Abbas the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Abbas the Great was born on the 27th of January 1571 in Herat, into a dynasty that seemed to be falling apart at the seams. His father, Mohammad Khodabanda, was nearly blind and widely regarded as weak. His mother, Khayr al-Nisa Begum, would be strangled by the very soldiers who were supposed to serve her. His eldest brothers would be killed. And before Abbas was ten years old, his own uncle had dispatched an assassin to murder him in Herat. Yet this same boy would go on to be called, by a scholar quoted in the introduction to one of the great chronicles of his era, "the chief architect of the modern Iranian state."

  How does a child who narrowly escapes execution by a lucky accident of timing ascend to reshape an empire? How does a seventeen-year-old placed on the throne by a scheming warlord turn the tables on his own kingmaker? And how does a ruler remembered for breathtaking architectural achievement become equally remembered for massacres that wiped out two-thirds of an entire regional population? The life of Abbas I, the fifth Safavid Shah of Iran, contains all of these questions. The answers begin in a court at war with itself, in the summer of 1576.

• 2. A Dynasty in Freefall

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  Tahmasp I died on the 14th of May 1576 without naming a successor, and within a single day the realm lurched into chaos. His son Haydar Mirza proclaimed himself shah with the backing of the Ustajlu tribe and powerful court Georgians, but he was killed within hours by the royal bodyguards. Another son, Ismail Mirza, emerged from twenty years of imprisonment to take the throne as Ismail II. The long confinement had left him deeply paranoid, and he began systematically murdering members of the Ustajlu tribe, relatives, and anyone who had simply held office under Tahmasp.

  The young Abbas, living in Herat under the guardianship of Shah Qoli Sultan of the Ustajlu, watched horsemen ride into his guardian's house and kill him. Then, in November 1577, Ismail dispatched a man named Ali-Qoli Khan from the Shamlu tribe to Herat to execute the boy Abbas. Ali-Qoli delayed the killing, arguing it would be inappropriate to execute an innocent descendant of a seyed on holy days such as Qadr Night and Eid al-Fitr. That delay proved decisive: on the 24th of November 1577, Ismail II died from consuming poisoned opium, and Ali-Qoli Khan became Abbas' new guardian instead of his executioner.

  When Mohammad Khodabanda was chosen as the new shah in February 1578, real power quickly drained away from him. Abbas' mother Khayr al-Nisa Begum stepped in and ran the administration herself, which enraged the Qizilbash military chiefs. The Ottoman Empire exploited the disorder and declared war on Iran in 1578. Khayr al-Nisa Begum organised a counter-offensive with her son Hamza Mirza, but her attempt to direct the campaign angered the Qizilbash amirs, and on the 26th of July 1579 they stormed the harem and strangled her. Abbas was still a boy. He barely knew his mother. The Safavid court chronicler Iskandar Beg Monshi would later record that the experience left a permanent mark on him and planted in him the conviction that Qizilbash power had to be broken.

• 3. The Road to Qazvin

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  After the queen's murder, an eleven-year-old named Hamza Mirza was proclaimed crown prince and the Qizilbash resumed fighting each other over the division of Iran's provinces. In 1581, the Qizilbash chief Ali-Qoli Khan, whose own mother and father had been killed in the faction wars, took the ten-year-old Abbas and proclaimed him Shah of Iran as a figurehead for a rebellion in Khorasan. Coins were struck and the Friday sermon read in Abbas' name in Nishapur.

  The real turning point came in 1586, when another Khorasan warlord, Murshid Qoli Khan Ustajlu, seized Mashhad and abducted Abbas from Ali-Qoli's possession. Hamza Mirza had been assassinated on the 5th of December 1586, stabbed by his personal barber, who may have been hired by Qizilbash conspirators. With the crown prince gone and Mohammad Khodabanda absent from the capital, Murshid Qoli saw his moment.

  During the first ten days of Ramadan 1586, Abbas, Murshid Qoli Khan, and a small escort of no more than a few hundred horsemen began riding the Silk Road toward Qazvin. As they moved through Qizilbash-controlled towns, the chiefs of the Takkalu, Afshar and Zul al-Qadr tribes rode out to pledge allegiance. By the time they neared the capital their party had grown to 2,000 armed horsemen. Citizens and soldiers poured into the streets to voice their support, and Abbas rode into Qazvin beside Murshid Qoli Khan in late September 1587. Mohammad Khodabanda, camped 200 miles away at Qom with his remaining supporters, abdicated. On the 1st of October 1587, in the palace at Qazvin, the crown was placed on the head of his seventeen-year-old son. Murshid Qoli Khan received the title of vakil, viceroy, as his reward.

• 4. Breaking the Qizilbash

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  Abbas inherited an empire that had been hollowed out. The Ottomans had seized Tabriz and vast territories in the west and northwest. The Uzbeks had overrun half of Khorasan. And the Qizilbash, who had killed the queen in 1579 and the grand vizier Mirza Salman Jaberi in 1583, still held the real levers of power. Abbas moved against each threat in sequence, starting closest to home.

  He first settled accounts with his mother's killers, executing three of the ringleaders and exiling four others. Then he turned his attention to Murshid Qoli Khan. The viceroy had forced Abbas into a marriage, begun distributing government posts among his own allies, and gradually confined the young shah to the palace. When the Uzbeks besieged Herat and Murshid refused to act, the entire garrison and population were massacred. Only then did Murshid march to Khorasan. Abbas arranged for four Qizilbash leaders to kill Murshid after a banquet on the 23rd of July 1589. With his kingmaker dead, Abbas could govern Iran in his own right.

  The solution Abbas chose to prevent the Qizilbash from ever regaining their grip was a system pioneered under Shah Tahmasp I but vastly expanded under his own reign: the ghulams. Between 1540 and 1555, Tahmasp had conducted raids into the Caucasus that captured roughly 30,000 Circassian and Georgian slaves in just four expeditions. These formed the seed of a new military class. Abbas enlarged the ghulam corps from a few hundred in Tahmasp's era to 15,000 highly trained cavalrymen as part of a full army division of 40,000 Caucasian soldiers. It is estimated that during Abbas' reign alone some 130,000 to 200,000 Georgians, tens of thousands of Circassians, and around 300,000 Armenians were deported from the Caucasus into Iran. By 1595, a Georgian named Allahverdi Khan had become Governor-General of Fars, one of the richest provinces in Persia. By 1598, Allahverdi Khan held the post of commander-in-chief of all Safavid armed forces. Abbas also systematically removed Qizilbash governors from their home provinces, disrupting their local ties, and replaced most of them with ghulams whose loyalty ran only to the shah.

• 5. Wars of Reconquest

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  To buy time while he rebuilt his army, Abbas signed a deeply humiliating agreement with the Ottomans in 1590, the Treaty of Constantinople, ceding Azerbaijan, Karabagh, Shirvan, Dagestan, parts of Georgia, Lorestan, and Kurdistan, including the former capital of Tabriz. He even sent his nephew Haydar Mirza to Constantinople as a hostage; Haydar Mirza would die there in 1596.

  His new army consisted of a cavalry of 10,000 to 15,000 Caucasian ghulams armed with muskets, a corps of 12,000 musketeers called the tufangchiyan, an artillery corps of 12,000 called the tupchiyan, and a personal bodyguard of 3,000, totalling about 40,000 soldiers funded directly by the crown. Abbas also brought this force to a scale of firepower the Safavids had never had before: he could field 500 cannon in a single battle. Military advice came in part from two English adventurers, Sir Anthony Shirley and his brother Robert Shirley, who arrived in 1598 as envoys from the Earl of Essex on an unofficial mission.

  In April 1598, Abbas launched his first campaign with the reformed force, against the Uzbeks in Khorasan. He lured the Uzbek army out of Herat by feigning a retreat and fought them on the 9th of August 1598. The Uzbek khan was wounded and his own men killed him during the retreat. Mashhad fell easily. By 1599, Abbas had pushed as far east as Balkh, though he eventually had to pull back and settle for holding most of Khorasan, including Herat, Sabzevar, Farah, and Nisa.

  He then turned west and staged one of his more theatrical provocations: after receiving what he considered an arrogant set of demands from the Ottoman ambassador, Abbas had the man seized, shaved his beard, and returned the beard to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. When war followed, Abbas used deception repeatedly. In 1603 he pretended to be setting out on a hunting expedition to Mazandaran, then pivoted to recapture Tabriz. Yerevan fell in June 1604. On the 6th of November 1605, at the battle of Sufiyan near Tabriz, Abbas and Allahverdi Khan won a decisive victory over the Ottoman forces. The Treaty of Nasuh Pasha in 1612 formalized Persian suzerainty over most of the Caucasus. Then in 1618, Abbas allowed an Ottoman army of 100,000 led by Grand Vizier Damat Halil Pasha to seize Tabriz unopposed, evacuating its inhabitants, and his force of 40,000 ambushed the Ottomans as they marched toward Ardabil, ending in complete Iranian victory.

  In 1622, four ships of the English East India Company helped Abbas retake the island of Hormuz from the Portuguese, who had held a base there since the 16th century. The Iranian navy had already expelled the Portuguese from Bahrain in 1602 under the command of Imam Quli Khan Undiladze. Abbas replaced Hormuz as a trading port with a new settlement, Bandar Abbas, on the nearby mainland.

• 6. Isfahan and the Arts

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  After defeating the Uzbeks and securing his northeastern frontier, Abbas moved the empire's capital from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1598. The transformation of the city was unprecedented in the Islamic world since the founding of Baghdad in the eighth century by Caliph al-Mansur, according to the scholar Roger Savory. New mosques, baths, colleges, and caravansarais rose across the city. The mosques Masjed-e Shah and the Masjed-e Sheykh Lotfollah, the Ali Qapu palace, the Chehel Sotoun palace, and the vast public space of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square became the signature monuments of the era.

  Abbas depended heavily on Armenian craftsmen and merchants to build his new capital's economy. He had relocated tens of thousands of Armenians by force from their homeland in the Armenian highlands, primarily from the wealthy merchant town of Jugha (also known as Jolfa). He built them a new settlement near Isfahan called New Julfa, constructed a cathedral there for their use, offered them interest-free loans, and allowed the town to elect its own mayor. These merchants held crown monopolies on silk trading, and Abbas understood that silk was not merely a commodity but the primary form of hard currency available to the empire.

  Abbas' painting studios gave rise to the Isfahan school, producing works by artists including Reza Abbasi and Muhammad Qasim. He brought 300 Chinese potters to Iran to expand local production of Chinese-style ceramics. Carpet weaving grew as a significant export industry as wealthy European buyers increased their demand for Persian rugs. Manuscripts, bookbinding, and ceramics also became important exports. A Mughal embassy that arrived in 1613 and stayed until 1619 included the painter Bishandas, sent specifically to paint the portraits of Abbas and leading Persian figures; the embassy left with 240 portraits of Timur and his descendants as gifts for the Mughal emperor Jahangir.

• 7. Suspicion and the Sons

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  Three of Abbas' five sons survived past childhood, and for a time the Safavid succession appeared secure. He had been on good terms with his crown prince Mohammad Baqer Mirza, born in Mashhad on the 15th of September 1587. But in 1614, during a campaign in Georgia, Abbas heard rumours that the prince was conspiring with a prominent Circassian named Farhad Beg Cherkes. Shortly after, Mohammad Baqer broke a point of royal protocol during a hunt by killing a boar before Abbas could make the first strike. Abbas read the gesture as confirmation of treachery. He fell into a depression and stopped trusting any of his sons. In 1615, he ordered Mohammad Baqer killed. A Circassian named Behbud Beg carried out the execution in a hammam in the city of Rasht. Abbas almost immediately regretted it.

  In 1621, a second son, the heir named Mohammad Khodabanda, assumed Abbas was dying and began celebrating his own accession. Abbas recovered and had the prince blinded to disqualify him from the throne. A plot to smuggle the blinded prince to the Mughals was betrayed; his followers were executed and the prince imprisoned in Alamut Castle, where Abbas' successor would later have him murdered.

  The third surviving son, Imam Qoli Mirza, became crown prince and Abbas trained him carefully for years. Then in 1627, for reasons the sources do not fully explain, Abbas had him partially blinded and imprisoned at Alamut as well. Abbas then chose as his successor the son of the prince he had killed: Sam Mirza, described as cruel and introverted, and said to loathe his grandfather for the murder of his father. Sam Mirza nevertheless succeeded Abbas at the age of 17 in 1629 under the name Shah Safi. Abbas died at his palace in Farahabad on the Caspian coast that same year and was buried in Kashan. The Cambridge History of Iran noted that by blinding and isolating his sons, Abbas effectively ended the training of competent successors, a pattern that would weaken the later Safavid shahs long after his reign.