Medieval Persia 1040-1797

David Morgan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317415664
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Weltgeschichte

Medieval Persia 1040-1797 charts the remarkable history of Persia from its conquest by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD to the modern period at the end of the eighteenth century, when the impact of the west became pervasive. David Morgan argues that understanding this complex period of Persia's history is integral to understanding modern Iran and its significant role on the international scene.

The book begins with a geographical introduction and briefly summarises Persian history during the early Islamic centuries to place the country's Middle Ages in their historical context. It then charts the arrival of the Salj?q Turks in the eleventh century and discusses in turn the major political powers of the period: Mongols, Timurids, Türkmen and Safawids. The chronological narrative enables students to identify change and consistencies under each ruling dynasty, while Persia's rich social, cultural, religious and economic history is also woven throughout to present a complete picture of life in Medieval Persia. Despite the turbulent backdrop, which saw Persia ruled by a succession of groups who had seized power by military force, arts, painting, poetry, literature and architecture all flourished in the period.

This new edition contains a new epilogue which discusses the significant literature of the last 28 years to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the latest historiographical trends in Persian history. Concise and clear, this book is the perfect introduction for students of medieval Persia and the medieval Middle East.

1
The Land and Peoples of Persia

The boundaries of the Persian state, although they have contracted very markedly – especially in the north-west and the east as a result of nineteenth-century Russian expansion and the emergence of Afghanistan as a political entity distinct from its neighbours – are essentially those established by the Ṣafawid shāhs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD. Historically, and certainly during the period covered by this book, the Persian cultural and even political sphere was much wider than the present national boundaries. We shall be concerned with lands that are now part of Turkey, Iraq, the Soviet Union and Afghanistan as well as with Persia proper.

The official name of the country is Iran, and in 1934 Reza Shah Pahlavi decreed that even foreigners should use that name when referring to his country. The term “Persia” derives from an ancient Hellenized form, Persis, of the name of one province in the south-west of the country. That province, Parsa, was the cradle of two of the greatest Persian dynasties, the Achaemenians (6th–4th centuries BC) and the Sasanians (3rd–7th centuries AD). After the Arab conquest in the seventh century AD the province became known, as it still is, as Fārs (for there is no “P” in the Arabic alphabet: the Persians had to invent a new letter when they adapted the Arabic script for the writing of their language). The major language of Persia is Fārsī, Persian: in linguistic terminology “Iranian” refers to a large family of languages of which Persian is only one, though by far the most widely spoken.

When the English talk about Persia, or the French about la Perse, then, they are – usually unconsciously, no doubt – using a Greek term for one Persian province, in much the same way as a form of the Latin provincial name Germania is used for the whole country of Deutschland. On this analogy there seems no strong reason why “Persia” should be replaced by “Iran”, any more than the Persians ought to feel obliged to give up calling the United Kingdom “Englestan”.

Persian itself is the official language of the country and the natural first language of perhaps two-thirds of the population. Structurally it is classified as Indo-European: it is quite different from Arabic, a Semitic language, even though it is written in the same script – with the addition of some extra letters – and has absorbed a large amount of Arabic vocabulary. In terms of language types, Persian is nearer to English than to Arabic, and English speakers generally find it easier to learn than the other major Middle Eastern languages. This is true at least in the early stages and after the initial barrier presented by the Arabic script has been surmounted. It is perhaps only after a few years’ experience that the student realizes that the language is a good deal more difficult than it seemed at first.

Persian is not exclusive to Persia. A form of it, called Tājīk, is the official language of the Soviet Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, and the traveller in the neighbouring Turkish-speaking republic of Uzbekistan will find it useful, especially in the ancient city of Bukhārā. It is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan, where it is known as Darī, though the official first language is Pashto, also a member of the Iranian family. It was for some centuries the language of the court and the administration in northern India.

Persian is a mellifluous language, heard at its best – if not its most readily comprehensible – in the recitation of poetry of which, at any rate until recent years, many Persians could without notice reproduce large quantities – a facility which has suffered as literacy has advanced. Edward Gibbon, who did not know the language but was evidently well informed, characterized it as “a smooth and elegant idiom, recommended by Mahomet to the use of paradise though it is branded with the epithets of savage and unmusical by the ignorance and presumption of Agathias” (a sixth-century Byzantine scholar and poet).¹ After the Arab conquest Sasanian Persian (Pahlavī) was replaced by Arabic as a written language, though it continued in oral use and eventually emerged as what is called New Persian (see Chapter 2), taking its place as the second literary language of Islam. It has since then shown a remarkable stability: the Persian of the tenth century AD presents no greater problem to a modern Persian than Shakespeare does to an Englishman of today.

The emergence of New Persian did not at all mean that Arabic disappeared from Persia. It retained, and retains, its prestige as the medium of writing on matters Islamic, for it was regarded (being the language of the Qurʾān) as the language of God: hence it was only fitting that those who wished to write on theology or (religious) law should use the same tongue. Even historical writing long continued, in the main, to be in Arabic: it was not until the thirteenth century that the bulk of our historical sources came to be written in Persian, though the language began to be used in state documents in the Ghaznawid period. The final dominance of Persian as a medium for historical writing coincided with the Mongol occupation of Persia, and the coincidence is unlikely to have been accidental. For the Mongols, pagans from the east, Arabic had no special status: indeed, it would have been incomprehensible to them whereas Persian, in time, became something of a lingua franca throughout the Mongols’ Asiatic empire.

Mongolian itself did not succeed in establishing a permanent position among the languages of Persia, although at least in documents it did for a time survive the collapse of Mongol rule. Presumably it was spoken by too small a proportion of the population to make much of a mark. The Mongol invasions certainly involved the immigration into Persia of large numbers of people, but most of them probably spoke one form or another of Turkish. When these immigrants were added to the Turkish speakers whose ancestors had already settled in Persia during the Saljūq period (11th–12th centuries AD), they became the largest linguistic minority in the country. Turkish is still the first language of many Persian citizens, notably the people of the north-west, in Āẕarbāyjān (which adjoins Turkey), but also among the Turkomans of the north-east and a number of nomadic tribes, including some of those in the south of the country. These varieties of Turkish are not uniform and none of them is identical with the Turkish of Turkey, though the latter and Āẕarbāyjānī Turkish are mutually comprehensible.

Other languages are spoken in addition to Persian and Turkish: Arabic (especially in Khūzistān in the south-west – the province was formerly called ʿArabistān), Kurdish and Balūchī are among the most important. A linguistic map of Persia would be a complex document.

By European standards Persia is a very large country, even in the rather truncated form in which it emerged from the Russian territorial depredations of the nineteenth century. It covers some 636,000 square miles. This is roughly equivalent to the combined surface area of France, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. From north-west to south-east is 1,400 miles, from north to south 875 miles. The population is large compared with most Middle Eastern countries: the census of 1976 produced a figure of 33.7 million, and an estimate in 1986 put it at 45 million. This population is distributed very unevenly around the country, roughly 70 per cent of which is desert and waste, supporting few people or none at all. The biggest areas of desert are in the centre and south, the Dasht-i Kavīr and the Dasht-i Lūṭ. So far as the rest of the country is concerned, 10.9 per cent of Persia’s total surface area is forest or pasture and only 10 per cent is cultivated cropland. The residue is marginal land, perhaps cultivable in sufficiently favourable circumstances.

Much of the country is high plateau, four to five thousand feet above sea level, with much higher peaks rising from it. The exceptions to this are Khūzistān and the Persian Gulf littoral, which are at an altitude only slightly above sea level, and the narrow coastal strip to the south of the Caspian Sea, which is itself 90 feet below mean sea level. The plateau is ringed to the north, west and south by high mountain ranges: to the north, the Alborz; to the west and south, the Zagros. The plateau is lacking in large rivers: the country’s biggest, the Kārūn, flows from the Zagros through Khūzistān and into the Gulf. Rivers on the plateau, such as the Zāyanda-rūd, the river of Iṣfahān, for the most part find no outlet, but ultimately lose themselves in sands or swamps.

The climate varies greatly from place to place. The mean monthly summer temperatures (in July) vary between 99°F at Ābādān and 77°F at Tabrīz. Absolute maximum temperatures at the two places in July are 127° and 104° respectively. This, however, is by no means as unpleasant as it may sound. Because of the height of the plateau the heat is very dry and thus, usually, perfectly tolerable even to natives of colder and wetter climes (this, of course, is not the case in the much more humid areas off the plateau). There can be extreme variations of temperature between day and night, and between seasons.

The people of Persia may be divided not only on a linguistic or ethnic basis – Persians, Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Lurs, Balūch and so on – but also in terms of their way of life. There are townspeople, agriculturalists, and nomads. Islam is essentially an urban faith, and despite the dependence of the cities on the agricultural base there was always a division, and indeed a lack of sympathy and understanding, between townspeople and peasants.

Some of the largest cities in Persia have become important only relatively recently. These include Ābādān, in the oil region of Khūzistān, and the capital, Tehran, now a vast metropolis far larger than any other city. It is sometimes said that Tehran was of no importance before the Qājār dynasty made the city its capital at the end of the eighteenth century. This is not strictly true: according to the Castilian ambassador Clavijo, who passed through on his way to Tamerlane’s Samarqand at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was already flourishing at that time. Nevertheless, until the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century the great city of northern Persia was not Tehran but Rayy, a few miles to the south of the modern capital.

Other cities have remained important for many centuries. Iṣfahān, in central Persia, was one of the Saljūq capitals, and later became the capital again under Shāh ʿAbbās I in the late sixteenth century. Tabrīz, in the north-western province of Āẕarbāyjān, was a major city, often the capital, throughout much of the period covered by this book since it was situated in the part of Persia most favoured by many of the dynasties that ruled the country. Shīrāz became the capital under the Buyids and the Zands and was the provincial capital of Fārs during the whole of the Islamic period. Some lesser cities, such as Yazd on the edge of the central desert, derived their permanent significance from the fact that they were oasis towns.

The great eastern province of Khurāsān was historically much larger than the present province of that name and included territory that is now in Soviet Central Asia and Afghanistan. It was divided into four quarters, centred on the cities of Marv, Balkh, Harāt and Nīshāpūr. Only the last of these is now in Persia, and it has been superseded in importance by Mashhad because of the presence there of the tomb of the eighth Shīʿī imām: a crucial consideration when Shīʿism became the official faith in the sixteenth century.

But most of the population were not town-dwellers: they were peasants, living in villages. The village rather than the isolated farmstead is the characteristic feature of the Persian rural landscape, though the villages vary very greatly in size. For the most part the peasants were not proprietors but tenants, usually holding their land (divided into jufts, the area that could be cultivated by a yoke of oxen) under a crop-sharing agreement with the landlord. Landlords were often absentees, living in the towns for most or all of the year. Although there was clearly a dominant landowning class, no really hereditary landed aristocracy was formed in Islamic times: the prevailing political instability and the nature of Islamic inheritance law militated against any such development.

The low rainfall over much of the country meant that most cultivation of crops had to be by irrigation. There were parts of the country in which dry farming could be practised, notably in Āẕarbāyjān and parts of Khurāsān, but elsewhere the usual method was by means of a device called the qanāt. This was an underground water channel which brought the water, often many miles, to where it was needed. The building of qanāts was a highly skilled operation and they required constant, and equally skilled, maintenance. Consequently the agriculture of Persia was peculiarly subject to the political vicissitudes that affected the country. If peasants were killed or driven away – as happened most notably during the Mongol period – neglect of the proper maintenance of the qanāts, even if they were not actually destroyed, could quite quickly have disastrous results. The land would not necessarily remain cultivable if simply left to itself.

The third sector of the population was the nomadic and semi-nomadic, which still exists, though it is now by no means as large a proportion as it once was. Nomadism flourishes mainly in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, in the west and south of the country. Some tribal confederations, such as the Bakhtiyārī of the Zagros, are of Iranian origin; others, such as the Qashqāʾī of Fārs, are Turks. For most of the period considered here, the parts of the country preferred by the nomads were Khurāsān and Āẕarbāyjān, because of their extensive grasslands on which flocks and herds could be pastured. One of the most notable semi-nomadic groups at the present day, the Shāhsevan, lives in the north of Āẕarbāyjān.

Most of Persia’s rulers from the Saljūqs in the eleventh century to the Qājārs in the nineteenth were of nomadic, tribal origin, or (as in the case of the Ṣafawids) came to power with such tribal support. This is to be explained largely in terms of the close compatibility between the nomadic life-style and efficiency in warfare: the mobility and skills in riding and archery which were required for a life of herding and hunting were easily adapted to fighting; and since almost the whole adult male population of these tribes would possess such skills, they were able to mobilize for warfare a formidably large proportion of their people, already fully armed and trained. It should not, however, be supposed that the relationship between the nomads and the settled people was purely predatory. This varied a good deal. It was probably the case that Mongol government benefited few but the rulers themselves but in other periods, such as Saljūq times, there was – or could be – a more mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between the different sectors of the population.

In the light of this great variety – ethnic, linguistic, and so on – it may be thought surprising that an entity which we can call “Persia” continues to exist. Yet the country of today is still recognizably, in some sense, the same country that Cyrus the Great ruled in the sixth century BC. There is an element of continuity that all the changes in rulers, peoples, religions and political boundaries have not contrived to eradicate. In what does this consist? It is probably hazardous to attempt too specific a definition. Concepts of “nationalism” are best avoided as a largely irrelevant and comparatively recent Western importation. The average Persian of two centuries ago, say, would not have defined himself as a Persian with a pedigree stretching back to Cyrus and Darius, of whom he would never have heard. He would probably have thought of himself, first and foremost, as a Muslim. Yet he was not the same as a Syrian or an Egyptian Muslim, and the difference was not simply one between the adherents of Sunnism and those of Shīʿism.

No doubt the survival, despite all its transformations, of the Persian language can do something to help explain the phenomenon – though this may be more symptom than cause. There does, in fact, appear to be a sense of Persian consciousness, of identity – īrāniyyat – which runs right through the country’s history: or so Western historians seem to suppose. This is a cultural, not a “national” identity, but it is none the less real for all that. Arabs, Turks, Mongols and Europeans might come and go, but Persia, somehow, is still Persia.

Note

1 E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols, London 1905–6, vol. 4, 362.

2
Persia in the Early Islamic Centuries

The Sasanian period

The period of Sasanian rule forms an important part of the background to the history of Islamic Persia. The Sasanian house, the last of the major pre-Islamic dynasties, ruled Persia from the early third century AD until the 630s. It is hardly surprising that this long stretch of centuries – a little over four hundred years – should have left its mark on Persian history and society. The most enduring of Persia’s subsequent dynasties, the Ṣafawids, survived for not much more than two centuries, and this was unusually long by the standards of the Islamic era.

The Persian tradition preserved a large body of legendary material, but the national memory in so far as it relates to actual historical events hardly reaches back much further than the Sasanian period. This may be seen from the national epic as it is preserved in the poetry of the Shāh-nāma of Firdawsī. There is some surviving memory of the Sasanians’ predecessors, the Parthians, but the Persians had contrived to forget the very existence of the founders of Persian greatness, the Achaemenians, who had for two hundred years been the major power in the ancient world. Cyrus and Darius are not traceable in the Persian memory. There is only a vestigial recollection of Alexander the Great’s adversary, Darius III, who appears in the Shāh-nāma as Dārā, and Alexander himself, who under the form Iskandar became the focus of an elaborate legendary epic which spread even to the Far East. The Persian perception of their history before the Sasanians is, then, of a world of myth and legend. Reconstruction of what had in reality happened in the previous thousand years had to await the attentions of modern Western scholars, using such sources as the Old Testament, ancient Greek historians (especially Herodotus), and, above all, the findings of archaeology.

The foundations of the Sasanian Empire were laid by Ardashir I, a local ruler in Fārs who overthrew the last of the Parthians. His reign is dated from AD 224. The most striking Sasanian remains may still be seen in Fārs. At Fīrūzābād is a Sasanian palace, of some architectural importance since its dome is borne by the earliest known squinches (supports for a round dome on a square base). More extensive ruins are at Bīshāpūr, and there too is a not...