The Safavids

In 1501 a teenage boy named Ismail was crowned shah in Tabriz. He was the hereditary head of the Safaviyya, a Sufi order based in Ardabil, and his followers, Turkmen tribesmen called the Qizilbash, 'red heads', after their red caps, revered him as something more than human. One of his first acts was to declare Twelver Shia Islam the religion of the state. Much of Iran was then Sunni; over the following two centuries it became a predominantly Shia country, as it remains. Ismail's aura of invincibility broke in 1514 at Chaldiran, where Ottoman guns defeated his cavalry. Rivalry with the Ottomans would shape Safavid borders for a century, and the capital moved back from the frontier, first to Qazvin and then, under Shah Abbas I, to Isfahan.

Half the world

Shah Abbas, who reigned from 1588 to 1629, made Isfahan his capital in 1598 and rebuilt it around a vast rectangular square, the Maydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan, 'image of the world'. On its four sides stand the Shah Mosque, its dome sheathed in blue tile; the smaller Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, its dome the colour of sand; the Ali Qapu palace, from whose balcony the court watched polo; and the gateway to the great bazaar. A rhyming saying, Esfahan nesf-e jahan, calls the city 'half the world'. Abbas moved thousands of Armenians from Julfa, on the Aras river, to New Julfa, a suburb across the Zayandeh river, and their merchants ran a silk trade reaching from Europe to India. Their cathedral, Vank, is still in use. Across the river ran bridges that were also promenades, the Si-o-se Pol, 'bridge of thirty-three arches', and later the Khaju.

Carpets, books and a fall

Safavid workshops produced some of the finest carpets ever woven. The Ardabil carpet, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, carries a couplet of Hafez and a woven date equivalent to 1539–40. For Shah Tahmasp, Ismail's son, painters spent years illustrating a copy of the Shahnameh with more than 250 paintings. The dynasty weakened in the later 17th century, and in 1722 an Afghan army took Isfahan after a long siege and famine. Safavid shahs reigned in name for a few more years, until 1736.