Ismail I

Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty and ruled Iran as shah from 1501 to 1524. Starting as the teenage head of a militant Sufi order, he conquered all of Iran and much of the surrounding region within a decade and declared Twelver Shia Islam the state religion, a decision that still shapes the country. His advance was stopped by the Ottomans at Chaldiran in 1514, but the state he created lasted for more than two centuries.

Ismail was born in Ardabil on 17 July 1487. His father, Shaykh Haydar, led the Safavid order, a Sufi brotherhood founded around 1300 that had grown into a military movement backed by Turkmen tribesmen known as the Qizilbash, "red heads". His mother, Halima Begum, was a daughter of Uzun Hasan, ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu confederation that then held most of Iran. Haydar was killed in battle in 1488, and in 1494 the Aq Qoyunlu took Ardabil and killed Ismail's elder brother. The seven-year-old boy was hidden in Gilan, on the Caspian, where he was educated for the next five years.

At about twelve Ismail came out of hiding. A circle of seven advisers guided the movement, but his followers revered him as a semi-divine figure, and his own poems present him as an incarnation of holy figures. In 1500 he gathered some 7,000 Qizilbash at Erzincan, conquered Shirvan, and then beat a much larger Aq Qoyunlu army at Sharur. He entered Tabriz and, according to one later chronicler, was enthroned there in December 1501. Within a few years he had added central Iran, Fars, Yazd and Diyarbakır, took Baghdad in 1508 and by 1510 ruled from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia and Khorasan, the founding territory of the Safavid Empire.

On taking power Ismail made Twelver Shia Islam the official and compulsory religion of a mainly Sunni population. Sunni brotherhoods were dissolved and those who refused to conform could be executed. In Baghdad the tombs of the Abbasid caliphs and of revered Sunni figures were destroyed on his orders. The conversion of Iran took generations to complete, but it set Iran apart from its Sunni neighbours. In 1510 he defeated the Uzbeks at Merv, where their ruler Muhammad Shaybani was killed.

Safavid preaching among the Turkmen tribes of Anatolia, many of them Ottoman subjects, alarmed the Ottoman Empire, and a pro-Safavid revolt broke out there in 1511. Sultan Selim I invaded, and at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 Ottoman artillery and musketeers broke the Qizilbash cavalry. Ismail was wounded and nearly captured, and Selim briefly occupied Tabriz before mutinous troops forced him to withdraw. Ismail recovered most of his kingdom, but the Ottomans kept eastern Anatolia and parts of Mesopotamia.

The defeat ended both Ismail's conquests and his aura of invincibility. He never led an army again, drank heavily and left government to his vizier, while rivalry between the Qizilbash chiefs and the Persian officials of the administration grew. Ismail was 36 when he died on 23 May 1524; he lies at Ardabil beside his ancestor Safi al-Din. His son Tahmasp I succeeded him amid a decade of Qizilbash civil war.

Ismail brought together the painters of Tabriz and Herat, among them Behzad and Sultan Mohammed, creating the Safavid court style, and began the lavish illustrated Shahnameh later finished for Tahmasp. Under the pen name Khatai he wrote poetry, mostly in a Turkic dialect that is seen as an early form of Azerbaijani, as well as some in Persian. His grandson Abbas the Great later took the dynasty to its height.

Our 1500 map shows the Aq Qoyunlu still ruling Iran on the eve of his conquests, and the 1530 map shows the Safavid Empire he left behind, bordered by the Ottomans to the west.