Hotak Dynasty

Kandahar

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

Kandahar was the Safavid empire's eastern frontier province, contested with the Mughals for a century, and its population was Pashtun — Ghilzai in the country around the city, Abdali to the west around Herat. Both were Sunni, which in a state that had spent two centuries enforcing Twelver Shi'ism was a standing problem, and the last decades of Safavid administration made it worse rather than better.

Isfahan sent Gurgin Khan, a Georgian convert and a capable soldier, to govern the province firmly. He governed it very firmly. Mirwais Hotak, the leading man of the Ghilzai, was arrested and sent to Isfahan as a hostage — where, having been given the run of the capital, he formed a view of the empire that turned out to be accurate: that it was rich, badly defended, and hated in its own provinces.

He went on the pilgrimage from there, and is reported to have obtained a ruling at Mecca that revolt against a Shi'i sovereign was lawful.

Whether that ruling existed in anything like the form the accounts give it cannot be established, and the distinction matters. A revolt authorised by a jurist is a different object from a revolt that simply succeeded; the first has a document behind it that other people can be shown. Nobody has ever produced this one. What the Hotaks ruled on, in the end, was the fact that they had won.

He returned to Kandahar, was received as a loyal subject, and in 1709 had Gurgin Khan killed at a banquet. The Ghilzai took the city. Isfahan sent four expeditions over the following years and all four failed, which taught the Ghilzai the thing that mattered most: that Safavid armies could be beaten by a provincial tribal levy.

Mirwais died in 1715 having never claimed to be more than the leader of his people. His brother succeeded him, argued for coming to terms with Isfahan, and was murdered for it by Mirwais's son.

Gulnabad

Drafted from Matthee, International Library of Iranian Studies (2012)expansion

Mahmud Hotak invaded Persia in 1722 with a force the sources put at something like twenty thousand men. He was not attempting to conquer an empire; the first campaign, two years earlier, had been a raid that reached Kerman and went home again. This one reached Isfahan.

On 8 March 1722, at Gulnabad east of the capital, the Safavid army came out to meet him — a much larger force, with artillery, commanded by court appointees who disagreed with each other — and was broken in a few hours. Matthee's account of the battle is unsparing about why: the Afghans were a tribal army that had been fighting for a decade and the Safavid army had not fought a serious war in a generation, was raised out of a system that had been decaying since Abbas I, and was commanded by men chosen for their position at court.

There was nothing behind it. Mahmud did not have to storm Isfahan and does not appear to have known how; he sat down around it instead. The siege lasted six months, the city ate its animals and then worse, and the reported mortality is enormous. On 23 October Shah Sultan Husayn rode out and handed Mahmud the crown in person.

A tribal confederation from one frontier province had become, in an afternoon at Gulnabad, the government of an empire — and it had no chancery, no revenue administration, no legitimacy in the country and no plan. It then took six months to collect the prize.

The six months

Drafted from Krusiński, The History of the Revolution of Persia, taken from the memoirs of Father Krusinski, Procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan (1728)peak

Mahmud Hotak did not storm Isfahan. He sat down around it in March 1722 and waited until October, and what happened inside the walls in those six months was recorded by a Jesuit who was in the city for all of it.

Judasz Krusiński was procurator of the Jesuit mission at Isfahan. He knew the court, he spoke the language, and he was an eyewitness. His account is partisan — he thought the Safavid government contemptible and said so — and on the siege itself it is the fullest testimony there is.

What follows is difficult and it is not softened here, because softening it would be the only real dishonesty available.

The prices

Corn failed in September. A pound of bread sold for thirty shillings that month, and for above fifty in October.

Isfahan had so many trees that Tavernier said it looked more like a forest than a city. Part of them were felled during the famine, and the leaves and the bark were sold by the pound. The roots of herbs were ground into meal. Boiled shoe leather was, for a time, the common food.

Afterwards

Then people ate the dead. Krusinski says the streets were full of bodies and that some of them had their thighs cut off privately, because the practice was not tolerated: men caught eating human flesh were bastinadoed for it. The fear of punishment did not stop it. Children were stolen and eaten, half dead of hunger already. He reports, and marks it as the worst thing in the account, that there were mothers who killed and ate their own children.

The mortality was such that nobody buried anyone. The corpses were thrown out into the streets in numbers that made it impossible to walk without stepping over them, and people grew used to it. Eventually the citizens began throwing them into the Zayandeh Rud where it ran nearest the city, in quantities that corrupted the water so thoroughly that it was a year before anyone would drink from the river or eat a fish out of it.

One household

Krusinski gives one story in full, and it is the one to keep.

A Persian lord sold everything he owned piece by piece to feed his household. When there was nothing left to sell and no food to be had, he decided to deliver himself and his family from a famine he could see no remedy for. He ordered a dinner rather more sumptuous than usual, and poisoned all of it privately, so that he and his whole family down to the meanest servant found an end of their miseries — none of them, except himself, knowing how it came.

The surrender

On 23 October Shah Sultan Husayn rode out of the city and handed Mahmud his crown in person.

That is the height of Hotaki power and it is worth being exact about what had been won. Twenty thousand Afghans had taken the capital of an empire without assaulting it, by sitting outside for six months while the people inside starved to death. Isfahan had been one of the largest and richest cities in the world. It never recovered its population, and Iran did not have a functioning central government again for fourteen years.

Seven years

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

The Hotaks held Isfahan from 1722 to 1729 and never held Persia. Safavid claimants were proclaimed elsewhere almost immediately — Tahmasp II got out of the city before it fell and set up in the north — and the provinces mostly ignored the new government. Russia took the Caspian coast. The Ottomans took Georgia, Armenia and much of the west, and in 1724 the two powers agreed to partition what they had between them.

What the occupiers did in the meantime cannot really be called a fiscal system. They confiscated. No source describes any attempt at a revenue administration, because the men who had taken the capital were a tribal levy without a secretarial class, in a country whose own administrators had no reason to work for them and every reason not to. An occupation that lives on what it can seize is not on a revenue basis; it is spending a stock.

Mahmud's own behaviour deteriorated into something the sources describe as madness and modern accounts have variously diagnosed. In 1725 he had most of the surviving Safavid princes killed in the palace, reportedly with his own hand. Shortly afterwards his cousin Ashraf had him killed and took the throne.

Ashraf was the abler of the two and inherited an impossible position: a shrinking Afghan force in a hostile country, an Ottoman army in the west, a Russian one in the north and a Safavid claimant in between. He beat the Ottomans once and made terms, executed Sultan Husayn, and held on.

It is worth stating what this episode is not. It is not the fall of Iran to Afghanistan, and treating it that way — as several nineteenth- and twentieth-century national histories on both sides have — reads a modern border back into a Safavid province in revolt. The Ghilzai of 1722 were subjects of the empire they took, and the man who ended them was from Khurasan.

The red gospel

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)contraction

An occupying army of a few thousand men holding a country of several million has one obvious problem and Mahmud solved it the obvious way, twice, and then went mad.

The first was in 1723, after a revolt at Qazvin had shown him what the country would do if it found the nerve. He calculated that he was in the middle of a large and hostile population with a handful of soldiers, and that the way to be master of one part of it was to kill the other; and that to avoid provoking the rising he was afraid of, he should begin with the people whose rank or birth would let them lead one. So on the day his detachment came back from Qazvin he invited the ministers, lords and Persian chiefs to a public entertainment. Three hundred came, without suspicion, and as soon as they were seated the guard fell on them with sabres. Among them were the chancellor of the empire, the governor of Isfahan and his brother, the khan of Gilan, and the grand master of the artillery.

Hanway keeps one detail out of that room. A boy of twelve, a son of the prince of Georgia, had been adopted by an Afghan; during the massacre he ran to the officers of that nation and begged them in tears to protect him, and neither his age nor their pleading saved him — he was taken from them and killed.

The bodies were laid out on the maydan in front of the palace. Then, so that their children should not grow up to avenge them, two hundred young men of the first nobility of Iran and Georgia were brought together from the academy where they were being educated, taken to an open field, and told to run for their lives; and the Afghans rode after them and hunted them down. Mahmud's public explanation was that these young lords had been conspiring against him. Then he assembled the three thousand men he had taken into his own pay out of Shah Husayn's guard, on the pretext of giving them an extra allowance of pilau, and had troops posted for the purpose cut them to pieces while they ate.

The second was in 1725, and it was the royal family. Several brothers, three uncles and seven nephews of Shah Husayn were shut up with him; counting the shah's own children the number came to more than a hundred, which Hanway pauses to explain by the reign that produced them — 1701 was remembered in Iran as the year of virgins, when Husayn had the provinces searched for beautiful girls, and there was a month in which thirty cradles were carried into the seraglio. On 7 February they were assembled in the palace yard with their hands tied behind them and Mahmud began the killing himself with his sabre.

Two of Husayn's sons were still alive when their father heard the noise and came running. The elder was five. They threw themselves into his arms; he wept over them and put himself in the way of the stroke; and when Mahmud came forward to kill them in their father's arms, Husayn put his arm out and took the blow instead. Hanway's sentence for what happened next is the one worth keeping: at the sight of blood running from the wound of a king, and a man of whom the tyrant had been used to think with some reverence, heaven stopped his murdering hand. The two children were left with their father.

After that Mahmud could not sleep. His mind, Hanway says, was perpetually agitated with the most frightful ideas, his intellect — already weakened by a long ascetic retreat — failed further, and he had an insupportable pain in his bowels. The court physicians could do nothing, so they sent for a religious remedy, and the one they sent for was Christian: the Armenians of New Julfa had a practice of reading what they called the red gospel over the head of a patient in such cases, and Armenians and Muslims in the country alike held that Persians as mad as Mahmud had been cured by it.

In the first days of April the clergy of Julfa put on their vestments, lit wax tapers, and walked in procession to the palace of the man who had conquered the country. They were received with great respect. They passed through the apartments between two rows of courtiers and guards whose modest bearing and profound silence expressed, Hanway notes, a reverence for these priests that could hardly have been expected from men of their religion. The ceremony was performed, and the clergy walked back to Julfa in the same order, attended by a great many of the lords of the court.

In a lucid interval Mahmud learned what the Armenians had tried to do for him, and sent them two thousand tomans in coin and as much again in goods, with a promise to return the rest of what he had extorted from them if he recovered. He made the same promise to the Dutch and the Indian merchants. He did not recover. His officers deposed him for his cousin Ashraf within weeks, and he died shortly afterwards.

The career they created

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

Tahmasp II, the Safavid claimant in the north, acquired in 1726 a commander from a Turkmen tribe in Khurasan named Nadir Quli. Within three years the Afghans were gone.

Nadir beat Ashraf at Damghan in September 1729 and again at Murche-Khort in November, took Isfahan, and drove the remnant east. Ashraf was killed in flight in 1730, and the Hotak state contracted back to the province it had come from. Husayn Hotak held Kandahar until 1738, when Nadir — by then shah himself — besieged it for a year, took it, and destroyed the city.

The occupation's most durable consequence is the man who ended it, which is an odd thing to say about a conquest and is nonetheless the case. Axworthy's biography makes the point directly: Nadir's whole career was built on being the person who reversed 1722, and the army he built to do it became the instrument he used on Delhi nine years later. The Hotaks broke the Safavid state and created the conditions for the next one.

A postscript, and not a small one. The Abdali of Herat, the other Pashtun confederation, served Nadir; one of their commanders, Ahmad Khan Abdali, was with him when he was murdered in 1747, took his treasury and his Afghan contingent, and founded the Durrani state at Kandahar. Modern Afghanistan dates itself from that. Both Afghan polities of the eighteenth century came out of this quarrel between a Safavid province and its governor.

What was not rebuilt

Drafted from Krusiński, The History of the Revolution of Persia, taken from the memoirs of Father Krusinski, Procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan (1728)afterlife

The Hotaki state lasted twenty-nine years and held a capital for seven of them, and its afterlife is not a dynasty or a doctrine. It is a hole in a city and two Afghan states that came out of the same quarrel.

Isfahan

Abbas I had made Isfahan one of the largest cities on earth — the maidan, the bridges, the avenue of plane trees, the Armenian suburb across the river with its own churches and its own silk merchants. Chardin and Tavernier had described it to Europe as a wonder.

After 1722 it was not that again.

The siege killed a large part of the population and the occupation drove out much of the rest; the trees that had made it look like a forest had been felled and sold as bark; the river had been used as a mass grave. When the Afghans left in 1729 the government did not come back with them — Nadir ruled from Mashhad, and the capital of Iran afterwards was Shiraz and then Tehran. Isfahan became a provincial town containing the monuments of an imperial one, which is what it still is.

That is the largest thing the Hotaks did, and they did it by waiting.

The two states

The second consequence is the one that has outlasted everything.

Nadir Quli's entire career was built on being the man who reversed 1722. The army he assembled to expel the Afghans was the instrument he took to Delhi nine years later, and the empire he made and could not hold came directly out of the Hotaki occupation. Without Mahmud there is no Nadir.

And on the other side of the same quarrel: the Abdali of Herat, the Ghilzai's rivals, served Nadir. One of their commanders, Ahmad Khan Abdali, was with him when he was murdered in 1747, took his treasury and his Afghan contingent east, and founded the Durrani state at Kandahar. Modern Afghanistan dates itself from that year.

Both Afghan polities of the eighteenth century, and the Iranian empire that briefly took Delhi, come out of a dispute between a Safavid frontier province and the governor sent to discipline it.

What they did not leave

No administration, because they never built one. No legitimating claim that anybody afterwards found worth invoking. No literature. No architecture. Their own dynasty ended in 1738 when Nadir besieged Kandahar for a year, took it, and destroyed the city.

They are one of the few states of this period that can be said to have left nothing at all — and to have changed everything, by removing something that had been there for two hundred and twenty-one years and could not be put back.