Ismail I

Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty at fourteen, made Iran a Shi'a country by decree, and was broken as a leader by a single afternoon at Chaldiran. He was the hereditary head of the Safaviyya, a Sufi order in Ardabil that had become militant and messianic, and his followers - the Qizilbash, named for the red caps they wore - regarded him as something close to divine and fought accordingly. He took Tabriz in 1501 and proclaimed himself shah, and within a decade held the whole Iranian plateau and Iraq. His central act was religious: he made Twelver Shi'ism the state religion of a country that was then overwhelmingly Sunni, imported jurists from Lebanon and Bahrain because Iran had too few, and enforced the change with executions and public cursing of the first three caliphs. It worked, and it is the reason Iran is a Shi'a state now and the reason the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry became sectarian rather than merely territorial. He also wrote poetry in Turkish under the name Khata'i, some of it claiming divinity, which was quoted against him. At Chaldiran in 1514 his cavalry charged Ottoman guns chained together and was destroyed, and Tabriz was briefly occupied. He never commanded in the field again. He spent his last ten years hunting and drinking while his officers governed, and the Qizilbash belief in his invincibility, which had been the foundation of the state, did not survive him. The dynasty lasted another two centuries, and its greatest ruler, Abbas I, spent his reign deliberately reducing the Qizilbash in favour of a standing army of Caucasian converts - dismantling the instrument his great-grandfather had used to build the state, because it had proved too dangerous to leave intact. The line Ismail drew between Iran and its Sunni neighbours has never been rubbed out.

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