Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  By the end of 1729 Nader’s army had defeated the Afghans in three battles, and had retaken Isfahan. Tahmasp was reinstalled in the old capital as Shah. But before Nader agreed to pursue the defeated Afghans, he forced Tahmasp to concede the right to collect taxes to support the army. The right to levy taxes enabled Nader to establish a state within the state, based on the army.

  Nader duly finished off the remnants of the Afghan occupying force. He went on to throw the Ottoman Turks out of western Persia, before turning rapidly east to conquer Herat. In all these campaigns, his modernised forces, strong in gunpowder weapons, outclassed their opponents, showing themselves able to overcome the ferocity of the Afghan cavalry charges and the attacks of the provincial Ottoman troops. But while he was in Herat, he learned that Tahmasp, in his absence, had renewed the war with the Ottomans, had allowed himself to be defeated, and had then concluded a humiliating peace with the Ottomans. Nader issued a manifesto repudiating the treaty, and marched west. It is striking that he declared himself publicly in this way and sought popular support for his action—a modern moment which argues against those who deny the existence of any but local and dynastic loyalties in this period.

  Arriving at length in Isfahan in the late summer of 1732, having prepared what was to come with typical care, Nader fooled Tahmasp into a false sense of security and got him drunk. He then displayed the Safavid Shah in this disreputable state to the Shi‘a courtiers and army officers. The assembled notables, prompted by Nader, declared Tahmasp unfit to rule, and elevated his infant son Abbas to the throne instead. Nader continued as generalissimo to this infant, and announced at the coronation his intention to ‘throw reins around the necks of the rulers of Kandahar, Bokhara, Delhi and Istanbul’ on his behalf. Those present may have thought this to be vain boasting, but events were to prove them wrong.

  Nader’s first priority was to attack the Ottomans again and restore the traditional frontiers of Persia in the west and north. In his first campaign in Ottoman Iraq he met a setback; a powerful army including some of the best troops held centrally by the Ottoman state marched east to relieve Baghdad under an experienced commander. This was warfare of a different order to that Nader had experienced up to that time. He was overconfident, divided his army outside Baghdad in an attempt to prevent supplies getting through to the besieged city, and suffered a serious defeat. He withdrew, but within a few months, replacing lost men and equipment with a ruthless efficiency that caused much suffering among the hapless peasants and townspeople that had to pay for it, Nader renewed the Turkish war, and defeated the Ottoman forces near Kirkuk. Moving north, he then inflicted a devastating defeat on a new Ottoman army near Yerevan in June 1735. In the negotiations that followed a truce was agreed on the basis of the old frontiers that had existed before 1722, and the Ottomans withdrew. The Russians, who had made an alliance with Nader against the Ottomans, were satisfied with the performance of their ally and had already withdrawn from the Persian lands along the Caspian coast (their regiments having lost many men to disease in the humid climate of Gilan).

  Nader Shah

  With the exception of Kandahar, Nader had now restored control over all the traditional territories of Safavid Persia. He decided the time was right to make himself Shah, and did so by means of an acclamation by all the great nobles, tribal chiefs and senior clerics of Persia at an assembly on the Moghan plain. There was little dissent; but the chief mullah was overheard to have spoken privately in favour of the continuation of Safavid rule, and was strangled. The infant Abbas was deposed, and the rule of the Safavid dynasty at last came to an end. It is noteworthy that despite Nader’s later reputation for tyrannical cruelty, and with the exception of the unfortunate chief mullah (whose execution carried its own political message), he achieved his rise to power almost without the use of political violence, unlike many of those who preceded him and came after him. He brought about the deposition of Tahmasp and the coronation at the Moghan not by assassination, but by careful preparation, propaganda, cunning manouevre and the presence of overbearing military force; above all by the prestige of his military successes.

  Some other significant events occurred at the Moghan. Nader made it a condition of his acceptance of the throne that the Persian people accepted the cessation of Shi‘a practices offensive to Sunni Muslims (especially the ritual cursing of the first three caliphs). Nader’s religious policy served a variety of purposes. The reorientation toward Sunnism helped to reinforce the loyalty of the large Sunni contingent in his army, which he had built up in order to avoid too great a dependence on the traditionalist Shi‘a element, who tended to be pro-Safavid. But the new policy was not aggressively dogmatic. Religious minorities were treated with greater tolerance; he was generous to the Armenians, and his reign was regarded later by the Jews as one of relief from persecution9 (though minorities suffered as much as anyone else from his violent oppression and heavy taxation, especially in later years). The religious policy made it easier for Nader to make a grab for the endowments of Shi‘a mosques and shrines, an important extra source of cash to pay his troops. Within Persia, Nader sought only to amend religious practices—not to impose Sunnism wholesale. But outside Persia he presented himself and the country as converts to Sunnism10—which enabled Nader to set himself up as a potential rival to the Ottoman Sultan for supremacy over Islam as a whole, something that would have been impossible if he and his state had remained orthodox Shi‘a.

  The religious policy also served to distinguish Nader’s regime and its principles from those of the Safavids. He did this in other ways too, notably with his policy toward minorities, and by giving his sons governorships rather than penning them up in the harem. He also showed moderation in the size of his harem, and issued decrees forbidding the abduction of women, which again was probably directed, at least in part, at pointing up the contrast between his rule and that of the last Safavids.

  Crowned Shah, with his western frontiers secure and in undisputed control of the central lands of Persia, Nader set off eastwards to conquer Kandahar. The exactions to pay for this new campaign caused great suffering and in many parts of the country brought the economy almost to a standstill. Nader took Kandahar after a long siege, but he did not stop there. Using the excuse that the Moghul authorities had given refuge to Afghan fugitives, Nader crossed the old frontier between the Persian and Moghul Empires, took Kabul and marched on towards Delhi. North of Delhi, at Karnal, the Persian army encountered the army of the Moghul Emperor, Mohammad Shah. The Persians were much inferior in number to the Moghul forces, yet thanks to the better training and firepower of his soldiers, and rivalry and disunity among the Moghul commanders, Nader defeated them. He was helped by the fact that the Moghul commanders were mounted on elephants, which proved vulnerable to firearms and liable to run wild and uncontrollable, to the dismay of their distinguished riders and anyone who happened to be in their path.

  From the battlefield of Karnal Nader went on to Delhi, where he arrived in March 1739. Shortly after his arrival rioting broke out and some Persian soldiers were killed. So far from home, and with the wealth of the Moghul Empire at stake, Nader could not afford to lose control. He ordered a ruthless massacre in which an estimated 30,000 people died, mostly innocent civilians. Prior to this point, Nader had generally (at least away from the battlefield) achieved his ends without excessive bloodshed. But after Delhi, he may have decided that his previous scruples had become redundant.

  Fig. 8. Nader Shah, in an unfinished Indian miniature—one of the most talented and successful military leaders of world history. Like the miniature, his achievement remained unfinished at his death and Persia plunged into self-destructive chaos. He is said to have signalled the beginning of the massacre in Delhi by drawing his sword.

  With a characteristic blend of threat and diplomacy, Nader stripped the Moghul Emperor of a vast treasure of jewels, gold and silver, and accepted the gift of all the Moghul territories west of the Indus river. The treasure was worth as much a
s perhaps 700 million rupees. To put this sum in some kind of context, it has been calculated that the total cost to the French government of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), including subsidies paid to the Austrian government as well as all the costs of the fighting on land and sea, was about 1.8 billion livres tournois. This was equivalent to about £90 million sterling at the time: close to the rough estimate of £87.5 million sterling for the value of Nader’s haul from Delhi. Some of the jewels he took away—the largest, most impressive ones, like the Kuh-e Nur, the Darya-ye Nur and the Taj-e Mah—had a complex and often bloody history of their own in the following decades.

  Nader did not attempt to annex the Moghul Empire outright. His purpose in conquering Delhi had been to secure the cash necessary to continue his wars of conquest in the west, for which the wealth of Persia alone had, by the time of his coronation, begun to prove inadequate.

  Nader’s campaigns are a reminder of the centrality of Persia to events in the region, in ways that have parallels today. A list of some of Nader’s sieges—Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, Herat, Kabul, has a familiar ring to it after the events of the first years of the twenty-first century. It is worth recalling that Persians were not strangers in any of the lands in which Nader campaigned. Although he and his Safavid predecessors were of Turkic origin and spoke a Turkic language at court, the cultural influence of Persian was such that the language of the court and administration in Delhi and across northern India was Persian, and diplomatic correspondence from the Ottoman court in Istanbul was normally in Persian too. Persian hegemony from Delhi to Istanbul would in some ways have been a natural thing for many of the inhabitants of the region, echoing the Persian character of earlier empires, and the all-pervasive influence of Persian literary, religious and artistic culture.

  Nader’s annexation of Moghul territory west of the Indus, removing the geographical barrier of the Afghan mountains, was one indicator that, had his regime endured, it might have expanded further into India. Other pointers in the same direction include his construction of a fleet in the Persian Gulf, which would have greatly facilitated communications between the different parts of such an empire, and his adoption of a new currency, designed to be interchangeable with the rupee. If this had happened (especially if the trade route through to Basra, Baghdad and beyond had been opened up), and had been managed wisely, there could have been a release of trade and economic energy comparable to that under the Abbasids, a thousand years before. But that was not to happen.

  On his return from India, Nader discovered that his son, Reza Qoli, who had been made viceroy in his absence, had executed the former Safavid Shahs Tahmasp and Abbas. Nader’s displeasure at this was increased by his dislike of the magnificent entourage Reza Qoli had built up while Nader had been in India. Nader took away his son’s viceroyship and humiliated him. From this point their relationship deteriorated, and he came to believe that Reza Qoli was plotting to supplant him.

  From India Nader made a successful campaign in Turkestan, and went on to subdue the rebellious Lezges of Daghestan, but there he was unlucky. The Lezges avoided open battle and carried out a guerrilla war of ambush and attacks on supply convoys. Nader’s troops suffered from lack of food. Nader himself was troubled by illness, probably liver disease caused originally by malaria and exacerbated by heavy drinking. The sickness grew worse after his return from India, and was accompanied by great rages that became more ungovernable and insane as time went on. While he was in Daghestan in the summer of 1742 he was told that Reza Qoli had instigated an assassination attempt against him in the forests of the Savad Kuh in May 1741. Reza Qoli denied his guilt, but Nader did not believe him, and had him blinded, to prevent him ever taking the throne.

  His failure in Daghestan, his illness, and above all his terrible remorse over the blinding of his son, brought about a crisis in Nader, a kind of breakdown, from which he never recovered. Perhaps because of the poverty and humiliations of his childhood, Nader’s family were of central importance to him, and loyalty within the family had up to that time been unquestioned, one of the fixed points on which he had constructed his regime. Now that foundation had given way, his actions no longer showed his former energy and drive to succeed, and he underwent a drastic mental and physical decline. He withdrew from Daghestan, in terrible weather conditions, without having subdued the Lezge tribes, and (according to plans laid months and years before) called new forces together for another campaign in Ottoman Iraq.

  When they gathered his army numbered some 375,000 men—larger than the combined forces of Austria and Prussia, the main protagonists in the European theatre of the Seven Years War, when that conflict began thirteen years later.11 This was the most powerful single military force in the world at that time—an enormous and in the long term insupportable number for a state the size of Persia (no Iranian army would reach that size again until the Iran/Iraq war of 1980-88). It has been estimated that whereas there were around 30 million people in the Ottoman territories in the eighteenth century, and perhaps 150 million in the Moghul Empire, Persia’s population was perhaps as low as 6 million, having fallen from 9 million before the Afghan revolt. Over the same period the economy collapsed, as a result of invasion, war and exactions to pay for war.12

  The army, and the taxation to pay for it, are recurring themes in Nader’s story. Was this army a nomad host, or a modern military force? This points to the wider question of whether Nader’s style of rule looked backward or forward. It is an extreme mixture. Nader himself repeatedly compared himself with Timur, stressing his Turkic origin and Timurid precedents in many of his public statements. He named his grandson Shahrokh after Timur’s son and successor, and at one point removed Timur’s tombstone from Samarkand for his own mausoleum, only to return it later (unfortunately, it got broken in half in the process). On several occasions he described himself as the instrument of God’s wrath on a sinful people, after the manner of earlier Asiatic conquerors, and his brutal conduct of government, particularly after his return from India, has as much in common with that of nomad warlord as that of a modern statesman.

  But he was not in any simple sense a tribal leader, and in many ways remained an outsider throughout his life, in successive milieus. He was not born into the leadership of the Afshar tribe to which he belonged, and some of his determined enemies throughout his career were fellow-Afshars. From the beginning his followers were diverse, including especially Kurds and Jalayir tribesmen. Later he repudiated his Shi‘a heritage, turned Sunni (at least for public consumption) and depended most heavily on his Afghan troops. Like other Persian leaders (and Napoleon), he was close to his immediate family and promoted them politically; but in his wider connections he was an opportunist, and the term ‘Afsharid’ that is applied to him and his dynasty is misleading. The name Nader means rarity or prodigy: it is appropriate. He was sui generis, a parvenu.

  Nader used government cleverly, began an important and thorough reform of taxation, and had a strong administrative grip. His religious policy was novel and tolerant in spirit. One should not overstate it, but some contemporaries remarked upon his unusually considerate treatment of women. In military matters he was wholly modern. He established the beginnings of a navy, and it now seems plain that something very like a Military Revolution, as described in the European context by Geoffrey Parker, was brought about in Persia by Nader Shah. It was under him that the majority of troops in the army were equipped with firearms for the first time, necessitating a greater emphasis on drill and training; characteristic of developments that had taken place in Europe in the previous century. The army increased greatly in size and cost, and Nader was forced to make improvements in his capability for siege warfare. He began to reshape state administration to make structures more efficient. These are all elements that have been shown to be typical of the Military Revolution in Europe.

  If Nader had reigned longer and more wisely, and had passed on his rule to a competent successor, the drive to pay for his successful ar
my could have transformed the Persian state administration and ultimately the economy, as happened in Europe, as Parker and others have argued. It could have brought about in Iran a modernising state capable of resisting colonial intervention in the following century. If that had happened, Nader might today be remembered in the history of Iran and the Middle East as a figure comparable with Peter the Great in Russia: as a ruthless, militaristic reformer who set his country on a new path. In the early 1740s he seemed set for great things—contemporaries held their breath to see whether he could succeed in taking Ottoman Iraq and establish his supremacy through the Islamic world as a whole. He had already achieved a large part of that task. Unfortunately, Nader’s derangement in the last five years of his life meant that the expense of his military innovations turned Persia into a desert rather than developing the country. His insatiable demands for cash brought about his downfall and the downfall of his dynasty.

  Nader’s troops invaded Ottoman Iraq in 1743 and rapidly overran most of the province, except the major cities. Baghdad and Basra were blockaded. Nader brought up a new array of siege cannon and mortars to bombard Kirkuk, which quickly surrendered, but the defence of Mosul was conducted more resolutely. Nader’s new siege artillery pounded the walls and devastated the interior of the city, but a lot of his men were killed in unsuccessful assaults, and he no longer had the will or patience to sustain a long siege. In October 1743 he withdrew, sending peace proposals to the Ottomans. Mosul marked the end of his ambition to subdue the Ottoman Sultan and demonstrate his pre-eminence in the Islamic world. It was another important turning-point.