Shah Abbas

The Ruthless King Who Became an Iranian Legend

David Blow

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781786729538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Shah Abbas (1571-1629) was shah of Iran from 1588 (when he assumed power by deposing his father, whom he later murdered) until his death in 1629. He is of critical importance in the history of Iran, restoring the power of the Safavids through war and the strategic negotiation of peace. He is still acclaimed for his strong and decisive rule and the architectural achievements of his reign although he is also recognised as a tyrant, whose paranoia (probably justified) caused him to imprison and assassinate many of his own relatives including his own son, ultimately leaving the throne to his grandson.Remarkably, this is the first biography of Shah Abbas in English. "On a Persian Throne" combines rigorous scholarship with a popular style to produce the definitive, accessible and objective biography of this seminal figure in Iranian history.

Chapter 1

Shah Abbas’s Inheritance: The Birth of a Shi’i State

The future Shah Abbas belonged to a ruling dynasty in Iran, that of the Safavids, which had very unusual origins. The name Safavid comes from Abbas’s distant ancestor, Sheikh Safi ud-Din (1252–1334), who was a Sufi or Islamic mystic and who founded his own Safavid Sufi order in 1301, when Iran was part of the vast Mongol Empire. The order was based in the town of Ardabil, in the north-western Iranian province of Azerbaijan. The Safavids are thought to have been Kurdish in origin, but by Sheikh Safi’s day they were a Persian-speaking family of small landowners, living near Ardabil, which was a commercial centre in mountainous country, about 40 miles inland from the Caspian Sea. There was also a large Turkoman tribal population in Azerbaijan, who spoke a language closely related to Turkish, known today as Azeri. In time the province would become almost entirely Azeri-speaking.

As the head of a Sufi order, Sheikh Safi was known as ‘the perfect guide’ (murshid-e kamil) and his followers as ‘disciples’ (muridan), who owed him absolute obedience. This relationship was to be of great importance in the Safavid seizure of power and for most of the first century of Safavid rule. Like all Sufi masters, Safi guided his disciples along a path towards a mystical union with the Divine. He was a great believer in the ecstatic communal exercises of Sufism, especially the practice known as zikr or remembrance of God, when devotees worked themselves into a frenzy as they recited the divine name, Allah. Safi and his successors won great renown as Sufi sheikhs and with the help of missionaries they attracted large numbers of followers over a wide area. Prominent among these were the Turkoman tribes in Azerbaijan itself, but also much further afield in Anatolia (the territory covered by modern Turkey) and northern Syria. They were also revered by the rich and powerful, whose generous donations helped to make the order extremely wealthy.

Up until the middle of the fifteenth century the Safavid sheikhs remained orthodox Sunni Muslims and purely religious leaders. After that, there was a fundamental change in their ideology and activity. As a hostile contemporary chronicler wrote of the chief instigator of this change, Sheikh Junaid (d.1460), ‘the bird of anxiety laid an egg of longing for power in the nest of his imagination’.¹ Junaid and his successors adopted an extreme form of Shi’ism, which was current among their Turkoman followers in Anatolia,² and gathered these followers around them as a military force which they used to acquire temporal power.

Mainstream or ‘orthodox’ Shi’ism is known as Twelver or Imami Shi’ism. Its adherents believe that, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632, God entrusted the guidance of mankind to a line of twelve divinely inspired Imams from the family of the Prophet. The line begins with Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, and passes through his son, Husain, who died what the Shi’a regard as a martyr’s death at the hands of his enemies on the plain of Karbala, north of Baghdad, in October 680 – an event that is commemorated annually in passionate mourning ceremonies. Husain is the key figure in Shi’ism and the source of its powerful emotional appeal. Shi’i tradition associates him closely with Iran, as he is said to have married the daughter of the last king of ancient Iran, Yazdgird III, who was overthrown by the invading Arabs in the mid-seventh century AD. Husain’s son, the Fourth Imam, known as Zain al-Abidin (‘the ornament of the worshippers’), is said to have been born of this marriage. The line of Imams continues until the Eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari, who died in 874 – according to the Shi’a, poisoned on the orders of the Sunni Caliph,³ like most of his predecessors. The Shi’a believe that his son, the Twelfth Imam, often referred to as the ‘Hidden Imam’, disappeared from sight in order to avoid a similar fate, but remains present in the world as its legitimate ruler and will reappear at the end of time as the Mahdi, ‘to fill the world with justice’.⁴

Early Safavid Shi’ism was unorthodox in that it attributed a common divinity to the Shi’i Imams and regarded the Mahdi as a messiah or saviour who might assume different human forms and intervene in the world on many occasions to institute a reign of justice – not merely once at the end of time. More significantly, the Safavid sheikh was seen by his enthusiastic Turkoman followers as sharing in the divinity of the Imams and as an incarnation of the Mahdi. A contributory factor that no doubt carried weight with the Turkomans was the Safavid claim to be descended from Ali, the First Shi’i Imam and the fourth Caliph of Islam. This claim was made before Junaid’s time, when it did not necessarily imply Shi’i sympathies. It was common for Sufi sheikhs to reinforce their authority by claiming descent from the Prophet or from one of the first four ‘rightly guided’ Caliphs, as they are called by Sunnis.⁵ Of these, Ali was the most popular and was venerated by Sunnis and Shi’a alike. The claim is now known to have been fabricated, as most such claims undoubtedly were, but there is no doubt that the Safavids and their followers believed it to be genuine.

The Safavid movement as it took shape under Junaid was only one of a number of extreme Sufi-Shi’i movements during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that attracted popular support by holding out the hope of an end to injustice and a more egalitarian society. Throughout the region, incessant warfare, insecurity, famine, plague and heavy financial exactions by those in power created a climate in which messianic and millenarian movements flourished.

The Safavid Turkoman tribesmen were known as Qizilbash, a Turkish word meaning ‘red-head’, because they wore a red bonnet with twelve folds, symbolizing the Twelve Shi’i Imams. It was with their fanatical support that Abbas’s great-grandfather, Shah Ismail I (1501–24), was able to conquer Iran in the first decade of the sixteenth century.⁶ By this time the Safavids themselves had become Turkoman in their language and their ways. Besides living among Turkomans, they had married princesses from the Turkoman dynasty which preceded them as rulers of western Iran.⁷ But they continued to speak Persian as well as Azeri Turkish, and both Ismail and his father, Sheikh Haidar, identified strongly with the heroes of Iranian legend.

Ismail began his conquest of Iran in Azerbaijan, the home of the Safavid Sufi order. In the summer of 1501 he captured its principal city of Tabriz – a great commercial entrepôt on the Silk Road which became the first Safavid capital. There, at the age of fourteen, he crowned himself king of Iran (padeshah-e Iran) and took the momentous step of declaring the Shi’i form of Islam to be the official religion of his new kingdom. But it was mainstream Imami or Twelver Shi’ism that Ismail proclaimed as the state religion, and not the extremist Shi’ism of the Qizilbash which had brought him to power. Imami Shi’ism, which did not offer a heaven on earth, offered a more stable basis on which to build a state. It could also be expected to meet less opposition from Sunnis, who at that time constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. However, there was to be continuing tension between these two forms of Shi’ism, the heterodox Shi’ism of the Qizilbash which was mixed up with their Sufi mysticism as followers of the Safavid Sufi order, and the orthodox Imami Shi’ism of a new clerical establishment. It was a tension that was to be finally resolved by Shah Abbas in favour of Imami Shi’ism.

Ismail was ruthless in suppressing rival messianic movements and most other Sufi orders⁸ and was quite prepared to use violent methods to impose Shi’ism, especially in the early years of his reign. Untold numbers of recalcitrant Sunnis were either killed,⁹ or fled to neighbouring Sunni lands. Most, however, remained and the conversion of even the majority of the population to Shi’ism would take many years. Ismail invited Arab Imami clerics to help him in the task, but met with little response. The only one known to have responded favourably during Ismail’s reign was a senior Lebanese Shi’i cleric, Sheikh Ali al-Karaki al-Amili, who made the first of a number of visits to his court in 1504–5, eventually settling in Iran and spearheading a major conversion drive under Ismail’s successor, Shah Tahmasp. The great majority of Arab Shi’i clerics held firm to the traditional Shi’i refusal to serve any government, even one that claimed to be Shi’i, in the absence of the Hidden Imam. Others were put off by the extremist manifestations of Safavid Shi’ism. They objected to the deification of Ismail, the practice of prostration before the king – a practice they believed should be reserved for prayer before God alone – the cavalier attitude towards the precepts of the Sharia (Islamic law), such as the prohibition on drinking wine, and the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs of Islam who, in the eyes of the Shi’a, had usurped the office that rightly belonged to the Imam Ali. Ismail had officials go through the streets carrying axes over their shoulders and crying out: ‘Cursed be Abu Bakr! Cursed be Omar! Cursed be Uthman!’ – the names of the first three caliphs. Anyone who heard this was obliged, on pain of death, to express their approval. Arab Shi’i clerics feared that this practice would provoke retaliation against Shi’a living under Sunni regimes. Ismail does seem to have made some attempt to distance himself from the extremism of his Qizilbash followers. Venetians who visited Tabriz during the early years of his reign reported that he was displeased with being called a god or a prophet.¹⁰

Nonetheless, Ismail was a theocratic and absolute ruler, as were all his successors. He claimed to be the divinely appointed representative of the Hidden Imam – a claim which in itself was not compatible with orthodox Imami Shi’ism, which regarded the most senior Shi’i clerics, the mujtaheds, as the vicegerents of the Imam during his absence. He also claimed to partake of the sinlessness and infallibility attributed to the Shi’i Imams. It was probably during Ismail’s reign that the claim to descent from the Imam Ali was refined and traced back through the Seventh Shi’i Imam, Musa al-Kazim (AD 745/6–799). All this was combined with the ancient Iranian concept of the king as ‘the shadow of God on earth’. Until the reign of Shah Abbas, however, the subjects who mattered most to the shah were the Qizilbash tribesmen on whom his power rested. In their eyes the shah’s legitimacy resided quite as much in his position as their Sufi master. The word sufigari, which meant ‘behaviour becoming a Sufi’, was synonymous with ‘loyalty to the shah’.

The early Safavid state was often referred to by contemporary Iranian chroniclers as ‘the Qizilbash kingdom’, because of the dominance of the Qizilbash tribes and their chiefs. The largest of these tribes were the Ustajlu, the Rumlu, the Shamlu, the Zul Qadr, the Tekkelu, the Türkman, the Afshar and the Qajar.¹¹ Together with a number of smaller Qizilbash tribes, they provided the military backbone of the state. Expert horsemen armed with bow and arrow, sword, dagger and battle-axe, they were a fearsome fighting force. When not fighting, they were nomadic pastoralists who occupied a particular area of the country within which they migrated with their livestock between summer uplands and winter lowlands, while also practising a certain amount of settled agriculture. There was, in addition, a large tribal population that was not Qizilbash, but in the sixteenth century it did not play an important role in the Safavid state. This population included Iranian, Kurdish, Arab and Baluch tribes, as well as other Turkish-speaking tribes. In all, nomadic tribes accounted for a quarter to a third of the total population of Iran in Safavid times, a proportion that remained more or less constant until well into the twentieth century.¹²

Until the reign of Shah Abbas, most of the land was assigned to Qizilbash tribal chieftains as administrative fiefs.¹³ They collected the taxes and used the revenue to maintain their households and their military forces. Their only obligations to the shah were to bring an agreed number of mounted troops to serve him when called upon to do so and to send him a rich present at the New Year. They bore the title of amir and the most important among them presided over a smaller version of the royal court and the central administration. These fiefs could be, and sometimes were, revoked by the shah, but there was an inevitable tendency for them to come to be regarded as the hereditary possession, if not of one family or clan, then of one tribe. Thus the south-western province of Fars, with its capital of Shiraz, was governed by Zul Qadr chiefs from 1503 until 1595, when the last of them was removed by Abbas as he set about breaking the power of the Qizilbash. Some lands were administered directly by the central government and others were governed by their hereditary rulers as vassals of the shah.

Since Ismail was not a Turkoman tribesman himself, he had no tribal force of his own. He had a personal bodyguard of two hundred of the most devoted Qizilbash Sufis, who were armed with sword and dagger and carried an axe. But he needed a larger body of regular troops he could rely on. So he created a kind of Praetorian Guard, paid for out of the royal treasury, available to serve the shah at all times, and taking its orders directly from him. This elite corps was made up mainly of Qizilbash horsemen chosen from all the tribes for their outstanding soldierly qualities. They were known as qurchis – a Mongol word meaning ‘quiver-bearer’ – and their Qizilbash commander was the qurchi-bashi. The Qurchis were 3,000-strong under Ismail and represented the beginnings of a standing army, which only came fully into existence under Shah Abbas.¹⁴

For the first seven years of Ismail’s reign, Qizilbash domination was almost total. They held all the key civil and military positions. But when Ismail came of age he began to appoint members of the indigenous Persian-speaking population, known then as Tajiks, to some of these positions, using them as a counterweight to the Qizilbash.¹⁵ A highly educated and generally well-to-do class of urban Tajiks had traditionally filled the ranks of the government bureaucracy and the religious institution, whatever regime was in power, and they now began to do so again. In particular, they took charge of the central administration. The head of this and the most senior government official was known to begin with as the vakil – the ‘alter ego of the shah’, according to one modern authority¹⁶ – although later he bore the more traditional title of vizier. The Qizilbash disliked being subjected to the authority of these Tajik chief ministers and murdered two of them in the course of the sixteenth century. They particularly disliked it when a Tajik usurped the military role which the Qizilbash regarded as exclusively theirs. But otherwise Qizilbash provincial amirs were only too ready to employ Tajiks to run their administration.

The gradual normalisation of the Safavid state must have been a severe disappointment to many of the ordinary Qizilbash tribesmen, and to many among the poorer classes in general, who had hoped that Ismail would fulfil his messianic promise by bringing about a social and economic revolution. Safavid propaganda had encouraged these hopes before and during the conquest of Iran. As late as 1515 a Portuguese official on a visit to the Persian Gulf, Duarte Barbosa, heard Ismail referred to as ‘the leveller’.¹⁷ But Ismail soon jettisoned any radical ideas in the interests of building a stable and powerful state, while the Qizilbash chieftains were too busy enjoying the fruits of conquest to have any interest in disturbing the status quo. This left the field open for other messianic and millenarian movements which would arise in the future and challenge the Safavids in their turn.

Safavid Iran was in conflict from the beginning with two principal external enemies – the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the west and the Uzbek Khanate in Transoxania in the east, with its capital in Bukhara. The conflict was sharpened by sectarian differences, since both the Ottoman Turks and the Uzbeks were Sunni Muslims. The Uzbeks, who were a confederation of Turkish and Mongol tribes, had a particular hatred of Shi’ism. Islam forbade the enslavement of fellow-Muslims, but the Uzbeks regarded it as legitimate to enslave Iranian Shi’a, on the grounds that they were not Muslims at all, but infidels. Shah Ismail succeeded in driving the Uzbeks out of the north-eastern Iranian province of Khurasan and restoring Iran’s ancient frontier on the Oxus River. But Uzbek attacks on the province continued and were a major problem that Shah Abbas had to contend with.

In the early years of his reign, Shah Ismail posed a serious threat to the Ottomans.¹⁸ Not only did he wield great power as ruler of a restored Iranian empire that included Baghdad and Mesopotamia and extended into eastern Anatolia, but he also had the support of large numbers of Turkoman tribesmen on Ottoman territory, who gave him their allegiance as their Sufi sheikh and ‘perfect guide’. He maintained contact with them through an underground network of deputies. The Safavid threat hung over the Ottomans until August 1514, when they inflicted a crushing defeat on Ismail’s army at Chaldiran in north-west Iran. The Ottoman army also suffered heavy losses in the battle and withdrew shortly afterwards, but Ismail lost eastern Anatolia and thereafter the Safavids were generally on the defensive against the Ottomans. The Ottoman victory had two other important consequences. It damaged Ismail’s charisma in the eyes of the Turkoman tribesmen who up till then had believed him to be invincible, making them less manageable and more inclined to put their own interests first. It also encouraged Ismail to look for allies to Christian Europe, which, like Iran, was under attack by the Ottomans.

The first European power Ismail turned to was Portugal, which was establishing commercial and military bases in the East following Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route round Africa in 1497. Barely a year after Chaldiran, in 1515, Shah Ismail sought help from the Portuguese admiral Albuquerque, who had just taken control of the island of Hormuz, a great trading entrepôt at the mouth of the Persian Gulf ruled by Arab kings who were nominally vassals of the shah. The move gave Portugal control of the Gulf for more than a century. Albuquerque responded enthusiastically to the idea of an Irano-European alliance against the Ottomans, urged Ismail to send ambassadors to Lisbon and pressed King Manuel of Portugal to lend h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Shah Abbas’s Inheritance: The Birth of a Shi’i State
• 2. A Turbulent Childhood and the Seizure of Power
• 3. Abbas Takes Control
• 4. The Recovery of Khurasan from the Uzbeks
• 5. English Adventurers at the Service of Shah Abbas
• 6. Maintaining the Offensive: Khurasan, the Persian Gulf and a Challenge to the Ottomans
• 7. Abbas Expels the Ottomans
• 8. The Search for European Allies
• 9. Pressure on the Gulf, Mass Deportations and the Murder of a Son
• 10. An Anglo-Iranian Victory: the Capture of Hormuz
• 11. Final Triumphs: the Capture of Qandahar and Baghdad
• 12. A Conflict of Envoys
• 13. The English Embassy and the Death of Abbas
• 14. Abbas, the Man and the King
• 15. The Court of Shah Abbas
• 16. The Throne and Mosque Alliance
• 17. The City that was Half the World
• 18. The Merchant King
• 19. Shah Abbas and the Arts
• 20. The Later Safavids
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography