As Shah Soleiman’s reign drew to a close, the Safavid regime looked strong, but had been seriously weakened; its monuments looked splendid, but the intellectual world of Persia, once distinguished for its tolerance and vision, was now led by narrower, smaller minds.
5
THE FALL OF THE SAFAVIDS, NADER SHAH, THE
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INTERREGNUM, AND
THE EARLY YEARS OF THE QAJAR DYNASTY
Morghi didam neshaste bar bareh-e Tus
Dar pish nahade kalleh-e Kay Kavus
Ba kalleh hami goft ke afsus afsus
Ku bang-e jarasha o koja shod naleh-e kus
I saw a bird on the walls of Tus
That had before it the skull of Kay Kavus.
The bird was saying to the skull ‘Alas, alas’
Where now the warlike bells? And where the moan of the kettledrums?∗
(attributed to Omar Khayyam)
According to a story that was widely repeated, when Shah Soleiman lay dying in July 1694 (1105 AH), he left it undecided which of his sons should succeed him. Calling his courtiers and officials, he told them—‘If you desire ease, elevate Hosein Mirza. If the glory of your country be the object of your wishes, raise Abbas Mirza to the throne.’1 Once Soleiman was dead, the eunuch officials who supervised the harem decided for Hosein, because they judged he would be easier for them to control. Hosein was also the favourite of his great-aunt, Maryam Begum, the dominant personality in the harem; and he duly became Shah.
Such stories present historians with a problem. Their anecdotal quality, though vivid, does not fit the style of modern historical writing, and even their wide contemporary currency cannot overcome a reluctance to accept them at face value. The death-bed speech, the neat characterisation of the two princes, the cynical choice of the bureaucrats—it is all too pat. But to dismiss it out of hand would be as wrong as to accept it at face value. It is more sensible to accept the story as a reflection of the overall nature of motivations and events, even if the actual words reported were never said. The story reflects the impression of casual negligence, even irresponsible mischief, that we know of Shah Soleiman from other sources. As the consequences will show, it also gives an accurate picture of the character of Shah Sultan Hosein, and the motivation of his courtiers. It is quite credible that Shah Soleiman left the succession open, and that over-powerful officials chose the prince they thought they thought would be most malleable.
Initially, Shah Sultan Hosein appeared to be as pious and orthodox as Mohammed Baqer Majlesi, the pre-eminent cleric at court, could have wished. Under the latter’s influence the bottles from the royal wine cellar were brought out into the meidan in front of the royal palace and publicly smashed. Instead of having a Sufi buckle on his sword at his coronation, as had been traditional (reflecting the Sufi origins of the Safavid dynasty), the new Shah had Majlesi do it instead. Within the year orders went out for taverns, coffee-houses and brothels to be closed, and for prostitution, opium, ‘colourful herbs’, sodomy, public music, dancing and gambling to be banned along with more innocent amusements like kite-flying. Women were to stay at home, to behave modestly, and were forbidden to mix with men that were not relatives. Islamic dress was to be worn. The new laws went through despite the protests of treasury officials, who warned that there would be a huge drop in revenue, equivalent to 50 kg of gold per day, because the state had made so much money from the taxation of prostitution and other forms of entertainment. To make sure the new order was widely publicised, it was read out in the mosques, and in some it was carved in stone over the door. A later order stipulated that Majlesi, as Shaykh oleslam, should be obeyed by all viziers, governors and other secular officials across the empire. Anyone who broke the rules (or had done so in the past) was to be punished.2 It was a kind of Islamic revolution.
Yet within a few months of his taking the throne, it seems Shah Sultan Hosein was drinking as much as his father had done, and his great-aunt, Maryam Begum (perhaps affronted among other things at Majlesi’s attack on women’s freedoms) had reasserted her dominance at court. The Sufis were eclipsed but not wholly suppressed. The decrees did not achieve temperance at court and were probably widely flouted, but they contributed to an atmosphere of renewed intolerance and repression of minorities. This was to prove especially damaging in the frontier provinces, where Sunnis were in the majority in many areas; notably in Baluchistan, Herat, Kandahar and Shirvan. Such was Majlesi’s achievement by the time of his death in 1699. Other clerics at court followed on in his spirit thereafter.
Shah Sultan Hosein was a mild tempered, well-meaning man. He had no streak of cruelty in his character, and there is no record of his having ordered any executions over the period of his reign (which like that of his father, also lasted twenty-eight years). His sequestered upbringing and indolent nature meant that he disliked being disturbed, or bothered with problems. The indications are that he was what we would call institutionalised, and as a result was lacking in confidence with the world outside the palace, or with people he did not know. He enjoyed wine and eating, but otherwise was pious and humane, and put his energies into a new complex of gardens and pavilions at Farahabad, south-west of Isfahan. His courtiers and officials encouraged him to leave state business to them, and avoid responsibility. His other main interest was sex. His emissaries collected pretty girls from all over his domains (from any group or religion except the Jews), brought them to Isfahan and delivered them to the Shah’s harem for his enjoyment. After a time, if they became pregnant, they would be taken away again, well furnished with money and presents. Some were married off to prominent nobles, so that when male children were born, they became the heirs of those nobles.3
One could make an argument that the world would have been a better place if there had been more monarchs like Shah Soleiman and Shah Sultan Hosein; pacific, passive, interested in little more than building pleasure pavilions, in garden improvements, drinking and silken dalliance. But war and politics, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Persia in 1700 was, as states go, well-placed: strong natural frontiers, its traditional enemies as pacific as herself, or distracted by more pressing troubles. The state of the economy has been debated, but it now seems that what were once taken as signs of economic decline were in fact signs mainly of the failure of the state to adapt to economic change.4 The expansion of European trade to dominance, subordinating and damaging the economies of Asia, had yet to happen. Persian architects still produced beautiful buildings: the Madar-e Shah madreseh in Isfahan shows the loveliness of Safavid style in this last phase. The state administration continued to function despite the Shah’s negligence, and was still capable of raising taxation (albeit less than it should have raised) and powerful armies. But the Safavid state had a soft centre, and the wider world was no less harsh and competitive than in the days of the Mongols and their successors. The story of the end of the Safavids is a powerful reminder that the prime concern of a state is always (or should always be) security: what Machiavelli called mantenere lo stato (to maintain the state), and that the rest, the palaces, the sophisticated court, the religious endowments, the parks and gardens, the fine clothes, paintings, jewellery and so on, however delightful, were mere froth.
The Afghan Revolt
The prime agent of the Safavid dynasty’s destruction was an Afghan of the Ghilzai tribe, from Kandahar, Mir Veis. He was wealthy and well-connected, but also had a reputation for generosity to the poor and to his friends, which made him popular among the Afghans, who valued rugged austerity and piety, and disliked ostentation. The oppressive Safavid governor of Kandahar, doubly unpopular because he was a Georgian asserting Shi‘a supremacy, worried that Mir Veis had enough influence to organise a rebellion, made the mistake of sending him to Isfahan, where he soon summed up the debility of the regime. Like most Pashtun-speaking Afghans, Mir Veis was a Sunni Muslim. While in Isfahan he secured permission from the Shah to go on the hajj to Mecca, where he obtained a fatwa legitimating a revolt against Safavid rule. Af
ter his return to Kandahar (he charmed Shah Sultan Hosein and easily convinced him of his loyalty) Mir Veis coordinated a successful revolt and killed the Georgian governor in 1709. A succession of armies were sent from Isfahan to crush the rebels, and there is evidence that at least one vizier made serious attempts to galvanise the state, among other things re-establishing the artillery corps that had ceased to exist in the time of Shah Soleiman. But the expeditions failed, and their failure encouraged the Abdali Afghans of Herat to revolt also. Manoeuvres by jealous courtiers in Isfahan impeded active officials or removed them from office, and the Shah failed to intervene. As the prestige of the state wilted, Safavid subjects in other territories revolted or seceded; in Baluchistan, Khorasan, Shirvan, and the island of Bahrain. Maryam Begum tried to prod the Shah into more determined action to restore order, but little was done and (mercifully for her) she seems to have been dead by 1721.
Mir Veis died in 1715, but in 1719 his young son, Mahmud, raided onto the Iranian plateau as far as Kerman, capturing the city and doing terrible damage there. Encouraged by this success, Mahmud returned in 1721 with an army of Afghans, Baluchis and other adventurers. Mahmud was an unstable character, and paradoxically he might not have succeeded but for this. He encountered difficulties at Kerman and Yazd, but rather than turning back as a more cautious leader might have done, he boldly pressed on towards the Safavid capital. The Safavid vizier mobilised an army against the Afghans that probably outnumbered them by more than two to one, but on the day of battle at Golnabad on 8 March 1722 the Persian commanders were divided by court faction and failed to support each other in the fighting. Shah Sultan Hosein stayed behind in Isfahan (something Shah Abbas would never have done). His Georgian guards were surrounded on the battlefield and massacred while the vizier’s troops stood by and watched, and his Arab allies headed off to plunder the Afghans’ baggage. The Persian cannon were overrun before they could fire more than a few shots, and the rest of the Safavid troops fled for the capital.
The Afghans, perhaps barely able to believe their luck, blockaded Isfahan (their numbers were insufficient for a successful assault and they had no heavy artillery to breach the walls). From March to October the capital endured a terrible siege that slowly starved the inhabitants until they were eating shoeleather and bark from the trees; there were also reports of cannibalism. Opportunities to bring in supplies or coordinate relieving forces from outside were missed, but Tahmasp, one of the Shah’s sons, escaped, and began rather ineffectually to collect supporters in the northern part of Persia. Finally, on 23 October the Shah rode out of the city on a borrowed horse to his former pleasure gardens at Farahabad and surrendered the city and the throne to Mahmud Ghilzai.
After the Afghan occupation of Isfahan the Ottoman Turks took the opportunity to conquer the western provinces of Iran, including Tabriz, Kermanshah and Hamadan (though not without fierce resistance by many of the inhabitants). Peter the Great of Russia, unwilling to see Ottoman power in the region expand unopposed, moved south on his last campaign to occupy the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. With these occupations completed, and in the absence of any obvious focus for resistance, it looked as though the Iranian State established by the Safavids in the early sixteenth century had gone for good. In Isfahan, isolated from the base of his support in Kandahar and in control of only a relatively small part of the previous Safavid realm, Mahmud grew increasingly unhinged and paranoid. In February 1725 he personally massacred almost all the surviving male members of the Safavid royal family in one of the courts of the palace, ceasing the slaughter only when the former Shah Sultan Hosein physically intervened. Shortly afterwards Mahmud, by now raving, either died of illness or was murdered, and was replaced as Shah by his cousin Ashraf. Ashraf initially made promises to protect the abdicated Shah Sultan Hosein, but eventually had him beheaded to forestall an Ottoman attempt to restore him to the throne.
The 1720s were a miserable decade for many Persians. In the territories occupied by the Ottomans, some people were initially carried off as slaves (it was permissible to enslave Shi‘as because the Sunni Ottomans regarded them as heretics). In the area controlled by the Afghans, Persian townspeople and peasants were frequently attacked and plundered, and Ashraf issued an edict ordering that the Persians should be treated the worst of a hierarchy of groups, worse than the Christians, Zoroastrians or even the Jews5. Fighting continued between the various occupiers, and those who still resisted them, and the economy was badly disrupted, causing further impoverishment, hardship and suffering.
The Slave of Tahmasp
By this time a young warlord called Nader Qoli, from the old Afshar Qezelbash tribe, had risen from obscure beginnings through the chaos and disorder of the times to become a local power in the province of Khorasan in the north-east. Contemporaries described him as tall and handsome, with intelligent dark eyes; he was ruthless with his enemies, but magnanimous to those who submitted, and capable of charming those he needed to impress, when necessary. He was energetic and always happiest in the saddle; a fine horseman who loved horses. He had a prodigiously loud voice (he was once credited with putting an army of rebels to flight by the sound of his voice alone—until the rebels heard him giving orders for the attack, they believed they were only confronting a subordinate).6 The Safavid cause regained some impetus in the autumn of 1726 when this stentorian commander joined forces with Tahmasp (the son of Shah Sultan Hosein, who been named Shah by his supporters but had been chased up and down northern Iran by the Afghans and Ottomans) and reconquered Mashhad, the capital of Khorasan. In recognition of his services, Tahmasp named Nader Tahmasp Qoli Khan, which means ‘the slave of Tahmasp’. It was an honour to be given the name of royalty in this way, but Tahmasp Qoli Khan was to prove an over-mighty servant. By contrast with Nader, Tahmasp combined the faults of his father and grandfather; he was an ineffectual, lazy, vindictive alcoholic. The usual upbringing had taken its usual effect. One of Tahmasp’s courtiers commented at this time that he would never make a success of his reign because he was always drunk and no-one was in a position to correct him.7 After consolidating his position by making a punitive campaign to cow the Abdali Afghans of Herat, and having established his dominance at Tahmasp’s court, by the autumn of 1729 Nader was finally ready to attack the Afghan forces that were occupying Isfahan. An eyewitness account from this time, from the Greek merchant and traveller Basile Vatatzes, gives a vivid impression of the daily exercises Nader had imposed on the army, to prepare them for battle. We know that he made these routine for his troops throughout his career, but no other source describes the exercises in such detail.
Vatatzes wrote that Nader would enter the exercise area on his horse, and would nod in greeting to his officers. He would halt his horse and sit silently for some time, examining the assembled troops. Finally he would turn to the officers and ask what battle formations or weapons the troops would practise with that day. Then the exercises would begin:
And they would attack from various positions, and they would do wheels and counter-wheels, and close up formation, and charges, and disperse formation, and then close up again on the same spot; and flights; and in these flights they would make counterattacks, quickly rallying together the dispersed troops… And they exercised all sorts of military manoeuvres on horseback, and they would use real weapons, but with great care so as not to wound their companions.
As well as practising movement in formation, the horsemen also showed their skill with individual weapons: lance, sword, shield and bow. As a target for their arrows a glass ball was put at the top of a pole, and the men would ride toward it at the gallop, and try to hit it. Few could, but when Nader performed the exercise he would gallop along, opening and closing his arms like wings as he handled the bow and the quiver, and hit the target two or three times in three or four attempts, looking ‘like an eagle’. The cavalry exercises lasted three hours. The infantry also exercised together:
…the infantry—I mean those that carried muskets—would get t
ogether in their own units and they would shoot their guns at a target and exercise continuously. If [Nader] saw an ordinary soldier consistently on top form he would promote him to be a leader of 100 men or a leader of 50 men. He encouraged all the soldiers toward bravery, ability and experience, and in simple words he himself gave an example of strong character and military virtue.8
Vatatzes’ description dwells on cavalry manoeuvres and the display of individual weapon skills because these were dramatic, but his description of infantry training and the expenditure of costly powder and ball in exercises is significant, showing Nader’s concern to maximise the firepower of his troops, which was to prove crucial. This passage also makes plain the care he took with the selection of good officers, and their promotion by merit. For the army to act quickly, intelligently and flexibly under his orders, it was essential to have good officers to transmit them. Three hours a day of manoeuvres, over time, brought Nader’s men to a high standard of control and discipline, so that on the battlefield they moved and fought almost as extensions of his own mind. Vatatzes shows the way Nader impressed on the men what they had to do by personal example: a principle he followed in battle too. Training, firepower, discipline, control and personal example were part of the key to his success in war. Nader’s transformation of the army was already well advanced.
Iran: Empire of the Mind Page 18