Safavid Empire

Two hundred years of being a Sufi order

Drafted from Babayan, Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 35 (2002)formation

The Safavids were a Sufi order before they were anything else. Shaykh Safi al-Din, who died in 1334, founded a tariqa at Ardabil in Azerbaijan; it was Sunni, it was respectable, it attracted endowments, and for four generations its shaykhs were religious figures with a large following and no army.

Somewhere in the fifteenth century that changed, and the change is the whole explanation of what happened in 1501. The order's following moved from settled Persian-speaking devotees to Turkmen tribes in Anatolia and Azerbaijan — the same human material as the two sheep, from the same pastures — and the doctrine moved with it, towards an Alid messianism that scholars call ghuluww, exaggeration: the belief that the imam's authority was present in a living man, that the end of the world was near, and that the shaykh was the one who would bring it.

Babayan's book is about that world, and its argument is that the Safavid state did not emerge from a religious movement so much as it emerged as one and then had to be converted into a government. Shaykh Junayd and his son Haydar led their followers into battle in the 1450s and 1460s and were both killed doing it; Haydar gave them the red twelve-gored cap that got them their name, Qizilbash, red-heads.

Isma'il was Haydar's son, and he was raised in hiding as the object of that expectation. His Turkish poetry, written under the pen-name Khata'i, does not gesture at it. He tells his followers that he is Alexander and Khidr and the eye of God, that Adam's clothing was changed and he is Faridun and Khusraw and Jesus, and that whoever follows him will not die.

Rulers claim divine sanction all the time and mean something modest by it. This is not that. A young man is telling armed men that he is God's eye and that following him confers immortality, in verse, under his own name, and they are believing him well enough to charge Ottoman artillery on the strength of it.

A confession imposed by decree

Drafted from Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (2006)formation

Isma'il was fourteen when he took Tabriz in 1501 at the head of the Qizilbash. He then declared Twelver Shi'ism the official religion of a country that was overwhelmingly Sunni, had the first three caliphs cursed publicly from the pulpits, and enforced it — by execution where necessary, and there is no reason to soften that.

Conversions of this kind almost never happen. They are gradual, or they follow conquest by generations, or they are a ruling-class affair that leaves the population alone — the Fatimids held Egypt for two centuries and did not make it Isma'ili. The Safavids changed the confession of a large settled population inside roughly a century, on purpose.

They did it with an apparatus that did not exist when they started. There was no Twelver clerical establishment in Iran to enforce a Twelver orthodoxy, so the dynasty imported one — jurists from Jabal Amil, Bahrain and Iraq, given stipends, endowments and offices — and put it in charge of law and education. The institution they built outlasted them and acquired its own doctrine about where authority sits, which is a later chapter.

Two consequences run out of 1501 and neither has stopped. The first is the map: Iran is a Shi'i state in a Sunni region because of a decision taken by a fourteen-year-old, and the confessional boundary in Iraq and eastern Anatolia was drawn by the wars that followed it. The second is that those wars — Ottoman against Safavid, on and off for two centuries — were the first sustained confessional conflict between two great Muslim powers, and both sides obtained rulings that the other's subjects could lawfully be killed.

The usual shape of these events is a ruler changing confession and the state following him. This is the other thing: a state setting out to change the population, and largely succeeding.

Chaldiran

Drafted from Babayan, Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 35 (2002)expansion

Between 1501 and 1510 Isma'il took Iran. He beat the remnants of the Ak Koyunlu, took Iraq-i Ajam, Fars and Kerman, then Baghdad, then in 1510 marched east and killed Muhammad Shaybani Khan of the Uzbeks near Merv, taking Khurasan and Herat. He was twenty-three, and the Qizilbash who had done it believed he could not be defeated because of what he was.

In August 1514, on the plain of Chaldiran north-east of Lake Van, Selim I met him with an Ottoman army that had artillery chained in a line and janissaries with matchlocks behind it. The Qizilbash charged the guns. The army was destroyed, Tabriz was occupied, and Isma'il's own wife was captured.

The frontier that battle set has moved very little in five hundred years, which is the fact usually reported. The consequence inside Iran is the larger one and it is Babayan's subject. A man whose followers believed he was divine had been beaten in a field by a man with cannon. Isma'il, by the accounts, never personally led an army again and spent the remaining decade of his life hunting, drinking and out of public sight; the Qizilbash amirs governed and fought each other, and when he died in 1524 his ten-year-old son inherited a decade of civil war among them.

What the state did afterwards was quietly change what it was. The messianic claim was not renounced — it could not be, it was the reason the tribes had come — but it stopped being the working basis of government, and the Arab Shi'i jurists the dynasty had been importing since 1501 were given the space to build something more durable and considerably less exciting in its place. The progression from a millenarian movement to an orthodox clerical establishment took about a century, and Chaldiran is where it starts.

It is also the second of four battles worth dating against each other — Otlukbeli 1473, Chaldiran 1514, Marj Dabiq 1516, Ridaniya 1517. In forty-four years the same Ottoman combination beat a Turkmen confederation, a Persian empire and the Mamluk sultanate, and each of the losers understood exactly what had happened and could not buy or build the answer.

Fifty-one years, eleven of them indoors

Drafted from others, A Narrative of Italian Travels in Persia in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1873)peak

Tahmasp reigned for fifty-two years, which is longer than any other Safavid and longer than most European reigns of the period, and almost nothing in the standard account of the dynasty happens during it. In 1571 a Venetian envoy named Vincentio d'Alessandri reached his court and wrote a report for the Senate, and it explains the silence.

D'Alessandri had been sent to find out whether Iran was worth an alliance against the Ottomans, so he wrote the kind of report a government wants: the provinces and what they produce, the revenue and the expenditure, the number and quality of the sultans — who, he notes for Venetian readers, are nothing but commanders of soldiers — and the person of the king.

The king was in his sixty-fourth year and the fifty-first of his reign, of middling stature, well made, dark, thick-lipped, with a grizzled beard, and more melancholy than anything else. D'Alessandri says this is known by many signs and principally by one: he had not come out of his palace for eleven years, and had not gone once to the chase or to any other amusement in that time.

The consequence is the part a Venetian would notice, because it is administrative. By the custom of the country a subject presented a petition to the king in person and justice was got by being seen; with the king indoors, it could not be done. So people came and shouted for justice in front of the palace day and night, sometimes a thousand of them, and the king heard the noise and gave orders to send them away, saying that there were judges appointed in the country and that justice was their business. What he did not take into account, writes d'Alessandri, is that the complaints were against those judges and sultans, who were in the habit of having people killed in the street — which he adds he had seen himself, as had many others.

The rest of the report is a study in what a treasury does when the ruler will not leave the harem. Tahmasp deliberated affairs of state with his women, and was miserly by nature except with them. He bought cloth in Khurasan and Aleppo and issued it to his soldiers as pay at ten times its value. He accepted any present however small and did not always make one in return. He paid a tribal chief on the eastern frontier four hundred talleri a year not to interfere with the caravans from India.

And the succession was already arranged in the worst possible way. Of eleven sons, the one the whole country wanted was Ismail, whom his father had put in prison and kept there; the sultans were afraid of him for his pride, and d'Alessandri's assessment is that if he ever came to the throne he would have to replace a great many of the commanders and fight all his brothers, who had taken possession of large parts of the kingdom. Ismail said he would bear his own imprisonment patiently but would not have children to be prisoners too. The third son, Haydar, was eighteen, small, beautiful, a fine speaker and horseman, too delicate for war, and the father's favourite.

Tahmasp died in 1576. Ismail came out of prison, took the throne, killed most of his brothers including Haydar, and was dead within eighteen months. Everything d'Alessandri predicted happened, and it happened in a year and a half.

That is the reign the dynasty's greatest age was built on top of. It is not nothing — the Ottoman wars were survived, the frontier was stabilised at Amasya in 1555, the capital was moved to Qazvin, and the state that Abbas would rebuild still existed to be rebuilt. But the report is a description of a monarchy that has stopped performing the one function its subjects could see, and the twelve years of dynastic murder that followed Tahmasp's death were not an interruption of it.

Abbas breaks his own army

Drafted from Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (2006)peak

Abbas I came to the throne in 1588 at sixteen, over a state that had lost Tabriz and much of the north-west to the Ottomans and Khurasan to the Uzbeks, and that was governed in practice by Qizilbash chiefs who had made his dynasty and expected to be paid in provinces for it. His first act was to make peace with the Ottomans on humiliating terms, conceding the territory, in order to have one war at a time.

Then he dealt with the Qizilbash, and how he did it is the most consequential thing anybody in the dynasty ever built. He built a standing corps of ghulams — Georgian, Armenian and Circassian captives from the Caucasus campaigns, raised as Muslim converts, trained, paid, and owing loyalty to the shah personally rather than to any tribe. He gave them the senior governorships and the army commands. And he paid for them by converting provincial land from tribal assignment into crown domain administered for the treasury, which took the revenue away from the Qizilbash at the same time as it took the offices.

It is the oldest solution in the region — the Abbasids at Samarra, the Samanids, the Ghaznavids, the Ottomans — and it fails the same way every time: an army that can make a ruler eventually makes one it prefers. The Safavid ghulams did not seize the throne. What happened instead was subtler and, on Matthee's reading, worse: the corps became a court interest group like the one it replaced, the crown lands it was paid from could not be returned to tribal assignment when the money ran short, and the frontier provinces lost the tribal cavalry that had defended them without gaining a standing garrison that could.

With the new army he took everything back: Khurasan and Herat from the Uzbeks by 1603, Tabriz and the north-west from the Ottomans, Baghdad in 1623, Hormuz from the Portuguese in 1622 with English ships. At his death in 1629 the empire was larger and better governed than at any other point in its history.

He also had his eldest son executed and two others blinded, and ended the practice of sending princes to the provinces to learn to govern. His successors were raised in the harem.

Isfahan

Drafted from Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (2006)peak

Abbas moved the capital to Isfahan in 1598 and rebuilt it. Tabriz had been indefensible since Chaldiran and Qazvin was still too far north; Isfahan sits in the middle of the plateau, out of reach of both frontiers, on a river, in irrigated country that could feed a court.

What he built there is one of the most complete surviving pieces of imperial urban planning anywhere. A new maidan five hundred metres long, arcaded on all four sides: the royal mosque at the south end, the entrance to the old bazaar at the north, the palace gate on one flank and a private mosque on the other, with polo played in the middle. Behind the palace gate a garden avenue, the Chahar Bagh, running a mile and a half south to the river and across it on a bridge that is also a dam. The forms are Timurid — the four-part garden, the four-iwan court, the double dome — and the scale is not.

It was also a commercial instrument, and the two purposes were designed together. Abbas ran the silk export as a crown monopoly, made the state the sole buyer, and moved the Armenian merchant community of Julfa in Azerbaijan wholesale to a new suburb across the river — New Julfa, which got its own churches, its own municipal autonomy and a network reaching Venice, Amsterdam, Aleppo and Manila. He dealt directly with the English and Dutch East India companies to route silk by sea around Ottoman territory rather than through it, which was a policy against the Ottomans conducted with a ledger.

The maidan is the argument in built form. A mosque, a palace, a bazaar and a customs revenue arranged around one rectangle, with the shah able to watch all four from a balcony.

The bill came later. Matthee's account of the following century turns partly on this: the crown lands that paid for the ghulam corps and the court could not be reconverted when the silk revenue fell, and a capital built for display and commerce in the middle of a dry plateau was a difficult place to defend and an impossible one to provision under siege. In 1722 that is exactly what happened to it.

The scholars they imported

Drafted from Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (2006)aside?What aside means

In 1501 there was no Twelver Shi'i clerical establishment in Iran, because there had been no Twelver Shi'i state in Iran to employ one. The dynasty had to build it, and the way it did so has a long consequence.

The Safavids imported jurists — from Jabal Amil in what is now Lebanon, from Bahrain, from Iraq — gave them stipends, endowments, appointments and land, and put them in charge of law, education and the administration of religious property. Within a century the imported scholars and their Iranian students were an established class with their own institutions, their own revenues from endowment, and their own doctrine of who held the imam's authority in his absence.

That doctrine is the interesting part, because the dynasty had an answer to the question and the scholars developed a different one. The Safavid answer, in the first decades, was that the shah held it: Isma'il was the imam's presence, or something even less qualified than that. The clerical answer, worked out over the following two centuries, was that in the imam's absence his authority devolved on the qualified jurists — which locates it in a class of scholars rather than in a king, and is the ancestor of the doctrine an Iranian revolution used against a different monarchy in 1979.

By the late seventeenth century the leading clerics were powerful enough to set policy. Muhammad Baqir Majlisi, a vast compiler of hadith and the most influential of them, held the senior religious office under the last effective shah and pressed campaigns against Sufis, philosophers, wine and the religious minorities the earlier Safavids had tolerated — including, at the end of the period, the Sunnis of the eastern provinces, which is not unrelated to the Afghan rising that finished the dynasty.

It is a very old trap. A ruler who cannot generate legitimacy himself imports an institution that can supply it — the Mamluks did it with the shadow caliphate in Cairo — and the institution outlives him and acquires interests of its own. The Safavid version is the most complete: the clergy the dynasty created to make itself lawful is still there, and the dynasty is not.

The cage

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

Abbas I built the Safavid state and also, by the account of a man who lived at the court a century later, installed the mechanism that took it apart. He was afraid of his sons, and the arrangement he made about them became the rule.

What Abbas did about his children

Krusinski — a Jesuit who spent years at Isfahan and was there when the Afghans came — sets it out as an established practice with a named origin.

Abbas had his eldest son killed and blinded two others. Then he had his grandson educated in a manner which was afterwards a rule for the education of all the king's sons: shut up in the harem, with no conversation but with the eunuchs, taught only to read and write, his only diversions shooting with a bow and riding an ass in the gardens.

And Krusinski adds the detail that makes it a policy rather than a cruelty. Abbas was so much on his guard against this child — who was far too young to attempt anything against him — that it was said he made him take opium every day to stupefy him, for fear the boy had more wit than he wished him to have.

What it produced

Consider what that arrangement selects for over a hundred years.

A prince raised in that room has met no soldiers, no provincial governors and no foreign ambassadors. He has no faction of his own, because he has never been outside to build one, and he owes his survival entirely to the eunuchs and the women who arranged it. When he is brought out and put on the throne he is the only man in the palace who does not know how the empire works, and everybody who does know is somebody who had a hand in choosing him.

Krusinski's judgement on one of the shahs of that century is the pattern in a sentence: a very bad king in peacetime, covetous of his subjects' wealth, committing crying acts of injustice for trifling profit, abandoning the government wholly to his ministers while he devoted himself to ease and pleasure, shut up in his harem — where he once stayed ten years together and never went abroad.

That same man, he adds, conducted himself capably in war, and would not have been much to blame if he had behaved as well in peace.

Why this is not the whole explanation

It is worth resisting the version of this story in which a great empire is destroyed by degenerate princes, because that is the account the eighteenth century liked and it does too much work.

The Safavid state had structural problems that no sequence of able shahs would have solved: a large, dry, thinly populated country whose revenues could not support an empire of that extent; a silk trade increasingly bypassed by sea; and a standing army that had to be paid whether or not there was a war. Abbas's own solution to the Qizilbash — converting tribal cavalry into salaried ghulams — had made the state permanently more expensive to run.

What the cage did was remove the one thing that might have addressed any of it. A shah who has never left the harem cannot lead an army, cannot inspect a province, and cannot arbitrate between the factions at court because he is the creation of one of them. The empire could survive incompetence at the top for decades. It could not survive it being systematic.

By 1722 the man on the throne was a pious, gentle and entirely unprepared ruler who had been raised exactly as Abbas prescribed, and there were twenty thousand Afghans outside the walls.

What actually fell

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

The standard account of the Safavid seventeenth century is a decline story with a moral shape: weak shahs raised in the harem, wine, eunuchs, a clergy turning intolerant, and a state that rotted until anyone could push it over. Matthee's book is an argument against that, and what follows takes his side.

His account is structural. Iran is large, dry and thinly populated, and its economic base could not generate the revenue an empire of that extent needed; the silver that had come in through the silk trade began going out again as the trade shifted; the state's composition was a network of tribal and provincial alliances that had to be renegotiated continuously and never became an administration; and the ghulam system that had replaced the Qizilbash left the frontiers without the cavalry that had held them. The shahs after Abbas I were not obviously worse men than the shahs before him. They inherited a state whose solutions to its first century's problems had become its second century's problems, and they had less to work with.

The end came from Kandahar, a province the Safavids had spent a century contesting with the Mughals, where the Sunni Ghilzai Afghans rose in 1709 over the government's treatment of them. In 1722 a Ghilzai force of perhaps twenty thousand under Mahmud Hotak crossed Iran, beat a much larger Safavid army at Gulnabad outside Isfahan, and then simply sat down around the capital. There was no assault. The siege lasted six months, the city starved — the reported mortality is enormous — and Shah Sultan Husayn walked out and handed the crown to Mahmud in person.

That is the fall, and it should be read the way Matthee reads it: not as a verdict on Safavid civilisation but as what happens to a state with a small fiscal base, no standing field army it can concentrate, and a capital it cannot provision. Isfahan had been built as a commercial instrument and could not feed itself under blockade.

The dynasty formally continued for fourteen more years as other men's authorisation. Nadir Shah, a Turkmen commander from Khurasan, drove the Afghans out and ruled in the name of Safavid puppets until 1736, when he had himself proclaimed and ended the line.

So there are two dates and they answer different questions. The Safavid state fell in 1722, in a siege, to twenty thousand Afghans. The Safavid dynasty ended in 1736, in a tent on a plain in Azerbaijan, when the man who had restored it decided he no longer needed it.

The name nobody could do without

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

The Safavid state fell in 1722. For the next fourteen years everybody who governed any part of Iran did so in the name of a Safavid, including the men who had no intention of giving anything back.

The puppets

Tahmasp II got out of Isfahan before it fell and was proclaimed in the north. He had almost nothing — no army, no treasury and no province he could hold — and he was, for four years, the only legitimate authority in the country, because he was the only Safavid at liberty.

Nadir Quli took service with him in 1726 and did the work: beat the Afghans out of Isfahan in 1729, pushed them back to Kandahar, fought the Ottomans in the west. Then he deposed Tahmasp in 1732 in favour of Tahmasp's infant son, and governed for four more years as regent for a baby called Abbas III.

That is the measure of what the dynasty had become. A commander who had personally reconquered the country still could not rule it under his own name, so he found a Safavid who could not yet speak and ruled as his deputy.

Mughan

In 1736 he called an assembly on the Mughan plain and had himself proclaimed shah, on the condition — he made a point of the condition — that the Safavid line was finished and nobody would restore it.

Hanway, writing seventeen years later from what he could gather in Russia and Persia, treats the whole sequence as a usurpation dressed up as an election, and he is not wrong about the mechanics. What he registers less clearly is why the theatre was necessary at all. Nadir had won every battle he had fought. He needed an assembly because the alternative was to be one more general who had seized a throne, and Iran had a two-hundred-year habit of believing that thrones belonged to one family.

Safavid claimants kept appearing afterwards, and were used by anybody who needed one. The Zands governed for decades without ever taking the title of shah, styling their ruler the deputy — the vakil — which is a way of saying that the office still belonged to somebody else.

What actually survived

Not the family. The confession.

The Safavids found a country that was mostly Sunni and left one that was overwhelmingly Twelver Shi'i, and no subsequent change of dynasty touched that. The Afghans who took Isfahan were Sunni and could not alter it in seven years. Nadir tried, seriously and for reasons of state — proposing that Twelver Shi'ism be recognised as a fifth school of Sunni law so that he could rule Iranians and Ottomans and Afghans without a confessional quarrel — and got nowhere with anybody.

The clergy the dynasty had imported and endowed outlasted the dynasty by a long way. It had its own revenues, its own courts, its own schools, and a doctrine about where authority sits in the absence of the imam that did not require a shah at all.

A family that claimed its founder was the eye of God ended with an infant regent and a general's assembly on a plain. What it built instead — a clerical establishment with an independent income and a theory of legitimacy — is still there.