Abbas the Great

Abbas I, the fifth Safavid shah, took the throne of Iran in 1587 at a moment of civil strife and foreign invasion and left it, at his death in 1629, as a strong, centralised state. He won back lands lost to the Ottomans and Uzbeks, built a new army loyal only to himself and made Isfahan one of the great cities of the Islamic world. He was also a ruthless ruler who deported and killed huge numbers of his Caucasian subjects and turned against his own sons.

Abbas was born in Herat on 27 January 1571, the third son of Mohammad Khodabanda, a nearly blind prince, and Khayr al-Nisa Begum. While still a baby he was left in Herat as its nominal governor, raised by guardians from the Qizilbash, the Turkmen tribal warriors who formed the backbone of the Safavid Empire. Their feuds nearly killed him: his uncle Ismail II sent a man to execute him in 1577, but the shah died before the order was carried out. In 1579 Qizilbash leaders strangled his mother, an experience that probably convinced him their power had to be broken.

During the weak reign of his father, the Qizilbash factions fought each other while the Ottoman Empire seized Tabriz and much of the north-west and the Uzbeks overran Khorasan. In 1581 his guardian proclaimed the boy shah in a rebellion in Khorasan, and in 1587 another Qizilbash leader, Murshid Qoli Khan, rode with him to Qazvin. On 1 October 1587 his father gave up the crown to him. Abbas soon arranged Murshid's murder, in July 1589, and began to rule in his own right.

To buy time, Abbas made a costly peace with the Ottomans in 1590, giving up Tabriz and wide lands in the Caucasus and west. He then built up a corps of ghulams, slave soldiers drawn mainly from Georgians, Circassians and Armenians who had converted to Islam and owed loyalty to the shah alone, as well as musketeers and artillery paid by the crown. Ghulams gradually replaced Qizilbash chiefs as provincial governors, bringing their revenues into the royal treasury. The English Shirley brothers, who arrived in 1598, helped.

Abbas defeated the Uzbeks near Herat in August 1598 and recovered most of Khorasan. In 1603 he turned west, retaking Tabriz and then Yerevan in 1604, and won a decisive victory over the Ottomans at Sufiyan in November 1605. A peace in 1612 confirmed his control of most of the Caucasus, and an Ottoman counter-attack in 1618 was ambushed and defeated. He took Bahrain from the Portuguese in 1602, captured Kandahar from the Mughal Empire of Jahangir in 1622 and, the same year, seized Hormuz with the help of English East India Company ships. In 1624 he took Baghdad, which the Ottomans recovered only after his death.

The reconquests were accompanied by mass violence. From 1604, as part of a scorched-earth policy against the Ottomans, up to 300,000 Armenians were forcibly moved from their homes, many to New Julfa near Isfahan, and thousands died on the way. After the Georgian kings of Kartli and Kakheti rebelled in 1614, his armies killed perhaps 60,000 to 100,000 Georgians in Kakheti and deported many more. He had the captive Queen Ketevan tortured to death in 1624 for refusing to give up Christianity.

In 1598 Abbas moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, which he rebuilt around the vast Naqsh-e Jahan Square with the Shah Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque and the Ali Qapu palace. Armenian merchants ran the silk trade, a royal monopoly, and carpets, ceramics and painting flourished. He sent embassies to Europe seeking allies against the Ottomans.

Suspicious of plots, Abbas had his eldest son killed in 1615 and two other sons blinded. He died at Farahabad, on the Caspian coast, in January 1629 and was succeeded by his grandson, Safi. Historians generally rank him as the greatest Safavid ruler, though they also note that his treatment of royal princes left the dynasty with poorly trained successors.

Our 1600 map shows the Safavid Empire before his western conquests, and the 1650 map shows Iran after them.