Afsharid Dynasty

The man from Khurasan

Drafted from Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (2006)formation

Nadir Quli was born about 1698 into the Afshar, a Turkmen tribe in northern Khurasan, in circumstances the sources agree were poor and the later court histories worked hard to improve. He was carried off in a Uzbek raid as a boy and escaped. He was a local commander of irregulars, then a bandit, then a commander again, and in 1726 he attached himself and his followers to Tahmasp II, the Safavid claimant with a title and no army.

Within three years he had beaten the Afghans at Damghan and Murche-Khort and put Tahmasp into Isfahan. Within six he had taken most of the western provinces back from the Ottomans and the Caspian coast back from the Russians. In 1732 he deposed Tahmasp for making a peace he disapproved of, installed Tahmasp's infant son as Abbas III, and ruled as regent. In 1736, with the infant conveniently dead, he summoned an assembly and took the crown.

Axworthy's biography is a corrective to two traditions at once — the nationalist one that made Nadir the restorer of Iran, and the older European one that made him an oriental despot in the Tamburlaine mould — and its method is to take the military history seriously. The interesting question about Nadir is not his character, which was formidable and became terrible. It is how a man with no lineage, no province and no legitimacy assembled in ten years the best army in Asia, and what having one did to the country that paid for it.

The type is not new. Timur could not be khan and held his following by victory; Nadir could not be Safavid and did the same thing four centuries later in the same country. The difference is that Timur's army was a tribal following and Nadir's was salaried.

Seven years to make a country

Drafted from Astarabadi, The History of the Life of Nader Shah, King of Persia (1773)expansion

Between 1729 and 1736 Nader retook Iran from three foreign armies and one domestic dynasty, and his own court historian wrote the campaigns down while they were happening. Mirza Mahdi Khan is a court historian and reads like one: the victories are providential and the shah is never at fault. But he was there, and what he is good at is the mechanics — how a beaten army is put back on its feet, what a review is for, which general would not come out of his trenches.

The Afghans went first. Nader pursued Ashraf across Iran, and in one of his sweeps found an Afghan force holding a narrow pass between two mountains with their artillery sited on it, the kind of ground on which, Mirza Mahdi observes, a small number of resolute men could have stopped a whole army in the days before firearms. The Persians went in hard enough that the Afghans left the position and ran. Ashraf, who had grown cautious since his first defeat, pulled back to Isfahan and massacred most of the inhabitants in cold blood — among them, the historian is careful to say, a number of learned men who had withdrawn from the world and hoped to end their days quietly.

He came out again in November on the plain of Murchakhur. Nader arrived in the late evening and would not wait: he sent a body of Kurds against the Afghan advance guard that night, and they killed some four hundred and came back with prisoners, who reported that an Ottoman general, the governor of Hamadan, had joined Ashraf with an army. That was unwelcome news, and it defines the next six years. Getting the Afghans out of Iran was the easy half. The hard half was that the Ottomans held the western provinces and the Russians held the Caspian ones, and both of them had taken their shares while Iran was prostrate and had no intention of giving them back.

The Ottoman war produced the one clear defeat of Nader's career, and it is the most instructive thing in the book. In 1733 he was besieging Baghdad when Topal Osman came down to relieve it. Nader broke off, and when his line began to give way he sounded the retreat and sent orders to the twelve thousand men left in front of Baghdad to raise the siege and follow. The troops on the east bank of the Tigris got away; those on the west found that the defenders had demolished the bridge and burnt the boats, and had to go round through forests and over mountains, guided by wandering Arabs who were, says Mirza Mahdi, always glad to show their detestation of the Turkish nation. Two thousand Persians were killed and more than twice as many Turks, and Osman entered Baghdad in triumph and was received by the inhabitants as a guardian angel.

What Nader did about it is the reason he won. He summoned the governors of every province to bring their best troops to a plain near Hamadan, arrived there on 2 August, reviewed the army, and — Mirza Mahdi's phrasing is exact — as if his late defeat had been a signal victory, distributed a large sum among his soldiers, giving each man double the value of the arms or the horse he had lost at Baghdad. Seven weeks later he was back in the field with the provincial contingents added, marched on Kermanshah so fast that the Ottoman commanders waiting to block him fled without striking a blow and left their ammunition, and halted at a place called Elmidaran, where he reviewed the army again and exhibited a mock battle with all the evolutions and manoeuvres of a real engagement.

Topal Osman, meanwhile, had come out of Baghdad and entrenched himself near Kirkuk, and was sufficiently elevated by his victory that he would not meet Nader in person and sent a small detachment under a subordinate instead. It was beaten and ran for Erzurum, and the reports of Nader's strength kept coming in, and the Ottoman general began to be careful.

That is the whole method in one season. He lost a battle, paid his men more than they had lost, drilled the army in front of itself until it believed the defeat had been an accident, and was back on the same ground inside two months against an opponent who had started to think about his own position. By 1735 the Ottomans had been beaten out of the western provinces and the Russians had handed back the Caspian ones by treaty rather than fight him for them.

He had restored the frontiers of Iran, and he was still, formally, the general of a Safavid king.

Mughan

Drafted from Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (2006)expansion

In January 1736 Nadir summoned an assembly to the Mughan plain in Azerbaijan: tribal leaders, provincial officials, and the senior Shi'i clergy. He had them elect him shah.

Elective monarchy is rare enough to be worth noticing anywhere. This is the version in which the candidate assembled the electorate himself, arranged the outcome in advance, and had a dissenting cleric strangled during the proceedings.

The conditions he attached are the substantial part. Nadir made his acceptance conditional on Iran abandoning the public cursing of the first three caliphs — the practice the Safavids had introduced in 1501 and made the mark of the state — and on Twelver Shi'ism being reconstituted as a fifth legal school, the Ja'fari madhhab, taking its place beside the four Sunni schools with a pillar of its own at the Ka'ba. He pressed the proposal on the Ottomans for eleven years, in successive treaties and embassies, and never got it.

In 1501 a state had set out to change the confession of its population and had succeeded. What Nadir attempted at Mughan was to reverse that by agreement, which nobody had tried anywhere.

His motives are argued about and Axworthy's reading is the practical one. The confessional frontier was the reason for two centuries of war with the Ottomans; a ruler who intended to fight in Anatolia, Iraq, India and Central Asia at once needed the western war to be endable, and the sectarian claim was the obstacle. He also had no personal stake in Safavid legitimacy — it was the thing he had just displaced — and considerable interest in detaching the clergy from the endowments that made them a power. He confiscated a great deal of religious property at the same time.

It failed in every direction. The Ottomans would not concede the fifth school; the Iranian clergy resented the confiscations and the doctrine; and the country had been Shi'i for two hundred and thirty-five years and did not want to negotiate about it. The settlement of 1501 outlasted the man who tried to undo it by rather a lot.

The thing nobody could afford

Drafted from Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (2006)aside?What aside means

The same story had been told four times in the two centuries before Nadir. At Otlukbeli in 1473 the Ak Koyunlu lost to Ottoman artillery and drilled infantry with firearms. At Chaldiran in 1514 the Safavids lost to the same combination. At Marj Dabiq and Ridaniya in 1516 and 1517 the Mamluks did. Each losing side understood precisely what had beaten it, and each of the pages says the same thing about why it could not answer: what the Ottomans had was not guns, which anyone could buy, but a standing paid infantry that could be drilled to use them, and none of these polities had a revenue system that could support one.

Nadir built one anyway.

His army was recruited across every people he ruled and several he did not — Persians, Afghans, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Georgians, Armenians, Bakhtiari — paid in cash, kept permanently under arms, drilled, and equipped with muskets and light artillery he could move fast. He used it the way the Ottomans used theirs: firepower in a prepared position, cavalry to exploit rather than to decide. At Karnal in 1739 it destroyed a Mughal army several times its size in about three hours. It beat the Ottomans repeatedly in country they had held for a century. At its height it was probably the most effective army in the world outside Europe, and possibly not excluding Europe.

It was a standing professional army, paid in cash, and that is the whole point. The Ottomans had one. Between the Bosphorus and India in the eighteenth century, nobody else did.

And the reason nobody else does is the reason it did not last. Iran in the 1730s had a small tax base, a population that had been through a decade of invasion and famine, and no fiscal apparatus of the kind that fed the janissaries. Nadir paid for the army with the Indian treasure, and when that was gone he paid for it by taxing a ruined country at rates that produced revolts he then had to use the army to suppress. The instrument consumed the state that held it inside a decade.

The conclusion the four battles pointed at was correct after all. The polities that lost at Otlukbeli and Chaldiran could not afford a standing professional army — and the one that built it anyway demonstrated why in the most direct way available.

Delhi

Drafted from Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (2006)peak

Nadir took Kandahar in 1738 after a year's siege, and then kept going. The pretext was that the Mughals had failed to close their frontier to Afghan fugitives; the reason was that the Mughal empire was visibly weak and extraordinarily rich, and his army needed paying.

At Karnal, north of Delhi, on 24 February 1739, he met a Mughal army that outnumbered his by a large margin — the figures given are unreliable in both directions — and destroyed it in a few hours, using entrenched infantry with firearms and light artillery against massed cavalry and elephants. Muhammad Shah surrendered. Nadir entered Delhi with him.

Then a rumour spread that Nadir was dead, and Delhi rose and killed several hundred of his soldiers. He ordered a general massacre; it lasted a day, and the reported death toll runs to tens of thousands. He then negotiated, took what he had come for, restored Muhammad Shah to a throne he no longer effectively held, and went home after fifty-seven days.

What he took is the largest single transfer of movable wealth in the period. The imperial treasury, the jewels, the Peacock Throne, the stone that became the Koh-i-Noor, and enough besides that he remitted three years of taxation across Iran on the strength of it. Mughal decline was a longer process and Karnal is not the whole of it; but the Mughals were never again a power in northern India, and the provinces that went their own way afterwards did so in the space Nadir made.

He came back and campaigned for another eight years — Bukhara and Khiva in 1740, Daghestan, the Ottomans again, a fleet built in the Persian Gulf to take Oman — and did not conquer anything else that stayed conquered. The Indian expedition was the peak in the exact sense: after it, everything he did was paid for out of it, and then out of Iran.

What it cost

Drafted from Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (2006)contraction

The three-year tax remission ran out, and the army did not. Nadir went on campaigning — in Daghestan for years, inconclusively, in country that suited mountaineers and not artillery — and the money had to come from somewhere. It came from Iran, collected by force, at rates the country could not meet after twenty years of war and invasion.

Axworthy's account of the last five years is grim reading, and its argument is structural before it is psychological. A ruler with a salaried army and no revenue system to support it has only one lever, and pulling it produces revolt, and revolt requires the army, which requires more money. Provinces rose — Fars, Astarabad, Shirvan — and were put down with towers of skulls, a deliberate citation of Timur that Nadir's propagandists were happy to make.

The personal deterioration is documented and is not separable from the position. In 1741 he was shot at in a forest in Mazandaran and became convinced his eldest son Reza Quli had arranged it. In 1742 he had him blinded, and then, hearing what he had done, had the witnesses who had accused him executed. He is reported to have said afterwards that he had blinded himself.

By 1747 he was extracting money from his own officers and had begun to suspect the Persian troops in the army as against the Afghan and Uzbek ones. In June, at Fathabad in Khurasan, a group of his own commanders — who had good reason to believe they were on a list — came into his tent at night and killed him.

He was about forty-nine, and he had ruled eleven years as shah. The empire outlived him by roughly a fortnight.

Nothing to hand over

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 7: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (1991)end

What happened after the murder is the clearest possible demonstration of what Nadir's state had actually been. There was no succession war, because there was nothing coherent to fight over. The Afghan contingent rode east under Ahmad Khan Abdali with as much of the treasury as they could carry, and founded the Durrani state at Kandahar that modern Afghanistan dates itself from. The Caucasus provinces went their own way. Every regional commander with troops became the government of wherever he was standing.

Nadir's nephew Adil Shah took the throne, killed all of Nadir's family he could find except Shahrukh — a grandson who was also, through his mother, a grandson of the Safavid Sultan Husayn, which is the reason he was spared — and was himself deposed and blinded within a year. Shahrukh was proclaimed at Mashhad in 1748, blinded in 1750 by a rival, and then restored, and held Khurasan as a client of whoever was strongest for another forty-six years.

That is the whole Afsharid afterlife: a blind man in Mashhad, tolerated by the Zands and then by the Qajars because he was harmless and because his Safavid blood made him useful to nobody. In 1796 Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar came to Mashhad, tortured him to find where Nadir's treasure was buried, and killed him.

So the dynasty has two ending dates, 1747 and 1796, and they measure different things: when the empire stopped and when the family did. That is the ordinary way these houses end.

The comparison to make is with the Timurids. Both were built by a man of no legitimate descent who held an enormous following by continuous victory; both took Delhi; both empires came apart on the founder's death. The difference is what was left over. The Timurid century produced a court style three later empires worked from. Nadir left a stripped treasury, a depopulated countryside, a blinded son, and the man who founded Afghanistan.

The treasure

Drafted from Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, with a Journal of Travels, to which are added the Revolutions of Persia (1753)afterlife

Nadir was murdered by his own officers in June 1747, and what he left behind was a quantity of loot, an army that immediately dispersed, and a reputation that Europe found more interesting than Iran did.

The plunder, and where it went

The Delhi treasure was the largest single transfer of movable wealth in the eighteenth century, and almost none of it stayed where he put it.

The Afghan contingent rode east under Ahmad Khan Abdali with as much of it as they could carry, and founded the Durrani state with it — including the Koh-i-Noor, which went to Kandahar, and then in due course to Lahore, and then to Punjab's British conquerors, and is in London. The Peacock Throne was broken up. The rest was fought over by Nadir's own commanders within weeks.

He had remitted three years of taxation across Iran on the strength of what he took at Delhi. By the time he died he was extracting revenue with a brutality that had raised the provinces against him, and the treasure was in a fortress at Kalat that his successors could not hold either.

The witness

Jonas Hanway was an English merchant of the Russia Company who travelled from London through Russia into Persia in the 1740s trying to open a Caspian trade, lost his goods to a rebellion, and came home and wrote it up. His Revolutions of Persia was published in 1753, six years after the murder, and it is the fullest contemporary account in English.

He is not a historian and does not pretend to be. He is a merchant explaining to other merchants why the Persian trade had failed, and the answer he gives is that the country had been governed by a man whose whole system was conquest, and that when the conquest stopped there was nothing underneath it.

That judgement is hard to improve on. Hanway had gone to Iran to sell British woollens and found a state that had no revenue system worth the name, an army that had to be paid every month in cash, and a ruler extracting the difference by torture. He got out with his life and not much else.

What Europe made of him

Nadir arrived in the European imagination as the last of the world-conquerors, and the timing was everything: he sacked Delhi in 1739, when England and France were beginning to think about India seriously, and the news that the Mughal capital could be taken by twenty thousand men from Khurasan was read in London and Paris as information rather than as a story.

Voltaire wrote about him. Hanway's book went through editions. He is the reason educated Europeans of the mid-eighteenth century knew there was a Persia and thought it was formidable — at exactly the moment it had ceased to be.

What Iran made of him

Much less, and this is the asymmetry worth ending on.

Nadir left no dynasty that lasted, no capital that survived him as a capital, no administration, no building anybody visits, and no religious settlement — his attempt to have Twelver Shi'ism recognised as a fifth Sunni school died with him and was not mourned. His grandson held Mashhad and Khurasan as a rump for another half-century, blinded, ruling one province of a country his grandfather had ruled the whole of.

He restored Iran's borders, expelled two invading powers, took Delhi, and is remembered in Iran chiefly as the man who did those things and then wrecked the country paying for them. The Timurids left a court style three empires worked from. Nadir left a hole where a government had been, and the Koh-i-Noor in somebody else's crown.