“To achieve a modicum of control around the country, the Safavid state resorted to various strategies beyond punitive expeditions to regions in revolt. One way of reducing subaltern power was to try and restrict the spread of firearms, a relatively new form of weaponry that was initially limited to the state. Like many contemporary states, the Safavids sought to halt their spread among the wider population. The people of Lar—a major manufacturing center of firearms—were prohibited from carrying guns at the time of Shah `Abbas I. In the late seventeenth century such orders were still in place in remote areas. Bénigne Vachet, traveling in western Iran in 1690, claimed that in all of Iran mountaineers were forbidden from carrying any other arms than batons. Such bans naturally had little effect. Ambrosio Bembo, traveling in the Kurdish Ottoman–Safavid borderlands in the 1670s, observed how not even peasants in those regions were without “an arquebus or sword or bows and arrows.”
Much more effective was the forcible resettlement of populations, a long-standing practice pioneered by the ancient Assyrians. Resettling a recalcitrant border tribe into the interior was typically designed to break up vested tribal power. Shah `Abbas thus deported the Qazaqlu from Qarabagh to Fars. Deportation was often a precautionary measure. We hear of tribes being moved away from the front lines in the face of imminent war, for fear that they might side with the enemy.
Depopulation was also a byproduct of the scorched-earth policy that the Safavids often engaged in. An example is Shah `Abbas’s removal of the entire Armenian population from the Aras River region in the face of Ottoman aggression in 1603–4. Most often the aim was the protection of borderlands. The northern frontiers, perennially exposed to raids by Uzbek, Turkmen, and Lezghi tribesmen, were a favored destination for deportations of this kind. Dividing the Qajar tribe into three groups, Shah `Abbas resettled many of its members to the north, making them guard Ganja in the Caucasus and Astarabad and Marv on the Central Asian frontier.
The same ruler sought to strengthen central control by relocating a large number of Qizilbash tribal folk to Georgia. `Abbas encouraged the Turkmen Göklen to settle around Astarabad so as to protect the Khurasan border against raids by the Yomut, a rival Turkmen tribe.
Frequent raids by Lezghi marauders as well as Russian pressure on Daghistan made Shah `Abbas II move large numbers of Turks to Georgia, prompting an uprising against Safavid rule in 1659.
Kurds, renowned for their martial qualities, were often deployed for defensive purposes. Many thus ended up in Khurasan. A number of Kurds were also sent to Kitch and Makran in Baluchistan to help defend those remote marches. Chardin gave the following numbers for troops defending the borders in the mid-seventeenth century: 6,000 for Kirmanshah; 50,000 each in Armenia and Georgia; and 8,000 each in Khurasan and Qandahar.
State authority was not founded on military means alone. In fact, force was not the principal form of control, even if the threat of armed intervention was always the ultimate deterrent. Isfahan used “soft” power much more widely and, arguably, more effectively to keep the provinces in check. This came in different forms, ranging from the appointment of shadow officials to alliance building by way of marriage and various tributary arrangements. In all of this, the ultimate purpose was to secure loyalty, a commodity that was structurally in short supply. As Patricia Crone puts it, the premodern state did not inspire any loyalty. Yet managing a state was predicated on at least some form of (temporary) loyalty. To achieve this was to engage in perpetual negotiation and bargaining.
Negotiation typically involved some form of mediation by brokers or middlemen, vakils. The vakil, a person who could deal with both parties and a central figure in Iranian politics, operated on different levels. Provincial governors were well advised not to take up their position in provincial outposts without good representation in Isfahan, since leaving the court would unleash a wave of intrigue against them. They would often stay in the capital themselves, dispatching a relative in their stead; and if they took up their post, they would leave a vakil to represent their interest. Until they were recalled to Isfahan to account for their behavior, these officials usually remained at a safe distance from the capital, where agents and family members interceded on their behalf. Some hardly ever showed up in the region to which they had been appointed, although few would go to such extremes as the muhrdar, keeper of the royal seals, who waited twenty years before visiting Qum, the province assigned to him by Shah Tahmasb.
One time-honored way of keeping individual power in check was to appoint mutually controlling officers. This began at the central court, where the nazir (steward of the royal household) checked on the grand vizier and in turn was controlled by a number of other officials. The vizier of a khassah province typically had a nazir and a vaqa’i`-nivis (registrar) as assistants, who acted as shadow officials charged with the task of monitoring him. According to Chardin, in Mazandaran the vizier and his assistant were expected to report on each other. The fiscally important Caspian provinces, moreover, were headed by a vazir-i kull, whose task it was to control the vizier in financial and juridical matters. In Bandar `Abbas, the shahbandar, harbor master, and the local khan operated in similar fashion. Chardin attributed the relative lack of rebellion in Safavid Iran to the ubiquity of such institutionalized mutual control.
Alliance building was the most commonly used control strategy. It came in various forms. One was to keep the sons of local rulers as hostages in the capital, conditioning them as loyal Safavid subjects. This age-old practice was especially common with regard to outlying regions such as Georgia, Daghistan, and `Arabistan. Shah `Abbas kept Constantin Mirza, son of the Georgian King Alexander, in Isfahan. Alqas Mirza, a Lezghi prince, was sent at a young age as a hostage to Isfahan, renamed Safi Quli Khan, reared in the harem, and in 1666 appointed governor of Yerevan.
A more benevolent form of cementing loyalty through alliances involved marriage arrangements between the Safavids and ruling families, officials in high military, administrative, and religious positions. This type of arrangement was particularly common in the case of Georgia. Shah `Abbas solidified the nexus with its royal house by giving Constantin Mirza’s sister in marriage to Prince Hamzah Mirza. A century later, Gurgin Khan, the Georgian commander-inchief of the Safavid army, married a daughter of Ja`far Quli Khan. of Sistan in a union designed to strengthen ties between Isfahan and that remote area. Sexual politics might even extend to the “barbarian” periphery. Shah Tahmasb gave a daughter in marriage to `Adil Giray, a Tartar chief whom he kept as a hostage, in hopes of preventing the Tatars from siding with the Ottomans.
In the borderlands, where power was by definition a matter of negotiation, operating with tact and sensitivity was especially important. Borders looked linear to foreigners entering and leaving Iran at clearly defined transit stations, yet they were above all permeable frontier zones, unpacified mountains and deserts inhabited by tribal peoples whose loyalty might be temporarily bought but could never be taken for granted. The Arabs and Kurds along the Ottoman borders, the Lezghis in the Caucasus, the Turkmen in Khurasan, and the Baluchis and Afghans on the eastern marches were notorious for their unwillingness to submit to outside authority.
In an approach that goes back to antiquity, the Safavids sought to bring security to such areas by making alliances with tribal chiefs, enlisting them through arrangements in which the latter pledged to defend the frontier in exchange for maintaining their local autonomy. This might take the form of a tribe submitting to the shah as “lovers of the shah,” shah-seven, as Kurds from the Hakkari region did when they disavowed loyalty to the Ottomans and offered their service to the Safavids, thus facilitating the taking of Van by the latter.
The tribal support the state needed, for intelligence and actual assistance in case of war, gave great leverage to the chieftains. The shah picked the Lezghi ruler, the shamkhal, but always from one of the local princes and with the consent of local forces, thus ensuring the stability that was the ultimate rationale of any such arrangement. In 1595 Shah `Abbas I agreed to a temporary subordination of the shamkhal to Russia, stressing that he was an Iranian vassal even if he was an underling of the czar.
In the Safavid–Ottoman borderlands, especially, too much pressure from Isfahan or Istanbul might drive a tribe into the arms of the other regime. Iskandar Beg Munshi called the Kurds fickle, deploring their tendency to switch sides in the conflict with the Ottomans. A policy of leniency and accommodation was vital in such conditions. This is probably why Khalil Khan, the governor of Bakhtiyari territory, was just deposed—as opposed to executed—after his people had risen in revolt against his violent oppression, and why he managed to regain his post twelve years later. Similarly, Shah `Abbas II received Mansur Khan, the ruler of Huwayza, with great pomp and circumstance in Isfahan in 1645, after he had led a rebellion against the Safavids. Sulayman Khan, the Kurdish beglerbeg of Ardalan, in 1657 took the side of Istanbul and tried to escape to Ottoman territory. Caught, he was only exiled to Mashhad for this act of treason. Not only that, but Shah `Abbas II, who had little interest in conflict with either the Kurds or the Ottomans, allowed him to be succeeded by his oldest son, Kalb `Ali Khan.
Loyalty was often literally bought, either with cash or by way of lucrative concessions. When Imam Quli Khan, the governor of Fars, marched against Basra in 1628, he got the Arab tribes en route to render him a variety of services by handing out “cash grants, robes of honor, and other gifts in profusion.” The Afghan warlord Mir Ways in the early eighteenth century served as qafilah-salar, supervisor of the caravan trade between Iran and India. The Safavids also made more institutionalized arrangements with various tribal peoples.
Shah `Abbas II coopted the Lezghis through a mutually beneficial tributary arrangement: They sent gifts to Isfahan as a token of fealty, and in turn received 1,700 tumans per annum from the shah to ensure stability and the protection of the border against other marauders. This arrangement included the resettling of large numbers of tribesmen from the mountains of Darband and Qubbah.The same ruler paid the Kharazmian ruler Abu’l Ghazi Khan an annual allowance of 1,500 tumans during a decade of gilded captivity in Isfahan, and kept disbursing this sum even after Abu’l Ghazi had escaped and regained power in Central Asia, simply to keep him from turning against Iran. After the shah had conducted several campaigns against the Uzbeks, he struck a deal whereby they received an annual stipend in exchange for a promise to desist from raiding—a promise they promptly broke following the shah’s death in 1666.”
- Rudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. pp. 144-148.
