Sword of Persia

Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant

Michael Axworthy

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857733474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia moderna

Nader Shah, ruler of Persia from 1736 to 1747, embodied ruthless ambition, energy, military brilliance, cynicism and cruelty. His reign was filled with bloodshed, betrayal and horror. Yet, Nader Shah is central to Iran's early modern history. From a shepherd boy, he rose to liberate his country from foreign occupation, and make himself Shah. He took eighteenth century Iran in a trajectory from political collapse and partition to become the dominant power in the region, briefly opening the prospect of a modernising state that could have resisted colonial intervention in Asia. He recovered all the territory lost by his predecessors, including Herat and Kandahar, and went on to conquer Moghul Delhi, plundering the enormous treasures of India. Nader commanded the most powerful military force in Asia, if not the world. He repeatedly defeated the armies of Ottoman Turkey, the preeminent State of Islam, overran most of what is now Iraq and threatened to take Baghdad on several occasions.
But from the zenith of his success he declined into illness, insane avarice and horrific savagery, committing terrible atrocities against the Persian people, his friends, and even his family, until he finally died as violently as he had lived. The "Sword of Persia" recreates the story of a remarkable, ruthless man, capable of both charm and brutality. It is a rich narrative, full of dramatic incident, including much new research into original Iranian and other material, which will prove indispensable to historians and students. The book includes many contemporary illustrations, and maps.

CHAPTER ONE

The Fall of the Safavid Dynasty

Unhappy Persia, that in former age
Hast been the seat of mighty conquerors
That in their prowess and their policies
Have triumphed over Afric and the bounds
Of Europe, where the sun dares scarce appear
For freezing meteors and congealed cold,
Now to be ruled and governed by a man
At whose birthday Cynthia with Saturn joined,
And Jove, the Sun, and Mercury denied
To shed their influence in his fickle brain!
Now Turks and Tartars shake their swords at thee,
Meaning to mangle all thy provinces.

Marlowe

The future conqueror of Delhi was born in a wild and dangerous region on the north-eastern frontier of Persia: the northern part of the province of Khorasan, far from the splendour of royal courts and palaces. There is some uncertainty about when Nader was born, but the likeliest date is 6 August 1698.¹ His father was of lowly but respectable status, a herdsman of the Afshar tribe; said also to have been a camel driver and a maker of sheepskin coats. His name was Emam Qoli. In comparison with many of the great nobles among whom he later moved, Nader’s birth was obscure; but in the local context of northern Khorasan his father may have had some status among the Afshars as a village headman.² Nader’s official historian, making no attempt to elevate his birth, wrote of his origins that ‘the sword takes its merit from the natural strength of its temper, not from the mine from which its iron was taken.’³

The Qereqlu Afshars to whom Nader’s father belonged were a semi-nomadic Turcoman tribe settled in Khorasan, in north-eastern Persia. Nader was born at Dastgerd, a fortified village on the northern side of the Allahu Akbar mountains of the Darra Gaz region, north-west of Mashhad, the capital of Khorasan. At birth he was named Nadr Qoli,⁴ which means ‘Slave of the wonderful’ – a way of piously dedicating the child to the service of God. When years later Emam Qoli’s son made himself Shah, he changed his name to Nader, meaning ‘Rarity’ or ‘Prodigy’ – it is possible that this had been a nickname earlier, as the growing boy showed his uncommon abilities.

For western readers, there might appear to be enough familiar elements here to form a picture of Nader’s origins. He was born in a village, in a province, with a large city nearby that served as an administrative centre for the province. His father looked after sheep, camels and other animals. But we would be wrong to fit this picture into a contemporary Western European model, with a settled, sedentary population largely made up of peasants, a controlling elite of nobles owning the land, and a scatter of towns and cities serving as markets in a peaceful, productive countryside. There were, of course, peasants and markets; and there was settled, productive agricultural land.^*

But there were large areas of less productive land in Khorasan, over which grazed the flocks of the armed nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes: Afshars, Kurds and others. Many of these peoples, including the Afshars to whom Nader’s family belonged, had been moved there in earlier centuries from the western part of Persia; partly to divide over-mighty tribal confederations that might have threatened revolt, partly to help defend an exposed frontier region. Fierce Turkmen nomads^† on horseback often mounted raids into the region from the steppe lands beyond to the north and east, carrying off slaves and animals for sale in the towns and cities along the old silk road of Central Asia.⁵ Because the Turkmen were Sunni Muslims and their Persian victims Shi‘as, religious scruples about making slaves of the hapless Persians did not apply. Their way of life, based on pastoralism and raiding, had scarcely changed since prehistory. Fear of Turkmen slavers would have been ever present in the background of Nader’s childhood.

The tribes of Khorasan were for the most part ethnically distinct from the Persian-speaking population, speaking Turkic or Kurdish languages. Nader’s mother tongue was a dialect of the language group spoken by the Turkic tribes of Iran and Central Asia, and he would quickly have learned Persian, the language of high culture and the cities, as he grew older. But the Turkic language was always his preferred everyday speech, unless he was dealing with someone who only spoke Persian.⁶ We know that Nader learned at some point, possibly later in life, to read and write.

Nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists made up about one third of the population of Persia in the early eighteenth century, numbering as many as three million people or more.⁷ Their tribal groups were held together by strong bonds of kinship, and by traditions of military and economic interdependence. Culturally many of them, though assimilated into the more sophisticated, urbanised Persian culture to a greater or lesser extent, identified with the Turco-Mongol tradition handed down from the time of Timur and Genghis Khan. They regarded themselves as a cut above the settled peoples those great leaders of horsemen had conquered.

When central authority was weak, as in the early eighteenth century, the mobility, cohesion and arrogance of the tribes tended to make them the masters of the landscape. Even when central authority was strong, the Shah often appointed tribal chiefs as local and regional governors, recognising their natural authority. Even later, in peaceful times, settled peasants gave part of their crops to local tribal leaders in return for what might be called protection; and the nomads paid little or no tax to central government.⁸

Nader grew up in this paradoxical tradition: a Persian subject speaking a Turkic language, familiar with an urbanised Persian culture that was understood and revered from Istanbul to Samarkand, Delhi and beyond, yet an uncomfortable outsider in cities, disdainful of city-dwellers who could not ride a horse.⁹ The life of Nader’s family would have followed the ancient rhythm of moving the fat-tailed sheep (which to western eyes look more like small, dark goats) and other livestock to the cooler upland pastures around Kobkan in the spring as the snows melted and the first flush of new growth appeared, and back to the milder winter climate of Dastgerd in the autumn.

Having waited a long time for the birth of a son, Emam Qoli was affectionate toward Nader, and proud of him. In later years, perhaps remembering the early, happy phase of his childhood, Nader himself was a doting father: perhaps too indulgent, as Emam Qoli had been. Even at the age of ten, Nader was said to have been a good horseman, hunter and racer of horses, skilled with the bow and the javelin. One of his early biographers, following the conventions common to lives of heroes in Persian literature, stressed his precociousness, saying that when Nader was one he seemed like a three-year-old and at the age of ten, riding his horse, he went hunting lions, panthers and boars.^* Another story says that when he played with other children he called himself the king and let the others rule smaller parts of his kingdom. On one occasion he made these princelings fight each other and in the end, if there was a winner, he gave his clothes to that child and returned home naked. When his mother saw him, she was angry, and he ran to his father to escape her. His father took Nader home and told his mother to let the child do what he wanted.¹⁰

Nader’s father died when Nader was still quite young, precipitating the family into friendless poverty. The years that followed were hard. It is significant for Nader’s later, sympathetic conduct toward women that he saw his mother struggling as a poor widow, in a society in which a woman without male protection was highly vulnerable. Destitute and with two young sons it would have been difficult to remarry, and some in these circumstances would have moved to the nearest city and slipped into prostitution for want of other options. Nader’s mother must have been a tough and strong-minded woman.

The boy must have missed Emam Qoli terribly. He grew up poor and insecure, open to jibes and sneers for his lack of a father. One might think, according to the usual wisdom in these matters, that he would have been crippled by such an experience, and lost his self-confidence. But different experiences draw out different responses in different people. In Nader’s case adversity strengthened his will to survive, stimulated the restless urge to assert himself, to challenge and overcome adverse circumstances, to take control and dominate others. His response to humiliation was a burning resolve to prove himself better than his tormentors.

These hard early experiences must also have fostered a dislike of people who were soft, who had achieved status too easily, including perhaps the mullahs. He never forgot the hardships of his early years, nor his bonds with those who had shared them, especially his mother and his brother Ebrahim. Nor did he try to conceal his early life of poverty. One story says that when his father died he and his mother were so poor that he had to support them by gathering firewood in the hills, taking them to market on an ass and a camel that they could barely feed. Years later, he conferred an honour on a man that had been a companion at this time, with the words ‘Do not grow proud, but remember the ass, and the picking of sticks.’¹¹ If some of his earliest memories included his feeling special for his intelligence and his natural dominance over other children (and for the way his father had doted on him), his later childhood marked him in a more negative way, as a social misfit and outcast. One way or another, he remained an outsider the rest of his life.

Beyond the seasonal migrations, life was unpredictable. There is a story that Nader and his mother were carried off into slavery by Turkmen raiders when he was still young. Another version suggests that he was captured with some companions by the Turkmen, but prayed for release, whereupon his fetters fell away ‘like cobwebs’. He freed his friends and carried off the raiders’ loot. This has been interpreted as a mythologised version of an episode in which Nader persuaded his captors to release him in exchange for a promise of future cooperation; an early showing of his ability to manipulate unpromising circumstances to his advantage.¹² Whatever the truth of it, the stories depict the sort of dangerous world in which a young boy grows up fast.

Around the age of fifteen,¹³ Nader went into the service of one of the tribal leaders who represented what passed for government authority in the region. This was Baba Ali Beg Kuse Ahmadlu, the governor of the town of Abivard, an important chief among the Afshars of Khorasan. There had probably been some kind of connection between Baba Ali and Nader’s father. Nader started as an ordinary musketeer^* but eventually rose in Baba Ali’s service to become his right-hand man. The javelin and bow he had learned to use in the Darra Gaz valley were still significant traditional weapons in tribal life and in hunting, but even in the remote north-east of Persia, the former was obsolete and the latter had been made obsolescent in warfare by the spread of gunpowder firearms. In learning to use a smooth-bore musket, Nader was learning the dangerous trade of modern warfare. The experience taught him the relatively unexplored potential of these weapons, through the exploitation of which he was eventually to revolutionise the practice of warfare in Persia and the surrounding region. But those days were as yet far off.

As Nader made his mark among the troops of the governor of Abivard, his main responsibility would have been to pursue raiders and retrieve their loot, whether portable property, animals or human beings. No doubt there was uncertainty in many cases about what belonged to whom, and it is likely that Nader profited from such grey areas. It is easy to see how later, hostile stories of his having been himself a bandit and robber could have originated.¹⁴

Around the year 1714/1715 a larger than normal raid by Turkmen of the Yomut tribe broke into northern Khorasan, several thousand strong. Baba Ali’s frontier force fought the Turkmen successfully, defeated them and captured 1,400 of the raiders. Nader must have distinguished himself in the fighting, because Baba Ali chose him to take the news of the victory to the Shah in the capital, Isfahan. In Isfahan Nader was presented to Shah Soltan Hosein and rewarded with a present of 100 tomans.^*15

This was Nader’s first visit to Isfahan, an encounter with a different world. Today the meidan of Isfahan – the central square with bazaar, mosques and palaces around it – is still one of the world’s great displays of urban architecture. The soaring, blue-tiled Shah mosque,^† built in the seventeenth century at the orders of Shah Abbas the Great, is breathtaking. In the early eighteenth century, Isfahan was even more impressive than it is today, with palaces, pleasure gardens and grand boulevards that have since vanished. One awestruck contemporary, who was there in 1716, was unable to look inside the royal palace but judged the interior by the exterior of the great doors, which were covered with bright glass, so that they looked like immense mirrors of crystal. He saw the Shah walk in the vast meidan in front of the palace accompanied by numbers of courtiers dressed in cloth of gold studded with jewels, by guards on foot and on horseback, and by an elephant. He wrote that one might have thought from the courtiers’ love of gold that their very flesh was made of it. But he said the courtiers did not rouse themselves to valour or virtue; nothing beyond the indulgence of pleasures.¹⁶ An astute young man like Nader with simple provincial tastes would also have quickly realised that the Shah and his court were not as impressive as their surroundings.

While in Isfahan, Nader is said to have met an old fortune-teller in the square and asked him about his future. The man went through his usual tricks and seemed shocked. He repeated what he had done a couple of times and finally he bowed in front of Nader and said, ‘You will soon be a great king, and a quarter of the kings of this world will obey you.’ Nader asked, ‘Have you gone mad? Or do you think you can fool me because I am a Khorasani?’ The old man replied, ‘I am not lying to you. I merely beg you to treat my children kindly when you become King.’

This fable belongs to a certain sort of narrative about the youth of great men, showing that their remarkable success was fated from the beginning. But it also illustrates the expectation of the rough-cut Khorasani that the citizens of the capital would try ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication and Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Epigraph Page
• Preface
• Prologue Zenith
• Chapter One The Fall of the Safavid Dynasty
• Chapter Two Tahmasp Qoli Khan
• Chapter Three War with the Afghans
• Chapter Four War with the Ottomans
• Chapter Five Coup d’État
• Chapter Six Nader Shah
• Chapter Seven To the Gates of Delhi
• Chapter Eight The Ruin of Persia
• Chapter Nine Towers of Skulls
• Chapter Ten Full Circle
• Notes
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography