Iran in World History

Maydan-e Shah
, now 
Maydan-e Khomeini
; also known as 
Naghsh-e 
jahan
square) with the Royal Mosque at one end and the entrance to 
the central bazaar at the other—dates to Shah Abbas’s time.
This urban design reflected the growing connection between the 
merchant class and the Shi‘ite Ulama linking economic power with 
spiritual authority. Among other things, the religious establishment 
relied on bazaar merchants to fund the construction of mosques and 
seminaries. This alliance between two powerful social classes would 
become central to Iran’s economic and political life over the coming 
centuries and is still operative today.

---

I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
78
The royal palace known as the Ali Ghapu (Grand Gate) stands on 
the western side of the maydan, facing the delicate Shaykh Lutfullah 
mosque on the east. Farther west of the Ali Ghapu a four-mile tree-lined 
avenue, the Chahar Bagh, stretches south to the Zayandeh River, which 
is crossed by the Allahverdi Khan Bridge, also known as the Bridge of 
Thirty-Three Arches.
While international commerce flourished under Abbas, it fell 
increasingly into the hands of Europeans, especially the Indian Ocean 
trade that linked Europe with India and China. Abbas was able to take 
the Persian Gulf port city of Gambron from the Portuguese in 1616, 
renaming it after himself (Bandar Abbas), but the Persian navy was no 
match for the English or the Dutch. With the decline of the Silk Road, 
overland trade shifted to a northwest-southeast axis, linking Iran with 
Muscovite Russia on the one hand and Mughal India on the other. 
Indian merchant communities grew throughout Iran as a result.
Abbas was succeeded by a series of weak rulers, most of whom 
were addicted to opium and rarely left the harem. The resulting power 
Naghsh-e Jahan Square in Esfahan was built by orders of Shah Abbas I. Shaykh 
Lotfollah mosque is on the left, the Royal Mosque center-right, and Ali Ghapu 
palace to the right; the entrance to the main bazaar is behind the viewer, 
opposite the Royal Mosque. The square, which evolved from the ancient Iranian 
garden model, is considered by many the pinnacle of urban design throughout 
the Muslim world. 
Pascal Xavier Coste
, Monuments modernes de la Perse 
mesurés, dessinés et décrits 
(Paris: A. Morel, [1867])

---

Th e Tu r k s
79
vacuum was filled by court intrigues, usually instigated by royal women, 
and increasingly by the Shi‘ite clergy under the leadership of the chief 
cleric (
shaykh ol-eslam
), Mohammad Bagher Majlesi. Majlesi used his 
power to suppress all competing forms of religious authority, especially 
the Sufi orders, illuminationist philosophers who saw truth as light, 
and rival clerics of the Akhbari school who relied on traditions rather 
than innovative thought. (Majlesi’s group, the Usulis, favored a flexible 
approach to jurisprudence, which gave more freedom of interpretation 
to clerics such as himself.) Majlesi also oversaw the closing down of 
taverns, cafés, and brothels, as well as the banning of opium smoking, 
gambling, public music and dancing, and sodomy—an exercise in social 
control that eerily foreshadowed the Islamic revolution of 1979.
The political role of the Usuli clerics persisted up to the time of the 
last Safavid ruler, Soltan Hossein (reigned 1694–1722). A few years 
into his reign Soltan Hossein turned over power to his great-aunt and 
her cohort, retreating like his predecessors into the sex-and-drugs life 
of the harem. Revolts arose throughout the empire in response to his 
weak rule. In 1722, an Afghan army laid siege to the Safavid capital, 
Esfahan.

---

F
ather Tadeusz Jan Krusinski, a Polish Jesuit missionary who lived 
through the Afghan seige of Esfahan in 1722, describes the scenes 
of horror suffered by the city’s starving inhabitants: “Shoe-leather 
being boiled was for a time the common food; at last they came to eat 
human flesh, and the streets being full of carcasses, some had their 
thighs cut off privately . . . several children were stolen and eaten, half 
dead as they were of famine.”
1
After six months of starvation and misery, a tearful Soltan Hossein 
finally emerged from the city gates of Esfahan and personally capit-
ulated to the Afghan leader Mahmud Ghilzai. After the fall of the 
capital, Iranian Shi‘as were severely persecuted by their Sunni Pushtun 
conquerors. In the west as well, the Ottomans took advantage of Iran’s 
turmoil to seize territory and enslave Shi‘ite “heretics.”
Meanwhile in the north, the Russians under Peter the Great cap-
tured Iran’s Caspian seaports including Darband, Baku, and Rasht. 
The Portuguese and Dutch were vying for control of the Persian Gulf, 
both soon to be elbowed out by the British. The population of Esfahan, 
which had numbered more than half a million in Shah Abbas’s time, 
fell by a factor of ten to fewer than fifty thousand. In the absence of 
any kind of strong central authority, the country’s various nomadic 
tribes bickered and fought over grazing lands and raided passing cara-
vans with impunity, disrupting the economy.
Amid the widespread chaos of the 1720s a young Ghezelbash war-
rior, Nader Gholi Beg of the Afshar tribe, put together a tribal alliance 
that managed to take control of Khorasan. By 1729 he had become pow-
erful enough to dislodge the Pushtuns from Esfahan, and he went on to 
push back the Ottomans and Russians, eventually recovering most of 
the former Safavid territories. Nader’s military successes, which were 
due to a highly disciplined officer corps and the effective use of modern 

---

Un d e r Eu r o p e’s S h a d o w
81
artillery, led to a brief restoration of nominal Safavid rule, but in 1736 
he put an end to this charade and had himself crowned king.
Two years later, Nader Shah, who saw himself as a second Tamerlane, 
launched an invasion of India. In early 1739 his army sacked the Mughal 
(that is, neo-Timurid) capital of Delhi. The booty they brought back to 
Iran included the so-called Peacock Throne, a major symbol of Mughal 
power and wealth, as well as the fabulous Kuh-e Nur—literally “moun-
tain of light”—then the world’s largest diamond. (The Peacock Throne 
thereafter vanished, perhaps melted down for its jewels. The Kuh-i Nur 
is part of Queen Elizabeth II’s crown, and is on display in the Tower of 
London.) So vast was the plunder from Nader’s India invasion that he 
was able to suspend taxation in Iran for the next three years. In 1740, 
Nader Shah conquered the Uzbek-controlled khanate of Bukhara: this 
was the last time the Persian-speaking regions of Central Asia would be 
under the same government as the rest of Iran.
With both Sunnis and Shi‘as represented within his army, Nader 
Shah put aside the Safavids’ religious intolerance. This policy pro-
vided a temporary respite for Iran’s Sunnis, Christians, Jews, and 
Zoroastrians. He also modernized the army, equipping ordinary sol-
diers with rifles and formal training, and even started a small navy 
based in the Persian Gulf. Stability was short-lived, however, as Nader 
slipped into mental illness and local tribal-based revolts broke out in 
response to the reimposition of taxation to finance his unending mili-
tary campaigns.
In 1747, Nader Shah was assassinated by a group of his own 
officers, plunging Iran once again into a period of anarchy as regional 
tribal leaders each asserted their independence. The country’s popula-
tion at this time was as much as 50 percent nomadic, which in the 
absence of a powerful king made any kind of centralized control virtu-
ally impossible. This situation would continue into the early twentieth 
century.
The constant upheavals of the first half of the eighteenth century 
in Iran are vividly illustrated in the life of Khadijeh Soltan Daghestani, 
an aristocratic poet of Esfahan who was successively married off 
to a series of five different men. Beginning with the Afghans, with 
each new regime she suffered the execution of her husband of the 
moment and was forcibly remarried to one of the conquerors. And 
yet, throughout the whole ordeal she was in love with her childhood 
sweetheart, a cousin. She followed him to India after the death of 
her fifth spouse, but died on the way. In one of her surviving poems, 

---

I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
82
Khadijeh likens her experience to that of the mythical tragic lovers 
Layla and Majnun:
Should you hear the tale of my suffering,
You will forget that of Layla and her story;
Should you hear of my cousin’s love,
You will forget all about the legend of Majnun.
2
The year of Nader’s assassination, one of his Pushtun officers in the 
east, Ahmad Khan Abdali of the Durrani tribe, crowned himself “King 
of Afghanistan,” thereby laying the foundations for the modern state 
of that name. Prior to that time the terms “Afghan” and “Pushtun” 
had been synonmous, referring to the stubbornly independent tribal 
peoples of the eastern Hindu Kush who had resisted foreign domina-
tion since the time of Alexander the Great. (“Afghan” derives from the 
Persian word