Safavid Iran

The Safavid state began in 1501 when Isma’il I, a teenage leader of a militant Sufi order, was enthroned as shah at Tabriz and within a decade subjugated most of Iran. He proclaimed Twelver Shia Islam the state religion over a population that was largely Sunni, enforcing its creed in the mosques of his dominion. That decree reshaped Iran’s identity and made it the demographic centre of Shia Islam. The empire reached its height under Shah Abbas I, who took the throne in 1587, broke the power of the Qizilbash tribal cavalry, and in 1598 moved his capital to Isfahan. There he laid out the Naqsh-e Jahan square, 524 by 158 metres, framed by the Shah Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, and the Ali Qapu palace — the works behind the saying “Isfahan is half the world.” Safavid Iran traded silk and carpets with Europe, fought the Ottomans to its west and the Mughals to its east, and ran royal workshops that wove the finest Persian carpets ever made, some with silk pile and roughly 500 knots per square inch.

After Abbas I the dynasty weakened. In 1722 an Afghan force under Mahmud Hotak besieged Isfahan for months; the city, starved, surrendered, and the shah abdicated. The Safavid state never recovered. A claimant dynasty held on nominally until 1736, when the warlord Nader Khan deposed the infant Abbas III, had himself crowned Nader Shah on the Moghan Plain on 8 March, and founded the Afsharid dynasty. The Safavid line was finished. Iran remained — and remains — a Shia state, so the religious settlement Isma’il imposed in 1501 outlived by centuries the dynasty that imposed it. The grave here is the Safavid state itself: the capital fell, the throne passed to a conqueror, and the dynasty ended.