For much of the Safavid period (907–1135/1501–1722), the Zoroastrians of Yazd and Kirman, the two historical centres of bihdīn (Zoroastrian) population in Iran, lived under the supervision of the khāṣṣa (crown) services of the central bureaucracy. They contributed cash and free labour to the crown sector, in exchange for the protection that khāṣṣa authorities, including the shah and members of the royal family, were supposed to provide against maltreatment at the hands of local notables and non-khāṣṣa elements in Yazd and Kirman. The crown sector's protection, however, was fragile and had limits, exposing the Zoroastrians to occasional abuse and exploitation from the mamālik (provincial) bureaucracy. The unstable balance of power between the crown and provincial services of the Safavid bureaucracy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a key role in shaping the status of Zoroastrians as a religious minority in early modern Iran.
The themes of continued religious suppression and victimization predominate in modern scholarship on the history of Zoroastrianism in early modern Iran. This is largely because the existing literature tends to valorize European sources. It was as an easy target for proselytizing that Zoroastrians had been of most interest to European travellers, resulting in their being portrayed in almost every major Safavid-era European travelogue as a community of the oppressed with a good potential for conversion to Christianity. In terms of temporal scope, the emphasis has been on the opening quarter of the eighteenth century. During the devolution that engulfed the Safavid dynasty in the 1710s–20s, the Zoroastrians of Kirman, Isfahan, Sistan and Yazd were either displaced or forced to fight as slaves and mercenaries with the Afghan rebels of Qandahar in central and southern parts of the country. The few studies dealing with Zoroastrianism in early modern Iran tend to linearize and totalize the clampdown on Zoroastrians in the early eighteenth century as if it were a constituent part of life throughout the Safavid period.Footnote 2
Secondary literature dismisses almost all internal primary sources, from court chronicles and local histories to religious writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Zoroastrian grandees of Yazd and Kirman. The only book-length study to examine the history of Zoroastrianism in early modern Iran simply pieces together the writings of a cohort of European travellers, including Gabriel de Chinon, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, André Daulier-Deslandes, Raphaël du Mans, Jean de Thévenot, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri and Cornelis de Bruijn.Footnote 3 But the works of these European observers and commentators offer only an absurdly distorted account of the ideological tenets of Zoroastrianism. Nor do they tell us much about the power relations between Zoroastrians and state authorities in Safavid Iran.
The present study examines the conditions under which the Zoroastrians of Yazd, Kirman and Isfahan interacted with successive generations of khāṣṣa and mamālik authorities in Safavid Iran, from the formative years of the dynasty under Shah Ismāʿīl (907–930/1501–24) and his immediate successors until the fall of Isfahan in the autumn of 1135/1722. I focus on the shifting dynamics of bureaucratic centralization in Safavid Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to explore how the ebbs and flows of the khāṣṣa protection impacted the minority status of the Zoroastrians. The central contention of this article is that the maltreatment of Zoroastrians had little to do with religious bigotry but was rather because, under the Safavids, the administration of their fiscal affairs had become a major bone of contention between those at the helm of Safavid bureaucrats. The argument I seek to develop concerns the material interest of Safavid bureaucrats in the revenue and labour potentials of the Zoroastrians, and the way in which the conflicts of interest between the central and the provincial services of the Safavid bureaucracy gave rise to such acts of persecution as over-taxation, forced labour, extortion and violence.
1. Primary sources
The ravāyat
The Zoroastrian ravāyats (priestly statements), Safavid court chronicles and local histories of medieval and early modern Yazd and Kirman have attracted little notice in the existing literature on Zoroastrianism in Safavid Iran.Footnote 4 The ravāyats typically take the form of letters written by Kirman- and Yazd-based hīrbads (priests) and dastūrs (high priests) and addressed to Parsee community leaders in Gujarat. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Parsee Zoroastrians of Gujarat had their own anjumans (congregations) in almost every major urban centre of the province, including Bharuch, Cambay, Navsari, Ankleshwar and the port city of Surat.Footnote 5 As the most popular genre of religious writing among the bihdīn clerics of Yazd and Kirman under the Safavids, the ravāyat originally aimed to spell out the ideological tenets of Zoroastrianism by amending the classical shāyast na-shāyast (proper and improper) literature, leading some scholars to conclude that the concept of ravāyat or ravā nā-ravā (permissible and impermissible) could be reckoned the Zoroastrian equivalent of the sharīʿa.Footnote 6 The Safavid-era ravāyats abound with details of rituals and rites, as well as invocations of apocalypse and the coming of the bihdīn saviour, Ūshīdar-i Zartusht. Yet a few extant ravāyat letters contain fragmentary references to mundane aspects of minority life in early modern Iran. These references are of historical value and, when contextualized, could broaden our understanding of the status of Zoroastrians in Safavid Iran. A study of religious minorities in medieval and early modern IranFootnote 7 points to the historiographical significance of ravāyats, but as regards the dynamics of minority life among the Zoroastrians in Safavid Iran, it chooses to rely in a unidirectional manner on European travelogues.
A volume of Zoroastrian miscellanea in the Majlis Library in TehranFootnote 8 contains copies of several ravāyats drafted and signed by various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bihdīn religious dignitaries in Yazd and Kirman. The volume in question is catalogued under the title Kitāb-i ʿulamā-yi islām after the title of the oldest treatise bound in with early modern ravāyats. Some of the letters, historical mathnavīs and religious treatises in this jung volume are in ungrammatical Persian, which could easily lead to misunderstanding and wrong conclusions. A number of the ravāyats reproduced in this volume are translated into English by two early twentieth-century Zoroastrian religious scholars, Manockji R. Unvâlâ and Bamanji N. Dhabhar, and published in two major collections of Zoroastrian religious texts.
In 1990, a single volume of Zoroastrian ravāyats from Kirman was published in Tehran (see n. 32 below). Of the ravāyat letters included in this volume only two are from the Safavid period while the rest cover the history of the community under the Qajar dynasty (1796–1925). These two Safavid-era ravāyat letters contain brief references to the maltreatment of Zoroastrians in Kirman by local grandees shortly after the death of Shah ʿAbbās (995–1038/1587–1629).
Court chronicles and local histories
References to Zoroastrians are few and far between in the Safavid dynastic chronicles. The early seventeenth-century historians Maḥmūd Āfūshtaʾī Naṭanzī (fl. 1005/1596–97) and Fażlī Beg Khūzānī Iṣfahāni (fl. 1049/1639–40) provide us with scant but important clues into the dynamics of community life among the Zoroastrians of Yazd and Isfahan under Shah ʿAbbās. As for Kirman, the existing narrative evidence, provided mainly by the local historian Mīr Muḥammad Saʿīd Mashīzī Bardsīrī (fl. 1104/1692–93), dates from the late seventeenth century. Mashīzī’s history details internal tensions between the khāṣṣa and the provincial services of the Safavid bureaucracy in Isfahan and Kirman over the tax and labour potentials of the Zoroastrians under the later Safavids.
Additionally, scattered information about the Zoroastrians of Yazd is found in the works of a number of local historians. Of special importance to this study is Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Bāfqī’s (fl. 1083/1672–73) Jāmiʿ-i Mufīdī, which contains biographical information about four high-ranking khāṣṣa bureaucrats who spent periods of administrative service as vizier of Zoroastrians of Yazd under the later Safavids.Footnote 9
A local history of Sistan from the reign of Shah ʿAbbās by Malik Shāh Ḥusayn Sīstānī (fl. 1036/1627) tells us very little about Zoroastrians. The province was home to the largest population of bihdīns in Safavid Iran, but the only reference in Sīstānī’s narrative pertains to border clashes with a contingent of tribal bandits involving a group of Zoroastrian landed notables from rural suburbs of Farāh in the closing quarter of the fourteenth century.
2. Surviving the tides of political change, 1480s–1580s
Under Shah Ismāʿīl a certain Marzbān-i Rustam-i Shah-Mardān (Marzbān b. Rustam b. Shah-Mardān) held the office of dastūr (high priest) in Yazd. Marzbān's years as high priest coincided with the Qizilbāsh conquest of the city and its subsequent assignment in the winter of 910/1505 as a tiyūl land grant to Ikhtīyār al-Dīn Ḥusayn Beg Shāmlū, the teenage shah's brother-in-law, guardian (lala) and deputy (vakīl).Footnote 10 In the same year, Ḥusayn Beg's daughter, born of Shah Ismāʿīl's sister, was married off to the Kārkīā crown prince Khan Aḥmad b. Sulṭān Ḥasan of Lāhījān, the city known as a major producer of raw silk in the Caspian province of Gīlān.Footnote 11 Ḥusayn Beg's appointment to governor of Yazd, a hub of the silk trade in early modern Iran, was intended to help him and his close relatives make money from the lucrative trade in raw silk and silken fabrics.Footnote 12 The decision to give Yazd as tiyūl land assignment to the second man of the Safavid regime also indicates the importance the city enjoyed as a major administrative unit under the new regime: in less than half a century Yazd was to become incorporated into the khāṣṣa sector of the Safavid bureaucracy. At the time of Ḥusayn Beg's arrival in Yazd a group of Zoroastrian landed notables were involved in the production of raw and processed silk. They owned farms and orchards in Naʿīmābād and Ahristān, two Zoroastrian-populated rural settlements outside the city walls on either side of the route to Bāfq, and ranked among the main suppliers of fresh white mulberry leaf for silkworm farms and silk-weaving workshops in Yazd.Footnote 13 At the close of the fifteenth century, the Zoroastrian inhabitants of Ahristān and Naʿīmābād contributed cash and free labour to the repair, maintenance and expansion of one of the major qanāt irrigation systems in Yazd.Footnote 14 Naʿīmābād and Ahristān were among “the most affluent and populated” neighbourhoods of Yazd under the early Safavids.Footnote 15
The involvement of Zoroastrians in menial jobs such as qanāt digging and public latrine cleaning is noted in the writings of pre-modern local historians as well as European travellers, who read this as an indication of their indigence.Footnote 16 For example, the Spanish–Portuguese ambassador to the court of ʿAbbās I, Don García de Silva y Figueroa, and the late seventeenth-century French missionary Nicolas Sanson described the Zoroastrians as an impoverished community, implying the likelihood of their easy conversion to Christianity.Footnote 17 It was rumoured at the time that the bihdīns of Yazd and Kirman believed that their prophet Zoroaster was of “Frankish” descent, a baseless claim that made European visitors eager to learn more about their religious beliefs, notwithstanding the expressed reluctance of Zoroastrians to share details of their creed with outsiders.Footnote 18 However, Jean Chardin noted that Zoroastrians had a keen interest in menial jobs simply because they considered such work not only beneficial to their own community but also spiritually transcending.Footnote 19
The earliest contact between the Zoroastrians of Yazd and Kirman and the Parsees of Gujarat took place in the closing quarter of the fifteenth century. There is evidence that under the Safavids the Parsee envoys would travel from eastern India to Iran overland, making their way to Yazd and Kirman from Gujarat and Agra via Qandahar and Sistan. An unpublished late fifteenth-century ravāyat underscores the relative safety of overland travel from India to Iran compared to the horrors and “impurities” of the sea voyage from Surat to the port city of Gumbrūn (later Bandar-i ʿAbbāsī).Footnote 20 Elephant ivory was the main export of the Parsee merchants from central and eastern India to Safavid Yazd and Kirman.Footnote 21 A number of these merchants acted as envoys, representing the Parsee community leaders with Zoroastrian religious dignitaries in Iran. In Yazd, almost all Parsee envoys were to visit Sharafābād (also Sharīfābād) and Turkābād, two villages in the districts of Rustāq and Ardakān – respectively 20 and 40 miles north-west of Yazd – where Zoroastrian priests and high priests presided over local fire temples.Footnote 22
One of the oldest early modern Zoroastrian ravāyats points to the arrival in Yazd of a Gujarati date merchant called Narīmān-i Hūshang (Narīmān b. Hūshang) of Bharuch.Footnote 23 The date given at the end of this ravāyat is 4 January 1487, and it is addressed to Bahrām-Shāh-i Changa-Shāh, the sālār (lay leader) of the Parsee anjuman of Navsari.Footnote 24 Narīmān's stay in Iran lasted about seven years, which suggests that he entered Yazd in 885–86/1480–81. Elsewhere it is claimed that he quit Iran within a year of his arrival in Yazd, which is not correct.Footnote 25 For several years Narīmān studied with a group of priests in Yazd. This relatively long stay in Iran helped Narīmān pick up some Persian and share more details about the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Parsee Zoroastrians with his bihdīn interlocutors in Iran.Footnote 26
There was no high priest in Yazd when Narīmān left Iran in 892/1487. This is implicit in the fact that the ravāyat he had been assigned to take to Gujarat is signed by three prominent hīrbads called Garshāsp, Bahrām-i Isfandyār and Shahryār-i Māhvandād. Their ravāyat opens with complaints about the lack of regular communication between the Zoroastrians of Iran and the Parsee bihdīns of Gujarat. They noted that “for many years Zoroastrians in Iran had awaited a word from bihdīns abroad”, but, to their frustration, no Parsee community leader in Gujarat had ever tried to get in touch with them. They also expressed their shock and disbelief at the news, shared with them by Narīmān, that none of the Zoroastrians in Gujarat were versed in the Pahlavi script, an indispensable requirement for the faultless administration of Zoroastrian religious rituals and services as practised in Iran. The three priests who signed the ravāyat in question also objected that, for much of the past two centuries, the Parsees of Gujarat had no hīrbad among them to oversee and administer their religious services, sharply adding that the indulgence of the Gujarati Zoroastrians in trade and pursuit of material gain had made “their soul, body, and even clothes polluted”.Footnote 27 It is worth noting here that in a catalogue of Zoroastrian ravāyats the complaints raised in this particular letter are mistaken for a depiction of the status quo in Yazd, leading the cataloguer to characterize the decades leading up to Shah Ismāʿīl's rise to power as “one of the most difficult periods” in the history of Zoroastrianism in Iran.Footnote 28
Dastūr Marzbān is the author of the ravāyat dated 7 January 1511. Written in response to a letter submitted less than two years earlier by a Parsee merchant-cum-envoy called Īzadyār, this ravāyat is addressed to Narīmān-i Hūshang and other Parsee worthies of Bharuch, Cambay, Navsari, Ankelshwar and Surat. In his ravāyat letter, Marzbān insists on affirming that Zoroastrian religious authorities in Yazd had heard nothing from their Parsee co-religionists since Narīmān-i Hūshang left Yazd in 1487. Marzbān was particularly worried about what he saw as growing unorthodoxy and ignorance in religious matters among the Parsee Zoroastrians, urging them to send one or two of their “priests” to Yazd so that he could teach them the basics of Zoroastrian liturgy.
Marzbān's ravāyat closes with his eulogy of Shah Ismāʿīl, whom he described as a “mighty and blessed king”. Following his conquest of Yazd in the winter of 910/1505, Marzbān admits, the Safavid monarch had been “fully charitable and supportive” (shafaqat-i tamām u imdād namuda) in his dealings with the Zoroastrian population of the city and its rural suburbs. The Zoroastrian high priest was so impressed by the youthful shah's show of “respect and tolerance” that he saw in his rise to power and subsequent military victories over various claimants to power across the country the outset of a turning point in the history of Zoroastrianism. Marzbān had come to believe that Ismāʿīl's ascent to the throne in 907/1501 represented one of the unmistakeable signs of the impending advent of the Zoroastrian messiah, Ūshīdar-i Zartusht and the subsequent beginning of a millennium of Zoroastrian revival. Therefore, he urged the Parsees of Gujarat to look carefully through all religious texts in their possession and write back to him soon if they came across any explicit or implicit prophecy discussed in these texts with regard to Shah Ismāʿīl as precursor to the promised apocalypse. He reminded them that:
In our religion, as it is stated in the ravāyat sent with Narīmān-i Hūshang, there are a number of apocalyptic signs that portent the coming of [Ūshīdar-i] Zartusht, Pashūtan-i Vīshtāspān, and Bahrām-i Hamāvand. Of these signs one, which has come to pass as of late in an unmistakable manner, is the rise to power from the mountains of Azerbaijan (Turkistan) of a king who wears red cap (tāj-i surkh) as his royal emblem and seizes the province of ʿIrāq-i ʿArab (Babylonia). Now nine years have passed since this mighty and blessed king ascended to the throne [and achieved all these accomplishments].Footnote 29
Marzbān's ravāyat closes with a list of signatories containing the names of the most prominent Zoroastrian worthies of Iran. Among them, he mentions the descendants of nine Zoroastrian dastūrs from Yazd, Sharafābād and Turkābād, where a population of 900 bihdīns lived at the time of Shah Ismāʿīl's capture of Yazd. Other notables referred to at the close of Marzbān's letter include a group of bihdīn grandees representing 700 Zoroastrians from Kirman. Under Shah Ismāʿīl, Marzbān pointed out, a total of 1,700 Zoroastrians lived in Khurāsān. According to him, the Zoroastrians of Khurāsān all claimed their descent from the last Sasanid king, Yazdigird III (632–51). The descendants of four priests are also named in Marzbān's ravāyat, who presided over the Zoroastrian congregation in Sistan, home to the largest anjuman in Iran under the early Safavids with a population of 2,700 bihdīns.Footnote 30 In the late fourteenth century, several hundred Zoroastrian landed notables (dihqāns) of Sistan, who had allied themselves with the Kart rulers of Herat and Farāh, were defeated and massacred during one of their many border clashes with tribal elements in south-eastern Khurāsān.Footnote 31 Early in the eighteenth century, the unrelenting raids mounted by the Afghans from Qandahar forced the remaining Zoroastrian population of Sistan to move en masse to Kirman, where they settled down in Zarasp and Guvāshīr, two major neighborhoods of the city.Footnote 32
What makes Marzbān's rosy and at the same time apocalyptic reading of Shah Ismāʿīl's rise to power more interesting is the fact that at that time there were many Shiʿi Muslims in Iran who like him consider tended to the advent of the Safavids as a prelude to the apocalypse and the coming of their own promised saviour, al-Mahdī.Footnote 33 In the middle of the sixteenth century, ʿAlī Ṭūsī al-Sharīf, a minor Shiʿi mystic-cum-cleric of sayyid descent from Mashhad who attended the Safavid court in Tabriz and Qazvin, wrote and dedicated a treatise to Shah Ṭahmāsp on the same topic. Here, various esoteric, internalist (bāṭinī), astrological and numerological omens, signs and interpretations are put forward to underpin the author's claim that the Hidden Imam will return in 963/1555–56, the year in which he predicted the Safavids would achieve a number of strategically decisive victories against their enemies to the east and west of Iran.Footnote 34 Interestingly, at least one Zoroastrian ravāyat, datable to the first part of the sixteenth century, claims that the Hidden Imam was of bihdīn descent. The author of this ravāyat clarifies that the twelfth imam, al-Mahdī, who is called here Ṣāḥib al-zamān, descended on the maternal side of his family from “a prominent Zoroastrian dastūr called Mihr-Āzmā the Orthodox (pākdīn)” and that his return was imminent.Footnote 35
The real importance of Marzbān's letter can be better understood when we read it in the context of the events that led to Shah Ismāʿīl's invasion and occupation of Yazd in 910/1504–05. There is evidence that the capture of the city by the Safavids, early in the winter of 910/1505, had saved the local Zoroastrian population from an impending existential threat in the form of an inchoate Mahdist theocracy headed by a Nūrbakhshī mutamahdī (claimant to Mahdiship) called Muḥammad Karra, a tribal leader from Kūhgīlūya and military governor of Yazd.Footnote 36 According to a sixteenth-century chronicle, prior to the Safavid ruler's invasion of Yazd, a group of Nūrbakhshī notables in Yazd and Isfahan, led by the Nūrbakhshī chief judge of the city, Ḥusayn Maybudī (d. 910/1505) had endorsed Karra's claim to Mahdiship.Footnote 37 Unlike the Niʿmatallāhī Sufi demagogues of Kirman and Yazd, who managed to shift their messianic focus from their own leaders to Shah Ismāʿīl when it was expedient to do so, the Nūrbakhshī notables of Yazd and Isfahan failed to grasp the scope and seriousness of the Safavid regime's messianic claims and in due course paid a heavy price for it.Footnote 38 The Zoroastrians feared that the rule of a Nūrbakhshī Mahdī in Yazd might eventually lead to their forced conversion to Islam and even mass execution, if they chose to resist forced conversion. But the rise of the Safavids changed the political scene dramatically. Soon after he captured Yazd, Shah Ismāʿīl ordered the execution of all leading Nūrbakhshī Mahdists, including Muḥammad Karra and Ḥusayn Maybudī in Yazd as well as four members of the Mīr-i Mīrān family of naqībs of Isfahan for their extremist views as well as for the injustices they had perpetrated on the Muslim and Zoroastrian denizens of Yazd.Footnote 39 This incident contextualizes the optimistic assessment given in Marzbān's letter of Shah Ismāʿīl's rise to power and his “fully charitable and supportive” treatment of the Zoroastrians.
Almost all sixteenth-century Persian chroniclers portray the Safavid conquest of Yazd as a bloody event during which many local allies and supporters of the Aqquyunlu were put to the sword.Footnote 40 Much of the killing seems to have taken place outside the city, far from its Zoroastrian-populated suburbs. In fact, Shah Ismāʿīl's stay in Yazd in the winter of 910/1505 was cut short owing to the punitive campaigns against Abarkūh and Ṭabas to the south and north of Yazd.Footnote 41 The early withdrawal of Safavid forces relieved the local population, including the Zoroastrians, from the fiscal burdens of the prolonged militarization of Yazd. On his return from Yazd to Isfahan, the Safavid ruler is reported to have stopped over in the mainly Zoroastrian district of Ardakān, where local notables, including bihdīn grandees and religious dignitaries, welcomed him warmly. During his visit, Shah Ismāʿīl issued a handful of land grant edicts, including a cash endowment in the form of suyurghāl assigned to a family of Muslim landed notables of Ardakān, a move that bears out Marzbān's account of the peacefulness of this early phase of dynastic transition in Yazd under Shah Ismāʿīl.Footnote 42 Shortly thereafter, Muslim and Zoroastrian notables of Yazd began to supply the Safavid court with raw and processed silk products. A single camel-load of silk fabrics prepared and shipped from Yazd to Tabriz in the early 1520s is estimated in a late sixteenth-century Safavid chronicle to be worth 1,000 tūmāns.Footnote 43 In other words, the cash value of each of these consignments of silk (bārkhāna) equalled the annual revenue to the Safavid central treasury from more than 80 rural and urban districts enfeoffed as tiyūl with military commanders and tribal chiefs across the country in the 1510s.Footnote 44
The first steps towards incorporating Yazd into the khāṣṣa sector were taken in the mid-sixteenth century. The first known khāṣṣa vizier of the city was a high-ranking bureaucrat from Tehra, Khvāja Muḥammad Sharīf Ṭihrānī, who reached this position in 964/1557.Footnote 45 It was during Ṭihrānī’s years in Yazd that his family emigrated to India, where his daughter was married off to the Mughal prince (later emperor) Jahāngīr (r. 1014–37/1605–27).Footnote 46 Ṭihrānī’s appointment to khāṣṣa vizier of Yazd roughly coincided with Shah Ṭahmāsp's consenting to the marriage of his stepsister, princess Dil-Ārā, also known as Khānish Begum (d. 972/1565) to the Niʿmatallāhī mystic and landed notable Nūr al-Dīn Niʿmatallāh Bāqī (d. 972/1565) of Yazd. During her years in Yazd, Khānish Begum purchased vast estates, including a village called Ibrāhīmābād near Sharafābād in Maybud, as well as several other landed properties in Yazd and Taft. According to a waqf deed dated 27 Rabiʿ I 963/19 February 1556, shortly before her death she endowed all these landed properties to the shrine of the the third Shiʿi imam Ḥusayn in Karbalā. The same deed shows that at the time several local Zoroastrian men and women worked for the Safavid princes as slaves.Footnote 47 The incorporation of Yazd into the khāṣṣa sector in the late 1550s ushered in a relatively long period of administrative stability, which, with a major interval of political tumult in the last decade of the sixteenth century, lasted several decades.Footnote 48
In the political chaos following the death of Shah Ṭahmāsp in spring 984/1576, the city suffered a famine. There are fleeting references to the unfolding turmoil in Yazd in at least one unpublished ravāyat letter drafted and signed by a group of Zoroastrian notables. Addressed to a certain Sīt Manūchihr-i Bahman-Shāh of Gujarat, this ravāyat clarifies that “injustice and repression is so rampant here in Iran that this letter is no place for a thorough discussion of it”. The signatories then lamented the scarcity of cash and food in Yazd, ending their letter with prayers for the coming of the Zoroastrian saviour, Ūshīdar-i Zartusht.Footnote 49 There is evidence that Kirman had likewise suffered bouts of famine and temporary depopulation in the 1550s, and as a result local bureaucrats were unable to produce the annual taxes levied on the city.Footnote 50 Narrative evidence from one contemporary Persian chronicle largely corroborates the references made in this particular ravāyat to price inflation and outbreak of famine in Iran later in the reign of Ṭahmāsp. According to Qavām al-Dīn Jaʿfar Beg Āṣaf Qazvīnī (d. 1021/1612), who wrote his history in Mughal India shortly after leaving Iran in the late 1570s following a long stint of service as the khāṣṣa vizier of Kashan, the monetary crisis of the closing years of the reign of Ṭahmāsp I had such deleterious effects on the national economy that the Safavid ruler had to intervene personally to stop the damage. He is reported to have ordered all bureaucratic agents to collect and send to the Safavid court in Qazvin all the gold and silver coins and bullions they could find. The Safavid central mint was then expected to use these gold and silver supplies to stabilize markets by introducing a new coinage.Footnote 51 Another early seventeenth-century Persian chronicle tells us that in the 1570s the Safavid authorities managed to stockpile in Qahqaha Castle in Qarājadāgh a stack of “six hundred” gold and silver bars (khisht), each weighting some 30 pounds (3,000 mithqāl-i sharʿī). This represented a preliminary step for monetary reform, but Ṭahmāsp's death put a sudden end to the realization of this undertaking.Footnote 52
The references made in the above-mentioned Zoroastrian ravāyat to “injustice and oppression” imply a period of continued chaos in Yazd in the wake of Shah Ṭahmāsp's death during which local authorities might have abused the Zoroastrian inhabitants of the city. Within a decade of Ṭahmāsp's death, both Yazd and Kirman drifted into a bloody civil war between the Afshār warlord, Begtāsh Khan Ālplū, who acted as hereditary governor of Yazd and Kirman, and his local and regional opponents in Kirman and Fars led by Yaʿqūb Khan Ẕu'l-Qadr, the governor of Shiraz. Begtāsh Khan soon ended the involvement of khāṣṣa authorities in the administrative affairs of Yazd and Kirman, but ʿAlī-Qulī Khan b. Shāh-ʿAlī Beg Shāmlū (d. 1034/1625), head of the khāṣṣa bureaucracy in Yazd, refused to leave the city.Footnote 53 This short period of political decentralization and de facto khāṣṣa hiatus continued until Ṣafar 998/December 1589, the month in which Yaʿqūb Khan defeated Begtāsh Khan and seized Yazd and Kirman. As the khāṣṣa prefect (dārūgha) of Yazd, ʿAlī-Qulī Khan Shāmlū tried to resist Yaʿqub Khan's efforts to place the city under the jurisdiction of the mamālik sector, exciting his outrage and desire for revenge.Footnote 54 On his way back to Yazd from Bāfq, where Begtāsh Khan had saved his valuables, Yaʿqūb Khan sacked all Zoroastrian-populated rural settlements outside the city walls, including Naʿīmābād, which was administratively controlled and protected by the khāṣṣa sector.Footnote 55 Five years later, in Jumādā II-Rajab 1002/February 1594, a spate of torrential rain and major floods caused the destruction and depopulation of Ahristān and Naʿīmābād, bringing the sixteenth century to a bitter end for the Zoroastrians of Yazd.Footnote 56
3. Under the khāṣṣa protection, 995–1038/1587–1629
According to an early seventeenth-century historical ravāyat, in 1007–08/1598–1600 a Yazd-based “chief high priest” (dastūr-i aʿẓam) was the religious leader of all bihdīn communities in Iran, suggesting a move towards the centralization of the Zoroastrian religious institution in Yazd.Footnote 57 Until then, the Zoroastrian communities of Kirman and Yazd each had their own local religious leaders. There is evidence that for much of the early seventeenth century the khāṣṣa services of the Safavid bureaucracy in Yazd were highly centralized, providing Zoroastrians with more protection against local authorities. That being the case, a Zoroastrian historical narrative in verse, dated 1027/1618 and authored by a certain Sīāvakhsh-i Minūchihr, praises Shah ʿAbbās as a just ruler. Similarly, the seventeenth-century jurist Muḥammad-Taqī Majlisī (1003–70/1594–1659) tells us that under Shah ʿAbbās all leading Shiʿi jurists in Isfahan had sealed a written statement in which the had officially been granted the status of Zoroastrians as a protected religious minority.Footnote 58 According to Sīāvakhsh, under Shah ʿAbbās “the gate of tyranny was blocked” and Zoroastrians enjoyed an era of peace and order. What is more, he records the arrival in Isfahan of a Parsee envoy called Bahman-i Isfandyār early in the reign of Shah ʿAbbās. Sīāvakhsh describes the transfer of a small group of Zoroastrians and their families to Isfahan, where state authorities granted them land and money to build a new suburban settlement called Gabrābād.Footnote 59 Making incentive payments to Zoroastrian new arrivals was a quite effective mechanism of state intervention to stimulate urban repopulation. Several years later, when Shah ʿAbbās was planning to transfer his capital to the forested village of Ṭāḥāna (later Faraḥābād) in Māzandarān, the Safavid authorities granted several hundred Georgian Jews land and cash (12,000 dinārs per person) so that they could build a new town for themselves in the vicinity of the shah's new capital.Footnote 60
According to a late seventeenth-century Armenian chronicler, the resettlement of Zoroastrians in Isfahan had been effectuated before 1027/1618.Footnote 61 Indeed, it must have taken place no sooner than 1006/1597–8, the year in which Isfahan was designated as the new Safavid capital.Footnote 62 Shortly before that, in late February 1003/1594, seasonal flooding of the Zāyandarūd River had destroyed much of the arable and populated areas stretching along its southern and northern banks: the flooding sparked an epidemic of famine and plague, causing further depopulation.Footnote 63 It was with the objective of repopulating Isfahan that Shah ʿAbbās ordered the transfer of a group of Zoroastrians to his new capital. On arrival, the Zoroastrians were settled in Hizār-Jarīb, also known as Saʿādatābād, a small village on the southern bank of the Zāyandarūd, where they founded Gabrābād. In the 1610s, several dozen Armenian stonemasons moved to Gabrābād with their families, suggesting that the number of Zoroastrian new arrivals was not sufficent to populate Saʿādatābād.Footnote 64
One of the earliest descriptions of Gabrābād is penned by Pietro della Valle, who visited Safavid Iran in 1618–21.Footnote 65 According to della Valle, under Shah ʿAbbās the Zoroastrian denizens of Gabrābād worked mostly as shawl weavers,Footnote 66 indicating that they were originally from Kirman, a major centre of goat hair weaving in Iran. It may be that the Zoroastrian shawl weavers of Gabrābād were paid by the buyūtāt (royal workshops and warehouses), run as part of the khāṣṣa administration. The author of a seventeenth-century Zoroastrian historical mathnavī tells us that Shah ʿAbbās supervised the financial and bureaucratic affairs of Zoroastrians in Gabrābād in person.Footnote 67 The Zoroastrian population of Gabrābād was estimated at around 100 households in the 1670s.Footnote 68 Under ʿAbbās II (1055–77/1642–66), bureaucratic authorities in Isfahan ordered the Zoroastrians of Gabrābād to evacuate the riverside strip of Hizār-Jarīb, where a new royal residential compound called Saʿādatābād Palace was to be built on the ruins of their houses.Footnote 69 Under the later Safavids, Capuchin missionaries in Isfahan are reported to have concentrated their proselytizing activities on the bihdīn population of Gabrābād in the hope of converting the ghettoized community to Christianity.Footnote 70
Another ravāyat from the reign of Shah ʿAbbās, drafted and signed on 13 March 1628 by a group of Zoroastrian lay leaders and religious dignitaries of Turkābād, points to the arrival in Yazd from the port city of Bandar-i ʿAbbāsī of a Parsee envoy called Bahman-i Isfandyār on 7 January 1628. The ravāyat in question deals mainly with the issue of rites and rituals, concluding with warnings about the impending coming of Ūshīdar-i Zartusht, the Zoroastrian saviour. Dastūr Bahrām-i Ardashīr's name stands atop the list of signatories. The other bihdīn worthies who signed this ravāyat include some 20 Zoroastrian notables from Yazd. Each name is followed by a residential address; some bear the title raʾīs, indicating that they held office as lay community leaders presiding over Zoroastrian communities in suburban Yazd, including Sūrk, a small village south of Ardakān, the Pusht-i Khān-ʿAlī (also Khalaf-i Khān-ʿAlī) neighbourhood of Yazd, the Yaghmābād neighbourhood of Ahristān, Bundārābād, a rural town in Rustāq district in Maybud, and the Maḥmūdābād neighbourhood of Taft. A Zoroastrian notable from Rāvar in Kirman is also among the signatories of this ravāyat; he too held the title raʾīs and lived in Yazd, bearing witness to even closer community ties between the Zoroastrians of Yazd and their co-religionists in Kirman under Shah ʿAbbās.Footnote 71
The administration of the khāṣṣa sector in Yazd became more centralized during the reign of Shah ʿAbbās. ʿAlī-Qulī Khan Shāmlū, who held office for more than three decades as the khāṣṣa prefect of Yazd, played a key role in expediting bureaucratic centralization of the khāṣṣa services in the city. The political clout ʿAlī-Qulī Khan wielded at the Safavid court in Isfahan helped him cement the bureaucratic hold of the khāṣṣa sector over Yazd. For much of his career under Shah ʿAbbās, ʿAlī-Qulī Khan was inside the Safavid ruler's circle of intimates and had the privilege of working for a while as chief secretary (amīr-i dīvān) at the grand vizier's office in Isfahan. During his stay in Isfahan, he delegated his duties in Yazd to a local deputy affiliated with the crown sector. Shortly before his death, ʿAlī-Qulī Khan retired in Tehran, which together with Ray and a number of villages in Qum had been assigned as hereditary tiyūl to the Shāmlū emirs. In ʿAlī-Qulī Khan's absence, a bureaucrat from Bāfq called Mīrzā Khalīlallāh Bihābādī acted as chief khāṣṣa supervisor in Yazd, taking care of administrative affairs of the city's Zoroastrians. When ʿAlī-Qulī Khan passed away in Tehran in 1034/1625, Mīrzā Khalīlallāh was made vizier of the Zoroastrians of Yazd.Footnote 72 Bihābādī’s years in Yazd lasted until the final years of Shah Ṣafī’s reign (1038–55/1629–42). A late seventeenth-century local history described Bihābādī’s tenure as an era of relative peace and comfort for the Zoroastrians of Yazd. He is reported to have been sympathetic to Zoroastrians. Citing anecdotal evidence, the same local historian pointed out that Bihābādī was careful not to allow his bureaucratic subordinates in Yazd to mistreat the bihdīns on account of their non-Muslim status.Footnote 73
Early in the seventeenth century, Yazd and its northern suburbs, including the predominantly Zoroastrian Pusht-i Khān-ʿAlī neighbourhood, had become the target of occasional raids launched from Khurāsān by the Uzbeks. As clashes with the Uzbeks dragged on well into the second decade of the reign of Shah ʿAbbās, they mounted a series of surprise attacks against central Iran, bringing Yazd and its suburbs under attack. One seventeenth-century Safavid chronicler recorded an attack against Yazd in 1005/1596–97 during which the Uzbeks laid siege to the Zoroastrian neighbourhood of Pusht-i Khān-ʿAlī. Led by ʿAlī-Qulī Khan Shāmlū, the khāṣṣa authorities soon intervened, arming Zoroastrians and sending a contingent of bihdīn fighters to repel the Uzbeks and patrol northern suburbs of the city.Footnote 74 The involvement of Zoroastrians in military activities under the Safavids can be dated to the reign of Shah Ismāʿīl. In the 1520s, a Zoroastrian military commander from Yazd, Gabr Isḥāq, ranked among deputies of the Safavid governor of Herat, Durmush Khan Shāmlū (d. 929/1523).Footnote 75
In the early seventeenth century, Shah ʿAbbās’ influential paternal aunt, princess Zaynab Begum (d. 1049/1640), who remained a spinster all her life as honorary fiancée of the Hidden Imam, became closely involved in the khāṣṣa affairs of Yazd, Isfahan and Kashan.Footnote 76 For several decades, Zaynab Begum held office as khāṣṣa governor of Kashan. She is reported to have had a keen interest in funding the construction of public buildings in Kashan and Isfahan. She funded and supervised the construction of a small caravanserai called Gabrābād in Qamṣar, a rural town some 20 miles south of Kashan.Footnote 77 From a seventeenth-century Safavid chronicle, we know that under Shah ʿAbbas I the cash collected annually as poll tax, or jizya, from the bihdīns of Yazd belonged to Zaynab Begum, a fiscal source that enabled her to underwrite the construction of such public buildings as Gabrābād Caravanserai.Footnote 78 In Qamṣar, even the labour force seems to have been provided by a group of Zoroastrians. The bihdīn workers and their families camped a few miles north-east of Qamṣar, where they founded a Zoroastrian village called Gabrābād (later Ḥusaynābād). Enslaving Zoroastrians as unpaid labour to be put to work in state-funded construction projects was a well-established practice in Safavid Iran. Late in the reign of Shah ʿAbbās several dozen Zoroastrians worked as slaves in a variety of urban projects funded and supervised by the Safavid governor of Kirman, Ganj-ʿAlī Khan Zīk (d. 1034/1624).Footnote 79 Relatedly, the construction of a Safavid-era caravanserai called Ḥalāl in Isfahan, dating from the reign of ʿAbbās II, was also funded by cash collected as poll tax from Zoroastrians and other non-Muslim denizens of the city. From a religious viewpoint, the money collected thus was considered the “purest” and accordingly the most legitimate source of cash for investment in public building projects. Local bureaucrats in Isfahan are reported to have leased the Ḥalāl Caravanserai to merchants trading with Baghdad so that the cash revenues accrued could be spent on the shah's daily meals and clothes.Footnote 80
Even though 1068/1658 is commonly considered the year in which Kirman was put under the jurisdiction of the khāṣṣa sector,Footnote 81 there is evidence that the incorporation of the province into the crown sector was initiated a quarter of a century earlier. Kirman's khāṣṣa transition dated back to the 1620s, shortly before the appointment of Amīr Khan Suklan Ẕu'l-Qadr, the keeper of the royal seals (muhrdār), to governor of Kirman in the autumn of 1034/1625, a position he held mainly in absentia until his death in 1045/1634.Footnote 82 Amīr Khan's predecessor in Kirman, Ṭahmāsp-Qulī Khan Turkmān (d. 1034/1625), held the same post as tarkhān or recipient of life-long tax exemption, which implies that Kirman had been run as a khāṣṣa administrative unit since 1033/1624, the year in which Ṭahmāsp-Qulī Khan's predecessor, Ganj-ʿAlī Khan Zīk, the last non-khāṣṣa governor of the province, died.Footnote 83 Early in 1035/1626, Amīr Khan sent his younger brother Qarā Khan to be deputy-governor to Kirman. Qarā Khan's short stay is marked by the arrest, torture, and execution of a number of local bureaucrats and landed notables based on purportedly unfounded allegations of tax fraud and embezzlement. Before long, a group of local worthies petitioned the khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan, urging them to conduct an investigation into Qarā Khan's “crimes”. In late 1035/1626, Qarā Khan was taken into custody for his high-handed treatment of the landed notables of Kirman.Footnote 84 The khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan then decided to appoint two local bureaucrats as Amīr Khan's deputies in Kirman, one of whom had the task of supervising the fiscal/scribal affairs of Zoroastrians, suggesting that under Shah ʿAbbās I the Zoroastrians of Kirman, like their co-religionists in Yazd, had their own khāṣṣa vizier.Footnote 85
Under the Safavids, some of the major collections of Zoroastrian religious texts were kept in Kirman.Footnote 86 During Amīr Khan Ẕu'l-Qadr's years as the khāṣṣa governor of Kirman, at least one anti-Zoroastrian riot is reported to have broken out in the city. According to a Zoroastrian ravāyat, in 1038/1629, a group of Muslim “riffraff” attacked a Zoroastrian fire temple in Kirman, killing two hīrbads and destroying several dozen Zoroastrian manuscripts. Further details concerning this incident are given in another ravāyat composed a few years later.Footnote 87 Here, it is clarified that the anti-Zoroastrian riot of 1038/1629 took place immediately after the news of Shah ʿAbbās’ death in Faraḥābād reached Kirman. Perhaps a faction of local authorities, who expected the khāṣṣa sector's control of local bureaucracy to be either dissolved or relaxed soon, seized the opportunity to pressurize authorities at the helm of the crown sector in Isfahan into relenting their hold on Kirman. Under these circumstances Zoroastrians, who continued to be the main beneficiaries and supporters of the khāṣṣa bureaucracy in Kirman, were singled out for punishment. During the anti-Zoroastrian riot in Kirman following the death of Shah ʿAbbās, the Zoroastrian neighbourhood of Zarasp (Zarasf), where former Safavid generalissimo (sipahsālār) and governor of Kirman, Ganj-ʿAlī Khan had built a major caravanserai, was raided. The rioters looted and destroyed a fire temple and its library.Footnote 88 This incident brings into sharper focus the fragility of the khāṣṣa protection of Zoroastrians in Kirman and the way in which local authorities could make life harder for them during periods of political instability and administrative chaos in Isfahan.
4. Zoroastrians under the later Safavids, 1038–1135/1629–1722
The reign of Shah ʿAbbās ended with two incidents that badly affected the Zoroastrian community of Kirman. The anti-Zoroastrian riot of 1038/1629 was followed by the outbreak of famine in Kirman in 1040–41/1631–32. In one Zoroastrian ravāyat letter, there is a reference to the onset of famine in Kirman shortly after Shah ʿAbbās’ death, during which several dozen Zoroastrian families and businesses were to suffer loss of life and financial ruin.Footnote 89
Under Shah Ṣafī, the Zoroastrian high priest in Kirman, Nūshīravān of Zarasp represented the bihdīn population of the city with the Safavid bureaucratic authorities in Isfahan. Perhaps he was co-opted by the khāṣṣa sector to act as vizier of the Zoroastrians in Kirman. Nūshīravān held the post of dastūr for about two decades starting in 1038/1629–30. He continued to look after the bureaucratic affairs of Kirman Zoroastrians until 1059–60/1649–50, the year in which Mīrzā Hāshim Khurāsānī of Herat was made khāṣṣa vizier.Footnote 90 During the 1630s–40s, Kirman saw a period of relative administrative stability, which helped the Zoroastrians, who mostly worked in agriculture, to prosper. Towards the end of Shah Ṣafī’s reign, local authorities in Kirman had lowered taxes on foodstuffs in order to speed up recovery from the famine of 1040–41/1631–32.Footnote 91 This in turn caused an influx of Zoroastrians from the famine-stricken provinces of Sistan and Makrān.Footnote 92 The overpopulation and physical expansion of Zarasp that took place during these years prepared the way for its annexation in the latter part of the seventeenth century to Guvāshīr, the central, predominantly Muslim, neighbourhood of Kirman.
Khāṣṣa protection had still its own institutional weaknesses, making Zoroastrians vulnerable to fiscal abuses meted out by local authorities. In 1054/1644–45, the khaṣṣa prefect of the Zoroastrians of Yazd, Mīr Kamāl Bundarābādī, was dismissed and incarcerated on charges of fiscal fraud, extortion and maltreatment of the bihdīn population of the city.Footnote 93 In Kirman too Zoroastrians were to endure over-taxation and other fiscal pressures at the hands of local bureaucrats. There was occasional disruption to the taxation process resulting in backlogs. Delays were mostly due to local bureaucrats’ inaction, as temporary suspension of taxation gave them an opportunity to voice their discontent with the unwillingness of khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan to turn over their bureaucratic powers to local grandees in Kirman. In 1066/1655, ʿAbbās II ordered the khāṣṣa vizier of Kirman to work with an interim fiscal inspector appointed from Isfahan to investigate the slow stream of tax money from Kirman to Isfahan. The inspector was also charged with setting up a workable tax payment plan for Zoroastrians so they could pay off their overdue taxes in instalments.Footnote 94 Yet this move came to nothing due to lack of co-operation between the khāṣṣa inspector and local bureaucrats, who wanted the shah to loosen the centralized management of khāṣṣa services in Kirman, a move that enabled them to take a share of the taxes imposed on Zoroastrians for themselves.Footnote 95 Putting fiscal pressure on the Zoroastrian clients of the khāṣṣa services of the Safavid bureaucracy was one way for bureaucrats in Kirman to leverage their micromanagement powers. Moreover, the delayed levying of tax on Zoroastrians enabled them to send a symbolic message to the imperial administration that local agents could easily sabotage the revenue stream of the khāṣṣa sector.
During this period a number of bihdīn notables of Kirman were forced to convert to Islam. On at least one occasion in 1066/1655, the year of ʿAbbās II's enthronement, a group of provincial bureaucrats held a major parade and public banquet celebrating with unprecedented fanfare the conversion to Islam of two prominent members of the Zoroastrian community in Kirman. This took place shortly after court officials in Isfahan had refused to decentralize the administration of fiscal services of the khāṣṣa sector, signalling local bureaucrats’ determination to use a combination of brute force and political campaigning to subvert the influence of khāṣṣa authorities and their allies in Kirman. By the end of the year, the young Safavid ruler gave in to local pressure and agreed to contract out the key khāṣṣa positions in Kimran to a cohort of provincial bureaucrats.Footnote 96 At that time, Ardashīr-i Nūshīravān of Zarasp held office as high priest in Kirman. In a ravāyat penned by him in 1061/1651, i.e. about four years before the forced conversion to Islam of the two above-mentioned bihdīn community leaders in Kirman, dastūr Ardashīr points to prevalent discontent and a sense of “anguished misery” among the Zoroastrians who “all are worried and looking forward anxiously to see better times”.Footnote 97
So far as Zoroastrians were concerned, the decision of the Safavid authorities in Isfahan, in 1066–67/1655–56, to limit their involvement in the khāṣṣa sector in Kirman proved a change for the worse, paving the way for a new round of systematic discrimination against the bihdīns. In the three years following the assignment of the khaṣṣa sector in Kirman to provincial bureaucrats, central authorities in Isfahan received hundreds of individual petitions from the bihdīns, all complaining about fiscal abuses and extractions from non-khāṣṣa contractors in Kirman. Before long, a group of Zoroastrians, led by a certain Suhrāb, travelled to Isfahan to submit their petitions to ʿAbbās II. This they managed to do during one of the royal outings in Saʿādatābād. But instead of conducting an independent investigation in Isfahan, court officials forwarded these petitions to provincial authorities in Kirman, asking them to give a verdict on the issue. This decision, and subsequent efforts by provincial bureaucrats to buy time and eventually kill the inquest, occasioned an anti-government demonstration in Kirman in summer 1068/1658, during which hundreds of Zoroastrian protesters swarmed the local governor's office at Naẓar Garden in Guvāshīr, forcing him to call for the Shaykh al-Islām and the Kalāntar to sit down with the Zoroastrian grandees and find a way to lower the rate of their poll tax.Footnote 98
The grand vizier Muḥammad Beg's (d. 1083/1672) campaign against religious minorities contextualized the plight of Zoroastrians in Kirman in the late 1650s. While Muḥammad Beg's persecution of the Jews in Isfahan has received much attention,Footnote 99 the maltreatment of Zoroastrians during the same period has only briefly been noted in modern scholarship. In general, emphasis has been given to the religious and sectarian factors behind the state crackdown on religious minorities under Muḥammad Beg, which, as we will see in the case of Zoroastrians, were of inconsequential implications. The mounting fiscal pressures on Zoroastrians early in the 1650s coincided with the sharp debasement of Safavid coinage under ʿAbbās II. The monetary crisis of the 1650s bankrupted many business owners and merchants in Isfahan and other major urban centres, including Kirman.Footnote 100 The economic downturn is reported to have reached its pinnacle in 1065–66/1654–55, the years in which the Zoroastrians of Kirman had been subjected to over-taxation.
As regards status quo in Yazd during the seventeenth century, it took several decades for Ahristān to recover and repopulate following the devastating floods of the winter of 1002–03/1594. Early in the 1670s, it is described once again as a prosperous, predominantly Zoroastrian neighbourhood.Footnote 101 In Shaʿban 1077/January–February 1667, the former khāṣṣa prefect of Qazvin, Kamāl al-Dīn Allāh-Qulī Beg, was made vizier of Yazd. The appointment letter issued in his name, which is partially reproduced in a local history of Yazd, clarifies that he had at the same time been charged with working as vizier of Zoroastrians. Prior to his promotion to khāṣṣa vizier of Yazd, Allāh-Qulī Beg owned several tiyūl land grants in the vicinity of Ahristān and Naʿīmābād, suggesting that the Zoroastrians knew him personally and might have a say in his promotion to their vizier.Footnote 102 Allāh-Qulī Beg's appointment seems to have been made with the aim of further centralizing the khāṣṣa sector in Yazd, but increasing career instability among crown sector recruits in the closing quarter of the seventeenth century had already sapped the effectiveness of any attempt at administrative centralization. Following Allāh-Qulī Beg's death in 1079/1669, his son Muḥammad Khalīl Beg took over his father's post as vizier of the Zoroastrians. The latter is said to have worked as a deputy of the Queen Mother in Yazd,Footnote 103 implying that long after princess Zaynab Begum's demise, female members of the royal family were still allocated a share of Zoroastrians’ poll tax. Less than two years after his appointment as vizier, however, on 17 Rajab 1081/20 November 1670, Muḥammad Khalīl Beg resigned and left for India via Basra.Footnote 104
The hold of the khāṣṣa sector on the fiscal/scribal affairs of Kirman was also about to unravel in the 1670s–80s. In 1087/1676, the local historian Muḥammad Saʿīd Mashīzī Bardsīrī reports that for two consecutive fiscal years Zoroastrians had managed not to pay their poll taxes.Footnote 105 In the same year, however, they were coerced into paying the delayed taxes as a lump sum. A local tax collector then ordered an increase in the rate of the poll tax for the following year. The decision to increase poll tax rates soon excited outrage among the bihdīns of Kirman. They first prepared and signed a petition, protesting against the “abuses” from the new tax collector, a certain Aḥmad Āqā, who worked for non-khāṣṣa agents in Kirman. The khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan threw their weight behind this petition in a bid to win the shah's support and eventually take total control of the khāṣṣa sector in Kirman. In the summer of 1093/1682, the grand vizier, Shaykh ʿAlī Khan Zangana (d. 1100/1689) ordered provincial bureaucrats in Kirman to conduct an investigation into Aḥmad Āqā’s maltreatment of Zoroastrians. Provincial authorities were slow to respond to complaints from Zoroastrians. To counter the inaction of provincial authorities, the Zoroastrians accused Mahdī-Qulī Beg, an ally of Aḥmad Āqā and the non-khāṣṣa prefect of Kirman in charge of the investigation, of forcing an underage Zoroastrian girl to be married off to one of his Muslim subordinates, calling for the khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan to pressurize him and his allies in Kirman into co-operating with Zoroastrians and working out a balanced poll tax plan for the coming fiscal year.Footnote 106 But all this was in vain. Next year, Shaykh ʿAlī Khan Zangana (d. 1101/1690) commanded one of his underlings in Isfahan, a ghulām called ʿIsā Beg, to travel to Kirman where he was supposed to arbitrate between the Zoroastrians and provincial non-khāṣṣa bureaucrats over the issue of poll tax.
ʿIsā Beg had been instructed to conduct a cadastral land survey during his stay in Kirman based on official registers of the province. He also had orders to draft an updated report detailing all khāliṣa (state-owned landed properties) land tenure contracts issued in the name of the Zoroastrian worthies of Kirman since the opening decades of the seventeenth century. This report was intended to help the khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan determine the exact amount of poll tax to be collected from Zoroastrians. Yet provincial, non-khāṣṣa authorities were intent on extracting more cash from the Zoroastrians in the form of high-rate poll tax. Therefore, they refused to allow ʿIsā Beg to see the official registers of the province, leaving him with no choice but to abandon his original plan of conducting a cadastral land survey. Eventually, ʿIsā Beg drafted a report drawing only on the available copies of land tenure contracts and royal edicts issued in the name of successive generations of Zoroastrian grandees of Kirman. ʿIsā Beg was an ally of the Zoroastrians, so in his report he recommended that poll tax rates be lowered considerably.Footnote 107 In the summer of 1095/1684, ʿIsā Beg submitted his report to Shah Sulaymān (1077–1105/1666–94) in Isfahan. The Safavid monarch praised him for the “services” he had rendered to the Safavid crown during his stay in Kirman, implying that a royal order was in the offing to decrease the poll tax rates imposed on the Zoroastrians of Kirman. Provincial bureaucrats from Kirman were quick to use their political clout at court to counter such a move. Eventually, they managed to persuade the shah to issue a royal edict permitting the extraction of high-rate poll tax from the Zoroastrians, an outcome that undid the reforms planned and initiated under grand vizier Shaykh ʿAlī Khan Zangana.
In the meantime, a group of Zoroastrian poll tax collectors in Kirman – known locally as sar-kalla-gīr – who had recently been urged by ʿIsā Beg to travel from Kirman to Isfahan to lobby the grand vizier and other court officials to persuade them to bring the Zoroastrians of Kirman back under the jurisdiction of the khāṣṣa sector, were stabbed to death in their beds by a gang of “thieves” at ʿIsā Beg's house. These murders resulted in the ad hoc reversal of the decision, endorsed by the shah, that allowed provincial, non-khāṣṣa bureaucrats in Kirman to impose higher tax rates on Zoroastrians. Thus ʿIsā Beg was appointed chief khāṣṣa tax collector in Kirman and the Zoroastrians were instructed to pay their poll tax at a reduced, fixed rate.Footnote 108 Two years later, in 1097/1686, Sulaymān ordered court officials in Isfahan to return the right to collect poll tax from Zoroastrians to non-khāṣṣa authorities in Kirman, a decision that heralded the downfall of ʿIsā Beg.Footnote 109 For the Zoroastrians, the decentralization of the poll tax administration in Kirman meant the renewal of persecution and abuses from non-khāṣṣa authorities. This arrangement remained in place under the next grand vizier, Muḥammad Ṭāhir Vaḥīd Qazvīnī (d. 1112/1700–01), and throughout the years leading up to the downfall of the Safavid dynasty in autumn 1135/1722. An early eighteenth-century European observer in Isfahan believed that the fiscal disputes over the Zoroastrians of Kirman boiled down to Shah Sulaymān's desire to convert all bihdīns in Iran to Islam.Footnote 110 However, no Persian narrative source supports this claim.
The reign of Shah Sulṭān-Ḥusayn (1105–35/1694–1722) saw an unprecedented rise in the number and frequency of raids mounted by the Baluchi bandits of Sistan against Kirman and its outlying rural settlements. In Rajab 1100/April–May 1689, a group of these bandits sacked Rāvar, a rural town some 80 miles north of Kirman, and killed several dozen Zoroastrians.Footnote 111 Later the same year, a group of Abdālī marauders from Khurāsān invaded Rāvar. Subsequently, the roads from Kirman to Qandahar and Herat became unsafe and almost all long-distance trade caravans funded and organized by the Parsee and Hindu merchants stopped operating.Footnote 112 The raids reached the city of Kirman itself as early as 1100/1689. The invaders targetted local merchants and retailers, including the Parsee Zoroastrians and their Hindu counterparts who were active in overland trade between Kirman and Gujarat.Footnote 113
Later in the reign of Sulṭān-Ḥusayn, provincial bureaucrats in Kirman, who had incurred huge losses due to unfolding chaos and instability in central and southern Iran, decided to increase once more the poll tax levied on the Zoroastrians. There were scattered protests against this decision, and a lay leader of the Zoroastrian community in Kirman called Rustam wrote a petition addressed to court authorities in Isfahan. But before he made it to Isfahan to submit his petition to the office of grand vizier, Rustam was abducted and then murdered by a group of “Zoroastrian riffraff”, who were reportedly resentful of his rumoured conversion to Islam. On Rustam's death, the Zoroastrian notables who had co-signed his petition began to flee from Kirman along with their families. A few months later, the provincial vizier of Kirman sent a report to the court in Isfahan, wherein he accused Zoroastrian “thugs” of abducting and murdering Rustam.Footnote 114 The khāṣṣa authorities in Isfahan had barely begun to investigate Rustam's murder when, in Ẕu'l-ḥajja 1101/September 1690, the Afghans of Qandahar launched their first major attack on Kirman, ushering in an era of unprecedented mayhem and anarchy that ended the effective control of the khāṣṣa authorities over the province, enabling local bureaucrats and military powerbrokers to bring the Zoroastrians under their total control.Footnote 115
Shortly before the downfall of the Safavid dynasty, provincial authorities in Kirman enslaved all male Zoroastrian inhabitants of the city, forcing them to work on local fortifications.Footnote 116 When Kirman eventually fell to the Afghans in Muḥarram 1132/November 1719, the invaders took hostage a group of Zoroastrian community leaders to force their relatives and co-religionists in Sistan and Yazd to fight with them as slaves and mercenaries against pro-Safavid forces in Isfahan.Footnote 117 The plight of Zoroastrians under the Afghans was worse than anything they had experienced under the Safavids. Anecdotal evidence provided by Armenian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian agents of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) points to the violent treatment of the Zoroastrians of Kirman by the Afghans. Their eyewitness testimony calls into question the claim in an early eighteenth-century European travelogue that the Afghan invaders of Kirman and Isfahan were the liberators of the Zoroastrians from the yoke of the Safavids.Footnote 118 Under the Afghans, the military governor of Kirman looted and set fire to Zarasp, destroying the houses and businesses of almost all bihdīn denizens of the city. What is more, several dozen Zoroastrian prisoners-cum-mercenaries from Kirman were forced by the Afghans to take part in their marauding expeditions against rural settlements south of the city.Footnote 119 The participation of the Zoroastrians in anti-Safavid military campaigns in central and southern Iran helped them appease the Afghan emirs, who as a reward for their collaboration, spared the lives of almost all bihdīns in Yazd, Kirman and Isfahan.Footnote 120
5. Concluding remarks
Throughout the Safavid period the persecution of Zoroastrians had little to do with religious bigotry and sectarian intolerance, but was closely related to the fact that for much of this period the administration of fiscal affairs was a major bone of contention between the central and provincial services of the Safavid bureaucracy. In Yazd, the Safavid invasion of the city in 910/1505 saved Zoroastrians from the perils of living under the rule of a local claimant to Mahdiship backed by an influential clique of prominent Nūrbakhshī demagogues, landed notables and provincial bureaucrats.
Zoroastrians in Iran made their first contacts with their Parsee co-religionists in Gujarat under the early Safavids. The ravāyat letters sent from Yazd and Kirman to Gujarat during the early sixteenth century come with fragmentary references to the circumstances under which the Zoroastrians lived and were treated by state authorities in Iran. The ravāyat literature shows that in the 1510s–20s there was a friendly power relationship between Shah Ismāʿīl and the Zoroastrians of Yazd. It also sheds light on the travails they went through during the chaos that ensued following the death of Shah Ṭahmāsp in 984/1576, and shortly thereafter during the decades leading up to ʿAbbās’ rise to power in 995/1587.
While Yazd was incorporated into the khāṣṣa sector in the mid sixteenth century, the assignment of Kirman to khāṣṣa authorities began in the reign of Shah Ṣafī. More than any other period in Safavid history it was under Shah ʿAbbās and his immediate successors that the dynamics of khāṣṣa protection shaped the routine of daily life among the Zoroastrians of Yazd, Kirman, and Isfahan. Under Shah ʿAbbās, the khāṣṣa services of the Safavid bureaucracy in Yazd became more centralized. The khāṣṣa sector supervised the levying and collection of poll tax from the Zoroastrians. The khāṣṣa also appointed viziers of Zoroastrians in Yazd and Kirman, charging them with overseeing the community’s bureaucratic affairs locally. Under the Safavids, several female members of the royal family were closely involved in the administrative affairs of the Zoroastrian community in Yazd and benefitted from their cash and free labour.
The crown sector was supposed to supervise the year-by-year collection of poll tax from Zoroastrians in Yazd and Kirman, shielding them from the fiscal abuses of local notables and non-khāṣṣa bureaucrats in both provinces. In exchange for their protection, authorities in charge of the khāṣṣa sector enslaved Zoroastrians and spent the cash extracted from them as poll tax on the construction of public buildings such as caravanserais. Under Shah ʿAbbās, the crown sector also forced a small group of Zoroastrians to move, together with their families, to the southern outskirts of Isfahan. The Zoroastrian new arrivals were professional shawl weavers and worked for the royal workshops and warehouses in Isfahan.
The khāṣṣa protection was not sustainable and had its limits. For brief intervals during the late seventeenth century, the Zoroastrians of Kirman and Yazd were subject to systematic fiscal discrimination by non-khāṣṣa bureaucrats. In general, bureaucratic authorities at the helm of the crown sector in Isfahan sympathized with Zoroastrians and did what they could to ameliorate their living standards in the face of over-taxation and extortion by local authorities in Kirman and Yazd. Under the later Safavids, the bihdīns of Kirman wielded a level of political clout at the Safavid court that enabled them to challenge local authorities and non-khāṣṣa agents in Kirman. However, the intervention of the khāṣṣa authorities on behalf of Zoroastrians never took institutionalized form, leaving the door open for local agents to keep Zoroastrians down and abuse them on a regular basis.
In the late seventeenth century, the lack of a centralized mechanism of supervision and intervention on the one hand, and the growing insecurity in central and eastern provinces of Iran on the other, exposed Zoroastrians to even harsher forms of abuse, extortion and violence at the hands of provincial authorities in Kirman and Yazd. The downfall of the Safavid dynasty early in the 1720s only worsened the plight of the Zoroastrians, leaving many of them with no choice but to fight against other Iranians as mercenaries in the service of the Afghan rebels of Qandahar.
