In Our Time - The Safavid Dynasty

Episode Date: January 12, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Safavid Dynasty, rulers of the Persian empire between the 16th and 18th centuries.In 1501 Shah Ismail, a boy of fifteen, declared himself ruler of Azerbaijan. Within a year he had expanded his territory to include most of Persia, and founded a ruling dynasty which was to last for more than two hundred years. At the peak of their success the Safavids ruled over a vast territory which included all of modern-day Iran. They converted their subjects to Shi'a Islam, and so created the religious identity of modern Iran - although they were also often ruthless in their suppression of Sunni practices. They thrived on international trade, and their capital Isfahan, rebuilt by the visionary Shah Abbas, became one of the most magnificent cities in the world. Under Safavid rule Persia became a cultural centre, producing many great artists and thinkers. With:Robert GleaveProfessor of Arabic Studies at the University of ExeterEmma LoosleySenior Lecturer at the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of ManchesterAndrew NewmanReader in Islamic Studies and Persian at the University of Edinburgh.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, one of Iran's greatest architectural masterpieces can be found in the city of Isfahan. It's the Shah Mosque, a magnificent building elaborately decorated with blue tiles,

and its construction was begun almost exactly 400 years ago. The mosque was the centrepiece of an ambitious programme of building which turned Isfahan into the most spectacular city in the Persian Empire, so large and impressive that its residents dubbed it Isfahan, half of the world. The ruler who commissioned it, Shah Abbas, was a member of the Safavids, a dynasty which re-established the Persian Empire and ruled for well over 200 years after coming to power in 1501.

The Safavids made Shia Islam their national religion, set up a robust state and economy, and traded with Europe and the East, and their legacy includes some of the greatest art and architecture created in what we now call Iran. We need to discuss the Safavid dynasty are Robert Gleve, Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter, Emma Lusley, Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester, and Andrew Newman, reader in Islamic Studies and Persian, at the University of Edinburgh. Robert Gleaf, before we go into more detail, will you give us some sense of the effect of the Safavids and the extent of their empire at its peak?

Just a quick overview. Well, the main success, if you like, the main achievement that we think of when we think of the Safavids is their ability to have established an Iranian empire once again for the first time since the coming of Islam to Iran. And at its peak, its domains included

what we currently call Iran, including Baghdad, up in the north, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and out in the east, up into what today we call Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. So it was a really impressive geographical area that they controlled. The areas around the edge were subject to loss and gain during the Safavid period. And I suppose the achievement of the Safavids was to establish the central heartland of what today we call the Iranian nation. And the borders of Iran that we have today are roughly speaking the borders which the Safavids held onto continuously during their period of power from 1501 when their first capital was declared in Tabriz, which is up in the north-west of Iran,

through to 1722 is quite often the date which is mentioned when their then capital, which is in central Iran, was taken by a rebel movement of Afghans. So the real achievement of the Safavids was to unite this area of Persian culture and literature and arts and an understanding of Persianness within the area that we currently call Iran. And it's interesting to think that it's alongside the Tudors and Suez, isn't it? Yes. So it's happening at a similar sort of time to great changes happening in Europe. And we'll probably come on to this a little bit later. But the relationships between the Safavids and the European powers

are a particular interesting part of the Safavid story. But before they came to power in 50.0, well, let's call 501 the starting point. There's always fiddles and fattles about starting and finishing. But let's take that. What had it been the dominant force in that region before then? Well, up until around about a century before the Safavids came on the scene, The Iran, as we know, as the area that we're talking about, was part of the Timurid Empire, which was led by Timor, or Tamerlane, as he's known in the Western tradition.

Tamerlane had established the Timurid Empire, which was much larger than the area I've just described for the Safavids, as it included large parts of Central Asia. And Iran was part of a larger project of Timorid imperial control. And that survived up until Timur's death in 1405. And after that, the Timurid Empire started to fray around the edges a little bit. And one of the areas where it frayed was on its western borders. And first of all, we had a series of Turkum and tribal confederations which began to go their own way and break away.

And the result was that we started to have the breakup of what we now call Western Iran, the breakup of that and the pulling away from that from the Timurid power and that gave the Safavids a chance if you like the disintegration of the Timurid, the Western lands of the Timurid Empire gave the suffavids an opportunity if you like to establish their control. So Andrew Newman can you tell us where the Safavids came from and how they were able to move in? Well the Safavids as a family were based in an Ardabil.

The Safavids were originally a Sufi order whose origins go back several centuries prior to Ismail capturing Tegrees in 1501, mainly a Sunni order, in fact, and an urban order that was quietest. But in the 1400s around the same time that Rob was talking about, the disintegration of the Timurid state and the rise of these Turkmen-based states. The rise of these Turkamon states was predicated on the base among Turkic-speaking tribal entities, which were scattered throughout this particular area, northwestern Iran, Eastern Turkey, northwestern Syria, northern Iraq, and very mountainous area,

broken up into tribes. Turkic tribes had been coming into this region since the Mongols in the Timurid period. And at that point, in the 1400s, the mid-1400s, these groups began to move into Sufi orders, one of which was the Safavid Sufi'i order. And Ismail, who in the last years of the 1400s, found himself at the head of that Sufi order then, was presiding over.

order, which had changed in its nature from a politically quiet, a Sunni movement to a movement largely populated by Turkamon tribal entities with their own sort of Sufi, Shi'i, messianic discourse. We're going to have to get this religion sorted out, so let's start now.

Sufi is the background. Shiism is the foreground. We're going to talk more about Shi'ism and Sufi, but the Sufavids come in out of Sufi and one of the words that Ishmael, the baby, Shah, as it were, exercises power is because he's thought to be head

of this mystical Sufis. Can you briefly tell us enough about Sufism to keep us going? Briefly to touch the Sufism is to keep it going. Yes. Well, Sufism has a high and a low Sufism, but it's a mystical understanding of how to reach a closer, how

to approximate one's relationship with the divine. And the Sufi orders, which permeated the region in this time period, consisted of urban orders, but also tribal orders and such. And the tribal orders in particular were much more mystical and much more millinarian and messianic, assuming that the leader of that order was in fact divinely appointed,

if not himself divine, who would facilitate that oneness, eventual oneness, with the divine itself. The urban settled Sufi sorts of orders were more literate, more contemplative in that respect. But it was the former, these tribal messianic movements, which were which were the shock troops as it were of the Safavid military and political project which enabled the Safavids to take over this territory. So we have the Sufis and then at the end of the 15th century, the late 1400s as you put it,

we have Ishmael just born, I mean just about those. So can you tell us why this Sufism was translated by the Safavids into Shiism and not into the Sunni part of Islam? split between the Sunnis and the Shia. Why Shias, Sunnis were much more powerful, they'd come out of Sunnis and so much. Why do they switch to Shiasm

at this time and why was it important for them to do it? I think one wants to look at the nature of the Shiae discourse and the nature of Ismail's discourse as it is epitomized, for example, in his divan of poetry, which we have and have had for many years, which has been translated

and studied. And what Ismail was doing was portraying himself in an extremely heterodox, fashion. At once he identified himself with the Ammns, that's right, but he also identified himself as the leader of the Safavid militant Sufi order, that is he was speaking also to his constituency, as it were, among the Turkamun tribes. He also spoke to Sunnisim, as it were, which was a force on the Iranian plateau. Iran was Sunni up until that point, and he also spoke to Christian traditions. He was, of course, descended bloodline from the Christian principalities along the Black Sea,

the south coast of the Black Sea. He was descended from the Turkamon-Princely states, which had arisen in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Timurids, and he had been brought up in a Zadhi-Shii family. So he knew something of all these and embodied all these kinds of traditions. And his poetry then contained allusions to himself as being all of these figures. The Shia, at that point, were a small force on the Iranian plateau, and most of the scholarly centers of Shi'i activity were, in fact, in Arabic lands.

speaking lands. Lebanon, Iraq, the shrine cities now, we know them, Najaf and Karbalah, eastern Saudi Arabia, the island of Bahrain. So the scholarly tradition of Shi'i activity was really outside of the Iranian plateau at this point. We're talking about someone who was called Ash when he was about one years old and

led an army when he was 14 years old. Did he or was led by generals to lead the army? Anyway, he was the official head and he was extraordinarily powerful after that. He effectively a great number of things in the next 20 years. Was this a project? Did he say,

look, I'm going to get them all together by playing up all the different aspects of my genealogy and my... I think it's a back and forth, as it were. I think the discourse at the time encouraged him, particularly for the tribal elements of whom he found himself the peer and the military commander. But you're absolutely right. It was the tribal leaders.

There were six or seven tribes who made up the confederation that backed the Safavids at this point. That's absolutely right. And it was they who were, in this messianic warrior status out to conquer territory. Many of the tribes had been forces in the political entities that constituted these Turkamon states that preceded the Safavids, and they shifted their allegiance, primarily because of Ismail's own ability

to identify himself more with their discourse. Are we talking about nomadic tribes mainly? I think one has a sense of that. I think they were settled-ish, as it were, in certain geographical areas. But when he conquered Tabriz, that settled them, they got a city. They were in the process of becoming senatorised anyway. They'd been in the region for many decades, many hundreds of years.

Emma Lusely, the first Safavidur, we were talking about Ishmael. How did he, we've set him up, as it were. And I think that's very clear now. But how was he brought to such power? He seems to launch himself on the world and grab it. And at the end of a, still is only in his early 30s when he dies, but he's got Iran inconceivably as an entity

that his family is ruling. I think it's one of those cases where his strengths and weaknesses were tied up. He was the undisputed leader of the tribe in as much as he was the Sufi peer as well as being a military leader, which meant that he had the tribe basically saying, right, we're going to follow you.

But in a way that also alienated other people. so he was bringing in... Can I interrupt one time? When we're talking about a tribe, how many people are we talking about? Gosh, it's incredibly hard to quantify that kind of question. I know it's probably a crass question, but it's always interesting. We do have accounts in Chronicles, but the thing is they're completely made up, so you can't really put any way to them.

Well, enough for the job, anyway, right. Anyone else on the idea? Well, there were six or seven of these tribal entities, and they had had, before the capture of Tabriz, a significant number of military victories, and those victories brought them then further followers. Are we talking about thousands or tens of thousands? Tens of thousands, I would imagine,

and growing as success brought them more followers, that's right. And you see, the thing is, being linked so strongly with the Turkmen tribes, that makes him very attractive to other Turkmen's, but it leaves him with a problem because the central Iranian plateau is actually Iranian-Persian-speaking people who can't identify at all with him and his tradition.

So he has to think, how do I actually open myself out to other influences? How do I get other people on side? And he has created a capital now, but the capital is permanently at risk of being taken over by the other great power in the region, which is the Ottomans, because what is now Georgia and Azerbaijan and Armenia is perpetually fought over between the early Safabid Empire and the Ottomans. And so he realizes he's got to move his power base physically into a more central location to protect his power, but he's got to reach out.

And so he uses Shiism as a tool, but he also institutes the Gulam, which is the slave corps, which I suppose people are more familiar with the Janissaras in the Ottoman court. This is taking a tribute of young people. largely Christians from the Caucasus and bringing them up and using them to go out and sort of spread his power. So he has two core forces, doesn't it? There's the Kizilbash, they wear red headdresses. Yes.

And they are Sufis. And they're, am I right? And so far, I think it's quite a pretty around this territory. And they're with him and they fight for him and they will fight to the death. And they're a powerful force when marshaled, which he does marshal them very well. And then there's this gulam, these are young people, boys and girls, larger Christian, taking into captivity into a sort of slavery. Yes.

At the same time, the young men can end up as generals, and the women can go into the harem and breed future shahs. Yes, that's exactly it. But the problem with the kizzle bash is that they are loyal primarily to the tribe, and there has been lots of fighting between brothers and uncles and cousins. So no Shah can actually guarantee that the kiselbash are going to stay with him, they might decide they want to go with his younger brother, for example. Now, the difference with the Goulam, the slave corps,

is that they take an oath of personal fealty to the Shah himself. They are not a risk in terms of coup. They rise with a particular Shah and they fall with him. So therefore, they have everything to gain by keeping one person in power, rather than deciding I'm a bit fed up with this one, I'm going to transfer my loyalty over. And one of the remarkable things,

about this dynasty for a very long time is that no shai is killed or... No sitting shah was ever killed. So they protected him well. Robert Cleaves now we've passed over the Shah, the Shi Islam that the Safavids take on. Can you tell us how they, having taken it

on board, how they made it into what became a state religion? Well Ismail's own brand of Shi' if you can call it, that was pretty unorthodox and something which the Shiite clerics, the ones who would study the texts and write the serious works of theology and law, it's not one that they would necessarily have recognised as particularly orthodox, but it was extremely effective in terms of proselytization and in terms of appealing to his own supporters

in order to gain their support. Because he portrayed himself, at times as this figure, the Mahdi, as it's called within the tradition, a sort of messianic figure, who inherits the power and the authority of previous Shi'i leaders of the distant past, the imams, as they were called, from the early Islamic time. Because he does that, he is at the beginning of the Safavid period, the importance of the individual and the, the loyalty towards the individual, both as leader of the Sufi order, but also as a sort of

messianic figure, as an enormously powerful tool for the recruitment. But it doesn't last forever. That sort of charisma, which is based around an individual, cannot sustain a dynasty for over 200 years, effectively. And a key event happened in the 1514 when he was defeated. Israel's forces were defeated by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chalduran. And this meant that the great messianic figure was somehow vulnerable. And according to the historiography, he loses interest in the running of the empire at that point and moves away from sort of the public pronunciation of his messianic status. And you have to have an ideology to replace that.

If that story is true, we have to have an ideology to replace it. And the way in which this was gradually developing was through the incorporation of what was basically a non-Iranian form of Shiism, what was called 12 Asheism, Orthodox 12-a-Sheism, was the incorporation into the Safavid message. Some clerics were imported into the empire and were used to promulgate the new faith. and also there was effective proselytisers within the Safavid organisation. And that was the mechanism, if you like, or one of the mechanisms whereby Shiism, what we call today Orthodox, 12 a Shiism, was gradually spread out across the Safavid Empire. But we shouldn't exaggerate that this was a sudden conversion of the whole of the areas that came under Safavid control.

No, we're not exaggerating. We're moving on. He built mosques, he built seminars, he built madrasas, he built madras, he. He imposed one way. Like many powerful leaders, he used religion of the power. The subsequent shahs were more active in the construction of this infrastructure. He became the great centre, the great nation, the great empire of Shiasim. So what was Andrew Newell, what was the Safavid's attitude to the other faiths, the other part of Islam, the much bigger collection of people in the other part of Islam? The Islam had split after the death of Muhammad into two,

was it his son-in-law, his cousin's son-in-law, was it his his son-in-law, was his his his bureaucratic successor, and the split remains to this day. Right. And he was going with the minority group the Shias. Right. So what was his attitude to the rest? Well, the important thing to remain about Iran as an entity

is that historically Iran has always been multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-religious. And immediately up until the rise of the Safavids, of course, the plateau was primarily populated, and certainly the urban settled elements who provided the administrative classes to run the empire were all Sunnis, and their fathers and grandfathers had served these previous Turkamon states, Sunnis. So while officially Shah Ismail and his successor and son, Shah Tav Mosb, were Shiites and 12 are Shiites,

unofficially on the part of the Iranian Sunni population, they were very tolerant. To run the empire, they needed these people, and so they would accept a nominal conversion, and they rewarded these people for this nominal conversion by giving them posts, throughout the empire, administrative posts, posts of an administrative nature at court, and eventually would intermarry with them as well. So his other base then was secured, and as Rob suggested really in the latter part of the 1500s

and the 1600s especially, Shiism, with the importing of some clerics and the greater project that Shah Abbas himself undertook in Esfahan and elsewhere, that's when Shiism, 12 or Sheism as it were, got legs, got roots in the area. Of course, there were also Christian Christians and Jews. That's right, exactly. What happened there?

Well, when we turned to the 17th century, the Christians and the Jews really much more come to the forefront. I think in the ones we think of in terms of the capital Esfahan are the Armenians, who were up into that point. The Armenian Christians. The Armenian Christians had been based in Eastern Turkey, and Abbas I first as part of a scorched earth policy against the Ottomans, forcibly removed them to New Jolfa. They were located in place called Jolpah, to New Jolpah, and Esfahan. It was a forced march. It was not pleasant, but he then resettled them, gave them land, allowed them to practice their own faith, conduct their own affairs. He did that to the merchants, but the rest of them, he sent to some malaria infested dump. Some of them did, but some of them also came to Esfahan as well. That's right.

There were Jews as well, native Jews, there always have been, obviously. And toward the 17th century as well, Iran's major trading partner in this period was in fact India. And there were Indian Hindus called Banyans who were also resident in the area. Before I move across to, I mean, there was persecution of the Sunni, though, weren't there? There was... It wasn't nicely, nicely, all the time. I mean, they were vilified, they were sometimes blinded and beheaded. It wasn't always... I would say that would be the exception, not the rule,

because if he alienated the administrative class too much, then they weren't going to work for him, he couldn't keep it on. So where there were alternatives, Sufi or Shi'i or Sunni, where movements postulated an alternative ruler to the person of the Shah and the ruling house, yes, then off with their heads, absolutely. But there's much less so, I think, of that than was portrayed in later chronicles.

Emma Lusley, what was the basis of their economy? Suddenly not, well, quite suddenly, as Rob said, it took a while, but in subspecies it, and it's not that long, they got a big empire. How did they run it? Where did the money come from? Well, they had a major problem, because

Iran has no deposits of gold or silver, so they were reliant on foreign currency coming in. So that meant, actually finding a way to bring a currency, particularly from Portugal and Spain, who were reaping the rewards of the new world at this point. They wanted gold and silver. Yeah, because they just didn't have it.

There were no minds. They had no way of getting it except taking it from other powers. And traditionally, they'd managed to get a lot of money apart from the trade with India because they were on the main silk and spice routes. But of course, this is also what we call in Europe the Age of Discovery. it's the beginning of major maritime trade and as the East India Company for instance

Exactly and the Portuguese in Goa So they're being cut out Because they're getting a lot of their money From taxes and custom duties From the luxury market Particularly silk They realise that ceramics are a coming thing in Europe So they import Chinese tradesmen

Who teach them how to make porcelain They're very good on luxury, brucated fabrics. All these kind of things, carpets, obviously, are very popular with the rulers in Spain and Portugal, and also to some extent France and England, although they weren't quite so wealthy. And whereas before they've managed to actually sell these on for money or they've managed to use the trade tariffs, the customs, now they're in trouble. You know, it's getting to the stage. Well, I don't think they, to some extent, ever really. answer that. It reaches a high point under Shah Abbas the first, the sort of great ruler of the Sephardic Empire, but after that

there is a strong decline. Can you take that on Robert Glee? He is the great ruler. He does build it up enormously. He ruled for 30, 40 years. It's terrific a mind of time. How did he, because although Emma spoken as if there's a falling away, it's still motored like a very powerful country at least, an empire in a way. Well, it benefited from being still an overland crossover route for

trade and a lot of trade coming through. And the Armenians that we mentioned before were extremely useful for Shah Abbas in terms of the collection of revenue and just cash going through the capital Isfahan. Why is that particularly? Why are they? Because of the Christian connection with the West?

Partly because of the Christian... And also that Shah Abbas had had decided that he wasn't sure if he could trust all of the Persian and Turkish merchants who were trying to run it and he decided that the Armenians

they had a they were extremely dexterous they could they had a knack for languages according to the the historical theory of how he made this decision to promote the Armenians they had a knack for languages

they were international in terms of their outlook cosmopolitan and they were Christian so that they would help trade with Europe and so they emerged as the natural choice, if you like, for him to favour as trading envoys for him. And so through their good offices, he was able to take in custom duties. There was a certain amount of silk production within the lands which he controlled and that was able to be exported out through the Ottoman lands.

And although the Safavids and the Ottomans were continually having spats and wars, the Ottoman Empire was an extremely important trading partner for Iran. And that was part of the reason why many of these spats and wars were resolved reasonably quickly by the Persians, because they wanted to have the trade of the Ottomans. So this was the sort of structure, the economic structure, on which he based his imperial project. and it was a grand imperial project and it needed finances. Very briefly, Andrew, because I'd like to go back to the, Andron, I'd like to go back to the wealth question. Was there any one reason for this remarkable stability for so long, or was it the usual, a bit of this and a bit of that?

I think it's rather the latter. I think there's a pragmatic inclusivity. I allude to Rob's just mentioning the fact that the Safavis militarily knew when to challenge the Ottomans, but they also knew when to make peace, both in 1555. and in 1639 they came to agreements with the Ottomans. The 1639 treaty lasted on through into the early 1700s until the fall of the Safavid capital of Esfahan. At the death of each Shah, there were incursions

from the Ottomans and the Uzbeks from Central Asia, later on also from the Mughals from India. So there was a sense then of pragmatism, of inclusivity, of Armenians and Jews and Indian merchants, Europeans, the Europeans being used, both for commercial purposes, but also as potential allies against the Ottomans to keep the Ottomans on the wrong footed on their western borders and their eastern borders. He welcomed missionaries, Catholic missionaries coming from the different Catholic kingdoms in the West

as well. The East India companies also appeared and had residences there. So there was a sense that everyone, foreigner and local alike, could look to the person of the Shah and in some sense feel as if his interests were mirrored, represented, understood and in that respect then felt that they were part of this larger project. Especially after 1639,

the 1639 Treaty, brought a peace dividend, as it were, to the empire. And one notices that there was a lot of extra building that went on, for example, on Isfahan and other centres which were product of this peace dividend. Can I turn down loosely for that? Because

you've said difficult to get money, yet this, we have to call him a great king, the great Shah Abbas I, who did remarkable things. He rebuilt what people called half the world Isfahan. Incredible mosques, wonderful architecture. It's still one of the great, it is, was, and can remain one of the great world cities to look at.

How, can you give us some idea of his personality? Who is this man who managed to do as much as you've been saying he did and then rebuild this city? He seems to being, as you expect, a very complex personality. The city in many ways is a garden city. It does have the bazaars. It does have built up areas. But there's also a lot of parks.

There's beautiful walkways with running water. And when you read about his early life, he was actually brought up in Afghanistan and seems to have enjoyed living in a garden sort of environment, living in a pavilion. And that's what he appears to have tried to. to recreate in Isfahan. The idea of paradise in Iran is a garden. I mean, Persian, Parsi, it's where we get paradise from, the English word paradise.

And so he seems to have tried to recreate how he imagined heaven or earth would have been in Isfahan. But there was a lot of building as well. Yes. They used fired brick instead of mud. Exactly. And they used tiling and used ceramics and enormously. valuable materials went into these spectacular building. As well as being the gardens, you've also said.

Yes. Well, I think another reason he was able to do this was it was a period of great technological advances. As you've just said, they went from using mud brick that had to be renewed every year with new rendering to fired bricks. In fact, the yellow bricks of Isfahan are still famous today. They still continue. But the major difference, I think most art historians would say, is they perfected the glazes of tiles. They came up with this new system, they called Haftarangi, seven colours. Up until then, if you wanted to decorate walls with tiles,

you had to do each colour on a different piece. So it was like a giant mosaic, and it was incredibly expensive to cover a vast expanse with tile work. Now, if you could actually paint lots of colours onto one panel and make regular square or rectangular panels, you didn't need to pay someone a lot of money to put them up. It was very easy. It was like tiling a bathroom.

Can we focus even more, zoom in a little, just for a moment, Robin Gleve, on the Safavid architecture. And what, for you, exemplifies it at its most? Well, probably the most impressive building when you think of Safavid architecture is the one you mentioned at the outset of the programme, which is the Shars Mosque in Isfahan. and that together with a that is positioned on the edge of a large central square area

it's rectangular to be precise called the Nashijahan Central Square if anyone's ever been to his family it's an impressive central area in the city forming a real hub and on each side of this of this square there is a real monument towards Safavir. architectural achievement. On the one side you have the Shars Mosque which we've already mentioned and then directly opposite that at the other end of the square you have the bazaar area which is a trading area which had been lavishly built and reflects if you like the importance of Isfahan as a trading centre so you have religion and trade at the two ends of the square if you like as the two elements of Safavid's strength and then in the middle on the two sides in the

middle you have on one side the Aligar Pallas which was used by the Shars as a place where they would appear to the public but also from where they would enjoy their leisure activities which was so much part of their royal persona including the games of Polo which were legendary within the square and then immediately on the other side was the Shars and the Courts private mosque the Lutfala Mosque in Isfahan and if you think of these four buildings this whole complex which is connected by by walkways and made up of merchants outlets. You really have the summation, if you like, of Safavid's self-expression in terms of architecture,

in terms of the things, the pillars of the empire, trade, religion, the Shah's personality, the Shah's power, his personal piety, as well as his religious project, all, if you like, visually represented within the Medan in Nashu Jahan, the square of Nashu Jahan in the centre of Isfahan. That was terrific, thank you. And Ren Yuman, what were the other part in the region doing about it when they were building this spectacular city

and when Shah Abbas seemed to be bringing all religions, all nations, all talents, it was the city of all talents? What were the Ottomans and Uzbeks and Mughals doing about it? Again, in the 16th and the 17th century, it's useful to divide it up that way. The major rivals were, yes, to the west, the Ottomans into the Central Asian region, the Uzbeks, and directly more east on the Mughals, especially after the 1550s or so. And the answer is that, as Rahm alluded already, there was this decisive defeat in 1514 of Ottoman forces under Ismail by the Safavids in Chalderon near Tabriz. fortuitously, although the Safavid project could have come to a speedy end, the Ottomans headed south and eventually west and captured Cairo.

They didn't choose to continue on east. The alliance between the Turkish tribal elements and the native Iranian administrative class held after Chal Duron continued to venerate and privilege the person of the Shah. But both at his death and the death of his son and successor Shah Tachmosp, the second Safavid Shah, who died in front of his son, 1576, the Ottomans and the Uzbegs then launched a series of incursions and lost territory. And these were coupled as well by internal struggles over who was to have the primary influence

at court between different fractions of the Turkish tribal elements and the Iranian administrative class. So in the case of Shah Tafmast, rather quickly, he conceded the loss of certain territory and signed a treaty in 1555 with the Ottomans. His death then 1576, again saw further incursions. Shah Abbas, when he was put on power on the throne in 1587, then settled the internal conflicts and then again pushed the Ottomans and the Uzbeks out. During the reign of Shah Abbas,

there was continued fighting between the Ottomans and the Safavits and the Uzbek, and it was only in the reign of his successor in 1639 that a peace treaty was signed. Again, seeding territory, mainly Eastern Iraq, is the area we think of that they lost. and after 1639 then the land borders were pretty much set. The Ottomans remained and kept the treaty.

The Uzbeks were there. There was a struggle over Kandahar with the moguls, but that was really much more on the periphery. And the Safavids developed a sense of having their armies placed in areas from which they could be mobilized in a period of three to six months in the event of another one of these attacks by these great land forces. And to some extent, that's the reason they didn't do so well when the rapacious Afghan tribal wars who were very mobile, who didn't bring with them lots of cannon and muskets and such, the Safavid troops

then couldn't respond quite as quickly to that incursion. Can we just pause for a moment to do, Emma, and say, there must have been a very powerfully organized and well-organized military force. They're taking everybody on, out there. I mean, they're whirring around there. There are sort of the center of a storm, all the storms directed at them.

They're going around a full circle, being invaded on the left, invaded on the right, and on it goes. So what do we know about the way, we know that Shabas brought in musket cannons, he brought in stuff from the West, he admired what the West was doing. What else gave him this power to keep everybody off his tail? He made... Or off his land more.

He was actually very good, I think, in choosing the personnel. He made a strong use of his tribal background and also military figures from the Caucasus. And in both these situations, we're talking about societies where there's a lot of inter-clan for. fighting and there's a whole military cast of society. And these people are born leaders because if you are born into the higher landowning caste in the Caucasus or in northwest Iran, you basically have to fight to hold onto your land. So he trains up a number of Georgian and Turkmen leaders and has them at different places throughout his empire. And with Abbas again, although we think of him as being static and living in his new capital at Isfahan.

I think he only spent about six months of his life there. He was perpetually out with his armies, patrolling different areas, trying to head off trouble. We come to what the disputy end of the Safahid reign, dynasty, Robert Cleave, while they're being preoccupied with the Ottomans, the Afghans, the Afghan slip in and take Isfahan, which is an extraordinary feat, but they do.

income the Afghan take yes for Han and that is supposed to be the end of the the Safavidam. Why did it end like that do you think if it did end like that? Why did it end like that? The traditional explanations are decadence, self-obsession, distance between the Shah and his people, creating a space if you like for opposition movements. So the decline and fall of the... Theoretically it's the same story that you hear over and over again about the end of empire. But to be a successful Safavid Shah, you didn't just have to be all-powerful. You had to be able to play off different elements.

You were ruling over a very complex, multi-ethnic, multi-tribal population with various loyalties and complex aspirations. And so you had to play those off against each other. And the unsuccessful Safavidshars were the ones that failed to do that, that failed to recognise who to put in what position as Emma. has alluded to who to put in what position. And really towards the end, the Safavid Shars became less and less good at that.

They became, if you like, as the population became more intermingled, they became less and less able to distinguish the various power centres. And in a sense, the Afghan uprising was a reflection of the failure of the Shah to be able to control the various elements of his own domain. So it's a military failure almost,

as well as an internal, they all became disillust. But you have a different reading, Andrew Newman, don't you? Can you tell us it? Yes, well, I think that, again, if one looks at the accession ceremonies, which mark the accessions of the last few shawes, both all the constituencies were, as it were, represented on the dais, bespeaking their understanding of this person exceeding to power.

As well, there were huge building projects and such that were going on. There were economic crises that took place, droughts and famines and such, but the realm... Why do you think it didn't end in 1722 when the Afghans took his behalf? For one thing, seven years later, the Safavans were back in the capital. It took them quite a while to mobilize their forces, plus the Ottomans and the Russians invaded major territory in the West, so they had even more on their plate to do this,

but they marched back into the capital within seven years. On the ground, records at the time, especially by the Dutch, for example, will attest that the people on the ground didn't feel that the Safavid Empire, as it were, had come to an end. They saw this as a blip. The Safavids Shah Abbasfer, example. Why are the most people thinking ending in 1722? Well, but I think most people are fixated with the date and the capture of the capital. But I think

as Emma suggested, really, the Sophomids did move around quite a lot and had a lot of centers, political centers throughout the realm. So while Esfahan is the one we always think of, because we can go and see it now, in fact, there were lots of areas around the rest of the South of the Empire, which also had the occupation of the Shah. Or maybe not, yes, that's true. In a sense, 722 wasn't the end, but it was the beginning of the end. That's certainly true because And yet what they'd done went through to the end of the 18th century and goes through today, the formation of Iran, the Persian, the Shiite religion, the great architecture. It continued almost to Europe, uninterruptedly.

And people are constantly making reference to it. And therefore, in that sense, their legacy is very important even today in the West and in Iran as well. I think I shouldn't have something uninterruptedly because I have to interrupt you. There's a long lot more to say, but thank you very much for that. Thank you very much to Emma Lissly, Robert Cleve and Andrew Newman. And next week we'll be talking about the European revolutions in 1848. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as The Forum,

the discussion programme about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBCworldservis.com slash forum.