A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  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 and also had a reputation for generosity to the poor and to his friends; this 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 organize a rebellion and made the mistake of sending him to Isfahan. There Mir Veis 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 legitimizing a revolt against Safavid rule. After 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 galvanize the state—among other things reestablishing 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, too. Maneuvers 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 his instability. He encountered difficulties at Kerman and Yazd, but rather than turning back as a more cautious leader might have done, he boldly pressed on toward the Safavid capital. The Safavid vizier mobilized an army against the Afghans that probably outnumbered them by more than two to one, but on the day of battle at Golnabad on March 8, 1722, the Persian commanders were divided by court faction and failed to support one another 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. 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 shoe leather and bark from the trees. There were also reports of cannibalism. Opportunities to bring in supplies or to 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 October 23, 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 was 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 afterward 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 Christians, Zoroastrians, or even Jews.5 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 northeast. 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. A fine horseman who loved horses, he was energetic and always happiest in the saddle. 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 had been named shah by his supporters and 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 gave Nader the name Tahmasp Qoli Khan, which means “the slave of Tahmasp.” It was an honor 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 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, Nader by the autumn of 1729 was finally ready to attack the Afghan forces that were occupying Isfahan. An eyewitness account from this time, from the Greek merchant and traveler 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, entering the exercise area on his horse, would nod in greeting to his officers. He would then 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 practice 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 counter-attacks, 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 practicing 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 together 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’s description dwells on cavalry maneuvers 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 because it shows Nader’s concern to maximize 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 maneuvers, 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.

  By the end of 1729 Nader’s army had defeated the Afghans in three battles and had retaken Isfahan. Tahmasp was reinstalled in the old capital as shah. But before Nader agreed to pursue the defeated Afghans, he forced Tahmasp to concede the right to collect taxes to support the army. The right to levy taxes enabled Nader to establish a state within the state, based on the army.

  Nader duly finished off the remnants of the Afghan occupying force. He went on to throw the Ottoman Turks out of western Persia before turning rapidly east to conquer Herat. In all these campaigns his modernized forces, strong in gunpowder weapons, outclassed their opponents and showed themselves able to overcome the ferocity of the Afghan cavalry charges and the attacks of the provincial Ottoman troops. But while he was in Herat, he learned that in his absence Tahmasp had renewed the war with the Ottomans, allowed himself to be defeated, and concluded a humiliating peace with the Ottomans. Nader issued a manifesto repudiating the treaty, and marched west. It is striking that he declared himself publicly and sought popular support for his action—a modern moment that argues against those who deny the existence of any but local and dynastic loyalties in this period.

  Arriving in Isfahan in the late summer of 1732—and having prepared what was to come with typical care—Nader fooled Tahmasp into a false sense of security and got him drunk. He then displayed the Safavid shah in this disreputable state to the Shi‘a courtiers and army officers. The assembled notables, prompted by Nader, declared Tahmasp unfit to rule, and elevated his infant son Abbas to the throne instead. Nader continued as generalissimo to this infant, announcing at the coronation his intention to “throw reins around the necks of the rulers of Kandahar, Bokhara, Delhi, and Istanbul” on his behalf. Those present may have thought this to be vain boasting, but events were to prove them wrong.

  Nader’s first priority was to attack the Ottomans again and restore the traditional frontiers of Persia in the west and north. In his first campaign in Ottoman Iraq he met a setback: a powerful army including some of the best troops held centrally by the Ottoman state marched east to relieve Baghdad, led by an experienced commander. This was warfare of a different order to that Nader had experienced up to that time. Overconfident, he divided his army outside Baghdad—attempting to prevent supplies getting through to the besieged city—and suffered a serious defeat. But within a few months, after replacing lost men and equipment with a ruthless efficiency that caused much suffering among the hapless peasants and townspeople who had to pay for it, Nader renewed the Turkish war, this time defeating the Ottoman forces near Kirkuk. Moving north, he then inflicted a devastating defeat on a new Ottoman army near Yerevan. This was in June 1735. A truce was negotiated on the basis of the old frontiers that had existed before 1722, and the Ottomans withdrew. The Russians—Nader’s allies against the Ottomans—had already withdrawn from the Persian lands along the Caspian coast, their regiments having lost many men to disease in the humid climate of Gilan.

  NADER SHAH

  With the exception of Kandahar, Nader had now restored control over all the traditional territories of Safavid Persia. He decided the time was right to make himself shah, and he did so by means of an acclamation by all the great nobles, tribal chiefs, and senior clerics of Persia at an assembly on the Moghan plain. There was little dissent, but the chief mullah was overheard speaking privately in favor of the continuation of Safavid rule, and was strangled. The infant Abbas was deposed, and the rule of the Safavid dynasty at last came to an end. It is noteworthy that despite Nader’s later reputation for tyrannical cruelty, and with the exception of the unfortunate chief mullah (whose execution carried its own political message), he achieved his rise to power almost without the use of political violence. He brought about the deposition of Tahmasp and the coronation at the Moghan not by assassination, but by careful preparation, propaganda, cunning maneuvering, and the presence of overbearing military force—and above all by the prestige of his military successes.

  Some other significant events occurred at the Moghan. Nader made it a condition of his acceptance of the throne that the Persian people accepted the cessation of Shi‘a practices offensive to Sunni Muslims (especially the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs). This new religious policy served a variety of purposes. The reorientation toward Sunnism helped to reinforce the loyalty of the large Sunni contingent in Nader’s army, which he had built up in order to avoid too great a dependence on the traditionalist Shi‘a element, who tended to be pro-Safavid. But also the new policy was not aggressively dogmatic. Religious minorities were treated with greater tolerance. Nader was generous to the Armenians, and his reign was regarded later by the Jews as one of relief from persecution (though minorities suffered as much as anyone else from his violent oppression and heavy taxation, especially in later years).9 The religious policy made it easier for Nader to make a grab for the endowments of Shi‘a mosques and shrines, an important extra source of cash to pay his troops. Within Persia, Nader sought only to amend religious practices—not to impose Sunnism wholesale. But outside Persia he presented himself and the country as converts to Sunnism10—which enabled Nader to set himself up as a potential rival to the Ottoman sultan for supremacy over Islam as a whole, something that would have been impossible if he and his state had remained orthodox Shi‘a.

  The religious policy also served to distinguish Nader’s regime and its principles from those of the Safavids. He did this in other ways, too, notably with his policy toward minorities, and by giving his sons governorships rather than penning them up in the harem. He also showed moderation in the size of his harem and issued decrees forbidding the abduction of women. This change was probably directed, at least in part, at pointing up the contrast between his rule and that of the last Safavids.

  Crowned shah, with his western frontiers secure and in undisputed control of the central lands of Persia, Nader set off eastward to conquer Kand
ahar. The exactions to pay for this new campaign caused great suffering and in many parts of the country brought the economy almost to a standstill. Nader took Kandahar after a long siege, but he did not stop there. Using the excuse that the Moghul authorities had given refuge to Afghan fugitives, Nader crossed the old frontier between the Persian and Moghul empires, took Kabul, and marched on toward Delhi. North of Delhi, at Karnal, the Persian army encountered the army of the Moghul emperor, Mohammad Shah. The Persians were much inferior in number to the Moghul forces, yet thanks to the better training and firepower of his soldiers, and rivalry and disunity among the Moghul commanders, Nader defeated them. He was helped by the fact that the Moghul commanders were mounted on elephants, which besides proving vulnerable to firearms were liable to run wild—to the dismay of their distinguished riders and anyone who happened to be in their path.