Relations between the Center and the Periphery in Safavid Iran

R E L A T I O N S B E T W E E N T H E

C E N T E R A N D T H E P E R I P H E R Y

I N S A F A V I D I R A N : T H E

W E S T E R N B O R D E R L A N D S

V . T H E E A S T E R N

F R O N T I E R Z O N ER U D I M A T T H E E

Iran is commonly seen as having generated history’s first world empire—anideologically underpinned superstate ruling over a culturally diverse population.The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE) “invented,” developed, and refinedmany imperial institutions, devices, and tools. It introduced the concept of theruler as the master of the universe and a reflection of the divine. Its rulers alsopioneered various methods and mechanisms designed to optimize control, fromgathering information through a network of spies to the notion of program-matic, or at least pragmatic, toleration involving a certain latitudinarianismon the part of the state vis-à-vis the religious beliefs and practices of itssubjects.

Given these antecedents, further reinforced by another unmistakable Iranianiteration of empire, that of the Sasanians (250–644 CE), it should beuncontroversial to call the state that arose a millennium later, that of the Safavids,an empire. The Safavids indeed were a latter-day representative of an imperialtradition in the Middle East going back to the beginning of the second millenniumCE. The state they forged and oversaw combined ancient Middle-Eastern struc-tures harking back all the way to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and theAchaemenids, and Turco-Mongol elements from the steppe formations originat-ing in Central and Inner Asia that had intruded upon the fertile lands of west andsouth Asia with the onset of the second millennium. The result was tension, but

Rudi Matthee is the John and Dorothy Munroe Professor of History at the University ofDelaware. He specializes in Middle Eastern history, with a research focus on early modern Iranand the Persian Gulf. His latest publications include Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fallof Isfahan, London: I.B. Tauris, 2013; and with Willem Floor and Patrick Clawson, TheMonetary History of Iran: From the Safavids to the Qajars, London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.

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also dynamic interaction between sedentary, urban-centered civilization revolvingaround agriculture and the revenue it yielded, and a pastoral-nomadic, mobileenvironment based on a war economy. Many of these centralizing institutions andpractices were transmitted over time and carried over into Safavid times. SafavidIran may not have been as obviously an empire as, say, the Ottoman state orMughal India, political entities of greater longevity respectively greater environ-mental, ethnic, and civilizational diversity.1 But it sprang from the same traditions,and it endured for a respectable amount of time in the face of comparatively harshecological conditions and weak economic foundations. By Iranian standards,Safavid rule indeed stands out for its durability: The Safavids were, with 221years, the state with the longest lifespan in Iranian history since the Sasanians.

In this essay I use the term “empire” for the Safavid state, yet I do soself-consciously, as it were without full conviction, hesitantly. There are severalreasons for this reluctance. The first is that, as is not uncommon with terminology,the term “empire” for the Safavids is a modern, retroactively applied one. Otherthan the sparsely used “mamlakat, pl. mamalek,” “realm,” which typically occursin the form of mamalek-e Iran or mamalek-e mahrusa, the (divinely) protectedrealm, or appellations such as molk-e vasi’ al-faza-ye Iran, the “expansive realmof Iran,” no equivalent to the term “empire” occurs in the Persian-languagesources of the time. It is telling in this regard that, as of the nineteenth century,Iranian authors adopted the European term “emperaturi,” but only for theOttoman Empire, choosing to persist in their use of dowlat-e Safaviya (Safavidstate) for the Safavid “Empire.” We thus lack a theoretical model for the conceptof empire in the indigenous sources. There is nothing in Persian-language worksthat hints at such a model other than the rather vague appellation of rulers as heirsto Chingiz (Genghis) Khan (c.1162–1227) or Timur Lang (c.1330–1370), as Lordof the Two Conjunctions, Saheb-qeran, the latter-day version of the age-old cycleof justice, or the bureaucratic nomenclature presented in late Safavid manuals ofstatecraft such as the Tadhkirat al-Moluk and the Dastur al-Moluk.2

1. For some reflections on this topic, see Rudi Matthee, “Was Safavid Iran an Empire?,” Journalof the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1–2, 2010, 233–65.

2. Vladimir Minorsky, trans. and ed., Tadhkirat al-Muluk. A Manual of Safavid Administration,Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1943; repr. Cambridge UP, 1980; and Mohammad Rafi’al-Din Ansari, Dastur al-Muluk, ed. Willem Floor and Mohammad H. Faghfoory, CostaMesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2007. The notion and history of the sahib-qeran are discussedin Naindeep Singh Chann, “Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction: Origins of the S· ah· ib-Qiran,”Iran and the Caucasus 1, 2009: 93–110; and in A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign:Sacred Kingship & Sainthood in Islam, New York: Columbia UP, 2012, passim, and esp.23–55 and 88–92.

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The second reason is that, regardless of terminology, the whole idea of thepre-nineteenth-century empire is constructed, not by those who administered thecomposite states we call empires, but by twenty-first century scholars, who areused to unified, coherent states with their comprehensive tool kits involvingpanoptic surveillance methods and near-complete infrastructural control mecha-nisms, all of which we tend to extrapolate and impose on earlier large-scalepolitical formations when we examine these. Especially the issue of intention-ality with regard to purpose and identity beyond the urge to conquer territorysine fine, is important in this regard, it seems to me, even if intentionalitybeyond the desire for survival by way of control is not part of the typicaldefinition of empire.

Safavid Iran nonetheless evinces various “imperial” traits. The most obviousone is the status and role of the shah, the apex and indispensable source of power.Revered as incarnations of the divine, Safavid shahs lost in stature as they cameto lose battles, yet they continued to enjoy a nearly unassailable mystique until thevery end of the dynasty’s effective rule in the early eighteenth century.3 Themarginalization of the Qizilbash, the Türkmen warriors who had broughtthe Safavids to power, in the course of their reign only reinforced the power of thedynasty and the patrimonial order it epitomized, inasmuch as this process repre-sented a shift from loyalty on basis of kin and tribe to personal allegiance to theshah.

The other “imperial” feature of the Safavid state concerns the centripetalworking of culture. Iran at any time of its existence was, in Michael Axworthy’sfelicitous term, an “empire of the mind,” a state-cum society that, while consti-tuting and reconstituting itself through the centuries in different shapes and guises,ultimately persisted as a Kulturnation, a cultural entity centering on the Persianlanguage and its artistic legacy, with sublime poetry and the mystical experienceat its heart.4 The Safavid state is the epitome of this in that its entire culturalproduction was articulated in Persian and followed “Persianate” motifs andidioms. True, the notion of an empire of the mind inevitably foregrounds thePersophone, urban-based element in the Iranian universe, and thus is all too easilyconflated with a centrally organized state structure. Yet a common core culturetied the ruling elites together, and inasmuch as empires were run by elites andultimately catered mostly to elites, this is no minor issue.

3. For this, see Rudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis: The Decline of the Safavids and the Fall of IsfahanLondon: I.B. Tauris, 2012, 248.

4. Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, New York: Basic Books, 2008.

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Neither of these features would explain the relative longevity of the Safavid state.As Beatrice Manz puts it in the introduction to her recent study of the Timurids,“How was it possible to keep control over an extensive region with so few of thetools that modern governments possess?”5 The short answer to that question is, ofcourse, that it was impossible to wield control over such a vast territory and thatlarge parts of the realm went unpatrolled by tax collectors and army recruiters. Thequestion then becomes, how did the state make sure that its many uncontrollable orpoorly controlled regions remained quiet or at least did not erupt into the kind ofchronic rebellion that would threaten the core of the realm and thus put the verysurvival of the state at risk? This is the central question posed in this essay, whichlooks at the interaction between the center and the periphery, and starts from thenotion that there was, as in all premodern states, a perennial tension between“widespread notions of unrivalled imperial might and frequent weaknesses ingovernment,” that the state was both strong and weak.6

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The Safavid state is commonly seen as having reached its greatest level of cen-tralization under the iconic Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 997–1038/1588–1629). This viewexemplifies a Carlylean “great-man theory” in that it conflates the shah’sunquestionably remarkable achievements with the very fate of the state. Thetruth is that the centralizing process to which ‘Abbas contributed so much didnot end with his death in 1038/1629 but continued under his immediate suc-cessors, Shah Safi (r. 1038–52/1629–42), and Shah ‘Abbas II (r. 1052–76/1642–66). ‘Abbas I pacified the economically important Caspian provinces, Gilan andMazandaran, turning them into crown, khassa, domain. He also ended tribalcontrol over Kerman, Yazd, and Fars, wrested Iraq from the Ottomans, andsubjugated the lowlands and the piedmont of the Caucasus region comprisingArmenia and Georgia. But he remained beholden to Allah Verdi Khan and, afterthe latter’s death, his son Imam Qoli Khan for the administration of the entiresouthern half of the country. Allah Verdi Khan, a Georgian who, having beenbrought to Iran as a gholam, “slave soldier,” under Shah Tahmasb (r. 931–84/1524–76), was appointed governor of Fars in 1595. Given control over the

5. Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran, Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 2010, 1.

6. Peter Fibiger Bang and C.A. Bayly, “Tributary Empires—Towards a Global and ComparativeHistory,” in Tributary Empires in Global History, eds Peter Fibiger Bang and C.A. Bayly,Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 1–20: 4.


adjacent region of Kuh-e Geluya a year later, he ended up overseeing an enor-mous swath of territory stretching some 1,000 km, from Ram Hormuz in Kuh-eGeluya to Bandar ‘Abbas on the Persian Gulf via Shiraz and Jahrom. At thesame time, he headed the most formidable military forces in the country, forceswhich Shah ‘Abbas often invoked to assist him in his various campaigns. ImamQoli Khan, who succeeded his father in 1022/1613, continued as the quasi-independent ruler of much of the south until Shah Safi had him and hisprogeny, all members of the Georgian Uniladze clan, executed in 1041/1632 aspart of a major purge of real and imagined rivals. The demise of the Uniladzesallowed Shah Safi to establish control over Fars by turning this importantprovince into crown domain a year later. The story of Kurdistan and itsincorporation into the Safavid realm, to which I will return later, is lessdramatic, but essentially the same, further suggesting that the greatest extent of“infrastructural” control from Isfahan was achieved not under Shah ‘AbbasI but sometime in the mid-seventeenth century.

All this, in addition to the peaceful conditions in which Iran found itselffollowing the conclusion of the Accord of Zohab (or Qasr-e Shirin) in 1049/1639,created the appearance of a state run from the center by a dynast in charge of histerritory. In a situation rife with paradox given the state’s underlying weaknesses,the late Safavid period offers many examples of central authority successfullyprojecting its power across space. Even in the last decades of the dynasty’s rule,when the grip of central power had visibly diminished, many cases are on recordof the shah ordering investigations into the reasons for corrupt local practices andtaxes in arrears, and recalling wayward, venal officials, often at the behest of anunhappy populace. Most tellingly, despite many instances of insubordination,subaltern forces failed to mount a real challenge to central Safavid control untilthe very end. Following Shah ‘Abbas I’s consolidation of power and his adoptionof Isfahan as his capital, the Safavid realm for the remainder of the dynasty’s lifespan was in some ways a state run from the center.

But this appearance is undermined and in some cases even negated by Iran’sphysical make-up involving extreme climatological conditions, a harsh topogra-phy, and a refractory, mostly tribal population, some one-third of which practicedpastoralism. Iran’s mostly arid environment, consisting of vast deserts and for-midable mountain ranges flanking the central plateau, barely gets a nod in themajority of studies about the country at any moment in its history, yet inarguablyplays a major role in the way life and society in Iran have always been structured.Two observations concerning traveling in such an environment should sufficeas illustrations: one is from the Capuchin Father Raphaël du Mans (1613–96),


long-time resident of Isfahan in the seventeenth century, who noted that Iranianarmies fought against “hunger, thirst, the harshness of the mountains, the lone-liness of the deserts, the distances between the various places, deprivation etc.”7

The other is by the British Lady Mary Sheil, who two centuries later describedtravel in Iran as follows: “. . . the general aspect of the land is one of extremebarrenness; one may often, and very often, travel twenty or thirty miles withoutseeing a habitation or a blade of verdure; and in some parts of Persia thesedistances amount to hundreds of miles.”8 A country’s physical environment is notthe same as its identity, and least of all its destiny, not even in premodern times,yet Iran’s rugged mountains and vast arid expanses set strict limits on statecapacities, and without taking it into consideration one is likely to arrive at adistorted picture of social, political, and economic relations in any given period.

Rather than by precise borders, as modern maps retroactively showing theSafavid realm would suggest, Iran at any time before the mid to late nineteenthcentury was marked by frontiers, zones of transition and indeterminate jurisdic-tion and loyalty rather than of precise borders—even though travelers leaving andentering the Safavid realm via well-established trade routes were confronted withclearly delineated border crossings, where goods were inspected, tolls had to bepaid, and the administrative order palpably changed. In Western Europe, frontiersturned into borders in the course of the seventeenth century, yet even towards theend of the eighteenth century frontiers were still a reality and few boundaries wereaccurately known.9 Iran had to wait until the second half of the nineteenthcentury, and in the case of the frontier zone that connects Khorasan to CentralAsia until the regime of Reza Shah (1878–1944) in the first half of the twentiethcentury, for that process to get underway.10

The centrifugal working of this was exacerbated by the lack of a centrallylocated region with natural centripetal features. Iran is not endowed with a majorriver concentrating wealth and power on the banks of which a fixed and enduring

7. Francis Richard, ed., Raphaël du Mans, missionnaire en Perse au XVIIè siècle, 2 vols, Paris:L’Harmattan, 1995, vol. 2, 287.

8. Lady Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners of Persia, London: J. Murray, 1856, 76.

9. Gordon East, The Geography behind History, New York: Norton, 1999, 98. For a goodexample of conditions in France, see Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A HistoricalGeography from the Revolution to the First World War, New York: Norton, 2008.

10. For the delineation of Iran’s boundaries in the nineteenth century, see Keith S. McLachlan,ed., The Boundaries of Modern Iran, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. For the issue onfrontiers during the nineteenth century, see Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions:Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999.


capital could have risen. Nor did it have a natural link to the sea by way of a majorport city that could have developed into a microcosm of the country and awindow on the world. The Persian Gulf littoral is unbearably hot and humid formuch of the year and, to make matters worse, interacts with a hinterland of scantresources and productivity. In sum, Iran knew no Paris or London, no Istanbul orBombay. Instead, the Iranian plateau has always been an archipelago of urbancenters, far apart, linked to other parts of the country by way of precarious traderoutes, yet largely self-sufficient with their immediate hinterland providing foodand other supplies, and thus practically autonomous. This is analogous to MughalIndia, which saw a succession of political centers, from Agra to Fatehpur Sikri toShahjahanabad/Delhi, except that all three are located in a circumscribed corearea within the northern Indo-Gangetic Plain, the subcontinent’s center of politi-cal and especially economic gravity. Iran never had one single power center. Asuccession of rather footloose dynasties hailing from different parts of the countrymade of Iran a land of many successive sultanic centers scattered around thecountry—from Maragha to Soltaniya to Tabriz to Qazvin and Isfahan, to Shirazand Mashhad and, finally, Tehran.11 Its government was always ambulant, livingin tents, and the “capital” was located wherever the shah and his entouragehappened to be.12 This pattern was momentarily interrupted when Shah ‘Abbaschose the centrally located city of Isfahan as his capital in the early seventeenthcentury, and turned it into a nexus of political authority and commercial activity(at least as long as the shah and his entourage were in town). Yet even in the caseof Isfahan, we should be careful not to view it as the country’s sole gravitationalcenter of a highly centralized state, with spokes evenly radiating to the outer partsof the realm. Power in Iran, as elsewhere in the Middle East, sprang from aninteractive “web of personal allegiances between the ruling families and localpowers.”13 With this in mind, it seems most productive to look at early modernIran as an archipelago of largely autonomous towns and their respective hinter-lands, overseen by a layered sovereignty, a relatively weak state that projected

11. In fact, Iran is easily the country with the most capitals in its history.

12. See Monika Gronke, “The Persian Court between Palace and Tent: From Timur to ‘AbbasI,” in Lisa Golombek and Maria Subtelny, eds, Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and CentralAsia in the Fifteenth Century, Leiden: Brill, 1992, 18–22.

13. Christine Noëlle-Karimi, “Khurasan and Its Limits: Changing Concepts of Territory fromPre-Modern to Modern Times,” in Markus Ritter, Ralph Kauz, and Birgitt Hoffmann, eds,Iran und iranisch geprägte Kulturen. Studien zum 65. Geburtstag von Bert. G. Fragner,Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2008, 9–19: 16.


strength and claimed universality, even as its formal writ did not run far beyondthe capital.14

In these circumstances the whole idea of a unified territory is misleading,redolent of the modern unified nation-state and wholly inappropriate for thecomposite state that the Safavids oversaw. Charles Tilly’s dictum that, untilmodern times, a viable state could not easily dominate any territory in excess of250 miles, c. 400 km, is certainly valid for the Safavid state.15 (Bounded)territory was anyhow less important than we tend to imagine, for as withall premodern states run from horseback, the focus was on mobility ratherthan on defending fixed positions. Beyond that, the state sought to secure themain trade routes that were vital for the exchange and circulation of goods.16

Successful shahs practiced this by spending much of their time campaigning,patrolling their realm, inspecting outlying provinces, but also going on pilgrim-age to boost their religious credentials. This combined a military mandateinvolving a strategy designed to punish and intimidate existing and potentialenemies, with devotional expectations. In the process, they practiced the cul-turally mandatory cult of the outdoors, which also included living in tents andgoing on frequent hunting trips.17

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It is on the margins, in the unpacified, mostly mountainous regions that have beencalled “shatter zones,” areas where the “human shards of state formation andrivalry accumulated willy-nilly, creating regions of bewildering ethnic and linguis-tic complexity,” that the empire really shows itself at work.18 In the case of theSafavids, no precise boundary between the center and the “shatter zones” can beestablished. Indeed, the “problem” of the borderlands was really an extension of

14. For this model as applied to the Timurid dynasty, see Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politicsand Religion, 2; and, in general, Peter Fibiger Bang, “Lord of All the World: The State,Heterogeneous Power and Hegemony in the Roman and Mughal Empires,” in Bang andBayly, eds, Tributary Empires, 171–92.

15. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990,47.

16. Jeremy Black, War and the World: A Comparative History, Houndmills, Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 140; and Noëlle-Karimi, “Khurasan and Its Limits,” 12.

17. For the situation in Mughal India, see Lisa Balabanlilar, “The Emperor Jahangir and thePursuit of Pleasure,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, third ser., 2, 2009, 173–86.

18. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland SoutheastAsia, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009, 7.


that of the core. Tribal power dominated not just the fringe, or even the outercore, but, in some ways, the very center itself, even after the Safavids hadmarginalized the Qizilbash by creating an administration and an army largelycomposed of mostly Armenian and Georgian so-called slaves of the shah,gholams. Tribal raiding from the fringes remained a hazard throughout theSafavid period, targeting the interior of the country in the seventeenth as much asin the sixteenth century. In 1513–14 marauding Uzbeks attacked the region ofKerman, and in 1596–97 these tribesmen penetrated as far as Yazd, hundreds ofmiles into Safavid territory.19 In the early 1680s, Bakhtiyari tribesmen were saidto be blocking roads in the vicinity of Isfahan, looking to plunder caravans.20 Andin 1694 Baluchi warriors mounted on swift camels were roaming within a day’sdistance of the capital.21

Still, the “shatter zones,” located at the edge of central state control andinfluence, constituted a perennial problem of particular urgency for serving as arefuge for the tribal elements who periodically penetrated the interior. How werethese peripheral lands prevented from breaking away and threatening the center?The answer to this question lies in part in an economic base that was even weakerin the case of the periphery than in the case of the “center,” making it exceedinglydifficult for local authorities to accumulate enough of a surplus to acquire andsustain independence—as opposed to nominal autonomy. But a more substantiveand “interactive” answer also requires a look at the mechanisms and tools used bythe Safavids to maximize control.

Violence in the form of military aggression, conquest, or punishment was theprincipal means of control in the Safavid instrumentarium, as it was in that ofall premodern states. This took various forms. One was terror by way of scorched-earth tactics, which was designed to make life miserable for the enemy. TheSafavid applied this tactic most widely in the frontier zone with the OttomanEmpire, the region between Tabriz and Erzurum—where there was plenty of(fertile) earth to be despoiled, affecting inhabitants in sizable numbers. ShahTahmasb’s destruction of large swaths of land in the 1540s and Shah ‘Abbas’s

19. ‘Abdi Bik Shirazi, Takmilat al-akhbar. Tarikh-e Safaviyeh az aghaz ta 978 h.q., ed. ‘Abdal-Hoseyn Nava’i, Tehran: Nashrani, 1369/1990, 49; and, in general, ‘Abbas ‘Ali GhaffariFard, Ravabet-e Safaviya va Uzbakan (913–1031 h. q.), Tehran: Vizarat-i Umur-i Kharijah,Mu’assasah-i Chap va Intisharat.

20. Richard, ed., Raphaël du Mans, vol. 2, 323.

21. Martin Gaudereau, “Relation de la mort de Schah Abbas Abbas, roi de Perse et ducouronnement de Sultan Ussain, son fils,” in Anne Kroell, ed., Nouvelles d’Ispahan1665–1695, Paris: Société d’histoire de l’Orient, 1979, 65.


ruination of the region of Jolfa in Nakhichevan as part of his deportation of theJolfan Armenian community in 1604–05, are perhaps the best examples of thiskind of terror.22

Another method applied to enhance control was forcible depopulation andresettlement, an age-old device designed to weaken loyalties and strengthenborder defenses. Shah ‘Abbas I resettled the tribe of the Qajars, whose originsseem to have been in Anatolia, to the northeast, making them guard the frontiersof the Caucasus around Ganja as well as the inhabited regions of Khorasanaround Astarabad and Marv. He also encouraged the Göklen Türkmen to settlein the vicinity of Astarabad so as to protect this border town from raids by therival Yomut Türkmen. In the 1670s, during the reign of Shah Soleyman (1076–1105/1666–94), the Göklen still protected the frontier north of Astarabad againstthe Yomut.23 But especially Kurds, known for their martial qualities, were oftenmoved over long distances for this purpose. Thus Shah Tahmasb sent the Kurdishchieftain Khalil Khan Siyas Mansur, who had rebelled against him, to Khorasanto defend the region against the Turkmen tribesmen.24 Kurdish tribes wereresettled to the barren lands of Kitch and Makran after Ganj ‘Ali Khan (d.1625),the ruler of Kerman, had subdued the Baluchi fortress Bin Fahl (Bampur) andtaken a number of Baluchi chieftains hostage in 1020/1611.25 The reign of ShahSoleyman witnessed another eastward move by Kurds. During his tenure as grandvizier between 1079/1669 and 1099/1689, Sheykh ‘Ali Khan, himself a Kurd, senta number of Kurdish officials and their retinue to Kerman to inspect the

22. For Tahmasb’s operations in eastern Anatolia, see Walter Posch, Osmanisch-SafavidischeBeziehungen (1545–1550): Der Fall Al?âs Mîrzâ, 2 vols paginated as one, Vienna:Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2013, 481ff. For Shah ‘Abbas’s actions inNakhichevan, see Jean Chardin, Voyages du chevalier Chardin, en Perse, et autres lieux del’Orient, 10 vols and map, ed. L. Langlès, Paris: Le Normant, 1810–11, vol. 2, 297, 305; andEdmund M. Herzig, “The Deportation of the Armenians in 1604–1605 and Europe’s Mythof Shah ‘Abbas I,” in Charles Melville, Pembroke Papers I, Persian and Islamic Studies inHonour of P.W. Avery, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Centre of Middle EasternStudies, 1990, 59–71: 67–8. For a description of these tactics in the Persian-language sourcessee Mirza Big Jonabadi, Rowzat al-Safaviyeh, ed. Gholamreza Tabataba’i Majd, Tehran:Bonyad-e Mowqufat-e Doktor Mahmud Afshar Yazdi, 1378/1999, 835.

23. Masih Zabihi and Manuchehr Setuda, eds, Az Astara ta Astarabad, 8 vols, Tehran:Entesharat-e anjoman-e asar-e melli, 1349–55/1970–6, vol. 6, 52–3.

24. Akihiko Yamaguchi, “Shah Tahmasp’s Kurdish Policy,” Studia Iranica 1, 2012: 118–19.

25. Iskandar Beg Torkaman and Mohammad Yusof Mo’arrekh, Zeyl-e tarikh-e ‘Alam-ara-ye‘Abbasi, ed. Soheyli Khvansari, Tehran: Ketabforushi-ye Eslami, 1329/1951, 132; andMohammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi, Ganj ‘Ali Khan, Tehran: Entesharat-e Asatir, 3rd edition,1368/1989, 42.


administrative record of the officials appointed to run the place and to replacethem.26

Building fortresses strengthened defenses as well. Following a practice that goesback to Roman times, Iran’s frontier towns were fortified—examples beingTabriz, Yerevan, and Qandahar, as opposed to the towns in the interior, whichwere only lightly defended—and Shah ‘Abbas I is known to have constructed thefortress of Tabarsaran on the border of Daghistan.27 These were meant less foractual defense—enemy forces, after all, could ignore fortified towns and movearound and beyond them—than for “carrying war into the enemy’s lands.”28

Military force and the expansion that was its logic knew its limitations,though. After Shah Isma’il (1487–1524/892–930, r. 1501–24/907–930) hadconquered large parts of Iran’s traditional core area, the Safavids found them-selves rather restrained in their ability to keep extending their territory. Thesparsely populated lands lying astride the arc running from the eastern shores ofthe Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Oman, Khorasan, Sistan, and Baluchistan, wererather unattractive targets, marked as they were by harsh natural conditions inthe form of vast sand, gravel, and salt deserts. A lack of naval capacity pre-cluded Safavid expansion into and across the Persian Gulf. That left Iraq andthe lowlands of the Caucasus. But the Safavids found in the Ottomans fiercecompetitors over Iraq and, to a lesser extent, over Armenia and Georgia.Indeed, Mesopotamia was, even without an Ottoman presence, alien territoryfor Iranians from the plateau, for it was Arab in language and culture, andendowed with an uncongenial climate. In the end, the Iranians resigned them-selves to ownership of the plateau, feeling rather secure behind the vast desertsand mountain ranges that surround and frame it.29

26. See Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 160–1.

27. Mostowfi Mofid Mostowfi, Mo?tas·ar-e Mofıd des Moh·ammad Mofıd Mostoufı, 2 vols, ed.Seyfeddin Najmabadi, Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, 1989–91, vol. 1, 184–5.

28. Amelie Embree, “Frontiers into Boundaries: From the Traditional to the Modern State,” inRichard Fox, ed., Realm and Region in Traditional India, New Delhi: Vikas, 1977, 255–80:260.

29. Subsequent Iranian regimes, most notably that of Nader Shah, were to break out of theseconfines, but the sentiment itself was to endure long beyond the Safavids, as is suggested bythe words of Agha Mohammad Khan, the warlord who inaugurated the Qajar dynasty in thelate eighteenth century. Faced with the threat of the Russians with their cannons, he is saidto have responded: “Their short shall never reach me: but they shall possess no countrybeyond its range. They shall know no sleep. Let them march where they choose; I willsurround them with a desert” (see John Malcolm, The History of Persia, 2 vols, London:Murray et al., 1815, vol. 2, 298).


“Hard,” military power remained indispensable for a state intent on keepingsubordinate elements from challenging the system. “Soft” power was just asimportant and, indeed, absolutely necessary for the maintenance of empire. Theshah himself may be said to have straddled the realms of these forms of power. Inhis capacity as charismatic ruler with strong and enduring connotations of incar-nating the divine, he was the most potent centralizing force in the realm, at leastas long as he met his obligation of patrolling and policing his territory. But sincethe shah could not be everywhere at once, and since not everyone was likely toobey his commands anyway, means other than military ones had to be applied.These included institutional bureaucratic methods, involving the conversion ofprovinces into crown domain in order to increase the flow of tax revenue to thecenter, as well as time-honored devices such as having officials shadow otherofficials and the keeping of relatives of subordinate rulers as hostages to ensuregood behavior.30 The profound insecurity of administrative positions, radicallyundermined by slander and intrigue, served as a powerful mechanism againstrebellion by subordinates as well.31 Beyond that, accommodation, negotiation,and quid-pro-quo arrangements of a tributary nature were indispensable tools inthe tool kit available to the state.

These latter methods were most vital, and often the only feasible ones, in thefrontier zones. One formal administrative arrangement in these zones was that ofthe velayat. Velayats, located on the edge of Safavid jurisdiction and largelyinhabited by fiercely independent tribal people, might, in their relationship withthe Safavids, be best described as protectorates, a convenient state “betweenannexation and mere alliance.”32 The five velayats in late Safavid times were‘Arabistan (modern Khuzistan), Luristan, Georgia, Kurdistan, and Bakhtiyariterritory, in that order of ranking.33 Valis, usually the khans of the dominantconfederation inhabiting the region, were all but independent governors. Hailingfrom leading local families, they usually ruled in hereditary fashion even if theshah officially appointed them. In a concession to regional autonomy, the latter

30. Pietro della Valle insisted that Shah ‘Abbas would give all officials a secondary official, a“secretary and a confidant,” upon their appointment (see Pietro della Valle, Delle conditionidi Abbas Re di Persia, Tehran Offset Press, 1976, 30 [original Venice: F. Baba, 1628]).

31. Engelbert Kaempfer, Am Hofe des persischen Grosskönigs, 1684–1685, Tübingen: H.Erdmann, 1977, 163.

32. Lord Halsbury, as quoted by W.G. Runciman, “Empire as a Topic in ComparativeSociology,” in Bang and Bayly, eds, Tributary Empires, 99–107: 99.

33. Ansari, Dastur al-Moluk, 11–15.


almost always chose a candidate from the region. Appointing someone fromoutside the resident tribe might create more problems than it solved, as is shownby the example of Kurdistan, where in the 1680s a non-Kurdish governor dis-patched by Shah Soleyman was run out of town by the local population.34 Goodbehavior by chieftains was enforced by means of keeping a family member,typically a son, in Isfahan as a hostage. Valis formally expressed allegiance toIsfahan and had coins struck in the shah’s name. Unlike regular governors,however, valis oversaw their regions’ administrative apparatus, controlled theirown budgets, maintained their own militia, and managed their own vassal rela-tions. In all of these operations the shah rarely intervened.35

In keeping with general practices in the premodern state, “what wasdemanded from the chieftains was an alliance for frontier defence, not a for-feiture of their local power.”36 This was obtainable through “contingent accom-modation.”37 This took many forms, ranging from cooptation of tribesmen asqorchis (members of the Safavid praetorian guard), the appointment of localofficials from the region and with the consent of their constituents, to marriagealliances with regional ruling houses, which meant, in effect, the raising of tribalsons at the royal court.38 The latter practice was customary in relations with thevelayats, most notably Georgia, but could extend to far-flung areas that lay wellbeyond any aspirational control. Shah Tahmasb (r.1524–76) thus gave a daugh-ter in marriage to ‘Adil Giray, a Tatar chief from the region north of the BlackSea whom he kept as a hostage in hopes of preventing the Tatars from sidingwith the Ottomans.39

34. Kaempfer, Am Hofe des persischen Grosskönigs; Mohammad Yusof Vala Isfahani, Khold-ebarin (Iran dar ruzgar-e Safaviyan), ed. Mir Hashem Mohaddes, Tehran: Bonyad-eMowqufat-e Doktor Afshar Yazdi, 1372/1993, 20; and Ayatollah Sayyed MohammadMardukh Kordestani, Tarikh-e Mardukh, Tehran: Chapkhaneh Artesh, 3rd edn., 1323/1944,111.

35. T.S. Kuteliia, Gruziia i sefevidskii Iran (po dannym numizmatiki), Tiflis: Metsniereba, 1979,30.

36. Embree, “Frontiers into Boundaries,” 264.

37. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics ofDifference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010, 14.

38. Yamaguchi, “Shah Tahmasp’s Kurdish Policy,” 115–17, 120.

39. Giovanni Michele, “Relazione delle successi della guerra,” Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, Cod.46-X-10, fol. 312v. For examples of Safavid sexual politics vis-à-vis Georgia, see HirotakeMaeda, “Exploitation of the Frontier: The Caucasus Policy of Shah ‘Abbas I,” in WillemFloor and Edmund Herzig, eds, Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, London: I.B. Tauris,2012, 471–90: 484–5.


The state might force loyalty with strong-arm tactics. For vassals like the Kurds,siding with the shah, one mid-seventeenth-century observer insisted, was a condi-tion for being accorded water rights. Most of the arrangements the central statemade with tribal chiefs from the periphery involved annual subsidies. In a reversalof ordinary roles played by superior and subordinate power, it was often the centralstate that made payments to the chieftains of the marches, in hopes of buyingstability and securing the protection of the marginal zone against outside, even“wilder” elements that could not possibly be subdued, only held at bay. Such atransfer of money did not offer any guarantee for lasting cooperation, though, forloyalty was instrumental at best, personal in nature and always contingent andtemporary.40

All peripheral regions were connected to the central state by way of sucharrangements. But not all borderlands and frontier zones were the same—as issuggested by the fact that no part of the eastern zone enjoyed the status of velayat.To demonstrate this point, the remainder of this study will subject two peripheralregions, one in the west, the borderlands between Iran and Iraq and easternAnatolia respectively, the other in the east, the vast frontier zone of Sistan andBaluchistan, to further investigation.

***

The western frontier was wild, mountainous, and largely inaccessible. Sinceancient times its main access route, connecting Iran with Mesopotamia, had runfrom Hamadan, Kangavar, and Kermanshah to Babylonia/Baghdad via Qasr-eShirin and Khaneqin, the border towns between Safavid and Ottoman territory.Access in the south, impeded by the impenetrable marshes of lower Iraq, wasconfined to the route that connected Shushtar to Basra via Huwayza. The region,moreover, was home to various tribal peoples, Lurs, Kurds, and the Arabs, whoclung fiercely to their autonomy. The Accord of Zohab, concluded between theOttomans and the Safavids in 1049/1639, created unprecedented clarity in thisregard. It delineated, if not a precise boundary line, a frontier zone with referenceto “mutually recognizable landmarks (including military installations) and inhab-itants.”41 The French Orientalist François Pétis de la Croix (1653–1713), travelingbetween Tabriz to Erzurum in 1670, observed that the border between the two

40. See Roy P. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, Princeton, NJ:Princeton UP, 1980.

41. Sabri Ates, The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914,Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013, 23.


states was marked by two hills on which a number of pillars (kütükler) had beenplaced and that, by mutual agreement, the area formed a no man’s land thatbelonged to neither state.42 Still, regional centers rather than regions were key tooccupation and control. Until the Ottomans brought it back under their controlin 986/1578, the area around Kars was, following the 962/1555 Treaty ofAmasya, no-man’s land.43 The Ottomans held Erzincan, Van, and Baghdad;Safavid control at that point centered on Baghdad.44 The Safavid authoritiesconsidered the main inhabitants of the region’s northern reaches, the Kurds, ficklefor their tendency to switch sides as they saw fit. Being sandwiched between twomajor powers and lacking the means to take on either by way of an outrightmilitary confrontation, the Kurds naturally did exactly that; sometimes in rapidsuccession, as was the case with two renegades, Hajji Beg Donboli and GhaziKhan Tekkelu, who in 946–7/1540 returned to the Safavid fold after havingdefected to the Ottomans on a previous occasion.45

In the borderlands with the Ottoman Empire, the persistent ability of tribalforces to play off one state against the other would be a problem until relativelyrecent times, exposing the inherent weakness of both Istanbul and Isfahan.46 Apolicy of leniency and accommodation was vital in these circumstances. This isprobably why Khalil Khan, the governor of Bakhtiyari territory, was justdeposed—as opposed to executed—after his people had risen in revolt againsthis violent oppression, and why he managed to regain his post twelve yearslater.47 As will be seen shortly, Shah ‘Abbas I accommodated himself withMubarak Khan, the formidable ruler of ‘Arabistan. Similarly, Shah ‘Abbas II

42. François Petis de la Croix, Extrait du journal du Sieur Petis, Fils. . . . , in Ahmad DouryEfendy, Relation du Dourry Efendy, ambassadeur de la Porthe Othoman auprès du roy dePerse, ed. L. Langlès, Paris: Ferra, 1810, 148.

43. Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas the Great (Tarı?-e ‘Alamara-ye ‘Abbası), ed.and trans. Roger M. Savory, 3 vols [paginated as one], Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978,350; and Posch, Osmanisch-Safavidische Beziehungen, 46.

44. H. Chick, ed., A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia. The Safavids and the Papal Missionin the 17th and 18Th Centuries, 2 vols [paginated as one], London: Spottiswood, 1939; repr.I.B. Tauris, 2012, 30.

45. Posch, Osmanisch-Safavidische Beziehungen, 58.

46. Only in the early nineteenth century did the Ottomans even attempt to subdue the tribalpeoples in their eastern borderlands (see Elke Hartmann, “The Central State in the Border-lands: Ottoman Eastern Anatolia in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Omer Bartov and EricD. Weitz, eds, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg,Russian and Ottoman Borderlands, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2013, 178).

47. See Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 147.


(r. 1052–76/1642–66) received Mansur Khan, the ruler of Huwayza, with greatpomp and circumstance in Isfahan in 1055/1645, after the latter had led arebellion against the Safavids.48 Soleyman Khan, the Kurdish beglerbeg ofArdalan, in 1067/1657 took the side of Istanbul and tried to escape to Ottomanterritory. Caught before he could do so, he was only exiled to Mashhad for thisact of treason. Not only that, but Shah ‘Abbas II, who had little interest inconflict with either the Kurds or the Ottomans, allowed him to be succeeded byhis oldest son, Kalb ‘Ali Khan.49 The French cleric Nicolas Sanson summed upthe situation by stating that the Safavids, in the face of their powerful neigh-bors, the Ottomans, made sure to maintain alliances with Türkmen chieftains,the rulers of Kurdistan and the Arabs of the desert, “who do not obey theGrand Seigneur.”50

Tribal warlords thus managed to retain partial autonomy. Shah ‘Abbas I, ina concession to local power, had to agree to Luristan having a khan who hailedfrom the ranks of the region’s elite.51 Adjacent Kurdistan was in the hands of apowerful local clan, the Ardalan, who, alternating in their professed loyaltybetween the Ottomans and the Safavids, ruled the region independently until1020/1611, when Shah ‘Abbas I marched against them. A real campaign aimedat outright conquest was avoided at that point with Halow Khan, the chief ofthe Ardalan, sending his son, Khan Ahmad Khan, as a hostage to Isfahan. KhanAhmad Khan, having joined the Safavid cause, returned to Kurdistan, where heoverthrew his father. The sending of hostages from Kurdistan to Isfahan hence-forth became customary. The marriage between Khan Ahmad Khan and theSafavid princess Zarrin Kolah further reinforced ties between the Safavids andthe Kurds. Over time, moreover, Safavid religious pressure and propagandasucceeded in making the Ardalan give up their Sunni beliefs and adopt TwelverShi’ism. Khan Ahmad Khan ended up assisting Shah ‘Abbas I in his conquest ofMosul, Kirkuk, and Baghdad. Yet this does not mean that the Kurds simplybecame subordinate to the Safavids. They retained their semi-independent statusunder ‘Abbas’s successor, Shah Safi I (r. 1039–52/1629–42), to the point whereKhan Ahmad Khan, unnerved by the massacres that followed the shah’s

48. Nationaal Archief (NA) (Dutch National Archives, The Hague), Coll. Gel. de Jongh 283,Daghregister Winnincx, 7 Oct. 1645, fol. 217.

49. Paul Luft, “Iran unter Schah ‘Abbas II (1642–1666),” unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Universityof Göttingen, 1986, 108–9.

50. N. Sanson, Estat présent du royaume de Perse, Paris: La Veuve de J. Langois, 1694, 176.

51. Chardin, Voyages, vol. 9, 205–6.


accession in 1039/1629, went over to the Ottomans and fought with the latterin the next war that broke out between the two powers.52

By establishing a mutually agreed-on border with the Ottoman Empire, theAccord of Zohab of 1049/1639 reduced the tribes’ room for autonomy.53 TheArdalan are, again, a good example of this tendency. They lost half of theirterritory to Ottomans as a result of the accord. Most important, they lost theirability to switch sides as easily as before. This became clear in 1067/1657, whenSoleyman Khan, the reigning beglerbeg of the Ardalan, sided with Istanbul andtried to escape to Ottoman territory. Caught, he was exiled to Mashhad ratherthan killed and, in a further sign of the Safavids’ continued instinct for accom-modation, Shah ‘Abbas II, uninterested in conflict with either the Kurds or theOttomans, allowed the khan’s oldest son, Kalb ‘Ali Khan, to succeed him.54 ShahSoleyman followed a similar strategy in 1084–85/1674, when the ruler of theKurdish principality of Kuchab, feeling threatened by Istanbul, sent a delegationto Isfahan to offer tributary allegiance to the Safavids. Yet the shah, unwilling tojeopardize his peace treaty with the Ottomans, rejected the offer, advising theKurds to accommodate themselves as best they could with the Porte.55 UnderSoleyman, Safavid power over the Kurds seems to have culminated. In 1093/1682,popular complaints brought down Khosrow Khan, who in his two years asgovernor is said to have oppressed his people. After various fruitless admonitionsto improve his governing style, he was summoned to Isfahan to be executed on theroyal square. In his stead, Shah Soleyman appointed Teymur Khan Ajarlu’i as thefirst non-Kurdish governor to the region. (Before long, he, too, was run out oftown by the local population.)56

In the late seventeenth century, as the central authority of the Safavid state grewweaker, a series of new troubles appeared in the northwestern borderlands. Theseculminated after a tribal chief named Soleyman Baba, who served as head of the

52. Motalleb Motallebi, “Jaygah va vazi’at-e hokmrani-ye valiyan-e Ardalan dar dawra-yeSafavi,” Nama-ye Baharestan 2, 1390/2011, 1119–20.

53. Thomas J. Barfield, “Turk, Persian and Arab: Changing Relationships between Tribes andState in Iran and along Its Frontiers,” in Nikki R. Keddie and Rudi Matthee, eds, Iran andthe Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, Seattle, WA: U. ofWashington P., 2002, 61–87: 74.

54. Kalb ‘Ali Khan first ruled the Senneh Dezh (Sanandaj) region but, becoming a favorite ofShah ‘Abbas II, ended up ruling all of Kurdistan (see Mardukh Kordestani, Tarikh-eMardukh, 110).

55. Chardin, Voyages, vol. 9, 232, 243; Kaempfer, Am Hofe des persischen Grosskönigs, 75–6.

56. Valah Qazvini Isfahani, Khold-e barin, 20; and Mardukh Kordestani, Tarikh-e Mardukh,111.


Ottoman-controlled region of Kurdistan, in 1099/1688 declared his independencefrom Istanbul. At an unknown date in the 1100s/1690s, Soleyman Baba foundedthe city of Sulaymaniya, naming it after himself. Subsequently he added Kirkuk andMosul to his territory.57 From there he expanded his territory westward, toSanandaj and Ardalan, and in the process got himself into an inevitable confron-tation with the Safavids. Mortaza Qoli Beg Zangana, the son of qorchibashi (headof the Praetorian Guard) Shah Qoli Khan and the assistant of the governor ofKermanshah, was ordered to move against the rebel forces of Soleyman Baba withtroops from the Kermanshah region. But, in keeping with the feeble military displayof the late Safavid polity, the response was rather half-hearted. The shah, opting notto antagonize the Ottomans, refrained from sending an all-out punitive expeditionagainst a tribal leader whom he considered to be under the jurisdiction of the Porte.Instead, he dispatched an envoy named Abu’l Qasem Khan to Istanbul, first tocongratulate Sultan Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703) with the latter’s recent coronationand, second, to urge the new ruler to rein in Soleyman Baba. In 1698 SoleymanBaba’s troops, numbering 30,000, took Ardalan and Orumiya. Shah Soltan Huseynresponded by ordering ‘Abbas Qoli Khan Qajar, sardar, army commander, andformer governor of Ganja, to confront the rebel with a force of 60,000 men.58 Thetwo parties initially seem to have reached a truce, but in July of the same yearSoleyman Baba attacked again and ended up defeating the Safavid forces, now ledby ‘Abbas Qoli Khan Ziyad Oghlu, near Marivan, close to the Ottoman-Safavidborder and about halfway between Sanandaj and Sulaymaniya. He next retreatedto Ottoman territory, after which Istanbul, keen to coopt him, offered him controlover the province of Shahrezur. He would continue to stalk the Kurdish border-lands with his troops, until in 1700–1 the Ottomans sent an expeditionary forceagainst him and ended his rule by having him executed.59

Farther south, near the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates across fromlower Mesopotamia, lay ‘Arabistan, modern-day Khuzistan. Like Kurdistan,‘Arabistan was a Safavid velayat, and thus inherently semi-autonomous. Flat, hot,

57. See ‘Abd al-Hoseyn Nava’i, ed., Asnad va mokatebat-e siyasi-ye Iran az sal-e 1038 ta 1105 h.q., Tehran: Entesharat-e Bonyad-e Farhang-e Iran, 1360/1981, 232.

58. Mohammad Ibrahim b. Zeyn al-‘Abedin Naseri, Dastur-e shahriyaran, ed. MohammadNader Nasiri Moqaddam, Tehran: Bonyad-e Mowqufat-e Doktor Mahmud Afshar Yazdi,1373/1994, 129, 132–3, 177; NA, VOC 1611, Gamron to Heren XVII, 6 May 1698, fol. 37.

59. Nasiri, Dastur-e shahriyaran, 222ff. ‘Abbas Qoli Khan was exiled to Alamut for his poorperformance (see NA, VOC 1626, Isfahan to Gamron, 22 February 1699, fol. 99; ShireenArdalan, Les Kurdes Ardalân entre la Perse et l’Empiree ottoman, Paris: Librairie orientalistePaul Guethner, 2004, 52–3, according to whom Soleyman Baba was defeated by the Safavidsin 1109/1698).


and unhealthy, ‘Arabistan until the modern era had little to recommend itself. Thearea around Dizful was known for its grain cultivation, and sugar cane hadtraditionally been grown in the area as well, but otherwise the region’s intrinsiceconomic value was limited before the discovery of oil at the turn of the twentiethcentury.60 More important than its agricultural revenue seems to have been‘Arabistan’s commercial significance, which the region derived from its location inthe vicinity of the port town of Basra, the Ottoman outlet to the Persian Gulf andthe entrepôt for trade between the Indian Ocean and the Fertile Crescent via Iraqand Syria. In addition, an important pilgrimage route connected Iran with theArabian Peninsula via Basra. The region thus had served as a buffer between theTurks and the Iranians ever since the occupation of southern Iraq by the Otto-mans in the mid-sixteenth century, contested by both even if generally (loosely)controlled by the latter.

Precious little provided a natural link between ‘Arabistan and the rest ofSafavid Iran. Not just its geographical and linguistic traits gave the region adistinctly ambiguous status within the Safavid realm but, cut off from the centralplateau by the formidable Zagros Mountain range, it was exposed to invadersfrom the western lowlands. The tribal character of the population further com-pounded the problem. Among the region’s semi-nomadic peoples were the BanuKa’b around Dowraq (modern Shadigan) in the south, the Al Nasar in thenorthern area around Shushtar and Dizful, and the Muntafiq in the Jazira acrossthe Shatt al-‘Arab. Since the sixteenth century ‘Arabistan had gradually becomearabicized, the result of Arabic-speaking tribes such as the Banu Ka’b moving infrom Mesopotamia.61 Inhabiting the middle, around the town of Huwayza, werethe Musha’sha’, a tribal confederation which, having come to power in thefifteenth century, over time had transformed itself into an eponymous, ferventlyIsma’ili-Shi’i dynasty. The end of full independence for the Musha’sha’ came whenShah Isma’il nominally brought them under his control in the early sixteenthcentury.62 Yet Safavid rule remained weak, and, aside from the brief period in the

60. See Mir ‘Abd al-Latif Khan Shushtari, Tohfat al-‘alam va zeyl al-tohfa, ed. S. Movahhed,Tehran: Ketabkhana-ye Tahuri, 1363/1984, 26; and Alexander Hamilton, A New Accountof the East Indies, 2 vols, Edinburgh: John Mosman, 1727, vol. 1, 89.

61. Sayyed Ahmad Kasravi, Tarikh-e pansad sala-ye Khuzestan, Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1362/1983, 130.

62. See Giyas al-Din b. Hemam al-Din al-Huseyni, Habib al-siyar, ed. Mohammad Dabir Siyaqi,4 vols. third edition, Tehran: Ketabforushi-ye Khayyam, 1362/1983, vol. 4, 497–9; Anon.,‘Alam-ara-ye Safavi, ed. Yad Allah Shokri, Tehran: Entesharat-e Ettela’at, 1363/1984,135–8; Vala Isfahani, Khold-e barin, 173–4; and Jonabadi, Rowzat al-Safaviya, 215–18.


tumultuous reign of Shah Mohammad Khodabanda (985–95/1578–87) whenthey seem to have become subordinated to the Ottomans, the Musha’sha’ by andlarge retained control over Huwayza.63

This situation did not fundamentally change under Shah ‘Abbas I. Unableto end their virtual autonomy, the shah initially accommodated himself toSayyid Mubarak b. Mutallib, the most formidable chieftain of the Musha’sha’.Commanding the tribe between 997/1589 and 1007/1616, Sayyid Mubarak in thefirst five years of his rule managed to seize Dawraq, Dizful, and Shushtar, allnominally under Safavid rule, and to expand his realm westward by invading andoccupying the Jaza’ir, the marshes north of Basra.64 So great was his power thaton old maps the territory he ruled is given as “the country of Barachan” (MubarakKhan).65 Following a great deal of unrest in ‘Arabistan, culminating in a conflictbetween Sayyid Mubarak and his son Amir Badr al-Din, who served as governorof Dizful, Shah ‘Abbas in 1003/1594–5 sent an army headed by his grand vizier,Hatim Beg Ordubadi, and the governor of Fars, Farhad Khan Qaramanlu, to theprovince. Sayyid Mubarak was thus forced formally to submit to Safavid author-ity by acquiring the title of vali, which means that he recognized the overlordshipof the Safavids, paid tribute, and was held to supply troops on command. Yet heretained a remarkable degree of autonomy. Shah ‘Abbas, fearing Ottoman inter-ference if he treated Sayyid Mubarak too harshly, allowed him to hold on to hisprevious conquests, including the Jazira region.66

The extent of continued Musha’sha’ autonomy was revealed two years later,when Sayyid Mubarak sheltered a band of rebellious Afshar who had taken refugewith him after being defeated by Mehdi Qoli Khan Shamlu, the governor of

63. W. Caskel, “Ein Mahdi des 15. Jahrhunderts. Saijid Muhammad Ibn Falah und seineNachkommen,” Islamica 4, 1931, 48–93: 80–1.

64. Molla Jalal al-Din Monajjem, Tarikh-i ‘abbasi ya ruznameh-ye Molla Jalal, Tehran:Entesharat-e Vahid, 1366/1987, 286; ‘Ali Shakir ‘Ali, Tarikh al-‘Iraq fi ‘ahd al-‘Uthmani1638–1750 m. Dirasa fi ahwalihi al-siyasiya, Baghdad: Sharikat al-Tab’ wa al-Nashral-Ahliyah, 1980, 127.

65. This appellation was still used in 1062/1652, more than a generation after his death (seeRoberto Gulbenkian, “Relações político-religiosas entre os Portugueses e os mandeus dabaixa Mesopotámia e do Cuzistâo ne primeira metade do século XVII,” in “Relaçõespolítico-religiosas entre os Portugueses e os mandeus da baixa Mesopotámia e do Cuzistâone primeira metade do século XVII,” in Roberto Gulbenkian, Estudios Históricos, II,Relações entre Portugal, Irâo e Médio Oriente, Lisbon: Acad. Portuguesa da História, 1995,325–420: 382).

66. Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, 675–7; and Mahmud b. Hedayat Allah Afushta’-yeNatanzi, Naqavat al-asar fi zekr al-akhyar, Tehran: Entesharat-e ‘Elmi va Farhangi, 2nd

edition. 1373/1994), 546ff.


Shushtar. Rather than sending Mehdi Qoli Khan on a punitive expedition againstHuwayza, the shah ordered him to make arrangements with Sayyid Mubarak,unwilling to “make a confirmed enemy of him,” as Iskandar Munshi puts it.67 Thesame autonomy allowed Sayyid Mubarak to conduct a rather independent foreignpolicy. Between 1605 and 1611, he thus solicited Portuguese naval support in hisstruggle against the Ottoman overlords of Basra, and in this context even sent hisown ambassadors to Goa.68

Sayyid Mubarak’s death in 1025/1616–17 ushered in a period of renewedtribal unrest in which the Musha’sha’ again openly defied Safavid rule. Shah‘Abbas first appointed the deceased ruler’s son, Sayyid Nasir, who had beenreared at the Safavid court and whose bond with the royal dynasty was reinforcedwhen the shah gave him his daughter Shah Begom in marriage, as his successor.Sayyid Nasir died within a year, however, poisoned, it seems, by his cousin SayyidRashid, who thus managed to become the new ruler of Huwayza.69 When SayyidRashid was killed in a tribal battle in 1029/1619–20, it was the turn ofSayyid Mansur, Sayyid Mubarak’s younger brother, to become the new vali ofHuwayza.70 Although Sayyid Mansur had long resided in Safavid territory, rela-tions between him and the shah became strained as soon as he was appointed rulerof Huwayza. Keen to enhance his autonomy, he established close relations withthe local ruler of Basra, Afrasiyab, who acknowledged Ottoman authority only inname. Relations with Isfahan further deteriorated when Sayyid Mansur defied aroyal order to join the Safavid campaign against Baghdad. When Mansur ignoredrepeated summons to appear at court—Della Valle has him state that “if the sciahwas king of Persia, himself was king of Haveiza, and that he did not valuehim”—the shah sent Imam Qoli Khan, the powerful ruler of Fars, to Huwayzawith the order either to capture or kill the rebellious vali. Imam Qoli Khan, taking

67. Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, 700–1.

68. Gulbenkian, “Relações político-religiosas,” 361–71. The Musha’sha’ also retained theirdistinctive coinage, which is Safavid with clear regional characteristics. For this, see RudiMatthee, “The Safavid Mint of Huwayza: The Numismatic Evidence,” in Andrew Newman,ed., Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the SafavidPeriod, Leiden: Brill, 2003, 265–94.

69. Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, 1130, 1146–47; and Pietro della Valle, Viaggi di Pietrodella Valle il pellegrino, Brighton: Gancia, 1843, vol. 2, 339. Also see Mohammad ‘‘AliRanjbar, Mosha’sha’iyan. Mahiyat-e fekri-ijtima’i va farayand-e tahvollat-e tarikhi, Tehran:Entesharat-e Agah, 1382/2003, 320–1. The marriage between Sayyid Nasir and Shah Begomis recorded by Fazli Khuzani Isfahani, “Afzal al-tavarikh,” University of Cambridge, Ms. Dd.5.6, fol. 311a.

70. Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas, 1173, 1180.


with him Sayyid Mubarak’s son, Muhammad, a protégé of his who had grown upat the Safavid court, in early 1625 arrived before Huwayza. Faced with thepossibility that the people of the town would side with the shah and acceptMuhammad as their new ruler, Mansur fled to Basra, where he was cordiallyreceived and given a piece of land. The inhabitants of Huwayza welcomedMuhammad but, in a show of continued bargaining power, insisted that noQizilbash troops would enter their town.71

From that time until the end of Safavid rule, Huwayza formally remainedsubordinate to the authority of Isfahan. As a symbol of this status, the Musha’sha’ruler annually sent nine horses to Isfahan as a present (pishkash).72 Internecinestrife intermittently flared up in the region, with various members of theMusha’sha’ fighting for supremacy, and no ruler of Huwayza managed to end theendemic tribal unrest that plagued the region.73 Basic power relations meanwhileremained the same. While rule continued to be hereditary within the house ofMusha’sha’, the shah would formally invest the vali with power and, through apolicy of divide and conquer, keep the region under a modicum of control.74

‘Arabistan was hit hard by the devastating plague that raged in Basra in theearly 1690s.75 According to the chronicler Shushtari, the decline of his nativeShushtar began in 1106/1694–5, a year marked by destructive flooding andharvest-destroying locust swarms.76 The epidemic created great unrest among theregion’s Arab tribes, most notably the Muntafiq, whose leader, the formidableShaykh Mani’ b. Mughamis, rose to prominence in this period.77 Forced to pay

71. Pietro della Valle, The Travels of Sign. Pietro della Valle A Noble Roman, into East Indiaand Arabia Deserta, London: J. Macock, 1665, 248–9. Eskandar Monshi, who tells the storyuntil 1033/1624, claims that Sayyid Mansur did join the shah on his Baghdad campaign andonly became defiant afterwards. The complicated position of Basra between Ottomanand Safavid influence and power is spelled in Rudi Matthee, “Between Arabs, Turks, andIranians: The Town of Basra between, 1600–1700,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies 1, 2006. 53–78.

72. Ranjbar, Mosha’sha’iyan, 323.

73. For such fighting under Shah Safi I, see Monshi and Isfahani, Zeyl-e tarikh, 152–3 and157–8.

74. For examples, see Ranjbar, Mosha’sha’iyan, 323ff.; and Jasim Hasan Shubbar, Tarikhal-Musha’sha’yin wa tarajim ‘alayhim, Najaf: Ma?ba? et al. -Adab, 1385/1965, 102ff.

75. Rasul Ja’fariyan, Safaviya dar ‘arsa-e din, 3 vols paginated as one, Qom: Pezhusheshkada-yeHowza va Daneshgah, 1379/2000, 776.

76. Sayyed ‘Abdallah bin Nur al-Din bin Ni’matullah Ash-Shushtari, Tadhkira-i Shushtar,Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1924, 66.

77. NA, VOC 1571, Gamron to Batavia, 26 June 1695, fols 167–8.


full taxes in the face of famine, they revolted against their Ottoman overlords. In1106/1695, with the Ottomans tied up in Europe, Shaykh Mani’ managed to takeBasra without a struggle, expelling the Ottoman basha and his troops.

Shaykh Mani’s expansionist ambitions extended to neighboring ‘Arabistan.Some 5,000 disgruntled Musha’sha’ followers of Sayyid Mahmud, a nephew ofFaraj Allah, the region’s Safavid-appointed vali, had joined forces with ShaykhMani’, assisting him in the seizure of Basra. The ensuing conflict between ShaykhMani’ and his Musha’sha’ sympathizers and the forces loyal to Faraj Allahresulted in the latter taking Basra, forcing Shaykh Mani’ to flee.78 Yet Faraj Allah’soccupation of Basra did not end the turmoil in the region. Shaykh Mani’ managedto regroup, with the support of Arab tribes, the Banu Khalid, the Fudul, and theRabi’a, and turned around to attack Basra and even Huwayza itself. Thisprompted Isfahan to dispatch an army from Luristan, led by ‘Ali Mardan Khan,the governor of Kuh-e Geluya. On 26 March 1697 the Iranian troops seized Basra.Initially, ‘Ali Mardan Khan was appointed governor of the city, but later thatsame year he was replaced by Ibrahim Khan, the governor of Dowraq.79 TheIranians ruled the port and its surroundings for the next four years. Yet, evercautious not to antagonize the Ottomans, Shah Sultan Hoseyn (1079/1668-1139/1726, r. 1106/1694-1134/1722) had keys of pure gold made early on and dis-patched Rostam Khan Zangana as ambassador to Istanbul to hand these over tothe sultan in a symbolic gesture. Before the year was out Shaykh Mani’, seeminglyrecovered, made common cause with his erstwhile enemy, Faraj Allah, who hadmeanwhile been dismissed from his post as vali of Huwayza. Together theydefeated a large Iranian force near the fortress of Khurma, killing most of thetroops and capturing their general.80

What little we know about developments in ‘Arabistan in the last years ofSafavid rule suggests continued almost continuous turmoil. In 1125/1713, atyrannical vali whose name remains unclear was deposed by a rival, promptingIsfahan to send ‘Avaz Khan, a former governor of Bandar ‘Abbas, to Huwayzato apprehend the rebel and to install the latter’s nephew, as well as to find outabout the reasons why the inhabitants had revolted against the previous

78. Ibid.; Ranjbar, Mosha’sha’iyan, 330–31.

79. Nasiri, Dastur-e shahriyaran, 249; NA, VOC 1598, Gamron to Batavia, 8 June 1697, fol. 80;Gollancz, Chronicle of Events, 415; Ranjbar, Mosha’sha’iyan, 331.

80. Nazmizada Mortaza Afandi, Gulshan-e khulafa, trans. Musa Kazem Nursu, n.p.: n.d., 307;NA, VOC 1611, 2nd fasc., Gamron to Batavia, 11 January 1698, fol. 19; Gamron to HerenXVII, 6 May 1698, fol. 37; and Gamron to Batavia, 20 August 1698, fol. 6.


vali.81 ‘Avaz Khan managed to reestablish order by having the old vali reinstated,prompting the deposed one to seek refuge with the Mughamis in Basra.82 The nextyear saw a new Arab revolt against Huwayza.83 In the summer of 1128/1716 SafiQuli Khan, the qollar-aqasi (head of the royal slave soldiers) and governor of Fars,moved against the Arabs but was defeated with great loss of life. In typicalfashion, the disaster was kept secret from the shah.84 Anarchic autonomy markedthe subsequent period in Khuzistan leading up to the fall of the Safavids.

***

With the Accord of Zohab (or Qasr-e Shirin) the intermittent warfare betweenthe Safavids and Ottomans came to an end, allowing the Iranians to turn theirattention to their eastern frontier. In 1058/1648 their troops retook Qandahar,the fortress city that marked the boundary between Safavid and Mughal terri-tory, putting the Safavids again in charge of the vast lands between Kerman andQandahar. Yet it was all little more than symbolic. The western frontier zonewas difficult terrain for any state bent on controlling it. But, endowed withenough natural resources to make it attractive to various contenders, it wasrelatively manageable in size as well as relatively densely populated. The easternfrontier zone was of a different order. It was fully part of Safavid territory asimagined by Mofid Mostowfi in his geographical compendium, Mokhtasar-eMofid, although the vast area of Sistan and Zabulistan receives but summarycoverage in this seventeenth-century work.85 But the vagueness of its boundariesin addition to its sheer size and emptiness truly made it a “frontier fiction” zonerather just than a borderland.86 Iran’s eastern half comprised the vast landsbetween the nominally controlled heartland and the area where Mughal influ-ence began to be felt, encompassing Kerman, Baluchistan, and Sistan, an area of

81. NA 1843, Gamron to Isfahan, 11 May 1713, fols 154–5. ‘Avaz Khan had served as governorof Bandar ‘Abbas in 1698–99 (see Nasiri, Dastur-e Shahriyaran, 273).

82. NA, VOC 1856, Isfahan to Gamron, 29 June 1713, fols 311–12.

83. NA, VOC 1856, Isfahan to Gamron, 20 March 1714, fol. 682; VOC 1870, Gamron toIsfahan, 26 July 1714, fol. 91.

84. NA, VOC 1879, Gamron to Batavia, 30 November 1716, fol. 16.

85. Mofid Mostowfi, Mo?tas·ar-e Mofıd, 285–7.

86. Christine Noelle-Karimi, The Pearl in its Midst: Herat and the Mapping of Khurasan(15th–19th Centuries), Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2014, 3. Theterm “frontier fiction” derives from Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping theIranian Nation, 1804–1946, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999.


over one million square kilometers, larger than France, with only Qandahar asa significant urban center. This enormous swath of territory did not just consistof vast desolate sand and salt deserts and arduous mountain terrain, but it wasalso thinly populated by tribal folk, Baluchis and Afghans, pastoralists who ofneeds were far more ambulant than the Kurdish tribes in the west. Both movedaround great distances with their goats and camels in search of livelihood andabove all, water wells. Both were also formidable warriors. The Iranians aresaid to have feared especially the Baluchis for the lightning speed with whichthey traveled on their camels, covering more than 100 km a day with two menriding each animal back-to-back on the saddle, one scanning the horizon ahead,one holding his gaze backwards.87 Like the Mughals, the Safavids had neverreally been in charge of this barren transit zone, except, intermittently, for thefrontier town of Gereshk and, at times when they controlled it, the well-guardedstronghold of Qandahar.88

Access to these lands was far more restricted than the huge area would lead oneto believe. Only two routes connected Iran with India through this territory. In thenorth the only, rather circuitous passageway—which largely skirted the area—followed the narrow corridor through Khorasan, north of the vast Dasht-e Lutand south of the mountains that separate Iran from the deserts of Kara Kum. Thisroute, connecting Qazvin with Mashhad and Herat, was relatively well equippedwith caravanserais, water cisterns, and villages. In the 1870s the British officerValentine Baker called this the “only direct road leading from Herat andKhorassan to Tehran passes Shahrood,” adding that “this place virtually com-mands the route from East to West, for there is abundant water supply and a mostfertile country.”89

87. Gaudereau, “Relation de la mort de Schah Abbas Abbas,” in Kroell, ed., Nouvellesd’Ispahan, 65; Keith Edward Abbott, “Cities of South Persia,” 30 Sept. 1850, in AbbasAmanat, ed., Cities and Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran,1847–1866, London: Ithaca Press, 1983, 135.

88. This situation would endure under the Qajars and well into the twentieth century. ForGereshk as a frontier town guarded by 10,000 soldiers in the reign of Shah ‘Abbas I, seeRobert Coverte, The Travels of Captain Robert Coverte, ed. Boies Penrose, Philadelphia, PA:Wm. F. Fell, 1931 [reprint of original 1612 edition], 75. For the lack of central control overBaluchistan in the Qajar period, see Firoozeh Kashan-Sabet, “Baluchistan: Nature, Ethnicity,and Empire in Iran’s Borderlands,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 2, 2013,187–220. It was Reza Khan (eventually Shah Rezah Khan) who would bring the region underthe control of Tehran (see General Hasan Arfa, Under Five Shahs, London: John Murray,1964, 254).

89. Valentine Baker, Clouds from the East. Travels and Adventures on the Perso-TurkomanFrontier, London: Chatto and Windus, 1876, 143.


The most direct link to India, and the only one that went straight throughSistan, was formed by a southern route, the road between Isfahan and Qandaharvia Tabas, Birjand, Farah, and Gereshk—the first Mughal stronghold comingfrom the west—was also the epitome of arduous traveling. Villages on this routewere few and far between, as were provisions, including (brackish) water; it waseasy to get lost on the unmarked trails, especially on the stretches crossing thesand and salt expanses between Birjand and Tabas, and the elements at anymoment and time of the year could wreak havoc with travelers and their packanimals.90

There was also a more direct route from Khorasan to Iran’s heartland, leadingthrough the Great Salt Desert, but it was an arduous route. Because of thedistances involved, the treacherous and inhospitable terrain, and the lack ofprovisions and above all water, Iran’s eastern half was effectively much fartherfrom Isfahan than the western territories comprising all the lands located west ofJibal.91 This alone caused the Safavids to be far less militarily engaged in the eastthan in the west (which also explains why Persian-language sources yield littleinformation about the area).92 There are yet other reasons why, other than someparts of Khorasan, this enormous expanse received relatively little of their atten-tion. One involves the origins of the Safavids and those who helped them attainpolitical power. The Qizilbash, the mainstay of their military, hailed from Ana-tolia and did not have a power base in the east. It is precisely to fortify the easternand northeastern frontier that, in due time, the Safavids mobilized tribal forcesrecruited from the Afshar and the Kurds, followed by Georgian gholam troops, totake up positions and fight their adversaries on the eastern frontier—Baluchis andAfghans. Another is the relatively scant revenue the arid eastern zone yielde—thesame problem, incidentally, that militated against local state building, to whichthe Baluchis and Afghans appear to have been less inclined (or capable of) than theKurds and the Arabs in the western borderlands. A third reason why the Iraniansmaintained a light military footprint in the area is that they seem to have lookeddown on the Mughals as rather pusillanimous, considering them a far less

90. Willem Floor, “Arduous Traveling: The Qandahar-Isfahan Highway in the SeventeenthCentury,” in Floor and Herzig, eds, Iran and the World, 207–35.

91. As Durant-Guédy puts it in his study of Isfahan in the Seljuq period, “[. . .] seen fromIsfahan, Khurasan appeared a faraway world, cut off physically by the Great Desert andpolitically by the emergence of autonomous local dynasties . . .” (see David Durand-Guédy,Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers: A History of Isfahan under the Saljuq Period, Abingdon:Routledge, 2010, 35).

92. Noelle-Karimi, The Pearl in its Midst, 74–5.


redoubtable enemy than the Ottomans. Shah ‘Abbas I, for one, is said to have sentonly one Iranian soldier to face three Indian ones during eastern campaigns.93

As a result, neither the Ghilzay nor the Abdali Afghans were beholden to anyone outside power. That does not mean that they had no role in the complicatedsystem of “managing” the borderlands; it just means that they were unable to playoff the Safavids and their neighbors in the same manner as the Kurds and theArabs managed to manipulate the Safavis and the Ottomans in the westernmarches. In either case tribal forces could never be subdued; only attempts atcontainment and restraint through paid cooperation might work. In response toAfghan grievances about oppressive Safavid governors, Shah Àbbas appointed anAfghan replacement. Mir Weys b. Shah ‘Alam, the chief of the Hotaki Afghantribe, at the turn of the eighteenth century served as the Safavid-appointedsupervisor of the caravan trade between Iran and India. This gave him and his clana stake in the Safavid enterprise.94

The growing restiveness of the eastern marches in the late seventeenth centurywas partly triggered and certainly exacerbated by a recurring series of droughtand famine, forcing the nomadic people of the region into the interior in search offood and resources. The raids conducted by these camel-riding tribesmen weremarked by high speed and mobility, making them unpredictable and very difficultto confront with regular military means. Throughout the 1100s/1690s reportsmention tribal incursions by Baluchis in the southeast and Ghilzay and AbdaliAfghans in the area around Qandahar and father north toward Khorasan,respectively.95 We have some specific documentation about the Abdalis raidingpopulation centers in Quhestan and Qa’enat, between Herat and Farah, in thewestern half of modern Afghanistan, in the period between 1722 and 1727. Likethe earlier ones, most of these raids seem to have been little more than cases ofcattle rustling that terrorized villagers.96

93. Sanson, Estat présent du royaume de de Perse, 162.

94. Molla Mohammad Mo’min Kermani, Sahifat al-irshad (Tarikh-e Afshar-e Kerman—payan-ekar-e Safaviyeh), Tehran: Nashr-e ‘Elm, 1384/2005, 361; John Malcolm, History of Persia,2 vols, London: Murray, 1815, 1.

95. See Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 162–3. For an early nineteenth-century description andassessment of such raids, see Sir Henry Pottinger, Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde.Accompanied by a Geographical and Historical Account of those Countries, London:Longman et al., 1816, 58–9.

96. For these raids, see Javad Abbasi, “Report of Dread: Diaries on the Situation in SouthernKhorasan at the Time of the Fall of the Safavid Dynasty,” in Maria Szuppe, AnnaKrasnowolska, and Clause Pedersen, eds, Mediaeval and Modern Iranian Studies. Proceed-ings of the 6th European Conferences of Iranian Studies, Paris: Peeters Press, 2011, 11–32.


This unrest was left to metastasize. The Safavids, hampered by a pressing lackof money, a diminishing inclination to go to war, and growing factionalism in theranks of their administration, reacted to this challenge in a halfhearted manner.They launched various punitive expeditions, to be sure, as they had done earlieragainst the Baluchis and the Kitch from Makran, but these were undermined byfaltering military preparedness due to a lack of money and materiel, as well as,increasingly, infighting in Isfahan leading to backbiting and obstructionism ofproper military preparations and, ultimately, a disastrously incoherent strategy.

A religious policy in the form of a new, more emphatically Twelver-Shi’i policydid not help either. The growing emphasis on faith as a marker of loyalty thatmarked the reign of Shah Soltan Hoseyn alienated the mostly Sunni population ofthe periphery, in the west as much as in the east. The monetary woes thatsimultaneously plagued the administration made matters worse, preventing theSafavids from continuing the time-honored policy of making pragmatic compro-mises with the shatter zone. Examples are the Caucasus, where the Sunni Lezghis(Lezgins) enjoyed a tributary relationship that netted them an annual subsidy untilit was revoked, making them revolt in response; the region abutting Central Asia,where the Safavids withheld the annuity that they had long paid to the SunniTurkmen, causing the latter to rise up under Shah ‘Abbas II; and, most fatally, theeastern zone, where Sunni Baluchis and Afghans dominated. There is the case ofthe unnamed Baluchi leader, tributary to Isfahan, whose clan erupted in rebellionafter he refused to hand over his daughter to Jamshid Khan, the gholam governorof Qandahar, and was killed in the aftermath.97

The case of Mir Weys is the most dramatic example of the tensions unleashedby Isfahan’s growing and, ultimately, fatal shortsightedness. The Afghan uprisingat large was clearly triggered by the cruel treatment they suffered from theGeorgian troops that were deployed to keep the eastern marches quiet, but MirWeys’s decision to revolt against the Safavids was a direct outgrowth of thecancellation of his post as supervisor of the eastern caravan trade, ostensibly forhis lack of service and dereliction of duty in collecting tolls and taxes. Thisamounted to the cutting of the subsidy that his clan effectively enjoyed—and theresult was similar to what would happen in 1841, when a successor Afghankinsman revolted again the British overlords when the latter cut his allowance.98

97. As told by Chardin, Voyages, vol. 10, 32ff., 41ff., 100ff.; also see Matthee, Persia in Crisis,161–2.

98. William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839–1842, New York:Knopf, 2013, 276.


The Safavids lazily thought they might use accommodation to soothe the Afghansafter Mir Wey’s death in 1129/1717. But they miscalculated, for Mir Weys’s sonand successor, the firebrand Mahmud, vowed to exact revenge upon the Iraniansand ignited his fatal rebellion. Iran’s rulers were not even able to accommodate theAfghan Hazaras, their Shi’i coreligionists who lived in a state of enmity with theirSunni neighbors yet, wooed by Mahmud, decided to side with the Ghilzay.99

Still, even after the Afghans had marched into Iran’s heartland, their occupa-tion of the Safavid capital and the concomitant fall of the dynasty was anythingbut inevitable. They were mostly equipped with swords and the light artillery theybought should have been powerless against the fortified walls of Isfahan and the60,000 troops garrisoned in the city. Political rivalries leading to a hopelesslydivided and mutually competing military command structure led to the defeat ofthe Safavids at the decisive battle of Golnabad on 8 March. Following his victoryover the Iranian forces and having taken Jolfa, the Armenian suburb of Isfahan,Mahmud still showed himself willing to negotiate. In August 1722, at the heightof the siege, he reached out to the shah, proposing to withdraw with his forces inreturn for being granted control over the eastern half of Iran, Khorasan, Sistanand Qandahar, Kerman as well as a payment of 400,000 tumans.100 The shahrefused. He did not get a second chance to compromise. Six months later Isfahanfell to the Afghans.

***

Iran in the Safavid period covered a huge area that was difficult to manage, diversetopography, and complex ethnic and religious affiliations. Whichever model weadopt and regardless of the label we affix to the governmental structure thatclaimed (and sought) to rule over this land, we moderns tend to look at a state likeSafavid Iran anachronistically, with twenty-first century eyes, hard-pressed not toimagine power evenly distributed over a territory extending in concentric circlesfrom the capital. This image is reinforced by the indigenous sources from theperiod, primarily court chronicles, which, written from the center, portray a

99. Judas Thadeus Krusinski, The History of the Late Revolutions of Persia, 2 vols, London:J. Pemberton, 1733, vol. 1, 210–12; J.P. Ferrier, History of the Afghans, London; J.Murray, 1858, 43–4.

100. Petros di Sarkis Gilanentz, The Chronicle of Petros di Sarkis Gilantentz concerning theAfghan Invasion of Persia in 1722, the Siege of Isfahan and the Repercussions in NorthernPersia, Russia and Turkey, trans. and ed. Caro Owen Minasian, Lisbon: Imprensa nacional,1959, 13–18; Willem Floor, trans. and ed., The Afghan Occupation of Safavid Persia,1721–1729, Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 1998, 157.


determined, purposeful, commanding ruler only challenged in his supreme author-ity by disobedient appointees, wayward ingrates, and refractory tribal folk neces-sitating punitive expeditions that invariably ended in royal victory, thepunishment of rebels, and the restoration of the divinely ordained order. All ofthis is personified by Shah ‘Abbas I and solidified by the appearance of theremarkably stable country that he left behind and that would persist until the lateseventeenth century.101

This essay, examining the ways in which the center interacted with the periph-ery in seventeenth-century Iran, has followed a less “centrist,” more realisticapproach, based on the notion that the Safavid state was strong as well asweak—strong in ideological appeal but weak in its logistical means. Its mainpurpose has been to identify its ways and means of control, asking the question ofwhy a largely unpatrolled periphery did not break away sooner than it did.

A fundamental part of the answer of why the lands at the margins were unableto gain regional autonomy must be that there was not enough of a surplus tosustain regional autonomy—as was historically typical among pastoraliststhroughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa.102 That fact doomedmost rebellions, minimizing the chances of success for new political dispensationsorganized and run from the periphery. Indeed, in keeping with traditional pat-terns, the people from the borderlands never attempted to conquer the Safavidheartland.103 The Afghan invasion that led to the fall of Isfahan in 1722 mightseem an exception to this rule since it allowed the invaders to take over the state.Yet their conquest and subsequent rule were the result of inertia and disarray inthe ranks of the central ruling order rather than a foregone conclusion. As it was,their rule was no more than an interlude owing to the difficulty the Afghans hadmaking the transition from a war band to an organized state structure.

The other part of the answer is that, until the last decade of the seventeenthcentury, the Safavids successfully employed the entire time-honored arsenal ofcontrol mechanisms in their attempt to optimize power in the lands under their

101. For some reflections on this, see Rudi Matthee, “Loyalty, Betrayal, and Retribution: BiktashKhan, Ya’qub Khan, and Shah ‘Abbas I’s Strategy in Establishing Control over Kirman,Yazd and Fars,” in R. Hillenbrand, A.C.S. Peacock, and F.I. Abdullaeva, eds, Ferdowsi, theMongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to QajarPersia, London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 184–200.

102. Jürgen Paul, “The State and the Military—a Nomadic Perspective,” in I. Schneider, ed.,Militär und Staatlichkeit, Halle: Centre for Oriental Studies, Martin Luther University,2003, 25–68: 32.

103. See Peter B. Golden, “War and Warfare in the Pre-Cingisid Western Steppes of Eurasia,” inNicola di Cosmo, ed., Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800), Leiden: Brill, 2002, 106.


sway. This naturally included violence by way of punitive expeditions. But, morefundamentally, in conditions where victory, let alone long-tem supremacy, wasnever guaranteed, they accommodated and negotiated with tribal chiefs, employ-ing traditional stratagems such as marriage arrangements and hostage taking, aswell as the type of tributary relations whereby the state paid peripheral forces inexchange for promises to desist from raiding, or incorporated these by makingthem part of the state structure, offering them positions or sinecures, even makingthem responsible for patrolling the limes against truly indomitable outsiders.

Both the western and the eastern borderland evince examples of these policies.But inasmuch as they were different—in size, in accessibility, in the nature of thepastoralism their inhabitants practiced, and in the surrounding geopoliticalcontext—their interaction with the center was different. Kurdistan and ‘Arabistanwere wild, and its peoples were adept at manipulating the two surroundingimperial states to their own military and fiscal advantage. This helped the Kurdsand the Arabs retain a modicum of autonomy throughout, even if their ability toplay off the Safavids and the Ottomans was severely curtailed with the conclusionof the Accord of Zohab.

The eastern frontier zone was infinitely vaster and less accessible than thewestern borderlands, harder to penetrate for the distances involved, the intenseheat, and the scarcity of water and provisions. The huge expanse of Sistan andBaluchistan served as a gigantic buffer zone with the Mughals, who, being too faraway to be a military factor beyond Qandahar, laid no real claim to the region.Yet the Safavid state, far less able to control and instrumentalize the easternmarches than the frontier zone with the Ottoman Empire for its own purposes,was unable to take advantage of this lack of competition.

In these circumstances, the idea of “taming the wild field” was impossible.104

Unlike Imperial Russia, which in a (contested) reading of its history, as of thesixteenth century embarked on a steady and inexorable expansionist drive,making use of relatively unobstructed terrain and the availability of water, theSafavids from the outset were constrained in their ability to extend their territoryas part of building an empire. Shah ‘Abbas I created “artificial” tribes, theShahsevan and Sheykhavand, who, like the Cossacks in Russia, were allowed topreserve their position in a changing geopolitical environment because of theirwillingness to adapt to the new rules of the borderlands. But the result was verydifferent. By recognizing the border, the Russian Cossacks gave up their

104. See Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the RussianSteppe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004.


unbounded expanses of the old steppe, but in exchange they reaped the benefitsthat came with patrolling the Russians Empire’s new back yard. Their disdain forborders made the Russian Empire more and more eager to corral the Cossacks,eventually leading to their political extinction.105 The Russo-Ottoman Peace ofKarlowitz of 1699 formally put an end to the steppe reading economy and thusmarked the beginning of the suppression of non-state violence. On the Iranianplateau, where most tribes were like the Tatars in Russia, who never fully adaptedto the geopolitical changes in the steppe, environmental and political conditionslong continued to militate against a similar outcome.

105. Brian J. Boeck, Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in theAge of Peter the Great, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, 146.


Relations between the Center and the Periphery in Safavid Iran

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