Zand dynasty

The Zand dynasty ruled most of Iran from 1751 to 1794, in the unsettled decades between the collapse of Nader Shah's empire and the rise of the Qajars. Its founder, Karim Khan Zand, governed from Shiraz and never called himself shah. His rule of almost three decades brought a rare spell of peace and recovery, and he is remembered in Iran as one of its most humane rulers. After his death the family fought among itself, and the dynasty was destroyed by Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar.

The Zands were a small tribe of the Laks, a branch of the Lurs of the central Zagros mountains who may originally have been Kurdish. In 1732 Nader Shah, who was then restoring the authority of the failing Safavid state, attacked the tribe and deported its survivors to Khorasan in the far north-east. Karim, born around 1705, served in Nader's army as an ordinary cavalryman. When Nader was murdered in 1747, the Zands went back to their homeland in the west.

Western Iran was then contested by tribal chiefs. In 1750 Karim Khan joined the Bakhtiari leader Ali Mardan Khan and others in taking Isfahan, and they set up a young Safavid prince as a puppet shah under the name Ismail III, with Karim Khan as army commander. The alliance soon broke down. Karim Khan defeated Ali Mardan Khan in a series of campaigns in the early 1750s and then overcame his other rivals, among them the Afghan commander Azad Khan and the Qajar chief Mohammad Hasan Khan. By about 1760 he held all of Iran apart from Khorasan, which remained under Nader's grandson Shahrokh.

Karim Khan took the title Vakil, "deputy", first of the state and later of the people, rather than shah. His court at Shiraz was smaller and plainer than the Safavid court, and he governed through relatives and trusted tribal leaders. He let the British East India Company open a trading post at Bushehr, and in 1775–1776 his brother Sadeq Khan besieged and took the Ottoman port of Basra. Refugees who had fled the wars of the previous decades returned, Armenian and Jewish communities resettled in Shiraz, and Christian missionaries were given edicts guaranteeing their freedom of worship. Karim Khan also kept the young Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar at his court as an honoured hostage.

Karim Khan rebuilt the walls of Shiraz and gave the city a citadel, the Arg of Karim Khan, along with the Vakil Mosque, bazaar and baths. Zand buildings are known for carved marble and tiles painted with flowers, animals and people, and some motifs were deliberately borrowed from the ancient ruins of Persepolis nearby. He restored the tombs of the poets Hafez and Saadi. Zand painting, whose leading figure was Mohammad Sadeq, became the basis of later Qajar art.

Karim Khan died on 1 March 1779, probably of tuberculosis, and a struggle for the succession began at once. In ten years six members of the family held power in turn, several of them for only months. Agha Mohammad Khan, who heard of Karim Khan's death while out hunting, set about rebuilding Qajar power and reuniting the country under his own rule. The last Zand ruler, Lotf Ali Khan, took power in 1789 and spent his reign fighting the Qajars. He was captured at Bam and killed in 1794, which ended the dynasty; Agha Mohammad Khan went on to found Qajar Iran.

Shiraz still honours Karim Khan. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when the names of former rulers fell out of favour, the city's two main streets kept the names of Karim Khan and Lotf Ali Khan. His monuments remain among the city's best-known sights. For the wider story of the country, see Iran.

Our 1783 map shows the Zand state under the label "Persia", with the Ottoman Empire to the west. From the 1800 map onwards the same label belongs to the Qajar state.