Nadir Shah

Nadir Shah drove the Afghans and the Ottomans out of Iran, sacked Delhi, and was murdered by his own guard after going mad. He was born to a Turkmen family of the Afshar tribe in Khorasan, was carried off as a slave with his mother as a child, and rose through banditry into military service at a moment when the Safavid state had collapsed and the country was being partitioned between Afghans, Ottomans and Russians. He restored it in a decade, took the throne himself in 1736, and then invaded India, where the Mughal army met him at Karnal in 1739 and was destroyed in three hours. He entered Delhi, a riot killed some of his men, and he ordered a massacre that lasted a day and killed tens of thousands. He left with the accumulated treasure of the Mughal empire, including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and remitted taxes in Iran for three years on the strength of it. He was a Sunni ruling a Shia country and tried to have Twelver Shi'ism recognised as a fifth school of Sunni law, which satisfied nobody. His last years were a paranoid campaign of extortion and blinding against his own subjects, including his eldest son. His officers killed him in his tent in 1747 and his empire disintegrated at once. The Koh-i-Noor passed from his treasury to Afghanistan, then to the Sikh empire, and then to Queen Victoria, and is claimed by four countries. He is sometimes called the Napoleon of Persia and sometimes the last great conqueror of Asia, and both descriptions are about the same thing: he was very good at war and left nothing behind that could function without him.

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