Muzaffarid Dynasty

An official who kept going

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)formation

The Muzaffarids began as Ilkhanid officials. The family held Yazd and its district as a governorship, and Mubariz al-Din Muhammad inherited that position as a boy in 1314 — which is why the dynasty's conventional start date sits twenty-one years inside a state it was still serving.

When the Ilkhanate stopped in 1335 he did what the Jalayir did in Iraq: he kept what he was holding and took more. Kerman in 1340. Then Fars, which meant fighting the Injuids — another Ilkhanid family, ruling Shiraz, whose last amir Abu Ishaq was a cultivated and unserious man remembered mainly because Hafez wrote about his court with affection afterwards. Mubariz al-Din besieged Shiraz, took it in 1353, and had Abu Ishaq executed in 1357. Isfahan followed, and in 1358 he took Tabriz from the Jalayirids, briefly, before losing it again.

The parallel with the previous page is close enough to be worth stating as a pattern rather than a coincidence. Two families of Ilkhanid provincial officers, neither Chinggisid, neither able to claim the throne, both surviving the collapse by holding the settled revenue of a region and continuing to run the administration that had collected it. They raised troops from tribes and from men holding land against service, and paid for them out of the land tax and the tolls, which is to say they went on doing exactly what the Ilkhanid provincial government had been doing. The Ilkhanate did not disappear in 1335 so much as decompose into its provinces, each of which kept working.

The difference is what they did with it, and the difference is one man's character.

The censor

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)expansion

Mubariz al-Din was a puritan, and by the standards of fourteenth-century Iranian rulers an extreme one. He closed the taverns of Shiraz, banned wine, broke the wine jars, enforced attendance at prayer, and is reported to have executed men personally while reciting the Qur'an. His subjects called him the muhtasib — the market inspector, the official responsible for public morals — and they did not mean it kindly.

Hafez, who was living in Shiraz through all of it, wrote about him. Not by name; the poems complain about the muhtasib and about a time when the wine has to be drunk in secret, when the rose has no buyer, when the city's pleasure has gone underground. The poems are read that way by the tradition and by the modern scholarship, and they are among the reasons this dynasty is legible at all.

In 1358 his sons removed him. They seized him, blinded him — the standard disqualification, since a blind man cannot rule — and imprisoned him until he died in 1363. Shah Shuja took Shiraz.

The reversal was immediate and total. The taverns reopened, the poets were paid, and Hafez wrote that the days of the censor were over and the wine could be drunk in the open. It is about as sharp a reversal of cultural policy as anywhere on record: it took place inside one family within a single year, and the same poet documented both halves of it from the same city.

It is worth resisting the obvious moral. The evidence is a body of lyric poetry written by a man whose income depended on the second regime and not the first, and Hafez is not a witness in the way a chronicle is. What can be said is that a ruler's religious severity was politically survivable until his own sons decided it was not, and that the constituency they were answering to was in Shiraz.

Shah Shuja

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)peak

Shah Shuja ruled from 1358 to 1384 and is the reason the Muzaffarids are more than a footnote between the Ilkhanate and Timur. He held Fars, Kerman and Isfahan, took Tabriz from the Jalayirids in 1359 and could not hold it, fought his own brother Shah Mahmud for twenty years over Isfahan, and made Shiraz the literary capital of the Persian-speaking world.

He was himself a poet, in Persian and Arabic, and unusually for a royal versifier the tradition takes him seriously. He read and argued about poetry; the anecdote literature has him disputing points with Hafez, which is the sort of story that accretes and is not evidence, but it accreted around him rather than around somebody else.

The politics were relentless and mostly inconclusive. Brothers, nephews and cousins held Isfahan, Kerman, Yazd and Shiraz as their own, in the appanage arrangement their father had set up, and made and broke alliances against whichever of them was strongest. Shah Shuja spent most of his reign campaigning against relatives, which is what happens to every dynasty that treats its territory as family property to be divided.

He died in 1384 and his will is the most consequential document the dynasty produced: he divided the territory formally among his relatives and — knowing what was coming out of the east — commended them all to Timur's protection.

This is the arrangement Timur arrived into. A country divided among five or six princes of one family, each with a city, each with an army, each with a claim on the others, and all of them nominally the protégés of the man about to destroy them.

Hafez

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)aside?What aside means

Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez-i Shirazi lived in Shiraz from about 1315 to 1390, left the city rarely and perhaps never for long, wrote about five hundred ghazals, and is the poet Persian speakers quote. His divan is used for bibliomancy — opened at random for guidance — in houses that own no other book of poetry, and his tomb in Shiraz is a place people go.

Political weight and cultural output come apart constantly, and this is about as far apart as they get. The Muzaffarid dynasty lasted about eighty years, never controlled more than a corner of Iran, produced no institution, was exterminated by Timur, and would be an entry in a genealogical manual and nothing more. It also paid the household expenses of the man who wrote the poems.

Hafez belongs to this dynasty rather than to any other because he had no other patrons. He wrote under the Injuids and praised Abu Ishaq; he lived through Mubariz al-Din's prohibition and wrote about it; he was patronised by Shah Shuja and by Shah Mansur and by the local notables and viziers around them. He was invited to India and to the Deccan and did not go. Almost every political circumstance he alludes to is a Shiraz circumstance, which is what makes the divan usable as evidence at all — and what makes it dangerous to use that way, because a ghazal is not a report and the tradition of reading these poems as coded political commentary is a great deal younger than the poems.

There is no honest way to put him in a ledger. Counting poets, or ranking a literary legacy, would need a rule applicable to sixty other states, and there is no way of comparing a Persian lyric tradition with a Chinese historiographical one that would not be an opinion wearing a number.

So the largest thing the Muzaffarids did cannot be counted, and it is this: they held the city where Hafez lived, for the whole of his working life, and three of them paid him.

Five princes and a will

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)contraction

Shah Shuja's death in 1384 turned the appanage arrangement from a nuisance into the whole of the dynasty's politics. His son Zayn al-Abidin held Shiraz; his brother's sons held Isfahan and Kerman and Yazd; Shah Yahya and Shah Mansur and Sultan Ahmad manoeuvred against each other, and the cities changed hands repeatedly among cousins.

What made it lethal rather than merely undignified was that it did not stop when Timur arrived in 1387, or when he came back. None of the cousins could stop manoeuvring, because each of them held a city as his own property and the man next door was the immediate threat; Timur was a periodic weather event and a cousin was a permanent one. So the house spent the years between the two Timurid campaigns doing to each other what he would shortly do to all of them.

Shah Mansur, the most capable of them, was also the most thorough. He took his own cousin Zayn al-Abidin prisoner when the man came to him for refuge, blinded him and blinded Shah Yahya's brother as well, took Shiraz in 1391, and had most of Fars by 1392.

He was also the only one of them who fought.

Monday, 18 November 1387

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)contraction

Timur came into Fars in the autumn of 1387 for a stated reason: Zayn al-Abidin had been summoned to appear before him and had refused.

Isfahan was on the road. He entered it and levied a heavy contribution, which provoked a riot in which a good many of his tax-collectors and agents were killed. What he did about that has a date attached to it — Monday, 18 November 1387 — and a figure. The massacre was general; the heads were counted, and the count that comes down through the chronicles is seventy thousand; and they were built into minarets. Browne, who is following Sharaf al-Din Yazdi's Zafarnama here, gives all three details in one sentence and does not embellish them.

The figure should be held the way any such figure has to be held. It is a round number produced by the winning side, in a book written for the conqueror's grandson, and the counting of heads is itself part of the performance rather than an audit. What is not in doubt is the method, because it recurs: Miranshah put down a Khurasan rebellion two years later and had ten thousand heads built into pyramids at Tus, and the Kartid ruler of Herat had done the same thing at Badghis before Timur was old enough to campaign. The towers are the region's existing grammar of terror, used by Timur at a scale nobody else reached.

Shiraz submitted the following month and was not touched.

It is on that occasion — December 1387 — that the meeting between Timur and Hafez is supposed to have taken place, and it is worth stopping on it, because it is the single most repeated story about this dynasty's city and it is almost certainly untrue. In the version Dawlatshah gives, Timur sends for the poet and upbraids him for the line offering to give away Samarkand and Bukhara for a Shirazi Turk's mole: I have subdued most of the habitable globe with this sword to embellish those two cities, and you would sell them both for a mole. And Hafez bows and answers that it is precisely such extravagance that has reduced him to his present condition, and Timur is so delighted that he pays him. Browne points out that Dawlatshah dates the interview to 795/1392-3, by which time Hafez had been dead four years; that no contemporary biographer of Timur, Sharaf al-Din Yazdi included, mentions any such meeting; and that he has found no trustworthy evidence for it whatever. He also records a second version he heard in Persia and never met in a book, in which Hafez says he has been misquoted and what he actually wrote was that he would give for the mole on her cheek two maunds of sugar and three dates.

What actually happened in Fars in those weeks is less quotable and more useful. Zayn al-Abidin fled to his cousin Shah Mansur at Shushtar, who put him in prison — violating, as Browne notes, the claims of kinship and hospitality at the same time. Most of the other princes of the house came to Shiraz and submitted. Then a courier reached Timur from Samarkand, having covered the distance in seventeen days, with news that Tuqtamish had risen behind him, and in February 1388 he went home — taking the scholar al-Sharif al-Jurjani with him as part of the spoil, and leaving Shah Yahya at Shiraz, Sultan Muhammad at Isfahan, Sultan Ahmad at Kerman and Abu Ishaq at Sirjan.

He had been in the province four months. He had killed seventy thousand people at one end of it and appointed four Muzaffarid princes to govern the other, and both acts were the same policy. For the next four and a half years he was occupied with Tuqtamish and the north, and the princes were left with a reprieve that none of them used to combine. Shah Mansur spent it blinding his relatives and taking Shiraz, and by 1392 he held most of Fars, which meant that when Timur came back there was exactly one Muzaffarid left who could put an army in the field.

The one who charged

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)end

Timur came back in 1393 to finish it. Shah Mansur met him outside Shiraz with a force that the sources put at a small fraction of Timur's, and did the thing nobody in the campaign had done: he identified the centre of the opposing army, charged it directly with a few hundred men, and got close enough to Timur to strike at him. The accounts say he cut through the guard and reached the standard. He was killed there, in his early thirties, and his head was brought to Timur.

Timur then summoned the remaining princes of the house — the cousins who had submitted, been confirmed, and gone on fighting each other — and had them executed. Not deposed, not blinded, not pensioned: killed, as a family, in one decision.

Compare what happened to the neighbours. The Jalayirids were beaten in 1410 and a remnant held Basra for another twenty-two years; the Kara Koyunlu were destroyed in a year and their tribes turned up inside somebody else's confederation. The Muzaffarids have no remnant, no claimant and no successor claim, because the house was extinguished on purpose.

What survives is Shiraz, which Timur did not destroy — he sacked and taxed it and took its craftsmen, as he took Baghdad's and Damascus's, and the tomb of Hafez, who had died three years earlier, was in it. The Muzaffarid century is legible now almost entirely through the poetry it paid for, which is an odd afterlife for a dynasty founded by a man who banned the wine the poems are about.

The poet who would not travel

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)afterlife

Timur exterminated the family in 1393 and there is nothing to follow. What follows instead is what the dynasty had been holding, which was a city with a poet in it, and the poet outlasted them by six hundred years and counting.

Everybody wanted him and nobody could get him

The measure of Hafez's standing in his own lifetime is not what the Muzaffarids paid him. It is who else was writing.

Sultan Ahmad ibn Uways the Jalayirid, ruling Baghdad — himself a poet, a musician and by several accounts a painter — repeatedly tried to induce him to come. Hafez declined, in a line that has been quoted ever since:

The zephyr-breeze of Musalla and the stream of Ruknabad Do not permit me to travel or wander afield.

He sent verses in the sultan's praise anyway, including a compliment on his descent and a couplet admitting that no rose-bud of delight had bloomed for him from the earth of Fars, and sighing for the Tigris of Baghdad and the spiritual wine. Which is to say he took the trouble to explain, in verse, that Baghdad sounded lovely and he was not coming.

Then India. Mahmud Shah Bahmani of the Deccan invited him and he set out — got as far as Hormuz, where a ship was waiting to carry him over. A storm blew up just as he was embarking and alarmed him so thoroughly that he abandoned the voyage, went back to Shiraz, and sent the sultan a poem instead.

Gertrude Bell's version of the relevant stanza is the one that has stuck:

Full easy seemed the sorrow of the sea Lightened by hope of gain—hope flew too fast! A hundred pearls were poor indemnity, Not worth the blast.

A third invitation came from Bengal. He did not go there either.

Which is the whole point

Set that beside what the Muzaffarids were.

They were a provincial house from Yazd that took Shiraz in the 1350s, ran a corner of southern Iran for about eighty years, spent most of it fighting relatives, produced no institution anybody kept, and were killed to the last man on Timur's orders. On any political measure they are a footnote in the wreckage of the Ilkhanate.

They also held, for the whole of his working life, the one city on earth that the most sought-after poet in the Persian language refused to leave — for Baghdad, for the Deccan, for Bengal, or for anywhere.

Three Muzaffarid rulers paid him. One of them, Mubariz al-Din, banned wine and closed the taverns and got written about for it in terms that have outlived every other fact about him. Hafez called him the muhtasib, the censor, and when he was blinded and deposed by his own son the poet wrote that the days of the censor were over.

What survives where

The dynasty has no tomb anybody visits, no monument, no successor, and no claimant.

Hafez's tomb is in Shiraz, in a garden, and people go there. His divan is opened at random for guidance in houses that own no other book of poetry. He is the poet Persian speakers quote when they want to say something they cannot say plainly — which is a use the Muzaffarids themselves gave him plenty of occasion to practise.