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READ: The Safavid Empire

Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid Empire as a Shi’ite society with strong Persian identity. Despite its ability to tax the silk trade and a solid central government, it faced expensive wars against the Sunni-majority states that surrounded it.

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By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What type of Islam was practiced by the founders and the majority of the people in the Persian Safavid empire, and what about most of their neighbors?
According to the article, why was the region of Persia (modern-day Iran) so diverse at the time of the founding of the Safavid empire?
What was the Mahdi within the Safavid Islamic tradition?
How was marriage strategic and political among the Safavid Qezilbash (“Red Turban”) ruling elite?
According to this article, what neighboring state fought with the Safavids the most and why?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

What were the tools the Safavid rulers used to govern this large and diverse state? How effective were those strategies?
The Islamic tradition is very diverse, with many different groups practicing Islam in different ways. How important do you think religious diversity within the Islamic world was in the history of the Safavid empire?

Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.

The Safavid Empire

By Trevor Getz

Persia as a world historical region

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, an ambitious ruling class of Shi’ite Muslims won popular support by emphasizing their Persian heritage and religious ideals—and the Safavid Empire was born. It emerged in Persia, a region that had already birthed many empires, including the Achaemenids (553–330 BCE) who had challenged the Greeks of antiquity. There were also the Parthians (248 BCE–224 CE) and Sasanians (224–651 CE) who had been rivals with the Romans and Byzantines. Seventh-century Persia was part of the Islamic world, ruled first by outsiders, then by their own Muslim Dynasties. However, just like China, Persia was vulnerable to attack from Central Asia’s nomadic peoples. In 1219, the Mongols conquered the region, and Mongol states continued to dominate another three centuries, until the Black Death helped bring about the collapse of their rule here, as elsewhere.

By 1500, Persia had a diverse society, particularly in terms of religion. Most inhabitants were Muslims, although many belonged to religious minorities including Zoroastrians, Christians, and a substantial Jewish population. Even among the Muslims, there was great diversity. Sufism, a set of practices and beliefs based on ethical reasoning and sometimes mysticism, had deep roots in Persia. Then there were the Sunni, members of the most populous branch of Islam.

However, Persia was also a center of another sect of Islam, called Shi’ite. Its members had broken away from Sunni in the eighth century CE to follow Imam Ali.

A muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, while in a madrassa, students cook, read, write, wash or are beaten by the master in this painting from the city of Tabriz. © Getty Images.

This great diversity was in part a result of geography. Persia’s vast region is environmentally diverse, and its many mountains and valleys allow people in different subregions to develop pretty different identities. But the diversity also had to do with the busy trading traffic through Persia. There was overland trade between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean to the west and the vast regions of Asia to the east, plus maritime trade across the Persian Gulf to Arabia, East Africa, and India.

The rise of the Safavid dynasty

The Safavid dynasty was founded by Ismail I who ruled from 1501 to 1524. He built an empire using troops with gunpowder weapons and by constructing a bureaucracy that had many features of the modern state. At the heart of this empire was Ismail’s loyal religious followers. His family were Kurdish by ethnicity and came from the mountains at the western edge of Persia. These semi-nomadic warriors fought in the constant raids that were a feature of this mountainous region. In the fourteenth century, they created the Safavid order. This religion was about personal growth and concerned with local issues and was more appealing than the rule-focused forms of Islam coming from far away. As a result, the Safavid order attracted many other semi-nomadic people and peasants. In the fifteenth century, they adopted Shi’ite Islam, and came into conflict with the expanding Ottoman Empire to the west, which was strongly Sunni.

Because the Ottoman forces to the west were too strong, Ismail I turned east to Persia, which lacked the organization needed to hold his formidable forces. Armed with guns and sabers, Ismail’s Qezilbash (“red turbaned”) cavalry quickly conquered the vast area of Persia. However, the new territory was diverse and had difficult terrain. How would the Safavids hold it all?

A Shi'ite Empire

Part of the answer was certainly to build a unified religious identity.

The Safavid Empire was born from a type of Shi’ism that was messianic—meaning that they were waiting for a great religious prophet, called the Mahdi. Like most Shi’ites, the Safavids believed the Mahdi would be a successor of Ali. Ali had been the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. He had been followed by a series Imams, exemplary humans and leaders, and the Mahdi would similarly be exemplary. The Safavids built a set of beliefs focused on waiting and preparing for the Mahdi to return. Within that creed, the Safavid king, or Shah, was a bridge to the Mahdi.

Once he took power, Ismail I set about unifying his kingdom under this religious doctrine. Ismail appointed new religious leaders in every territory he conquered. They functioned as judges, but they also spread the Shi’ite faith to captive audiences who were required to become Shi’ites. Ismail met resistance with force. As many as 20,000 Sunnis were killed in the city of Tabriz when they resisted conversion. More often, though, the killing was limited to the religious and political leaders of Sunni populations.

Often, the Safavids found supporters or willing converts, and they were helped by Shi’ite intellectuals and lawyers who came as refugees from regions conquered by the Ottoman Empire, including many from Arabia.

Image from the Battle of Chaldiran between the Ottoman and Safavid Empire, featuring Shah Ismail I, who founded the Safavid Dynasty and made Shia Islam the official state religion. © Getty images.

Running and funding the empire

Under Ismail, the Safavid government was divided into several offices. One of these was essentially military and political. Another controlled religious affairs, including converting people to Shi’ism and implementing law, which was based on religious texts. Still another office kept the royal treasury and collected taxes. At first, many of these leaders were Qezilbash, like Ismail, but slowly local Persian officials became prominent. By the middle of the sixteenth century, well-trained religious legal experts and judges—many of them Persian—came to run most of the functions of the government.

Military, religion, and the treasury were all engaged in one of the most important ongoing tasks of the Safavid state—fighting Sunni opponents, and in particular the Ottoman Empire. The conflict between the two states was partly based on religious differences, but also a conflict over resources and control of territory. There were periods of peace, but low-level conflict and even outright war were more common. This meant keeping up a large army, and also engaging in diplomacy. The Safavids frequently tried to make deals and treaties with, for example, Europeans like the Habsburg Emperors who also opposed the Ottomans.

Financing these wars was not easy. But in the seventeenth century, Safavid rulers created a robust economic system. They stopped the system that allowed people to inherit land from their fathers, instead leasing estates in return for taxes. They also expanded the production of silk, a very profitable export. When the Ottomans tried to stop the export of this silk to Europe, the Safavids made deals with Christian traders from Armenia who could get the silk to Europe without going through the Ottoman Empire.

Over time, however, the Qezilbash fighters divided into factions based on the original groups, whose conflicts could be pretty disruptive. Their disputes became especially heated when a new Shah was chosen. In Safavid law, each son of the Shah was eligible to become the new Shah, so they each sought out supporters to try to help them claim the throne. A good strategy was marrying a woman who represented one of these factions. As a result, royal wives often became quite powerful, as each guaranteed support for the prince (her husband) trying to become Shah.

To reduce the power of the Qezilbash fighters, Sultan Abbas I (1588–1666) followed the Ottoman practice of building an army of enslaved people—many of them from ethnic minorities from the empire’s edges. The idea was that this army would be loyal to the Shah and not to a particular Qezilbash faction. When particular Qezilbash groups resisted this shift, Abbas used his new army and newly developed cannon to blast their fortresses. As a result, Abbas managed to strengthen the central power of the government and reduce problems with the internal conflicts of the Qezilbash groups.

Demise of the empire

Abbas I died in 1629, leaving no clear successors. A fight for the throne broke out, and many royal princes died before his very young grandson, Shah Safi, was put on the throne, ruling from 1629 to 1642. Rivalries and disputes continued, and eventually broke the government. As Shahs, Safi and his successors were increasingly weak, while bureaucrats and the families of their many wives fought to influence them. Meanwhile, the Ottoman armies and those of their allies were pushing on the borders of the empire. In the 1650s, another Sunni power, the Mughal Empire, also fought with the Safavids in their eastern provinces and in Afghanistan. They supported yet another Sunni state called the Khanate of Bukhara. Although not formally allied to the Ottomans, these states’ combined efforts overwhelmed the Safavid forces. It was a combination of Sunni armies, from east and west, that finally brought down the last Safavid Shah in 1726.

So, the Safavids fell to military defeat, but there are some longer-term and bigger trends that deserve consideration. The early eighteenth century saw the Little Ice Age sweep across the world, making central Asia drier and colder, and driving nomadic people further south. Many joined the Mughals in fighting against the Safavids, with the hope of occupying better lands. Then there was the decline in tax money from the silk trade to Europe. This was partly due to the rise of piracy in the Gulf of Arabia, but also the increasing ability of Europeans to get silks directly from East Asia via ship. As a result, the government increased taxes on land, and this damaged the economy because people had less money to spend. The Safavid state was even running out of currency. Silver was in such high demand in China and India in this period that people were selling it to Europeans who in turn would sell it to East Asia.

This may seem like complex stuff! But the result was simple: a country without money cannot fight a war on two fronts, and that’s what happened to the Safavid Empire.

Author bio

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Sources

Amanat, Abbas. Iran: A Modern History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

McCabe, I.B. The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1530-1750. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999.

Savory, R. Iran Under the Safavids. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Image credits

Cover image: A painting by Ali-Quli Jabbadar depicting a 17th-century royal garden pavilion scene from the court of the Safavid Shah Sulaiman. © Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images).

A muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, while in a madrassa, students cook, read, write, wash or are beaten by the master in this painting from the city of Tabriz. © Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Image from the Battle of Chaldiran between the Ottoman and Safavid Empire, featuring Shah Ismail I, who founded the Safavid Dynasty and made Shia Islam the official state religion. © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

Map of the Safavid Empire in 1550 showing Sunni-ruled neighbors such as the Ottoman Empire and the Khanate of Bukhara. By WHP, CC BY-NC 4.0.

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World History Project AP®

Course: World History Project AP® > Unit 3