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.