Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire
Feb. 5th, 2011 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI've been interested in Persian/Iranian history ever since I read about Shah Ismail I in Toynbee. I have as many books on the subject as I do on the history of any non-Western society. Until now, though, I haven't had a source on Ismail himself and his successors. Safavid Iran, by Andrew J. Newman, is that source. A few words of review are under the cut.
Newman sets himself the task of countering a longstanding interpretation of the Safavid Empire, which has it beginning to decay after the death of Ismail I, a decay temporarily arrested under his great-grandson Abbas I, only to resume on Abbas' death, ending in the capture of the capital, Isfahan, by the Afghan marauder Nadir Shah. This story points, among other things, to the defeat of the Safavids by the Ottoman Turks in 1638, resulting in the permanent loss of what is now Iraq, as a critical point, after which the truncated empire's decline was hastened. Newman rejects this story, in various ways too complex to go into in a brief review. I want to touch only a few highlights of Newman's version of Safavid history.
The most important point is that holding the empire together was a delicate and largely successful balancing act, with multiple dimensions. First, the main source of power for Ismail and his successors was military, resting with a fractious coalition of Turkic warlords. Yet administering the empire required the cooperation of the native Persian - Tajik - bureaucrats, inherited from the country's previous rulers. The shahs needed to balance Tajik interests against Turkic ones (and deftly shift from favoring one Turkic clan to another, as one or another grew too powerful or too unruly). Eventually, the Safavid rulers added more legs to this wobbly stool, bringing in and favoring Armenian, Circassian, and Jewish merchants; but the balancing act was never easy, and the empire's stability is remarkable. (I say, "stability", but that is relative - there were two major civil wars, each time involving disputed succession. Even so, the times of internal peace were much longer than the times of disruption.)
A cross-cutting problem had to do with religious issues. Ismail I's rise depended on his status as the leader of a Shia/Sufi sect; upon gaining power, he made Shi'ism the national religion, despite the fact that, at this time, Persia was majority Sunni. (That apparently changed fairly quickly.) His claim to legitimacy rested on a partial identification of the Shah with the Twelfth Imam, and he and his successors were necessarily drawn into whatever religious controversies arose among their Shi'ite subjects. (The details of these controversies, I must admit, elude me; I don't know enough about the history of Islam to follow the arguments closely.) The Safavid shahs were also naturally allied with Sufi leaders, but the individualistic tendencies of Sufism made that a dangerous business. All too often, one or another Sufi would challenge the shah's legitimacy; to crush such a threat required allying, for a time, with more orthodox brands of Islam. Such an alliance could not be permanent, of course, without casting a shadow on the entire Safavid project.
Economically, the Safavids faced a chronic balance of trade problem, one they shared with the Turks and Europeans to their west: namely, the continuing appetite for luxury goods and quality manufactures from India and China, which resulted in a continuing flow of precious metals eastward. Persia is not blessed with an abundance of such metals, and so trade with the west for gold, coming in from Africa, and later for American silver, was a necessity. The most natural trade route ran straight to the eastern Mediterranean - that is, through Ottoman territory; and with war endemic between Sunni Turkey and Shia Persia, that route was constantly being disrupted. When European merchants began planting trading posts on the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, the Safavids at first supported them, seeing in them a way around their neighbors and enemies; but the Portuguese and the Dutch interests proved unsatisfactory, and ultimately that project was abandoned. Newman agrees that the Ottoman conquest of Mesopotamia was a critical event, but he claims that it redounded to the benefit of the Persians; once a permanent peace was in place on the western front, the direct trade route to the Mediterranean reopened, and a period of prosperity followed, rather than the decay perceived by earlier historians.
Newman does not spend much focus on such traditional topics as war and diplomacy, being more interested in social and economic events. Each chapter covers a particular span of time, discussing first the political events, then backtracking to, successively, religious, economic, and artistic trends. (I found this a bit confusing at times, as earlier events were sometimes described after later ones.) The story is a rich one, and even a passing familiarity with events elsewhere in Eurasia at this time makes it an illuminating one.
Newman sets himself the task of countering a longstanding interpretation of the Safavid Empire, which has it beginning to decay after the death of Ismail I, a decay temporarily arrested under his great-grandson Abbas I, only to resume on Abbas' death, ending in the capture of the capital, Isfahan, by the Afghan marauder Nadir Shah. This story points, among other things, to the defeat of the Safavids by the Ottoman Turks in 1638, resulting in the permanent loss of what is now Iraq, as a critical point, after which the truncated empire's decline was hastened. Newman rejects this story, in various ways too complex to go into in a brief review. I want to touch only a few highlights of Newman's version of Safavid history.
The most important point is that holding the empire together was a delicate and largely successful balancing act, with multiple dimensions. First, the main source of power for Ismail and his successors was military, resting with a fractious coalition of Turkic warlords. Yet administering the empire required the cooperation of the native Persian - Tajik - bureaucrats, inherited from the country's previous rulers. The shahs needed to balance Tajik interests against Turkic ones (and deftly shift from favoring one Turkic clan to another, as one or another grew too powerful or too unruly). Eventually, the Safavid rulers added more legs to this wobbly stool, bringing in and favoring Armenian, Circassian, and Jewish merchants; but the balancing act was never easy, and the empire's stability is remarkable. (I say, "stability", but that is relative - there were two major civil wars, each time involving disputed succession. Even so, the times of internal peace were much longer than the times of disruption.)
A cross-cutting problem had to do with religious issues. Ismail I's rise depended on his status as the leader of a Shia/Sufi sect; upon gaining power, he made Shi'ism the national religion, despite the fact that, at this time, Persia was majority Sunni. (That apparently changed fairly quickly.) His claim to legitimacy rested on a partial identification of the Shah with the Twelfth Imam, and he and his successors were necessarily drawn into whatever religious controversies arose among their Shi'ite subjects. (The details of these controversies, I must admit, elude me; I don't know enough about the history of Islam to follow the arguments closely.) The Safavid shahs were also naturally allied with Sufi leaders, but the individualistic tendencies of Sufism made that a dangerous business. All too often, one or another Sufi would challenge the shah's legitimacy; to crush such a threat required allying, for a time, with more orthodox brands of Islam. Such an alliance could not be permanent, of course, without casting a shadow on the entire Safavid project.
Economically, the Safavids faced a chronic balance of trade problem, one they shared with the Turks and Europeans to their west: namely, the continuing appetite for luxury goods and quality manufactures from India and China, which resulted in a continuing flow of precious metals eastward. Persia is not blessed with an abundance of such metals, and so trade with the west for gold, coming in from Africa, and later for American silver, was a necessity. The most natural trade route ran straight to the eastern Mediterranean - that is, through Ottoman territory; and with war endemic between Sunni Turkey and Shia Persia, that route was constantly being disrupted. When European merchants began planting trading posts on the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, the Safavids at first supported them, seeing in them a way around their neighbors and enemies; but the Portuguese and the Dutch interests proved unsatisfactory, and ultimately that project was abandoned. Newman agrees that the Ottoman conquest of Mesopotamia was a critical event, but he claims that it redounded to the benefit of the Persians; once a permanent peace was in place on the western front, the direct trade route to the Mediterranean reopened, and a period of prosperity followed, rather than the decay perceived by earlier historians.
Newman does not spend much focus on such traditional topics as war and diplomacy, being more interested in social and economic events. Each chapter covers a particular span of time, discussing first the political events, then backtracking to, successively, religious, economic, and artistic trends. (I found this a bit confusing at times, as earlier events were sometimes described after later ones.) The story is a rich one, and even a passing familiarity with events elsewhere in Eurasia at this time makes it an illuminating one.
