Persia’s state of decadence in the middle of the 19th Century: - Qajar Kings proved extraordinarily prolific of male offspring

Fath-Ali Shah

2nd Qajar King 

1772–1834

...Fath-‘Alí Sháh ... and his successors after him, have proved so extraordinarily prolific of male offspring that the continuity of the dynasty has been assured; and there is probably not a reigning family in the world that in the space of one hundred years has swollen to such ample dimensions as the royal race of Persia.... Neither in the number of his wives nor in the extent of his progeny, can the Sháh, although undeniably a family man, be compared with his great-grandfather, Fath-‘Alí Sháh. To the high opinion universally held of the domestic capacities of that monarch must, I imagine, be attributed the divergent estimates that are to be found, in works about Persia, of the number of his concubines and children. Colonel Drouville, in 1813, credits him with 700 wives, 64 sons, and 125 daughters. Colonel Stuart, who was in Persia in the year after Fath-‘Alí’s death, gives him 1,000 wives and 105 children.... Madame Dieulafoy also names the 5,000 descendants, but as existing at an epoch fifty years later (which has an air of greater probability).... The estimate which appears in the Nasikhu’t Tavaríkh, a great modern Persian historical work, fixes the number of Fath-‘Alí’s wives as over 1,000, and of his offspring as 260, 110 of whom survived their father. Hence the familiar Persian proverb ‘Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere.’ ...No royal family has ever afforded a more exemplary illustration of the Scriptural assurance, ‘Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children, whom thou mayest make princes in all lands’; for there was scarcely a governorship or a post of emolument in Persia that was not filled by one of this beehive of princelings; and to this day the myriad brood of Sháh-zádihs, or descendants of a king, is a perfect curse to the country, although many of these luckless scions of royalty, who consume a large portion of the revenue in annual allowances and pensions, now occupy very inferior positions as telegraph clerks, secretaries, etc. Fraser drew a vivid picture of the misery entailed upon the country fifty years ago (1842) by this ‘race of royal drones,’ who filled the governing posts not merely of every province, but of every buluk or district, city, and town; each of whom kept up a court, and a huge harem, and who preyed upon the country like a swarm of locusts.... Fraser, passing through Adharbayján in 1834, and observing the calamitous results of the system under which Fath-‘Alí Sháh distributed his colossal male progeny in every Government post throughout the kingdom, remarked: ‘The most obvious consequence of this state of affairs is a thorough and universal detestation of the Qájár race, which is a prevalent feeling in every heart and the theme of every tongue.’ 
- Lord Curzon  (Extract from “Persia and the Persian Question”, quoted by Shoghi Effendi in the Introduction to the Dawn-Breakers)