Safavid Iran, 1600–1660

Shah since 1587, Abbas I ruled from Isfahan, his capital since 1598. He was building a state that answered to him rather than to the Qizilbash chiefs who had put him on the throne: a paid corps of ghulams, provinces such as Gilan and Mazandaran taken into the crown domain, and a stronger bureaucracy run by his grand vizier.

Hatem Beg Ordubadi, son of the lord of Ordubad, had been made accountant of the whole realm in 1591 and grand vizier six months later. He ran the revenue and the chancery, reorganised the taxes of newly annexed Gilan in 1594–95, and, unusually for a Persian official, also led troops without turning the Qizilbash against him.

Eskandar Beg, from a Turkman Qizilbash family, had chosen the chancery over soldiering and risen to be one of the shah's own secretaries. He was attached to Hatem Beg's retinue. His History of the World-Adorning Abbas, which runs from the dynasty's founding to Abbas's death, is counted the most important history written in Safavid Iran.

Jalal al-Din Monajjem Yazdi was the shah's astrologer. He went with Abbas on his journeys and campaigns, and the shah would take no firm decision without consulting him. He also kept a record of the reign, known as Mulla Jalal's journal or the Tarikh-e Abbasi, which runs to 1611; he died in 1618, and his son Kamal later held his post.

Allahverdi Khan, the Georgian ghulam who commanded the ghulam corps and governed Fars, was the shah's leading general. From 1600 he enlarged and reorganised the army with the help of the Englishman Robert Sherley. At court he had spoken up for Robert's brother Anthony and his plan of an alliance with Christian Europe. In 1602 men from his province took Bahrain.

Anthony Sherley, an English adventurer who reached Iran in 1598, urged Abbas to seek allies in Europe against the Ottomans, and in 1599 the shah sent him west with letters to the Christian princes. Through Moscow, Prague and Rome he quarrelled with his Persian colleague over who led the embassy; in Rome they came to blows, and in May 1601 Sherley left the mission for Venice.

Hossein Ali Beg Bayat, an elderly Qizilbash officer of the royal household, was the shah's own ambassador on the mission. Rudolf II received him in Prague in October 1600 and Pope Clement VIII in Rome in April 1601. In Spain his nephew and his secretary Oruj Beg were baptised and stayed behind. He sailed home from Lisbon in 1602 with weapons but no alliance.

Robert Sherley, Anthony's younger brother, had stayed in Iran, in effect a hostage for the embassy. He served in the reform of the army, married a Circassian woman of the court, Teresa Sampsonia, in 1607, and in 1608 Abbas sent him to Europe as his own envoy, to Poland, Rome, Spain and England, still seeking allies against the Ottomans.

Abbas had won Herat back from the Uzbeks in 1598 and pushed on toward Balkh. Baqi Muhammad, the Uzbek prince who ran the khanate of Bukhara for his father, beat the shah's army near Balkh in 1602 and kept the city; Abbas lost most of his artillery and turned west. Baqi Muhammad was proclaimed khan the next year and died in 1605.

Baha al-Din al-Amili, Sheikh Baha'i, came from a family of Shi'i scholars of Jabal Amil, in present-day Lebanon. Abbas admired him and made him shaykh al-Islam of Isfahan. He wrote on law, hadith and the Qur'an, and on mathematics and astronomy; his Essentials of Arithmetic was read from Egypt to India, and tradition credits him with planning parts of the new capital.

Mir Damad, Mohammad Baqer Astarabadi, was the other great teacher of the capital: a jurist and a philosopher in the line of Avicenna, whose doctrine of 'atemporal origination' answered the old dispute over whether the world was created in time. His students called him the Third Teacher, after Aristotle and al-Farabi, and he is counted the founder of the School of Isfahan.

Mulla Sadra, from a family of officials in Shiraz, had studied with both Baha'i and Mir Damad in Qazvin and followed them to Isfahan. Condemned by some clerics for his views, he withdrew to the village of Kahak near Qom. Around 1605 he began his great work, the Four Journeys of the Intellect, which took him some twenty-five years.

In September 1603, with the Ottomans tied down by their war in Hungary and by revolts in Anatolia, Abbas struck west. He took Tabriz on 21 October and Nakhchivan soon after, and besieged Erevan from November; it fell in June 1604. The Ottoman sultan, Mehmed III, died that December, leaving the war to his son.

Ahmed I came to the throne at thirteen in December 1603, with the eastern provinces already falling. He made Cigalazade Sinan Pasha commander of the eastern army, which did not leave Constantinople until June 1604, late in the campaigning season. The war he inherited would end in his reign with the first treaty in which the Ottomans gave up territory.

Cigalazade Sinan Pasha, an Italian-born veteran of the last Persian war, advanced while Abbas fell back and stripped the frontier bare. In November 1605 he marched on Tabriz and was routed at Sufiyan, leaving some twenty thousand dead. He died on the retreat that December, and in June 1606 Abbas took Shirvan.

Qarachaqay, an Armenian of Erevan enslaved as a boy and raised as a ghulam, had started in a royal tailoring workshop and become an artillery officer. At Sufiyan he commanded a regiment of musketeers under Allahverdi Khan. Around 1610 Abbas gave him the title 'intimate of the illustrious', kept for the shah's close companions.

The next Ottoman commander, the grand vizier Kuyucu Murad Pasha, faced Abbas north of Tabriz in 1610 without giving battle, and died in 1611. His successor, Nasuh Pasha, sued for peace. The treaty of 20 November 1612 restored the frontier of 1555, giving Abbas back all that was lost in 1590, in return for 200 loads of silk a year.

Amir Khan, a Kurdish chief of Bradost called Lepzerin, 'golden hand', after losing a hand fighting the Ottomans, had joined Abbas's camp; the shah made him a khan and gave him Urmia and Oshnavieh. He then built the castle of Dimdim, west of Lake Urmia, and rebelled.

Abbas sent his grand vizier to bring Amir Khan back to obedience or crush him. Hatem Beg besieged Dimdim from November 1609 to the summer of 1610, took it and killed its whole garrison. The shah ordered a general massacre in Bradost and Mukriyan, resettled the land with Afshar tribesmen and deported many Kurds to Khorasan.

Hatem Beg died near Urmia during the campaign, in 1610 or 1611, and was buried at Mashhad. Abbas gave the grand vizierate to his son, Mirza Taleb Khan, who would hold it until 1621. Hatem had once refused a post to the father of an official named Saru Taqi, a grudge that Saru Taqi would settle with the son.

As Cigalazade's army advanced in 1604, Abbas emptied the frontier. The Armenians of the Araxes valley were driven into Iran; fewer than half are said to have survived the march. The merchants of Julfa were taken to Isfahan, where in 1605–06 they built a new town across the river from the capital, New Julfa, valued by the shah for their knowledge of the silk trade.

Sheikh Lotfollah, another jurist from Jabal Amil whom Abbas brought to Iran, became the shah's father-in-law. In 1602–03 Abbas began a mosque for him on the east side of Isfahan's great square, facing the palace, as a place for his teaching and his Friday prayers; it was finished in 1618–19 and bears his name.

Ali Reza Abbasi, a calligrapher from Tabriz who had become one of the shah's intimates in 1593, was made royal librarian in 1598, in charge of the court's painters and calligraphers. His name stands among the inscriptions of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, and he went on to work on the Shah Mosque beside it.

Reza Abbasi, the leading painter of the court, was a different man. Abbas gave him the name Abbasi in 1603; soon after he left the shah's service for the company of Isfahan's wrestlers and athletes, and came back about 1610. His single figures for albums, usually signed and often dated, set the style of the Isfahan school.

Giorgi Saakadze, a minor noble who had beaten an Ottoman army at Tashiskari in 1609, had married his sister to King Luarsab of Kartli. The great lords persuaded the king that Saakadze was a Persian agent; in May 1612 he escaped a plot to kill him and fled to the shah, became a Muslim and Abbas's adviser on Georgia.

Luarsab II, king of Kartli since 1606, divorced Saakadze's sister and allied with Teimuraz of Kakheti against the shah. When Abbas invaded in 1614, guided by Saakadze, both kings fled west to Imereti. Abbas promised peace if Luarsab gave himself up; he surrendered in October 1615, refused to become a Muslim, and was held at Astarabad and then near Shiraz.

Teimuraz I of Kakheti would not submit either. When the shah's army came in March 1614 he fled to Imereti, and Abbas gave Kakheti to his Muslim cousin, Isa Khan, and Kartli to another convert prince. On 15 September 1615 the Kakhetian nobles rose against Isa Khan, and the rebels offered Teimuraz the crown of all eastern Georgia.

Queen Ketevan, Teimuraz's mother, went to Abbas in 1614 to plead for her son's kingdom and was kept as a hostage. She was sent south to Shiraz, Imam-Quli Khan's capital, where she would spend the next ten years.

When Allahverdi Khan died at Isfahan in June 1613, Abbas gave Fars to his son Imam-Quli Khan, who already governed Lar, and made him an amir of the divan. Imam-Quli now held the coast facing Portuguese Hormuz, and kept up his father's policy of undermining the Portuguese in the Gulf.

In 1615 the shah granted trading privileges to the English East India Company, whose ships sailed from Surat in India; a trade agreement followed in 1616 and the English set up a station at Jask, on the coast east of Hormuz. Their presence was a challenge to the Portuguese who held the Gulf.

Mulla Sadra was called back from Kahak to his native Shiraz to teach at the Khan madrasa, which Allahverdi Khan and his son Imam-Quli Khan built there; one account dates the invitation to 1612, others later. He taught at Shiraz for the rest of his life, and his school there carried on the teaching of Mir Damad and Baha'i.

Zaynab Begum, Abbas's aunt, had been the leading woman of the harem, a counsellor of the shah and governor of the crown lands of Kashan; she had overseen the upbringing of his sons. In 1613–14 she fell into disgrace and was banished to Qazvin; the chronicler Fazli Khuzani blamed Mir Damad.

Mohammad Baqer Mirza, called Safi Mirza, was Abbas's eldest son and heir. During the Georgian campaign of 1614 the shah heard that the prince was plotting with a leading Circassian, Farhad Beg; when Safi Mirza killed a boar at a hunt before his father could strike, the suspicion seemed confirmed.

In 1615 Abbas decided the prince must die. Behbud Beg, another Circassian in his service, killed Safi Mirza in a bathhouse at Rasht, and the prince was buried at Ardabil. The shah regretted the murder almost at once and was plunged into grief.

Dilaram, a Georgian concubine of the murdered prince, was the mother of his son Sam Mirza, born in 1611. The boy grew up inside the harem, with no province to govern and no experience of affairs; through him, the line of the son Abbas had killed would inherit the throne.

When Kakheti rose for Teimuraz in September 1615, Abbas came back in person in 1616 and laid the kingdom waste. Some sixty to seventy thousand people were killed and more than a hundred thousand carried off to Iran. Qizilbash governors were put over Kakheti, and Turkman tribesmen were moved in to hold it.

Fazli Khuzani, a young official from an Isfahan family of bureaucrats, rode with the troops that stormed Zagem in 1616 and counted the dead and the 700 enslaved. From 1617 he was a provincial vizier under the governor Paykar Khan, collecting Kakheti's taxes and settling thousands of Turkman families on its empty land. His chronicle, the Afzal al-Tavarikh, records it all.

The 1612 peace did not hold: Abbas sent no silk. Öküz Mehmed Pasha, grand vizier from October 1614, led an army east and besieged Erevan from September 1616, without heavy siege guns. Abbas harried his supply lines; after six weeks or more the Ottomans retreated into the winter, and Mehmed was dismissed that November.

Damat Halil Pasha, his successor, invaded again in 1618 with Tatar and Georgian help, and offered to withdraw if Abbas gave back his conquests. Abbas refused, went to Ardabil, and turned down a second offer that asked only for the silk and a son of his as a hostage.

Qarachaqay, made khan and commander-in-chief in 1616, carried out Abbas's orders: burn the countryside, pick off enemy detachments and avoid a pitched battle until cold and hunger did their work. After the Ottoman defeat he governed Tabriz and Azerbaijan, and then Mashhad.

Signed at Sarab on 26 September 1618, the peace restored the frontier of 1612 with small changes and cut the silk Abbas owed from 200 loads a year to 100. It showed that neither empire could now take much from the other.

In 1621 Abbas dismissed Mirza Taleb and made Salman Khan, a wealthy Turkman commander of the Ustajlu tribe, his grand vizier: the rise of the ghulams had not taken every high office from the Qizilbash. Salman held the post until he died in 1623 or 1624.

In 1621 Abbas fell seriously ill. His son and heir, Khodabanda Mirza, thinking his father was dying, began to celebrate his accession with his Qizilbash supporters. The shah recovered and had him blinded; when the prince's followers plotted to smuggle him abroad, they were executed and he was shut up in the fortress of Alamut.

Rui Freire de Andrade, the Portuguese commander sent to stop English trade in the Gulf, was beaten by an English squadron off Jask in January 1621. In May he began a fort on Qeshm, the island that fed and watered Hormuz, and raided the coasts around it.

Abbas put Imam-Quli Khan in charge of driving the Portuguese out. He had soldiers but no ships, so when nine English vessels reached Jask in December 1621 he demanded their help, offering rewards and threatening to cancel the privileges the shah had granted the East India Company in 1615.

John Weddell, an East India Company captain, was joint admiral of the English fleet of five ships and four pinnaces that joined the attack. Qeshm's fort surrendered on 1 February 1622 and Rui Freire was taken prisoner. Imam-Quli's troops and the English then besieged Hormuz, which surrendered on 22 April.

William Baffin, the navigator who had searched the Arctic for a Northwest Passage, sailed with the fleet as its surveyor. On 23 January 1622 he went ashore at Qeshm to measure the fort's walls for the gunners and was shot dead, one of the few Englishmen killed.

Jahangir, Mughal emperor since 1605, held Kandahar, the fortress city on the road between Iran and India, which the Safavids had lost in 1595. When Abbas appeared before it on 20 May 1622 with an army gathered at Nishapur, Jahangir was slow to respond, and ordered his son Prince Khurram to lead the relief.

Prince Khurram was at Mandu in the Deccan. Fearing to lose his place at court while he was away, he evaded the command, and the relief force the Mughals could raise was too small. Kandahar fell on 22 June 1622 after a siege of forty-five days, and Khurram went on to rebel against his father.

Abbas gave Kandahar to Ganj-Ali Khan, a Kurd who had grown up with him at Herat and had governed Kerman since 1596, where he built the complex that bears his name. He died in 1624 or 1625, and his son Ali Mardan Khan followed him as governor.

Khan-Agha Begum, Abbas's third daughter, had married a young sayyid of Isfahan, Khalifa Sultan, on 28 November 1607. Through his mother's Marashi line her husband was already related to the shah; the marriage made him Abbas's son-in-law, and their four sons were the shah's grandsons.

When Salman Khan died, Abbas made Khalifa Sultan grand vizier, in 1623 or 1624: a learned cleric, son of the scholar Mirza Rafi al-Din Mohammad, who would serve Safi as sadr. While the shah was in Georgia in 1625 he ran affairs from Isfahan, and he kept the office to the end of the reign.

Since 1621 Baghdad had been held by Bakr, a janissary officer who wanted the sultan to make him its pasha. When an Ottoman army came against him he offered the city to Abbas; when the Ottomans made terms he shut the gates on the Persians. Abbas besieged it, Bakr's son let the Persians in, and on 14 January 1624 Baghdad was Safavid. Bakr was killed and many Sunnis massacred.

Murad IV had come to the Ottoman throne in 1623 as a boy of eleven, raised to it by a palace conspiracy; his mother ruled for him, and Anatolia was in revolt. The loss of Baghdad, followed by Mosul, Kirkuk and the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, was a heavy blow to his government's prestige.

Hafız Ahmed Pasha, the governor of Diyarbakır who had dealt with Bakr, was now grand vizier. He marched on Baghdad in 1625 and besieged it from November. Abbas brought a relief army and cut the besiegers' supply convoys; the Ottomans lost heavily attacking his camp and lifted the siege on 4 July 1626.

In September 1624, after ten years as a hostage at Shiraz, Ketevan was ordered by Abbas to become a Muslim. She refused, and she was tortured to death. Her son Teimuraz told her story in a poem, The Book and Passion of Queen Ketevan.

In the spring of 1625 Abbas sent Qarachaqay into Georgia with Saakadze as his adviser, keeping Saakadze's son as a hostage. Saakadze had secretly joined the rebels. On his advice Qarachaqay split his army, and at dawn on 25 March the Georgians fell on the camp at Martqopi; Saakadze killed Qarachaqay in his tent. Abbas had the hostage son beheaded.

The rising swept the Safavid officials out of Kakheti. Fazli Khuzani's patron, the governor Paykar Khan, fled, and Fazli barely escaped, saving several children on the way. His career in Georgia was over; he went back to court, and later served as vizier of Kerman.

Isa Khan, a member of the Safavid house married to a daughter of Abbas and commander of the royal guard since 1612, was given the army of Georgia. On 30 June 1625, at Marabda, the rebels nearly beat him until reinforcements came from Azerbaijan; the Safavid victory was costly, and the fighting went on in the hills.

Teimuraz came back to lead the rising. After Marabda he and Saakadze fell out; in 1626 Teimuraz beat him at Bazaleti and drove him into exile among the Ottomans, who put him to death in 1629. Abbas in the end accepted Teimuraz as king of Kakheti.

Imam-Quli Mirza, Abbas's youngest son, had been his favourite and, after the blinding of 1621, his designated heir. In 1626–27 the shah had him blinded too and sent to Alamut. The blinding was incomplete, and after Abbas's death he would claim the throne; the Qizilbash chiefs had his eyes put out again.

In the spring of 1627 Abbas restored his aunt Zaynab Begum as head of the harem at Farahabad and Isfahan. During his last illness she supervised his treatment, and the court chronicles say she helped persuade him on his deathbed to name his grandson Sam Mirza, Safi Mirza's son, as his successor.

Yusuf Agha, a Circassian eunuch, was the most powerful man in the harem: master of its ghulams and spokesman for the Armenian merchants of Isfahan, which put him at the centre of the silk trade. In 1629 he was made master of the hunt.

Zaynal Khan, a Shamlu chief who had served as Abbas's ambassador to the Mughals in 1620 and governed Ray from 1625, was closely tied to Zaynab Begum. When Abbas died at Farahabad on 19 January 1629, the two of them collected the signatures of the great officers in Mazandaran for Sam Mirza's succession.

Sam Mirza, eighteen, was proclaimed shah in Isfahan on 28 January 1629, with Rostom guarding the city, and crowned as Shah Safi the next night. At the coronation Khalifa Sultan girded him with the royal sword and Mir Damad read the sermon. He had grown up wholly in the harem and had never governed a province.

Safi made Zaynal Khan master of ceremonies, then in March 1629 regent of the realm, an office vacant since 1588, and commander-in-chief. Zaynab Begum had returned to the harem days before, perhaps on condition of his appointment. With Isa Khan, Khalifa Sultan and Rostam Khan he dominated the young shah's first year.

In Gilan, angered by heavy taxes and a harsh vizier, a descendant of the old Kia'i rulers, Sultan Kalanjar, rose in 1629, taking the name Adil Shah; his enemies called him Gharib Shah. His followers took Rasht and Lahijan and sold off the royal silk.

Saru Taqi, a Tabrizi official castrated in 1615 on a false charge and since then vizier of Mazandaran and Gilan, where he built at Farahabad and Ashraf, joined the governors who crushed the rising. Gharib Shah was taken to Isfahan, tortured and put to death in the great square with many of his followers.

Hüsrev Pasha, grand vizier since April 1628, had crushed the rebel Abaza Mehmed Pasha at Erzurum and turned on Iran. Floods kept him out of Iraq, so he invaded Iran proper: on 4 May 1630 his army routed Zaynal Khan at Mahidasht, near Kermanshah, and sacked Hamadan. His siege of Baghdad later that year failed.

Safi had Zaynal Khan killed for his defeat on 17 July 1630, by an old eunuch of the harem; his head was set on a stake in the camp as a warning. The man who had helped make Safi shah was the first great officer the new reign destroyed.

Rostam Khan, a Georgian of the Saakadze family raised a Muslim at court, had entered Abbas's service at eleven. Already chief justice, he took command of the musketeers in 1630 and in 1631 became commander-in-chief, winning back Najaf as the Ottomans fell back.

Isa Khan's wife was Abbas's daughter Zubayda Begum, so his sons had the blood of the dynasty twice over. Safi had Isa Khan and three of his sons put to death, in 1631 by most accounts, others placing it in the purge of 1632.

On 12 February 1632, in the bloodiest of Safi's purges, Zaynab Begum was ordered out of the court to Qazvin; Dilaram Khanum, the shah's mother, took her place at the head of the harem. Forty women of the harem were killed, and most of the sons of Abbas's daughters were blinded or killed.

Two days later Khalifa Sultan was dismissed as grand vizier and sent to Qom, and his four sons, Abbas's grandsons, were blinded. He spent the next years in scholarship.

Yusuf Agha and his family were destroyed in the same purge of 1632; 450,000 tomans were said to have been found among his possessions. In August 1632 Safi's blinded half-brother was killed at Alamut, and in 1633 his blinded uncle Imam-Quli Mirza was executed.

Safi recalled Mirza Taleb Khan, Abbas's vizier of 1610–21, to the vizierate in 1632. In 1633 Saru Taqi, settling his family's old grudge against Hatem Beg, had him secretly murdered and took his office and his house.

Saru Taqi, now grand vizier, would hold the office for twelve years. He was said to have conspired in the fall of Imam-Quli Khan, whose vast estates passed to the crown, and in 1634 he put his own brother over Mazandaran.

Darvish Reza, a dervish of Qazvin who claimed now to be the deputy of the hidden Imam, now the Mahdi himself, had drawn followers even among courtiers, and had impressed Saru Taqi. In the summer of 1632 he led them in arms into the city, demanded that its prefect join him, and held out at a shrine until troops stormed it.

Imam-Quli Khan, the conqueror of Hormuz and the richest of Abbas's governors, found himself out of favour with Safi's new men. Late in 1632 he was put to death with two of his sons, and then the rest of his family; his estates went to the crown in 1633.

His brother Daud Khan, governor of Ganja and Karabakh, was married to Teimuraz's sister and was a friend of Saakadze. Rostom had already had him removed from the council; in 1633, frightened by the purge, he fled to Georgia and urged Teimuraz to rise again.

Teimuraz raided Ganja with Daud and refused to give him up in exchange for the shah's pardon; he let him go into Ottoman territory instead. Safi answered by sending an army against him.

Rostom, prefect of Isfahan since 1618, introduced to Abbas by Saakadze, had guarded Safi's accession and helped bring down the Undiladze family. Named viceroy of Georgia in 1632, he entered Tbilisi on 18 February 1633 and took the throne of Kartli, which he ruled for the shah for twenty-five years.

Rostam Khan, the commander-in-chief, led the army that put Rostom on the throne. His harshness toward the Georgian nobles, above all his raid on the Tsitsishvili estates, split him from the new king, and he was recalled; in 1635 he was made governor of Azerbaijan.

Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji, from Lahijan in Gilan, was Mulla Sadra's pupil and son-in-law. Teaching at the Ma'sumiyya madrasa in Qom, he developed a theology close to Avicenna's philosophy without following Sadra's central doctrines, and trained the next generation, his own sons among them.

Murad IV, ruling in his own right since May 1632, took the field himself. In 1635 he captured Erevan in August and sacked Tabriz; Safi took Erevan back the next spring. In 1638 Murad marched on Baghdad.

Bektash Khan, a Georgian ghulam of the Mirimanidze family, had governed Baghdad since 1631 and repaired its walls and built outworks. He held out for about six weeks from mid-November 1638. He died a year after the city fell, by illness, suicide, murder or poison: accounts differ.

Tayyar Mehmed Pasha, made grand vizier on the march, directed the siege cautiously until the impatient sultan rebuked him. He then led a general assault and was killed in it, on 24 December 1638; the city fell the next day and was sacked.

Kemankeş Mustafa Pasha, an Albanian janissary officer and admiral, was made grand vizier the day Tayyar died. He led the Ottoman side in the talks that followed, and on 17 May 1639 signed the Treaty of Zuhab: Baghdad and Iraq went to the Ottomans, Erevan and the eastern Caucasus stayed with Iran.

Ali Mardan Khan had followed his father, Ganj-Ali Khan, as governor of Kandahar. Saru Taqi, who wanted him removed, demanded a large sum from him; his brother-in-law Mirza Taleb had been murdered. In March 1638 he handed Kandahar to the Mughals and entered their service.

Shah Jahan, the Khurram of 1622, emperor since 1628, took the city, made Ali Mardan governor of Kashmir and by 1643 one of the highest-ranking nobles of his empire. His general Qulij Khan forced the Safavid garrison of Bost, under Mihrab Khan, to surrender.

Reza Abbasi worked on into Safi's reign, his later style darker and heavier, with old men, dervishes and Europeans among his subjects. He died in 1635.

Mu'in Musavvir, born in Isfahan around 1610–15, had been Reza's pupil. His career ran from about 1630 to 1693, and in 1676 he painted the best-known portrait of his master. He kept to the Isfahan manner and avoided European influence.

With the war in the west ended at Zuhab, Safi, who had grown up in the harem and drank heavily, left the running of the state to his grand vizier, Saru Taqi, and his commander-in-chief, Rostam Khan. In May 1642 he died at Kashan, aged about thirty.

Saru Taqi governed with the backing of the harem. Its senior woman was Dilaram Khanum, the shah's mother, who would support him as regent for her grandson; the heir's own mother was Anna Khanum, a Circassian concubine.

Anna Khanum, a Circassian brought to the harem as a slave, became Safi's concubine and on 30 August 1632 bore him his eldest son, Soltan Mohammad Mirza, at Qazvin. The boy grew up among the women and eunuchs of the harem, and his mother's standing rested on him.

Rajab Ali Tabrizi, a philosopher and mystic educated at the Sheikh Lotfollah school in Isfahan, was tutor to the young prince Soltan Mohammad Mirza. His pupils in Isfahan would include Qazi Sa'id Qomi.

Safi died at Kashan on 12 May 1642; on 15 May his son was enthroned there as Abbas II, aged nine. The boy, raised in the harem and tutored by Rajab Ali Tabrizi, was sent to Qazvin to be educated as a king, while the vizier and his mother governed.

Anna Khanum, the shah's mother, worked closely with Saru Taqi; the French traveller Chardin remarked on their friendship. Together with the household steward and the commander of the royal guard they formed the circle that held power for the first three years of the reign.

Mohammad Ali Beg, steward of the royal household, sat in that circle with Saru Taqi and Jani Khan. He kept the stewardship until 1651, when Mohammad Beg, the future grand vizier, succeeded him.

Rostam Khan, the commander-in-chief, was in Khorasan preparing to retake Kandahar. Saru Taqi saw him as a rival and obtained a decree for his death for refusing an order from the capital; he was executed at Mashhad on 1 March 1643, and his brother was dismissed.

Jani Khan, the Shamlu commander of the royal guard, was tied to Saru Taqi by the marriage of his daughter to the vizier's nephew. Yet on 11 October 1645 Jani Khan and five others broke into Saru Taqi's house and killed him, most likely with the young shah's consent. When Anna Khanum's eunuch came to ask why, Jani Khan called the vizier a dog and a thief and insulted the queen mother.

Safi Quli Beg, the royal sommelier, son of Amir Beg Armani, warned that the conspiracy aimed at the shah himself. Four days after the vizier's murder Jani Khan was killed, by poison in one account; Anna Khanum drove the revenge, and many of his Shamlu tribesmen died with him.

On 14 October Abbas, now thirteen, recalled Khalifa Sultan, the vizier his father had dismissed thirteen years before. He at first declined, pleading age, then took office; he began with a campaign against gambling, prostitution and wine in the coffee houses.

Mohammad Taher Vahid Qazvini, a secretary and poet, had served as assistant and adviser to Saru Taqi. After the murder Khalifa Sultan made him the court's recorder, and in 1645 he became the official historian of the reign; his Abbas-nama tells it from inside the administration.

Encouraged by the Mughals' costly war against the Uzbeks around Balkh, Abbas II marched from Isfahan on 4 April 1648 with some forty thousand men, Khalifa Sultan riding with him. He took Bost and on 28 December laid siege to Kandahar.

Daulat Khan, the Mughal commander of the fortress, failed to keep discipline in its garrison, and on 22 February 1649 Kandahar surrendered after a short siege. The Safavids also took the other strongholds that controlled the region.

Abbas made Mihrab Khan, a Georgian of the Mirimanidze clan, governor of the recovered city. He had once commanded at Bost, which he surrendered to the Mughals in 1638, and had since governed Astarabad. He died at Kandahar later in 1649.

In 1648, at Abbas's bidding, Rostom invaded Kakheti, defeated Teimuraz and took the kingdom for the shah. Teimuraz fled west and never ruled again. Zaal of Aragvi and other nobles who had backed him made their peace with Rostom.

Saib Tabrizi, whose family Abbas I had moved from Tabriz to Isfahan, had spent seven years with patrons in Mughal Kabul and the Deccan before returning in 1632. Abbas II made him king of poets, and Saib celebrated the campaign in his Qandahar-nama.

Otar Beg, Mihrab Khan's Georgian kinsman, succeeded him as governor of Kandahar in 1649 and held it until 1662 or 1663, through every Mughal attempt to take it back.

Shah Jahan sent his son Aurangzeb with his grand vizier and some fifty thousand men in 1649. Aurangzeb beat the Persians outside the walls but his guns could not breach them. He tried again in 1652; Uzbek raids and two months of resistance forced him to give up.

Sa'dullah Khan, a scholar from Chiniot who had been Shah Jahan's grand vizier since 1645, took part in the sieges of Kandahar alongside Aurangzeb from 1649 to 1653. He died in office in 1656.

In 1653 Shah Jahan gave the next attempt to his eldest son and heir, Dara Shikoh, with the two heaviest guns in the empire. After five months the walls still stood, and on 29 September 1653 the Mughals gave up for good.

Under Abbas II the shah's officials forced Iran's Jews to convert; Vahid's chronicle dates the conversions between 1645 and 1654 and speaks of 20,000 families. Baba'i ben Lotf of Kashan was one of the forced converts and kept his faith in secret. His Book of the Forced Convert, some 5,300 verses of Persian in Hebrew script, is the first Judeo-Persian chronicle.

The Dutch company, a leading buyer of Iran's silk, had blockaded Bandar Abbas in 1645 over what it saw as unfair terms for buying silk. Wary of its own losses, it soon gave way to Iranian demands.

In 1651 the company sent Joan Cunaeus to Isfahan as its ambassador, with Cornelis Speelman as his secretary to record the journey. Abbas II received them with great festivity, and a new silk treaty was concluded in 1652.

Russian Cossacks had built a fort on the Sunzha in 1634 in support of Teimuraz, who looked to Moscow for help, and Russia was squeezing the foreign merchants who carried Iranian silk. Under Tsar Alexis new forts went up, one on the Iranian side of the Terek.

Khosrow Khan, an Armenian convert who governed Shirvan from 1643, was ordered to act. With troops from Ardabil, Karabakh and Astara and Dagestani allies, some 20,000 men, he besieged the Sunzha fort from 7 March 1653; on 25 March its garrison slipped away and the fort was destroyed.

In 1653 Alexis, unwilling to divide his forces, sent an embassy to Isfahan. Abbas II agreed to a settlement, saying the fighting had begun without his consent.

Allahverdi Khan, an Armenian ghulam, son of Khosrow Khan of Shirvan and the shah's childhood friend, had become master of the hunt and in 1649 commander of the royal guard. He had backed an Armenian official, Mohammad Beg, through New Julfa and the royal household. When Khalifa Sultan died on 5 March 1654, he recommended him as grand vizier.

Mohammad Beg, son of the court's master tailor, had been prefect of New Julfa in 1643, harbourmaster of Bandar Abbas in 1646, and in 1651 succeeded Mohammad Ali Beg as household steward. As grand vizier from 1654 he took Hamadan, Ardabil, Semnan and Kerman into the crown domain. He and his patron became rivals, and in 1661 Allahverdi's reports to the shah brought him down.

Fayz Kashani, who had studied with Baha'i and Mir Damad and then for eight years with Mulla Sadra, whose daughter he married, taught in Isfahan and led its Friday prayer. A mystic and a prolific writer, he was one of the scholars Abbas II kept close.

Mohammad Taqi Majlisi, a pupil of Baha'i, led the Friday prayer in Isfahan's old congregational mosque after Baha'i and Mir Damad, and spread the Shi'i hadith; he leaned toward mysticism. Abbas II, who wanted Shi'i law available in Persian, kept friendly relations with him, and he wrote Persian commentaries on the hadith. He died in 1660.

Under Abbas II the persecution of Sufis grew, and with it a literature against them. Mohammad Taher Qommi was one of the Shi'i scholars who wrote against the Sufis, at a court whose shah still honoured his family's own Sufi order.

Qazi Sa'id Qomi, born in 1639 and a judge in Qom, studied in Isfahan with Rajab Ali Tabrizi, Fayz Kashani and Lahiji. Under Rajab Ali's influence he took a mystical line, and later criticised Sadra's theory of substantial motion.

Shah Jahan fell ill in September 1657, and his sons fought for the throne. Aurangzeb beat Dara Shikoh at Samugarh in 1658, took power and shut his father up in the fort of Agra; Dara was captured and executed in 1659. The prince who had twice failed before Kandahar was now Iran's neighbour on the throne.

Rostom died on 17 November 1658, aged about ninety-three, after twenty-five years as the shah's king of Kartli. He had adopted a Bagrationi prince of the Mukhrani branch as his heir.

Vakhtang V had become a Muslim in Iran in 1654, taking the name Shahnavaz. Abbas II confirmed him as king of Kartli, recognised on 1 January 1659, and Vakhtang ruled Kartli, as Rostom had, as the shah's client.

In 1660 Vakhtang's daughter Anuka was sent to Abbas II's harem, tying the shah's household to the royal house of Kartli. After Abbas's death she married Shahverdi Khan.

In the 1650s the shah's government moved Qizilbash Turkman tribes into Kakheti, up to 80,000 people, to repopulate it, watch its nobles and guard against Dagestani raids and Russian pressure. They began building a fortress at Bakhtrioni and fortifying the old monastery of Alaverdi, driving Georgians off their land.

Zaal, duke of Aragvi, a former partisan of Teimuraz who had made his peace with Rostom in 1648, led the revolt of 1659. In the shah's counter-attack he was murdered by his own nephews on the shah's order, in May 1660.

Bidzina Cholokashvili, a Kakhetian noble who had sided with Teimuraz against Rostom, was among the leaders. The rebels, joined by the mountain clans, took and destroyed the Turkman strongholds at Bakhtrioni and Alaverdi; afterwards he was handed to the tribes whose people had been killed, tortured and put to death.

Shalva, duke of Ksani, and his kinsman Elizbar joined the rising. When it was crushed they asked the shah for pardon; he gave them up to the Turkman tribes, and both were tortured to death in 1662. The Georgian Church counts Bidzina, Shalva and Elizbar as martyrs.

Elizbar of Ksani, Shalva's companion in the rising, shared his fate. The rebels lost the war but won their point: the Turkman settlers left Kakheti, and the shah gave up the plan to settle Georgia with the Qizilbash.