The Safavid dynasty was, in origin, a Sufi religious order — the Safaviyya — founded at Ardabil in north-western Iran by Sheikh Safi al-Din (1252-1334). For two centuries the order was a small, locally important spiritual fraternity. In the late fifteenth century its sheikhs began to recruit a substantial military following among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan (the so-called Qizilbash, "red-heads," after their distinctive twelve-gored red headgear), and they pivoted, in two generations, from Sunni mysticism toward an extreme and millenarian form of Twelver Shi'a Islam. In 1499 the fourteen-year-old sheikh of the order, Ismail, came out of hiding in Gilan, took Tabriz the following year in a brief campaign, and on the spring equinox of 1501 was crowned shah of Iran. He was fifteen years old.
What he then did, in 1501, is the founding political act of modern Iran. He declared Twelver Shi'a Islam to be the official religion of his new state, and he set about imposing it. Sunni religious leaders were given the choice of conversion, exile, or death. The first three caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman), revered by Sunnis as the rightly-guided successors of the Prophet, were ritually cursed from the pulpits of every congregational mosque in Friday prayer; the practice persisted until the nineteenth century. Shi'a religious scholars were imported, in some numbers, from the existing Shi'a centres in Lebanon (Jabal Amil), Bahrain, and southern Iraq (Najaf, Karbala) to staff the new clerical establishment. Within a generation, Iran had been transformed from a predominantly Sunni country into a predominantly Shi'a one, and would remain so. The Shi'a-Sunni political fault line of the modern Middle East dates substantially from 1501.
Shah Ismail and Chaldiran
Ismail's military success in his first decade was extraordinary. By 1510 he controlled all of modern Iran, most of Iraq, eastern Anatolia, and parts of Azerbaijan. The new shi'ite empire alarmed both of its great Sunni neighbours: the Ottomans to the west and the Uzbeks (the new ruling dynasty in Transoxiana, who had succeeded the Timurids) to the east. The Ottomans, in particular, regarded the Safavid empire as a religious existential threat — Ismail's Qizilbash followers were actively proselytising among the Shi'a Turkmen tribes of the Ottoman eastern provinces, and any successful Safavid invasion of Anatolia would have triggered a tribal revolt against Constantinople. In August 1514, the Ottoman sultan Selim I (Selim the Grim) marched east with an army of about 100,000 troops, equipped with field artillery and matchlock arquebuses. The Safavid army of about 40,000 cavalry, armed in the traditional Iranian style with the lance and the composite bow, met them on the plain of Chaldiran in north-western Iran on the 23rd of August. Ismail refused, on chivalric grounds, to attack the Ottoman artillery before it had deployed. The Safavid army was destroyed. Ismail's own tent was captured; his wife Tajlu Khanum was taken prisoner.
The defeat at Chaldiran was the defining event of Ismail's reign. He never personally led an army into battle again. The aura of millenarian invincibility on which his charismatic authority had rested was broken. He died ten years later, aged thirty-six, of melancholy and drink. But the Safavid state survived. The Ottomans were unable to consolidate their territorial gains in Azerbaijan, and over the following century the frontier stabilised roughly along the line of the Zagros mountains — a line that became, in 1639, the modern Iran-Iraq border, fixed by the Treaty of Zuhab and barely changed since.
Shah Abbas the Great
The Safavid state under Ismail's son Tahmasp I (r. 1524-1576) survived but stagnated. The Qizilbash tribal aristocracy, the original military base of the dynasty, had begun to behave as the new ruling class, treating the shah as a primus inter pares. The two reigns following Tahmasp's were dominated by tribal civil war and the public assassination of two shahs in succession. The crisis was resolved by Tahmasp's grandson Abbas I (r. 1587-1629), known to subsequent Iranian tradition as Shah Abbas the Great. Abbas inherited a state that had lost half its territory and was effectively run by feuding tribal commanders. Over the course of his forty-year reign, he reconquered the lost provinces, reorganised the army around a new royal slave corps recruited from Caucasian Christian prisoners of war (the ghulam, modelled on the Ottoman Janissary system), broke the political power of the Qizilbash aristocracy, and moved the capital of his empire from Qazvin to Isfahan, in the centre of the country.
Isfahan under Abbas became, for the first half of the seventeenth century, one of the most populous and architecturally spectacular cities in the world. Its population at peak was perhaps 600,000 — roughly the same as London and Paris combined. Its central square, the Naqsh-e Jahan ("Map of the World") — 510 metres long by 165 wide — was built between 1598 and 1629, surrounded by the Imperial Mosque, the Sheikh Lutfullah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace, and the entrance to the great covered bazaar. It is the second-largest historic plaza in the world (after Beijing's Tiananmen) and the most architecturally coherent. The Persian proverb Esfahan nesf-e jahan ast — "Isfahan is half the world" — was coined under Abbas. The Safavid silk industry, run as a royal monopoly under Abbas's direct administration, made the empire wealthy. English, Dutch, and Portuguese trading companies competed for access. The English East India Company opened its first Iranian factory in 1617.
The art and the architecture
The Safavid period is the cultural peak of post-Islamic Iran. The miniature painting tradition that had developed at Herat under the Timurids was inherited and refined at the Safavid courts of Tabriz, Qazvin, and Isfahan; the Tabriz school produced, in the 1530s, the great manuscript known as the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp (now dismembered, with its pages scattered across the world's major museums). Carpet weaving, ceramic-tile production (the great Imam Mosque at Isfahan is faced almost entirely in glazed tile), and silk textile design all reached classical form. The literary culture, less original than the Timurid one but enormous in volume, produced the long love-poetry of the so-called Indian Style (sabk-i hindi), which would influence Urdu and Mughal court poetry through the seventeenth century.
"The Shah is fond of buildings as a man is fond of his garden." — Pietro della Valle, Italian traveller at Isfahan, 1617
The end
The Safavid decline of the late seventeenth century was the standard imperial story: a sequence of shahs less competent than Abbas, a court increasingly dominated by harem and clerical factions, an army less professional and more corrupt, a fiscal crisis. The end came suddenly. In 1709 the Pashtun governor of Kandahar, Mir Wais Hotak, rebelled against the Safavid governor of his city. Sixteen years later his nephew Mahmud Hotak, having consolidated control of the eastern Iranian provinces, marched on Isfahan itself. The Safavid shah Sultan Husayn, an indecisive and devout man who had spent most of his reign on religious patronage, attempted a defence; the city fell after a six-month siege in October 1722. Sultan Husayn formally abdicated in favour of the Afghan commander. Two hundred years of Safavid rule had ended.
The Afghan interregnum lasted only seven years. The next Iranian conqueror — Nader Shah Afshar, a Turkmen tribal leader from Khurasan — drove the Afghans out, restored a member of the Safavid family to the throne as a puppet, and then deposed him and made himself king in 1736. The Safavid dynasty was formally over. The next century would be one of the most chaotic in Iranian history, and is the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter VI