Safavid Dynasty

In 905/1499 Ismail made his bid for power; by the autumn of 1500 he had been joined by 7,000 Kiizilbash at his rendezvous at Erzindjan.

 

He turned aside to crush the Shirvanshah, who had killed both his father and his grandfather, and then, at the battle of Sharur, he routed Alwand Ak koyunlu.

 

Ismail entered Tabriz (907/1501), had himself crowned as the first shah of the Safavid dunasty, and proclaimed the Djafari rite of Ithna ‘ashari Sh’ism to be the official religion of the new Safavid state.

 

Shah Ismail died on 19 Radjab 930/23 May 1524, and was succeeded by his son Tahmasp, then ten and half years of age.

 

The extent to which the theocratic concept of the early Safavid state had broken down in practice was demonstrated by the ten years of civil war between rival Kizilbash factions which marked the beginning of his reign.

 

The authority of the shah was usurped by Kizilbash chiefs, who were the de facto rulers of the state during this period.

 

In 940/1533-4, however, Shah Tahmasp made clear his intention to rule in fact and not in name only, and, for most of the remainder of his long reign of fifty-two years, he maintained a precarious ascendancy over the turbulent Kizilbash.

 

In 982/1574, Shah Tahmasp became seriously ill, and the Safavid state was once again involved in a crisis.

 

At first, the dissensions which broke out among the Kizilbash appeared to be merely a recrudescence of the factional struggles which had imperiled the Safavid state fifty years previously.

 

But the new crisis was, in fact, of a very different nature.

 

 

The question from 982/1574 onwards was not which of the Kizilbash tribes should achieve a dominant position over its rival, but rather, whether the Kizilbash as a whole could maintain their privileged position over its rivals, whether the Kizilbash as a whole could maintain their privileged position as the military aristocracy in the Safavid state, in the face of the challenge from new ethnic elements in Safavid society, namely, the Georgians and Circassians.

 

The majority of these people were the offspring of prisoners taken during the course of four campaigns waged in the Caucasus by Tahmasp between 947/1540-1 and 961/1553-4.

 

In addition, a certain number of Georgian nobleman voluntarily entered Safavid service during Tahmasp’s reign.

 

By the time of the death of Tahmasp in 984/1576, the power of the Georgian and Circassian women in the royal haram was such that they intervened in political affairs and engaged in active intrigue with a view to securing the throne for their own sons.

 

In this way, they introduced into the Safavid state dynastic rivalries of a new kind.

 

The struggle for power between the Kizilbash and the Georgians and Circassians, continued during the reigns of Ismail II (984/1576 – 985/1577) and Sultan Muhammad Shah (985/1578 – 996/1588), and was finally settled in favor of the latter by the measures taken by Shah Abbas I [q.v.] (996/1588 – 1038/1629) measures which radically altered the social basis of the Safavid state.

 

The situation which ‘Abbas faced at his accession was critical in the extreme.

 

The Ottomans had resumed operations in Adharbaydjan, and the citadel at Tabriz had been in their hands since 993/1585.

 

In the east, the Uzbeks stormed Harat in 997/1589, and swept on across Khurasan as far as

Mashhad.

 

To free his hands to deal with the Uzbeks, ‘Abbas was forced to negotiate a humiliating peace with the Ottomans which left more Persian territory in Ottoman hands than ever before (998/1589 – 90).

 

The events of his yoth had led him to place no faith in the loyality of the Kizilbash and he set about creating a standing army which would be paid direct from the Royal Treasury and would be loyal only to himself.

 

From the ranks of the Georgians and Circassians (thereafter termed Ghulaman-i Khassa-yi Sharifa) he formed a cavalry regiment of some 10,000 men, and a personal bodyguard of 3,000 men.

  

 

A regiment of musketeer, 12,000 strong recruited from the Persian peasantry, and an artillery regiment, also of 12,000 men, completed the new standing army of 37,000 men.

 

Under Shah Suleyman (1077/1666 – 1105/1694), who was an alcoholic, and under the pious but uxorious Shah Sultan Husayn (1105/1694 – 1135/1722), neither of whom took any interest in state affairs, the progressive breakdown of the central administration was marked by increasing inefficiency and corruption at all levels of government.

 

The military machine had been allowed to run down to such an extent that the Shah had to turn to the Georgians for help in dealing with a band of Baluci marauders in 1110/1698-99.

 

About the same time the Afshar chief Nadir Khan emerged as the most powerful of tribal chiefs lending their support to the Safavid house, and in 1142/1729 he drove the Afghans from Isfahan and re-established the Safavid monarchy in the person of Tahmasp II.

 

It soon became clear, however, that Nadir Khan’s support of the Safavids was only a device to enable him to use pro-Safavid sentiment for his own ends.

 

In 1145/1732 he deposed Tahmasp II in favor of the infant Abbas III, for whom he acted as regent.

 

Four years later, he abandoned this fiction, and had himself crowned as Nadir Shah.

 

This marked the extinction of the Safavid dynasty, which had existed only in name since 1134/1722.

 

Nadir Shah (1148/1736 – 1160/1747) consciously modeled himself on Timur, and there are some points of similarity between his career and that of his exemplar.

 

Like Timur, Nadir was primarily, indeed solely, a soldier, and, like Timur, he was totally unable to administer the territories overrun by his armies.

 

As a result, just as the campaigns of Timur had left a vacuum in south-west Asia, so those of Nadir disrupted the administrative system inherited from the Safavids, impoverished the state, and led to a general breakdown of law order.

 

The result was half a century of civil war as the Zands and the Qajars fought for supremacy in the vacuum created by Nadir.

 

Nadir restored national dignity and prestige after the humiliation of the Afghan episode, and recovered Iranian territory which had been usurped by the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Afghans.

 

History

 

History

Historians are those who assemble knowledge about the community.

 

They have been active in almost every society, small or large.

 

In part out of long practice and in part to sustain themselves, historians have honed the art of collecting information and presenting it in ways tailored specifically to the interests of their audiences.

 

Over the centuries, the works of good historians continue to be read because human communities reproduce common patterns of behavior.

 

For example, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Sima Qian, the early giants of written history, wrote analyses of personal characteristic and social situations that still ring true today.

 

In general, the tales of individual ambitions and group interactions preserve much that is similar over the eons.

 

Even so, there are distinct genres of history that relate specifically to particular audiences, and there have been times when history has changed in response to new knowledge and new ways of organizing and prioritizing knowledge.

 

In fact the list of genres and audiences is rather long.

 

Out of the family came genealogy, from the begettings of the Bible to the family tree of lineages both humble and lordly.

Out of the village came the local history, tales of key local events that included biographies of outstanding local figures.

 

From the traveler and compiler came geography, which accounted for distant lands and peoples.

 

From the dynasty came the dynastic chronology of successive rulers and their exploits.

 

From the warrior came the war story, which recounted heroism in victory or defeat.

 

The universal history priests accounted for the relations of man and God over time.

 

From these groupings emerged various themes in history: the dynasty created cultural history, based on the work of palace poets and sculptors, but so did the masses, based on village songs and dances.

 

Philosophers produced reasoned histories of the world that struggled with the question of where it had come from and where it was going.

 

All these types of history were born out of their various social settings, and these locales continue to produce new histories for their audiences.

 

The genealogies and local histories were parochial, while the geographies an universal histories were cosmopolitan.

 

All were about the world, but more importantly, all were about different portions of it.

 

These histories maintained their discrete character.

 

They also became intertwined, in the hands of good storytellers, into myths combining such elements as genealogy, biography, dynastic chronology, geography, and universal history.

 

Oral histories survived in detail for several generations and then were lost or transformed, yet their basic social message (for example, the truism behind a fable or parable) often survived much longer.

 

Written histories could be passed on with greater precision.

 

Such languages as Chinese, Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit have sustained long traditions of historical interpretation, and out of these written traditions came civilizational histories.

 

World history too persisted through all these times, in the minds of those few who strained vigorously against the limits on their knowledge of past and present.

 

World history emerged from the dreams of prophets, generals, emperors, and perhaps also inventors, as they strove to explore and master the furthest dimensions of their environments and the forces at work within them.

 

Many people might have been interested in world history.

 

Neverthless, the tiny, tenuously connected series of world historians persevered, developing their interpretations step by step.

 

Each of the major written languages preserves contributions to the understanding of world history, but those writing in the modern European languages took the lead in creating the modern vision of world history.

 

Among European Writers, studies on the history of the ancient world developed out of the tradition of classical studies that began in the Renaissance and thrived thereafter.

 

Parallel studies of the history of Christianity and of medieval Europe were gradually drawn into these classical studies and included in the analysis of politics elite culture, and ideas.

 

During the nineteenth century, studies of world history in early times broadened fundamentally as new fields of study emerged especially archaeology, linguistics, Orientalism, and Sinology.

 

The frameworks and the questions of scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continue to dominate the study of world history in early times.

 

This work is centered on “civilization” – the emergence of civilization, the course of civilizational histories, and interactions among civilizations.

 

This focus on large states and on world religions means that the literature on early world history tended to neglect peoples outside the bounds of “civilization”.

 

For the world history of times since about 1500, the framework of analysis was formed out of each era’s social analysis.