Introduction
In military terminology, a two-front war stands for an armed conflict in which fighting takes place on two geographically separate fronts. It typically involves two or more separate forces engaged in an armed confrontation with an adversary, simultaneously or nearly simultaneously, in the hope that this adversary will be forced to split his fighting force to deal with both threats, therefore reducing his odds of success.Footnote 1
World history shows numerous examples of this predicament. The locus classicus is Rome fighting the first Macedonian War at the same time that it was engaged in the Second Punic War against Carthage. Half a millennium later, the Byzantine Empire was frequently beleaguered by enemies from the east as well as by opponents in Italy. More recently, Napoleon fought multiple wars on as many fronts, from Spain to Russia. Poland, which lost its freedom and sovereignty at various times between 1772 and 1945, offers the clearest example of the danger of being trapped between hostile, more powerful neighbors. A conflict between Paraguay and Brazil in 1864 turned into the so-called “War of the Triple Alliance” a year later when Argentina and Uruguay joined Brazil. By some accounts, two-thirds of the people of Paraguay lost their lives in the bloodletting that followed. Proportionally almost as disastrous were both World War I and World War II, which saw Germany battle its enemies in the east and the west, while the US fought in Europe as well as the Pacific, with a better outcome. After fighting two wars against multiple enemies, Israel in 1978 “solved” the two-front war dilemma by concluding a separate peace with Egypt.
The Safavids, the rulers of the dynasty that came to power in Iran in 1501, faced a similar problem, structurally and perennially. From the moment of their emergence as a state at the turn of the sixteenth century until their demise in the early 1720s they were hamstrung between two empires of greater population strength and more abundant natural resources, the Ottomans to the west and the Mughals in the east. At the same time, they faced near-incessant incursions combined with a serious challenge to the urban centers of Khorasan from the formidable forces of the newly emerging Uzbek dispensation. Long distances and rugged terrain consisting of steep mountains in the west and waterless deserts in the east shielded the core area of the Iranian plateau from the full military force of its neighbors, which is surely one reason why the Safavids, despite Iran’s comparatively low population and limited resource base, survived as long as they did. Yet this natural advantage could not mask the dynasty’s fundamental military weakness and the result, its inability to sustain a war on more than one front simultaneously.
In the scholarly literature on the Safavid state this aspect of its foreign relations rarely receives more than perfunctory attention.Footnote 2 Diplomacy and war in Safavid Iran tend to be viewed in bilateral and separate, often dichotomous terms, involving the recurrent conflict between the Safavids and the Ottomans over Mesopotamia and the southern Caucasus, the more episodic confrontation between the Safavids and the Mughals over Qandahar, and the protracted struggle with the Uzbeks over control over Khorasan. The complexity of Iran’s position as a result of the simultaneity of the external threat it faced is often overlooked and rarely addressed. In the voluminous literature on the Ottoman confrontation with the Christian powers of Europe, Iran is frequently left unmentioned and often entirely absent.Footnote 3 This is particularly true for the country’s stance vis-à-vis the so-called “Turkish Question,” the Christian-European concern about Ottoman aggression in southeastern Europe—the fear that the Turks might push into the heart of Europe by taking Vienna (which they almost did in 1529 and 1683) or invade the Italian peninsula and threaten Rome after landing in Otranto (which they did in 1480)—and the attempts to thwart their imperialist thrust by forging a grand Christian coalition, which preoccupied European rulers from the 1450s until the late seventeenth century. Next to the European powers—the Spanish and the Habsburgs, the Papacy, Venice, the Poles and the Russians—the Iranians were active participants in these long-standing efforts to challenge and repel the Ottomans, both as recipients of countless envoys from European nations eager to complete a “cordon sanitaire” around the Ottomans by bringing the Safavids into the alliance, and as agents interested in containing and neutralizing the Turks for their own reasons. That Iran’s entanglement in this process is in many ways the history of waging war on two (or more) fronts at once, or rather the story of trying to avoid getting involved in such a complicated conflict, is rarely acknowledged.
Of course, Iran’s adversaries were confronted with a similar predicament. Indeed, all parties faced their own enemies, the Ottomans and the Mughals as much as France and the Habsburg Empire or Spain and England. And they were often internally divided to the point of enabling their adversaries to drive a wedge between them. The result was a complex musical-chair-like dance marked by alliances with “enemies of enemies.”Footnote 4 Every party in effect sought to weaken everyone else by inciting war between neighbors.
The benefits to Christendom of conflict between the Safavids and the Ottomans had an important place in European strategic thinking, which cherished the idea of two Islamic powers destroying each other as early as the reign of Shah Esmaʿil I (r. 1501‒24).Footnote 5 As John Pao Rubies points out, the European strategy was to coordinate a complicated scenario in which the Ottomans would have to fight two wars simultaneously, one in the west, in the Balkans and on the Mediterranean front, and one on their eastern flank, against Iran.Footnote 6 The Venetian physician-cum spy Giovanni Tomassio Minadoi, writing in the 1580s, articulated the notion that war between the Ottomans and the Safavids would be advantageous to the Europeans by mentioning the likelihood that “each campaigning season might bring a renewal of Ottoman attacks on the West.”Footnote 7
Conversely, the Safavids were just as happy to see Ottomans battle it out in the Balkans as the Europeans were content to have the Ottomans preoccupied on their eastern flank. The Safavid army was one of mounted warriors. Expert in guerilla warfare marked by the quick dash followed by (feigned) retreat, and lagging in gunpowder technology, it instinctively sought to avoid open battle. As the Venetian consul in Istanbul, De’Ludovisi, put it in the 1530s, the shah’s forces generally were no match for those of the sultan as long as the latter was not confronted with adversaries elsewhere.Footnote 8 The Iranians indeed feared the Turks, realizing the superiority of the latter, numerically as well as logistically.Footnote 9 They thus were generally careful to pursue a policy aimed at maintaining a balance of power with their mostly Sunni neighbors, the Ottomans, the Uzbeks of Central Asia and the Indian Mughals.
The Ottoman army may have been the better war machine, but the Turks, too, were a “one-front army with a two-front empire.”Footnote 10 Like the Safavids, the Ottomans sought to avoid having to engage in war on multiple fronts simultaneously. They were much more eager to fight in the Balkans, fertile and productive territory held by clearly defined, Christian, enemies, than to march east, where the enemy was Muslim and war thus was harder to justify, and where guerilla warfare and scorched earth tactics awaited them.Footnote 11 Their reluctance to engage in easterly expeditions had a logistical and environmental dimension as well, involving the aforementioned long distances, rough terrain and a lack of victuals, above all water.Footnote 12
As for the Mughals, they considered Kabul and Qandahar pivotal for their defense, but both cities also marked the outer limit of their military reach. The distance between the Mughal core area, the Gangetic plain of northern India, and Iran’s population centers was far greater, the logistical difficulties much more daunting and the reward much smaller, than the space that separated the Ottomans from the Safavids. In Jos Gommans’ words, “any siege of Qandahar launched from India was predestined to fail, since it had to be rounded off in a few months during the summer.”Footnote 13 This, in addition to the fact that the Mughal army counted as far less formidable in Safavid eyes than that of the Ottomans, made the Mughals less of a threat to the Iranians. Indeed, whereas the Ottomans took Tabriz more than once and several times penetrated deep into western Iran—once even threatening Ardabil, the burial place of their founder, Sheykh Safi al-Din—Qandahar twice fell to the Mughals (through betrayal, in 1595 and in 1639), and the Mughal army never managed to move beyond it. Of the three parties, the Mughals, faced with their own adversaries in Bengal and the Deccan, were arguably the least prepared to sustain a two-war front.
Religion undeniably played a role in the war between the various empires. There was the overarching (perceived) dichotomy between Christianity and Islam. The European powers fought under the banner of the former faith, and the Muslim invoked the latter creed. At times this created a façade of solidarity. Safavid envoy Maqsud Beg, visiting Istanbul in 1578, made a plea for a Safavid‒Ottoman peace with the argument that, as Muslim nations, they should form one front in order to subdue the “Christian people.”Footnote 14 Yet religion was not a clear-cut category, and it was invariably trumped by geostrategic concerns. This comes out most clearly in the eagerness with which various European powers courted Iran and the equal enthusiasm with which the Iranians sought to enlist European assistance. The Europeans were, of course, divided between Catholic and Protestant nations and principalities. Something similar was true on the other side with the Sunni‒Shiʿi rift. This was more than fodder in the propaganda war that invariably accompanied armed conflict. There was, as Naimur Rahman Farooqi puts it, always the potential of Sunni “solidarity,” the Ottomans joining the Uzbeks and/or the Mughals in a “faith-based” coalition against the Shiʿi Safavids.Footnote 15 The arguments and stakes in the allegiances and alliances that resulted were never just religious, though. In Rhoads Murphey’s words, much of the Safavid‒Ottoman enmity had its origins in non-ideological issues, having to do with the pursuit of kingly glory and a search for material resources.Footnote 16 This is exemplified in the fact that shortly after the coming to power of Shah Abbas I, Sayyid Mubarak of the Shiʿi Muoshaʿshaʿ suggested to the Sunni Uzbeks they make common cause to topple the new Safavid ruler.Footnote 17 The enmity between the Uzbeks and the Mughals, too, tended to be stronger than Ottoman‒Mughal friendship, preventing a successful common stance.Footnote 18
Given the vastness of the topic, I can do little more here than adumbrate the issue, explore its parameters and present a schematic outline rather than engage in a detailed discussion. This essay cannot hope to do justice to the complexity of the search for alliances among the main players, let alone account for the role played by smaller, regional powers straddling the borderlands between empires, “swing states” that could be swayed to collaborate with any adversary. This includes the Kurds, the Mushaʿshaʿ, the tribal dynasty that ruled Khuzestan, formally under Safavid jurisdiction but effectively semi-autonomously, or the Shirvanshahs who were independent until their territory, Shirvan in the Caucasus, was incorporated by Shah Tahmasb (r. 1524‒76). The Safavids were always suspicious about the loyalty of these groups, fearful that they might join the Ottomans or even team up with the Uzbeks. Addressing the issue from the Safavid vantage point, and focusing on the relationship with the Ottoman and, to a lesser extent with the Uzbeks and the Mughals, I thus first offer some observations about the period of Shah Esmaʿil I and Shah Tahmasb, then discuss the reign of Shah Abbas I (r. 1587‒1629) in more detail, and make some concluding remarks about the period after 1639, when the Iranians greatly reduced the specter of a war on multiple fronts by concluding the Peace of Zohab (or Qasr-e Shirin) with their archenemies, the Ottomans.
Antecedents: Shah Esma ‘il and the Ottomans, 1501‒24
Like all Safavid shahs who came after him, Shah Esmaʿil, the dynasty’s first territorial ruler, faced the Ottomans as his most formidable enemy. As is well known, Esmaʿil suffered a terrible defeat against them at Chalderan in 1514, and subsequently gave up on the business of war (although not on war-related diplomacy). But the outcome of Chalderan itself was, in a way, a function of the two-front dilemma—for both parties. Soon after Esmaʿil came to power in 1501 he set out on a series of far-flung campaigns. In these, he went far beyond Baghdad and Mesopotamia, which he took in 1508. He reached deep into Anatolia, extending his rule well beyond the Iranian plateau in his attempt to sway the region’s inhabitants to his creed. In 1510 Venetian spies caught by the Mamluks while returning from Iran revealed a plan to take on the Ottomans and the Mamluks jointly, the Safavids by land and the Europeans by sea.Footnote 19 Esmaʿil’s opponent, Sultan Selim (r. 1512‒20), eventually set out to confront the Safavid armies, but not before mollifying the Mamluks of Egypt, dissuading them from siding with Iran and, after sending a mission to the Uzbek ruler, ʿObeyd Allah, with the announcement that he was about to march on Iraq accompanied by a proposal to take joint action against the Safavids.Footnote 20
Simultaneously confronted with the Uzbeks in the northeast, Esmaʿil at the time had to deploy the bulk of his military resources to his eastern flank as well, even after he defeated the founder of the Uzbek dispensation, Sheybani Khan (r. 1488‒1510), near Marv in 1510—sending his hay-stuffed skin as a present to Sultan Bayezid in Istanbul. Yet under Sheybani Khan’s nephew and successor, ʿObeyd Allah, the Uzbeks managed to stage a come-back. The common Uzbek threat next brought the fledgling Safavid state into an understanding with Sultan Babur (r. 1497‒1530, with interruptions), the as yet weak founder of the Mughals who faced in the Uzbeks his most formidable foes. The alliance that followed, which was meant to allow Babur to try and recover Transoxiana with Safavid assistance, would survive for almost half a century “notwithstanding considerable and occasional strain.” This included Babur’s defection from the Safavid army at the Battle of Ghajdavan in late 1512, which helped the Uzbeks gain a victory over the Safavids, allowing them to take terrible revenge for the Safavid massacre of Sunni inhabitants two year earlier. The defeat at Chalderan, in turn, presented an opportunity for Babur to launch a campaign toward Transoxiana five years later.Footnote 21
The result of Chalderan was a chastened shah commanding a weakened army which he still needed to keep the Uzbeks at bay. Eventually, nine years after his defeat, Shah Esmaʿil established contacts with the main adversaries of the Ottomans in Europe, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (r. 1516‒58) and the Hungarian King Louis II (r. 1506‒26).Footnote 22 Yet these initiatives were the desultory moves of a powerless ruler who would soon die from alcoholic excess. As for the Ottomans, a weakened Safavid state allowed Sultan Selim to turn his attention elsewhere. In 1516 the Ottoman army invaded Syria. Moving further southward, the Ottomans managed to defeat the Mamluks and conquer Egypt the following year, eliminating a past and potentially future ally of the Safavids.
In 1520 Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520‒66) mounted the Ottoman throne, succeeding his father Selim I. The sultan’s spies told him that the Safavids were in no position to take revenge for Chalderan and attack Anatolia.Footnote 23 His grand vizier, Piri Paşa, also advised him about the weakness of the Iranians. Yet the wars in the east, including an embargo on Iranian silk imposed by Selim in 1512, had taken their toll on the Ottoman treasury. So, after sending a message of conciliation to Shah Esmaʿil, the sultan felt secure enough to launch a major offensive into the Balkans, where he took Belgrade in 1521. Having defeated the Serbs at Mohács in 1526, the Ottomans moved into Hungary, to appear before the walls of Vienna in 1529. Exactly at the time that the Ottoman Balkan campaign got underway, the Uzbeks laid siege to Herat in a move that may or may not have been coordinated with Istanbul.Footnote 24
The Reign of Shah Tahmasb, 1524‒76
By the time that the Ottomans had concluded their Balkan campaign, Esmaʿil had died and a new shah, his son Tahmasb, had mounted the Safavid throne. It took Tahmasb a full decade to overcome the tribal discord that erupted upon his accession. Even after he established control over his realm, Tahmasb proved to be one of the least warlike Safavid shahs, and certainly the most pacific one until the last two effective rulers of the dynasty, Shah Soleyman (r. 1666‒94) and Shah Soltan Hoseyn (r. 1694‒1722). He was particularly loath to go to war against the Ottomans.
Peacefully inclined or not, Tahmasb was confronted with the two-war dilemma before he was able to establish control over his realm. In the period 1524‒38, the Uzbeks, advancing from Marv, launched five invasions into Khorasan, during which time they managed to capture and lose Herat, Mashhad and Astarabad more than once while fighting the Qezelbash. In 1528 Tahmasb had to make a choice. The Uzbeks at the time were engaged in a prolonged siege of Herat. A rebellion in Baghdad, which drew in the Ottomans when Zu’l Feqar, the local governor, offered them the keys to the city, simultaneously forced his attention westward. Tahmasb opted to march east to take on the Uzbeks. After defeating them in the Battle of Jam in September 1528, he rushed back to the western front. Yet his initial choice cost him control over Baghdad, which fell to the Ottomans. The city would soon be restored to Safavid rule, and Zu’l Feqar Khan was to be murdered by the rebels. None of this seems to have involved direct intervention by the Ottomans who, engaged in Europe at the time, were unable to assist the insurgents.Footnote 25
Shah Tahmasb at no point expressed a desire for an all-out conflict with the Ottomans. The latter do not seem to have been keen on an all-out war either. More than one Ottomanist has characterized Süleyman’s policy vis-à-vis Iran as one of containment or even self-defense, rather than conquest.Footnote 26 Murphey calls the sultan’s second and third Iranian campaign “acts of last resort in retaliation for ongoing harassment, rather than unprovoked aggression for the sole purpose of extending Ottoman territorial control,” and his policy a cautious one “aimed more at containment than conquest.”Footnote 27 According to Isıksel, the Ottomans in the 1550s employed a policy of “pénétration pacifique” by way of istimâlet, coaxing and winning over undecided forces through concessions and favors.Footnote 28
Yet the fact is that all subsequent wars fought between the two parties were launched by the Ottomans—often in response to Safavid provocation, to be sure, and usually at a time when they had their hands free in the Balkans or saw the Iranians as weak and divided or preoccupied with their eastern foes. The premier example of this is the so-called War of the Two Iraqs of 1534‒35 (in reference to Mesopotamia, ‘Eraq-e ‘Arab as well as western Iran, ‘Eraq-e ‘Ajam), a conflict which the Austrian historian Hammer-Purgstall called the beginning of two centuries of warfare alternating with peace, the one calling forth the other or the other guaranteeing the first.Footnote 29 The backdrop to this conflict was the situation in central Europe, where in 1529 the Ottomans (narrowly) failed to take Vienna. Four years later Sultan Süleyman concluded a peace agreement with Ferdinand I of Hungary, leaving him free to turn his attention to the east again. At this point Tahmasb was still engaged on his own eastern flank, where the Uzbeks had laid siege to Herat. No sooner had he managed to relieve the city than he was informed that the Ottomans were marching toward his western border. The latter had been alerted to Iran’s weakness by the Safavid governor of Azerbaijan, Ulama Tekkelu, who defected to the Ottoman side and helped them take Tabriz. Shah Tahmasb, still moving east, initially was unaware of these developments. As soon as he learned of the Ottoman invasion he turned around and hurried back in forced marches, but his exhausted army was unable to mount a full-scale resistance to the Ottoman forces.
The ensuing campaign, led by Süleyman himself, was preceded by an exchange of letters between the two rulers in which the Ottoman ruler showed himself to be far more bellicose than his Safavid counterpart. In one of these, Süleyman challenged his opponent to a fight, referring to the war his father, Selim, had fought with Tahmasb’s father, and taunting him by referring to his lack of courage. Tahmasb replied by saying that he did not want to end up destroying himself, estimating that his troop strength was one-tenth that of the Ottomans. In another message, the Ottoman ruler boasted that he had taken Belgrade and Rhodes, fortifications that had seemed unassailable, and how he had converted their houses of worship into mosques, warning the shah that he could easily turn his army eastward and destroy Tahmasb’s realm with the same ease. It is unclear if the Safavid ruler responded to this threat. It also remains unclear if the Ottomans worked in cahoots with the Uzbek ruler ʿObeyd Khan, who at the same time invaded Khorasan; proof of such collusion is lacking. The actual campaign that resulted brought their army deep into western Iran, as far as Zanjan and Soltaniya in fact, forcing the Safavid army to retreat to Qazvin. Its lasting result was the Ottoman incorporation of Iraq, including Basra, into their realm.Footnote 30
Unable to challenge Ottoman supremacy in Mesopotamia, Tahmasb in the next few years spent most of his military energy on the ever restless eastern front. In 1537 he personally led an expedition to seize Qandahar from Kamran Mirza, a half-brother of Sultan Homayun who a few years earlier had taken the city from the Safavids. Yet within a year the city passed back into the hands of Kamran Mirza, who held it for the next seven years.Footnote 31
The next Ottoman invasion of Iran was preceded as well as facilitated by developments in Europe involving the rivalry between the two main continental powers and rivals, France and Austria. In 1547, the French did all they could to end their conflict with the Ottomans so as to give the latter an opportunity to resume fighting the Habsburgs. On 1 April, King Francis I died and was succeeded by his son Henry II. The latter, feeling threatened by Charles V, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, immediately set out to conclude a treaty with the papacy that would also include Venice and the Swiss. Yet the plan did not work out. Worse, on 19 June the Ottomans and the Habsburgs signed an armistice, next allowing Charles V to start making preparations for war against France as well as to take on his own Protestants. Sultan Süleyman, in turn, found himself in an advantageous position to prepare for a new war against the Safavids.Footnote 32
What followed was the second Ottoman invasion of Iran, which includes the story of Alqas Mirza, Shah Tahmasb’s favorite son, who defected to the Ottomans, only to be extradited to his father, who promptly had him executed. In his detailed study of the conflict, Walter Posch plausibly argues that Alqas Mirza’s defection was not the cause of the campaign the Ottomans undertook in 1547, but merely the excuse to create a protectorate in Shirvan and Georgia, a vassal state akin to the Balkans or the territory of the Crimean Tatars, designed to provide defensive depth and security and part of a plan that had originated a decade earlier, during the Campaign of the Two Iraqs.Footnote 33 The Ottoman took large swaths of eastern Anatolia, and even occupied Tabriz for a short while—prompting the Safavids subsequently to move their capital to Qazvin—but were unable to consolidate their power. When they retreated in 1549 these regions went back to being ruled by local and regional warlords.
The Ottoman entanglement with Transylvania, to which the Habsburg King Ferdinand I laid claim, next allowed the Safavid shah to focus on regaining territory in Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia which he had lost during the campaign in the late 1540s. Convinced that the Ottoman sultan was too busy fighting in the Balkans to be a threat to him, Tahmasb in 1552 set out to capture Arjish (Erçis), ‘Adeljavaz (Adilcevaz) and Akhlat, all located in the Van region, while his Qezelbash ravaged the surrounding area as well as the region of Nakhchevan.
This news prompted Sultan Süleyman to move against the Safavids once again. He ordered his vizier, Ahmad Paşa, to cease fighting the Habsburgs by lifting the siege of Eger in northern Hungary, and to prepare to march east. Tahmasb, still in Nakhchevan and notified that Süleyman himself was to head the army, decided to delay the Ottoman march by sending an envoy to Istanbul. This emissary, a Turkish prisoner of war, was sent back, though, with the message that the Porte expected to receive a more senior diplomat. The shah thereupon dispatched Mir Shams Diljani, and authorized him to sign a peace treaty.Footnote 34 Yet when Diljani arrived in Istanbul the Ottomans had just finished their war preparations. Told that he would receive the sultan’s response en route, he was thus forced to accompany the Ottoman army when it left Üsküdar in late August 1553, heading for Syria, where the sultan was planning to spend the winter months.Footnote 35
When the news arrived that Esmaʿil, Tahmasb’s son had assaulted Van with 8,000 troops, the sultan abandoned his plan to visit Jerusalem and accelerated his war preparations.Footnote 36 Tahmasb responded by emptying Nakhchevan and Yerevan of their inhabitants. The Ottomans briefly entered these cities but, finding them devastated and deserted, quickly withdrew to Erzurum.Footnote 37 Yet both parties were in a weak position, the Ottomans because eastern campaigns were always a drain on men, materiel and morale—a condition aggravated for the sultan by the death of two of his sons during the campaign—and the Safavids because of inherent military weaknesses. Both parties thus were ready for peace.
War-weary, the two parties in 1555 signed the Treaty of Amasya.Footnote 38 Amasya may be called the successful outcome of Süleyman’s “policy of containment” vis-à-vis Iran. The sultan, apparently fed up with the endless campaigns against the Safavids, signed the accord, despite efforts by the attending envoys from Hungary and the Austrians to spoil the negotiations by trying to sway the Ottomans to make peace with Hungary so as to be able to put his full weight behind another anti-Iranian campaign.Footnote 39 The Iranians were given control over Tabriz but otherwise suffered substantial territorial losses, which included Iraq, Bahrain, Lurestan, much of Azerbaijan, Armenia and central Georgia. Once signed, the treaty proved to be a milestone. It marked the first time ever that the Ottomans recognized Safavid Iran as a legitimate entity. All indications are that Shah Tahmasb was keen to uphold and respect its terms. When in 1559 Prince Bayezid, the rebellious son of Sultan Süleyman, took refuge in Safavid territory, he tried to incite his host to mount an expedition against the Ottomans. Yet the shah, Eskandar Beg Monshi claims, was loath to break a peace accord that had come into being after so much bloodshed and devastation.Footnote 40 Instead, Tahmasb eventually agreed to hand Bayezid over to his father, delivering him to a certain death. The Ottomans, too, long abided by the terms of the treaty. In the early 1560s, for instance, Süleyman sought to dissuade the Uzbeks from attacking Iran with the argument that he had made peace with the Safavids at Amasya.Footnote 41
Tahmasb took advantage of the lull in hostilities with the Ottomans as well as turmoil in the ranks of the Mughals following the death of Homayun (r. 1530‒40; 1555‒56) in early 1556, to retake Qandahar two years later. The Ottomans meanwhile were preoccupied in Hungary until 1568, as well as in the Mediterranean, where they seized Cyprus in 1571.
By that time the Ottoman acceptance of the conditions of Amasya was wearing thin. As long as Sultan Süleyman was on the throne, until 1566, they had little enthusiasm to resume fighting. Relations deteriorated under his son and successor, Selim II (r. 1566‒74), and religious sentiments played an undeniable role in this development. Selim II’s reign saw a growing emphasis on the Sunni character of the Ottoman polity. Also changing were foreign policy considerations related to a strategic reluctance to fight on more than one front simultaneously. In 1563 the Porte secured some stability in the Persian Gulf by entering into an “unofficial truce” with the Portuguese which would last until 1622. More importantly, following the Christian defeat of the Ottomans at the naval Battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571, the European front was momentarily quiet. A little over a month after Lepanto, Pope Pius V, flush with the hard-won Christian victory, wrote a letter to Shah Tahmasb urging him to use this opportune moment to invade Ottoman territory and recapture Mesopotamia. Together with letters from other European rulers, this message was taken to Iran by a Portuguese-appointed mission that set sail in early 1572. The mission took two years to reach its destination and Miguel Abreu de Lima, its head, was only received in audience by the shah in 1575, suggesting the difficulty of keeping up an efficient correspondence about current and evolving affairs at the time. We have no first-hand information about the mission’s reception, yet Tahmasb, still feeling bound by the Treaty of Amasya, clearly rejected the proposal. Upset by the poor treatment of Muslims in Portuguese-occupied Hormuz and displeased by the low-value gifts Abreu de Lima had brought, he snubbed the diplomat, who was prevented from leaving Qazvin until the shah’s death in 1576.Footnote 42 Shortly before his death, Tahmasb indeed sent a last embassy to Istanbul in order to congratulate the new Sultan Murad III on his accession. The lavishness of the mission, which consisted of 250 persons and 50 camels carrying rich gifts, suggests that, until the end of his days, Tahmasb was determined to maintain good relations with the Porte.Footnote 43
Tahmasb’s death was a turning point in a process that, in a way, had started earlier, in 1573, when the Ottomans had made peace with the Venetians—marking the end of the Sacred League of Christian nations. In 1574, the Italian envoy to Istanbul, Costantino Garzoni, called the Ottomans secure within their borders, since their enemies were either divided or too weak to attack.Footnote 44 In 1576, following a war that had gone on for twenty-five years, they arranged for a ceasefire with Spain as well. Reaffirmed in 1578, and consolidated in 1581, this truce marked, in Braudel’s memorable words, the “swing of the pendulum which carried war outside Mediterranean confines,” making Spain move towards Portugal and the Atlantic, and “Turkey towards Persia and the depths of Asia ... and the Indian Ocean.”Footnote 45 The peace this arrangement would bring to the Mediterranean for the next two decades had important consequences for the regional balance of power. For one thing, it enabled the Turks to launch a new offensive against Iran.Footnote 46
The Ottomans indeed attacked again in 1578, having first secured another front by having their long-standing peace accord with Poland confirmed.Footnote 47 In the same year, they also made their first efforts to convince the Uzbeks to join them in a common front against the Safavids.Footnote 48 A great deal of discussion about the wisdom of resuming war against Iran preceded the eastward expedition among the political and military leadership in Istanbul. The lure of the riches of Shirvan and Georgia was one motive for their decision to take up arms again. What ultimately swayed the sultan, though, was the obvious weakness of the Safavids following the death of Tahmasb, the short and bloody reign of his ephemeral successor, Esmaʿil II (1576‒78), and the accession to the throne of the purblind, feeble Mohammad Khodabanda in 1578.Footnote 49 If Süleyman’s policy had been one of “containment,” his successor’s offensive had all the hallmarks of a campaign designed to conquer and control.
At the end of the war, in 1590, Iran had seen its most populous city, Tabriz, occupied and ravaged by Ottoman troops, and the Safavids had lost large tracts of their most productive lands in the northwest, including much of the Caucasus, to the Turks. It would take a decade and a half following the enthronement of a new, forceful ruler, Shah Abbas I, before the Iranians could mount a counteroffensive and hope to regain these territories.
The Reign of Shah Abbas I, 1587‒1629
Shah Abbas I came to power in a welter of Qezelbash seditiousness, the same type of tribal turmoil that had almost brought down Shah Tahmasb in the first decade of his reign. In order to avoid having to fight an unwinnable war on two fronts and intent on putting his domestic house in order first, the shah in 1590 concluded a disadvantageous accord with the Ottomans. With the Peace of Nowruz, he ceded to Iran’s archenemies a large swath of the country’s western provinces comprising Azerbaijan, Georgia, Shirvan and parts of Lurestan. Abbas spent the next decade reorganizing his realm, strengthening royal power by way of enhancing revenue and by creating an army loyal to the person of the ruler rather than beholden to tribal chieftains. He also set out to recapture Khorasan from the Uzbeks, who had taken advantage of the shah’s engagement with the Ottomans to open a second front against the Safavids in 1588 and to gain full control over the region.
In 1593, Abbas seemed ready to take on the Uzbeks. He sent a few envoys to India to sound out Sultan Akbar (r. 1556‒1605) on the latter’s willingness to assist him in this endeavor, but met with little success. The Uzbek ruler ‘Abd Allah, in turn, approached the Ottomans for military assistance. Yet the latter were naturally reluctant to endanger the advantageous peace accord they had concluded with the Iranians. In 1594 an Uzbek envoy named Ushah Bahador arrived in Istanbul to inform Sultan Murad III about his recent conquest of Khvarazm and, alluding to his plans to launch an expedition against the Safavids, to announce his willingness to keep fighting the “Qezelbash”—the Iranians. Sultan Murad’s response was non-committal: instead of promising concrete action, he announced that, although he had made peace with Iran, he intended to continue fighting for the “Muslim” faith.Footnote 50 ‘Abd Allah, in Audrey Burton’s words, must have been disappointed at the response, since he had planned a major expedition into Khorasan, and Iran’s entanglement in a second front would have facilitated this initiative. He thus sent another envoy to Istanbul to make his case but when the latter, Tardi ‘Ali, arrived in the Ottoman capital in 1595, Sultan Murad had just died, and all the emissary could do was congratulate his successor, Mehmed III (r. 1595‒1603).
The result of this initiative—the knowledge that the Ottoman front posed no immediate risk—gave Shah Abbas, no doubt informed about developments by his spies, a tremendous advantage in his own war plans. His attitude vis-à-vis his enemies in this period betrays caution alternating with self-confidence bordering on recklessness. In 1595, he dismissed an Ottoman envoy who had come to Isfahan without gifts, indicating that he wanted to see Shirvan returned. Yet he also refused to move when several towns in that region asked him to intervene on their behalf, promising them that he would spring into action once he had driven the Bokharans out of Khorasan.Footnote 51 He accomplished that by recapturing Mashhad and Herat in 1598. Following this success, the shah conducted two more campaigns to Khorasan between 1599 and 1601, establishing lasting boundaries between Iranian-held Khorasan and Transoxiana.
In preparation for a new round of conflict with the Ottomans, Abbas reached out to potential new allies. One of those was Russia. Between 1591 and 1595 he sent at least three missions to Muscovy (Moscow) and received an equivalent number of envoys in return with requests for a military alliance against the Ottomans. His relations with Russia were part of a delicate balancing act, though. Abbas did not yet intend to break his peace with the Ottomans, but the Russians might be indispensable in a future conflict with Istanbul. At the same time, the expanding Muscovite state posed a growing threat to the Iranian-held southern Caucasus.Footnote 52
Abbas in this period turned to the Christian nations of western Europe as well, just as the Europeans, alerted to the Safavid ruler’s military acumen and friendly disposition to Christianity, showed a growing interest in Iran. Following the failed Abreu mission under Tahmasb, Spain and the Papacy sent only one delegation to Iran during Shah Mohammad Khodabanda’s reign, 1578‒87. Shah Abbas’ reign, by contrast, witnessed a multipronged series of attempts to forge an alliance between Iran and various European courts. The main power targeted by Abbas was Spain. King Philip II was among the most fervent proponents of a crusade against “unbelief”—represented by Protestants in his own domains as much as by the Muslim foes. Yet Spain, in the throes of economic decline, confronted with a rising England and entangled in a protracted struggle against Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, was unable to throw its full weight behind an anti-Ottoman alliance. Its interest in maintaining a working relationship with the Ottomans is seen in the mission to Istanbul by Stefano Ferrari, who in 1587 came to seek a renewal of the armistice of 1581.Footnote 53
The most consequential of the multiple missions Abbas sent to various European courts was the one that set out for Prague, Rome and Madrid via Russia in 1599, led by Hoseyn Beg in addition to the English diplomat-adventurer Anthony Sherley. Military cooperation was likely part of the mission’s mandate.Footnote 54 Abbas offered to march against the Ottomans with 60,000 cavalry and infantry as soon as he was assured that he would not face the Ottomans alone. As an additional token of good faith, he promised that he would welcome Christians in his realm with all kinds of favors and privileges for their persons and business. He suggested to Philip III that once the Ottoman Empire was vanquished, any parts formerly belonging to Iran would fall to the Safavids, while the remainder would go to Spain. The rulers of Prague, Rome and Madrid all showed themselves amenable to these suggestions, with the Habsburg emperor even insisting that he would henceforth reject any attempt at rapprochement by the Ottomans. They all responded with counter-missions, so that the next few years saw a frenzy of diplomatic activity, marking the height of Safavid interaction with Christian Europe.Footnote 55
One of the missions sent to Iran in response to Shah Abbas’ initiative was that led by the Augustinians Jerónimo da Cruz, António de Gouvea, its chronicler, and Christóbal del Espíritu Santo, who set out from Goa in early 1602. After landing in Hormuz, these men traveled to Khorasan where they met the shah in the early autumn of the same year, after which they accompanied the royal suite back to Isfahan. Their main task was to convince Shah Abbas of the willingness of the European powers to coordinate a two-front anti-Ottoman war with Iran.Footnote 56 De Gouvea relates how in their initial meeting the shah expressed his favorable opinion of the Christian nations and his loathing of the Turks.Footnote 57 Yet following their arrival in the capital, Abbas became noticeably cooler toward de Gouvea and his men, either because the news had meanwhile broken that the Portuguese were about to appear before Hormuz with the intent of capturing Bahrain or because the Shiʿi clerics of Isfahan had risen in protest against an Augustinian request to build a church in Isfahan. Abbas did grant the missionaries permission to erect a church and a house in his capital, but was evasive in his responses to their other requests.Footnote 58
This change in demeanor reflected the shah’s decision to resume war with Ottomans in an attempt to regain lost lands rather than wait for the Europeans to help him do so. It is unlikely that this decision was taken at de Gouvea’s recommendation, as the latter claims was the case. Abbas rather seems to have taken advantage of the double bind in which the Ottomans found themselves, engaged with the Habsburgs in Hungary and fighting against their own Jelali insurgents, to attack Azerbaijan.Footnote 59 In October 1603 he managed to take the citadel of Tabriz. From there he moved into Armenia to appear before Yerevan, a fortified place deemed impregnable. After a nine-month siege, he took the fortress in June 1604. By then the Ottomans had launched a counteroffensive. In November 1605 the two armies finally met at Sufiyan, near Tabriz, after months of scorched earth tactics and attempts by the Safavids to wear their enemies down by attrition. The Safavid victory at Sufiyan, which owed more to luck and circumstance than to larger numbers or superior tactics, not only prevented the Ottomans from conquering new territory but enabled the Iranians to recapture the remainder of the territories previously lost, including Ganja, which they took in 1606.Footnote 60 The Habsburg emperor, meanwhile, benefited from the distraction of Shah Abbas’ offensive against the Ottomans to extract favorable conditions from the latter which went into the Treaty of Zsitva-Torok.
This treaty, concluded between the Ottomans and the Austrians on 11 November 1606, allowed the Ottomans to go to war against Iran again. They solicited assistance from the Qipchaqs, a vassal people inhabiting the south Russian steppes, inviting their leader, Gazi II Giray, to joint action against the Safavids in the Caucasus (and the Celali insurgents in eastern Anatolia).Footnote 61 Istanbul would likely have preferred to draw closer to the Mughals, too, but continued to face problems in the relationship with the other major Sunni power following the accession of Emperor Jahangir in 1605. Tellingly, soon after his accession, the new Indian emperor abandoned the name Selim, which he thought resembled too closely that of the sultan of Rum, and took the name Jahangir—world conqueror. The Ottomans, hopeful that a new Mughal ruler might mean better relations, in 1608 sent a congratulatory embassy yet imbued it with little weight, as a result of which the envoy was spurned by having his credentials rejected. Nor was the next Ottoman embassy to India successful. Expressly charged to dissuade the Mughal ruler from siding with the Safavids, it too was humiliated and sent home with nothing to show for it.Footnote 62
The main reason for the frosty relations between Agra and Istanbul at this point was Jahangir’s amicable relationship with Shah Abbas, which, according to English ambassador Thomas Roe, was based on the fear and respect the Mughal monarch, ruler over an “effeminate people,” had for the “more warlike nation”—Iran.Footnote 63 Safavid‒Mughal relations were indeed cordial to the point of being affectionate, at least until the Iranian conquest of Qandahar in 1622. Shah Abbas and Jahangir exchanged embassies, calling each other brother, baradar. Shah Abbas kept his peer informed about developments in the Ottoman Empire, and the Mughal rulers reciprocated by lending monetary assistance to Iran in its fight with the Turks.Footnote 64
The Safavid aggression vis-à-vis Qandahar did little to alter that comity. Following the accession of Jahangir and the subsequent rebellion of his son, Khosrow, the Safavid governor of Herat, Hoseyn Khan, laid siege to Qandahar in 1606. The stout defense by its governor, Shah Beyg Khan, and the arrival of reinforcements the next year compelled the Safavids to retreat, however. Abbas next dispatched an envoy to Jahangir to confirm the amicable relationship between the two rulers. He was well received at the Mughal court. Although the diplomatic language continued to speak in terms of friendship, the issue of Qandahar seems to have created ongoing tension between the two states.
The Treaty of Zsitva-Torok, meanwhile, was clearly disappointing to Abbas, forcing him to renew his efforts to find allies against the Turks. He thus turned to Russia again. Yet the Russians, mired in their so-called Time of Troubles, smutnoe vremya, a period of great political and economic turmoil that lasted from 1584 to 1611, were unable to offer military assistance. Abbas thus had no choice but to approach the western Europeans nations once again. At this point, he had clearly given up any illusions about the willingness of the Christian rulers to assist him in his struggle against the Ottomans. In 1608, he kept up appearances as he promised the members of the first Carmelite mission to arrive in Iran that he was ready to offer them the three famous churches of Yerevan and would even hand over Jerusalem to the pope as soon as he had taken the city from the Turks—while he was also discussing peace with the Ottomans.Footnote 65 Yet the Carmelites, writing in the summer of the same year, report how, having won several victories against the Turks, Abbas did not “care a [jot] for all the Christian Princes and publicly mocks at them because they do not make war on the Turks, and [if they do so] at their winning nothing.”Footnote 66 A year later Abbas warned the Iberian missionaries present in Isfahan that if their king, Philip III, would not wage war on the Ottomans, he would send all of them back to their country. At the same time he was planning his own expedition against the Turks, while brooding on ways to regain Hormuz from the Portuguese. Zeynal Beyg, the envoy Abbas had sent to the court of the Habsburg ruler Rudolf II, probably told the shah nothing new when he cautioned him that the European powers were just out to have the Ottomans and Safavids destroy each other.Footnote 67
In 1610 an Ottoman ambassador, Kheyr al-Din, carrying letters from grand vizier Murad Paşa, arrived in Iran with a proposal to make peace along the lines agreed on four years earlier. Indeed, the envoy carried a message that spoke of a desire for unification lest Europe profit from the disunity of the two countries.Footnote 68 What followed shows that war-making is not necessarily antithetical to conducting negotiations. Briefly, in Eskandar Monshi’s words, the shah sent Kheyr al-Din back accompanied by his own envoys, with the message that if the Ottomans wished to live in peace and friendship, he would reciprocate. Yet the sincerity of the Ottomans seemed in doubt when news broke that they were preparing an eastern expedition, with the excuse of responding to a call for military assistance from the governor of Erzurum. There followed a series of armed confrontations that eventually brought the Ottomans before the gates of Tabriz once again. Yet negotiations continued, with the shah repeating that he was willing to conclude a just peace, along the lines of the Treaty of Amasya. Eventually, the sultan agreed, deeming it in the best interest of his people to come to an agreement as well.Footnote 69 On 11 March 1611 two Ottoman ambassadors arrived in Isfahan to talk peace. Father Melchior OSA, talking about this mission, noted that the shah, aware that the Europeans would like to see a continuation of the Safavid‒Ottoman conflict so that both would consume each other, was not going to wage war on the Turks at this point.Footnote 70 On 20 November 1612, the two parties signed the Treaty of Nasuh Paşa, aka the Treaty of Istanbul. This agreement obligated Shah Abbas to send a substantial amount of silk in tribute to Istanbul every year, but it also allowed Iran to hold on to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Shirvan, and it gave Iranian pilgrims the freedom to travel to Mecca via Syria.Footnote 71
Free from Ottoman harassment, Shah Abbas now focused on the Persian Gulf trade route, seeking to open it up to Safavid-controlled commerce, which presupposed ousting the Portuguese from Hormuz. In 1614 the Iranians attacked and took Gombroon, the port city that would subsequently be renamed Bandar Abbas. Further action was forestalled by the resumption, a year later, of war against the Ottomans, which was caused by the death of grand vizier Nasuh Paşa, the main protagonist in Istanbul of peace with Iran.Footnote 72 This caused Abbas to interrupt his campaign to make life difficult for the Portuguese. It also prompted him to intensify contacts with the Mughals. In October 1616 Mohammad Reza Beg arrived in Ajmeer as Safavid envoy to the Mughals. Carrying rich presents, including twenty-seven Persian and Arabian horses and seven camels loaded with velvets, he came to solicit funds for Abbas’ war against the Ottomans.Footnote 73 The response came in the person of Khan ‘Alam, a Mughal envoy, who arrived in Isfahan in 1617.Footnote 74 By that time, keen to diversify his options, Abbas had welcomed the first representatives of the English East India Company, who arrived at the Iranian coast in 1616, and, following the ouster of the Portuguese from Hormuz in 1622, the agents of the Dutch East India Company.Footnote 75
In 1617 a peaceful reprieve in Uzbek‒Safavid relations was shattered with a series of Uzbek incursions into Khorasan. Presumably neither Emam Qoli, the Uzbek ruler, nor his brother were involved in these, and Shah Abbas did not see this as a casus belli—or, perhaps, was not in a position to open another front. Yet the raids followed an exchange of letters between Emam Qoli and the Porte in the two years prior, involving the suggestion of joint action against the Safavids. For Emam Qoli this was a matter of avenging his father’s defeat in 1598 at Pol-e Salar. This exchange did not result in a joint campaign however, mainly, it seems, because Sultan Ahmad died unexpectedly in late November 1617. His successor, his older brother, the psychologically disturbed Mustafa I, did not follow up. He engaged in little more than bellicose posturing during the three months that he was in power, before being deposed, to make room for Osman II.Footnote 76
On 28 September 1618, Shah Abbas concluded the Peace of Sarab with the Ottomans, ending the latest installment in Safavid‒Ottoman hostilities in the Caucasus.Footnote 77 This treaty prompted the shah, who was now thoroughly convinced that European overtures toward him were just posturing, to abandon even the pretense that he was interested in Christian support in his struggle against his archenemies. The first European envoy to be fully confronted with this new stance was Don García de Silva y Figueroa, the Spanish envoy who arrived at the Safavid court in 1619, his mission a much delayed response to the various embassies Shah Abbas had dispatched to Italy and the Iberian Peninsula more than a decade earlier. Don García’s mission, which had been four years in the making, is perhaps the best example of how, at the time, slow communications caused diplomacy to run perpetually behind the facts. Don Garcia was welcomed with great ceremony in Isfahan, which probably reflected Spain’s lingering reputation in Iran as a major Catholic nation and a world power. But he was rebuffed in his wish to have an audience at a most critical moment, when Abbas was conducting talks with an Ottoman representative about having the provinces recently acquired by him recognized as Iranian territory by Istanbul. As the Spanish envoy’s account states, it was precisely one of his mission’s objectives to prevent such as treaty coming into being. Don García recognized that Shah Abbas distrusted the Europeans for having made peace with the Ottomans, having fought them for years in Hungary, at the time the shah was fighting them. Ever since the peace, the Ottomans had been able to direct their forces towards retake Armenia, while the Europeans, the Austrians and the Poles would have had a great chance to recover at least the part of Hungary that had been taken from them.Footnote 78
When Shah Abbas received Don García, he questioned him the way he had questioned earlier envoys, about the reasons why the Europeans never made good on their promises to take up arms against the Ottomans. To exhort the Christians powers to resume their confrontation with the Turks, Don García adds, had been the aim of so many Safavid embassies, just as the Europeans had always importuned the Iranian to go to war with the Turks. De Silva y Figueroa may have been right to say that, in the end, the fruitless posturing, the various envoys carrying messages full of promises, all of it was really meant to achieve a mutual goal: to see the forces of the Turks partitioned and divided.Footnote 79
Shortly after Don García’s departure, Shah Abbas displayed a keen awareness of the pitfalls of a war on two fronts—and its advantage if one’s enemy were confronted with it. He did so during a disputation organized by him which brought together representatives from the Carmelite fathers present in Isfahan. The shah asked the assembled the rhetorical question of whether the Iranians would have been able to retake Tabriz and Jolfa, Yerevan and subsequently Shirvan in the period 1603‒6 were it not for the way the emperor had kept the Ottomans engaged in war, “at the request and insistence of the pope.” The response was equally rhetorical: Would the shah have been able to consolidate his position in western Iran if the Turks had not desisted from attacking Iran until 1610? Abbas initially had nothing to say to this. Yet later during the conversation he shot back, stating that if the Christian nations had kept their promises and attacked the Turks at the time when he, Abbas, had been at war with them, the latter would have been totally destroyed by now. He singled out the pope for being especially inactive, urging him to take the lead and spend his treasure taking up arms against the Ottomans, after which everyone would follow him.Footnote 80
In 1622, momentarily free from Ottoman pressure, Shah Abbas set out to address matters in the south and east of his realm. He finally took on the Portuguese, ousting them from Hormuz with English naval assistance. Qandahar soon followed. Abbas simultaneously used his friendly relations with the Mughals to lull his Indian “brother” to sleep, causing Jahangir to neglect the defense of the strategic city. One reason for the Mughal weakness was that Khorram, Jahangir’s rebellious son, refused to send troops to the beleaguered fortress. Apprised of the debilitating intrigue raging at the Mughal court, Shah Abbas moved against Qandahar with a surprise attack and took the poorly defended city after a siege of five to six weeks. In a letter to Jahangir, the shah made light of the usurpation, presenting it casually as the almost involuntary, desultory outcome of a hunting and touring trip. Jahangir clearly was very upset, as comes out in his angry reply.Footnote 81 Yet he was unable to react in any forceful manner, and the rebellion of Khorram, the later Shah Jahan, that followed for some time scuttled all hopes for an effective Mughal response.
This loss prompted Jahangir, fully aware of his weakness, to seek a rapprochement with the Ottomans as well as the Uzbeks. Especially the latter, fearful of the growing power of the Iranians, eagerly acceded to this overture. What followed was a diplomatic game conducted in the name of Sunni solidarity and designed to obliterate Shiʿism by way of defeating the Safavids. As for the Ottomans, they had good reasons to warm up to the Mughals and the Uzbeks as well, for Shah Abbas, on a roll after the conquest of Qandahar, at this point took advantage of an Ottoman regime weakened by a mentally unstable and ephemeral ruler, Mustafa I (r. 1617‒18, 1622‒23). In 1623 he made peace with the Uzbeks, allowing them to hold on to two areas which they had seized, Badghis and Bala Morghab, and the following year he retook Baghdad and the central parts of Mesopotamia as well.Footnote 82
The fall of Qandahar ended the superficial Indo-Iranian friendship and compelled Jahangir to look for stronger ties with the Uzbeks and the Ottomans. He first sought to restore relations with the former, whose ruler, Emam Qoli Khan, feeling threatened by Iran as well, eagerly acceded to his overtures. The common Sunni faith provided a bond or at least served as a rhetorical device propagating unity in the exchange of embassies that followed. Emam Qoli Khan in turn sent envoys to Istanbul to gauge Turkish interest in joining the prospective alliance. The Ottomans, still chafing under the recent loss of Baghdad, responded positively. Murad IV closed the circle by sending envoys to Hindustan in order to “renew the old friendship” between Istanbul and Agra, asking Sultan Jahangir to launch an attack on Iran with the assurance that, this way, the kingdom of Iran would soon be crushed under a double assault. Yet by the time the letter arrived, Jahangir’s own empire was being torn asunder by internal revolt, most importantly the sedition of Prince Khorram. Jahangir’s death in 1627 definitively scuttled the implementation of the envisaged anti-Safavid double front.Footnote 83
Shah Abbas died in January 1629 and was succeeded by his young and inexperienced grandson, Mirza Safi, who mounted the throne as Shah Safi (r. 1629‒42). In July of the same year the Ottoman army, clearly taking advantage of the various domestic rebellions that erupted in Iran in this transitional phase, set out from Üsküdar for an easterly march. The Ottomans reached Mosul in the winter and, assisted by collaborating Sunni-Kurdish tribes, first sought to lay siege to Baghdad. Yet, forced to postpone their assault by heavy rains and swollen rivers, they moved into Iran in early 1630, entering via Shahrizor and Nahavand. They pressed on to Hamadan, which they torched and destroyed. They next turned north, heading for Qazvin and Ardabil but, faced with the heat of summer and short on water, came no farther than the town of Dergazin, which they also destroyed, before turning around in the direction of Baghdad.Footnote 84 The expedition they mounted five years later would culminate in their definitive capture of Mesopotamia.Footnote 85
Unrest in India, caused by a persistently rebellious Prince Khorram, followed by Jahangir’s death in 1627, prevented the incipient coalition of anti-Iranian forces to come to fruition. Jahangir’s successor, the young and energetic Shah Jahan (r. 1628‒58), had the reestablishment of Mughal suzerainty over Central Asia, the recovery of Qandahar and the undermining of an Uzbek‒Safavid alliance as his three primary goals. For those to be accomplished he had to maintain friendly relations with the Uzbeks while striking at Qandahar, all the while keeping Isfahan neutral in a conflict with the Uzbeks. Following the exchange of various missions accompanied by the offering of many gifts and the assurances of Sunni solidarity, a common front of sorts was established in about 1635. At that point the Ottomans, having gained considerable military ground against Iran, captured Yerevan. (They would lose the latter city a year later.) In 1636 the Mughal ruler sought contact with Istanbul, notifying Sultan Murad IV of his resolve to recover Qandahar and proposing a three-pronged attack on Iran by India, Central Asia and Turkey.Footnote 86
Both cities, Qandahar and Baghdad, thus were lost to the Safavids again. Like his grandfather, Shah Safi was mindful of the need to keep war limited to one front. He wisely chose to acquiesce in the loss of Baghdad and to try and retrieve Qandahar instead, making the specter of a two-war front involving his most formidable foe a thing of the past. Nor did the other powers capitalize on Iran’s manifest weakness at that point. The reason, Sarkar submits, is that Shah Jahan was “opposed to the liquidation of Persia as it would upset the balance of power in Asia.” He neither sent his condolences to Istanbul following the death of Sultan Murad IV in 1640 nor a congratulatory message on the accession of his successor, Ibrahim. The Istanbul‒Delhi axis was thus “still-born,” even though its objective had been partially realized with the Ottoman seizure of Baghdad in 1638 and the simultaneous occupation of Qandahar by the Mughals.Footnote 87 A year later, Shah Safi definitely forestalled the chances of an all-out two-front war by concluding the Treaty of (Pol-e) Zohab with the Ottomans.
The Aftermath of the Treaty of Zohab
The Treaty of Zohab removed the Ottoman threat and thus the specter of a serious two-front war from the list of immediate Safavid concerns. This allowed Shah Abbas II, who had succeeded Safi upon the latter’s death in 1642, to turn to his eastern front, where in 1648 his army seized Qandahar from the Mughals.Footnote 88 The Iranians seem to have received some moral support from the Ottomans in this endeavor. Sultan Ibrahim, upset about the Mughal invasion of Balkh a few years earlier, is said to have endorsed Shah Abbas II’s attempt to capture the city.Footnote 89 Indeed, while the Safavid army, on its way to Qandahar, was encamped at Bestam, Shah Abbas II received an Ottoman envoy who brought a letter congratulating the Iranians and wishing them good luck with the campaign.Footnote 90 Yet when in 1656 a Mughal envoy arrived in Istanbul seeking an alliance with the aim of jointly occupying Iran, the grand mufti of Istanbul counseled the sultan against the idea with the argument that the Ottomans did not need outside assistance if they wished to take on Iran, adding that it was actually in their interest to have the Safavids remain as a barrier between them and the Mughal state.Footnote 91 Soon thereafter the Mughals, admitting inferior military power, gave up their attempts to recover Qandahar and resigned themselves to Safavid control over the frontier city. The Iranians, meanwhile, sought to insulate themselves even further from external war by making tributary arrangements with the Uzbeks and the Khvarazmians, whereby both received stipends in exchange for promises to desist from cross-border raids.Footnote 92
Even after the threat of direct war had subsided, concerns about the Ottomans and their intentions continued to preoccupy the Safavid governing elite. Shah Abbas II’s concern with this issue is brought out in the description the French merchant-traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier gives of a party at the court in 1665 to which the ruler invited a number of French and Dutch residents of Isfahan. The shah queried Tavernier about the designs of the Ottoman sultan, to which the Frenchman responded by pointing out that the Turks were no longer the military threat they once were. Abbas II displayed a keen knowledge of European affairs in the discussion that ensued, with his remark that the Ottomans and the Habsburgs had lately made peace. In this he referred to the Peace of Vasvár, which followed the Turkish defeat at the Battle of Saint Gotthard, aka the Battle of Mogersdorf, fought in Burgenland in August 1664, which prevented the Ottomans from invading Austria.Footnote 93
The Iranian accommodation with their most serious foes untied the hands of both the Safavids and the Ottomans, allowing the former to turn inward and the latter to turn their attention westward again–even though they continued to pay lip service to the idea of an anti-Safavid alliance in their diplomatic correspondence with the Uzbek khanates and the Mughals.Footnote 94 In due course, the Ottomans indeed became engaged in a major new conflict with the European powers and more particularly Venice. Known as the War of Candia, after the island of Crete, the center of the confrontation, this conflict lasted from 1645 until 1669, when the island fell to the Turks. This was followed in 1672 by a conflict with Poland during which the Ottomans gained Podolia and parts of Ukraine. Faced with this renewed aggression, the Europeans kept putting pressure on the Safavids to reopen their western front. In the first years of the Candia war, for instance, the Venetians sent various requests for military assistance to Isfahan. Shah Abbas II’s response invariably included an affirmation of friendship but no commitment to military support.Footnote 95 Yet the Iranians and the Venetians kept in contact about the issue. In 1669 Shah Soleyman noted in a letter to Domenico Conterini, the Doge of the Serenissima, that he had been informed about the fall of Crete to the Ottomans and that he awaited further information and requests from the Venetians.Footnote 96
After 1667, the year in which the Poles and the Russians came to a mutual agreement by concluding the Peace of Andrusovo, these two powers took the lead in approaching Iran, sending numerous missions to Isfahan. One of these, the Russian delegation that arrived in the Safavid capital in the summer of 1675, reportedly had come to inquire about the dispatch of 20,000 troops which Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich had requested in the fight against the Ottomans. This, Jean Chardin explains, referred to the defensive alliance that the Iranians had had with the Russians for twenty years, whereby they had agreed each to supply an equivalent number of troops in case of an Ottoman attack. This mission was meant to impress upon the Iranians that the tsar would see further delay as a refusal to comply with the terms of the agreement. The reaction to this overture was typical of Iran’s new stance. The council of state that deliberated the issue concluded that Russian interests should not prevail over those of Iran, which meant that keeping the peace with the Ottomans was more important than honoring the agreement with Muscovy. Most courtiers agreed that war should be resumed at the time when the Ottomans were at war with Poland, yet grand vizier Sheykh Ali Khan (in office 1669‒89) persuaded the shah not to reopen hostilities with the Ottomans.Footnote 97
The renewed Ottoman threat to central Europe culminated in the failed siege of Vienna in 1683. Shah Soleyman is said to have been very happy about the Christian victory at Kahlenberg, expressing the hope that the European armies might continue fighting the Turks. He himself was no longer interested in participating in this struggle though. Besides, he had fresh problems with the Uzbeks, who are reported to have killed thousands of Safavid soldiers in Khorasan in early 1684 and who would continue to stage raids into northeastern Iran in the years thereafter.Footnote 98 This did not prevent the Europeans from trying to reawaken Iran’s anti-Ottoman instincts. Sebastian Knab OP, newly appointed as archbishop of Nakhchevan, in 1685 came to Iran with letters from the pope, the Habsburg emperor, and the hero of the relief of Vienna, Polish King Jan Sobieski. The first two missives, written before the Ottoman defeat on 12 August 1683, exhorted the Safavids to relieve the beleaguered Europeans by mounting a campaign against the Turks. The third, composed after the event, informed the shah about the Christian victory and called on him to take advantage of the Ottoman weakness by joining forces with the Christian Holy League.Footnote 99 All this was in vain, Knab concluded. Soleyman, he explained, was not a warrior king but a stationary monarch given to lascivious luxury. Besides, he was forced to maintain an army near Ganja against the Lezghis of Daghestan, and to keep the quarreling Georgian rulers in check. The first minister—Sheykh Ali Khan—was a crypto-Sunni and, besides, his private domains were too close to the Ottoman border for him to risk a new conflict with the Turks. Moreover, the country’s army commander, sepahsalar, and the secretary of the shah both drew pensions from Istanbul and were, allegedly, Ottoman spies. Meanwhile, Raphaël du Mans, the influential French missionary who acted as the court’s interpreter, did all he could to dissuade the court from joining the Christian alliance, for fear of the negative consequences for the French crown.Footnote 100
The French cleric Nicolas Sanson reports a similar Iranian reaction to the European envoys assembled in Isfahan in the mid-1680s, the representatives of Poland, the Papacy, the Habsburgs and the Russians. During an audience in 1685, Sheykh Ali Khan, responding to their request to take up arms against the Ottomans again, posited that the benefit of such a move could not exceed that of living in peace with the Ottomans. When Knab opined that the Turks had often broken their word and that they would surely violate the accord again, the grand vizier retorted that the shah did not intend to follow the Turks in their bad faith. The Polish envoy submitted that the occasion was favorable to retake Basra, Baghdad and Erzurum from the Ottomans. To this, the Iranians responded that these cities were surely no more important to them than Kameniec (Kamieniec Podolski/Kamianets-Podilskyi, now in western Ukraine) was to the Poles and that when the latter had retaken that city from the Turks, the Safavids would contemplate recovering the urban centers of Mesopotamia. The Russian envoy in turn reminded the Iranians how weak the Turks were and how easy it would be to bring them down. The grand vizier, showing a keen understanding of the forces that kept the powers of West Asia in balance, responded that it would be fine to humiliate the Ottomans at the right time, but that they should not perish. They were, he pointedly added, powerful neighbors, and it was not in Iran’s interest that they would become too weak since their territory served as a barrier between the Safavid realm and that of the Christian princes. During the final audience for the assembled envoys, Sheykh Ali Khan offered his guests an apt metaphor by reminding them how risky it was to open a well-plugged beehive. He gave his guests to understand that Iran was in a state of rest while the Grand Seigneur, its most redoubtable enemy, was busy fighting the Christians, and that if the Iranians were to ally themselves with the Europeans, the Tatars, the Uzbeks and the Mughals would all attack Iran to defend the Ottomans, their coreligionists. If their troops were no more powerful than bees, compared to those of Iran, their great number would still inconvenience the Iranians, who could not hope to be relieved by the Christians because of the great distance that separated Europe from Iran.Footnote 101
Iran’s long-standing anxiety about being surrounded by enemies persisted over time. In 1700 Caspar Schillinger, traveling through Nakhchevan on his way to Iran, was asked by the local governor why the German emperor had not moved to combat the Turks but instead had made peace with them.Footnote 102 In time, enemies changed, but the anxiety remained. In 1707, the French envoy Pierre Victor Michel, on his way from Istanbul to Isfahan, was held up in Yerevan for almost a year. In one of his discussions with the local khan he reminded the magistrate of the fact that Iran had two formidable enemies, the Turks and the Muscovites. The first, he explained, no doubt superfluously, might attack from Erzurum, Diyarbakir or Baghdad. The tsar, he presciently added, might enter Iran through Georgia, a land populated by his coreligionists, or via Astrakhan on the Caspian, going all the way to Gilan, Iran’s most prosperous province, and teaming up with the Uzbeks, who lived to the east of the Caspian Sea.Footnote 103
Conclusion
This essay has offered a bird’s eye view of the wars the Safavids fought against their main enemies in the two centuries of their existence. It has done little justice to many of the elements that determined war and peace, from logistics and circumstances when, rather than military preparedness, betrayal and defection were decisive factors, to the imponderables of contingency. Working on a large canvas, it has merely identified some persistent and recurring patterns in Safavid military strategy. One of these is the limited scope of Iran’s territorial ambitions following Shah Esmaʿil’s initial thrust into Anatolia and Syria. After their defeat at Chalderan, the Safavids would continue to pursue control over Iraq and domination of the southern Caucasus, but in Anatolia they would never again (be able to) press beyond Erzurum—even as the Ottoman armies repeatedly covered 2,000 km to attack and invade Iranian territory. Similarly, in Khorasan after numerous confrontations with the Uzbeks, the Safavids established a boundary that left Transoxiana to the latter. In their various conflicts with the Mughals, their claim never extended beyond Qandahar.
The most important strategic consideration of successive Safavid rulers involved the conundrum that Iran was constantly faced with and that has continued to be at the heart of its national security challenge—how to prevent hostile forces surrounding it to band together in an anti-Iranian coalition. Their broad strategy to prevent this from happening was similar to that of the modern Israelis: the pursuance of a policy designed to bring in and align oneself with the “periphery” in order to neutralize the immediately surrounding threat. The Safavid decision to end their conflict with the Ottomans in the late 1630s was, in Ernest Tucker’s words, the “culmination of a process of normalization that had begun with the Treaty of Amasya.”Footnote 104 Like the earlier treaty, it owed much to the perennial fear on the part of a weakening state of having to engage with two or more adversaries at once. Conversely, the stability that marked Iran for more than half a century following the Peace of Zohab undoubtedly owed much to its leaders’ decision to conclude a lasting peace with the Ottomans. Yet, from Iran’s point of view, this peace continued to be part of a balancing act. As the German Johann Gottfried Worms put it in the 1730s, the Iranians were keen to have the Turks squeezed, but did not want to see them destroyed.Footnote 105 Still, Iran’s sense of vulnerability, its long-standing anxiety about being surrounded by enemies, persisted until the end of the Safavid period and, indeed, persists today.
