Abbas I (Abbas the Great)

Abbas I (27 January 1571 - 19 January 1629), known as Abbas the Great, was the fifth Safavid shah of Iran, reigning from 1587/1588 to 1629. The third son of Mohammad Khodabanda, he is generally considered the greatest ruler of the Safavid dynasty. He rebuilt the military and the state, recovered the territories lost to the Uzbeks and the Ottomans, made Isfahan his capital and one of the great cities of the Islamic world, and carried Safavid Iran to the height of its power. ^{1 2}

He was born at Herat on 27 January 1571 — Encyclopaedia Iranica pairs the date with 1 Ramadan 978 — the third son of Mohammad Khodabanda and Khayr al-Nisa Begum, the Mahd-e Olya. Raised in Khorasan in the custody of Qizilbash guardians, he was a pawn in the tribal factions of his father's reign: his mother was murdered by Qizilbash conspirators in 1579, and his elder brother, the heir Hamza Mirza, was assassinated in 1586. In October 1587 his guardian Murshid Quli Khan Ustajlu marched him to Qazvin and proclaimed him shah over his deposed father; Iranica dates the formal handing over of the royal insignia to 1 October 1588. ^{1 2 3}

Abbas first freed himself from his kingmaker: Murshid Quli Khan was assassinated in 1589 with the connivance of the Georgian ghulam Allahverdi Khan. To escape dependence on the Qizilbash tribal cavalry, the shah built a standing army of ghulams — converts from among Georgian, Armenian and Circassian prisoners — together with musketeer and artillery corps advised by the English Sherley brothers, and paid for it by converting state provinces into crown lands. In 1590, still too weak to fight on two fronts, he signed the Treaty of Istanbul, ceding Azerbaijan, Georgia and other western territories to the Ottomans to buy time against the Uzbeks. ^{1 2}

The new army was turned first east: in 1598 Abbas routed the Uzbeks and recovered Herat and Mashhad after a decade of occupation. Then he moved against the Ottomans, retaking Tabriz in 1603 and, campaign by campaign, every province ceded in 1590; the peace of 1612 and the settlement at Sarab in 1618 confirmed the recovered frontier. War resumed in 1623, when he took Baghdad. Kandahar was recovered from the Mughals in 1622, and in the same year, with ships of the English East India Company, he expelled the Portuguese from Hormuz, the island commanding the Gulf trade. ^{1 2}

In 1598 Abbas transferred the capital from Qazvin to Isfahan and rebuilt it around the great Maydan-e Shah, flanked by the Shah Mosque, the Shaykh Lutfallah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace and the Qaysariya bazaar, with the Chahar Bagh avenue leading across the Zayandeh river. Thousands of Armenian craftsmen deported from Julfa were settled in the suburb of New Julfa and made the silk trade — a royal monopoly — flourish; Persian carpets, textiles, tiles and manuscript arts reached a celebrated peak, and European ambassadors, merchants and travellers frequented the court. ^{1 2}

Like almost all the Safavid monarchs, Abbas was a Shi'ite Muslim of the Twelver school, with a particular veneration for Imam Husayn. He maintained the cult of the Safavid shaykhs at Ardabil, generously supported the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad, and in 1601 made the pilgrimage on foot from Isfahan to Mashhad, performing menial tasks at the shrine to display his devotion. Such acts strengthened the Safavid shahs' claim to act as representatives on earth of the Hidden Imam, and kept pilgrimage wealth inside Iran while Karbala and Najaf were in Ottoman hands. The English and Arabic articles both name his religion as Twelver Shi'ism; Iranica documents the same devotion. ^{1 4 2}

His health was poor from 1621. Fearful that his sons would be used against him as he had been used against his father, he had confined them to the harem; one son was executed and two blinded on suspicion, and two others predeceased him. He died at his palace at Farahabad on the Caspian coast — Wikidata names the place as Behshahr, the neighbouring town — on 19 January 1629 (Jumada I 1038, in Iranica's pairing), and was buried in his mausoleum at Kashan. His grandson Safi succeeded him. ^{1 3 2}