Zand Dynasty

Twelve years of everybody

Drafted from Perry, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1979)formation

Nadir was killed in June 1747 and Iran spent the next twelve years being fought over by his officers, his relatives, and every tribal leader with enough men to try. The country had been at war more or less continuously since 1722, had been taxed to the edge of destruction to pay for the army that had won the wars, and had lost a substantial part of its population to invasion, famine and flight.

Three men mattered. Azad Khan, an Afghan commander of Nadir's, held Azerbaijan. Muhammad Hasan Khan Qajar held the Caspian provinces with the Qajar tribe behind him and was the most dangerous. And Karim Khan, leader of the Zand — a Lak tribe of the central Zagros, obscure before this and never numerous — held the centre and the south.

Karim Khan won, and Perry's account of how is not a story of battles. He was beaten repeatedly, twice very badly, and kept coming back because he was better than his rivals at the two things that actually decided it: keeping the allegiance of tribal leaders who had no reason to be loyal, and not destroying the country he was fighting over. He treated captured enemies well and conspicuously. He did not sack cities that submitted. Where his rivals extracted, he taxed lightly and made a policy of it, and the result was that after a decade the people of the disputed provinces preferred him.

In 1759 Muhammad Hasan Khan was killed by his own men. By 1762 Azad Khan had submitted and been pensioned. Karim Khan was the government of Iran, and had been fighting for it for twelve years.

He then did something none of his predecessors in this region had done, which was to stop.

The wars he did fight

Drafted from Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz, by the Route of Kazroon and Feerozabad; with Various Remarks on the Manners, Customs, Laws, Language and Literature of the Persians, to which is added a History of Persia from the Death of Nadir Shah to the Present Time (1807)expansion

Edward Scott Waring, who spent a year in Shiraz in 1802 and wrote the first connected English account of the Zands, begins by explaining what is wrong with both of his sources, and the explanation is worth having before the narrative.

He worked from two Persian manuscripts. One was a history written by a Shirazi covering the period from Karim Khan to the capture and death of Lutf Ali Khan; the other was by a man who had been secretary to a grandson of Karim Khan's brother and was an actor in a good deal of what he relates. Waring's warning is even-handed and blunt. A historian living under a despotic monarchy, writing up the successes of the family that currently holds the sceptre, will in many cases be guilty of unpardonable flattery and wilful falsehood; and a historian attached to the interests of Karim Khan's family may naturally be suspected of attributing to fortune what was in fact the result of provident wisdom. His method, he says, was to temper the animosity of the second with the pliancy of the first.

What the two of them agree on is the order of the conquest. Karim Khan established his government in Azerbaijan, Iraq-i Ajam, Rasht and Gilan — the northern and western provinces, taken piecemeal over more than a decade of the fighting — and then marched south to Shiraz accompanied by the principal chieftains and men of consequence of the subdued provinces, which is the arrangement itself: the leaders of every province he had taken came with him and stayed where he could see them. He entered the city on 11 Safar 1189.

The southern and eastern campaigns he delegated. His troops under Sadiq Khan, Nazar Ali Khan and Muhammad Khan Zand reduced Kerman and Sistan, which were being held by the inhabitants and a body of Afghans, and brought in several other places that had refused his authority. And then, in Waring's single sentence for the one war outside Iran, the important city of Basra was added as an appendage to the Persian government after a long and bloody siege.

That is the whole of it, and the brevity is not an accident of the source. Karim Khan fought for twelve years to get the country and then spent the next fourteen not expanding it. Waring's manuscripts have him at Shiraz devoting his time to securing the tranquillity and independence of the government, founding colleges and baths, and putting up buildings that would add to the comfort and ease of the inhabitants; and the Vakil's bazaar, he adds, will hand down his memory to an admiring and grateful posterity. The fort he built round the city took Agha Muhammad Khan infinite labour and expense to destroy, which Waring thinks the man enjoyed.

The judgement Waring reports is uniform and he says he will not dispute it: under the Vakil anarchy was subdued, the country was cultivated, an excellent police was established in every city, justice was administered to the meanest individual, and the ear of the Vakil was open to the most trivial complaint. The inhabitants of Shiraz, he says, enjoyed thirteen years of the greatest security any of them had known.

The fourteenth year is where his manuscript changes register. The cup-bearer saw that his days were completed, and filling the bowl of his existence with the bitter wine of death, he was attacked with a violent and inveterate distemper; and towards the morning of 13 Safar 1193 he delivered up his soul to the giver of life.

Vakil

Drafted from Perry, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1979)peak

Karim Khan never called himself shah. For twenty-eight years he ruled as vakil — deputy, agent, advocate — nominally on behalf of Isma'il III, an infant Safavid he had installed and then kept in comfortable confinement for the rest of his life. And in his own formulation the deputyship was not only of the dynasty: vakil al-ra'aya, deputy of the subjects, a title borrowed from the official who in Safavid practice represented a city's population to its governor.

Whether that was modesty, calculation, or a piece of political theatre is argued about, and Perry's answer is that it does not have to be one of them. Safavid legitimacy was still the only legitimacy the country recognised — Nadir had spent eleven years demonstrating that no amount of victory substituted for it — and a Lak tribal leader with no descent and no claim was better off governing in the name of a child than being one more usurper. That it also happened to be true to how he governed made it more effective, not less.

Ruling on somebody else's behalf is an old device and it is usually a fiction of convenience. The Jafnid phylarchs held Roman rank; Timur ruled beside a Chinggisid puppet; Hasan Buzurg the Jalayirid did the same with an Ilkhanid one. Karim Khan's deputyship for a Safavid infant belongs to that family and is not quite the same animal, because of the second half of the formula.

He called himself vakil al-ra'aya — the deputy of the subjects. That is not a claim to act for an absent sovereign. It is a claim to act for the governed, and nobody else in the eighteenth-century Islamic world was saying anything like it.

The practical consequence of refusing the title was that he also refused the programme. A shah is expected to reconquer the Caucasus, fight the Ottomans and restore the empire's frontiers. A vakil is not. Karim Khan fought one foreign war, against the Ottomans for Basra in 1775, and it was about trade routes.

Shiraz

Drafted from Perry, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1979)peak

He settled on Shiraz in 1765 and rebuilt it: a citadel, a walled bazaar that is still the city's bazaar, a mosque, a bath, a garden, new walls and a moat. It is a modest programme against Abbas I's Isfahan, and the comparison is the point — this was a government spending on the town it governed from rather than on a statement.

The economic policy was of a piece. Taxes were set low and collected without the exactions of the Nadir years; internal tolls were reduced; merchants were protected and, in several documented cases, compensated by the government for losses. He worked to bring the Gulf trade back through Iranian ports, gave the English East India Company a factory at Bushehr in 1763, and in 1775 sent an army to take Basra from the Ottomans, holding it for four years — a campaign about customs revenue and the routing of the India trade rather than about territory, and he gave the city back.

None of this made Iran a power again. The Zand state held the centre and the south; Khurasan was the blind Afsharid's, Azerbaijan was intermittent, the Caspian provinces were Qajar country he never fully subdued, and the Caucasus was gone. Karim Khan is not remembered because he restored an empire.

He is here because of what the thirty years were like to live in, which the sources are unusually consistent about, and which is rare enough anywhere to be worth stating plainly. He is the ruler Iranians remember without qualification: not the greatest, not the most successful, but the one under whom the country was not being destroyed by its own government. Perry's book takes that reputation seriously as evidence rather than as sentiment, and concludes that it is substantially deserved.

He died in 1779, in his seventies, of natural causes, in bed, which almost nobody else in this region's six centuries managed.

The hostage

Drafted from Perry, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1979)aside?What aside means

When Muhammad Hasan Khan Qajar was killed in 1759, Karim Khan took his son to Shiraz. This was normal practice: the heir of a defeated rival was kept at court, treated well, given an allowance and a position, and thereby prevented from becoming the focus of a revolt. Agha Muhammad Khan lived in Shiraz for sixteen years on those terms.

He had been castrated as a small child, on the orders of Adil Shah Afshar, in the round of mutilations that followed Nadir's murder. He was therefore disqualified from ruling by every convention his world recognised, and the disqualification is part of why Karim Khan felt safe keeping him.

What he did in Shiraz was watch. He was in the presence of a functioning government for sixteen years, in the household of the man who had beaten his father, learning how a tribal leader with no legitimacy held Iran together — the alliances, the tax policy, the treatment of defeated enemies, the deliberate refusal of the title.

He drew the opposite conclusion from all of it. When Karim Khan died in 1779 he left Shiraz within days on a hunting excuse, reached Mazandaran, raised the Qajars, and spent the next fifteen years taking the country with a cruelty that is remarkable even by the standards of this region's eighteenth century. He hunted the last Zand across Iran for four years. He blinded twenty thousand people at Kerman, by the standard account, for having sheltered him. He took the title of shah in 1796 in a coronation that deliberately invoked the Safavids and Nadir at once, and he had himself crowned with Nadir's jewels.

The Zand state and the Qajar state are therefore one story told twice, and the second one begins in the first one's palace, with a boy watching.

It is also as clean a demonstration as exists that the succession problem these governments kept failing at was not a technical difficulty to be solved by a better rule. Karim Khan governed better than any of his neighbours for thirty years, and the arrangement did not survive him by a fortnight, because the thing holding it together was him.

The present possessor of Shiraz

Drafted from Francklin, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia in the Years 1786-7 (1790)contraction

In 1786 an English officer named William Francklin travelled from Bengal to Persia, spent eight months at Shiraz living in a Persian household, and wrote down what he saw. He arrived seven years after Karim Khan's death, in the middle of the wars that were dismantling everything the man had built, and his phrase for the ruler of the city is the whole chapter.

He calls Ja'far Khan the present possessor of Shiraz.

Ten years of cousins

Francklin sets out how it happened, and the sequence is depressingly simple.

After Karim Khan's death Sadiq Khan openly assumed the government. As soon as the news reached Ali Murad Khan at Isfahan, that lord instantly rebelled — deeming himself to have an equal right to the government, Francklin says, as in fact he had — and declared himself a competitor for the empire. Persia was by this means again involved in all the horrors of a civil war.

Ali Murad eventually brought about twelve thousand men to Shiraz and besieged it. He had no artillery. The city had a most excellent fosse, a good wall and plenty of provisions, and he found the siege much harder than he had expected.

That is the Zand state after 1779: two members of one family, each with a real claim, taking turns to besiege the capital their uncle had fortified.

What the fortifications were for

Francklin describes them with a soldier's eye, and everything he admires is Karim Khan's work.

A wall right round the city, twenty-five feet high and ten thick, with round towers every eighty paces. A dry ditch sixty feet deep and twenty broad, which he thought would by itself let the place hold out a long time against any power in Persia — where, he adds, artillery is little known and less used. Six gates, one of them the Darvaza-yi Sa'di, named for leading to the poet's tomb. And the citadel, the Ark, also Karim Khan's, where Ja'far Khan lived and which also served occasionally as a state prison.

At the door of the Ark was a painting of Rustam fighting the White Demon out of the Shahnama, full length and, Francklin thought, ill-proportioned. Opposite, in a large handsome square, a gallery where the khan's trumpets and kettledrums played at sunrise and sunset.

A man who had refused to be called shah built a wall his nephews could not take, and his family spent a decade proving it.

The one who got away

Francklin also records, in the flat manner of a man who does not know what it will come to, where the other player was.

Agha Muhammad Khan, son of Husayn Khan Qajar, found means to escape from Shiraz on the night following Karim Khan's death, fled north, collected troops, and soon made himself master of Mazandaran and Gilan — being proclaimed at about the same time as Ali Murad Khan set up in the south.

Francklin published in 1790. He did not know that the escaped hostage would take Shiraz four years later, and that the wall, the ditch and the drums would go to the man who had spent sixteen years inside them as a guest.

The last Zand

Drafted from Perry, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1979)end

Karim Khan's brothers, sons and nephews fought each other for the vakilate from the week of his death. Six of them held Shiraz in ten years and most of them were blinded or killed by the next; the family destroyed itself while the Qajars took the north, then Isfahan, then everything except Fars.

Lutf Ali Khan, Karim Khan's great-nephew, was the last and by the accounts the most capable — twenty-one when he took Shiraz in 1789, personally brave, and a good enough commander that Agha Muhammad Khan took four years to finish him. He was betrayed by his own chief minister, who closed the gates of Shiraz against him while he was in the field, and spent his last two years as a fugitive with a few hundred men, raiding across southern Iran.

He was captured at Bam in 1794, blinded, tortured, sent to Tehran and killed. He was twenty-five. Agha Muhammad Khan then destroyed Kerman for having sheltered him.

The Zand dynasty lasted forty-three years, and the part anybody remembers is the twenty-eight in the middle.

What it leaves is a bazaar in Shiraz that people still shop in, a tomb people still visit, and a reputation. Nobody has published a figure for how much territory it held; nobody claimed its legitimacy afterwards; it had no succession rule and demonstrated the fact comprehensively. Forty-three years is shorter than a good many obscure emirates managed.

There is no way of measuring whether a government was any good to live under, and that is the whole of the Zand case. Every quantity available makes them smaller than they were.

The bones

Drafted from Perry, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1979)afterlife

Agha Muhammad Khan took Shiraz in 1794, killed the last Zand, and then did something to Karim Khan that is remembered better than most of what either man did alive.

He had the body dug up, brought to Tehran, and reburied under the steps of his own palace, so that he would walk over it every day.

What that is

It is not simply desecration, though it is that. It is a claim about who had been right.

Karim Khan had governed for thirty years without taking the title of shah, calling himself the deputy of the subjects, keeping a Safavid infant on a throne he did not want, and declining to build the kind of terror his neighbours ran on. Agha Muhammad had watched all of it from inside the household, for sixteen years, as a hostage.

The reburial is his verdict. A man who ruled without the title ends up under the staircase of a man who took it, and the point is made daily, with the feet.

Which of them was right

On the evidence of the following century, the eunuch.

The Qajar dynasty lasted a hundred and thirty years. The Zand state did not survive Karim Khan by a fortnight in any working sense, because everything about it — the restraint, the low taxes, the tolerance, the refusal of the title — depended on one man's judgement and none of it was institutional. His nephews inherited a wall, a ditch and a set of drums, and spent ten years besieging each other for them.

Agha Muhammad built nothing pleasant and produced a dynasty. He was murdered by two of his own servants in 1797, three years after the reburial and one year after his coronation, having condemned them to death the previous evening and then carelessly allowed them to serve him overnight.

And what people go to see

The asymmetry is in what survives above ground.

Shiraz has Karim Khan's citadel, his bazaar — which is still the bazaar, and still busy — his mosque, his garden, and the tomb of Hafez as he rebuilt it. The city is one of the pleasantest in Iran to be in, and a great deal of the reason is a man who ruled for twenty-eight years and refused a crown.

Tehran has the Qajar palaces, and the steps are gone.

Karim Khan's remains were eventually recovered and reburied in Shiraz. He is the only ruler in this whole sequence — Safavid, Afghan, Afsharid, Zand, Qajar — of whom Iranians in the following two centuries have said, more or less without qualification, that things were better when he was in charge.