Sultan Husayn

Sultan Husayn was the last effective Safavid shah, and the dynasty that had ruled Iran for two centuries collapsed in his reign under an army of Afghan tribesmen that never numbered more than about twenty thousand. He came to the throne in 1694 out of the harem, where royal princes had been raised for generations to prevent them plotting, and with the same result everywhere it is tried: he had no experience of government, war or men. He was pious, gentle and almost entirely governed by others - the court eunuchs, his aunt Maryam Begum, and above all the senior cleric Muhammad Baqir Majlisi, whose programme of enforcing Twelver orthodoxy he endorsed. Wine was banned, then permitted again when his relatives objected. Sufi orders were suppressed. Sunnis in the empire's border provinces, and Georgian and Armenian Christians, were pressed hard, which converted loosely held frontier regions into hostile ones. Meanwhile the treasury was empty, the standing army had been allowed to decay to save money, and provincial governors were selling offices. The Ghilzai Afghans of Kandahar revolted in 1709 under Mirwais Hotak and destroyed every force sent against them. In 1722 Mirwais's son Mahmud marched on the capital, beat the imperial army at Gulnabad, and besieged Isfahan for six months until the city was reduced to eating whatever it could find; tens of thousands died of starvation. Sultan Husayn rode out and handed Mahmud the crown himself. He was kept as a prisoner and executed in 1726 when an Ottoman army approached. Nader Shah expelled the Afghans afterwards, but the Safavids never really returned.

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