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Ismail I (; 17 July 1487 – 23 May 1524) was the founder and first shah of Safavid Iran, ruling from 1501 until his death in 1524. His reign is one of the most vital in the history of Iran, and the Safavid period is often considered the beginning of modern Iranian history.. Under Ismail, Iran was unified under native rule for the first time since the Islamic conquest of the country eight-and-a-half centuries earlier.
Ismail inherited leadership of the Safavid order Sufi order from his brother as a child. His predecessors had transformed the religious order into a military movement supported by the Qizilbash (mainly Turkoman Shiite groups). The Safavids took control of Azerbaijan, and in 1501 Ismail was crowned as king ( padshah). In the following years, Ismail conquered the rest of Iran and other neighboring territories. His expansion into Eastern Anatolia brought him into conflict with the Ottoman Empire. In 1514, the Ottomans decisively defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, which brought an end to Ismail's conquests. Ismail fell into depression and heavy drinking after this defeat and died in 1524. He was succeeded by his eldest son Tahmasp I.
One of Ismail's first actions was the proclamation of the Twelver denomination of Shia Islam as the official religion of the Safavid state,. marking one of the most important turning points in the history of Islam,. which had major consequences for the ensuing history of Iran.. He caused sectarian tensions in the Middle East when he destroyed the tombs of the Abbasid caliphs, the Sunni Imam Abu Hanifa an-Nu'man, and the Sufism ascetic Abdul Qadir Gilani in 1508.
The dynasty founded by Ismail I would rule for over two centuries, being one of the greatest Iranian empires and at its height being amongst the most powerful empires of its time, ruling all of present-day Iran, the Azerbaijan, Armenia, most of Georgia, the North Caucasus, and Iraq, as well as parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan..... It also reasserted Iranian identity in large parts of Greater Iran. The legacy of the Safavid Empire was also the revival of Iran as an economic stronghold between East and Western world, the establishment of a bureaucracy state, its Safavid art, and Mecenate.
Ismail I was also a prolific poet who under the pen name Khaṭāʾī () contributed greatly to the literary development of the Azerbaijani language. He also contributed to Persian literature, though few of his Persian writings survive.
His mother Halima Begum was the daughter of Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the Turkoman Aq Qoyunlu dynasty, by his Pontic Greeks wife Theodora Megale Komnene, better known as Despina Khatun. Despina Khatun was the daughter of Emperor John IV of Trebizond. She had married Uzun Hassan in a deal to protect the Empire of Trebizond from the Ottoman Turks. Ismail was a great-great-grandson of Emperor Alexios IV of Trebizond and King Alexander I of Georgia.
Roger Savory suggests that Ismail's family was of Iranian origin, likely from Iranian Kurdistan, and later moved to Azerbaijan where they assimilated into the Azerbaijanis population. Ismail was bilingual in Persian and a Southern Turkic dialect, a precursor of modern Azeri Turkic. His ancestry was mixed, from various ethnic groups such as Georgians, Greeks, Kurds and Turkomans;; ; ; .. the majority of scholars agree that his empire was an Iranian one..
In 700/1301, Safi al-Din assumed the leadership of the Zahediyeh, a significant Sufi order in Gilan, from his spiritual master and father-in-law Zahed Gilani. The order was later known as the Safavid. One genealogy claimed that Sheikh Safi (the founder of the order and Ismael's ancestor) was a lineal descendant of Ali. Ismail also proclaimed himself the Mahdi and a reincarnation of Ali.
When Ismail reached the age of twelve, he came out of hiding and returned to what is now Iranian Azerbaijan along with his followers. Ismail's rise to power was made possible by the Turkoman tribes of Anatolia and Azerbaijan, who formed the most important part of the Qizilbash movement.; ; ; .
The successful conquest alarmed the ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu, Alvand, who subsequently proceeded north from Tabriz and crossed the Aras River in order to challenge the Safavid forces. Both sides met at the Battle of Sharur, which Ismail's army won despite being outnumbered by four to one. Shortly before his attack on Shirvan, Ismail had made the Georgian kings Constantine II and Alexander I of the kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti, respectively, attack the Ottoman Turks possessions near Tabriz, on the promise that he would cancel the tribute that Constantine was forced to pay to the Aq Qoyunlu once Tabriz was captured. After eventually conquering Tabriz and Nakhchivan, Ismail broke the promise he had made to Constantine II and made the kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti both his .
In July 1501, following his occupation of Tabriz, Ismail took the title Pādshāh-i Irān (King of Iran). He appointed his former guardian and mentor Husayn Beg Shamlu as the vakil (vicegerent) of the empire and the commander-in-chief ( amir al-umara) of the Qizilbash army. His army was composed of tribal units, the majority of which were Turkmen from Anatolia and Syria with the remainder Kurds and Chagatai people. He also appointed a former Iranian peoples vizier of the Aq Qoyunlu named Amir Zakariya as his vizier. After proclaiming himself Shah, Ismail also proclaimed Twelver Shi'ism to be the official and compulsory religion of Iran. He enforced this new standard by the sword, dissolving Sunni Brotherhoods and executing anyone who refused to comply to the newly implemented Shi'ism.
Qasim Beg Hayati Tabrizi (), a poet and bureaucrat of early Safavid era, states that he had heard from several witnesses that Shah Ismail's enthronement took place in Tabriz immediately after the Battle of Sharur on 1 Jumada al-Thani 907 / 22 December 1501, making Hayati's book entitled Tarikh (1554) the only known narrative source to give the exact date of Shah Ismail's ascent to the throne.
After defeating an Aq Qoyunlu army in 1502, Ismail took the title of "Shah of Iran".. In the same year he gained possession of Erzincan and Erzurum, while a year later, in 1503, he conquered Persian Iraq and Fars province in the Battle of Hamadan (1503). One year later he conquered Mazandaran, Gorgan, and Yazd.
In 1507, he conquered Diyarbakır. During the same year, Ismail appointed the Iranian Amir Najm al-Din Mas'ud Gilani as the new vakil. This was because Ismail had begun favoring the Iranians more than the Qizilbash, who, although they had played a crucial role in Ismail's campaigns, possessed too much power and were no longer considered trustworthy. One year later, Ismail forced the rulers of Khuzestan, Lorestan, and Kurdistan to become his vassals. The same year, Ismail and Husayn Beg Shamlu seized Baghdad, putting an end to the Aq Qoyunlu. Ismail then began destroying Sunni sites in Baghdad, including the tombs of Abbasid Caliphs and tombs of Imam Abu Hanifah and Abdul Qadir Gilani.
By 1510, he had conquered the whole of Iran (including Shirvan), southern Dagestan (with its important city of Derbent), Mesopotamia, Armenia, Greater Khorasan, and Eastern Anatolia, and had made the Georgian kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti his vassals. In the same year, Husayn Beg Shamlu lost his office as commander-in-chief in favor of a man of humble origins, Mohammad Beg Ustajlu. Ismail also appointed Najm-e Sani as the new vakil of the empire due to the death of Mas'ud Gilani.
Ismail I moved against the Uzbeks. In the Battle of Merv (1510), some 17,000 Qizilbash warriors trapped an Uzbek force. The Uzbek ruler, Muhammad Shaybani, was caught and killed trying to escape the battle, and the shah had his skull made into a jewelled drinking goblet.. In 1512, Najm-e Sani was killed during a clash with the Uzbeks, which made Ismail appoint Abd al-Baqi Yazdi as the new vakil of the empire.
Selim I eventually defeated Ismail at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. Ismail's army was more mobile, and his soldiers were better prepared, but the Ottomans prevailed in large part due to their efficient modern army and possession of artillery, black powder and muskets. Ismail was wounded and almost captured in battle. Selim entered the Iranian capital of Tabriz in triumph on September 5 but did not linger. A mutiny among his troops, fearing a counterattack and entrapment by fresh Safavid forces called in from the interior, forced the triumphant Ottomans to withdraw prematurely. This allowed Ismail to recover. Among the booty from Tabriz was Ismail's favorite wife, for whose release the Sultan demanded huge concessions, which were refused. Despite his defeat at the Battle of Chaldiran, Ismail quickly recovered most of his kingdom, from east of Lake Van to the Persian Gulf. However, the Ottomans managed to annex for the first time Eastern Anatolia and parts of Mesopotamia, as well as briefly northwestern Iran.
The Venetian ambassador Caterino Zeno describes the events as follows:
He also adds:
The consequences of the defeat at Chaldiran were also psychological for Ismail; his relationships with the Qizilbash followers were fundamentally altered. The tribal rivalries between the Qizilbash which had ceased temporarily before the defeat at Chaldiran resurfaced intensely immediately after his death and led to ten years of civil war (930–40/1524–33) until Shah Tahmasp regained control of the affairs of the state. The Safavids later briefly lost Balkh and Kandahar to the Mughals, and nearly lost Herat to the Uzbeks.
During Ismail's reign, mainly in the late 1510s, the first steps for the Habsburg–Persian alliance were taken with Charles V and Ludwig II of Hungary being in contact with a view of combining against the common Ottoman Turkish enemy..
In the second part of the fifteenth century, Safavid propaganda adopted many beliefs held of ghulat groups. Ismail's father and grandfather were reportedly considered divine by their disciples, and Ismail taught his followers that he was a divine incarnation, as is demonstrated by his poetry. For example, in some of his poems he wrote "I am the absolute Truth" and "I am God’s eye (or God himself)". This made his followers intensely loyal to him. Through their supposed descent from Musa al-Kazim, Ismail and his successors claimed the role of deputy ( na'ib) of the Hidden Imam (the Mahdi) and also the infallibility or sinlessness ( isma) ascribed to the Mahdi; this brought them into conflict with the (high-ranking Shi'ite jurisprudents) who traditionally claimed the authority of deputyship. At least until his defeat at Chaldiran in 1514, Ismail identified himself as the reincarnation of Alids figures such as Ali, Husayn, and the Mahdi. Historian Cornell Fleischer argues that Ismail took part in a broader trend of Messianism and Millenarianism claims, which were also being expressed in the Ottoman Empire. He writes, "Shah Ismāʿīl was the most spectacular and successful— but by no means singular—instance of the convergence between mysticism, messianism, and politics at the beginning of the sixteenth century."
Besides his self-identification with Muslim figures, Ismail also presented himself as the personification of the divine light of investiture ( Khvarenah) that had radiated in the ancient Iranian shahs Dara II, Khosrow I (), Shapur I (), since the era of the Achaemenids and Sasanians. This was a typical Safavid combination of Islamic and pre-Islamic Iranian motifs. The Safavids also included and promoted Turkic and Mongol aspects from the Central Asian steppe, such as giving high-ranking positions to Turkic leaders, and utilizing Turkic tribal clans for their aspirations in war. They likewise included Turco-Mongolian titles such as khan and Baghatur to their growing collection of titles. The cultural aspects of the Safavids soon became even more numerous, as Ismail and his successors included and promoted Kurds, Arabs, Georgians, Circassians, and Armenians into their imperial program. Moreover, the conquests of Genghis Khan and Timur had merged Mongolian and Chagatai aspects into the Persian bureaucratic culture, terminology, seals, and symbols.
Another early commission was the contribution of additional miniatures in 1505 to an Aq Qoyunlu manuscript, the Khamsa of Nizami (Tabriz, 1481). Shah Isma'il entrusted the creation of eleven miniatures to the young painter Sultan Mohammed, who later became a key artist of the Safavid school. Some of the paintings created by Sultan Mohammed for this manuscript are considered as highly original, such as The Mir'aj of Prophet Muhammad (now in the Keir Collection in London), in which the Prophet can be seen rising over the Great Mosque in Mecca, the Ka'ba and his tomb, riding into a billowing mass of heavenly clouds with a multitude of angels. The sky is pieced with an oculus, an artistic device of probable European origin. A small inscription in gold letters on the portal of a small building on a terrace gives the date of creation as 1505.
One of the main criteria used to differentiate the Safavid miniatures from the Aq Qoyunlu ones is for a great part iconographic, as the protagonists in Shah Isma'il's paintings generally wear his signature turban, the Taj-i Haydari, which he introduced when he occupied Tabriz in 1501-1502.
Towards the end of his reign, circa 1520-21, Shāh Ismaʿīl also commissioned panegyric histories of his accomplishments, where he can be seen in various court and battle scenes. These works, such as the Shāhnāmah Shāh Ismaʿīl (Tabriz, 1541), were generally completed only after he died. These manuscripts offer some very interesting illustrations in lively style, which, stylistically, are witnesses to the persistence of the Turkoman element in the creations of Tabriz around 1541. Some, such as Shāhnāmah Shāh Ismaʿīl are more provincial in style but also show undisguised and rather gruesome scenes of conquest, such as the time when a defender of Firuzkuh was roasted on a spit at the hands of the Safavids.
Probably about 1522, Shah Isma'il started a sumptuous illuminated manuscript of the Shahnameh for his son Shah Tahmasp I. But Shah Ismail I died in 1524, shortly after the work had begun. Work continued into the 1530s, ultimately including 258 original miniatures. It is now dispersed, and known under the name of Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp.
Khata'i's divan (collection of poems) was compiled during the reign of Ismail's successor, Tahmasp I, so all of the poems in it may not actually belong to Ismail's pen. The oldest surviving copy of the divan (dated 1535) comprises 262 Qasida and Ghazal, and ten ruba'is. The second oldest copy has 254 qasidas and ghazals, three , one murabba' and one musaddas. T. Gandjei argues that the Syllabic verse poems attributed to Khata'i (as opposed to the usual aruz ones, based on syllable length) are really the works of Bektashi-Alevi poets in Anatolia. Kioumars Ghereghlou states that the author of the divan is "still unknown", citing the fact that Ismail's son Sam Mirza never referred to his father as the author of the divan in his Tuhfa-yi Sami, a collection of biographies of contemporary Persian poets (he does, however, state that his father wrote poetry in Persian and Turkish).
Ismail is considered an important figure in the literary history of Azerbaijani language. According to Roger Savory and Ahmet Karamustafa, "Ismail was a skillful poet who used prevalent themes and images in lyric and didactic-religious poetry with ease and some degree of originality". He was also deeply influenced by the Persian literary tradition of Iran, particularly by the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, which probably explains the fact that he named all of his sons after characters from the Shahnameh. Dickson and Welch suggest that Ismail's "Shahnamaye Shahi" was intended as a present to his young son Tahmasp. After defeating Muhammad Shaybani's Uzbeks, Ismail asked Hatefi, a famous poet from Ghor Province, to write a Shahnameh-like epic about his victories and his newly established dynasty. Although the epic was left unfinished, it was an example of in the heroic style of the Shahnameh written later on for the Safavid kings..
Most of the poems are concerned with love—particularly the Mysticism Sufi kind—though there are also poems propagating Shi'i doctrine and Safavi politics. His other serious works include the Nasihatnāme, a book of advice sometimes included in his divan, and the unfinished Dahname, a book which extols the virtues of love—both written in proto-Azeri Turkic..
Along with the poet Imadaddin Nasimi, Khata'i is considered to be among the first proponents of using a simpler Azerbaijani language in verse that would appeal to a broader audience. His work is most popular in Azerbaijan, as well as among the of Turkey. There is a large body of Alevi and Bektashi poetry that has been attributed to him. The major impact of his religious writings, in the long run, was the conversion of Persia from Sunni to Shia Islam.
Examples of his poems are:
An Italian traveller describes Ismail as follows:
This portrait engraving was then used as a reference by the Italians painter Cristofano dell'Altissimo between 1552 and 1568 for his famous portrait of Shah Ismail in the Florence. It is thought that this portrait was affected by idealized notions of Shah Ismail as a savior of Christians and Europeans against the Ottomans, complete with rumors of a conversion of Christianity. It may be for this reason that Shah Ismail's face is idealized in this portrait as "spiritual, nice and bright".
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