Ismail I

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Ismail I
Shahanshah of Persia
Сефи 1й 1629-42.jpg
Shah Ismail I.
Reign 1501–1524
Coronation 1501
Born July 17, 1487
Birthplace Ardabil
Died May 23, 1524
Place of death Tabriz
Buried Ardabil
Successor Tahmasp I
Consort daughter of Shirvanshah II Khalilullah[1][2][3][4]
Royal House Safavid dynasty
Father Haydar Safavi
Mother Halima Begum aka Martha, daughter of Uzun Hasan

Ismail I (July 17, 1487 – May 23, 1524), known in Persian as Shāh Ismāʿil (Persian: شاه اسماعیل‎; full name: Abū l-Muzaffar bin Haydar as-Safavī), was a Shah of Iran (1502) [5][6] and the founder of the Safavid dynasty which survived until 1736. Isma'il started his campaign in Iranian Azerbaijan in 1500 as the leader of the Safaviyya, a Twelver Shia militant religious order, and unified all of Iran by 1509.[7] Born in Ardabil in Northwestern Iran, he reigned as Shah Ismail I of Iran from 1502 to 1524.

Ismail played a key role in the rise of Twelver Islam; he converted Iran from Sunni to Shi'a Islam, importing religious authorities from the Levant.[8] In Alevism, Shah Ismail remains revered as a spiritual guide.

Ismail was also a prolific poet who, under the pen name Khatā'ī ("Sinner") contributed greatly to the literary development of the Azerbaijani language.[9]

Contents

Life and political history [edit]

See also: Ideology of Safavids
The battle between the young Ismail and Shah Farrukh Yassar of Shirvan

Ismail was born to Martha and Shaykh Haydar on July 17, 1487 in Ardabil. His father, Haydar, was the sheikh of the Safaviyya Sufi order and a direct descendant of its Kurdish[10][11][12] founder, Safi-ad-din Ardabili (1252–1334). Ismail was the last in line of hereditary Grand Masters of the Safaviyah Sufi order, prior to his ascent to a ruling dynasty. As a boy only a year old, he lost his father, the leader of a growing Qizilbash community in Iranian Azerbaijan, who died in battle. His mother Martha, better known as Halima Begum, was the daughter of Uzun Hasan by his Pontic Greek wife Theodora Megale Komnene, better known as Despina Khatun.[13] Despina Khatun was the daughter of Emperor John IV of Trebizond. (She had married Uzun Hassan in a deal to protect Trebizond from the Ottomans.[14]) Ismail grew up bilingual, speaking Persian and Azeri.[15][16]

In 700/1301, Safi al-Din assumed the leadership of the Zahediyeh, a significant Sufi order in Gilan, from his spiritual master and father-in-law Zahed Gilani. Due to the great spiritual charisma of Safi al-Din, the order was later known as the Safaviyya. Like his father and grandfather Ismail headed the Safaviyya sufi order. An invented genealogy claimed that Sheikh Safi (the founder of the order and Ismael's ancestor) was a lineal desendant of Ali. Ismail also proclaimed himself the Mahdi (The Guided One) and a reincarnation of Ali.[17]

As legend has it, the infant Ismail went into hiding for several years. With his followers, he finally returned to Tabriz. Ismail's advent to power was due to Turkoman tribes of Anatolia and Azerbaijan, who formed the most important part of the Qizilbash movement.[18]

In the summer of 1500, about 7000 Qizilbash forces, consisted of Ustaclu, Shamlu, Rumlu, Tekelu, Zhulkadir, Afshar, Qajar and Varsak tribes, responded to the invitation of Ismail in Erzincan.[19] Qizilbash forces passed over the Kura River in November 1500, and marched towards the Shirvanshah's state. They defeated the forces under the Shirvanshah Farrukh Yassar near Cabanı (present-day Shamakhi Rayon, Azerbaijan), and conquered Baku.[20] In July 1501, Ismail was enthroned as Shah of Azerbaijan,[21] choosing Tabriz, Azerbaijan, as his capital. When the Safavids came to power in 1501, Shah Ismail was 14 or 15 years old; by 1510 he had conquered the whole of Iran.[22] After defeating the Aq Qoyunlu in 1502, he took the title of Shah of Iran.[6]

The Battle of Marv in 1510

In 1510, Ismail I moved against the Uzbeg tribe. In battle near the city of Merv, some 17,000 Qizilbash warriors ambushed and defeated a superior Uzbek force numbering 28,000. The Uzbek ruler, Muhammad Shaybani, was caught and killed trying to escape the battle and the shah had his skull made into a jeweled drinking goblet.

In 1514, Selim I, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, attacked Ismail's kingdom. Selim and Ismail had been exchanging a series of belligerent letters prior to the attack.

Selim I defeated Ismail at the battle of Chaldiran in 1514.[23] Ismail's army was more mobile and their soldiers were better prepared but the Ottomans prevailed due in large part to their efficient modern army, and possession of artillery, black powder and muskets. Ismail was wounded and almost captured in battle. Selim I entered the Iranian capital of Tabriz in triumph on September 5,[24] but did not linger. A mutiny among his troops fearing a counter attack and entrapment by the fresh Safavid forces called in from the interior, forced the triumphant Ottomans to withdraw prematurely. This allowed Ismail to recover quickly. Among the booties from Tabriz was Ismail's favorite wife, for whose release the Sultan demanded huge concessions, which were refused. Despite his defeat at the Battle of Chaldiran, Ismail quickly recovered most of his kingdom, from east of the Lake Van to the shores of the Indian Ocean.

After the Battle of Chaldiran, however, Ismail lost his supernatural air and the aura of invincibility, gradually falling into heavy drinking of alcohol.[25] Ismail retired to his palace and withdrew from active participation in the affairs of the state, leaving these to his minister, Mirza Shah-Hussayn.[26] He died on 23 May 1524 at the relatively early age of thirty-six. To consolidate his position and get the Iranians to fight the Ottomans, Ismail then made the Twelver shia the official religion of Iran.

The consequences of the defeat at Chaldiran were also psychological for Ismail: the defeat destroyed Ismail's belief in his invincibility, based on his claimed divine status.[27] His relationships with his Qizilbash followers were also fundamentally altered. The tribal rivalries between the Qizilbash, which temporarily ceased before the defeat at Chaldiran, resurfaced in intense form immediately after the death of Ismail, and led to ten years of civil war (930-40/1524-33) until Shah Tahmasp regained control of the affairs of the state.

Ismail's reign featured extensive conquests, shaping the map of Iran up to the present day.[citation needed] Iraq, including Baghdad and the holy Shi'a shrines of Najaf and Karbala, had been already seized from the Jalayirids and remained a part of Ismail's kingdom until its end. Despite the defeat at Chaldiran, where he lost western Armenia and northwestern Kurdistan, he managed to pass on to his son, Tahmasp I, his entire vast empire. Ismail destroyed Sunni sites in Baghdad including tombs of Abbasid Caliphs, tombs of Sunni Imam Abū Ḥanīfah and Abdul Qadir Gilani.[28]

His son Tahmasp I succeeded him as Shah.

Ismail's poetry [edit]

The battle between Shah Ismail I and the Borjigin Abu'l-Khayr Khan.

Ismail is also known for his poetry using the pen-name Khatā'ī (Arabic: خطائی‎ "Sinner").[29] According to Encyclopædia Iranica, "Ismail was a skillful poet who used prevalent themes and images in lyric and didactic-religious poetry with ease and some degree of originality". He was also deeply influenced by the Persian literary tradition of Iran, particularly by the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, which probably explains the fact that he named all of his sons after Shahnameh-characters. Dickson and Welch suggest that Ismail's "Shāhnāmaye Shāhī" was intended as a present to the young Tahmasp.[30] After defeating Muhammad Shaybani's Uzbeks, Ismail asked Hatefi, a famous poet from Jam (Khorasan), to write a Shahnameh-like epic about his victories and his newly established dynasty. Although the epic was left unfinished, it was an example of mathnawis in the heroic style of the Shahnameh written later on for the Safavid kings.[31]

He wrote in the Azerbaijani language,[32] and in the Persian language. He is considered an important figure in the literary history of Azerbaijani language and has left approximately 1400 verses in this language, which he chose to use for political reasons.[32] Approximately 50 verses of his Persian poetry have also survived.

Most of the poems are concerned with love — particularly of the mystical Sufi kind — though there are also poems propagating Shi'i doctrine and Safavi politics. His other serious works include the Nasihatnāme, a book of advice, and the unfinished Dahnāme, a book which extols the virtues of love.

As Ismail believed in his own divinity and in his descent from Ali, in his poems he tended to strongly emphasize these claims.[citation needed]

Along with the poet Imadaddin Nasimi, Khatā'ī is considered to be among the first proponents of using a simpler Azeri language in verse that would thereby appeal to a broader audience. His work is most popular in Azerbaijan, as well as among the Bektashis of Turkey. There is a large body of Alevi and Bektashi poetry that has been attributed to him. The major impact of his religious propaganda, in the long run, was the conversion of Persia from Sunni to Shia Islam.[33]

The following anecdote demonstrates the status of vernacular Turkish and Persian in the Ottoman Empire and in the incipient Safavid state. Khatā'ī sent a poem in Turkish to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I before going to war in 1514. In a reply the Ottoman Sultan answered in Persian to indicate his contempt.

Issue [edit]

Ismail I's Statue in Ardabil, Iran.

Legacy [edit]

Defeat of Shah Ismail I during the Battle of Chaldiran.

Ismail's greatest legacy was establishing an enduring empire which lasted over 200 years. Even after the fall of Safavids in 1736, their cultural and political influence endured through the era of Afsharid, Zand, Qajar, and Pahlavi dynasties into the modern Islamic Republic of Iran, where Shi’a Islam is still the official religion as it was during the Safavids.

Emergence of a clerical aristocracy [edit]

An important feature of the Safavid society was the alliance that emerged between the ulama (the religious class) and the merchant community. The latter included merchants trading in the bazaars, the trade and artisan guilds (asnaf) and members of the quasi-religious organizations run by dervishes (futuvva). Because of the relative insecurity of property ownership in Persia, many private landowners secured their lands by donating them to the clergy as so called vaqf. They would thus retain the official ownership and secure their land from being confiscated by royal commissioners or local governors, as long as a percentage of the revenues from the land went to the ulama. Increasingly, members of the religious class, particularly the mujtahids and the seyyeds, gained full ownership of these lands, and, according to contemporary historian Iskandar Munshi, Persia started to witness the emergence of a new and significant group of landowners.[35]

Memory [edit]

In the name of Ismail I mentioned:

Alevism [edit]

Main article: Alevism

In Alevism, Shah Ismail is seen as a religious figure, and a moral spiritual leader. His teachings are in the Buyruk.

Ancestry [edit]

See also [edit]

Portal icon Poetry portal

Footnotes [edit]

  1. ^ Mюнeджжим-бaши, c.173
  2. ^ Шapaф-xaн Бидлиcи, т.ц c.169
  3. ^ Xoндeмиp, 'т.III, ч.4, c.570-571, 599-601
  4. ^ Дopн, c.593-595 Эфeндиeв. Heкoтыpыe cвeдeния, c.90.
  5. ^ Ismāʿīl I, in Encyclopædia Britannica, online ed., 2011
  6. ^ a b Woodbridge Bingham, Hilary Conroy, Frank William Iklé, A History of Asia: Formations of Civilizations, From Antiquity to 1600, and Bacon, 1974, p. 116.
  7. ^ Encyclopedia Iranica. R.M. Savory. Esmail Safawi
  8. ^ Ismāʿīl I at Encyclopædia Britannica
  9. ^ G. Doerfer, "Azeri Turkish", Encyclopaedia Iranica, viii, Online Edition, p. 246.
  10. ^ Richard Tapper, Frontier nomads of Iran: a political and social history of the Shahsevan, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-521-58336-7, p. 39.
  11. ^ EBN BAZZAZ Encyclopedia Iranica
  12. ^ Muḥammad Kamāl, Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy, Ashgate Publishing Inc, 2006, ISBN 0-7546-5271-8, p. 24.
  13. ^ Peter Charanis. "Review of Emile Janssens' Trébizonde en Colchide", Speculum, Vol. 45, No. 3,, (Jul., 1970), p. 476
  14. ^ Anthony Bryer, open citation, p. 136
  15. ^ Roger M. Savory. „Safavids“ in Peter Burke, Irfan Habib, Halil Inalci:»History of Humanity-Scientific and Cultural Development: From the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century", Taylor & Francis. 1999. Excerpt from pg 259:"Доказательства, имеющиеся в настоящее время, приводят к уверенности, что семья Сефевидов имеет местное иранское происхождение, а не тюркское, как это иногда утверждают. Скорее всего, семья возникла в Персидском Курдистане, а затем перебралась в Азербайджан, где ассимилировалась с говорящими по-тюркски азерийцами, и в конечном итоге поселились в маленьком городе Ардебиль где-то в одиннадцатом веке [Evidence available at the present time leads to the conviction that the Safavid family came from indigenous Iranian stock, and not from Turkish ancestry as it is sometimes claimed. It is probable that the family originated in Persian Kurdistan, and later moved to Azerbaijan, where it became assimilated to Turkic-speaking Azeris and eventually settled in the small town of Ardabil sometime during the eleventh century.]".
  16. ^ Вопрос о языке, на котором говорил шах Исмаил, не идентичен вопросу о его «расе» или «национальности». Его происхождение было смешанным: одна из его бабушек была греческая принцесса Комнина. Хинц приходит к выводу, что кровь в его жилах была главным образом, не тюркской. Уже его сын шах Тахмасп начал избавляться от своих туркменских преторианцев. [The question of the language used by Shah Ismail is not identical with that of his race or of his "nationality". His ancestry was mixed: one of his grandmothers was a Greek Comnena princess. Hinz, Aufstieg, 74, comes to the conclusion that the blood in his veins was chiefly non-Turkish. Already, his son Shah Tahmasp began to get rid of his Turcoman praetorians.] — V. Minorsky, "The Poetry of Shah Ismail I," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 10/4 (1942): 1006–53.
  17. ^ Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology Page 23 By Stephen P. Blake [1]
  18. ^ Encyclopaedia Iranica. R. N. Frye. Peoples of Iran.
  19. ^ Faruk Sümer, Safevi Devletinin Kuruluşu ve Gelişmesinde Anadolu Türklerinin Rolü, Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, Ankara, 1992, p. 15. (Turkish)
  20. ^ Nesib Nesibli, "Osmanlı-Safevî Savaşları, Mezhep Meselesi ve Azerbaucan", Türkler, Cilt 6, Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, Ankara, 2002, ISBN 975-6782-39-0, p. 895. (Turkish)
  21. ^ The New Encyclopædia Britannica: Micropædia, Encyclopædia Britannica, 1991, ISBN 978-0-85229-529-8, p. 295.
  22. ^ BBC, (LINK)
  23. ^ Michael Axworthy Iran: Empire of the Mind (Penguin, 2008) p.133
  24. ^ The later Crusades, 1274-1580: from Lyons to Alcazar Door Norman Housley, page 120, 1992
  25. ^ The Cambridge History of Islam, Part 1, By Peter Malcolm Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, Bernard Lewis, p. 401.
  26. ^ Momen (1985), p. 107.
  27. ^ RM Savory, Safavids, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed
  28. ^ History of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey
  29. ^ Encyclopedia Iranica. ٍIsmail Safavi
  30. ^ M.B. Dickson and S.C. Welch, The Houghton Shahnameh, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1981. See p. 34 of vol. I).
  31. ^ R.M. Savory, "Safavids", Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition
  32. ^ a b V. Minorsky, "The Poetry of Shah Ismail I," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 10/4 (1942): 1006–53.
  33. ^ http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/v8f6/v8f665.html
  34. ^ The Royal Ark
  35. ^ RM Savory, Safavids, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed page 185-6
  36. ^ Отмечен день рождения Шаха Исмаила Хатаи

References [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Shah Ismail I
  • Momen, Moojan (1985). An Introduction to Shi`i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelve. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-03531-4. 
  • R.M. Savory, Esmā'il Safawī, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, (LINK)
  • Mirză Răsul İsmailzadä, Şah İsmail Säfävi (Xätai) küllüyyatı: qäzällär, qäsidälär, näsihätnamä, dähnamä, qoşmalar / Xätai ; mätnin elmi-tänqidi täktibatçısı; Alhoda Publishers, Iran, 2004 (in Azeri), ISBN 964-8121-09-5, OCLC 62561234
  • M. Momen, An Introduction to Shi'i Islam, Yale Univ. Press, 1985, pp. 397, ISBN 0-300-03499-7

External links [edit]

Ismail I
New creation Shah of Persia
1502–1524		 Succeeded by
Tahmasp I
Medieval
Modern
Contemporary
Notes
Azerbaijani is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Republic of Dagestan and also widely spoken in Iran, Turkey, Russia and Georgia
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