1. Safavid Empire

2. Rise of the Safavid Empire
The Safavids were Persian Muslims that began building an empire around the 1500s.
It resembled its longtime Ottoman foe in many ways:
It initially used land grants to support its all-important cavalry
Its population spoke several languages
It focused on land rather than sea power
Urban notables, nomadic chieftains, religious scholars served as intermediaries between the people and the government.
The Safavid Empire began when the Safavid leader, Ismail, conquered Persia and made himself shah, or king.

3. He was the hereditary leader of a militant Sufi brotherhood called the “Safaviya” for his ancestor Safi al-Din.
Shah Ismail declared that his realm would practice Shi’ite Islam and revere the family of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali.
He told his subjects to abandon their Sunni.
He was thought to be an incarnated god and his word was law to the Qizilbash.

4. Society The Safavids blended Persian and Muslim traditions.
Most of the people spoke Turkish and belonged to the Nomadic group called Qizilbash or “redheads”, because of their distinctive turbans.
This laid the foundation for national culture of present day Iran.

5. Each Sufi brotherhood had a distinctive rituals and concepts of mystical union with God, but Iran stood out as the land where Sufism most often fused with militant political objectives.
Iran had become a distinctive society.
Shi’ite doctrines say that all temporal rulers, regardless of title, are temporary stand-ins for the “hidden imam”, the 12th descendant of Ali.

6. The Turkish language which had a vigorous tradition of folk poetry, developed only slowly, primarily in the Ottoman empire as a language of literature and administration.
Islam itself provided a tradition that crossed ethnic and linguistic borders.
After the Mongols destroyed Baghdad, the two languages ( Arabic and Persian) intensified.
The capital of the Islamic caliphate and thereby diminished the importance of Arabic- speaking Iraq.

7. The Safavids were Shia; most other Muslims were Sunnis.
Although Ismail’s reasons for compelling Iran’s conversion are unknown, the effect was to create a deep chasm between Iran and its neighbors, all of which were Sunni.
Nomad groups held some lands in common and did not subdivide them into individual landholdings as in the ottoman empire.
Many people in rural areas lived according to the will of a nomad chieftain who has little interest in building the agricultural economy.

8. Military
The Safavids, like the ottoman, had difficulty finding money to pay troops armed with firearms.
The nomad warriors refused to trade in their bows for firearms.
Shah Abbas responded by establishing a slave crop of year-round soldiers and arming them with guns.
The Christian converts to Islam who initially provided the manpower for the new crops came mostly from captives taken in raids on Georgia in the Caucasus.
The strong hand of Shah Abbas kept the inevitable rivalries and intrigues between the factions under control.

9. Istanbul and isfahan
Isfahan became Iran’s capital in 1598 by decree of Shah Abas I (r ).
Istanbul was built on seven hills on the south side of the narrow Golden Horn inlet and has a skyline punctuated by the gray stone and thin, pointed minaret of the great imperial mosques.
The mosques surrounding the royal plaza in Isfahan featured brightly tiled domes rising to gentle peaks and unobtrusive minarets.
Residents enjoyed the privacy of interior courtyards and were usually in houses made of wood.

10. Women seldom appeared in public, even in Istanbul’s long, serpentine bazaar.
The women’s quarters- called anderun, or “interior”, in Iran and harem, or “forbidden area”, in Istanbul- were separate from the public rooms where the men of the family received visitors.
The private side of family life has left few traces, but it is apparent that women’s society- consisting of wives, children, female servants and sometimes eunuchs (castrated male servants)- had some connections with the outside world.

11. Fall of the Empire
Overland trade through Safavid territory declined because of mismanagement of the silk monopoly after Shah Abbas’s death in 1629.
The country faced the unsolvable problem of finding money to pay the army and bureaucracy.
Trying to remove the nomads from their lands to regain control of taxes proved more difficult and more disruptive militarily than the piecemeal dismantling of the land-grant system in the ottoman empire.
By 1722 the government had become so weak and commanded so little support from the nomadic groups that an army of marauding Afghans was able to capture Isfahan and effectively end Safavid rule.

12. The Safavid never possessed a navy.
The Portuguese seized the strategic Persian gulf island of Hormuz in 1517 and were expelled only in 1622, when the English ferried Iranian soldiers to the attack.
The shahs relied on the English and Dutch for naval support and never considered confronting them at sea.
But the navy decayed after nadir shah died, and Iran did not have a navy again until the 20th century.

13. The Mughal Empire

14. Basis of the Empire
The Mughal Empire was a land of Hindus, ruled by a Muslim minority.
Muslim dominion in northern India began with repeated military campaigns in the early 11th century.
The Hindus disliked the destruction of their culture, and the Mughals struggled to compete with them.
The Mughals were challenged with the tasks of conquering and organizing a large territory state, and finding a way to help with the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims.

15. Political Foundations
Babur ( ) was the founder of the Mughal Empire. He descended from Timur.
Even though Mughal means ‘Mongol’ in Persian, the Timurits were of Turkish descent.
Babur set out to defeat Muslim sultans in the area. He defeated the last sultan of Delhi in 1526.
Akbar, Babur’s grandson, created the central management of the expanding empire. Most of India fell under Mughal rule through him and his successors.

16. Hindus and Muslims
The Mughal State inherited traditions of unified imperial rule from the Islamic caliphate, Ghengis Khan and Timur.
Akbar strived for social harmony and was not focused only on having more territory and money.
Akbar made different systems of resolving legal disputes based on what religion the disputes were a part of.
He made himself the center of a new ‘Divine Faith’ that incorporated Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Sikh, and Christian beliefs.

17. Aurangzeb, Akbar’s enthusiastic grandson, took rule in 1658.
A mysterious pattern of conversation between Mughal India and Sunni Islam occurs during Akbar’s rule.
Aurangzeb, Akbar’s enthusiastic grandson, took rule in 1658.
Gradual religious change produced Muslim communities whose social customs were very similar to those in neighboring non-Muslim communities.
By the 18th century, the Mughals were encountering opposition from the Sikhs (a new religious group) as well as Hindu guerrilla forces in the province of Maharashtra on India’s west coast.

18. Decay and Regional Challenges (1707-1761)
Mughal power didn’t survive long after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707.
Historians consider the land-grant system a central part in the decline of imperial authority.
Aurangzeb failed to effectively integrate new Mughal territories in southern India into the imperial structure. Regional power challenged the military power.
A general named Nadir Shah invaded India and sacked Delhi, which Akbar’s grandson had rebuilt decades before.

19. This marked the end of the empire and many regions within it became independent of government rule. Some even flourished.
The decline in central power favored the intrusion of European adventurers, which began a new phase of European development in India.