at this gigantic machinery for plunder and oppression was the direct result of the Khivan campaign of 1873. General Kauffman had encountered some opposition from the Yomud Turkomans who ranged the desert of Khiva, and he was not a man to tolerate half-measures. He waged a war of extermination against this once powerful tribe, and the ruthless cruelty that attended it struck terror throughout the southern steppes. The Gokhlan Turkomans, inhabiting the estuary of the Atrak and the rich valleys behind it, had been brought to heel by an energetic governor of the Persian province of Bajnard in 1869,[611] and their piracies on the Caspian had been put down with a strong hand by the Russian naval authorities.[612] With the pacification of Khiva, too, came the formation, in 1874, of a Transcaspian military district, subordinate to the Caucasus,[613] which was placed under the governorship of Major-General Lomakin. On the north-west the Tekkes saw an iron wall arise which checked their aggressions and was a standing menace to their independence. Nor were the prospects in the west of their habitat more encouraging. The Russian treaties with Khiva and Bokhārā forbade slavery, and closed the principal markets for the captives of their bow and spear. In 1877 the Tekkes turned to Persia, and made her an offer of their allegiance in return for support against the white man’s encroachments. This contingency was not to be regarded with equanimity by the Russians, for they rightly considered the Turkomans as within the sphere of influence of the Transcaspian district.[614] Nor were commercial considerations wanting. Russia was by this time the virtual mistress of the Khānates, and was directly interested in the development of their trade; but caravans were unable to cross the Turkoman Desert while the nomads remained untamed, and were driven to take circuitous routes in order to reach the commercial centre of Orenburg.[615] And the authorities in St. Petersburg were still dominated by the schemes first promulgated by Peter the Great for diverting the course of the Oxus into the Caspian, and regarded