After Tamerlane (13 page)

If the Ottomans failed to achieve a decisive victory over the Christian states in South East Europe, and the Mediterranean, this
was at least in part because their resources were strained by the hundred-years war waged against Safavid Iran to the east – an Islamic counterpart to the ‘wars of religion' which afflicted much of early modern Europe.
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From the Ottoman point of view, this struggle was much more vital to the stability of their empire than the pursuit of territorial expansion in Hungary or Croatia. The fluid borderlands of eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan formed the bridge between the Turkic tribes who lay at the core of the Ottoman state and those who dominated much of the Iranian plateau. Ottoman rule in Asia Minor, and Ottoman supremacy in much of the Fertile Crescent, depended upon the tribal loyalties of this volatile region. It was hardly surprising that the Ottoman sultans reacted so fiercely to the rise of Safavid power in a zone that was the fulcrum of Turkic politics and culture.
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Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid Empire, was the son of the grandmaster of a militant Shia order based in Ardabil. The order became known as the Qizilbash, or ‘Red-heads', from their distinctive headdress. The crucial feature of the Safavid system was the cementing together of a tribal confederacy through common allegiance to a religious leadership dedicated to Shi'ism, the dominant form of Islam on the Iranian plateau.
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Shia hostility to the Sunni (orthodox) majority in Islam originated in the disputed succession to Muhammad in the early years of the Islamic caliphate, and drew much of its emotional intensity from the martyrdom of Hussein, the great Shia leader who was defeated and killed by Sunni forces, commemorated each year during Muharram. Shia Islam had its own scholastic and theological traditions, its own holy cities and centres of pilgrimage, at Najaf and Kerbela (in modern Iraq). There was also a strongly millenarian flavour to Shi'ism, with its belief in the ‘Hidden Imam' (to whom prayers could be addressed) and its hope of ultimate triumph over an unjust Sunni world. Perhaps as a result, Shia Islam had historically been much less deferential to the authority of secular rulers than Sunni, looking instead to mullahs, or religious teachers.
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The genius of Ismail lay in supercharging a tribal coalition (the usual means of state-building in western Iran since the death of Tamerlane) with personal devotion to himself and his successors as dynastic leaders of a religious fraternity engaged in a holy struggle.
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Armed with this potent formula, he achieved astonishing success. In 1501 he made
himself master of Tabriz, the greatest city of north-west Iran. By 1510 his armies had conquered Azerbaijan, Gilan and Mazanderan along the Caspian Sea, Hamadan, Isfahan, Yazd, Kirman, Fars and much of modern Iraq, as well as Anatolia as far west as Diarbekir (deep inside modern Turkey). In that year he also defeated the Uzbeks at Merv in Khorasan, and laid the foundations for absorbing much of modern Afghanistan, with its Iranian culture, into the Safavid Empire. But four years later, at the Battle of Caldiran in eastern Anatolia, Ismail was roundly defeated by the Ottoman army with its superior firepower. Although the Safavids continued to challenge Ottoman predominance in eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iraq for a further century (the Safavids ruled in Baghdad between 1508 and 1534, and again between 1623 and 1638), defeat at Caldiran was to prove decisive in pushing the centre of Safavid power away from Anatolia and on to the Iranian plateau. In 1530 the capital was shifted from vulnerable Tabriz to Kasvin, and it eventually settled in Isfahan in 1598.

By that time the original basis of Safavid rule had been considerably modified. Under Ismail and his son Tahmasp, Turkmen tribal levies had provided the military muscle and Turkmen tribal chiefs – the ‘amirs' – the military and administrative elite through whom the growing empire had been ruled. The distribution of conquered lands had been the means of preserving tribal loyalty to the ruling house. The price had been factional struggle, and at times open conflict, between tribes whose nomadic way of life was antagonistic to stable territorial administration. However, the accession of Abbas I, the fifth Safavid shah, in 1587 marked the onset of a political revolution. Abbas freed himself from dangerous dependence upon Turkic tribal support by a device very similar to the Ottoman
devshirme
. From Christian communities in Georgia and the Trans-Caucasus he recruited an army and bureaucracy of
qullars
(or
gholamani
), slave converts whose loyalty to him would be undivided.
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By the end of his reign, in 1639, more than half the Safavid provinces were ruled by
qullars
. Abbas also created a royal army of musketeers (ethnically Iranian, not Turkic), and
qullar
cavalry and artillery, paid from the revenues of a growing number of directly administered ‘Khassa' provinces.
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This regime represented a deliberate dilution of the old Turkic
character of Safavism, and an increasing reliance upon ethnic Iranians and foreign slaves, who adopted Persian not Turkic culture. The choice of Isfahan as the imperial capital, the lavish architectural programme which transformed the city, royal patronage of the ornamental, and the development of a distinctive Isfahan school of philosophy marked the appearance of a new Persian high culture which would command the respect and admiration (as well as influencing the thought and language) of the ethnically diverse elites of an empire which stretched at its height from Tabriz to Kandahar (conquered by Abbas in 1622).

The Safavid reunion of much of ‘Greater Iran', together with (comparative) internal peace and order, also contributed to a commercial revival vigorously promoted by the ruling house. The Safavids used their increasing revenues to improve trade routes and build caravanserais. Under Abbas, Iran's principal export of raw silk was a royal monopoly (with Armenian merchants as his agents),
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and Isfahan with its twin city New Julfa became a great commercial centre, with an Indian mercantile community of some twenty thousand by the end of the seventeenth century.
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When John Fryer went there on commercial business in 1677 (wandering the streets in Persian clothes to avoid attention), he found a cloth market larger than the famous Blackwell Hall in London, and four Catholic churches. The shah had allowed Augustinian monks to build a church in 1598, and had even paid for its decoration.
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Abbas was strong enough to destroy the Portuguese settlement at Hormuz in 1622 in favour of his own emporium at Bandar Abbas. Ultimately, as we shall see, the Safavid project of a great agrarian empire, with a flourishing commerce under royal control and a unifying high culture, was frustrated by the failure to subjugate completely the Turkic tribal elements – a reflection perhaps of the unfavourable balance between settled agriculture and nomadic pastoralism on the Iranian plateau.
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Nevertheless, by their enforcement of Shia Islam, by institutionalizing it as the ‘state religion'
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and by restoring Persian as the language of government and high culture, the Safavids imposed on their far-flung dominions a remarkable degree of cultural unity. The extent to which they identified their rule with religious uniformity and popular religiosity is in striking contrast with the Ottoman model, and may help to explain
why the ultimate territorial legacy of the Safavids was to prove somewhat grander than that of their erstwhile Ottoman rivals.

The Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran were both successor states of the short-lived world empire that Tamerlane had constructed between 1380 and his death in 1405. The Timurid
raj
had fallen apart in the fifteenth century, but its old imperial centre in Turan (Transoxiana or West Turkestan) continued to be the great cultural entrepô t of the Islamic world. Turan was still the launch pad for would-be empire-builders to the west and south, towards the Iranian plateau and the Near East, or on to the plains of North India. Its Turko-Mongol elite, with its prestigious high culture, its grand conception of monarchy and its command of a commercial and diplomatic network, was a ruling class in search of an empire.

By 1500, however, perhaps because the shrivelled remnants of Timurid rule could no longer defend the Turanian oases against the attacks of steppe warrior-nomads, Timurid power in its Turanian heartland had been broken by the Uzbeks. Among the defeated Timurid princes driven from Samarkand was Babur, who took refuge in Kabul.
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But the Timurid instinct was strong. In 1519, with an army of some
1,500
men, Babur descended on to the North Indian plains like an Asian Pizarro to carve out a new Timurid kingdom. He entered Hindustan not as a predatory barbarian from the Central Asian steppes, but as the representative of the most advanced and cultivated society in the Islamic world. At the Battle of Panipat, near Delhi, Babur defeated the ruling Muslim dynasty, the Lodi sultanate of Delhi, and made himself master of North India. Behind this triumph lay personal courage, military skill and the technical prowess of Central Asian warfare, with its tactical mobility.
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But the success of his conquistador regime also built on his Timurid prestige and his control over the trade routes between North India and Central Asia, through which passed perhaps half of India's most valuable exports.
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Babur himself, while relishing the wealth to be won in Hindustan, viewed its lack of civilized amenities with imperial contempt for colonial backwardness. When he arrived in Agra, he was disgusted at the state of the grounds where he wanted to create a proper ‘
char-bagh
' – an Iranian-style garden with running water and flowers. But the work
was started: ‘Then in that charmless and disorderly Hind, plots of garden were… laid out with order and symmetry… and in every border, roses and narcissus in perfect arrangement.'
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It seems more than likely that Babur's real intention was to use North India's resources to restore Timurid rule in Samarkand, Tamerlane's capital. It was his early death (significantly, he was buried in Kabul by his own command) and the policy of his son Humayun which ensured that the Timurid enterprise would be focused instead on ruling North India.

The North Indian world which Babur's successors would rule had been dominated since the eleventh century by Muslim warrior elites of Turkic or Afghan origins. By 1500, much of the Indian subcontinent was divided between the great conquest states they had founded: the sultanates of Delhi, Bengal, Gujarat, Deccan (splintering into five successor states by 1500), Khandesh, Multan and Kashmir. Only in Mewa (a Rajput state in North India) and in Vijayanagar (in the far south) had Hindu states withstood the deluge. The Muslim colonial elites, the
ashraf
, were anxious to safeguard their group solidarity. They maintained an intellectual ‘Establishment' of theologians, preachers and judges as a way of preserving their distinctive culture against the risk of absorption by the Hindu milieu.
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To assert the permanence of their rule, they built mosques, colleges, shrines and emphatic monuments, like the impressive
minar
or tower at Chhota Pandua in Bengal.
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Within the sultanates their power was based on a system of semi-feudal land grants in exchange for military service, and rested ultimately upon the agrarian surpluses of Hindu cultivators, especially in the great North Indian ‘fertile crescent' on the Indo-Gangetic plains.

Babur's dramatic
entrada
had been a false start. The Delhi rulers who had fled to eastern India revived under Sher Shah, who drove Humayun out of India in 1539–40. But Sher Shah's successors proved unable to build a cohesive North Indian empire, and the Timurids returned to Delhi in 1555. It was the reign of Akbar (1555–1605), who was Babur's grandson, that saw the real foundation of the Timurids' Mughal empire. Akbar embarked on a series of territorial conquests that brought almost all the subcontinent, except for the far south, under his rule by the early seventeenth century. This was not a transient
despotism, a freebooter's empire that disintegrated as quickly as it had been assembled. Instead, Akbar drew upon Timurid traditions to fashion a grander and more durable imperial system than previous Muslim rulers in India had been able to create.

At the core of Akbar's empire was a great service aristocracy of
mansabdars
or imperial rank-holders (most of them of Central Asian or Iranian origin)
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who formed the amirs – the military and administrative elite. These men were rewarded (and their loyalty ensured) by the grant of large revenues drawn from the land. The ingenuity of Akbar's system lay in the careful distinction between the land revenues attached to a
jagir
(one of the landed estates which the elite held as
jagirdars
) and the exercise of administrative or judicial authority over
its population. In any given locality a
jagirdar
exercised revenue rights but not political control, which was reserved to the official representative of the
padshah
– or emperor.
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The imperial centre thus prevented the emergence of a decentralized feudal system. By instigating a new and ubiquitous rule of regular revenue assessment, it ensured that the state received a lion's share of the revenue that the
jagirdars
collected. Although they were sometimes obliged by political expediency to make concessions to powerful local landholders (those too entrenched to be easily uprooted), Akbar's ministers were able to apply their revenue system – collecting in cash perhaps one-half of the value of agricultural production
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– with remarkable uniformity across his territories.
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