Who ruled Herat?

Herat lies in the Hari River's fertile valley in western Afghanistan, close to the borders of Iran and Turkmenistan, and has been a crossroads of routes between the Middle East, Central Asia and India since antiquity. Medieval writers called it the pearl of Khorasan, and in the fifteenth century, as the capital of the Timurid rulers, it was one of the great centres of art and learning in the Islamic world. Today it is Afghanistan's third-largest city.

The date of Herat's founding is unknown. Under the Achaemenid Empire the district was called Haraiva, after its river, and Greek writers knew it as Aria; it appears among the provinces listed in Darius I's Behistun inscription of about 520 BCE. In 330 BCE Alexander the Great captured the regional capital, Artacoana, and the town was rebuilt with a citadel. It then passed to the Seleucids, and in 167 BCE to the Parthian Empire. Under the Sasanians it was a provincial capital and mint town, and by around 430 it had a Christian bishop of the Church of the East, though most of its people are thought to have been Zoroastrian. In the late Sasanian period it lay on the frontier of long wars with the Hephthalites.

Arab armies reached Khorasan in the 640s and 650s. Herat submitted to an Arab governor but, like other towns in the region, rebelled and had to be retaken several times. The Tang Chinese claimed a brief, loose overlordship around 659 to 661, the furthest west Chinese power ever reached. The city then passed through the hands of the Tahirids, the Saffarids, who captured it in 867, the Samanids, the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks and the Ghurids, who began a new Friday Mosque in 1201. Tenth-century geographers describe a walled, well-watered town with a citadel and four gated markets.

The Mongols besieged Herat twice. The first siege ended in surrender, but a revolt against Mongol rule led to a second, a seven-month siege that closed in June 1222 with a massacre; one account claims that the entire population, put at 1.6 million, was beheaded. The city lay largely in ruins until the 1230s. From 1244 a local family, the Kart dynasty, governed it under Mongol overlordship and rebuilt mosques and other buildings.

Forces of Tamerlane took Herat in 1380. After Timur's death his son Shah Rukh moved the capital of the Timurid Empire from Samarkand to Herat in 1405, and under Shah Rukh and later Sultan Husayn Bayqara, who ruled from 1469, the city became the focus of a cultural flowering sometimes compared with Renaissance Florence. The Musalla complex, the Gawhar Shad mausoleum of 1438 and the tomb of the scholar Khwaja Abdullah Ansari outside the city date from this time.

The Uzbeks under Muhammad Shaybani seized Herat in 1507, but Shah Ismail I of the Safavid Empire took it in 1510. Under the Safavids it was an important provincial capital, the birthplace of Shah Abbas the Great, and several future shahs governed it in their youth. In 1716 the Abdali Afghans revolted and set up their own state, which Nader Shah brought back under Persian rule. Soon after Nader's death in 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani made Herat part of his Durrani Empire.

In the nineteenth century Herat was often an independent principality, repeatedly attacked by Qajar Iran. A Persian siege beginning in 1837 failed with British help, and a Persian occupation in 1856 led to the Anglo-Persian War; under the Treaty of Paris Persian troops withdrew in 1857. On 26 May 1863 forces of the Afghan emir Dost Muhammad Khan took the city, and it has been part of Afghanistan since. In 1885, during the Panjdeh crisis with Russia, much of the Musalla complex was blown up to deny it to an expected Russian advance.

In March 1979 an army mutiny and popular revolt against the communist government briefly took control of Herat; government reprisals killed somewhere between 3,000 and 24,000 people, depending on the source. The city suffered heavily during the Soviet-Afghan War, including bombing in 1983. The Taliban captured it in September 1995, lost it to anti-Taliban forces in November 2001, and took it again on 12 August 2021. Herat today has an estimated 670,000 residents, most of them Persian-speaking Tajiks.