The latest round of forced contributions and requisitioning, to make good the losses in Daghestan and provide for the campaign of 1743, had caused great distress and resentment across Persia. Revolts broke out in Astarabad (led by Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar, whose son was to found the Qajar dynasty later in the century), Shiraz and elsewhere. Early in 1744 Nader withdrew to a camp near Hamadan, in order to be closer to the troubles and coordinate action against them. The insurrections were put down with great severity. Shiraz and Astarabad were devastated, and in each place two white towers were erected, studded with niches which held the heads of hundreds of executed men.
At length Nader realised that the Ottomans were not going to accept his peace proposals, and learned that new Ottoman armies were advancing toward his frontiers. His son Nasrollah defeated one of these, and Nader achieved victory over the other, near Yerevan, in the summer of 1745. This was his last great victory, and it was followed by a treaty with the Ottomans in the following year. But by this time new revolts had broken out, driven by Nader’s oppressive practices: each place he visited was ransacked by his troops and tax collectors, as if they were plundering enemies. His demands for money reached insane levels, and cruel beatings, mutilations and killings became commonplace. His illness recurred and irritated further his mental instability. By the winter of 1746-1747 his crazy demands for money extended even to his inner circle of family and close advisers, and no-one could feel safe. His nephew, Ali Qoli, joined a revolt in Sistan and refused to return to obedience. Unlike previous rebels, Ali Qoli and his companions had contacts among Nader’s closest attendants. In June 1747 Nader was assassinated by officers of his own bodyguard near Mashhad; they burst into his tent in the harem while he was sleeping. One of the assassins cut off his arm as he raised his sword to defend himself, and then another sliced off his head.13
The short-lived nature of Nader’s achievements is one explanation for why he has not been better known outside Iran, but it is not a sufficient one. With a few exceptions Nader, having excited much interest and writing in Europe among his eigtheenth-century contemporaries, was largely ignored in the nineteenth. Why should this have been so?
Without overstating the case, it seems plausible that it was because Nader’s vigour and his successes fitted badly with the crude Victorian view of the Orient as incorrigibly decadent and corrupt, ripe for and in need of colonisation. From a purely British perspective, his military successes might then have been thought to detract from the later victories of Clive and Wellington in India, and to have conflicted with the myth of the supposedly inherent superiority of European arms; an important element in the edifice of British imperialism. By the latter part of the twentieth century the Great Men of History (as Carlyle described them) could no longer be regarded with the same hero-worship they had enjoyed before, and the oblivion to which Nader had been consigned was perhaps deepened by a general distaste for conquerors.
Nader’s historian, Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi, far from showing distaste, celebrated Nader’s victories as a sign of the favour of God, and of God’s will that Nader should reign. In this as well as other respects, Mirza Mahdi’s account serves as a conduit for Nader’s own attitudes. Writing as Nader’s official historian in Nader’s own lifetime, it was never likely that he would show any radical independence of thought. An independent observer who met him described him as ‘wise, humble, polite, attentive, and respectable…’ His history is painstakingly accurate about dates and places, with only occasional lapses. Having accompanied Nader on his campaigns from the earliest days, he was in an almost unique position to know the facts of what happened, but he tended to put a favourable gloss on events, and on occasion omitted mention of actions that would have reflected badly on Nader.
The greatest single omission in Mirza Mahdi’s narrative was his failure to mention the blinding of Reza Qoli Mirza in 1742. It is generally agreed that Mirza Mahdi’s history was for the most part written as a chronicle while Nader was alive. But some years later he added a section dealing with the last months of Nader’s life, and the aftermath of his assassination. In this section the criticism he had been forced to suppress in Nader’s lifetime, flooded out. He described how Nader’s cruelties, instead of calming him, only made him the more frenzied; and how many of his people were driven by his oppression to abandon their towns and houses and take to the deserts and mountains, or to emigrate. The words that Mirza Mahdi used to introduce this last section of his history serve well to summarise Nader’s career. He wrote:
From the beginning of Nader Shah’s reign until his return from Khwarezm and his march into Daghestan, he was entirely occupied with the care of his empire and the administration of justice, in such a manner that the people of Iran would have given their lives for his preservation; but after this time he changed his conduct entirely. At the instigation of some hostile spirit, this unhappy monarch listened to ill-intentioned spies, and had the eyes of Reza Qoli, the best and the dearest of his sons, torn out. Remorse quickly followed this rash cruelty, and Nader Shah became like a madman. The reports of bad news that he received in succession thereafter of troubles in various parts of his dominion increased his rage.14
New Maps of Hell
The story of the decades after Nader’s death is one of chaos, destruction, violence and misery. Anyone looking to restore their faith in the innate goodness of human nature would do well to skip the next few pages. After Nader’s assassination his nephew Ali Qoli made himself Shah, renamed himself Adel Shah (which means The Just Shah—a misnomer), and sent troops to Nader’s stronghold at Kalat-e Naderi in Khorasan. There they murdered all but one of Nader’s sons and grandsons, and even cut open the bellies of pregnant women in the harem, to finish off heirs as yet unborn.
The army Nader had assembled, within which he had encouraged competition between commanders and ethnic groups, could not hold together once he was gone. Like that of Alexander after his death, the army split, following charismatic generals. The commander of the Afghans, Ahmad Khan Abdali, whom Nader had released from prison in Kandahar in 1738, fought Nader’s assassins in the camp and then left for home (with a mixture of Ghilzai, Abdali and other Afghans, and others). Along the way he captured a quantity of treasure, including the fabulous Kuh-e Nur diamond that Nader had taken from Delhi. On his arrival in Kandahar he was elected to be the first Shah of the Durrani dynasty, founding a state based on Kandahar, Herat and Kabul that was to become modern Afghanistan—in this sense one could say that Afghanistan was founded in the muster lists of Nader Shah. Another of Nader’s commanders, the Georgian Erekle, who had accompanied him to Delhi, established an independent kingdom in Georgia. Most of the other ethnic and tribal groups Nader had assembled in Khorasan returned home also; including the small Zand tribe, originally from Lorestan (though perhaps ultimately of Kurdish origin), under one of their leaders, Karim Khan; and the Bakhtiari, under Ali Mardan Khan.
Adel Shah was unable to maintain control in an impoverished country swarming with unemployed soldiers, and was deposed after little more than a year by his brother, Ebrahim. Other rulers followed, only to be deposed in turn; Nader’s surviving grandson, Shahrokh, then a Safavid descendant of Shah Soleiman, then Shahrokh again (though he had been blinded in the interim). Shahrokh remained in place from 1750 until 1796, seemingly with the consent and even the protection of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who respected him as the descendant of Nader. But from the early 1750s the regime in Mashhad could exert little influence beyond Khorasan.15
Adel Shah’s brother Ebrahim had initially controlled Isfahan, but after he moved east Karim Khan Zand and Ali Mardan Khan Bakhtiari took over the western provinces, coming to an agreement with each other and ruling in the name of another Safavid prince, Esma‘il III. Step by step Karim Khan removed his rivals, killing Ali Mardan Khan in 1754 and deposing Esma‘il in 1759. He stabilised his regime by fighting off external rivals also: Azad Khan, another of Nader Shah’s Afghan commanders, who controlled Azerbaijan; and Mohammad Hasan Khan
Qajar, who had his power base in Mazanderan. Karim Khan also fought the Ottomans and conquered Basra; something Nader Shah had never achieved.
The rule of Karim Khan Zand was an island of relative calm and peace in an otherwise bloody and destructive period. In the years of the Afghan revolt and the reign of Nader Shah, many cities in Iran were devastated by war and repression (some, like Kerman, more than once—in 1719 and 1747—and it was to suffer terribly again in 1794). By mid-century most of the built-up area of Isfahan, the former capital, was deserted; inhabited only by owls and wild animals. In the last years of the Safavids, it had been a thriving city of 550,000 people,16 one of the largest cities in the world; a similar size to London at the time, or bigger. By the end of the siege of 1722 only 100,000 people were left, and although many citizens returned thereafter the number fell yet further during the Afghan occupation and later so that by 1736 there were only 50,000 left.17 It has been estimated that the overall total population of Persia fell from around nine million at the beginning of the century to perhaps six million or less by mid-century through war, disease and emigration; and that population levels did not begin to rise significantly again until after 1800,18 (by contrast, the population of England rose from around six million in 1700 to around nine million in 1800). Trade fell to one-fifth of its previous level.19
But despite the pitiful state into which the country had fallen, the major outside powers, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, did not intervene as they had in 1722-1725. It was partly that they were busy elsewhere, but surely also that the outcome of their previous attempts had not encouraged them to repeat the experiment.
The eighteenth century has been portrayed as a period of tribal resurgence20, and the names of the main parties contending for supremacy for much of the century—Afshar, Zand and Qajar—alone point in that direction. Many of the troops fighting in the civil wars, most of them horsemen, were recruited from the nomadic tribes, who still would have comprised between a third and a half of the population. The make-up of the tribes was complex and far from static—there were many different terms to express different kinds of clans, tribal subdivisions, tribes and tribal confederations; and the alliances between tribes formed, broke and reformed in new combinations from time to time. At the best of times, as for centuries if not millennia, the tribes lived in an uneasy tension with the more settled people of the towns and villages. The tribes and the settled peoples were usually divided by ethnicity, language or religion, or by a combination of them. The tribesmen lived in more rugged mountain and arid territory, and had more rugged attitudes to go with their more marginal existence. They raised livestock, and traded their surplus to supply the towns and villages with wool and meat. In return they received goods they could not make for themselves; some foodstuffs, but also weapons. But as well as this more open form of exchange, there was often an exchange on the basis of security, more or less disguised. Peasants might pay tribute to a local tribal leader to have their crops left alone at harvest time, or to avoid raiding that might otherwise mean some being carried off as slaves (especially in the north-east). Or the local tribal leader might often have been co-opted, in a more formalised arrangement, to serve as the regional governor, collecting tax instead of protection money. But in general, before, during and after this period, the tribes and their leaders tended to have the upper hand, and to exploit it politically. Their position of supremacy was only decisively overturned when the twentieth century was quite well advanced.
Karim Khan Zand did not have Nader’s insatiable love of war and lust for conquest. His governmental system was less highly geared. After he removed Esma‘il, Karim Khan refused to make himself Shah, ruling instead as vakil-e ra’aya (deputy or regent of the people): a modern-sounding choice of title that probably reflects his awareness of the weariness of the Iranian people and their longing for peace. He restored traditional Shi‘ism as the religion in his territories, dropping Nader’s experiment with Sunnism. Karim Khan chose Shiraz as his capital, and built mosques, elegant gardens and palaces there that still stand, erasing the scars of the revolt of 1744 and beautifying the city that had been the home of Sa’di and Hafez. Karim Khan ruled there until his death in 1779. He was a ruthless, tough leader, as was necessary in those harsh times; but he also acquired an enduring reputation for modesty, compassion, pragmatism and good government, unlike most of his rivals. His reputation shone the brighter for the surrounding ugliness and violence of his times.
Renewed War
After Karim Khan’s death in 1779, Persia lapsed again into the misery of civil war. This time the struggle was between various Zand princes on the one side and the Qajars, based in Mazanderan, on the other. The Qajars were united by Agha Mohammad Khan (the son of Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar) who had fallen into the hands of Adel Shah in 1747 or 1748 and had been castrated at Adel Shah’s orders when he was only five or six years old. After that he was kept as a hostage by Karim Khan, but treated kindly.21 He grew up to be a fiercely intelligent, pragmatic man, but grim and bitter, with a bad temper and a vicious cruel streak that grew worse as he got older. He was never able to overcome the loss of his manhood, and was depicted looking drawn and beardless in contemporary illustrations as a sign of it.
When Karim Khan died Agha Mohammad escaped to the north, where he successfully conciliated other branches of the Qajar tribe that had previously feuded with his family, but had to fight his own brothers to establish his dominance (Agha Mohammad’s rise was much more firmly based on his lineage and on the Qajar tribe than that of Nader Shah was based on the Afshars). That achieved, and with the help of the Yomut Turkmen allies that had long supported his family, he ejected Zand forces from Mazanderan and began campaigning south of the Alborz mountains. But when he arrived outside Tehran, the gates were closed against him. The citizens politely told him that the Zands were in charge in Isfahan and that meant the people of Tehran must obey the Zands (with the implication that if Agha Mohammad Khan could take Isfahan, they would obey him too). Agha Mohammad marched on to Isfahan, taking it in the early part of 1785. He was then duly accepted into Tehran in March 1786, after other successful campaigning in the west. From that point it became clear that he intended to establish himself as ruler of the whole country, and Tehran has been the capital since that time.
There was to be much more fighting before Agha Mohammad could rule supreme, and he was still far from secure in the south. Isfahan changed hands several times, but the Zands could not deliver a knock-out blow either, and in January 1789 their leader (Ja‘far Khan) was assassinated. The ruling family of the Zands then fought among themselves for the leadership, until Lotf Ali Khan Zand, a young grand-nephew of Karim Khan, entered Shiraz in May 1789, establishing his control.
Lotf Ali Khan was young and charismatic, and was a natural focus for the hopes of those who remembered the the prestige of his great-uncle, but militarily he was at a disadvantage from the start. He fought off an attack by Agha Mohammad in June 1789 but when he made a move on Isfahan in 1791 Shiraz revolted against him behind his back. He returned but was unable to get back into his former capital and was forced to lay siege to the city. The Shirazis sent for help to Agha Mohammad, and sent Lotf Ali Khan’s family as prisoners to him too. Lotf Ali Khan was able to defeat a combined force of Qajars and troops from Shiraz, but the city still held out and in 1792 Agha Mohammad himself marched south with a large army. Agha Mohammad by this time was showing some of the fierce anger and vicious cruelty for which he later became notorious. At one point he saw a coin minted in Lotf Ali’s name and became so enraged that he gave orders for the Zand’s son to be castrated.
Lotf Ali Khan now nearly brought off a coup that could have won him the war. As Agha Mohammad approached Shiraz, he camped with his Qajar troops near the ancient sites of Persepolis and Istakhr. After night fell, Lotf Ali approached the camp with a smaller force and attacked from several directions in the dark. Chaos erupted, and Agha Mohammad was in great danger when Lotf Ali sent thirty or forty men right
into the camp, who penetrated as far as Agha Mohammad’s private compound, which was defended against them by a few musketeers. At this point one of Agha Mohammad’s courtiers went to Lotf Ali and told him that Agha Mohammad had fled. The battle appeared to be over and Lotf ‘li was persuaded that further fighting would only risk his own troops killing each other in the dark. He ordered his men to sheathe their sabres. Many of them dispersed, plundered the parts of the camp they were in control of and left the scene with the booty. But when dawn came Lotf Ali discovered to his horror that Agha Mohammad was still there. He had not fled, and the Qajar troops were regrouping around him. Lotf Ali Khan was surrounded and outnumbered by the Qajar forces, and only had 1,000 of his own men still with him. He quickly withdrew, and fled eastwards22.
From this point on Lotf Ali Khan’s support began to dwindle away. He captured Kerman, but Agha Mohammad Khan moved against the city and besieged it. The Qajars broke into the city by treachery in October 1794 and Lotf Ali Khan fled to Bam. Agha Mohammad ordered that the women and children of Kerman should be given over to his soldiers as slaves, and those of the men that were not killed he had blinded. To be sure that his orders were carried out the eyeballs were cut out, brought to him in baskets and poured out on the floor—20,000 of them. Sir John Malcolm recorded that these blinded victims were later to be found begging across Persia, telling the story of the disaster that had befallen their city.23
Iran: Empire of the Mind Page 20
