Angiolello, a traveller who followed his countrymen Barbaro and Contarini to Persia; and from the two authorities combined may be gathered the further narration of the murder of Rustam and usurpation of the throne by a certain Ahmad, whose death, under torture, six months afterwards, made way for Alamut, the young son of Ḥasan. These discrepancies can be reconciled on reference to yet another record bound up with the narratives of the four Italians aforesaid, and of much the same period. In the Travels of a Merchant in Persia the story of Yaʽqub’s death is supplemented by the statement that “the great lords, hearing of their king’s decease, had quarrels among themselves, so that for five or six years all Persia was in a state of civil war, first one and then another of the nobles becoming sultans. At last a youth named Alamut, aged fourteen years, was raised to the throne, which he held till the succession of Sheikh Ismaʽil.” Who this young man was is not specified; but other writers call Alamut and his brother Murad the sons of Yaʽqub, as though the relationship were unquestionable.
Now little is known, save incidentally, of Julaver or Rustam; but Baisingar is the name of a nephew of Omar Sheikh, king of Ferghana and contemporary of Uzun Ḥasan. There was no doubt much anarchy and confusion in the interval between the death of Yaʽqub and the restoration, for two years, of the dynasty of the White Sheep. But the tender age of Alamut would, even in civilized countries, have necessitated a regency; and it may be assumed that he was the next legitimate and more generally recognized sovereign. Markham, in designating this prince the last of his house, states that he was dethroned by the renowned founder of the Safawi dynasty. This event brings us to one of the most interesting periods of Persian history, any account of which must be defective without a prefatory sketch of Ismaʽil Sufi.
The Sufi or Safawid (Safawi) Dynasty (1499–1736).—Sheikh Saifu ’d-Din Izhak[1]—lineally descended from Musa, the seventh imam—was a resident at Ardebil (Ardabil) south-west of the Caspian, some time during the 14th century. It is said that his reputation for sanctity attracted the attention of Timur, who sought him out in his Sheikh Saifu’d-Din. abode, and was so charmed by the visit that he released, at the holy man’s request, a number of captives of Turkish origin, or Georgians, taken in the wars with Bayezid. The act ensured to the Sheikh the constant devotion and gratitude of these men—a feeling which was loyally maintained by their descendants for the members of his family in successive generations.
His son Sadru’d-Din and grandson Kwaja ʽAli (who visited Mecca and died at Jerusalem) retained the high reputation of their pious predecessor. Junaid, a grandson of the last, married a sister of Uzun Ḥasan, and by her had a son named Sheikh Haidar, who married his cousin Martha, daughter of Uzun Ḥasan and Queen Despina. Three sons Sheikh Haidar. were the issue of this marriage, Sultan ʽAli, Ibrahim Mirza, and the youngest, Ismaʽil, the date of whose birth is put down as 1480 for reasons which will appear hereafter. So great was the influence of Sheikh Haidar, and so earnestly did he carry out the principles of conduct which had characterized his family for five generations, that his name has become, as it were, inseparable from the dynasty of his son Ismaʽil, and the term “Haidari” (leonine) is applied by many persons to indicate generally the Safawids of Persia. The outcome of his teaching was a division of Mahommedanism vitally momentous to the world of Islam. The Persian mind was peculiarly adapted to receive the form of religion prepared for it by the philosophers of Ardebil. The doctrines presented were dreamy and mystic; they rejected the infallibility of human wisdom, and threw suspicion on the order and arrangement of human orthodoxy. There was free scope given for the indulgence of that political imagination which revels in revolution and chafes at prescriptive bondage. As Malcolm remarks, “the very essence of Sufi-ism is poetry.”
Those authorities who maintain that Yaʽqub Shah left no son to succeed him consider valid the claim to the vacant throne of Sheikh Haidar Sufi. Purchas says that Yaʽqub himself, “jealous of the multitude of Aidar’s disciples and the greatness of his fame, caused him to be secretly murthered”; but Krusinski attributes the act to Rustam a few years later. Zeno, the anonymous merchant and Angiolello affirm that the devotee was defeated and killed in battle—the first making his conqueror to be Alamut, the second a general of Alamut’s, and the third an officer sent by Rustam named Suleiman Bey. Malcolm, following the Zubdatu ’t-tawarikh, relates that Sheikh Haidar was vanquished and slain by the governor of Shirvan. The subsequent statement that his son, Sultan ʽAli, was seized, in company with two younger brothers, by Yaʽqub, “one of the descendants of their grandfather Uzun Ḥasan, who, jealous of the numerous disciples that resorted to Ardebil, confined them to the hill fort of Istakhr in Fars,” seems to indicate a second interpretation of the passage just extracted from Purchas, and that there is confusion of persons and incident somewhere. One of the sons here alluded to was Ismaʽil, whom Malcolm makes to have been only seven years of age when he fled to Gilan in 1492. Zeno states that he was then thirteen, which is much more probable,[2] and the several data available for reference are in favour of this supposition.
The life of the young Sufi from this period to his assumption of royalty in 1499 was full of stirring adventure; and his career as Ismaʽil I. was a brilliant one. According to Zeno, who seems to have carefully recorded the events of the time, he left his temporary home on an island of Lake Van before he was eighteen, and, passing into Ismaʽil I. Karabakh,[3] between the Aras and Kur, turned in a south-easterly direction into Gilan. Here he was enabled, through the assistance of a friend of his father, to raise a small force with which to take possession of Baku on the Caspian, and thence to march upon Shemakha in Shirvan, a town abandoned to him without a struggle. Hearing, however, that Alamut was advancing to meet him, he was compelled to seek new levies from among the Jengian Christians and others. At the head of 16,000 men, he thoroughly routed his opponents, and, having cleared the way before him, marched straight upon Tabriz, which at once surrendered. He was soon after proclaimed shah of Persia (1499), under the designation which marked the family school of thought.
Alamut had taken refuge at Diarbekr; but his brother Murad, at the head of an army strengthened by Turkish auxiliaries, was still in the field with the object of contesting the paternal crown. Ismaʽil lost no time in moving against him, and won a new victory on the plains of Tabriz. Murad fled with a small remnant of his soldiers to Diarbekr, the rallying-point of the White Sheep Turkomans. Zeno states that in the following year Ismaʽil entered upon a new campaign in Kurdistan and Asia Minor, but that he returned to Tabriz without accomplishing his object, having been harassed by the tactics of Ala ud-Daula, a beylerbey, or governor in Armenia and parts of Syria. Another writer says that he marched against Murad Khan in Irak-i-Ajami and Shiraz. This last account is extremely probable, and would show that the young Turkoman had wished to make one grand effort to save Isfahan and Shiraz (with Kazvin and the neighbouring country), these being, after the capital Tabriz, the most important cities of Uzun Ḥasan’s Persia. His men, however, apparently dismayed at the growing prestige of the enemy, did not support him, and he was defeated and probably slain. There is similar evidence of the death of Alamut, who, it is alleged, was treacherously handed over to be killed by the shah’s own hands.
Ismaʽil returned again to Tabriz (1501) “and caused great rejoicings to be made on account of his victory.” In 1503 he had added to his conquests Bagdad, Mosul and Jezira on the Tigris. The next year he was called to the province of
- ↑ According to Langlès, the annotator of Chardin, his real designation was Abu ’l-Fath Izhak, the Sheikh Saifu ’l-Hakk wu ’d-Din or “pure one of truth and religion.”
- ↑ So thinks the editor and annotator of the Italian Travels in Persia, Charles Grey.
- ↑ Possibly Kara-dagh, as being the more direct road.
