Abstract:

The current study consists of an introduction, five parts, a conclusion and a list of the literature used. The first chapter highlights the characteristic features of the Safavid state. The second chapter reviews the status of the Safavid Shah. The third chapter describes the official ranks of the Safavid state. The fourth chapter summarizes the structure of the Safavid army. The fifth chapter contains a review of the social life and economic situation in the Safavid state. Founded by Shah Ismail in 1501, the Safavid state was a feudal state ruled by a theocratic monarchy. By 1510 the territory occupied by this state stretched from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, encompassing the lands between the rivers Euphrates and Amu Darya. Azerbaijan and its capital city Tabriz formed the heartland of this wide empire whose official ideology was Shia Islam. The Qizilbash Turks were the main founders and ruling strata of the state, which was often called the Qizilbash state after these tribes. On his father’s side of the family, the first Safavid Shah was descended from the sheikhs of Ardabil, who claimed to be Seyyids, i.e. descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. On his mother’s side, he was the grandson of Uzun Hasan, the Akkoyunlu ruler. As a result, Shah Ismail considered himself the heir to the caliphate of Imam Ali, from a spiritual and ideological perspective, while simultaneously claiming to be the political legacy of the Akkoyunlu state. In one hand the young leader of the Safavids held the titles Shah and Murshid-i-Kamil (i.e. the "perfect spiritual director") seeing himself successor to the “holy shah” (i.e. Imam Ali) and the Ardabil sheikhs, while in the other he held the titles Khaqan and Bahadur Khan due to his adherence to the Turkic state tradition. There were many military, civil and religious offices within the administrative structure of the Safavid state. In this paper, we discuss the functions of nearly 30 government offices and their bearers that operated during the reign of Shah Ismail I. Shah Ismail’s army consisted mainly of Turkish Qizilbash cavalry. According to information obtained from numerous sources, the number of soldiers in Shah Ismail’s army totaled between 70-100,000 men after he had consolidated his rule. The Safavid troops had firearms, albeit in small numbers. The ruling class was made up of the semi-nomadic Qizilbash nobility as well as high-ranking civil bureaucrats, Shia clerics and other resident feudal lords. There were five forms of land ownership: khassa (domains owned by the ruling dynasty), divani (state lands), waqf (property of pious and charitable institutions), mulk (lands owned by landlords) and ijma (property owned by the rural community). The state’s lands were mainly divided up among the Qizilbash elites in the form of conditional feudal land ownership. Conditions conducive to the country’s economic and cultural development emerged with the cessation of chaos of the late Akkoyunlu period and the creation of a powerful central authority following the formation of the Safavid state. Although the Safavid state was founded as one of the last examples of classical nomadic empires, it was unable to continue in this fashion. The succession of defeats at the hands of the Ottomans during the 16th century compelled the Safavids to take new initiatives leading to the reforms of Shah Abbas I.

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