Nader Shah

• 1. Introduction

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  Nader Shah stood at the ruins of Delhi in March 1739, having just killed tens of thousands of people in a single day. He had arrived from a birthplace of poverty so stark that he once gathered firewood sticks to sell at market. The son of a herdsman from the fortress of Dastgerd in Khorasan, he would die as what contemporaries called the wealthiest monarch on earth. He fought the Ottomans and the Mughals, crossed the Khyber Pass against forces twice his size, plundered the Peacock Throne, and briefly assembled an empire stretching across more than a dozen modern nations. How did a boy who lost his father at thirteen and was carried off into slavery by Uzbek raiders end up toppling the dynasty that had ruled Iran for over two hundred years? And why, after winning so much, did his empire collapse the moment he died?

• 2. A Tribe on the Move

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  The Afshar tribe had originally lived in the Turkestan region, but during the thirteenth century they shifted to the Azerbaijan region in northwestern Iran, driven there by the expansion of the Mongol Empire. By the start of the sixteenth century, the Afshars were resettling again, this time into Khorasan in the northeast, either during the reign of the first Safavid emperor Ismail I or under Shah Abbas I, who needed them to hold off Uzbek attacks.

  Nader's dialect placed him in the Southern Oghuz group or in the Azerbaijani branch; in any case, Turkic was the language he preferred for almost every conversation. He learned Persian because it was the language of cities and culture, but he spoke it only when his interlocutor knew no Turkic. His knowledge of Arabic, the language of theology, appears to have been limited or nonexistent, which fit a broader indifference toward religion that observers noted throughout his life.

  Approximately three million people in Iran at the start of the eighteenth century were nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists, making up roughly one-third of the total population. Within these groups, shared customs of mutual aid in fighting and finance held tribal communities together. Many identified with a Turco-Mongol heritage traced to Timur and Genghis Khan, and they viewed settled populations as inferior. The British academic Michael Axworthy called this heritage paradoxical; Nader embodied it completely.

• 3. From Slavery to General

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  Nader was born in the fortress of Dastgerd, in the northern valleys of Khorasan. His father Emam Qoli was a herdsman who may also have worked as a coatmaker. The family lived nomadically, and Nader was a long-awaited son.

  At age thirteen, his father died. His only income came from gathering firewood and transporting it to market. Around 1704, when he was about seventeen, Uzbek raiders invaded Khorasan, killed many peasants, and took Nader and his mother into slavery. His mother died in captivity. He returned to Khorasan in 1708. By fifteen, before the enslavement, he had enlisted as a musketeer for a local governor and risen to become that governor's right-hand man. These early years of deprivation did not make him sympathetic to the poor. As he later told his generals at his birthplace after conquering Delhi: "You now see, to what a height it has pleased the Almighty to exalt me; from this you should learn not to despise men of low estate." He was interested exclusively in his own advancement, and that ambition would carry him further than almost any soldier in Asiatic history.

• 4. Saving a Dying Dynasty

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  The Safavid dynasty had ruled Iran since 1502, but by the early eighteenth century, the reigning shah Soltan Hoseyn was a weak ruler unable to contain rebellion. In 1722, Ghilzai Afghan forces under Mahmud Hotaki defeated a Safavid force at the Battle of Gulnabad, besieged Isfahan, starved the capital into submission, and forced Soltan Hoseyn to abdicate. Meanwhile, in 1722, Russia under Peter the Great launched a war that captured Dagestan, Derbent, Baku, Gilan, Mazandaran, and Astrabad. The Ottomans seized Iranian territory to the west, including Georgia, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Russia and the Ottomans confirmed their new possessions in the Treaty of Constantinople in 1724.

  Nader initially submitted to a local Afghan governor in Mashhad, then rebelled and built his own small army. He aligned himself with the Safavid claimant Tahmasp II, taking the title Tahmasp Qoli, meaning Servant of Tahmasp. He exposed and helped remove a rival, Fath Ali Khan, who was plotting with enemies, after which Tahmasp made Nader chief of his army. In late 1726, Nader recaptured Mashhad. In May 1729, he defeated the Abdali Afghans near Herat, and many of them joined his forces. In September and November 1729, he beat the Ghilzai Afghans under their new leader Ashraf at the battles of Damghan and Murchakhort. He entered Isfahan in December of that year and handed it to Tahmasp. The citizens' rejoicing did not last; Nader immediately plundered them to pay his troops.

• 5. The Crown He Seized

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  Tahmasp II made a fatal miscalculation while Nader was away fighting in the east. He launched his own campaign to retake Yerevan, lost all of Nader's recent territorial gains to the Ottomans, and signed a treaty ceding Georgia and Armenia in exchange for Tabriz. Nader, furious, returned and made his move. In Isfahan, he got Tahmasp drunk and displayed him before the courtiers, asking whether a man in such a state was fit to rule. In 1732, Tahmasp abdicated in favor of his infant son Abbas III, and Nader became regent.

  He then formally assembled support. He suggested to close intimates, after a hunting party on the Moghan plain, that he should be proclaimed Shah. His adviser Hasan-Ali Beg Bestami recommended gathering all the prominent men of the state to produce a signed and sealed document of consent. Nader approved. Summonses went out in November 1735, and notables began arriving in January 1736 for a qoroltai, a grand assembly in the tradition of Genghis Khan and Timur, specifically chosen because the Moghan plain offered sufficient size and, in Nader's own terms, an abundance of fodder. All agreed, many enthusiastically, the rest fearing Nader's anger if they showed support for the Safavids.

  On the 8th of March 1736, a date his astrologers chose as especially favorable, Nader was crowned Shah of Iran before an exceptionally large assembly of nobility, military commanders, religious figures, and the Ottoman ambassador Ali Pasha. His new royal seal read: "Since the jewel of State and Religion had vanished from its place God reinstated it in the name of the Iranian Nader."

• 6. The Delhi Plunder

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  In 1738, Nader Shah conquered Kandahar, the last stronghold of the Hotaki dynasty. His attention turned to the Mughal Empire of India. Its ruler Muhammad Shah could not contain rebellious nobles, expanding Sikh power, or the Hindu Marathas of the Maratha Empire. Nader asked that Afghan rebels who had taken refuge in India be handed over. Muhammad Shah refused. Nader crossed the border.

  He marched a small contingent through nearly impassable mountain passes and caught enemy forces at the mouth of the Khyber Pass entirely by surprise, defeating them despite being outnumbered two to one. Ghazni, Kabul, Peshawar, Sindh, and Lahore fell. With him traveled his Georgian subject Erekle II, future king of eastern Georgia, commanding a Georgian contingent as part of the force.

  Muhammad Shah raised an army of some 300,000 men to confront the Iranians. On the 13th of February 1739, outnumbered five to one, Nader crushed the Mughal force in under three hours at the Battle of Karnal. He captured Muhammad Shah and entered Delhi. When a rumor spread that Nader had been killed, some Indians attacked and killed Iranian soldiers. By midday, 900 Iranian troops were dead. Nader ordered the city sacked. On the 22nd of March, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed, and as many as 10,000 women and children were taken as slaves. Muhammad Shah begged for mercy.

  Nader withdrew, but he took the keys to the royal treasury, the Peacock Throne, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, whose name means Mountain of Light in Persian, the Darya-ye Noor diamond, meaning Sea of Light, and treasures estimated at seven hundred million rupees. The booty left Delhi loaded onto 700 elephants, 4,000 camels, and 12,000 horses. On the return journey, Sikh cavalry attacked in the Chenab valley and seized a large portion of the plunder, freeing most of the slaves. The Persians could not pursue them, weighed down by what remained and battered by the May heat. What Nader kept was still so much that he suspended taxation in Iran for three years.

• 7. Cruelty and Unraveling

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  After the Indian campaign, Nader's health declined and his temper darkened. He conquered the Khanate of Khiva in 1740 and forced the Uzbek Khanate of Bukhara to submit. He dispatched artisans to Merv, present-day Bayramali in Turkmenistan, hoping to rebuild its dam and use the city as a northeastern defensive base. Merv never became prosperous.

  In 1741, passing through the forest of Mazandaran on the way to fight Dagestani tribes, an assassin shot at him and only lightly wounded him. He suspected his son Reza Qoli Mirza of being behind the attempt. Reza, left to govern Iran during the Indian campaign, had already ordered the murder of the former shah Tahmasp and his family, including the nine-year-old Abbas III. Nader eventually had Reza blinded as punishment and ordered his son's eyes brought to him on a platter. When it was done, Nader cried out to his courtiers, "What is a father? What is a son?" He then began executing the nobles who had witnessed the blinding.

  In his final years, he ordered the assassination of large numbers of suspected enemies. His soldiers executed 150 monks at the Monastery of Saint Elijah after they refused to convert to Islam. His second Ottoman war, begun in 1743, produced battlefield victories at Kars and Mosul but showed little of his earlier brilliance. It ended in 1746 with the Treaty of Kerden, in which the Ottomans agreed to let him occupy Najaf. The French Jesuit who served as Nader's personal physician wrote that it was difficult to know which religion he followed, and that many who knew him best said he had none.

• 8. Death and Disintegration

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  In June 1747, Nader became convinced his personal guard was planning to kill him. He summoned Ahmad Shah Durrani and loyal commanders, ordering Ahmad Shah to assemble Durrani regiments and arrest the guard, with permission to kill them if they resisted. He then slept with his favorite wife outside the royal tent, guarded by the very men he had accused. The plan leaked.

  Four conspirators entered the royal enclosure at Quchan at night. The eyewitness account came from Chuki, one of Nader's favorite concubines, and was recorded by his physician Père Louis Bazin. Nader woke to the noise and shouted for his sword. The assassins panicked and tried to flee, but their two chiefs turned them back. Muhammad Quli Khan struck him first with a sword blow that felled him. As Nader lay bleeding and too weak to rise, he pleaded: "Why do you want to kill me? Spare my life and all I have shall be yours!" Salah Khan then ran in and severed his head. Bazin recorded the scene's final words: "Thus perished the wealthiest monarch on earth."

  His nephew Ali Qoli renamed himself Adel Shah and took power; he was probably involved in the plot and was deposed within a year. The empire dissolved into civil war as almost every provincial governor declared independence. Ahmad Shah Durrani, the commander Nader had summoned on the night of his death, proclaimed independence and founded what became modern Afghanistan. Erekle II, who had marched alongside Nader into India and whom Nader made king of Kakheti in 1744, declared de facto independence and eventually unified eastern Georgia as the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. Iran would not be unified again until Karim Khan founded the Zand dynasty and became its ruler by 1760. In 1768, Christian VII of Denmark commissioned Sir William Jones to translate a Persian-language biography of Nader into French; it was published in 1770 as Histoire de Nadir Chah, evidence that the Iranian conqueror remained a subject of fascination across Europe long after his death.