Ch 11 Lesson 4 Review What United the Lands in the Islamic World?

The three Islamic empires of the early on modern period – the Mughal, the Safavid, and the Ottoman – shared a common Turko-Mongolian heritage. In all three the ruling dynasty was Islamic, the economical system was agrarian, and the armed forces forces were paid in grants of land acquirement. Despite these similarities, however, significant differences remained. And, to fully appreciate the individual temporal systems, a cursory description of the political, economic, religious, and cultural weather condition in each state is necessary. Inside the confines of a single chapter, notwithstanding, it is non possible to review all of the literature and settle all of the controversies. Every bit a result, the brief overview that follows depends, for the most part, on the most recent general histories and surveys.

Safavid Empire (1501–1722)

Safavid Iran was shaped like a basin, a apartment bottom encircled by ii mountain ranges. The Elburz Mountains ran along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea and met the smaller ranges of Khurasan in the eastward. The Zagros Mountains stretched from Azerbaijan in the northwest to the Persian Gulf then east toward Baluchistan. The Eastern Highlands bordered the country on the southeast. A high barren plateau, with an average tiptop of iii,000 anxiety, formed the base of the bowl. Two deserts – the Kavir and the Lut – sprawled across this area. Only three rivers interrupted the dry plateau: The Karun River (the only navigable one) originated in the Zagros Mountains and flowed to the Shatt al-Arab and the Persian Gulf; the Safid River rose in the Elburz Mountains and emptied into the Caspian Sea; and the Zayanda River, the only one of the three that watered the plateau, began in the Zagros Mountains and flowed through Isfahan, dying in a salty swamp nearby.

Map 1. The Safavid Empire, c. 1660

No reliable estimates are available for the population of Safavid Iran. However, given the scarcity of abundant state, the full was considerably below that for either the Mughals or the Ottomans. Because of the big area taken upwards by mountains and deserts, just about one-eighth of the country was tillable.¹ As a issue, an estimate for 1650 of eight to 10 million seems reasonable.²

In 1501 Shah Ismail I (1501–1524), the founder of the dynasty, defeated the Turkish Aq Quyunlu forces that had, along with the Qara Quyunlu, ruled northwestern Islamic republic of iran since 1396.^threeLike his father and granddaddy, Ismail headed the Safaviyya Sufi order. As Twelver or Imami Shiites, this mystical order rejected the first three caliphs and honored the Twelve Imams as the direct descendants of Muhammad. An invented genealogy claimed that Sheikh Safi (the founder of the order and Ismail'south ancestor) was a lineal descendant of the Seventh Imam, Musa al-Kasim. Ismail besides proclaimed himself the Mahdi (Guided One) and a reincarnation of Ali (the get-go Imam).

The Safavid founder united in his person the two indigenous components of the state – the Turkish Qizilbash "men of the sword" and the Western farsi Tajik "men of the pen." Except for their loyalty to Ismail and their membership in the Safaviyya order, the Qizilbash warriors were indistinguishable from their Sunni brethren in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman empire. Their common heritage gave the Safavid-Ottoman rivalry a special intensity. By contrast, as a descendant of landowners from the province of Gilan, Ismail too had a Western farsi side. Under him, equally nether the earlier Turkish rulers, Iranian scribes filled judicial, religious, and authoritative positions. The hereditary notables, peasants, merchants, and artisans were Farsi also. During Ismail'southward reign tension and competition marked the relationship between these ii groups.

Shah Tahmasp I (1524–1576), eldest son of Ismail, ascended the throne at age ten. His get-go twelve years in power (1524–1536) witnessed a civil war betwixt the Shamlu and Ustajlu Qizilbash tribes, and he had no real independence as a ruler. To impose gild, Tahmasp introduced a program aimed at reestablishing purple authority, a plan extended and brought to determination past Abbas I. He created a new tribe, the Shahvand, and gave information technology a position equal to that of the other tribes. He increased the number of Qizilbash in his personal bodyguard and assembled a household troop of Christian slaves. He as well divided each Qizilbash tribe internally and shifted tribal leaders from post to post. Some chieftains were kept at court in administrative positions while others were given military machine commands or provincial governorships. These measures weakened the powers of the tribes and laid the background for the more thoroughgoing reforms of Abbas I.⁴

Like Ismail, Tahmasp was considered past his Qizilbash followers to be divinely favored. They gave him the messianic title Lord of the Historic period (Sahib-i Zaman). In 1557 he shifted his capital from Tabriz to Qazvin. The need to escape Ottoman threats in the Northwest and to more than easily defend his borders in the Northeast probably prompted the move. Because Qazvin had long been a stronghold of Sunni orthodoxy, Tahmasp made a major endeavor to spread Shiism in his new capital. He decorated the mosques and madrasas with Shiite slogans, repaired the shrines of Shiite saints, commissioned religious poetry and funeral elegies, and expanded the ceremonies of religious mourning.^five

On his accession at historic period sixteen, Shah Abbas (1587–1629) appointed his tutor, Murshid Quli Khan, viceroy.⁶To counter the threat of Qizilbash insurgency the young emperor executed a group of tribal chieftains, and, when he was strong enough, ordered the elimination of his tutor. Free at final, Abbas undertook a radical reorganization of the state. He profoundly increased the number of cavalrymen in his personal babysitter. These men, although they were Qizilbash tribesmen, differed from their kinsmen in their absolute loyalty to the shah: they left their tribal homelands, came to court, and became members of the royal household. Under Abbas they expanded to betwixt ten thousand and fifteen thousand men, and, past the end of his reign, the highest-ranking held provincial governorships and state offices, and their leader had get the near important official in the country.^viiThe emperor likewise created a corps of household slaves equanimous of Armenian, Georgian, and Circassian converts to Shiite Islam. Numbering ten k to xv thousand, these slave soldiers were even more dependent on Abbas than were the Qizilbash cavalry. Slaves rose to high ranks and by the cease of Abbas'due south reign they, along with the leaders of the household cavalry, held about of the important imperial posts.

To pay for his war machine reorganization Abbas instituted a serial of economic reforms. He redistributed agricultural country from the domain of the tribal chieftains to the domain of the imperial household, thereby giving him the coin to pay his newly expanded babysitter. At about the same time he began to make a greater apply of the local Armenian merchants, primarily to market silk from the province of Gilan, which in 1592 had been incorporated into the purple household. To further increase household revenues and to take advantage of the arrival of the European East India Companies (primarily the English and the Dutch), Abbas in 1619 established a monopoly over the sale and export of silk.⁸

The emperor's religious role, withal, differed significantly from that of his predecessors. Because of the xiv-year civil war (1576–1590) later the decease of Tahmasp and the sheer passage of time, Abbas did not appear to receive the aforementioned veneration from his Qizilbash followers every bit had Ismail and Tahmasp. Too his personal behavior were ambiguous – he flirted with the Nuqtavi heresy in his early years and showed an uncharacteristic involvement in the teachings of the Christian missionaries. Similar the Mughal emperor Akbar, all the same, who fabricated several pilgrimages to the shrine of the Sufi saint Muin al-Din Chishti betwixt 1562 and 1579 (one on foot), Abbas in 1601 burnished his reputation for piety by completing a xl-i-day pilgrimage on foot from Isfahan to the shrine of the Imam Riza in Mashhad. Similar his predecessors, he promoted the spread of the Shiite mourning rituals, commemorating the martyrdom of the Imam Husain.^ix

At the kickoff of his reign, Abbas made peace with the Ottomans on disadvantageous terms (ceding the province of Republic of azerbaijan and Tabriz, its capital) in guild to concentrate his forces against the Uzbeks in the Northeast. In 1590 he transferred his majuscule from Qazvin to Isfahan, and in 1598, his armed forces reorganization underway, Abbas reconquered Herat and Mashhad. Having achieved peace in the east, the emperor turned his attention to the Ottomans and in 1603–1604 recaptured Azerbaijan. The treaty of 1612 reestablished the sometime boundaries betwixt the two states and in 1622, with help from the English, he expelled the Portuguese from Hormuz.

Abbas died in Mazandaran in 1629 and was succeeded by his 18-year-old grandson, Shah Safi (1629–1642). The coronation ceremonies included rituals from the Safaviyya social club, suggesting that even at that late date Ismail's role every bit Sufi master had not been forgotten. Under Shah Safi, Abbas'south policy of strengthening the imperial household at the expense of the tribal chieftains continued. Generous to his supporters but suspicious of potential rivals, the new emperor executed many loftier-ranking officials during the early years of his reign. Imam Quli Khan, Abbas's rich and powerful governor of Fars, was put to death in 1632, and his province added to the purple domain. Raised in the harem, Safi had fiddling interest in ruling. In 1633 he turned over management of the empire to his thousand wazir, Mirza Muhammad Taqi, known as Saru Taqi. A man of honesty, integrity, and ability, he held the mail until 1645, when he was assassinated by jealous rivals.¹⁰

Shah Safi likewise followed Abbas's pb in economic reorganization. He added the lands of the defeated Qizilbash chieftains to the domain of the imperial household. He rescinded Abbas'south silk monopoly and, every bit a effect, merchandise with the European companies increased dramatically. He besides encouraged the spread of Shiism, witnessing the massive processions from the upper gateway of the imperial palace.¹¹

During Safi'southward reign armed forces conflict with Iran'south neighbors recommenced. In 1629 the Ottomans captured Hamadan, simply in 1630 the Safavids resisted their attempt to regain Baghdad. Sultan Murad IV captured Erivan and overran Tabriz in 1635. In 1639 the Ottomans recaptured Baghdad for the last time, and a treaty in the adjacent yr established peaceful boundaries betwixt the two states. By dissimilarity, the skirmishes in the Northeast with the Uzbeks continued throughout the seventeenth century. Except for a brief battle over Qandahar, the relationship with the Mughals remained peaceful. When Safi died in 1642, the state was at peace. He was cached in Qum.

Abbas 2 (1642–1666) succeeded his father to the throne at age ten.¹²At this point the Qizilbash chieftains had lost their preeminent position in the state, having to contend with the leaders of the imperial household troops and the ranking clerics. After Saru Taqi's murder, Abbas 2 began to play a more agile role in land affairs and devoted several days a week to administration. Internationally, the truce with the Ottomans continued, and no total-scale battles with the Uzbeks erupted.¹³

Although he had no pregnant function in the Safaviyya Sufi order, Abbas II, like the other emperors after Ismail, retained a reputation for sanctity. He continued to promote the spread of Shiite ceremonies and festivals only the popular interest in messianic, esoteric sects persisted. The 1639 treaty with the Ottomans put an cease to the skirmishes on the western borders, and the 1657 trade agreement spurred an upsurge in commercial activity. Economic bug, however, could non exist eliminated: Abbas declared a tax amnesty and underwrote several big diplomatic receptions, he fought the Mughals over Qandahar, and he carried out an extensive building plan in Isfahan. To deal with the revenue shortfall Muhammad Beg, the new wazir, raised taxes, devalued the currency, and reduced the size of the army. Although not uniformly successful, these reforms seemed to restore a measure of economic stability.¹⁴

On the death of his father, the twenty-year-old Safi Mirza (1666/68–1694) came to the throne. Crowned in 1666 as Safi Ii, the new emperor faced then many serious problems (bad harvests, an earthquake, and Cossack raids) that his ministers decided that his coronation had been sick-fated. The royal astrologers chose a new date, and in the second ceremony two years later he took the proper name Suleiman. His reign was relatively peaceful – no battles with the Ottomans, Uzbeks, or Mughals.¹⁵

The new enthronement, however, didn't completely change Suleiman'due south luck. Natural disasters – harsh winters, swarms of locusts, drought, and bad harvests – plagued his entire reign. The promotion and elaboration of Imami Shiism continued: important works on the theology and philosophy of the creed appeared while the court underwrote an expansion of Ashura ceremonies and the devotions at the shrines of local saints.^sixteen

Because Suleiman had not bundled for a successor, a series of harem intrigues put Sultan Husain (1694–1726) rather than his younger brother, Abbas Mirza, on the throne.¹⁷ Past this point, however, the empire was at peace, not threatened by any of its traditional enemies. The imperial administration, refined and developed over the years, was able to handle the routine problems of governance. Economic problems persisted: crop failures brought on inflation and occasional famine, and the trade deficits with India and the European companies led to attempts to control the outflow of specie. Sultan Husain's building projects – the Chahar Bagh complex and the Farahabad garden palace – put a considerable strain on the imperial treasury.

Repose, studious, and absorbed in religious matters, the Shah cruel nether the influence of several influential clerics, most notably the religious scholar Mir Muhammad Baqir Khatunabadi, the first Mulla Bashi. In 1695 the emperor promulgated an edict signed by the Sheikh al-Islam of Isfahan (Majlisi 2) and half dozen other prominent ulama banning all not-Islamic activities. In the cardinal square of the majuscule, six yard bottles of Georgian and Shirazi wine from the imperial cellars were smashed.¹⁸

Muhammad Beg's policy of neglecting the armed services, having been followed by Suleiman and then Sultan Husain, finally had its effect. Although the ground forces was able to meet the usual challenges in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Afghan attacks in the 2nd and third decades seemed to grab the Safavid generals by surprise. In 1711 the Ghilzai Afghans captured Qandahar and in 1721 they arrived outside Kirman. In 1722, after a long and terrible siege, the Afghans crushed the larger Safavid ground forces and sacked Isfahan. Shah Sultan Husain was beheaded in 1726, and the two figurehead shahs who prolonged the dynasty were replaced in 1736 by Nadir Shah, a Turkman of the Afshar tribe.

Mughal Empire (1526–1739)

In both area and population the Mughal empire was past far the largest of the three states.¹⁹In 1650 it boasted a population of most 150 million people and covered nearly the entire Indian subcontinent. From the offset of the commencement millennium ce, India had been an Eldorado, famed throughout the Eurasian world for its spices, textiles, diamonds, and paper. Every bit an agrestal empire its size and wealth were heavily dependent on its climate. Unlike the arid, sparsely populated Safavid and Ottoman empires, Mughal Republic of india was tropical. The two smashing river systems (the Indus and Ganges) and the almanac monsoon sustained a remarkably rich growing flavor, yielding two bumper crops a year (primarily wheat and rice). In the north the subcontinent was sheltered from the polar winds of Central Asia by the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains. From these ranges flowed the ii rivers that watered the n Indian plains. The Jamuna-Gangetic organization flowed south and east emptying into the Bay of Bengal while the Indus organization (comprising the five rivers of the Punjab) ran west and southward into the Arabian Sea. The southern peninsula of the subcontinent was cut off from the North past the Vindhya Mountains. Although at ten yard feet they were non as forbidding as the towering northern ranges, they constituted a significant natural bulwark, dividing the peoples and cultures of India into two very different halves.

In addition to the river systems, the other major correspondent to Republic of india's size and wealth was the monsoon, a flavor of torrential rains that inundated the subcontinent from two directions. The get-go blew in from the Arabian Sea in early June, watering the southwest coast and moving eastward across about of the land by the first week of July. The second, originating in the Bay of Bengal, spread over Assam and was deflected by the Himalayas into North Bharat, arriving in early July too.

Under the Mughals this rich, culturally complex, and heavily populated region was slowly molded into a operation land. Like other north Indian empire builders, the early on Mughals established their headquarters nearly the conjunction of the Ganges and the Jamuna. Having consolidated themselves in the due north, they extended their control to the eastern and western edges of the flood plainly and and so moved across the Vindhyas, gradually incorporating the lands of central and southern India into their evolving empire.

Map 2. The Mughal Empire, c. 1660

Muhammad Zahir al-Din Babur, a Chagatai Turk from Fergana in Central Asia, was the founder of the Mughal Empire. Although Babur could trace a connectedness to Chagatai Khan, the second son of Chinghiz Khan (ca. 1162–1227), through his mother, it is by no means authentic to call him or his successors Mongol. Mughal, the proper noun of the dynasty, is a variant of Mongol and was used in India to distinguish immigrants or the recently immigrated from local Muslims. Considering Babur'southward father, Umar Sheikh Mirza, was straight descended from Timur (1336–1405), the great Cardinal Asia empire builder, information technology is more accurate to call the dynasty Timurid, the name by which it was known to Indians of the period.

In 1526 Babur, at that time ruler of a city state centered on Kabul, defeated the Afghan rulers of North India and inaugurated Mughal rule in the subcontinent. He immediately captured Delhi (later Shahjahanabad), Agra, Gwalior, and Kanauj and in 1527 defeated the massed armies of the Rajput ruler, Rana Sangha. By 1529 he was master of the Indo-Gangetic Plains all the fashion to Patna just in 1530, at the height of his power, he died.

Humayun (1530–1556), Babur's son and successor, faced a hard job. He had to mold territories in Afghanistan, Punjab, and the Gangetic Plains into a performance state, and he had to exercise it against the opposition both of his own followers and of the recently defeated Afghans. It is no wonder that he failed and was forced to seek refuge with the Safavid ruler of Islamic republic of iran, Shah Tahmasp. From 1540 until Humayun's return to India in 1556 Afghans ruled Northward Bharat.

Jalal al-Din Akbar (1556–1605), like the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I, came to the throne as a callow, untested teenager (Akbar at xiii, Abbas at sixteen) and, like Abbas, had to rid himself of an overbearing tutor and successive challenges to his authority. In 1571 having asserted his authorization over his fractious followers and defeated his master north Indian rivals, Akbar moved his headquarters from the old north Indian upper-case letter of Agra to a new purple heart named Fathpur Sikri, some twenty-four miles to the west. From in that location he launched a far-reaching entrada of radical reform.

Akbar'south new regal order was the event of three kinds of reform – military-administrative, economic, and cultural. The commencement problem facing Akbar was how to organize, pay, and ensure the loyalty of his martial followers? The young ruler had witnessed firsthand his male parent Humayun'southward difficulty maintaining a group of reliable commanders, men who could exist counted on in both peace and in war. In 1575 he instituted a program of branding, requiring the horses of each cavalryman to carry two brands: his helm's and the emperor's. Presently after, Akbar began to brand the first appointments in what was to develop into the characteristic feature of Mughal rule – the mansabdari or officeholder system. This was a ranked military-administrative bureaucracy, each fellow member of which filled an administrative or military position and provided a certain number of armed and mounted followers. At about the same time, Akbar began to reorganize his administration. He established a daily routine for dealing with armed forces and economic matters,²⁰ fix a record role,²¹ divided the empire into provinces,²² and ordered a village past village census (probably never completed).²³

For the early on modern Islamic earth Akbar'southward new armed forces-administrative system was unusually open to ethnic and religious differences. Unlike the Ottoman and Safavid states, where conversion was required, the Mughals decided not to restrict membership in the mansabdari system to the Primal Asian Sunni warriors who had made up the majority of Babur's followers and who had accompanied Humayun on his reconquest of India in 1555. Rather, Akbar's organization included all of the local martial groups: Turanis (Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims from Central Asia), Iranis (Persian-speaking Shiites from Safavid Iran), Afghans (Sunni Muslims from eastern Republic of india), Sheikhzadas (Indian-born Muslims), Rajputs (Hindu warriors from north Republic of india), and Marathas (Hindu warriors from western Republic of india).

In addition to military-administrative restructuring, Akbar devoted a skillful deal of time to economic reorganization. Considering the Mughal empire, similar the Ottoman and Safavid states, was agrestal-based (with, to be sure, dynamic commercial, manufacturing, and financial sectors), this involved, for the nearly part, a reordering of the state revenue organization. Assessments were out-of-date and numerous disagreements had arisen between imperial recordkeepers and regular army officers. Thus, in early on 1575 Akbar ordered a detailed survey of central northward Republic of india – measuring the arable state (establishing standard measurements for length and area) and collecting data on prices and yields. With this information the regal revenue administrators in 1580 published the 10-Year Settlement (Ain-i Dahsala), establishing a acquirement rate in greenbacks for each piece of state in the central empire. Thereafter, the members of Akbar's mansabdari system, paid in state revenue grants (or jagirs), were chosen jagirdars.

At about the same time Akbar also began to fashion a multifaceted imperial ideology, 1 that would foster a deeper commitment to him and his dynasty and that would also exist hospitable to the religious beliefs of all his subjects. In 1575 he erected the Ibadat Khana (Firm of Religious Assembly) in Fathpur Sikri.²⁴ At first the discussions in this hall were traditional – the representatives were Muslims and the topics were Islamic beliefs and practices.²⁵ These sessions (from ca. 1575–1579), yet, proved ultimately disillusioning. As he had been exposed during the previous 20 years to the religious multifariousness of early modern India, Akbar could not defer to the unimaginative religious specialists of traditional Islam. Deeply dissatisfied with the insularity of these men and their wholesale condemnation of nontraditional and non-Islamic beliefs and practices, Akbar decided to promote a new policy. Chosen "sulh-i kull," this new approach was adult during the period 1579–1582 with the aid of Abu al-Fazl, Akbar's main historian and ideologue, and his male parent, Sheikh Mubarak.²⁶ Usually translated "universal peace" or "accented toleration," the phrase, it seems to me, is improve rendered "lasting reconciliation." Akbar's intent was not to establish perfect harmony amongst the competing religious and cultural groups of the Indian subcontinent but, rather, to reach a kind of modus vivendi.

"Sulh-i kull" was aimed at 2 quite unlike audiences: the i not-Muslim and the other Muslim. During the 1579–1582 period, Akbar became very interested in the non-Muslim religious traditions of the subcontinent – Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. Because India was an overwhelmingly Hindu country and because Akbar had already decided to depict the Rajputs into the mansabdari arrangement, he had begun every bit early as 1562 to ally the daughters and nieces of the Rajput chieftains. Subsequently 1579 Hindu mystics and Brahmin priests began to frequent the discussions in the Ibadat Khana, and he began to appoint high-ranking Rajputs to important state offices. Although Akbar had always allowed his Rajput wives to follow their own customs, in the 1580s in Fathpur Sikri he began to participate in their religious ceremonies and rituals, commemorating the Hindu festivals of Diwali, Dussehra, Vasant, and Holi. Of the other three non-Muslim religious traditions, Zoroastrianism had the greatest impact on the emperor.

The second part of Akbar's "lasting reconciliation" policy was directed toward Muslims. In June 1579 he read the khutba (Friday sermon) in the primal mosque of Fathpur Sikri. Although the accounts of his performance differ, this reading marks the beginning of Akbar'south efforts to bring order to the contentious religious environment of Muslim India. The 2d step followed closely: Ii months after in Baronial Abu al-Fazl and his father drafted a mahzar (a document attested to by others) that proclaimed Akbar the adjudicator of religious disputes – either those between Sunnis and Shiites or those among the representatives of the 4 Sunni law schools.

The third, final, and most controversial role of Akbar's effort to bring order to Indian Islam was the Sufi-like majestic order that he founded – the Tauhid-i Ilahi (Divine Monotheism).²⁷ Most of the early, high-ranking members of the new club were Muslim (eighteen of the 19 named in the Ain), and its arrangement and ceremony were modeled afterward the Sufi mystical orders of north India. In the Ain-i Akbari, volume three of the Akbar Nama, Abul al-Fazl's monumental history of Akbar'southward reign, Akbar's new lodge is discussed nether the rubric "rules for the disciples [ain-i iradat-i guzinan]."²⁸ "Iradat" was the Sufi term for discipleship, and in the gimmicky sources the members of the order were referred to every bit "disciples" ("murids") and their human relationship with Akbar as "discipleship" ("muridi").²⁹

Akbar expected the members of the Tauhid-i Ilahi to be in the vanguard of the "lasting reconciliation" movement, reflecting in their words and deeds a tolerance of their fellow Muslims and an appreciation for the cultural complexity of Mughal India. For example, the emperor pointed with approving to a recently immigrated Iranian who acted as if at that place were no deviation between Sunnis and Shiites, following the principle of "lasting reconciliation or sulh-i kull."³⁰ Subsequently, he admonished his son Prince Daniyal "be not offended by diversity of religion. Struggle hard to sit in the shade of "sulh-i kull."³¹Finally, in 1594 he sent a letter to Shah Abbas counseling tolerance and restraint. The Safavid ruler was at the terminate of a bloody campaign against the millenarian, extremist sect of the Nuqtavis. Akbar, however, had welcomed a leading member of the group to his courtroom in 1577 and had sent a letter of back up to another leader in 1584. Akbar wrote: "He [Shah Abbas] must . . . practice supreme caution before putting any one to death and destroying what is an edifice of God. . . . It must be considered that the Divine mercy attaches itself to every form of creed, and supreme exertions must be fabricated to bring oneself into the ever vernal flower garden of "sulh-i kull."³²

Akbar's son and successor, Jahangir, wrote of his father's tolerance:

The Professors of various faiths had room in the broad area of his incomparable sway. This was unlike from the practice in other realms, for in Iran there is room for Shias simply, and in Turkey, Republic of india, and Turan there is room for Sunnis only . . . in his dominions . . . there was room for the professors of opposite religions, and for behavior adept and bad, and the road to altercation was closed. Sunnis and Shias met in i mosque, and Franks and Jews in one church, and observed their own forms of worship. "Sulh-i kull" was his disposition. He associated with the proficient of every race and creed and was gracious to all in accordance with their condition and understanding.³³

Jahangir (1605–1628), the least forceful of the 4 dandy emperors, has unremarkably been seen as weak and uncertain, failing to build on Akbar'southward successes and ceding much of his authority to his wife Nur Jahan. During his reign no serious attempt was made to extend Mughal rule in the Deccan and Southward India, and Qandahar in central Afghanistan was lost to the Safavids. By contrast, Mughal rule in the province of Bengal was reorganized and put on a peaceful, stable footing. The number of mansabdars expanded from about eight hundred to about iii grand, proving to be a major burden on the treasury and causing the pct of state revenues controlled by the royal household to drib precipitously.

The Emperor Shahjahan (1628–1658) was a different human being altogether. Energetic, bold, and a skilled general, he readopted Akbar'due south policy of vigorous expansion. His first move was to reestablish Mughal rule in the Deccan. He was likewise responsible for the final serious endeavour by the Mughals to recover Qandahar – winning information technology briefly, losing it to the Persians, and then failing on three split occasions to regain it. By the middle of his reign, he had consolidated Mughal rule in most of the subcontinent. All this meant that he was free to patronize the arts – verse, painting, and especially architecture. Shahjahan is all-time known as the builder of the Taj Mahal, that beautiful memorial to his wife in Agra, but he besides renovated the palace-fortresses in Agra and Lahore and planned and congenital a new capital city (Shahjahanabad) in the Delhi area.

Aurangzeb (1658–1707), the concluding of the iv great emperors, is an enigma. Possessed of energy, talent, feel, and discipline, he should accept been the perfect ruler, presiding over a reign of peace and prosperity. Yet in that location is almost universal agreement that Aurangzeb was a failure and that his reign marked the beginning of the stop. Similar other Mughal princes earlier him, Aurangzeb grew discontented and revolted against his begetter. Unlike the others, withal, he was successful, and in 1658 he locked his father in the Agra fort and replaced himself on the throne. A skillful general and a conscientious ambassador, the new emperor brought Assam and Eastern Republic of india into the empire, subdued the Sikhs (a militant religious motion centered in the Punjab), and moved confronting the Marathas. His Maratha campaign, initially successful, soon bogged down, and he left North India in 1679 to direct the military effort in person. For 20-eight years, until his death in 1707, he pursued the wily Maratha horsemen from place to place, acquisition and reconquering small forts, fighting innumerable skirmishes, but always failing to strength the one major battle that would take decided the result. By temperament Aurangzeb was traditional, bourgeois, and compulsive, trying to roll dorsum Akbar's policy of "lasting reconciliation" and unwilling to delegate authoritative and military details.

Aurangzeb'south son, Bahadur Shah (1707–1712), was an old man when he finally came to the throne, and the empire he inherited had been bled of men and resource by the long unsuccessful Deccan entrada. The reign of Farrukhsiyar (1713–1719), Bahadur Shah'southward successor, was undistinguished, and he was eventually replaced past Muhammad Shah (1719–1748). Like his firsthand predecessors, Muhammad Shah had no interest in generalship or assistants, devoting himself to hunting and palace amusements. In 1739 Nadir Shah, the newly crowned ruler of Iran, took Qandahar and Kabul from the Afghans and entered the subcontinent. Easily defeating the disorganized and desperately led Mughal troops, he occupied Shahjahanabad. After a group of immature toughs attacked and killed some ix hundred of his soldiers, Nadir ordered a general massacre. When the Iranian ruler finally left, the city lay devastated and the Mughal empire was, in any meaningful sense, at an end.

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman empire (ca. 1300–1923) was the commencement and longest-lived of the iii early modern Islamic empires. Unlike the other two, information technology had no natural boundaries and controlled no coherent geographical entity. Information technology was but the "the domains of the House of Osman." Nevertheless, by the late sixteenth century the Ottomans controlled an enormous swath of territory: Anatolia, Iraq, the Balkans, Republic of hungary, Syrian arab republic, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Different the heavily watered plains of north India or the arid highlands of Islamic republic of iran, the Ottoman empire encompassed a wide diverseness of climates – the lush Tigris-Euphrates and Nile deltas, the deserts of Arabia, and the more temperate climates of Anatolia, Syria, and Due north Africa. In 1600 the population of the empire was nearly twenty 1000000.³⁴

Osman (1281–1326), the eponymous founder of the dynasty, began as the ruler of a small Seljuq successor state in western Anatolia.³⁵He and his early followers were Muslim Turks, descendants of the Central Asian Turkish tribes who migrated due south, defeated the Abbasids at Baghdad (1055), and established the Seljuq dynasty that ruled large parts of Anatolia, Republic of iraq, and Islamic republic of iran from the mid-eleventh to the mid-fourteenth centuries. The descendants of these Central Asian tribesmen comprised the majority of Osman's followers in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and the majority of Shah Ismail's warriors in the early on sixteenth century. In the fourteenth century Osman and his successors slowly expanded their fledgling land – due east across Anatolia and west into the Balkans. Under Bayezid I (1389–1402), nevertheless, the push eastward brought the Ottoman warriors up confronting the powerful forces of Timur. At the boxing of Ankara in 1402 Bayezid'due south army was crushed. He was taken captive and died soon after. A major cause of the Ottoman defeat, foreshadowing a problem with the Safavids a century afterward, was the divided loyalties of Bayezid's men. His tribesmen, recognizing many of their sometime comrades amid Timur'south forces, soon defected to the enemy. A hundred years later the descendants of these men were again torn – this time betwixt their loyalty to their Ottoman commanders, on the ane hand, and the charismatic leadership of Shah Ismail, on the other.³⁶

Map 3. The Ottoman Empire, c. 1660

In the Ottoman ground forces and regal household slaves or servitors (kul) filled many positions. Although earlier Islamic regimes (the Abbasids, Seljuqs, and Mamluks, for example) had employed slaves, the Ottomans relied on them to a much greater extent that did the rulers of either the Mughal or Safavid empires. Because, according to Islamic law, Muslims could non be enslaved, about slaves were prisoners of war, employed primarily as soldiers. However, as the demand for slaves increased in the late fifteenth century, the Ottomans instituted a levy (devsirme). Considered an extraordinary revenue enhancement on the non-Muslim cultivating families of the realm, it was ordered every three to 7 years. In the sixteenth century the annual totals ranged from well-nigh one to three chiliad boys. The young men were circumcised, converted to Islam, and taught Ottoman Turkish, simply they were not mistreated – physically driveling, restricted to menial occupations, or passed from owner to owner. Most of them came from the Balkans and were destined for the Janissaries, the sultan's personal infantry. A small percentage of the talented were sent to the palace schoolhouse – entering imperial service and condign eligible for the highest military and authoritative offices. Amongst the Ottomans the slave system permeated the entire society, from top to bottom, and the regal palace provided a model for the ranking military and administrative households. Slave women populated the royal harem and sultans were the sons of slaves, their daughters marrying loftier-ranking slave officers and officials. Anyone who was part of the Ottoman country, from gardener to grand wazir, bore the championship of "kul," all entered the organisation as slaves.³⁷

The showtime half of the fifteenth century, between the death of Bayezid (1402) and the accession of Mehmed II (1444–1446, 1451–1488) was a menses of disruption and dissension. Timur had overthrown Ottoman rule in Anatolia, and it was only slowly reestablished. Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople in 1453 not only signified Ottoman recovery merely also underlined the dynasty's ambition – to build an empire rivaling the Roman. Mehmed took two titles: Sovereign of the 2 Lands (Rumelia or Southeastern Europe and Anatolia) and of the Two Seas (the Mediterranean and the Black). Although he expanded the new country'south territories in both Anatolia and Eastern Europe, it was nether Selim I (1512–1520) that the Ottomans became the most important Sunni state in the Islamic world. In 1514 Selim defeated Shah Ismail and his Turkish tribesmen at Chaldiran in eastern Anatolia. Although Selim couldn't hold Tabriz, he did expel the Safavids from Baghdad and Basra. In 1516 he defeated the Mamluk forces near Aleppo, adding Syria, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula to his fledgling empire. Gaining command of the two holy cities, Selim added, "Retainer of Mecca and Medina," to Mehmed's titles.³⁸

The Ottoman empire, like the Mughal and Safavid states, was agrarian-based. The bulk of purple revenues came from rural taxes on crops, animals, and other produce. Whereas the Mughals and Ottomans measured the agricultural land of the key empire and drew up registers setting along the average yield of each subdivision, neither had the financial structure or the authoritative framework to centrally collect rural taxes and pay a corps of cavalry from the imperial treasury. As a result, the Ottomans, like the Mughals, paid their mounted men in grants of land revenue (chosen timars) – the timar system in the Ottoman empire was the crude equivalent of the jagirdari system in the Mughal.³⁹

The timar was the smallest piece of assignable state. Information technology consisted of a village or a group of villages and the surrounding fields. The sultan's share of the land revenue enhancement was assigned to a cavalryman who lived in the village, maintained gild, and joined the imperial forces whenever called upon. From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, these men comprised the bulk of the royal armies. The timar lands were mostly constitute in the older parts of the empire – Anatolia and the European provinces. Later Selim'south victory over the Mamluks in the early sixteenth century, Arab republic of egypt and the North African provinces were not assigned to cavalrymen. They remitted a fixed annual sum in greenbacks to the cardinal treasury, well-nigh which went to pay the Janissaries.⁴⁰

Unlike the Mughals or the Safavids, the Ottomans were a formidable naval power. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the new capital was provisioned primarily past sea. With Selim's defeat of the Mamluks in the early on sixteenth century control of the sea became even more than of import: ships full of Egyptian grain and cotton had to be protected and the pilgrimage routes from Africa and India had to be safeguarded. The Ottoman fleet was composed primarily of oared galleys, cannons being added in the tardily fifteenth century. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Ottomans were the major naval ability in the Mediterranean and Blackness Seas, occasionally even sending a fleet to the Indian Ocean – seventy-ii ships were deployed against the Portuguese in 1538. Ottoman superiority at sea, however, ended in 1571 when Phillip II of Spain and the Venetians destroyed most of the Ottoman navy at the battle of Lepanto.⁴¹

In the older historiography the Ottoman empire was said to accept reached the peak of its military machine, political, and economic power nether Selim's son, Suleiman I (1520–66). Suleiman extended Ottoman rule in Eastern Europe by conquering Hungary (but declining to have Vienna in 1529). He defeated the Safavids and reconquered Baghdad and annexed virtually of N Africa. During Suleiman'south reign too the Ottoman navy dominated the seas – the Mediterranean, the Black, the Scarlet, and the Persian Gulf. Although in Europe Suleiman was known equally the Magnificent (in award of his military prowess and the splendor of his court), in his ain dominions he was the Lawgiver. Although Quranic law regulated certain aspects of religious, family, and social life, many other matters were left to the decisions of individual sultans. Suleiman had all of these orders and opinions nerveless, collated, and, if necessary, revised. They were published in a single lawmaking, the Ottoman Laws. In Istanbul he increased the number of mosque schools, making a bones education bachelor to all Muslim boys. For the talented, higher teaching could exist pursued in one of the eight madrasas (colleges) of the capital. Suleiman also patronized the arts. Whereas painters, poets, jewelers, and goldsmiths produced of import works, the greatest artistic achievements of his reign were probably architectural. Sinan, the chief royal architect, was responsible for over 3 hundred monuments. His 2 masterpieces were the Suleimaniye Mosque Circuitous in Istanbul and the Selimiye Complex in Edirne (synthetic during the reign of Suleiman's son Selim II).⁴²

The Ottoman empire, like the Mughal, was a complex agglomeration of peoples and cultures, filled with different languages, religions, and ethnicities. Whereas the ruling elite was Muslim, it was not Turkish – as the sultans and many of the ranking officials were Christian converts or the descendants of Christian converts. In Anatolia, the ancient heartland of the dynasty, the people were Turks but in the former Mamluk territories Muslim Arabs predominated. And, of course, the European provinces held Greeks, Slavs, and Serbs – all Christian. In Istanbul there were a meaning number of Jews. Inside the overall framework of the Ottoman social order, the various religious and ethnic groups had a great bargain of autonomy. Under the millet (community) organisation, a separate legal framework was established for each group. A leader resolved legal and social problems and served equally the intermediary betwixt the authorities and the community. Every bit long as the various groups paid their taxes and were peaceful, the Ottoman authorities left them alone. The Muslim population itself was divided into two classes: the askeri (military) and the reaya (tax-paying). The askeri were more often than not soldiers – either infantry or cavalry – but they also included other members of the Ottoman governing appliance – administrators, courtiers, religious officials, teachers, and judges. All were paid by the state. The reaya, past dissimilarity, were mostly peasant cultivators and, as the empire was agrarian-based, provided the bulk of imperial revenues.⁴³

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, after Suleiman and his immediate successors, the Ottomans faced a period of political unrest and military defeat. 2 ruinous and ultimately unsuccessful wars tore at the military, economic, and political foundations of the state. In the east the war with the Safavids (1578–1590) added important territories simply strained the capacities of the Janissaries and the provincial cavalry. And in the due west the long and debilitating war with the Habsburgs (1593–1608), while ending inconclusively, revealed that the Austrians had become the armed forces equals of the Ottomans. Meanwhile, Shah Abbas, after defeating the Uzbeks, turned toward Anatolia. In the entrada (1603–1608) that followed he regained all of the territory that he had lost in the before war. At the aforementioned time, the slave organization began to break down. The xxx-yr menstruation of almost continuous warfare bred an immediate need for more infantry and, as a result, many native born Muslims were enrolled in the ranks of the Janissaries. At the finish of the sixteenth century, as the wars in the eastward and west wound down, the cardinal assistants demobilized a smashing many men. Banding together in groups of twenty-five to thirty, these unemployed soldiers (called celali in the sources) rocked Anatolia, Syrian arab republic, and Iraq from circa 1580–1612. Hungry and experienced, they fought the imperial Janissaries to a standstill and forced many peasants to flee the countryside for the cities, causing a sharp driblet in agronomical production.⁴⁴

In the older historiography the military defeats of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, along with the "celali" rebellions, were evidence of a precipitous decline from the glories of Suleiman's reign. The newer scholarship, however, has tended to pass up this stark dichotomy and has begun to argue that the seventeenth century was more a period of change and transition than a time of reject and fall. The various crises brought virtually a profound transformation of the Ottoman state. Military defeats revealed that the timar calvary had become antiquated, increasingly ineffective in the new earth of gunpowder engineering science. In society to recruit and train more infantry the imperial officials decided to increase the pct of government revenues collected in cash, switching the tax collection status of more and more provinces from timar to taxation-farming. At the same time under Ahmed I (1603–1617) the administrative system was reformed: a new law code was promulgated; the law of succession was changed, eliminating fratricide and opening the throne to collateral descendants; and the slave levy was slowly abandoned as more than and more military and administrative recruits came from the gratuitous-born Muslim population. All of this led to a more professional organization that depended less and less on the free energy and abilities of individual sultans, finally culminating in the ascension to prominence of the Koprulu family of 1000 wazirs (1656–1703).⁴⁵

Although the Mughal and Safavid empires were early modern entities entirely (born in the early on sixteenth century and destroyed or substantially weakened past the early eighteenth century), the Ottoman empire was not. Founded in the late thirteenth century, it lasted until the early twentieth. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, were a time of military machine and economic weakness. Ottoman provinces in the Balkans were recaptured by Austria, and Egypt and Algeria became independent in all but name, somewhen falling nether the influence of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and France, respectively. Command of the core empire devolved from the Ottoman central regime in Istanbul to local notables in the provinces. After a series of not very successful wars with the Russians, Selim III (1789–1807) began the procedure of war machine modernization. Reform and rejuvenation, spurred on by challenges from the European powers, continued through the Tanzimat (Reorganization) Period (1837–1876). In the tardily nineteenth century, nationalist movements erupted throughout the empire, and the Ottoman determination to enter World State of war I on the side of the Key Powers was catastrophic. At the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 the empire was dismembered, but Anatolia and a small slice of Europe remaining. When the Kemalist motility alleged a republic in 1923, the career of the most successful Islamic state in history had come to an end.⁴⁶

The political relationships among the three early modern empires were determined, to a significant degree, past the difficulties of altitude. Whereas the empires differed dramatically in population, each controlled a substantial territory. Their capitals, however, were widely separated. Information technology was two,239 kilometers (i,391 miles) from Istanbul to Isfahan (equally the crow flies), two,466 kilometers (1,532 miles) from Isfahan to Shahjahanabad, and 4,556 kilometers (2,831 miles) from the Ottoman to the Mughal capital. As a result, for one state to mount a armed forces campaign confronting another was a complex and extremely expensive proposition. In addition, because the Safavid empire, with its mountains and deserts, separated the other ii, the primary political rivalries were, for the nigh part, between the Ottomans and Safavids, on the one hand, and the Safavids and Mughals, on the other.

From the early sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth, the Ottomans and Safavids were locked into a contentious and intermittently bloody rivalry. Because both dynasties drew their early followers from the same indigenous group, the stakes were high. Turkish tribesmen constituted the bulk both of the Iranian Qizilbash (the Shiite members of the Safaviyya Sufi social club) and the Ottoman timar cavalry. The Ottoman efforts to pacify and command the eastern Anatolian–northern Iran area (centered on the cities of Baghdad and Tabriz) were sporadic. Because the campaigning flavor was ordinarily limited to the 3 months following the fall harvest and as both sides often employed a scorched earth policy, the usual result of these battles was engagement followed by withdrawal – either the Ottomans from Tabriz or the Safavids from Baghdad. The issues, however, were real and the struggles, although brusk-lived, were ofttimes destructive.

Past dissimilarity, the political relationship between the Mughals and Safavids was much more peaceful. As with the Ottomans and Safavids, distance was an important gene. Isfahan and Shahjahanabad were separated non but by thousands of kilometers merely also past the Hindu Kush and Safid mountains and by the winds and waves of the Arabian Sea. A brief look at the quarrels over Qandahar illustrates the point. Whereas the urban center, some iii hundred kilometers s of Kabul, changed hands several times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the transfers of control were rarely bloody. Oftentimes, in fact, they were peaceful: a commander was bribed and defected or, faced with a superior strength, offered a prudent surrender. For the Safavids Mughal Republic of india was a state of opportunity rather than a battlefield. Poets, painters, soldiers, administrators, and religious dissidents entered the subcontinent, finding refuge and fortune there. In the eyes of the seventeenth-century poet Saib Tabrizi, the principal enemies of the Safavids were the Uzbeks and Ottomans, not the Mughals.⁴⁷

In the case of the Mughals and the Ottomans, no long-term, meaningful political human relationship was possible. The enormous altitude between the two capitals and the intervening presence of the Safavids meant that diplomatic missions, not to mention war machine confrontations, were extremely rare.⁴⁸ In fact, the only hint of an armed engagement was the appearance of the Ottoman navy in the Indian Body of water in the 1530s. Although a desultory commutation of ambassadors betwixt the two courts can exist traced in the sources, the concrete results were negligible, and the intent seems to have been primarily symbolic, oriented toward impressing an internal audience rather than reaching whatsoever tangible political or economical agreements.

The only sustained interaction between the 2 was religious non political. Because the Ottomans controlled the Arabian Peninsula and the Mughals were Sunnis, the Indian pilgrims and the Meccan authorities had a complicated relationship that extended beyond the thirty days of the pilgrimage month. The problems were practical – gifts to Hajj officials and Indian overcrowding of the sacred sites – and the individuals involved were middle-ranking – Meccan governors and caravan ship captains. As a result, the disagreements never reached an intensity that would take provoked a armed services response.

Whereas the Ottomans were the superior military machine power, with access to the advanced gunpowder technology of early on mod Europe, the Safavids played the leading part in the cultural sphere. In the early modern Islamic world, Arabic was the language of faith but Persian was the language of literature (poetry, history, geography) and, increasingly, of philosophy and scientific discipline. Information technology was besides the lingua franca of the time, much similar French in eighteenth-century Europe, and in Mughal Bharat it was the language of court and state – records, documents, and orders. Although the Mughal emperors spoke Turkish or Urdu (Hindawi) within their extended households, Western farsi was the medium of communication amid the members of the multicultural mansabdari system. Persian was also the linguistic communication of history, theology, philosophy, and scientific discipline, nearly all of the written textile of the Mughal state was in Persian.

In the early modernistic Ottoman empire Western farsi did non play every bit primal a role. At courtroom the language was Ottoman Turkish and the Christian servitors who manned the college reaches of the authoritative and military hierarchies learned it every bit young boys. Although Ottoman Turkish was heavily influenced by Farsi and, to a lesser extent, by Standard arabic, information technology quickly became the language of state – records, orders, and everyday conversation. Notwithstanding, the ability to read and write Farsi was highly prized. A knowledge of the Persian literary classics – the poetry of Saadi and Hafiz, the mystic verses of Rumi, and the histories of the Persian masters (especially the Shahname of Firdausi) was absolutely essential. Without mastery of this textile, an educated human would be lost at the Topkapi courtroom or in the upper reaches of the legal, religious, and administrative hierarchies. For case, in the last half of the sixteenth century the official Ottoman historian, even though he ordinarily wrote in Ottoman Turkish, bore the title "Shehnameci," that is, the Shahname author.

If, in the early modern Islamic world, the Ottomans were ascendant militarily and the Safavids culturally, so the Mughals were the preeminent economical power. Economical relationships among the three empires, although complex in detail, were in outline adequately simple. The basic movement was goods and bolt from east to west and precious metals (gold and silverish) from west to due east. Cloth and spices were sent from India to the Iranian markets, and Safavid silk was transported to the Ottoman ports of Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. Ottoman argent (much of it from the new globe) paid for the Safavid silk and passed direct into the hands of the Indian merchants who supplied the Iranians with textiles and spices. In addition, Mughal Bharat also exported financial expertise: Indian bankers and moneychangers dominated the bazaars of Isfahan, Bandar Abbas, Tabriz, and Qazvin.

Although the 3 dynasties shared a common organized religion, ethnicity, and political and economy structure, their sources of legitimacy differed. Each based its authority, or right to rule, on a dissimilar set of behavior and claims. After Selim'due south defeat of the Mamluks, the Ottomans asserted their claim to the caliphate. They were the protectors of the two sacred cities, Mecca and Medina, and the successors to the Rightly-Guided Deputies of the prophet.⁴⁹The Mughals, like the Ottomans, were Sunnis, just their claim to legitimacy was based on their ancestry. Babur, the founder of the dynasty, was a direct descendant of Timur. The Safavids, by contrast, were Shiite and their authority, like the Ottomans, had a spiritual basis. Ismail claimed to be a descendant of the Seventh Imam, an incarnation of the Mahdi, and the Murshid (Master) of the Safaviyya Sufi lodge. The Safavids too claimed a share of the divine right accorded kings in the aboriginal, Iranian imperial tradition.⁵⁰

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Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/time-in-early-modern-islam/safavid-mughal-and-ottoman-empires/9D55F0A0262017473EC8A9A7ED86C508

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