Titans of History

ABBAS THE GREAT

1571–1629

I preferred the dust from the shoe soles of the lowest Christian to the highest Ottoman personage.

Abbas the Great

Abbas was the most successful shah of Iran in the period between the great kings of the ancient world and the modern era. He extended the kingdom both eastward and westward but importantly for understanding Iran today, it was the triumphant Abbas the Great who consolidated the Twelver Shiism that is so distinctive now; he and family offered themselves as the divinely chosen representatives of the Hidden Imam; and reassembled Iran as a great power for the first time since the Arab conquests. All of this is very relevant to understanding Iran in the twenty-first century.

It was not Abbas who brought this form of Shiism to Iran: he was the descendant of a line of Shia sheikhs backed by a fanatical following of Turkoman tribesmen known as Qizilbash—“redheads” after their red bonnets: these featured twelve folds to symbolize the twelve Imams of the Shia. They believed that after Muhammad, God gave the guidance of humanity to a line of his descendants beginning with Ali and continuing with his son Husain. The line ended with the murder by the Sunnis of the eleventh imam in 874. His son, the twelfth imam, disappeared having been “occulted”—hidden by God—ready to appear as the Madhi, the Chosen One, “to bring justice to the world.”

In the meantime, other intermediaries—namely Abbas’s Safavid family—touched by this divinity would rule until the twelfth imam reappeared. Abbas’s great-grandfather Ismail had come to power in 1501, declaring himself shah and making this form of Shia the official religion. Ismail threatened the Ottoman sultans, who were Sunni, with his resurgent Shiite Iran, until Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Ismail in 1514. But this new Iran fell into disorder after Ismail’s death, putting both its future and that of its distinctive Shiism into doubt. The Ottomans regained their dominance over the Caucasus and reconquered Iraq

Abbas was the grandson of the old reclusive Shah Tahmasp. Though his father was the eldest son, he was disqualified from the throne because he was blind. Abbas grew up amidst turbulence and vanished glory, dominated by powerful Qizilbash generals who behaved with unwise arrogance around the young prince. Abbas was lucky to survive the short and murderous reign of his demented uncle Ismail II, who actually ordered his execution but was found dead himself before it could be carried out. His mother was murdered by tribal rebels. Abbas’ blind father was then placed on the throne in spite of his handicap, but the kingdom was cursed by marauding over-mighty Qizilbash warlords, Ottoman and Uzbek invasions, Portuguese imperialism, and family civil wars.

Abbas was the Shah’s middle son, but he became heir after his elder brother was assassinated. In 1588, the blind shah abdicated and placed the crown on Abbas’s head. Initially the seventeen-year-old found himself under the control of the Qizilbash potentate Murshid Quli Khan to whom he owed the throne: after enduring many humiliations, Abbas had him assassinated and then set about ruling in his own right.

Abbas quickly showed his mettle: he reformed the army allowing him to defeat and diminish the powers of the Qizilbash tribes; then he re-conquered Khurasan, which had been lost to the Uzbeks, before turning on the Ottomans, defeating them in the Caucasus. In 1605 he decisively routed their army at Sufian near Tabriz then advanced into Azerbaijan and Georgia.

In order to undermine the Ottomans, he opened relations with Europe, especially the English, granting privileges to the East India Company, which he also used to back his campaign to reduce Portuguese influence in the Persian Gulf. His artistic masterpiece was his creation of a splendid new capital at Isfahan, where many of his beautiful creations still survive—particularly the Royal Square and Royal Mosque. Both an aesthete and a man of violence, Abbas was an exceptional political and military leader—colorful, highly intelligent, curious, a fine conversationalist with a sense of humor and theater. Nevertheless he was ruthless in imposing royal power and punishing dissent, deploying a web of police spies to watch his enemies. Paranoiac and merciless, he had his own eldest son and heir Prince Safi murdered and blinded two of his other sons. Yet typically he regretted deeply his killing of Safi and sank into remorse and melancholy.

The Ottomans were the dominant power of the Near East and they had never accepted Abbas’ resurgent Iran. In 1616, they again attacked him but the shah defeated them in 1618. A few years later, he used English backing to help defeat the Portuguese and take their island base of Hormuz. In 1622, he recaptured Kandahar in today’s Afghanistan from the Mughal emperors of India. Taking advantage of court intrigues in Istanbul, Abbas was finally able in 1624 to retake Baghdad and Iraq, which had been lost to the Ottomans ten years earlier. At his death in 1629, this contemporary of James I of England left a vast and powerful Iran that included Afghanistan and Iraq and extended from the Caucasus to the borders of India, with Twelver Shiism established as its state religion. Iran remained stable and thriving for a century until the downfall of the dynasty in 1722. This was the work of Abbas.