A treaty was concluded, by which the khalif engaged to confine himself within the walls of Bagdad, and to pay the sultan an annual tribute. This composition deceived the expectations of the Ismailites, who had hoped that the result of this war, between the sultan and the khalif, would be the destruction of the latter: the grand-master, therefore, resolved to complete what the sultan had begun; and that, though the khalif had escaped the sword, he should not be spared by the dagger. In the camp, two farsangs from Meragha, while Messud was absent, having gone to meet the ambassadors of Sandjar, Assassins put the khalif and his immediate suite to death;[127] and not content with that foul deed, mutilated the dead, in the most horrible manner, by cutting off the noses and ears; as though they would, to the treason of a khalif’s murder, add insults to his corpse.[128] _Reign of Mohammed, Son of Kia Busurgomid._ After a blood-stained reign of fourteen years and three days, Kia Busurgomid, feeling his end approaching, named his son, Mohammed, as successor in the grand-mastership of the order; either because he really found none other worthy of the office, or that the natural desire of making the sovereignty hereditary in his family caused him to depart from the spirit of the fundamental maxims of the order, as they had been sketched out by Hassan Sabah. Be that as it may, the office, which, without respect to relationship, ought to have depended on the nomination of the existing grand-master, remained hereditary in the family of Busurgomid to the fall of the order. His death was, at first, a cause of great joy to the enemies of the Ismailites; when, however, they perceived that his son drove the chariot of restless ambition in the bloody track of his father, all Asia again sank into despair. He began, as his father had ended, with regicide; and before the votaries of Islam had time to recover from the consternation, with which the murder of the Khalif Mostarshed had overwhelmed them, their ears were horror-stricken with the intelligence of the fate of Rashid, his successor. The order had hoped, by the violent death of Mostarshed, to succeed in involving the khalifat in confusion and immediately effecting its ruin. This expectation, however, proving fallacious; and Rashid, immediately on taking possession of the vacant throne, and ere he was firmly seated on it, meditating revenge against his father’s butchers, the new grand-master resolved to begin where his predecessor had ended, and to heap murder on murder, crime on crime, and to add regicide to treason.