Afsharid Iran

• 1. Introduction

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  Afsharid Iran began with a man born as Nadr Qoli into a humble semi-nomadic family of the Afshar tribe in Khorasan. Within a few decades, he would command an army of 375,000 men, seize the Peacock Throne from a Mughal emperor, and suspend taxation across Iran for three years on the proceeds of a single campaign. His name was Nader Shah, and the empire he built stretched from the Caucasus to the Indian subcontinent.

  How did a local warlord from north-eastern Iran displace the last Safavid shah and carve out the largest Iranian territory since the Sasanian Empire? What compelled him to march on Delhi and carry its treasures home? And why did an empire that reached such extraordinary heights collapse so completely after his death in 1747? The answers stretch from a frozen plain in Azerbaijan to the streets of Delhi, and from the Ottoman court to a blind young heir confined to a single city.

• 2. A Tribe and Its Name

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  The Afshar tribe traced its origins to Turkestan, from which it had migrated to Azerbaijan in the 13th century. Early in the 17th century, Abbas the Great relocated many Afshars from Azerbaijan to Khorasan, placing them on the north-eastern frontier to defend against Uzbek incursions. It was in this transplanted community that Nader Shah's branch, the Qereqlu, took root.

  The name the dynasty used for the state it ruled was not new. Since the Safavid era, the official title had been Mamâlek-e Mahruse-ye Irân, meaning the Guarded Domains of Iran. That phrase carried weight beyond politics. It expressed a sense of territorial and cultural unity built around the Persian language, Shia Islam, and monarchy. Scholars trace the concept's origins to the Mongol Ilkhanate in the late 13th century, a period when regional trade, written culture, and the early forms of Shia practice were knitting together what would become the early modern Persianate world.

• 3. Rise Against Chaos

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  The Ghilzai Afghan leader Mahmud Hotak overthrew the Safavid shah Soltan Hoseyn in 1722, at a moment when the dynasty had already grown weak. Russia and the Ottoman Empire both moved to fill the vacuum. Russian forces seized Caucasian territories and sections of northern mainland Iran through the Russo-Persian War. The Ottomans pushed in from the west. By the Treaty of Constantinople in 1724, the two powers agreed to divide what they had taken.

  Nader joined Soltan Hoseyn's son Tahmasp II and led the resistance against the Ghilzai Afghans. He defeated the Abdali Afghans near Herat in May 1729, and then crushed the Ghilzai leader Ashraf at the Battle of Damghan in September 1729 and again decisively at Murchakhort in November. Ashraf was eventually murdered by his own followers. Nader entered Isfahan in December, handing it to Tahmasp and plundering the city to pay his troops. Tahmasp rewarded him with governorship over the eastern provinces, including Khorasan, and gave him his sister in marriage.

  Tahmasp's own ambitions proved costly. While Nader was absent fighting in the east, Tahmasp launched a campaign to recapture Yerevan and ended up losing all the territory Nader had recently won back, signing a treaty that ceded Georgia and Armenia to the Ottomans in exchange for Tabriz. Nader's response was theatrical and calculated. In Isfahan, he reportedly got Tahmasp drunk, then displayed him to the courtiers and asked whether a man in that state was fit to rule. In 1732, he forced Tahmasp to abdicate in favour of Tahmasp's own infant son, Abbas III, with Nader as regent.

• 4. The Crowning on the Mughan Plain

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  After a hunting party on the Mughan plain, Nader raised the question of his own succession with a small circle of intimates. Among them were Tahmasp Khan Jalayer and Hasan-Ali Beg Bestami. Hasan-Ali stayed silent until Nader pressed him, then advised that the proper course was to assemble all leading men of the state and obtain their agreement in a signed and sealed document.

  Nader approved the idea. The court historian Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi and the writers of the chancellery sent out summonses in November 1735, and the great men of the military, religious establishment, and nobility began arriving in January 1736. Nader held a qoroltai on the plain, a grand assembly in the tradition of Genghis Khan and Timur. The Mughan plain was chosen for its size and, as the source records, its "abundance of fodder".

  On the 8th of March 1736, a date Nader's astrologers had selected as especially propitious, he was crowned Shah of Iran before an exceptionally large gathering that included the Ottoman ambassador Ali Pasha. Many attendees were genuinely enthusiastic; others, the source notes, feared his anger if they showed sympathy for the deposed Safavids. Two years earlier, through the Treaty of Resht of 1732 and the Treaty of Ganja of 1735, Nader had already forced Russia to cede the territories it had seized in 1722-23. The new shah now had the recognition of two great powers and the loyalty of a formidable army.

• 5. Delhi and the Peacock Throne

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  In 1738, Nader Shah besieged and destroyed Kandahar, the last seat of the Hotak dynasty, and founded a new city beside its ruins that he named Naderabad. With Afghanistan secured, his attention shifted eastward to the Mughal Empire, then ruled by Muhammad Shah. The once powerful state was fracturing under pressure from increasingly disobedient nobles and the expanding Hindu Maratha Empire from the south-west.

  Nader's stated pretext was the Mughal emperor's refusal to hand over Afghan rebels who had taken refuge in India. In the campaign for Peshawar, Nader took a small force through nearly impassable mountain passes and surprised the enemy forces at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, defeating them despite being outnumbered two to one. This opened the way to Ghazni, Kabul, Lahore, and Sindh. Among those who accompanied Nader into Mughal territory was Erekle II, the future king of eastern Georgia, who commanded a Georgian contingent.

  Muhammad Shah summoned a force reported at some 300,000 men and marched north. Nader crushed that army in less than three hours at the Battle of Karnal on the 13th of February 1739. When a rumour spread in Delhi that Nader had been assassinated and Indians killed Iranian troops, Nader ordered a general sack. On March 22, between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed in a single day, until Muhammad Shah begged for mercy.

  Nader agreed to withdraw in exchange for the keys to the royal treasury, the Peacock Throne, and jewels including the Koh-i-Noor, meaning Mountain of Light in Persian, and the Daria-i-Noor, meaning Sea of Light. Estimates put the total value of the haul at as much as seven hundred million rupees. The plunder was sufficient for Nader to suspend taxation across Iran for three years on his return. Nader ceded back to Muhammad Shah all territory east of the Indus before leaving Delhi at the start of May 1739, though the Sikhs ambushed his column on the march home and recovered a portion of the loot.

• 6. Paranoia and Decline

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  The Indian campaign marked the peak of Nader's power. In 1740, he conquered the Khanate of Khiva and forced the Uzbek khanate of Bukhara to submit. On that Central Asian expedition, he wanted his son Reza Qoli Mirza to marry the khan of Bukhara's elder daughter, a descendant of Genghis Khan, whom Nader regarded as a role model. Reza refused, and Nader married the woman himself.

  In 1741, while passing through the forests of Mazandaran on the way to campaign against the Lezgin tribes of Daghestan, an assassin fired at Nader but only lightly wounded him. He became convinced Reza was behind the attempt. He had his son confined to Tehran, and later had him blinded as punishment, though he immediately regretted it. He then began executing the nobles who had witnessed the blinding.

  The Daghestan campaign itself went badly. The Lezgins, Avars, Laks, and Dargins used guerrilla tactics that the Iranian army could not overcome, and Nader was eventually forced to withdraw from a region he had initially overrun. His 1743 war against the Ottoman Empire, begun with a huge army, showed little of his earlier military brilliance and ended in 1746 with a peace treaty under which the Ottomans agreed to let Nader occupy Najaf.

  His health had been declining for years. He built an Iranian navy using lumber from Mazandaran and Gilan, constructing ships at Bushehr, purchasing thirty more in India, and recapturing the island of Bahrain from the Arabs. In 1743, he conquered Oman and its capital Muscat. But the man who had commanded 375,000 troops at his height was increasingly paranoid, ordering the killing of large numbers of suspected enemies. In 1747, a faction of his own officers assassinated him.

• 7. After the Assassination

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  Nader's nephew Ali Qoli may have been part of the plot that killed him. He moved quickly to seize the throne and proclaimed himself Adel Shah, meaning the Just King. He ordered the execution of all of Nader's sons and grandsons, with one exception: the 13-year-old Shahrokh, son of the blinded Reza Qoli.

  Nader's former treasurer Ahmad Shah Abdali declared independence and founded the Durrani Empire, taking the eastern territories that would eventually form Afghanistan. Erekle II and Teimuraz II, whom Nader had himself crowned as kings of Kakheti and Kartli in 1744 for their loyal service, seized the moment of chaos to assert de facto independence. Erekle II later unified the two kingdoms into the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, becoming the first Georgian ruler in three centuries to preside over a politically unified eastern Georgia.

  Adel Shah made the mistake of sending his brother Ebrahim to secure Isfahan. Ebrahim turned against him, defeated him in battle, blinded him, and took the throne. Adel had ruled for less than a year. Army officers then freed Shahrokh from prison in Mashhad and proclaimed him shah in October 1748. Ebrahim was defeated and died in captivity in 1750; Adel was put to death at the request of Nader's widow. Shahrokh was briefly deposed in favour of a puppet called Soleyman II but restored by his supporters, though he too was blinded.

  Shahrokh reigned in Mashhad with his territory shrinking through the 1750s to little more than the city and its outskirts. He also faced repeated Durrani invasions into Khorasan. In 1796, Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar, founder of the Qajar dynasty, seized Mashhad and tortured Shahrokh to make him reveal the locations of Nader Shah's hidden treasures. Shahrokh died of his injuries, and with him the dynasty ended. One of his sons, Nader Mirza, rose in revolt in 1797 after Agha Mohammad Khan's own death, but the uprising was crushed and Nader Mirza was executed in April 1803.

• 8. Religious Reform and Statecraft

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  Nader Shah was raised Shia but came to believe that the Safavid form of Shia Islam had deepened the conflict with the Sunni Ottoman Empire. His army itself was religiously mixed, combining Shia and Sunni soldiers alongside a notable minority of Christians, including Uzbeks, Afghans, and Christian Georgians and Armenians.

  He proposed that Iran adopt a modified form of Shia practice he called Ja'fari, named in honour of Ja'far al-Sadiq, the sixth Shia Imam. His goal was for Ja'farism to be recognised as a fifth school of Sunni Islam, which would allow Iranian pilgrims to perform the hajj in Mecca, then under Ottoman control. He also stood to gain financially from the revenues associated with the pilgrimage trade. He banned Shia practices that Sunnis found most offensive, including the cursing of the first three caliphs. The Ottomans refused to recognise Ja'farism as a fifth mazhab but did permit Iranian pilgrims to make the hajj.

  His French Jesuit personal physician reported that it was genuinely difficult to determine what religion Nader followed, and that people who knew him well believed he had none. He made sure to undercut clerical support for the Safavids: he had the chief mullah of Iran strangled after the man was heard expressing sympathy for the deposed dynasty. He also introduced the kolah-e Naderi, a hat with four peaks symbolising the first four caliphs. His flags deliberately avoided green, the colour associated with Shia Islam and the Safavids, using combinations of red, blue, white, and yellow instead, with the navy's admiral flag carrying a red Persian sword on a white ground.