Who ruled Isfahan?

Isfahan lies on the Iranian plateau in central Iran, at about 1,600 metres, where the Zayandeh Rud, a river fed by snow from the Zagros Mountains, waters a fertile oasis before fading into the desert. Its central position on routes across the plateau made it a natural seat of government. Twice it served as the capital of a great empire, under the Seljuks in the 11th century and the Safavids from 1598, and the Safavid city of mosques, palaces and bridges is the one that defines its reputation.

Settlement in the oasis is old, and in antiquity the district, known to Greek writers as Gabae, lay within the Achaemenid Empire and its successors. Under the Sasanian Empire the area held a military and administrative town called Jay and, nearby, a Jewish settlement later known as Yahudiyya; the medieval city grew from these two centres. Arab armies took the region in the 640s, bringing it into the caliphate and, over time, into the world of Islam.

Isfahan rose in importance under the Buyids and their Kakuyid vassals in the 10th and 11th centuries. The Seljuk Turks took it in the 1050s, and Toghril Beg made it his capital. Under Sultan Malik-Shah and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk, at the height of the Seljuk Empire, the city flourished as a centre of learning and government, and the Great Mosque, the Masjid-e Jameh, gained its two famous domes in the 1080s. Later centuries were harder. The Mongols captured the city in the 13th century, and in 1387 it surrendered to Timur; when the inhabitants rose against his tax collectors, he ordered a massacre in which his soldiers were reported to have killed about 70,000 people.

In 1598 Shah Abbas I of the Safavid Empire moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan and rebuilt it on a grand scale. At its centre he laid out the Naqsh-e Jahan square, more than 500 metres long, framed by the Shah Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace and the entrance to the royal bazaar. A long avenue, the Chahar Bagh, led south to the Allahverdi Khan bridge over the Zayandeh Rud. Abbas also moved Armenians from Julfa in the Caucasus to a new suburb, New Julfa, where they ran much of Iran's silk trade. With merchants, envoys and scholars arriving from Europe, India and the Ottoman lands, Isfahan became one of the largest cities in the world, and a Persian saying called it "half the world".

Safavid power weakened, and in 1722 an Afghan army under Mahmud Hotaki besieged the city for months. Thousands died of famine before the shah surrendered. Isfahan never recovered its status: later dynasties ruled from Mashhad, Shiraz and, from the end of the 18th century, Tehran.

In the 20th century Isfahan revived as an industrial centre for textiles and then steel, and it remains an important centre of Iran's defence and nuclear industries. Naqsh-e Jahan Square was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1979, and the Great Mosque in 2012. With about two million people, Isfahan is one of the largest cities in Iran, though its river has run dry for much of the year in recent decades because of drought and heavy upstream water use.