(Azeri is a Turkic language.) The order in Ardabil was founded in the thirteenth century by the Sufi master Zahed Gilani, and little is known about its beliefs and practices in its . By 1511, the Uzbeks in the north-east were driven across the Oxus River where they captured Samarkand establishing the Shaibanid dynasty, and from which they would continue to attack the Safavids. They embarked on a military campaign, winning victory after victory until, in July 1501, Ismail entered the Shirvanshah capital of Tabriz and declared himself shah, or emperor, of all Iran (Figure 4.20). Power was shifting to a new class of merchants, many of them ethnic Armenians, Georgians, and Indians. A soup kitchen distributed free food to the needy, and occasionally the square was cleared for polo games, public ceremonies, and festivals. Except for Shah Abbas II, the Safavid rulers after Abbas I were largely ineffectual. Ismail I, despite his heterodox Shi'a beliefs, which were not compatible with orthodox Shi'ism (Momen, 1985) patronized Shi'a religious leaders, granting them land and money in return for loyalty. But there was little public enthusiasm, and after his death most who had claimed to adopt Sunnism during his reign quietly reverted to Shiism. This system brought the brightest and most talented into government service while preventing the development of an entrenched and unchecked aristocracy. Tahmasps desire to fend off the Turkish threat led him to ally himself with a rising European power, the Habsburg Empire. The loss of his capital Tabriz to the enemyand to a Sunni Muslim at thatwas a huge blow to Shah Ismails standing among his own armies, made worse by the fact that he had declared himself invincible based on his fictionalized semidivine ancestry. His son Ali Mirza took his place, but within a few years his capital at Ardabil was conquered by his enemies. One of the most renowned Muslim philosophers, Mulla Sadra (1571-1640), lived during Shah Abbas I's reign and wrote the Asfar, a meditation on what he called "meta philosophy," which brought to a synthesis the philosophical mysticism of Sufism, the theology of Shi'ism, and the Peripatetic and Illuminationist philosophies of Avicenna and Suhrawardi Maqtul (1155-1191). Thirdly, military and political power in Persia was generally in the hands of ethnic Turks, while ethnic Persians, called Tajiks, were dominant in the areas of administration and culture. Then two Englishmen, Robert Sherley and his brother Anthony, helped Abbas I to reorganize the Shah's soldiers into a partially paid and well-trained standing army similar to the European model (which the Ottomans had already adopted). The most distinctive and prized artworks of the Safavid era were illuminated manuscripts of well-known texts decorated with miniature paintings. Safavid Iran was one of the Islamic "gunpowder empires", along with its neighbours, the Ottoman and Mughal empires. If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked. The epic called the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), a stellar example of manuscript illumination and calligraphy, was made during Shah Tahmasp's reign.
