The term dowlat, which in modern Persian means "government", was then an abstract term meaning "bliss" or "felicity", and it began to be used as concrete sense of the Safavid state, reflecting the view that the people had of their ruler, as someone elevated above humanity. As Vladimir Minorsky put it, friction between these two groups was inevitable, because the Qizilbash "were no party to the national Persian tradition". Then he turned against the Ottomans, recapturing Baghdad, eastern Iraq, and the Caucasian provinces, by 1622. The school reached its apogee with that of the Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra who is arguably the most significant Islamic philosopher after Avicenna. The war between the two powers continued under Ismil's son, Emperor Tahmasp I, and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, until Shah Abbs retook the area lost to the Ottomans by 1602. The political structure of the Safavid Empire was structured like a pyramid with the Shah at the very top of the pyramid, similar to a pope. [31], b Official language,[10] coinage,[11][12] civil administration,[13] court (since Isfahan became capital),[14] literary,[11][13][15] theological discourse,[11] diplomatic correspondence, historiography,[16] court-based religious posts. [156], A proper term for the Safavid society is what we today can call a meritocracy, meaning a society in which officials were appointed on the basis of worth and merit, and not on the basis of birth. Every office had a deputy or superintendent, whose job was to keep records of all actions of the state officials and report directly to the Shah. [100] None of the perpetrators were brought to justice, although the shah lectured the assembled amirs on how they departed from the old ways when the shah was master to his Sufi disciples. The Safiviyeh came to be led by a fifteen-year old, Ismail I. Another famous manuscript is the Khamsa by Nezami executed in 1539-43, by Aqa Mirak and his school in Isfahan. Merit By the time of Isml I, the orders sixth head, the afavs commanded enough support from the Kizilbashlocal Turkmens and other disaffected heterodox tribesto enable him to capture Tabrz from the Ak Koyunlu (Turkish: White Sheep), an Uzbek Turkmen confederation. Women from the provinces and slaves pierced their left nostrils with rings, but well-born Persian women would not do this. In the far eastern territories, the Mughals of India had expanded into Khorasan (now Afghanistan) at the expense of Iranian control, briefly taking Kandahar. [83] Although the first slave soldiers would not be organized until the reign of Abbas I, during Tahmasp's reign, Caucasians already became important members of the royal household, Harem and in the civil and military administration,[86][87] and were on their way of becoming an integral part of society. and Delhi was sacked. [126][127] Kakheti lost two-thirds of its population in these years by Abbas' punitive campaign. In 1722, an Afghan army led by Mir Wais' son Mahmud advanced on the heart of the empire and defeated the government forces at the Battle of Gulnabad. The outstanding ruler of the Safavid dynasty, Abbas restored Persia as a great power, waging war . George Lenczowski, "Iran under the Pahlavis", Hoover Institution Press, 1978, p. 79: "Ismail Safavi, descendant of the pious Shaykh Ishaq Safi al-Din (d. 1334), seized Tabriz assuming the title of Shahanshah-e-Iran". Except for Shah Abbas II, the Safavid rulers after Abbas I were therefore rendered ineffectual, and the Iranian government declined and finally collapsed when a serious military threat emerged on its eastern border in the early eighteenth century. In between were nobles, rich merchants, and city people. Afterwards, Ismail went on a conquest campaign, capturing Tabriz in July 1501, where he enthroned himself the Shh of Azerbaijan,[51][52][53] proclaimed himself King of Kings (shahanshah) of Iran[54][55][56] and minted coins in his name, proclaiming Twelver Shsm as the official religion of his domain. Tahmsp received Humayun as the true emperor of the Mughal dynasty, despite the fact that Humayun had been living in exile for more than fifteen years. Safavids went on and conquered rest of . Ferrier, RW, A journey to Persia: Jean Chardin's Portrait of a Seventeenth-century Empire, pp. political (1/2 Max 1/2 miranda) -the Safavid political structure is represented by a pyramid with the highest social class at the top or the shah, and the lowest social class at the bottom or the farmers and herders. "Shahsevan in Safavid Persia". The Qizilbash were a wide variety of Shii Muslims (ghult) and mostly Turcoman militant groups who helped found the Safavid Empire. From then on Cyrus was called the " shah ," or king, of Persia. . [218] In 1602, Shah Abbas I drove the Portuguese out of Bahrain, but he needed naval assistance from the newly arrived British East India Company to finally expel them from the Strait of Hormuz and regain control of this trading route. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. It was from this time that the division of the Shia world into mujtahid (those who could follow their own independent judgment) and muqallid (those who had to follow the rulings of a mujtahid) took place. In September of that year, Tahmasp and Bayezid were enjoying a banquet at Tabriz when Tahmasp suddenly pretended he had received news that the Ottoman prince was engaged in a plot against his life. The Safavids were members of a Sufi tariqa (path of spiritual journey) founded in the 7th/ 13th century by Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili. Shah Abbas wanted to undermine this political structure, and the recreation of Isfahan, as a Grand capital of Iran, was an important step in centralizing the power. The Shah had a dozen of each in his service and would usually be accompanied by three doctors and three astrologers, who were authorized to sit by his side on various occasions. The two wrestlers were covered in grease. Chardin also noted that bringing cases into court in Iran was easier than in the West. The demise of Tamerlane's political authority created a space in which several religious communities, particularly Shii ones, could come to the fore and gain prominence. According to the Encyclopdia Iranica, for Tahmasp, the background of this initiation and eventual composition that would be only finalized under Shah Abbas I, circled around the military tribal elite of the empire, the Qizilbash, who believed that physical proximity to and control of a member of the immediate Safavid family guaranteed spiritual advantages, political fortune, and material advancement. [205] But the creation of this large standing army, that, for the first time in Safavid history, was serving directly under the Shah, significantly reduced their influence, and perhaps any possibilities for the type of civil unrest that had caused havoc during the reign of the previous shahs. Usually neither Persian nor European authors mention in which language people communicated with each other. Located in the central Middle East, the kingdom occupied a fundamental geographic location and had substantial effect in the stability of the region. Persianization went hand in hand with the popularization of 'mainstream' Shii belief. They cleverly allied themselves with European powers in order to protect themselves from the Ottomans. Having started with just the possession of Azerbaijan, Shirvan, southern Dagestan (with its important city of Derbent), and Armenia in 1501,[60] Erzincan and Erzurum fell into his power in 1502,[61] Hamadan in 1503, Shiraz and Kerman in 1504, Diyarbakir, Najaf, and Karbala in 1507, Van in 1508, Baghdad in 1509, and Herat, as well as other parts of Khorasan, in 1510. Immediately after Nadir Shah's assassination in 1747, the Safavids were re-appointed as shahs of Iran in order to lend legitimacy to the nascent Zand dynasty. Noting that the Safavids were Islamic Iran's longest-lasting dynasty, Newman 2008 challenged Safavid "decline" and, in its place, offered analyses to account for the Safavids' longevity. P Politics and Governance The early Safavid . 1977, p. 77. [49] Ismil was of mixed Turkoman, Kurdish, Pontic Greek, and Georgian descent, and was a direct descendant of the Kurdish f Muslim mystic Sheikh Safi al-Din. [145] The Iranian authority was restored in Kakheti, but the Qizilbash Turkics were prevented from settling in Kakheti, which undermined the planned Iranian policies in the respective province. Poetry lacked the royal patronage of other arts and was hemmed in by religious prescriptions. Shah Abbas ordered a general massacre in Beradost and Mukriyan (Mahabad) (Reported by Eskandar Beg Monshi, Safavid Historian, 1557-1642, in the Book "Alam Ara Abbasi") and resettled the Turkish Afshar tribe in the region while deporting many Kurdish tribes to Khorasan. After the Peace of Amasya, Tasmsp underwent what he called a "sincere repentance." The legal system was built up of two branches: civil law, which had its roots in sharia, received wisdom, and urf, meaning traditional experience and very similar to the Western form of common law. "afavid Dynasty". -Reorganized the empire's military . These cities were later inherited by his Abdali Afghan military commander, Ahmad Shah Durrani, who would go on to found the Durrani Empire in 1747. In Esposito, John L. This military force would serve the shah only and eventually consisted of four separate branches:[202]. Each element constituted 20 percent of the crop production, and if, for instance, the farmer provided the labour force and the animals, he would be entitled to 40 percent of the earnings. Since two other sons had predeceased him, when he died on January 19, 1629, he had no son capable of succeeding him. Roemer, H.R. The Safavids were descended from Sheikh af al-Dn (1253-1334) of Ardabl, head of the Sufi order of afaviyyeh (afawiyyah). It seems likely that most, if not all, of the Turkoman grandees at the court also spoke Persian, which was the language of the administration and culture, as well as of the majority of the population. The Safavid Empire, based in Persia (Iran), ruled over much of southwestern Asia from 1501 to 1736. [65] Tahmsp was the ward of the powerful Qizilbash amir Ali Beg Rml (titled "Div Soltn Rumlu") who saw himself as the de facto ruler of the state. The Shah had stables in all the principal towns, and Shah Abbas was said to have about 30,000 horses in studs around the country. What remained unchanged, however, was the constant threat of local disaffection with the weak central authority. In 1545 a combined IranianMughal force managed to seize Kandahar and occupy Kabul. In 1527 Tahmsp demonstrated his desire by shooting an arrow at Div Soltn before the assembled court. There was a systemic administrative organization in the empire which developed further into a dual system of civil administration and . As part of its completion, he greatly expanded the ghulam military corps from just a few hundred during Tahmsp's era, to 15,000 highly trained cavalrymen,[174] as part of a whole army division of 40,000 Caucasian ghulams. "The Safavid Period". [63] Furthermore, by the early 1510s Ismail's expansionistic policies had pushed the Safavid borders in Asia Minor even more westwards. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. As a result, Iran was cut off from overseas links to East Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and South Asia. In describing the lady's clothing, he noted that Persian dress revealed more of the figure than did the European, but that women appeared differently depending on whether they were at home in the presence of friends and family, or if they were in the public. The elegantly baroque, yet famously misnamed, "Polonaise" carpets were made in Iran during the seventeenth century. For more than two centuries the Safavid kingdom prolonged the older political and cultural tradition of Persia and endowed the country and its peoples with a unique character of historic significance . The Persian Empire emerged under the leadership of Cyrus II, who conquered the neighboring Median Empire ruled by his grandfather. The standing army created by Abbas consisted of: (1) 10,00015,000 cavalry ghulm regiments solely composed of ethnic Caucasians, armed with muskets in addition to the usual weapons (then the largest cavalry in the world[115]); (2) a corps of musketeers, tufangchiyn, mainly Iranians, originally foot soldiers but eventually mounted, and (3) a corps of artillerymen, tpchiyn. The treaty was the first formal diplomatic recognition of the Safavid Empire by the Ottomans. The country was repeatedly raided on its frontiersKerman by Baluchi tribesmen in 1698, Khorasan by Afghans in 1717, constantly in Mesopotamia by peninsula Arabs. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license) The Rise of the Safavid Empire The Uzbeks struck in the Spring of 1578 but were repelled by Murtaza Quli Sultan, governor of Mashhad. At its height, it encompassed the areas of modern-day Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Increased contact with distant cultures in the seventeenth century, especially Europe, provided a boost of inspiration to Iranian artists who adopted modeling, foreshortening, spatial recession, and the medium of oil painting (Shah Abbas II sent Zaman to study in Rome). After the death of Haydar, the Safaviyya gathered around his son Ali Mirza Safavi, who was also pursued and subsequently killed by Ya'qub. A very strenuous form of exercise which the Persians greatly enjoyed was hunting. And in spite of being transported for more than thirty days, they were fresh when they reached Isfahan After melons the finest fruits were grapes and dates, and the best dates were grown in Jahrom. Savory, Roger: Iran under the Safavids, pp. [148], The Dutch and English were still able to drain the Iranian government of much of its precious metal supplies. Figueroa heard Abbas speak Georgian, which he had no doubt acquired from his Georgian ghulams and concubines. Shah Abbss remarkable reign, with its striking military successes and efficient administrative system, raised Iran to the status of a great power. [159], Jean Chardin, the 17th-c French traveler, spent many years in Iran and commented at length on their culture, customs and character. In 1514, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I invaded western Armenia, causing the ill-prepared Safavid army to retreat. He created a religious order based in Shi'a Islam that gradually grew . How many rulers did the Safavid empire have? He expanded commercial links with the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company. The Silk Road which led through northern Iran was revived in the 16th century. The Shumlu leader, Ali Quli Khan, however, holed himself inside Herat with Abbas. Safavid culture is often admired for the large-scale city planning and architecture, achievements made during the reign of later shahs, but the arts of persian miniature, book-binding and calligraphy, in fact, never received as much attention as they did during his time. Presently, there is a community of nearly 1.7 million people who are descendants of the tribes deported from Kurdistan to Khurasan (Northeastern Iran) by the Safavids. But the stumbling block of Hormuz remained, a vassal kingdom that had fallen into the hands of the Spanish Habsburgs when the King of Spain inherited the throne of Portugal in 1580. But it was Shah Safi, under influence by his Prime Minister, Saru Taqi, that initiated the program of trying to increase the royal revenues by buying land from the governors and putting in place local commissioners. However, at that time it was referred to by various other names. 21920. Although in those campaigns (and in 1554) the Ottomans captured Tabriz, they lacked a communications line sufficient to occupy it for long. Blow; chapter: "English adventurers at the servise of Shah Abbas.". The Safavids ultimately succeeded in establishing a new Persian national monarchy. Contacts with the Pope, Poland and Moscow were no more fruitful. Clothes that became soiled in any way were changed immediately. These early, successful governments make the Ottoman Empire one of the most important in history. Adam Olearius, "The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors" (excerpts). A leisurely form of amusement was to be found in the cabarets, particularly in certain districts, like those near the mausoleum of Harun-e Velayat. [45] There were many local states prior to the Iranian state established by Ismil. This layer would become the "third force" in Iranian society, alongside the other two forces, the Turkomans and Persians. From 1540 and onwards, Shah Tahmasp initiated a gradual transformation of the Iranian society by slowly constructing a new branch and layer solely composed of ethnic Caucasians. In this period, handicrafts such as tile making, pottery, and textiles developed and great advances were made in miniature painting, bookbinding, decoration, and calligraphy. The growth of Safavid economy was fuelled by the stability which allowed the agriculture to thrive, as well as trade, due to Iran's position between the burgeoning civilizations of Europe to its west and India and Islamic Central Asia to its east and north. One of Tahmsp's sisters married a Circassian, who would use his court office to team up with Tahmsp's daughter, Pari Khn Khnum to assert themselves in succession matters after Tahmsp's death. However, strategically it remained inconclusive. As a result of the Mongol conquest and the relative religious tolerance of the Ilkhanids, Shii dynasties were re-established in Iran, Sarbedaran in Khorasan being the most important. Originally, the Safaviyeh was a spiritual, less denominational response to the upheavals and unrest in northwest Iran/eastern Anatolia in the decades following the Mongol invasion. "the Order of the Lion and the Sun, a device which, since the 17 century at least, appeared on the national flag of the Safavids the lion representing 'Ali and the sun the glory of the Shii faith", Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovski, J. M. Rogers, Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, Courtauld Institute of Art. [175] Thus, starting from the reign of Tahmsp I but only fully implemented and completed by Shah Abbas, this new group solely composed of ethnic Caucasians eventually came to constitute a powerful "third force" within the state as a new layer in society, alongside the Persians and the Qizilbash Turks, and it only goes to prove the meritocratic society of the Safavids. Russian Empire, historical empire founded on November 2 (October 22, Old Style), 1721, when the Russian Senate conferred the title of emperor (imperator) of all the Russias upon Peter I. Poetry lacked the royal patronage of other arts and was hemmed in by religious prescriptions.