3.2: Gunpowder Empires- Safavids

Introduction

The Safavid Empire was a close contemporary of the Ottoman Empire, and while there are significant differences between the two in terms of the manner of their formation, the empires also went through some of the same broad trends. The emergence of the Safavid demonstrates the enormous opportunity that existed for charismatic men who could attract followers and command their loyalty. Unlike Osman, whose success as a ghazi was his main selling point, the Safaviyya Order that would eventually evolve into an imperial dynasty, made its name as founders and spiritual leaders of an idiosyncratic Sufi sect (Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam often based around a spiritual leader or sheykh). Research suggests that support for the Ottoman Empire grew because its military successes made them “fashionable”. The Safavid, on the other hand, won adherents through the charisma of its leaders and the power of their ideology. Figure 3.2.1 is an image of the Shah Mosque's vaulted entrance with downward facing honeycomb patterns. The entire facade is covered with tile mosaics and calligraphy. This mosque in Isfahan is one of the greatest architectural masterpieces of the Safavid period.

Figure 3.2.1: "Shah Mosque of Isfahan," is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Safavids

Europeans gave the name “Safavid” to this Persian empire, which was a bastardization of the pronunciation of their name, calling the various Safavid traders and nobles “Sophis”, which in Greek meant “wise one.” This name shows not only the relationship between Europe - England in particular - and Safavid Persia, but also the impression of the Safavids over their neighbors who were often referred to as “Turks,” which became synonymous with someone who was lazy, loutish, or a thief. This didn’t necessarily mean that the Safavids were held in any sort of higher esteem by the Europeans, only that they were different from other Islamic empires of the time.  Evidence of this is shown in the relationship between the Safavids and their non-Islamic trading partners, such as the Dutch and British East India companies, the English brothers the Sherleys, and French and Muscovy traders, all who aided the Safavids in finding ways around the Ottoman middlemen, often to their own detriment or the detriment of their countrymen. 

Sheyk Safi, after whom the dynasty was named, founded his order in the 1250s in what is now Azerbaijan. Interestingly, the Safavid family was almost certainly not from a Turkic background, but as they grew more important, they were able to gain greater legitimacy by intermarrying into the families of local Turkic rulers. Beginning with Safi’s original ideas, his successors gradually developed a militant ghazi movement in which they were treated as almost divine figures by their core followers known as the Qizilbash (“red-heads” due to their distinctive red head wear). The Qizilbash support for the Safavid was based on a mix of ideology, a reaction to Ottoman attempts at centralization, and the charismatic authority of the Safavid spiritual masters. The ideology of the movement would have seemed shocking and completely unacceptable to anyone schooled in more traditional Islamic theology. However, the radical nature of Safavid doctrine helped inspire the passionate support of their followers as well as the adoption of a distinct identity. At the same time, the extremism of the movement may have kept it relatively small by alienating potential supporters.

While the Qizilbash were a key source of Safavid power, they would also serve as a check on the ability of the dynasty to centralize power. As loyal as the Qizilbash were to the Safavid, they also had expectations about their proper role in the empire. That meant status, of course, but also a near-monopoly over the military, a key role in provincial governance, and a presence at the center of power as well. Having a group of supporters who regarded the ruler as a near-divine figure was certainly helpful, but there were other aspects of the relationship that were more destabilizing. A core belief of the Qizilbash was that the Safavid Dynasty was the fount of charismatic authority. This means that each generation produced a figure whose personal charisma marked them as the rightful successor to the previous ruler. The Qizilbash were thus loyal to the Safavid as a whole, but there were still questions about which particular heir, whether son or daughter, was deserving of their support. This very issue was the cause of two civil wars within the empire during the 16th century. The core basis of the Safavid rise to power was ultimately a check on their ability to consolidate their rule on a more stable and centralized authority. The Safavid would thus have to temper the most radical parts of their ideology and define their power in a new manner. 

An important step in this direction had occurred by the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Shah Ismail I began transforming the dynasty’s once idiosyncratic Sufism, which had attracted the Qizilbash in the first place, into a more theologically acceptable Shi’ism. Today Sunni and Shi’a Islam are generally regarded in oppositional terms. In the sixteenth century, however, the two main branches of Islam did not yet represent clearly differentiated religious identities. In some ways, it was the Safavid and their rivalry with the Sunni Ottoman Empire that helped establish those identities more clearly. For the Safavid, Shi’ism was useful because it fit with their millenarian beliefs, allowed them to continue to claim semi-divine status for their leader, and made them distinct compared to the neighboring Islamic states. Just as importantly, although Shi’ism differed from Sunni Islam in important ways and had significantly fewer followers, it still had a long historical and intellectual tradition from which the Safavid could borrow. By recruiting from an already existing group of well-regarded religious scholars, they were able to bring into the empire men who could provide the regime with a kind of ideological legitimacy that could appeal to segments of the population who may have been alienated by the most radical and heretical aspects of their older ideology. 

For much of the fifteenth century, the Safavids were more of a movement than a state, although one with increasing military might. It was with Ismail I (r.1501-1524) that the Safavid was transformed into an empire. Upon taking power Ismail inherited an ideological tradition that was associated with, “beliefs so extreme that they are difficult to reconcile with monotheism.” (Findley, 124) In one of his poems, for instance, Ismail declared:

Adam has donned new clothes: God has come! God has come!

My name is Shah Ismail. I am God’s mystery. I am the leader of all the ghazis.

My mother is Fatima [Muhammad’s daughter], my father is Ali [Muhammad’s son-in-law] … 

Despite the messianic claims of this poem, Ismail’s actions early in his reign make it clear that he had, “an awareness that to unify and centralize his domains it would be imperative to alter the nature of Safavid legitimacy and to forge a uniform religion: heterodoxies like his own had to be contained.” Thus, while it was Shaykh Safi who gave the empire its name it was unquestionably Ismail who created it. In addition to the establishment of a more doctrinaire Shi’ism as the ideology of his state, he was also responsible for significant territorial expansion. By 1510, when he was still just 22, he had conquered all of modern-day Iran, portions of Mesopotamia, Armenia, and the eastern part of Anatolia. 

Acquiring an empire forced Ismail and his successors to move away from many of the original elements that had made the Safavid powerful. Like the Ottoman ultimately had to split with their ghazis in order to create a more regular and rational imperial order, so too did the Safavid have to renounce their Qizilbash followers. By some accounts the Qizilbash were so devoted to Ismail that they went into battle unarmored believing that his miraculous powers would shield them from harm. This type of loyalty was vital to Ismail’s success in capturing his empire but became more inconvenient when it came to ruling that empire. Or, to use the old axiom, “a state captured on horseback could not be governed on horseback.” Thus, the centrality of the Qizilbash had to be reduced. Ismail adopted the traditional Persian title of Shah and imported Shi’a scholars from Bahrain and Lebanon. However, it would prove impossible at this early stage, even for a ruler as revered as Ismail, to do anything about the Qizilbash. They were simply too important to the military success of the nascent empire and wielded far too much authority for Ismail or his immediate successors to be able to move against them. Indeed, after Ismail’s death in 1524 the Qizilbash contested each of the successions for the rest of the sixteenth century. The result was a twelve-year civil war at the beginning of the reign of Tahmasb (r.1524-1576) and another fourteen-year conflict (1575-1590) upon his death. By the time of Shah Abbas the Great (r. 1590-1629) it was clear that an orderly and centralized empire could not coexist with the continuing power of the Qizilbash. Shah Abbas was finally able to counter their influence by building up a large force of slave-soldiers (called ghulam but similar to the Ottoman janissaries) made up of men captured from the Caucasus region. The ghulam could both fill the military-administrative roles that the qizilbash once had while also giving the state the confidence to stand up to them if they resisted the reduction of their role. By weakening the qizilbash, Shah Abbas and his successors could also unify the empire’s ideology. For most of the sixteenth century the shahs had to play up the charismatic messianism preferred by the qizilbash while presenting a more orthodox shi’ism for the ulema and the Persian elite. With the qizilbash now marginalized, Shah Abbas could now establish himself at the head of a doctrinally purer Shi’ism . 

Since Ismail’s time the Safavid had attempted to promote Shi’ism as the only legitimate belief of the empire. Unlike the Ottoman, who saw diversity as a norm to be respected rather than a challenge to be eradicated, Shi’ism was central to the legitimacy of the Safavid. Thus its language and assumptions had to be adopted universally. This was certainly not something that happened instantly. Some scholars suggest that the empire’s population was not majority Shi’i until the 18th century, but at least one contemporary chronicler, Janabadi, states that in the 1610’s, when he began writing his book, “there was no sign of those bid‘at [wrongful innovations] and deviation [i.e., Sunni Islam] in Iran.” Whatever the case, the fact is that when the Safavid came to power in the sixteenth century, Shi’ism had no special hold on the population of the empire outside of a few specific cities. At least by the empire’s end in 1722, however, its territory had become the global center of Shi’ism. The fact that the modern nation of Iran, which encompasses much of the old Safavid territory, continues to contain the largest Shi’ite population in the world attests to the long-term consequences of Safavid rule while also being suggestive of the homogenizing potential of early-modern empires. 

Figure 3.2.2: "Hondius Map of Persia (1606-1636)," Jodocus Hondius, in the Public Domain.

To make another point about the impact of early-modern empires on globalization, we can look at the competitive interactions between the Safavid and Ottoman. As we’ve seen, the former first gained prominence in association with its radical, almost heretical, ideology of millenarian Sufism centered on the charismatic messianism of the Safavid leader. The Ottoman, by contrast, arose through conquest while eschewing a clear ideological perspective. By the sixteenth century, the Ottoman were well into their golden age as a still-expanding dynamic empire based around a clear set of imperial institutions. Among the many threats they still faced were the Qizilbash of eastern Anatolia whose numbers grew, especially during the time of Ismail I, due to the attractiveness of the Safviyya ideology. The perceived threat was great enough that sixteenth-century Ottoman rulers began to promote their own messianic identities more actively. Suleiman the Magnificent, for instance, took on titles such as “the Messiah of the end time,” and “the master of the auspicious conjunction,” while also emphasizing that his military victories demonstrated that he was the God-chosen ruler who could establish universal monarchy. The irony is that while Ottoman rulers were desperately trying to establish an ideological basis that could inspire their subjects to a level of passion and devotion comparable to that which the Qizilbash had for the Safavid, the Safavid themselves were struggling to become more like the Ottoman. As they became the masters of their own empire, the ideological basis of their power came to be seen as an impediment to the kind of regular and orderly rule that the Ottoman were so adept at. The result was that these two opposing states became more like each other over the course of the sixteenth century. The authority of the Safavids became more institutionalized and less ideological at the same time that the institutional foundation of the Ottoman state became more ideological. As we continue to explore other states in the early-modern era, we will continue to see the way that the homogenizing effects of interaction played out in different contexts.

Stifled by the rise of the Ottoman empire, Persian trade with Europe became another reason for clashes with their western neighbor.  Persia developed a thriving silk production during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing with the Far East territories in China and Japan. However, as the Ottoman power grew, they used high taxes and embargoes against the Persian merchants to prevent this silk and other trade goods from reaching markets in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, often playing them off of the Venetians in the game of middlemen. A war between Sultan Suleyman and Shah Ishmael in 1532 would not only force the Persians to find other means of trade to the west but also reduce the amount of territory they held.  

The height of the Safavid Empire in Iranian history has been considered the reign of Shah Abbas I (r. 1588-1629), also known as “Abbas the Great”.  His connection with European powers, first through the British East India Trading Company and later directly with the English through the Sherley brothers who were minor nobility from the Elizabethan court, allowed Persian goods to circumvent the Ottoman middlemen and aggression towards Persia.  This didn’t stop the Ottomans, of course; Ottoman troops remained there in the early part of his reign until he had them expelled and created Persia’s first standing military. Here is where Abbas “borrowed” from the Ottomans, as his military also came from conquered slaves in a manner similar to the Janissary corps of the Ottoman sultans.

Like other regions around the Asian continent, more art and intellectual study had an opportunity to flourish within Abbas’s empire; this was one of his four reforms, which also included getting rid of corrupt government officials scattered across the territory, and a military loyal only to him.  Shiraz became an artistic center, allowing writing and poetry to grow; the poet Rumi, who lived during the thirteenth century, saw a renaissance of his writings, and his gravesite in the city became a center of pilgrimage.  Shah Abbas’s capital city of Isfahan saw the construction of the Shah Mosque (see Figure 3.2.1), which would provide inspiration for continued architectural art pieces, especially mosques, throughout the Persian empire. These complex pieces would showcase the richness of Abbas’s territories and led to the development of geopolitical and trade connections outside of the Dar-al-Islam. Although not as well known as their neighbors, the Safavids nevertheless made their mark on the Asian continent. 

Review Questions

• What differences do you see between the various empires in this region, geographically, topographically, and population-wise? What impact do you think these differences had on their interactions with each other?
• What were some of the reasons why the Ottoman Empire was able to expand in comparison to the Safavid and Mughal empires? How did this affect the development of these empires?