Nader Shah

Nader Shah rose from a poor herding family in Khorasan to drive foreign invaders out of Iran in the 1720s and 1730s, set aside the Safavid dynasty and rule as shah from 1736 until his murder in 1747. His campaigns reached from the Caucasus to Delhi, where his troops massacred tens of thousands of people in 1739. In his last years he grew increasingly cruel and suspicious, and the empire he built fell apart almost as soon as he was killed.

Nader, born Nadr Qoli, came from the Qirqlu clan of the Afshars, a Turkmen tribe that had served the Safavid Empire and lived in northern Khorasan. His birth date is uncertain: sources give either November 1688 or 6 August 1698. His father, a herdsman, died when he was young. As a teenager he joined a provincial governor as a musketeer and rose to become his chief lieutenant. Stories that he and his mother were carried off by Uzbek raiders are told as legend.

In 1722 Afghan rebels under Mahmud Hotaki captured Isfahan and forced Shah Soltan Hoseyn to abdicate. Russia under Peter the Great seized the Caspian provinces, and the Ottoman Empire took much of the west. Nader, by now leading his own small force in Khorasan, joined the late shah's son, Tahmasp II, and became his commander. He retook Mashhad in 1726, beat the Abdali Afghans near Herat in May 1729 and crushed the Afghan ruler Ashraf at Damghan and Murche-Khort later that year, restoring Tahmasp to Isfahan in December.

Nader then turned on the Ottomans. When Tahmasp, acting on his own, lost Nader's gains and signed away Georgia and Armenia, Nader forced him to abdicate in 1732 in favour of his infant son, Abbas III, with Nader as regent. Routed by the Ottomans near Baghdad in 1733, he struck back and by 1735 had recovered the Caucasus, while Russia agreed to withdraw from the remaining Iranian lands it held. At a great assembly on the Moghan plain he accepted the crown and was proclaimed shah on 8 March 1736. He tried to steer Iran away from the strict Shia identity of the Safavids, proposing that it be recognised as a fifth school of Sunni law.

After taking Kandahar in 1738, Nader invaded the weakened Mughal Empire. He forced the Khyber Pass and, on 13 February 1739, routed a far larger Mughal army at Karnal. In Delhi, after a rumour of his death led to attacks that killed some 900 of his soldiers, he ordered the city sacked. On 22 March between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants were killed and many women and children enslaved. He left in May with an immense treasure, including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, so large that Iran was spared taxes for three years.

In 1740 Nader brought Bukhara and Khiva under his control. A campaign against the mountain peoples of Dagestan bogged down in guerrilla warfare. After an attempt on his life in 1741 he suspected his son Reza Qoli and had him blinded, then executed nobles who had witnessed it. He built a navy, took Bahrain and Oman, and fought a second Ottoman war that ended with a treaty in 1746. Meanwhile heavy taxes for his armies ruined much of the economy and provoked revolts, which he put down with mass killings.

In June 1747, at his camp near Quchan, officers of his own guard, fearing he was about to have them killed, broke into his tent and murdered him. His nephew Adel Shah took the throne, but the empire quickly broke up: Ahmad Shah Durrani founded the state that became Afghanistan, and Karim Khan Zand eventually took most of Iran. Admired by some as Iran's restorer and a military genius in the mould of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, whom he idolised, he is remembered by others for his brutality.

Our 1715 map shows the Safavid Empire shortly before its collapse, and the 1783 map shows the successor states that emerged after his death.