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Journal of persianate studies 8 (2015) 276-308
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The Decline of Safavid Iran in Comparative
Perspective
Rudi Matthee
University of Delaware
[email protected]
Abstract
This essay analyzes the incontrovertible weakening of the Safavid state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century by putting it in a larger context. It does so by
comparing various manifestations of Iran’s “decline” at the time to conditions and
developments in the adjacent Ottoman and Mughal states, where similar processes
were playing out in the same period. In order to arrive at a measured and balanced view
of similarities and differences between these three early modern Islamic empires, it
singles out and focuses on four areas: geographical/environmental and economic conditions, political developments, the state of the army, and ideological characteristics.
Keywords
Safavids – decline – early modern empires – Ottomans – Mughals – Afghans
Introduction
There are good reasons to view Safavid Iran from its emergence as a state in
1501 until its demise in 1722 in the way most Iranians, as well as many modern scholars dealing with this period in Iranian history, do: as a polity in its
own right, unique, sui generis, a world unto itself. The unique features of
the Safavids, most significantly their role as the creators of the world’s only
Twelver-Shiʿi nation, their status as the founders of the modern Iranian nationstate, and the abrupt disintegration of their state in the face of an uprising
* I would like to thank Stephen Dale and Alan Mikhail for commenting on an earlier draft of
this essay.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/18747167-12341286
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followed by an assault by a small band of Afghan warriors, all appear to justify
such an approach.
It is also possible, and arguably more instructive, to view Safavid Iran as part
of a continuum of political entities encompassing the adjacent Ottoman and
Mughal empires (as well as, to a lesser extent, the Central Asian Uzbek state),
entities that gave a measure of structure and cohesion to the area between
the Balkans and the Deccan before the advent of colonialism. In an effort to
find a short-hand term for their common features, modern scholarship has
affixed various labels to these early modern polities: “gunpowder empires,” a
term suggested by Marshall Hodgson (Hodgson, III, pp. 17-16, 26); “patrimonial-bureaucratic states,” in deference to Max Weber,1 or “tributary polities,”
referring to the extraction by the central, imperial government of wealth as a
token of respect and submission or allegiance, a model adumbrated by Marx
and further developed by Eric Wolf, among other neo-Marxists (Wolf, pp. 76,
79-82). On a deeper, less functionalist level, the communality between these
polities was above all a matter of inhabiting a common cultural space, of being
heirs to a set of shared Turko-Mongol patterns and traditions, of taking part in
a culture that, at the elite level, expressed itself in the Persian language and was
suffused with Persianate and Islamicate, mutually comprehensible, cultural
motifs (Fragner, passim; Soudavar; Robinson). Such traditions and patterns
are reflected in the ways in which war, trade, and diplomacy were conducted
between and among these states. People migrated; goods, money and precious
metals were transmitted; and ideas were diffused across the lands in ways that
warrant the term “oikoumene/ecumene” introduced by Marshall Hodgson for
the (even wider) region (Hodgson, III, passim). Merchants traveled far and
wide, between Isfahan and Bursa or Aleppo and Izmir, via Tabriz in Azerbaijan
and Tokat in Anatolia, or following the trail into Mesopotamia via Hamadan
and Baghdad; between Isfahan and Lahore via Farah and Qandahār, or taking
the maritime route, between the Persian Gulf port of Bandar ʿAbbās and Surat
in Gujarat, the Malabar Coast or the ports of Coromandel. Iranians readily
found employment at the Mughal court; the Safavids fought wars against the
Ottomans and, to a lesser extent, the Mughals, under the banner of the Shiʿi
faith; diplomatic missions were elaborate affairs involving large numbers of
people and an abundance of high-quality gifts; and the natural environment,
in which urban centers and their surrounding oases were like islands in a vast
ocean, created a commercial nexus sustained by caravan traffic by way of camels and caravanserais.
1 For the features of the patrimonial state, see Weber, I, pp. 1006-10. For its manifestation in the
Mughal case, see Blake. For reflections on Safavid Iran as an empire, see Matthee, 2010.
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Most importantly for the purposes of this essay, the three states in question
were structured and behaved in institutionally comparable ways, politically,
religiously, as well as economically. They thus present a degree of commensurability leading to a certain isomorphism in their reaction to internal and
external challenges. The elites in all three cases were foreign in origin, either
having taken power by way of military invasion or initially introduced as “slave
soldiers,” in a variant of the Mamluk system. Rule was patrimonial in the sense
that power resided in the household of the ruler who personified not just the
dynasty but the very idea of Islamic sovereignty. Islam, either in its Sunni manifestation in the case of the Ottomans and the Mughals, or in its Twelver-Shiʿi
variant in the Safavid case, underpinned the system, formally turning the ruler
into the divinely appointed defender of the faith. Also shared was the absence
of primogeniture as a self-evident principle of succession and legitimacy;
instead authority resided in the ruling clan rather than in the person of the
ruler, leading to a type of “corporate” government as a model that continued
to linger even as sons often succeeded their fathers. One consequence of this
was the importance of the royal harem as a place where power was selected,
managed, and perpetuated, resulting in a major role in state management for
women and eunuchs. All three states, finally, used similar methods to collect
revenue. They depended mostly on the yield of agriculture for their income.
With regard to commerce, they sought to maximize wealth not by way of mercantilist protectionism, by imposing tariffs and other restrictions on imports,
but with a “laissez-faire” approach, allowing merchants from far and wide,
indigenous and foreign ones alike, to participate, and encouraging imports for
the sake of an economy that was primarily designed to satisfy internal markets
by ensuring an abundant supply of essential commodities.
The study of the various manifestations of the commonality of and the interaction between the Ottomans, the Safavid and the Mughals have thus far not
gone much beyond art, gift-giving, literature, and historiography. Diplomacy
has received some attention, as has trade, but scholarship on war, arguably the
main form of interaction in the “connective” history embodied by these states,
is still in its infancy. The greatest impediment here is a long-standing separation
and insularity of discourses in Middle Eastern history, which is exacerbated by
the national(ist) tenor of modern historiography: Ottomanists, preoccupied
with their empire’s military, political and economic links to Europe, generally
don’t look “east”; and scholars of the Mughal Empire tend to be focused on connections with Britain, the colonial power that supplanted the Mughals in much
of India and that also accounts for the limited linguistic abilities that many
scholars of the Subcontinent bring to their field. Safavid historians, in turn,
many of them hampered by similar language barriers, have been even more
insular in their purview. In keeping with a general inclination among Iranians
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to see their country as unique, civilizationally pivotal, and little influenced
by other regional powers, except perhaps in negative ways, they have often
analyzed Safavid Iran as a country prevented from reaching its natural destiny
by (proto)-colonial and imperialist machinations, European, not Ottoman or
Mughal or even Russian, to be sure. Even the tendency to privilege “mind over
matter,” following converging biases and interests of traditional Persianate culture and modern Western Orientalism, has not necessarily generated profound
studies of cultural interaction between Sarajevo and Hyderabad.
Recent book-length studies by Stephen Dale and Douglas Streusand portend
change, at least with regard to comparative history. Yet, these studies appear to
lie outside today’s prevailing discourse of empire studies at large, in part perhaps because at least Streusand’s study adheres to the obsolescent “gunpowder
empire” model, in part surely because current empire studies, driven by an agenda
whose search for “modernist” tendencies excludes religion (and culture at large)
as a serious ideological factor, tend to situate the Ottoman Empire in a comparative framework that includes the Habsburg, the Mughals and the Chinese but
leaves out the presumably less commensurate Safavids.2 One scholar, struck
by this absence of Iran from the discourse, in this case the discourse about
non-Western “modernities,” has aptly called the “Turkey-India-China grouping” the “Three Tenors of non-Western Modernities” (Ben-Dor Benite, p. 649).
Safavid “decline” in a comparative context is the specific topic of this paper,
which seeks to broaden Iranian horizons in order to gain a better perspective
on processes and developments that preceded the fall of Isfahan to a small
band of Afghan tribesmen in 1722. “Decline” might be called the shared theme
of the three empires under review, even though these days the term and the
concept are highly contested, if not outright suspect. We still legitimately talk
about Venetian decline after 1453, Dutch decline after the “Golden Age” of
the seventeenth century, British decline in the twentieth century, and, now,
American decline, yet decline applied to the Middle East has become a loaded
term, the “D-word,” as Cemal Kafadar has called it (Kafadar, p. 32).3 The weakening of early modern Islamic empires is currently not at the top of the scholarly
agenda, to say the least, and even in the case of the Central Asian Uzbek state,
former seventeenth-century marginalization has come to be reinterpreted as
2 An exception is D’Souza. For recent studies that compare the Ottomans with the Habsburgs,
the Russians and/or the Chinese, see Barkey, 2008, Lieven, 2000, and Subrahmanyam. The latter goes so far as to speak of “three early modern empires that covered an impressive swathe
of more or less contiguous territory” only interrupted by a “small gap from east to west equivalent to the width of the Safavid Empire” (p. 75).
3 For a recent study of the “decline” of France as a result of war-related expenses and fiscal
mismanagement under Louis XIV, see Rowlands.
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(commercial) revival and growth (Levi, pp. 13ff). As one colleague recently put
it with reference to the Ottoman state, previously the favored target of decline
theorists: “. . . the very task of refuting ‘decline’ has become a preoccupation in
itself, posing obstacles to any new core narrative of early modern Ottoman history, lest it carry a taint of declensionism” (White, p. 345).
In traditional scholarship, the Ottomans began their slide following the
death of Sultan Süleyman in 1566 (or at least the murder of grand vizier
Mehmed Sokollu Pasha in 1579) (Hammer-Purgstall, IV.2-3, p. 51). Ottomanists
long ago began to chip away at that notion and have now more or less discarded
it; yet the issue of a state and a society faced with multiple, profound problems
adding up to a debilitating crisis has not gone away.4 The Ottoman state in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century inarguably showed signs of
weakness, with victories on the battlefield no longer a given, a rise in provincial
rebellions and rural banditry, and increasing turmoil in the ranks of the governing elite. Late sixteenth-century Ottoman literati themselves experienced
their moment in history as one of decline, and engaged in a vigorous debate
over ways to remedy this condition (Lewis). Yet in the last quarter century or
so Ottomanists, turning away from the very notion of decline, have interpreted
these developments in various revisionist ways (Howard; Quataert; Neumann).
Following an interpretation first proposed by Mughal scholars to the effect
that the decline of the center might equal the rise of the periphery, they have
separated state and society, at times implicitly, to argue or imply that the weakening of the first did not necessarily entail the weakening of the latter, that,
indeed, a retreating state allowed other, mostly local “actors” to enter the fold.
They thus have looked for provincial energy and initiative, finding it in the
power elites of Syria and Lebanon, or in the invigoration of trade in Palestine
or Iraq, and arguing that local forces from a variety of backgrounds became
mediators with the center while finding access to state resources and offices.5
A few scholars have recently even sought to turn the “decline paradigm” on its
head by arguing for an Ottoman equivalent of such quintessentially European
notions as the “Age of Exploration” and the “Age of Enlightenment.” Giancarlo
Casale’s book, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, presents the (short-lived military) thrust of the Ottomans into the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean as if it
were part of an exploratory endeavor with a global reach. Baki Tezcan’s study,
The Second Ottoman Empire, is equally as insistent in its revisionism, calling for
a “positive narrative and approach for the seventeenth century” (Teczan, p. 10).
Rather than analyzing weakness and its causes, the author seeks to construct
4 The first one to do so in a systematic manner was Abou-El-Haj.
5 For a summation of the state of the field, see Khoury.
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a century of renewal, beginning with the proposition that regicide, rather than
a symptom of decline, might actually be a sign of strength, and continuing
with the idea that the growing irrelevance of the sultan in reality represents
a (civilizing) trend by way of the emergence of alternative elites, the rise of
proto-democratic tendencies, and the creation of new legal foundations for
the empire (Tezcan, p. 5).
One does not have to agree with all aspects of Casale’s and Tezcan’s revisionism to call the seventeenth-century Ottoman case one of “temporary” as
opposed to “definitive” decline.6 For all the serious problems they faced, the
Ottomans endured for a further three-and-a-half centuries after the first signs
of weakness had appeared, and, under the guidance of a series of forceful and
energetic grand viziers, even managed to reorganize their institutions, for
which reason the term “decline” has been rightfully contested: a slide that continued for 350 years is not a useful organizing principle, so that it is arguably
more productive to theorize the longevity of the Ottomans.
It is much more difficult to reject the idea of “decline” for the Mughal state.
There is hardly a scholarly consensus about what made the Mughal dynasty
atrophy, or even when the process began, but there is no question that the
polity it led and represented did dissolve in the course of the eighteenth century. But if the idea of Mughal “decline” cannot be simply dismissed, it can be
mitigated by way of deflection and circumvention. The Mughal collapse was
a rather gradual and inchoate process, involving the mutation of the central
state into a series of regional power centers and, ultimately, a creeping incorporation into a new, colonial dispensation, which has even been “blamed”
not just for hastening the demise of the Mughal polity but also for causing a
decline in Indian economic well-being.7 And as various historians have argued
in the last few decades, in the Indian, multipolar case the rise of provincial
centers such as Awadh and Hyderabad demonstrably “made up” for the disintegration of the center.8
Differences between the Safavids, the Ottoman and Mughals
The point addressed in this essay is the weakening of the Safavid state, with the
argument that, in the Iranian case, decline is impossible to evade, circumvent
6 For the difference, see Subrahmanyam, p. 82.
7 See the discussion in Erikson, pp. 38-40.
8 See, for instance, Marshall; Bayly, 1983; Alam. For a critique of this model, see Ali. The various
contributions to the debate have now been brought together in Bhagarva.
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or ignore; the current trend of positing “transformation” and “adaptation” in
the face of manifest crisis clearly does not work for the Safavids. We have to
confront the issue of the weakening of key elements in state and society headon. The Safavid state after all fell, hard, fast and dramatically; and it did so at
the hands of a relatively small number of poorly equipped tribal warriors. Any
state of minimal strength and resilience would have been able to withstand
their “assault.” The fact that the Safavid state did not manage to do so begs
an explanation of the reasons and causes for its obvious weaknesses, why it
lacked the adaptive capability to meet the challenges that came its way. We
might be able to do so profitably by comparing conditions in Iran with those in
the adjacent Ottoman and Mughal states, trying to avoid the “single explanatory mode” that is said often to constrain the practitioner of the synchronic
way of looking at history (Bang and Bayly, introd., p. 11).
The idea of decline is notoriously problematic, inherently impossible to
quantify or to prioritize in terms of its causes, except in exceptional circumstances, and abandoning a “single explanatory mode” behind leaves one open
to a bewildering array of scenarios. The locus classicus, Roman decline, is a
case in point. In his exhaustive study of the subject, Alexander Demandt elaborates on a seemingly endless list of reasons modern scholars have adduced for
the fall of Rome, from the abolition of God to military retrenchment to moral
degeneration to self-satisfaction and smugness (Demandt, passim). This essay
does not invoke the Romans as the avatars of good governance, just as it does
not ascribe, in Victorian fashion, the weakening of the Safavid state to moral
degeneration and a waning of creative powers. Nor does it assume or posit a
“golden age” of centralization, efficiency and fortitude under an iconic ruler
followed by a steady slide toward mismanagement, frailty and dissolution. Just
as the fact that Ottoman Empire reached its greatest expansion under Sultan
Süleyman does not automatically mean that the state he guided was a welloiled administrative apparatus, and just as Mughal India was wracked with
rebellion even as it flourished culturally under Sultan Akbar, so the reign of
Shah ʿAbbās I should not be used as the yardstick against which later times
inevitably fall short (Abou-El-Haj, p. 10). Nor, finally, does this study attribute
the loss of economic and military vigor in seventeenth-century Iran to external
causes. Naturally, the interaction with foreign lands, either by way of warfare
or of bullion flows, did not leave Iran untouched. Yet there is no indication that
the incipient forces of globalization, or the impact of (Western) imperialism
had any bearing on Iran’s fate at the turn of the eighteenth century. As insisted
by Dale and argued by the present author in his Persia in Crisis, the Safavids
(like the Mughals) “had not been fundamentally weakened by European
expansion before they collapsed or declined” (Dale, p. 248). The Ottomans as
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well as the Russians clearly had their eyes on Iranian territory, and both sent
embassies to gather intelligence on the conditions of the Safavid state and its
army prior to the fall of Isfahan (Dourry Efendy, passim; Mostafa Agha, pp.
23-25; Bushev, passim). But the Russians only invaded northern Iran when
the Afghan siege of Isfahan was already in progress, and the Ottoman troops
waited until after the Afghan occupation of Isfahan before moving toward
Yerevan, Tabriz and Hamadan (Lockhart, p. 10; Mostafa Agha, p. 9). Instead, in
an effort to bring some organization and clarity to the issue, I propose to look
at four distinct, yet interrelated aspects of late Safavid society that represent
its physical “base” with its political and cultural “superstructure,” geographicaleconomic conditions, the state of the military, political structures, processes
and events, and ideological issues involving the question of legitimacy as well
as religious policies.
A
Geographical/Environmental and Economic Conditions
In spite of the many fertile oases surrounding its major urban centers, perhaps
the most distinguishing, albeit often overlooked, feature of (Safavid) Iran is
an unforgiving natural environment consisting of formidable mountain ranges
and steppe lands receiving less than the 200 mms of annual rainfall needed for
rain-fed agriculture, extending in the east to stark, largely waterless deserts,
vast open, sparsely populated rather unproductive spaces that were difficult to
traverse, let alone manage and control. Steel and Crowther, two English merchants, in the early seventeenth century summed up their impression of travel
through Iran by describing the route between Qandahār and Isfahan as “barren, where sometimes in two or three days’ travel, there is no green thing to
be seen; only some water, and that also often brackish, stinking and naught”
(Purchas, IV, p. 2373). Just as in Russia, with its vast emptiness, filling up the
frontier in Iran meant emptying out the heartland (Sunderland, p. 42). Hence
the difficulty the Safavids faced guarding their frontiers with sufficient force.
Adding to Iran’s centrifugal character was that the country, essentially landlocked, lacked a central site, a major river or a natural harbor, where a fixed
and permanent capital, a nexus of political, military and commercial power,
might have emerged. The Ottomans had in Istanbul a political and economic
center that remained in place for almost six hundred years, giving the state a
rootedness that greatly facilitated its centripetal, centralizing urges and inclinations. India’s political center was less immutable, but Delhi served the role of
political center for much of Muslim rule in the subcontinent, and the alternative capitals, Agra, Fatipur Sikri, and Lahore, were all located within the rather
narrow orbit of the fertile Indo-Gangetic river basin, north India’s center of
gravity. The Iranian situation was far more centrifugal. Following the lack of a
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central river or any other nodal point, strategic considerations, the background
of the various dynasties that came to power over time, and the enduringly
ambulant nature of Iranian rulers until the 1800s, Iran did not settle on a permanent capital until the turn of the nineteenth century; the capital was essentially where the itinerant shah and his entourage resided at any given time, and
even Isfahan proved to be a temporary capital, losing that status in the early
eighteenth century.
Like parts of Russia and, to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean basin, Iran
was also a land of scarce resources, and an “essentially poor country, with but
few internal sources of wealth” (E. Sykes, p. 101).9 After living in Iran for some
two decades during which he had become a confidant of Shah ʿAbbās, the
Carmelite Father Giovanni Tadeo in 1626 called the “Kingdom of Persia, taken
alone without its tributary states, [. . .] poor in money” (Chick, p. 287). Until
the discovery and exploitation of oil about a century ago, the country indeed
had a poor revenue base. Its agricultural output was low; the plateau was woefully short on timber; it lacked easily exploitable gold and silver deposits; and
the Safavid realm produced few exportable goods beyond raw silk, the bulk of
which was of comparatively inferior quality, which is why, eventually, it was to
lose the competition with silk from Bengal (Matthee, 1999, pp. 203, 209). All this
imposed serious limitations on productivity (Christensen, p. 249). Remarks by
modern travelers to the effect that Iran’s richest villages lay at some remove
from the main caravan routes, sheltered from regular despoilment by passing dignitaries including the shah himself, suggest that the true wealth of the
country to some extent remained invisible to outside observers (Chardin, II,
p. 138; IV, p. 428; VIII, pp. 496-97; De la Maze, IV, p. 70; Binning, II, p. 144). Yet
such recesses of prosperity and their potential tax revenue typically remained
out of reach to the state as well. A high percentage of the country’s rather small
population of no more than eight million, finally, was made up by tribal folk,
people who were hard to tax let alone to pacify and who often disrupted the
orderly conduct of trade and agriculture. Long-term environmental degradation did the rest. As P. M. Sykes (p. 450) put it in the early twentieth century:
“Nature has indeed been the reverse of lavish with her gifts, and man has systematically aggravated this unfortunate condition of affairs by ruthlessly burning every tree or bush and never attempting to replace the loss by planting.”
9 For Russia, see Hellie. Fernand Braudel (I, p. 241) cautions not to be deceived by the “famous
charm and beauty” of the Mediterranean. He saw the underlying “fundamental poverty” of
a region where “man gains his daily bread by painful effort,” and where “great tracts of land
remain uncultivated and of little use,” as one of the main reasons for the sixteenth-century
decline of the Mediterranean.
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The Ottomans and Mughals shared some of these traits, albeit to a lesser
degree. The total Ottoman population has been estimated at 25-30 million; the
tribal element, much smaller as a percentage of the overall population than in
Iran, was not really centered in the heartland, and some of the most productive regions, such as Egypt and the Balkans, were not tribal-pastoral at all. The
Ottomans managed to wrest themselves free of tribal dominance by way of the
relatively successful military organization of their state: As of the sixteenth
century they began to recruit their military and administrative cadre, on an
individual basis, from a non-tribal slave elite. Their success in institutionalizing this recruitment through training and education allowed them to escape
the Ibn Khaldunian trap of tribesmen taking on the states created by former
tribesmen (Gellner, p. 73). And as of the late seventeenth century, the Ottoman
administration embarked on a policy designed to count, register and, ultimately sedentarize its nomadic tribes (Kasaba, p. 17). The Mughal state, with
an estimated population of perhaps 100 million, was of an altogether different magnitude. In Mughal India, too, tribal allegiances played a minimal role
at the center following Sultan Akbar’s establishment of the mansabdāri service system. Indeed, the Indian subcontinent, or at least its heartland, “never
experienced a nomadic conquest at all” (Wink, p. 123), so that tribal peoples
(the Marathas, the Pathans, the Rohillas and the Jats) operated mostly on the
periphery. Of course, in the Indian case, the tribal, mostly non-Muslim fringe
did contribute to the weakening in the end, and many of the wars of the early to
mid-eighteenth century were fought against peoples inhabiting the periphery.
Most importantly, both adjacent empires were endowed with much more
abundant resources than Iran, as a result of which the state was able to garner
far more revenue: from the Balkans and Egypt in the case of the Ottomans;
from the vast, fertile Punjab and the Ganjetic Plain all the way to Bengal in the
case of the Mughals. Many foreign observers drew attention to Iran’s relative
poverty. Jean Chardin, the French Huguenot jeweler who spent up to a decade
in Iran and knew the country well, called Iranian peasants better off than their
French counterparts, but described Iran itself as “dry, barren, mountainous,
and but thinly inhabited,” insisting that no more than one-twelfth of its surface
was cultivated. India by contrast, which Chardin visited at least twice during
his time in Iran from 1666 to 1677, is called “a country very rich, fruitful and
populous” (Chardin, 1810, IV, pp. 268, 288; idem, 1988, p. 130). Josua Ketelaar,
a Dutch East India Company official who headed a mission to Isfahan in 1717,
thought that the Safavid court was far less opulent than the Mughal court,
which he had visited years earlier (NA, VOC 1901, Diary Ketelaar, fol. 457).
Safavid Iran indeed had an enormous trade deficit especially with India,
causing a large portion of its commercial profits to be siphoned off to the
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s­ ubcontinent via its Persian Gulf ports. This made India, with China, the other
destination of this bullion trade, the precious metal sink of the world, gathering the enormous surplus from its enormously large export volume in commodities such as textiles and spices.
As a result of these various factors Iran knew an exceedingly fragile balance
between revenue and expenditure, one that was much more precarious than
in the two adjacent states. This fundamental ecological and economic vulnerability, which may have been aggravated by a series of droughts, famines and
epidemics in the late 1680s and 1690,10 and the attendant urge to enhance royal
revenue prompted the Safavid crown to pursue a variety of fiscal policies in the
mid to late seventeenth century. One was to curb and restrict the growing outflow of bullion and specie to India via the Persian Gulf ports. Time and again
the Safavid state issued bans on the export of gold and/or silver, or imposed
taxes on money before it was spirited out of the country. All these measures
foundered on subterfuge by merchants and the rampant corruption that
existed among officials, and to the extent that they were successful, they were
counterproductive inasmuch as they impeded trade. The result was a dramatic
decline in the number of active mints and an equally dramatic fall in the volume of silver struck into convertible coins (Matthee, Floor and Clawson, ch. 3).
Another approach was that of tampering with the coinage itself, lowering
its weight and/or its fineness, producing more coins from a given amount of
metal. In the absence of structural monetary reform, and given the contradictory impulses, the shah often hoarded coins of sound alloy in his treasury
before issuing compromised “new” money. This, too, was a stopgap measure
that increased royal income in the short term while it worsened rather than
alleviated the structural problems (Matthee, Floor and Clawson, ch. 3).
The Ottomans, faced with the same problems, embarked on similar remedies, only to find their realm engulfed by the kind of frightful vicious cycle
of monetary debasement and inflation that modern scholarship has tended
to see as a symptom, if not a cause, of the empire’s decline in the seventeenth
century (Pamuk 2000, pp. 131ff). The Mughals, too, suffered a series of terrible
drought and famine, which killed millions, most notably in the period 1630-32,
and again in the years 1658-60 and 1685-87 (Van Santen, pp. 44, 54, 71, 96, 173-77;
Parker, p. 403). They also periodically experienced monetary shortages in this
same period. Yet their vastly superior productive forces and the resultant continued inflow of money, from the New World and Europe via the Islamic Middle
East, enabled them to overcome these problems with relatively greater ease.
10 For the Mughal situation, see Kruijtzer, p. 272. For the Ottomans, see White.
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The Safavids also engaged in a sustained policy of converting state land
(mamālek) into crown land (khāsseh), governed by state-appointed officials.
By the 1650s, much of the realm had thus been appropriated by the crown.
The long-term conversion to khāsseh land reflects a shift from a decentralized
polity beholden to tribal military power to an agrarian-based system in which
tribal chieftains came to be subordinated to the new, centrally appointed
royal “slave” (gholām) class of soldiers and bureaucrats. Khāsseh land offered
short-term fiscal benefits for the state, but these were far outweighed by the
disadvantages, landholders no longer interested in maintaining the long-term
productivity and prosperity of their land, and the fact that most revenue was
now siphoned off from the territory. Chardin in the 1670s pointed out the drawbacks of the khāsseh system by calling the viziers of crown lands bloodsuckers,
adding that, at the time when he was in Iran, these converted territories no
longer yielded good soldiers and that money which used to circulate in the
country now disappeared and was hoarded in the shah’s treasury. The peasants, who naturally bore the brunt of this, responded by engaging in fraud,
passive resistance and, ultimately, flight (Chardin, 1810, V, pp. 367ff, 551-53).
The Ottoman Empire experienced something similar with the conversion of
timar holdings to hass land, belonging to the sultan and assigned to tax farmers by way of the eltezām system. In the late seventeenth century, Istanbul
sought to remedy the problems inherent in the eltezām system and the resulting shortfall in state revenue by introducing the so-called mālekāneh system,
a lifetime tax farming arrangement. The mālekāneh system reduced the abuse
inherent in the previous short-term leases and, by fixing revenue payments to
the state, made the income of the latter more predictable. The new arrangement had its drawbacks: It reflected a loss of state control over land and it was
open to neglect of the land by the mostly absentee landlords, and it did not
prevent the long-term weakening of the Ottoman treasury, but it does seem to
have given the state a new lease on fiscal health (Darling, pp. 126ff.).
India, of course, did not undergo a similar process. In the course of the seventeenth century the so-called jāgirdāri system of non-hereditary landholders
fell into a crisis. Shah Jahān reformed the system by reassessing the salaries of
the jāgir holders, but he was unable to stem the discrepancy between assessed
land revenue and the actual yield, and by the turn of the eighteenth century
conditions had reached crisis proportions again, which were exacerbated by
Bahādor Shah’s practice of favoring officials by doling out jāgirs far beyond the
capacity of the land to support these fiefs (Chandra, 1959/2002, pp. 96-98). Yet
the weakening of the center this development represented coincided with, and
was to some extent exacerbated by, the emergence of local chiefs and regional
landholders who increasingly asserted their autonomy (Alam).
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B
Political Conditions
Here we are faced with a paradox: Iran in the mid to late seventeenth century
was, or at least appears, far more stable than either neighbor. The Herat region,
by way of example, is said to have known a period of peace during the entire
period of 1648 to 1698 (Tumanovich, p. 155). Indeed, the peace and stability
that Safavid Iran enjoyed compared to the general pattern of unrelieved misery, war and famine in other parts of the world, from Russia, with its Time of
Troubles, and China to France and Central Europe, prompts Geoffrey Parker
to speak of the “enigma of Iran” (Parker, p. 417). On the surface, Safavid society in the half century following the death of Shah ʿAbbās I in 1629 seems to
defy the “seventeenth-century crisis” model (as did Japan, the other exception
singled out by Parker). It stands out for cultural efflorescence expressed in the
splendid architecture of Isfahan as rebuilt and embellished under Shah ʿAbbās
I, in brilliant philosophy exemplified by Mollā Sadrā as the most prominent
representative of the so-called “School of Isfahan,” and in a well-functioning,
secure road system that continued to draw praise from foreign observers until
shortly before the fall of the dynasty. Seventeenth-century Iran was beset by
many economic problems, notably a loss of agricultural fertility and productivity and a sharp decrease in the availability of silver coinage, leading to a
precipitous drop in the number of active mints. But the country was at peace,
knew no regicide, did not experience succession struggles in the form of fratricidal warfare (all seventeenth-century Safavid rulers died peacefully and
successions rival Safavid pretenders unharmed) and the last three shahs were
assisted by only a small number of few grand viziers. One of these, Shaikh ʿAli
Khan was in office for a full twenty years, 1669-89, and only one, Mohammad
Mirzā Taqi Khan, was assassinated as part of a court-led conspiracy in 1645. In
sum, Iran in the mid-seventeenth century was an island of political stability
compared to its neighbors.
Overall, the Ottoman Empire may have been successful, and certainly more
successful than the Safavids, in moving from an empire run as a military enterprise to an empire managed and maintained by way of organizing a functioning bureaucracy and coopting members of the conquered peoples to run it
(Greene). Some of this long-term success may be attributable to the fact that
the Ottoman state was built on the foundations of a pre-existing Byzantine
structure as expressed in sultanic titles such as basileus, caesar, and tsar
(Koƚodziejczyk, p. 181). But in the seventeenth century the lands ruled from
Istanbul, and especially the empire’s eastern marches, were far more turbulent
than the territory controlled by the Safavids, with their unsafe roads, endemic
banditry and debilitating Janissary rebellions. This coincided with considerable political turmoil at the center. Despite recent efforts at revising the first
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few decades of the seventeenth century as a period of regeneration, we are
still left with the seventeen-year reign of the bloodthirsty Morād/Murad IV
(1623-40), and the murderous eight years that the psychopathic Ebrāhim I sat
on the throne (1640-48).11 Ebrāhim was eventually killed; three year later his
mother, Kösem Sultan, was brutally murdered, and in the course of the seventeenth century sultans seemed increasingly irrelevant and were treated as
disposable (Baer, p. 143). Between 1644 and 1656 the Ottomans went through
eighteen grand viziers; four of these were executed, eleven were dismissed,
and only one died a natural death. The three decades from 1650 to 1680 are
traditionally seen as an age of recovery, a politically tranquil period, in part
because of the strong hand of the Köprülü grand viziers who wielded control in the absence of forceful sultans (Teczan, pp. 47, 59-60, 215). But in 1687,
Sultan Mahmud IV was deposed as a result of rebellions following defeat in the
Balkans (at Mohacs) and a mounting tax burden imposed to fund wars.
In Mughal India, meanwhile, the fratricidal war and internecine strife that
preceded the accession of Shah Jahān in 1628 was as intense as the turmoil
that led to his deposition thirty years later. Following his impressive military
successes on the battlefield of the Deccan in 1617, Shah Jahān, then still known
as Shāhzāda Khorram, had received the title “Shah Jahān Bahādor” (brave)
and with that the right to succeed from his father, Jahāngir. But court intrigue
involving Nur Jahān, Jahāngir’s favorite wife who promoted the candidacy of a
younger brother, made him fall out of favor, causing him to revolt against his
father in 1622. Defeated and forced to surrender unconditionally, he nevertheless gained the throne upon Jahāngir’s death in 1627, after which he promptly
had his rivals executed and his stepmother imprisoned, allowing him to reign
uncontested. When Shah Jahān fell ill in 1657, a new round of internecine warfare
broke out, pitting Dārā Shekuh, Shah Jahān’s first-born son and heir-apparent
against Shah Shojāʿ, his younger son, who declared himself king of Bengal. The
struggle included another son, Morād Bakhsh, who declared himself emperor
of Gujarat. Morād Bakhsh found in yet another brother, Aurangzeb, his main
adversary, but after an initial confrontation the two became allies. Ultimately
the confrontation narrowed down to the struggle between Aurangzēb and Dārā
Shekuh. When the former accused the latter of having usurped the throne and
even of having apostatized, a series of bloody battles between the two erupted.
Aurangzēb emerged victorious from this struggle, prompting almost all
11 Tezcan, p. 47, sees Sultan Ahmed I’s peaceful enthronement in 1603 as a “major victory
for the constitutionalists, whose goal was to secure the supremacy of the law over the
dynasty.” He makes a similar argument about the succession of Sultan Mostafā I in 1617,
pp. 72ff.
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supporters of Dārā Shekuh to defect and rally around him. After taking the
capital, Agra, Aurangzēb moved against Bengal and defeated Shah Shojāʿ ’s
troops, forcing his brother to flee to Arrakan (modern Burma), where he was
executed by local rulers. Morād Bakhsh was next executed at Aurangzēb’s
orders. This left Dārā Shekuh as Aurangzēb’s only opponent. Aurangzeb pursued his brother all along northern India, until he managed to capture him in
1659. Crowning himself emperor he had his brother executed. His father, Shah
Jahān, immured in Agra for years, was to die in captivity in 1666.
Aurangzēb faced no direct opponent during his long reign, and he died
peacefully. But his tenure was marked by serious uprisings and revolts, and
his death was immediately followed by a fierce and bloody succession struggle
between the two pretenders, ʿAzam Shah and ʿAlam Shah. The latter, having
prevailed, was to reign as Bahādor Shah for a short five years, after which five
rulers were to occupy the throne in quick succession between 1712 and 1720.
How do we explain this discrepancy? Viewed in retrospect and within a
larger time frame, the tranquility of Iran in this period appears as the lull before
the storm, a function of the absence of a significant challenge in the form of
a major war, which in turn temporarily masked a woeful lack of revenue and
growing military vulnerability (more about which later). But to explain the
quietude in domestic politics and, more particularly, in court circles, we must
also look at the question of legitimacy. One major difference between the
Safavids and the Ottoman and the Mughal states, respectively, involves succession principles and practices. Both the Safavids and the Ottomans ended
up modifying the egalitarian Turco-Mongol practice with its tendency to vest
authority and succession rights in the entire clan by instituting a patriarchal
line and immuring the heir-to-be in the palace. In the Ottoman case, there is
a transition from open contest to a system of seniority as the basis of the succession of the oldest member of the Ottoman dynasty in the second half of
the seventeenth century (Peirce, pp. 91-112). Throughout the sixteenth century,
the Safavids went through multiple rounds of internecine succession warfare,
however, beginning with Shah Tahmāsb’s killing several of his siblings, including his only full brother, Bahrām Mirzā. Yet in Iran the notion of primogeniture, a legacy of pre-Islamic statecraft and its focus on divine kingship, always
provided a powerful counterweight to these fissiparous tendencies. Reinforced
by the Sufi milieu that had given rise to the Safavids and that centered on charismatic leadership passed on from father to son, succession by seniority only
became the norm, or at least the practice, with Shah ‘Abbās II, who mounted
the throne in 1642. Yet even earlier the principle was strongly entrenched in the
Safavid polity, more strongly than even in the Ottoman Empire, where seniority was adopted in 1617, and certainly more firmly than among the Mughals,
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who never “developed a strategy for limiting competition, so that brothers and
sons continued to compete for power until the end of the dynasty.”12 If the
Mughals never allowed pragmatism to prevail in their succession mechanism,
and if in the Ottoman case “pragmatism prevailed over principle in the matter
of succession,” Safavid pragmatism aligned with pre-Islamic principle to produce succession by the ruler’s direct offspring (Murphey, p. 103).13
Similarly, the status and stature of the Safavid shah, in his capacity of trustee
of the divine, remained near-unassailable. Indeed, despite the loss of legitimacy that had set in with Iran’s defeat against the Ottomans in 1514, the shah
continued to occupy a metaphysical stature and be revered as the indispensable apex of the political pyramid. The French missionary Sanson at the end
of the seventeenth century drew attention to this fact by claiming that the
Iranians thought of their ruler as the “most magnificent, the most powerful
and the most absolute ruler of all Asia” (Sanson, p. 3).
The harem system, of course, threw up weak, reclusive and pleasureseeking rulers; Morād III (r. 1574-95), Ahmed I (r. 1603-17) and his direct successors in the case of the Ottomans, and Solaymān (r. 1666-94) and Soltan Hosayn
(r. 1694-1722) in the case of the Safavids, all men who failed the test of kingship
by abdicating as warriors extending, defending and patrolling their territory.
Following the reign of Süleyman, the Ottomans engaged in what Colin Imber
calls “frozen legitimacy” by changing the role of the sultan from an active to
a symbolic warrior (Imber). This process entailed a decrease in his standing
and legitimacy, as reflected in the critical debates the issue evoked among
­contemporaries.14 In Iran, a similar process took place but it evolved along different lines. The last Safavid shahs, too, spent virtually all their time immured
in their palaces, invisible to the public and inaccessible to all but their most
immediate entourage. Since the empire was not just the shah but the shah
who actively engaged in battle, this led to a great loss of prestige and legitimacy
among his fellow warriors, the Qezelbash. Yet it was precisely the Qezelbash
who were sidelined and supplanted by new elements in society as the Safavids
became more urban and pacific. The shah, meanwhile, retaining his aura as
the indispensable apex of the system in his capacity as God’s trustee on earth,
remained pivotal to the “Iranian” conception of statecraft as articulated by
12 For the Safavid case, see Babayan, pp. 373-74. For the Ottomans, see Peirce, pp. 99-101. The
Mughal case is discussed in Blake, 2011, p. 220.
13 For a good discussion of the common roots as well as the historical differences in organizing succession between the Ottomans and the Safavids, see Mitchell.
14 See Karateke, with lists of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman campaigns and
the sultans’ role in these.
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late Safavid political and religious commentators (Sabzavāri, pp. 66-67; Nāji,
pp. 107-11).
The last three Safavid shahs were fortunate in having a number of capable
grand viziers by their side, most notably Mohammad Beg (in office 1654-64),
and Shaykh ʿAli Khan (in office 1669-89). Yet it was precisely the shah’s persistently exalted position which prevented these officials from becoming
alternative power holders. Grand viziers remained counselors, servants who
continued to operate at the sufferance of the ruler, rather than effective standins, holders of full executive power next to a feeble shah. Late Mughal India
exhibits a similar pattern. The descendants of the Iranian Zo’l-Feqār Khan,
namely Asad Khan and Zo’l-Feqār Khan, served the Mughal rulers Aurangzēb
and his successors for long periods of time, with Asad Khan holding on to
his position as grand vizier for more than thirty years (Chandra, 1959/2002,
pp. 40ff.). Yet, none of these acquired the executive power that might have
enabled them to reenergize the state as a bureaucratic and military engine in
ways seen in the Ottoman Empire. There, too, much of the seventeenth century is marked by weak sultanic power. But somehow the Ottomans made a
rather successful transition from what Stephen Dale (p. 248) calls a “dynastic
to a ministerial state.” The power vacuum created by a series of weak sultans
was filled by strong grand viziers such as (Sokollu) Mehmed Pasha (in office
1565-79), who served as the de facto ruler of the Ottoman state for much of the
reign of Selim II and Murad III; and ultimately by a dynasty of grand viziers,
the Köprülüs, who took up where the fait-néant sultan left off, and “rescued the
Ottoman state” by overseeing the system for much of the period between 1656
and 1735 (Dale, p. 267). The first of these was Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (in office
1656-61), who reversed the chaotic conditions prevailing at the time with great
brutality, killing 10,000, and pacifying the countryside (Baer, p. 76). His successor, Fāzel Ahmad (in office 1661-76), although less severe and a patron of the
arts, took on the fight against Venice, which led to the taking of Candia (Crete)
in 1666, and presided over renewed campaigning against the Austrians. Next
came Kara Mustafa. Ambitious, authoritarian and keenly engaged in the continuing anti-Austrian struggle, he was executed in 1683, following the Ottoman
defeat at Vienna earlier that year. Amcazada Köprülü Huseyn Pasha (in office
1697-1702) was an able administrator who, given a free hand by Sultan Mustafa
(Mostafā) II (r. 1695-1703), took measures to reform the fiscal and bureaucratic
system, leading to tax relief and attempts to settle nomads in areas where peasants were in short supply (Dale, p. 267).
The Ottoman Empire, in turn, witnessed a devolution of central power
accompanied by a rise of provincial rulers, local power holders who became
autonomous from the center without being able to fully break with the center,
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the Maʿans in Lebanon, the ʿAzms in Syria, the Jalilis in Mosul, the Mamluks
in Egypt. Most of these, especially the ones holding power in the urban
­centers of Syria and northern Iraq, lacked the military means to pose a threat
to the Ottoman state. Tied to Istanbul by the obligation to supply mercenary
troops to the sultan and enjoying the entitlements allocated to them by the
state, they mediated between central and local interests. They continued to
see themselves as subjects of the sultan and merely sought to optimize their
own income and status within the existing order. The so-called neo-Mamluk
regimes of Egypt, Palestine, Baghdad and Basra, were far more autonomous,
and Ottoman control in the fringe provinces of North Africa and the Arabian
peninsula was little more than nominal. Yet until the Western military and ideological intrusion of the early nineteenth century, even the peripheral rulers
made no serious attempts to secede from Istanbul, either because of internal
divisions, as in the case of Egypt, or because they feared being swallowed up by
Iran, as in the case of the overlords of Iraq (Khoury).15
C
Military Conditions
The state of the military in any system is naturally linked to economic and
political conditions. The Ottoman and Mughals continued to fight; they were
forced to in the case of Ottomans, against the Europeans, or chose to keep
expanding, as in the case of the Mughals who moved southward toward the
Deccan, intent on rooting out the region’s “infidel,” non-Muslim or “heretical,”
Shiʿi rulers. Even if the terrain and the climate of the south with its hills and
humidity were hardly conducive to the deployment of cavalry and artillery,
India’s geographical shape and the absence of insurmountable natural barriers, in addition to the fact that the northeastern frontier was closed, made moving south a natural inclination for Mughal rulers keen to enlarge their empire.
Sultan Aurangzēb may have been a bigot, but he was no weakling.16 Prior
to coming to power, Aurangzeb earned his stripes as an administrator, serving
as viceroy of the Deccan between 1636 and 1642, then as governor of Multan
and Sind from 1648 to 1652, and then again as viceroy, sobahdār, of the Deccan
15 Masters distinguishes four categories by origin: tribal/clan-based groups; neo-Mamluks;
Ottoman military forces; and the urban notables.
16 A famous anecdote, celebrated in Persian as well as Urdu verse, relates how, when
Aurangzeb was fifteen years of age he narrowly escaped death in an elephant fight and
successfully defended himself from a stampede. While his other brothers fled from the
arena, Aurangzeb’s valor was well appreciated by his father, Shah Jahān, who granted him
the title Bahādor and had him weighed in gold, presenting him with gifts worth 2 lakh
rupees.
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in 1652. He also took part in a campaign against Balkh in 1647, and participated
in the Mughal attempt to reconquer Qandahār from the Safavids between 1649
and 1652. As a ruler, Aurangzēb also personally led his troops into war, besieging Bijapur in 1685 and taking Golconda two years later (Sarkar, pp. 9ff.).
The Shivaji revolt of the 1660s, which was triggered in part by Aurangzēb’s
refusal to make meaningful concessions to the Marathas, posed a severe challenge to Mughal power and financial wherewithal. M. N. Pearson even sees in
the Maratha revolt the beginning of the decline of the Mughal state (Pearson).
They were disruptive, to be sure. The sack of Surat, the Mughals’ premier port
of economic import, and also suffused with religious significance for being the
point of departure for India’s hajj pilgrims, represented a direct affront to
the legitimacy of the dynasty. Yet these disruptions did not bring the Mughal
state down; they did not even prevent Aurangzēb from pursuing his Deccan
campaign.
The expansionist wars toward the south waged by the Mughals, on the
other hand, have been variously evaluated. Historians have viewed the “ceaseless wars” fought by Aurangzēb as especially ruinous to India’s economy and
environment, hastening the financial exhaustion of the empire (Sarkar, 2001).
More recently, J. F. Richards called the Mughal expansion profitable, providing
the state with enormous amounts of cash. In his words, from Akbar’s annexation of Malwa in 1561 until the fall of Golconda to the Mughals more than a
century later, every victory generated a large amount of plundered treasury
from the lands of defeated rulers, more than compensating for the expense of
the conquests (Richards, 1993, p. 185). Richards agrees that Aurangzēb’s draining wars against the Marathas dealt a severe blow to the central treasure, but
insists that the Mughal Empire was still “self-financing from its own resources,”
so that Mughal emperors did “not depend on loans from private financiers for
even the most expensive military campaigns” (Richards, 1990, p. 628). Upon
Aurangzēb’s death in 1707, his successor Bahādor Shah found the staggering
sum of 240 million rupees in unminted gold and silver in the imperial treasury
in Agra, suggesting that the Deccan campaign waged by his predecessor had
hardly depleted the realm’s resources (Richards 1993, p. 253). Upon Bahādor
Shah’s death in 1712 all had been spent, though (Chandra, 1959/2002, p. 99).
Turning to the Ottomans, Sultan Mehmed IV, also known as Avci Mehmed
(r. 1648-87), was a weak ruler who tried to make up for his failure to command
his troops in person by projecting a warrior ( ghāzi) king image and having
himself depicted as having recaptured power from harem women. But the age
of the warrior sultan was clearly over (Baer, pp. 145, 171). The Ottomans kept
fighting, and more than held their own during the so-called Candian War of
1644-66. The crowning event of this confrontation, the seizure of Crete in 1666,
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did not inaugurate a new string of military successes, though. Until about 1700,
the Ottomans managed to keep up with regard to artillery and siege warfare.
Yet, in the same period their war machine failed to keep pace, financially,
organizationally and technologically, with the military might of the European
powers, including that of the modernizing Russians (Aksan, pp. 90, 95). The
result was a string of defeats beginning with their rout by the Habsburgs at
St Gotthard in 1664 and their failure to take Vienna in 1683. Besides, even if the
Ottoman victory over the Russians at the Pruth in 1711 proved that defeat was
not foreordained, the Treaty of Karlowitz twelve years earlier had really set the
tone for the future by ending centuries of imperial expansion and forcing the
Ottomans to retreat from large swaths of Central Europe.
The decline and collapse of the Safavids can most definitely not be ascribed
to “imperial overstretch.” Aside from Qezelbash forays deep into Anatolia in
the early phase, under Shah Esmāʿil I, the invasion and incorporation of the
lower parts of the Caucasus under Shah Tahmāsb and Shah ʿAbbās I, and the
intermittent occupation of Iraq, the Safavids never sought to extend their
dominion far beyond the plateau. This was partly a function of Iran’s topography, which set natural limits to expansion. Iraq, hot and humid, was alien
territory for the Qezelbash used to the bracing climate of the plateau; the vast
eastern desert expanses were an unattractive target, effectively putting India’s
fertile heartland out of reach. Almost everywhere, a lack of water made campaigning difficult.17
But the relative lack of expansionist zeal may also have to do with changes
in the make-up of the Safavid elite, involving a shift in gravity from the redtoothed tribal Qezelbash who lived for and by war, to the Tajiks, the more
urban-based ethnic Iranians, and the so-called gholāms, especially the
Armenians, who came to supplant the Qezelbash as the main administrators. The stake in peace and stability these groups represented was reinforced
by the outright pacific sentiments exhibited by the women and the eunuchs
of the royal harem, who came to take on a decisive role in executive power
at the court. This new temperament became manifest in 1638-39 when, in an
extraordinary moment, the Safavids gave up on war (with their western neighbors) voluntarily, by concluding the Peace of Zohab (or Qasr-e Shirin), after
ceding Mesopotamia to the Ottomans. The Persian-language chronicles are
explicit in listing a desire for peace and prosperity as the driving force behind
this agreement (Vāla Qazvini Esfahāni, pp. 531, 585; Tafreshi, p. 174). The underlying motives were part strategic calculation, the realization that the Safavid
17 A lack of water had always been the most crucial problem for the army, and in the Safavid
period matters were no different; see Briant, p. 55.
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army was no match for the Ottoman military, part cost-cutting calculus. It is
remarkable that, the Treaty of Zohab and the potential benefits of the attendant “peace dividend” notwithstanding, the Safavids descended into fiscal ruin
shortly thereafter. In the Ottoman Empire at least, as in a Western European
country like France under Richelieu and Colbert, taxes were raised manifold
for the (partial) purpose of waging ever more ambitious and costly wars. Yet
the military consumed an extraordinary two-thirds of Ottoman state income
in 1669-70 (Faroqhi, 1994, II, p. 541).
The inevitable result was a neglect of the military. An army that doesn’t fight
loses its readiness and, eventually, its ability to fight. There is ample evidence
for the woeful state that the Iranian armed forces had fallen to in the late seventeenth century. In a last demonstration of military prowess the Safavids
still managed to retake Qandahār from the (relatively weak) Mughals in 1648.
Otherwise, a lack of serious adversaries bought them some time, during which
they deluded themselves into thinking that their country’s physical environment worked in their favor. Enjoying strategic depth, like the Russians, they
felt safe behind the vast deserts and the formidable mountain ranges that surround the Iranian heartland, which is the main reason why they had never
fortified the cities of the interior.18
D
Ideological Conditions
It is here that the similarities are most apparent and poignant. Religion proclaimed and imposed as state ideology became more prominent in all three
cases, as it did in contemporary Russia, where the “Old Believers” came to prevail in part because of weak (secular) leadership. The well-known Kadizadeli
movement in the Ottoman Empire goes back to the preaching of the scholar
Birgili Mehmed (d. 1573), who inspired Kadizade Mehmed (d. 1635) to take up
his call for the need to purify Islam in the early seventeenth century. Going
through various phases, the movement manifested itself most clearly in the
capital and had its greatest effect on state policy beginning in 1660, when
the blame for a devastating fire in Istanbul was put on the Jews, who were
expelled from the center of the city and saw many of their synagogues burned.
Sultan Mehmed IV, who had a close relationship with the movement, at this
point shed his former “feminine” garb and turned more “pious.” The result was
18 The Polish missionary Krusinski, II, p. 199, offers the example of the Ottoman Mesopotamian campaign of 1638, when the Iranians had allowed their enemy to advance to within
fifteen days of Isfahan, after which they “turned off the springs everywhere before and
after the army,” so that “about half of the [Ottoman] army perished from thirst in the
desert.” For Iran’s lack of fortified cities, see Matthee, 1996, and idem, 2012, chap. 5.
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growing pressure on non-Muslims to convert. In 1696 a sultanic rescript abolished the common law (kanun) and introduced the Shariʿa (Baer, chs. 9 and 11;
also see Zilfi and Evstatiev).
Another aspect of the greater prominence of religious forces in the late seventeenth century is criticism of the same Sultan Mehmed IV, who, after his
army’s defeat at Vienna in 1683, turned into a sedentary monarch. The Ottoman
ulama openly denounced his lifestyle, admonishing him to abandon his obsessive hunting and inviting him to sit on the throne and obey God’s commands
(Baer, p. 233). Beyond the sultan and his conduct, the Kadizadeli movement
blamed military defeats abroad and economic difficulties on the political
establishment’s affiliation with Sufi orders. Mehmed IV reacted to this rebuke
by closing Istanbul’s coffeehouses, although he only implemented ideas that
suited his authoritarian rule, maintaining a close relationship with Sufis (Baer,
pp. 68, 70). Despite the problems this type of pressure tended to cause for nonMuslim inhabitants of the empire, the Kadizadeli movement does not seem to
have an adverse effect on the recruitment of large numbers of originally nonMuslims into the rank of the bureaucracy and the military.
The Mughal state at this time was ruled by the intolerant Sultan Aurangzēb,
whose policies were a far cry from those of his forebears, despite efforts by
modern scholars to rehabilitate him. Shortly after coming to power, he
recruited mohtasebs, censors, officials charged with the maintenance of public order, from the ranks of the clerical forces. He also issued various decrees
proscribing practices at variance with the tenets of Islam, such as drinking
and dancing. In 1668, he outlawed Hindu religious fairs, and the following
year he forbade the construction and repair of Hindu temples, presumably
in response to reports about the teaching of false doctrines in those places
(Eaton, pp. 265-66).19 He also is on record as having destroyed many Hindu
temples. He may have been less motivated by religious zeal than by the need to
raise revenue when in 1679 he reimposed the poll tax (jezya), on non-­Muslims,
but the effect was divisive nonetheless, unleashing rebellions among the
Rajputs and Marathas (Chandra, 2003; Kruijtzer, pp. 198-99). These practices
have been contested. It has been argued that, despite his personal dislike of
Shiʿis, Aurangzēb employed many officials of Iranian extraction, that he continued the practice of his predecessors of conferring land grants (jāgirs) on
Hindu temples, and that the percentage of foreign-born Hindu office holders
(mansabdārs) reached one-third during his reign. Pragmatism reflected in a
lack of rigidity and a measure of flexibility is also suggested by his decision in
19 Eaton, p. 266, concludes that, . . . “Aurangzeb’s policies respecting temples within imperial
domains generally followed those of his predecessors.”
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1705 to suspend the jezya in the Deccan, ostensibly “on account of the distress
caused by war and famine in the region,” but quite possibly to accommodate
the Marathas (Chandra, 2003, p. 323). Jahāndār Shah (r. 1712-13), abandoned the
doctrinaire policies of Aurangzēb. Assisted by chief minister Zu’l-Feqār Khan,
he abolished the jezya altogether and made concession to the Rajputs as well
as to the Marathas (Chandra, 1959/2002, pp. 124-25).
In late Safavid Iran, as in the Ottoman Empire, one witnesses an unmistakable erosion of royal legitimacy. A divine aura continued to surround the shah,
but unhappiness with the dissolute life style of the ruler caused some members
of the ulama to grumble that, while kingship remained necessary, the shah
should be no more than the deputy of a mojtahed, a cleric of exemplary character and surpassing wisdom (Chardin, V, pp. 215-16; Matthee, 2005, pp. 89-90).
Such criticism became more widespread under the last two Safavid monarchs.
The transitions of power in 1666 and 1694 were peaceful, but popular criticism
of the shah’s conduct grew louder, to the point where the meek and pleasureloving Shah Soltān Hosayn faced not just calls to have him replaced by his
brother, but even a coup attempt (Matthee, 2012, pp. 199-201).
The late Safavid period stands out in particular for the rise of doctrinaire
religious forces, exemplified in the dour dogmatism of Mohammad-Bāqer
Majlesi (d. 1699), the shaykh-al-Eslām (top religious authority) of Isfahan under
Shah Soltān Hosayn and the main cleric of his time, author of the 110-­volume
Behār al-anwār. Soltān Hosayn, pusillanimous, uxurious and exceedingly
devout, is said to have ruled under his spell, and, alongside the harem eunuchs,
Majlesi had a strong influence on state affairs for as long as he was alive (ʿAbdal-Ḥosayn Ḵātunābādi, pp. 552, 556, 559). Like Aurangzēb in Mughal India,
Soltān Hosayn at Majlesi’s behest issued a series of decrees outlawing practices
abhorrent to Islam in its strict interpretation, from drinking and gambling to
the strolling in public of women unaccompanied by male guardians (Nasiri,
pp. 35ff). Just as in India, the growing influence of clerics and the official focus
on religious propriety did not prevent non-Muslim, in this case non-Shiʿi, elements from playing a role in the state structure. Indeed, the longest-serving
grand vizier under Soltān Hosayn, Fath-ʿAli Khan Daghestāni (in office 1715-20),
was a self-proclaimed Sunni who hailed from the tribal, fervently Sunni region
of Daghestān. Yet the new orientation did cause a deepening rift in government circles, especially since it created conditions in which the religiously
underpinned interests and claims of Shariʿa-minded forces were no longer balanced by the “agenda” of a “secular,” pragmatic shah able and willing to keep
these at bay.
The late Safavids may be said to have conducted a policy of religious imperialism, which differed from the earlier, episodic intolerance under Shah Esmāʿil,
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Shah Tahmāsb and Shah ʿAbbās I in that it was more consequential for being
more systemic and comprehensive. It contained a strong anti-Sufi element,
as was true in the Ottoman case. This new orientation had repercussions for
all minorities (Armenians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and the Sunni inhabitants of
the realm) in the form of higher taxes and growing harassment, forcing especially the Armenians, the only “minority” with resources and contacts outside
of Iran, increasingly to seek refuge in Russia and Italy. But it manifested itself
above all in anti-Sunni propaganda and policies. The Ottoman Empire is said to
have owed its longevity to “pragmatism, flexibility and negotiation,” enabling
it to “co-opt and incorporate into the state the social groups that rebelled
against it” (Pamuk, 2004, p. 228).20 The same tools had allowed the Safavids
to maintain control over their realm or at least to keep it from disintegrating.
A policy based on a divide-et-impera strategy that mixed reward and retribution with flexibility, a willingness to tolerate and accommodate both alien and
wayward indigenous elements, had enabled Shah ʿAbbās I and, to a certain
extent his immediate successors, Safi I and ʿAbbās II, to wield power over disparate groups and interests. The last two rulers of the dynasty, Solaymān and
Soltān Hosayn, lost this insight and capacity. The first was cruel and erratic; the
second was meek and gullible; they were both narcissists, withdrawn, unable
to stay above the fray, to tamp down the endemic feuding and factionalism
between Qezelbash and gholām forces, between the eunuchs and the gholāms,
and among individual men of large ambitions and outsized egos and appetites
(Krusinski, I, pp. 90-92, 106-108). Factionalism and its corrosive effects in the
form of endemic divisiveness in the ranks of the bureaucracy and the army
became rife under their watch. The hard-line religious stance adopted by the
state at the turn of the seventeenth century only exacerbated the growing cleavages: It pitted the center against the periphery, and especially the tribal periphery, which happened to be mostly Sunni. Just as Russia’s Nikonian Schism and
the religious intransigence it represented contributed to the Cossack uprising
led by Sten’ka Razin in the 1670s, so the doctrinaire forms of Shiʿism that came
to prevail in Safavid court circles antagonized the tribal fringe to the point of
provoking rebellion among its inhabitants (Parker, p. 180).
The result was a fatal weakening of allegiance and loyalty in the vulnerable,
mostly Sunni borderlands. Loyalty was the scarcest of commodities, especially
in the frontier zones, and the empire could only acquire it by literally buying it, through accommodation, by way of tributary arrangements, and by giving the tribal periphery a stake in the core enterprise. Yet the Safavids might
20 For a recent essay questioning pragmatism as the foundation of Ottoman policy-making,
see Dağli.
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have saved their state if they had continued to accommodate their periphery
by honoring existing tributary arrangements with its tribal inhabitants, the
Lezghis in the Caucasus, the Uzbeks in Khorasan, the Baluchis and the Afghans
in Baluchistan and Sistan. There are strong indications that all of these might
have been bought off. The Lezghi raids into the lowlands of the Caucasus in
the early eighteenth century were really meant to remind the shah of their
vassal status and the consequences of a refusal to honor them with the robes
of honor and the agreed-upon annuity this status entitled them to (Dourry
Efendy, pp. 41-42). The Baluchis kept their raiding practices in check in return
for a tributary stipend from Isfahan until the Safavids stopped disbursing the
money. The Afghans, too, were ready to “secure their retreat” by accepting to
be “bought off,” which would have meant Safavid acknowledgement of Afghan
sovereignty over the Qandahār region and the payment of a substantial sum of
money to sustain their troops. Isfahan, no longer attuned to the time-­honored
ways and means of sustaining an empire, rejected the offer (Krusinski, II,
p. 209). It was the cardinal mistake of the Safavids to neglect this policy maxim,
to alienate especially their frontier zone through financial shortsightedness
and religious exclusion precisely at a time when the loyalty of its inhabitants
was most needed.
‘Ali Mohammad Hazin Lahiji, the man of letters from Gilan who lived
through and bore witness to, the dying days of the Safavid state, was right to
attribute the fall of Isfahan to a negligent elite and an enfeebled army which by
the 1720s had not seen war for close to a century (Hazin Lahijani, p. 190). When
the assault came, in the form of a small number of Baluchi tribesmen followed
by equally small cohorts of Afghans, the Safavids, militarily weakened, politically disorganized, and unable to count on the tribal marches, put up little
resistance and dissolved.
Conclusion
After the Safavids fell in 1722, the name, reputation and legitimizing force of
the dynasty continued to resonate for half a century or more (Perry). Safavid
Iran, moreover, lives on in the present in various tangible and intangible ways,
politically as well as culturally. The Twelver Shiʿism proclaimed by Shah Esmāʿil
as his realm’s official faith endures as Iran’s state religion; most of the territory
the Safavids conquered continues to be part of modern Iran; for all the persistent linguistic diversity on the plateau, Persian became the undisputed tongue
of the country’s administrators and clerics and, eventually, of the majority of
the population; and to many Iranians the reign of the Safavids represents the
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last time when their country flourished as a proud and independent country.
Yet even if all this endured as part of the Iranian “empire of the mind,” the state
the Safavids oversaw collapsed; and no exposition on lasting artistic brilliance
or continuous religious vitality can substitute for an analysis of the reasons
why it did.
This essay has subjected Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal
state to a comparative analysis on the basis of an assumed degree of commensurability centering on shared principles of statecraft, military organization,
revenue collection and commercial policy. Its aim was not to demonstrate that
these polities fell away from some imaginary ideal state, but to establish an
explanatory framework for the inarguable weakening of their political command structure, economic wherewithal, and military resilience in the course
of the seventeenth century. It has argued that an intertwined combination of a
harsh natural environment, an inherently poor resource base, military neglect
and ideological rigidity accounts for the fatal weakening of the Safavid state at
the turn of the eighteenth century.
Sparsely populated, predominantly tribal even at the center, and inherently
low on resources, Safavid Iran was much more vulnerable than either of its two
neighbors. These traits severely impeded the centralizing capacity of the state,
making it far more circumscribed than that of the Ottomans and the Mughals.
Iran’s lack of easily exploitable precious metal deposits, causing a woeful shortage of current coin, exacerbated this weakness. This was an endemic problem
that defied easy solutions. Like the Ottomans and the Mughals, who faced
similar deficits, the Safavids employed multiple measures to tackle the problem. They sought to ban or tax the export of bullion and specie; they tampered
with the coinage, lowering its weight or its precious metal content. Yet, in the
absence of fundamental reform, such measures only worsened the problem
by impeding trade, sowing confusion and encouraging subterfuge among merchants and producers. The Safavids also converted large swaths of their realm
to crown land, hoping to increase the flow of revenue to the center. Yet maximizing the amount of crown land was similar to tampering with the coinage in
that it provided short-term revenue while causing long-term financial damage.
The recurrent wars the Safavids fought against the Ottomans only aggravated Iran’s impecuniousness. There is no question that the need to curb costs
was a factor in the decision to make peace with Istanbul in 1639. This should
have resulted in a “peace dividend.” Yet, the money saved was not necessarily
used productively; much of it was wasted on royal panoply or hoarded in the
coffers of the shah and the elite. An unintended consequence of the resulting stability, meanwhile, was a decrease in the fighting capacity of the army.
Temporarily obscured because the Iranians felt safe behind the deserts and
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mountain ranges that framed a plateau that momentarily was on no one’s
marching route, Safavid military weakness was fully exposed when the first
real challenge appeared on the horizon in the early eighteenth century.
In a fateful vicious cycle, military neglect went hand in hand with the
conversion of the shah from an ambulant warrior-shah to a fait-néant ruler
ensconced in his palace, susceptible to the blandishments of eunuchs and the
exhortations of the ulama. Unlike the Mughals, the Safavids managed to limit
filial competition and thus the often bloody internecine strife that marked the
transfer of power from one ruler to the next. This, in addition to the divine
aura that continued to surround the Safavid monarchs ensured peaceful successions and contributed to overall stability. But the price was weak executive
power for which even the most energetic grand vizier was no real substitute.
This retreat of the body politic’s only sovereign power unleashed the forces of
factionalism in the ranks of the governing elite, gholāms, women, and eunuchs
who worked at cross purposes, intent on undermining each other, obstructing the flow of scarce resources to a neglected and depleted army, loath to see
any general gain prestige and power at their expense by succeeding on the
battlefield.
The loss of military vigilance and the lack of oversight in administrative
management, as well as a growing emphasis on outward religiosity, combined
to antagonize the tribal, Sunni dominated periphery. Given the vastness and
desolation of especially Iran’s eastern half, which may have been “conquered”
but was never incorporated, an Ottoman-type policy of seeking to control
the tribes by sedentarizing them would have been utterly impossible. Yet the
Safavids might have saved their state if they had continued to accommodate
their periphery by honoring existing tributary arrangements with its tribal
inhabitants. The fragile bonds of loyalty, always predicated on a combined lure
of money and the fear of reprisal, thus snapped. Iran, hollowed out from the
inside, exhausted by elite infighting, succumbed to what C. A. Bayly has called
the first of the eighteenth-century tribal “breakouts”: a westward expedition
by a small band of tribal warriors who marched into the heartland relatively
unopposed, after which they appeared before a capital that was “quite defenceless, having only a slight wall around it, built of mud dried by the sun . . . and
broken down in many places” (Bell, I, p. 121).21 Mughal India would soon follow,
partly under the weight of the same forces, even though it received its mortal
blow only with the next tribal breakout, Nāder Shah’s invasion of India, and
had an afterlife that lasted, in some ways, until 1857. The Ottomans, too, came
out of the seventeenth century severely weakened, politically, financially and
militarily; yet they persisted and battled on, sustained by a more productive
21 For the tribal breakouts, see Bayly, 1989, pp. 38ff.
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balance between central and peripheral interests and influence, an army that
remained, perforce, alert and well equipped, and an intermittent array of competent grand viziers who were able to pick up where weak sultans left off.
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