Alaeddin, nevertheless, treated the Sheikh Jemaleddin Ghili with great reverence; he was entirely devoted to him, and sent him an annual pension of five hundred dinars, on which the sheikh lived, although he enjoyed besides a gratuity from the prince of Farsistan. The inhabitants of Kaswin reproached him for distributing the latter, and living on the money of the impious; the sheikh replied, “The imams declare the executions of the Ismailites and the confiscation of their goods to be lawful; how much more lawful, then, is it, to make use of the money and goods which they give of their own accord!” Alaeddin, to whose ears, probably, this talk of the Kaswiners came, affirmed that he spared them only on the sheikh’s account; and that if Jemaleddin Ghili did not reside there, he would fill sacks with the earth of Kaswin, and hang them on the necks of its inhabitants, and drive them to Alamut. He ordered a messenger, who gave him a letter of the sheikh’s once when he was intoxicated, to receive a hundred blows of the bastinado, and said to him, “Thoughtless and foolish man that thou wert, for giving me a letter of the sheikh’s when I was intoxicated; thou shouldst have waited till I had come from the bath, and recovered my senses.”[241] Besides the sheikh, Alaeddin held in considerable estimation the great mathematician, Nassireddin, of Tus, who had been sent as a hostage to Alamut, by Mohammed Motashem Nassireddin, to whom he had dedicated his celebrated work, Akhlaki Nasseri (_the Ethics of Nassir_). He, as we shall soon see, as prime minister of Alaeddin’s successor, supported, for a time, the tottering edifice of the Ismailitic rule; it fell, however, at last, affording to the world a remarkable proof, of what talents and a thirst for revenge, are able to effect in the maintenance, and overthrow of thrones.