Military Reforms of Shah Abbas I
Shah Abbas I inherited a collapsing Iran in 1588 and rebuilt it into a state that lasted another century. The Safavid empire had been founded in 1501 on the military power of the Qizilbash — Turkmen tribal cavalry whose devotion to the shah was religious and whose chiefs had spent the previous decade fighting each other, installing and murdering princes, and losing territory to the Ottomans and the Uzbeks. Abbas came to the throne at seventeen and began by signing a humiliating peace with the Ottomans in 1590 that gave up Azerbaijan, Karabakh and Georgia, in order to deal with the Uzbeks and with his own army. His reforms were institutional. He created a standing force of slave soldiers — ghulams, largely Georgian, Armenian and Circassian in origin, converted and trained — paid from the treasury and loyal to the crown rather than to a tribe, and equipped them with muskets and artillery with technical help that included two English adventurers. He converted tribal land into crown land to pay for it, and appointed ghulams as provincial governors. He then took back everything conceded, defeating the Uzbeks in 1598 and the Ottomans in a war from 1603 that recovered Baghdad, and expelled the Portuguese from Hormuz in 1622 with English naval help. He moved the capital to Isfahan and built the great square, the mosques and the bridges that are still there, and deported tens of thousands of Armenians from Julfa to a new quarter of the city to run the silk trade. He also blinded or killed his own sons. The succession was the flaw he built into his own settlement. Fearing rivals as his father had reason to, he killed one son and blinded two, and left the throne to a grandson raised in the harem — beginning the practice of confining princes there that produced a century of inexperienced shahs.
- Year: 1590 CE
- Category: Political
