98 RENAISSANCES A classic example of the narrowing of a pilgrimage-horizon was to be found in the history of the holy places of the Shi* ah. Within less than a hundred years of the date of the Hijrah, Mecca and Medina, the two oecumenical Islamic holy cities in the Hijaz, had been partially sup- planted, as goals of pilgrimage for Shi'i Muslims, by two sectarian holy cities in 'Iraq—Najaf and Karbala—that had been sanctified by the martyrdoms of an 'All and a Husayn; and these 'Iraqicynosures of the Shi'ah had afterwards been supplemented by the tombs of an Imami Shi'ah's seventh and ninth imams, Musa al-Kazim and Muhammad al-Jawad, at Kazimayn. When, in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, the career of the Safawi Imami Shi'ite empire-builder Shah IsmS'Il strongho after, 'Iraq itself fell under the dominion of the Sufawis' Sunni arch- enemies the 'Osmanlis,2 it became the policy of u Safawi imperial regime to discourage its Shf I subjects from making pilgrimages even to the historic holy places of the Shl'ah in an Arab 'Iraq that was now in hostile Ottoman Turkish Sunni hands, and to divert their hungry eyes •with the lure of competitive cynosures inside the Safawi Empire's poli- tical frontiers. Persian pilgrims heading for Karbala and Mecca were provided with alternative goals en route at Qumm and Qashan in a Per- sian 'Iraq where they could slake their spiritual thirst at a lower cost in money, fatigue, and danger without having to descend from their temperate native plateau to the sultry lowlands at its western foot, or to make the arduous transit of the Arabian desert between the Shi* I Mus- lim holy cities on the Lower Euphrates and the oecumenical Muslim holy cities in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea, Better still, these Per- sian Shi'I pilgrims could be induced not merely to stop short of the Qiblah, but to turn their backs on it, by being directed towards the Mashhad of the Imam Riz§ in KhurasSn, in the north-eastern corner of the Safawi dominions.3 This Shi'ite Muslim story has Far Eastern Buddhist and Western and Orthodox Christian parallels. After the propagation of the MahSySna into the domain of a disinte- grating Sinic Civilization, the converts to this oecumenical higher reli- gion in a nascent Far Eastern World were inspired with a zeal to visit the scenes of the Buddha's life and work in Northern India; and surviving records of journeys made by Chinese pilgrims to the holy land of Buddh- ism in the course of a span of years beginning in A.D. 259 and ending circa A.D. 1050+ showed that the practice had been at its height in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of the Christian Era. This floruit is surprising at fir^st sight, considering that the more frequented pilgrims' way was not the sea-route from the south-east coast of China to the Bay of Bengal but the land-route via the Tarim Basin and the Oxus-Jaxartes * See I. i. 366-400, together with the note by Professor H, A. R, Gibb, ibid,, pp. 400—2* * See I. i. 389-90. j $ee I, J. 3