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Misunderstanding of how essentially fragile Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad Khwārezm-Shah’s apparently imposing empire was, its distance away from the Mongols’ eastern homelands, and the strangeness of new terrain all doubtless induced fear in the Mongols, and this might partly account for the terrible events with which Genghis Khan’s name has ever since been associated. The terror his invasion brought must also be ascribed to his quest for vengeance. Genghis Khan’s first two missions to Khwārezm had been massacred, but the place of commercial motives in the Mongol’s decision to march to the west is indicated by the fact that the first was a trade mission. The massacre and robbery of this mission at Utrār by one of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad’s governors before it reached the capital made Genghis single out Utrār for especially savage treatment when the murder of his second, purely diplomatic, mission left him no alternative but war.
His guides were Muslim merchants from Transoxania. They had to witness one of the worst catastrophes of history. During 1220–21 Bukhara, Samarkand, Herāt, Ṭūs, and Neyshābūr were razed, and the whole populations were slaughtered. The Khwārezm-Shah fled, to die on an island off the Caspian coast. His son Jalāl al-Dīn survived until murdered in Kurdistan in 1231. He had eluded Genghis Khan on the Indus River, across which his horse swam, enabling him to escape to India. He returned to attempt restoring the Khwārezmian empire over Iran. However, he failed to unite the Iranian regions, even though Genghis Khan had withdrawn to Mongolia, where he died in August 1227. Iran was left divided, with Mongol agents remaining in some districts and local adventurers profiting from the lack of order in others.
The Il-Khans
A second Mongol invasion began when Genghis Khan’s grandson Hülegü Khan crossed the Oxus in 1256 and destroyed the Assassin fortress at Alamūt. With the disintegration of the Seljuq empire, the caliphate had reasserted control in the area around Baghdad and in southwestern Iran. In 1258 Hülegü besieged Baghdad, where divided counsels prevented the city’s salvation. Al-Mustaʿṣim, the last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, was trampled to death by mounted troops (in the style of Mongol royal executions), and eastern Islam fell to pagan rulers.
Hülegü hoped to consolidate Mongol rule over western Asia and to extend the Mongol empire as far as the Mediterranean, an empire that would span the globe from China to the Levant. Hülegü made Iran his base, but the Mamluks of Egypt (1250–1517) prevented him and his successors from achieving their great imperial goal, by decisively defeating a Mongol army at ʿAyn Jālūt in 1260. Instead, a Mongol dynasty, the Il-Khans, or “deputy khans” to the great khan in China, was established in Iran to attempt repair of the damage of the first Mongol invasion. The injuries Iran had suffered went deep, but it would be unfair to attribute them all to Ghengis Khan’s invasion, itself the climax to a long period of social and political disarray under the Khwārezm-Shahs and dating from the decline of the Seljuqs.
The Il-Khanid dynasty made Azerbaijan its center and established Tabrīz as its first capital until Solṭānīyeh was built early in the 14th century. At first, repair and readjustment of a stricken society were complicated by the collapse of law. The caliphate, as the symbol of Muslim legality, had been eroded by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad and by its own withdrawal into a temporal state in Iraq and the Tigris-Euphrates estuary region. But it had retained enough vitality for Sultan Muḥammad’s action in setting up an anticaliph to have alienated influential members of his subject people. After 1258 it was gone altogether, while Hülegü Khan showed considerable religious eclecticism and had, in any event, the yāsā, or tribal law, of Genghis Khan to apply as the law of the Mongol state, in opposition to, or side by side with, the sharia, the law of Islam.
The Il-Khans’ religious toleration released Christians and Jews from their restrictions under the Islamic regime. Fresh talent thus became available, but competition for new favors marred what good effects this release might have had on interfaith relations. It took time for Iranian administrators to resume their normal role after the invasion and to restore some semblance of administrative order and stability. Their process was impeded by the paganism of the new conquerors as well as by jostling for influence among classes of the conquered, not in this instance exclusively Muslim. At the same time, a shattered agrarian economy was burdened by heavy taxes, those sanctioned by the sharia being added to by those the yāsā provided for, so that the pressure of exploitation was increased by Mongol tax innovations as well as by the invaders’ cupidity.
The pressure was increased beyond the economy’s endurance: the Il-Khanid government ran into fiscal difficulties. An experiment with paper currency, modeled on the Chinese money, failed under Gaykhatu (reigned 1291–95). Gaykhatu was followed briefly by Baydu (died 1295), who was supplanted by the greatest of the Il-Khans, Maḥmūd Ghāzān (1295–1304). Ghāzān abandoned Buddhism—the faith in which his grandfather Abagha, Hülegü’s successor (1265–82), had reared him—and adopted Islam. One of his chief ministers was also his biographer, Rashīd al-Dīn, of Jewish descent. He seems deliberately to have striven to present Ghāzān, whom he styles the “emperor of Islam” (pādshāh-e eslām), as a ruler who combined the qualities and functions of both the former caliphs and ancient Iranian “great kings.”
Ghāzān made strenuous efforts to regulate taxes, encourage industry, bring wasteland into cultivation, and curb the abuses and arrogance of the military and official classes. Facilities for domestic and foreign merchants were furnished. Buildings were constructed and irrigation channels dug. Medicinal and fruit-bearing plants were imported and the cultivation of indigenous ones encouraged. Observatories were built and improved—a sure indication of concern with agricultural improvement, for seasonal planning required accurate calendars. He fostered Muslim sentiment by showing consideration for the sayyids, who claimed descent from the Prophet’s family, and it seems probable that he wished to eradicate or overlay Shiʿi-Sunni sectarian divisiveness, for Ghāzān’s Islam appears to have been designed to appeal equally to both persuasions. Any slight bias in favor of the Shiʿah might be attributed to a desire to capture the emotions and imagination of many of the humble people who had reacted against the Seljuqs’ zeal for Sunnism and craved a teaching that included millennial overtones. Shiʿism had been liberated by the fall of the Abbasid caliphate, and its belief in the reappearance of the 12th imam, who was to inaugurate peace and justice in the world, satisfied this popular craving for religious solace.
Ghāzān’s work was carried on, but less successfully, by his successor Öljeitü (1304–16). Between 1317 and 1335, though he finally relinquished the expensive campaigns against Egypt for the opening to the Mediterranean, Abū Saʿīd was unable to keep the Il-Khanid regime consolidated, and it fell apart on his death. Ghāzān’s brilliant reign survives only in the pages of his historian, Rashīd al-Dīn. Wars against Egypt and their own Mongol kinsmen in Asia had in fact hampered the Il-Khans in accomplishing a satisfactory reintegration of an Iranian polity.
As the atabegs had done after the Seljuqs, Il-Khanid military emirs began to establish themselves as independent regional potentates after 1335. At first, two of them, formerly military chiefs in the Il-Khans’ service, competed for power in western Iran, ostensibly acting on behalf of rival Il-Khanid puppet princes. Ḥasan Küchük (the Small) of the Chūpānids was eventually defeated by Ḥasan Buzurg (the Tall) of the Jalāyirids, who set up the Jalāyirid dynasty over Iraq, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan; it lasted from 1336 to 1432. In Fārs, Il-Khanid agents, the Injuids, after a spell of power during which Abū Isḥāq Injū had been the poet Hāfeẓ’s patron, were ousted by Abū Saʿīd’s governor of Yazd, Mubāriz al-Dīn Muẓaffar. Thus in 1353 Shīrāz became the Muẓaffarid dynasty’s capital, which it remained until conquest by Timur in 1393.
The Timurids and Turkmen
Timur (Tamerlane) claimed descent from Genghis Khan’s family. The disturbed conditions in Mongol Transoxania gave this son of a minor government agent in the town of Kesh the chance to build up a kingdom in Central Asia in the name of the Chagatai Khans, whom he eventually supplanted. He entered Iran in 1380 and in 1393 reduced the Jalāyirids after taking their capital, Baghdad. In 1402 he captured the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid I, near Ankara. He conquered Syria and then turned his attention to campaigns far to the east of his tumultuously acquired and ill-cemented empire; he died in 1405 on an expedition to China. Timur left an awesome name and an ambiguous record of flights of curiosity into the realms of unorthodox religious beliefs, history, and every kind of inquiry concerning lands and peoples. He showed interest in Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism that varied from a scholastic study of ascetic techniques for mastering the carnal self to complete abandonment of all forms of authority in the belief that faith alone is necessary for salvation. Sufism had increased in the disturbed post-Seljuq era as both the consolation and the refuge of desperate people. In Sufism Timur may have hoped to find popular leaders whom he could use for his own purposes. His encounters with such keepers of the consciences of harried, exploited, and ill-treated Iranians proved that they knew him perhaps better than he knew himself. Whatever his motives may have been, the reverse of stability was his legacy to Iran. His division of his ill-assimilated conquests among his sons served to ensure that an integrated Timurid empire would never be achieved.
The nearest a Timurid state came to being an integrated Iranian empire was under Timur’s son Shah Rokh (reigned 1405–47), who endeavored to weld Azerbaijan and western Persia to Khorāsān and eastern Persia to form a united Timurid state for a short and troubled period. He succeeded only in loosely controlling western and southern Iran from his beautiful capital at Herāt. Azerbaijan demanded three major military expeditions from this pacific sovereign and even so could not long be held. He made Herāt the seat of a splendid culture, the atelier of great miniature painters (Behzād notable among them), and the home of a revival of Persian poetry, letters, and philosophy. This revival was not unconnected with an effort to claim for an Iranian center once more the palm of leadership in the propagation of Sunni ideology: Herāt sent copies of Sunni canonical works on request to Egypt. The reaction, in Shiʿism’s ultimate victory under the Safavid shahs of Persia, was, however, already being prepared.
Western Iran was dominated by the Kara Koyunlu, the “Black Sheep” Turkmen. In Azerbaijan they had supplanted their former masters, the Jalāyirids. Timur had put these Kara Koyunlu to flight, but in 1406 they regained their capital, Tabrīz. On Shah Rokh’s death, Jahān Shah (reigned c. 1438–67) extended Kara Koyunlu rule out of the northwest deeper into Iran at the Timurids’ expense. The Timurids relied on their old allies, the Kara Koyunlu’s rival Turkmen of the Ak Koyunlu, or “White Sheep,” clans, who had long been established at Diyarbakır in Turkey. The White Sheep acted as a curb on the Black Sheep, whose Jahān Shah was defeated by the Ak Koyunlu Uzun Ḥasan by the end of 1467.
Uzun Ḥasan (1453–78) achieved a short-lived Iranian empire and even briefly deprived the Timurids of Herāt. He was, however, confronted by a new power in Asia Minor—the Ottoman Turks. His relationship with the Christian emperor at Trebizond (Trabzon) through his Byzantine wife, Despina, involved Uzun Ḥasan in attempts to shield Trebizond from the ineluctable Ottoman advance. The Ottomans crushingly defeated him in 1473. Under his son Yaʿqūb (reigned 1478–90), the Ak Koyunlu state was subjected to fiscal reforms associated with a government-sponsored effort to reapply rigorous purist principles of Sunni Islamic rules for revenue collection. Yaʿqūb attempted to purge the state of taxes introduced under the Mongols and not sanctioned by the Muslim canon. But the inquiries made by the Sunni religious authorities antagonized the vested interests, damaged the popularity of the Ak Koyunlu regime, and discredited Sunni fanaticism.
This attempt to revive strict Sunni religious values through revenue reform or to effect the latter under the guise of religion no doubt gave impetus to the spread of Safavid Shiʿi propaganda. Another factor must have been related to the same general economic decline that made Sultan Yaʿqūb’s fiscal reforms necessary in the first place. Sheikh Ḥaydar led a movement that had begun as a Sufi order under his ancestor Sheikh Ṣafī al-Dīn of Ardabīl (1253–1334). This order may be considered to have originally represented a puritanical, but not legalistically so, reaction against the sullying of Islam, the staining of Muslim lands, by the Mongol infidels. What began as a spiritual, otherworldly reaction against irreligion and the betrayal of spiritual aspirations developed into a manifestation of the Shiʿi quest for dominion over a Muslim polity. By the 15th century, the Safavid movement could draw on both the mystical emotional force of Sufism and the Shiʿi appeal to the oppressed populace to gain a large number of dedicated adherents. Sheikh Ḥaydar inured his numerous followers to warfare by leading them on expeditions from Ardabīl against Christian enclaves in the nearby Caucasus. He was killed on one of these campaigns. His son Ismāʿīl was to avenge his death and lead his devoted army to a conquest of Iran whereby Iran gained a great dynasty, a Shiʿi regime, and in most essentials its shape as a modern nation-state.
Gone were the days of rule by converted and zealous Sunni Turks or by Mongols of ambiguous spiritual allegiance. Iran’s defilement was removed by the swelling tide of Shiʿism, which bore Ismāʿīl to the throne his family was to occupy without interruption until 1722, in one of the greatest epochs of Iranian history.
The Safavids (1501–1736)
Shah Ismāʿīl
In 1501 Ismāʿīl I (reigned 1501–24) supplanted the Ak Koyunlu in Azerbaijan. Within a decade he gained supremacy over most of Iran as a ruler his followers regarded as divinely entitled to sovereignty. The Safavids claimed descent—on grounds that modern research has shown to be dubious—from the Twelver imams. Muslims in Iran, therefore, could regard themselves as having found a legitimate imam-ruler, who, as a descendant of ʿAlī, required no caliph to legitimate his position. Rather, Safavid political legitimacy was based on the religious order’s mixture of Sufi ecstaticism and Shiʿi extremism (Arabic ghulū), neither of which was the dusty scholasticism of the Sunni or Shiʿi legal schools. The dynasty’s military success was based both on Ismāʿīl’s skill as a leader and on the conversion of a number of Turkmen tribes—who came to be known as the Kizilbash (Turkish: “Red Heads”) for the 12-folded red caps these tribesmen wore, representing their belief in the 12 imams—to this emotionally powerful Sufi-Shiʿi syncretism. The Kizilbash became the backbone of the Safavid military effort, and their virtual deification of Ismāʿīl contributed greatly to his swift military conquest of Iran. In later years, though, extremist (ghulāt) zeal and its chiliastic fervor began to undermine the orderly administration of the Safavid state. Ismāʿīl’s attempt to spread Shiʿi propaganda among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia prompted a conflict with the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Following Iran’s defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran, Safavid expansion slowed, and a process of consolidation began in which Ismāʿīl sought to quell the more extreme expressions of faith among his followers. Such actions were largely preempted, however, by Ismāʿīl’s death in 1524 at the age of 36.
The new Iranian empire lacked the resources that had been available to the caliphs of Baghdad in former times through their dominion over Central Asia and the West: Asia Minor and Transoxania were gone, and the rise of maritime trade in the West was detrimental to a country whose wealth had depended greatly on its position on important east-west overland trade routes. The rise of the Ottomans impeded Iranian westward advances and contested with the Safavids’ control over both the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. Years of warfare with the Ottomans imposed a heavy drain on the Safavids’ resources. The Ottomans threatened Azerbaijan itself. Finally, in 1639 the Treaty of Qaṣr-e Shīrīn (also called the Treaty of Zuhāb) gave Yerevan in the southern Caucasus to Iran and Baghdad and all of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans.
