Shah Abbas I
Shah Abbas I took the Safavid throne at seventeen from the tribal chiefs who had made him a puppet, bought time from the Ottomans with a bad peace, built an army of slaves and musketeers that owed nothing to the tribes, took back everything the peace had given and more, moved the capital to Isfahan and made it half the world, and blinded or killed the sons who might have done to him what he had done to his father. He was born in 1571 at Herat, where the Qizilbash chiefs who ran the provinces kept him, and in 1588 the faction that held him marched on Qazvin and put him on the throne in place of his blind father. Within two years he had the chief who had done it killed. The state he inherited had lost Tabriz and the west to the Ottomans and Khorasan to the Uzbeks, and its army was the tribal cavalry of the Qizilbash, whose chiefs governed as they pleased. He signed the peace of 1590 that conceded Azerbaijan, Karabakh and Georgia, and used the decade it bought to build a different army. There were regiments of ghulams, Georgian and Armenian and Circassian slaves converted and trained, a corps of musketeers and one of artillery, paid from the crown's own provinces, which he took from the tribes for the purpose. The Uzbeks were beaten out of Khorasan in 1598, the Ottomans out of Tabriz in 1603 and out of Baghdad in 1624, the Portuguese out of Hormuz in 1622 with English ships. In 1598 he moved the capital to Isfahan and built the square, the mosques, the bridge and the avenue that made the proverb. He brought the Armenians of Julfa there by force and gave them the silk trade and their own quarter, received Europeans from every court, and made pilgrimage on foot to Mashhad. He had his eldest son killed in 1615 on suspicion and two others blinded, and was succeeded in January 1629 by a grandson who had been raised in the harem and knew nothing, which is how the dynasty went.
- Lived: 1571 CE – 1629 CE
- Nationality: Persian
- Roles: shah, monarch
