Abbas I of Persia/Iran

That move to central Iran was dictated by the military vulnerability of the then Safavid capital Qazwin, and the yet more vulnerable location of the original capital at Tabrı¯s. Mounting the throne at age 17, Abbas suffered early military defeat and was compelled to surrender large swaths of important territory to the Ottomans to the west-Christian Georgia and Azerbaijan, as well as Tabrı¯s-in order to concentrate on fighting the Uzbeks, who had captured several towns in northeastern Iran, including Herat (1588). This costly peace bought time to consolidate power over the fractious Iranian tribes by displacing them from their traditional place in the army. This proved to be Abbas’ singular accomplishment: creation of a professional standing army. This was a radical change in a society where infantry played a minor role and feudal cavalry was the dominant arm. Moreover, Safavid cavalry was recruited by tribe and retained local rather than ”national” or dynastic loyalties. The new system significantly reduced the number of horse soldiers available.

These were replaced by infantry armed with muskets, units Abbas modeled on the Janissaries. This was intended to stop Ottoman gunpowder troops, who had so often beaten Iran’s armies in the long century of war between these rival sunni and sh-ıa empires that began at Chaldiran (1514). Abbas also drew directly from Western expertise: he built Iran’s first artillery corps utilizing European renegades, notably Robert Shirley (whose brother, Anthony Shirley, Abbas made ambassador to the crowns of Europe). The shah also changed the ethnic mix of the army. Gone were the core Iranian tribes, replaced by Georgian, Armenian, and Circassian converts to Islam, descendants of Christian prisoners from earlier wars. These military slaves, or ”ghulams of the shah,” were prized and trusted because of their unique dependence on Abbas. This, too, imitated the close Janissary ties to the sultan.

As elsewhere, creation of a standing army soon led to a financial crisis. Where tribal cavalry was paid for by servitor warlords, the new troops were paid from central revenues. This meant, as it did with reforming monarchs in Europe, that Abbas had to modernize Iran’s tax system and bureaucracy and reduce the grip of the old religious elite, in his case the Qizilbash. Once the reformed army was ready Abbas used it in a spectacular expansionist drive which carried almost to Iran’s pre-Islamic borders, from the Indus at Kandahar to Baghdad in Iraq. In the first of a series of campaigns against the Ottomans, he retook Tabrı¯s in 1603.

Through sieges of Erivan, Shirvan, and Mosul, he captured most of Iraq. Each side employed scorched earth tactics along the frontier to deny resources to the enemy, but in 1606 Abbas destroyed an Ottoman army at Sis. To the east, he retook Kandahar in 1621, a city seized by the Mughals under Akbar during his boyhood. Southward, in alliance with the East India Company (EIC) he captured Hormuz from the Portuguese in 1622. Shrewdly, in the rest of his empire he granted trading privileges to the EIC’s main rival, the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC). In 1623 he took Baghdad when its Ottoman garrison defected. While he was sometimes ruthless and cruel in court politics, in matters religious or commercial he was open to foreign ideas and practices. By the standards of the age he was a moderate, modernizing, and tolerant ruler.