Tahmasp I ( or ; 22 February 1514 – 14 May 1576) was the second shah of Safavid Iran from 1524 until his death in 1576. He was the eldest son of Shah Ismail I and his principal consort, the Mawsillu princess Tajlu Khanum.
Tahmasp ascended the throne after the death of his father on 23 May 1524. The first years of Tahmasp's reign were marked by civil wars between the Qizilbash leaders until 1532, when he asserted his authority and began an absolute monarchy. He soon faced a long-lasting war with the Ottoman Empire, which was divided into three phases. The Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, tried to install his own candidates on the Safavid throne. The war ended with the Peace of Amasya in 1555, with the Ottomans gaining sovereignty over Iraq, much of Kurdistan, and western Georgia. Tahmasp also had conflicts with the Uzbeks of Bukhara over Khorasan, with them repeatedly raiding Herat. In 1528, at the age of fourteen, he defeated the Uzbeks in the Battle of Jam by using artillery.
Tahmasp was a patron of the arts and was an accomplished painter himself. He built a royal house of arts for painters, calligraphers and poets. Later in his reign, he came to despise poets, shunning many and exiling them to the Mughal court of India. Tahmasp is known for his religious piety and fervent zealotry for the Shia branch of Islam. He bestowed many privileges on the clergy and allowed them to participate in legal and administrative matters. In 1544 he demanded that the fugitive Mughal emperor Humayun convert to Shi'ism in return for military assistance to reclaim his throne in India. Nevertheless, Tahmasp still negotiated alliances with the Christian powers of the Republic of Venice and the Habsburg monarchy who were also rivals of the Ottoman Empire.
Tahmasp's succession was disputed even before his death; after his death a civil war erupted, causing the deaths of most of the royal family. His reign, spanning nearly fifty-two years, was the longest of any Safavid ruler. While contemporary Western accounts were critical of him, modern historians recognize Tahmasp as a courageous and capable commander who preserved and expanded his father's empire. His reign marked a pivotal shift in Safavid ideological policy: he ended the Turkoman Qizilbash tribes' veneration of his father as the Messiah and instead established himself as a pious and orthodox Shia king. Tahmasp also initiated a long-term process, later continued by his successors, to diminish Qizilbash influence in Safavid politics. This was achieved by introducing a "third force" composed of Islamized Georgians and Armenians.
Name "Tahmasp" () is a New Persian name, ultimately derived from Old Iranian *ta(x)ma-aspa, meaning "having valiant horses." The name is one of the few instances of a name from the epic poem Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) being used by an Islamic-era dynasty based in Iran. In the Shahnameh, Tahmasp is the father of Zaav, the penultimate shah of the mythical Persian Pishdadian dynasty.
Background
Tahmasp was the second shah of the Safavid dynasty, a family of Kurdish origin, who were sheikhs of a Sufi (school of Sufism) known as the Safavid order and centred in Ardabil, a city in the northwestern Iran. The first sheikh of the order and eponym of the dynasty, Safi-ad-din Ardabili (d. 1334), married the daughter of Zahed Gilani (d. 1301) and became the master of his father-in-law's order, the Zahediyeh. Two of Safi-ad-Din's descendants, Shaykh Junayd (d. 1460) and his son, Shaykh Haydar (d. 1488), made the order more militant and unsuccessfully tried to expand their domain.
Tahmasp's father, Ismail I (), who inherited the leadership the Safavid order from his brother, Ali Mirza, became shah of Iran in 1501, a state mired in civil war after the collapse of the Timurid Empire. He conquered the territories of the Aq Qoyunlu tribal confederation, the lands of the Chinggisid (Descendant of Genghis Khan) Uzbek Shaybanid dynasty in the eastern Iran, and many city-states by 1512. Ismail's realm included the whole territory of modern Iran, in addition to sovereignty over Georgia, Armenia, Daghestan, and Shirvan in the west, and Herat in the east. Unlike his Sufist ancestors, Ismail believed in Twelver Shia Islam and made it the official religion of the realm. He forced conversion on the Sunni population by abolishing Sunni Sufi orders, seizing their property, and giving the Sunni (Islamic clergymen) a choice of conversion, death, or exile. From this, a power vacuum emerged which allowed the Shia to create a clerical aristocracy filled with (descendant of Muhammad) and (Islamic scholar expert in the Islamic law) landowners.
Ismail established the Qizilbash Turkoman tribes as inseparable members of the Safavid administration since they were the "men of the sword" who brought him to power. These "men of the sword" clashed with the other major part of his bureaucracy, the "men of the pen", who controlled the literati and were mainly Persian. Ismail created the title of (deputy to the king) to resolve the dispute. The title of surpassed both the (commander-in-chief; mostly bestowed upon Qizilbash leaders), and the grand vizier (minister and head of the bureaucracy) in authority. The holder of the title was the vicegerent of Ismail and represented him in the royal court. The creation of this new superior title could not cease the clashes between the Qizilbash leaders and Persian bureaucrats, which eventually climaxed in the Battle of Ghazdewan between the Safavids and the Uzbeks, in which Ismail's , the Persian Najm-e Sani, commended the army. The Uzbek victory, during which Najm was captured and executed afterwards, was the result of the desertion of many of the Qizilbash.
The Uzbeks of Bukhara were a recurring problem on the Iranian eastern borders. The Safavids and the Shaybanids rose to power almost simultaneously at the turn of the sixteenth century. By 1503, when Ismail I had taken possession of large parts of the Iranian plateau, Muhammad Shaybani, Khan of Bukhara (), had conquered Khwarazm and Khorasan. Ismail defeated and killed Muhammad Shaybani in the Battle of Marv in 1510, returning Khorasan to Iranian possession, though Khwarazm and the Persianate cities in Transoxiana remained in Uzbek hands. Thereafter the possession of Khorasan became the main bone of contention between Safavids and Shaybanids.
In 1514, Ismail's prestige and authority were damaged by his loss in the Battle of Chaldiran against the Ottoman Empire. Before the war with the Ottomans, Ismail promoted himself as a reincarnation of Ali or Husayn. This belief weakened after Chaldiran, and Ismail lost his theological-religious relationship with the disappointed Qizilbash tribes who had previously seen him as invincible. This affected Ismail, who began drinking heavily and never again led an army; this permitted the seizure of power by the Qizilbash tribes which overshadowed Tahmasp's early reign.; .
Early life
Abu'l-Fath Tahmasp Mirza was born on 22 February 1514 in Shahabad, a village near Isfahan, as the eldest son of Ismail I and his principal consort, princess Tajlu Khanum from the Mawsillu tribe of the Aq Qoyunlu confederation. According to the narrative told by Iranian s (coffeehouse storytellers), on the night of Tahmasp's birth, a storm erupted, with wind, rain, and lightning. Tajlu Khanum, feeling her labour pains beginning, suggested that the royal caravan camp in some village. The royal caravan thus headed to Shahabad. The (warden) of the village was a Sunni and did not let Tajlu Khanum enter his house, but a Shia resident of the village welcomed her into his modest house. By then, Tajlu Begum's pain had made her faint, and shortly after entering the house gave birth to a son. When the news reached Ismail, he was reportedly "heaped" with utmost joy and happiness, but refrained from seeing his son until his astrologers gave him an auspicious date to do so. When the auspicious hour arrived, the young boy was presented to Ismail and astrologers foresaw his future to be one entwisted with war and peace and that he would have many sons. Ismail named the boy Tahmasp after Ali, the first Imam, told him to do so in his dream. From the same parents, Tahmasp later had a brother, Bahram Mirza Safavi, and two sisters, Pari Khan Khanum and Mahinbanu Soltanum, who all came to have important political and cultural roles.
In 1516, when Tahmasp Mirza was two years old, the province of Khorasan became his fief by Ismail's order. This appointment was specially done to emulate the Timurid dynasty, that followed the Turco-Mongol tradition of appointing the eldest son of a sovereign to govern a prominent province like Khorasan. The centre of this major province, the city of Herat, would go on to be the city where Safavid crown princes were raised, trained, and educated throughout the sixteenth century. In 1517, Ismail appointed the Diyarbakr governor Amir Soltan Mawsillu as Tahmasp's (tutor) and governor of Balkh, a city in Khorasan.; . He replaced the Shamlu and Mawsillu governors of Khorasan, who did not join his army during the Battle of Chaldiran for fear of famine. Placing Tahmasp in Herat was an attempt to reduce the growing influence of the Shamlu tribe, which dominated Safavid court politics and held a number of powerful governorships. Ismail also appointed Amir Ghiyath al-Din Mohammad, a prominent Herat figure, as Tahmasp's religious tutor.
A struggle for control of Herat emerged between the two tutors. Amir Soltan arrested Ghiyath al-Din and executed him the following day, but was ousted from his position in 1521 by a sudden raid by the Uzbeks who crossed the Amu Darya and seized portions of the city.; . Ismail appointed Div Sultan Rumlu as Tahmasp's , and the governorship was given to his younger son, Sam Mirza Safavi. During his years in Herat, Tahmasp developed a love for writing and painting. He became an accomplished painter and dedicated a work to his brother, Bahram Mirza. The painting was a humorous composition of a gathering of Safavid courtiers, featuring music, singing, and wine-drinking.
In the spring of 1524, Ismail became ill on a hunting trip to Georgia and recovered in Ardabil on his way back to the capital. But he soon developed a high fever which led to his death on 23 May 1524 in Tabriz.
Regency
The ten-year-old Tahmasp ascended the throne after his father's death under the guardianship of Div Sultan Rumlu, his , the de facto ruler of the realm. Rule by a member of the Rumlu tribe was unacceptable to the other Turkoman tribes of the Qizilbash, especially the Ostajlu and Takkalu. Kopek Sultan, governor of Tabriz and leader of Ostajlu, along with Chuha Sultan, leader of the Takkalu tribe, were Div Sultan Rumlu's strongest opponents. The Takkalu were powerful in Isfahan and Hamadan, and the Ostajlu held Khorasan and the Safavid capital, Tabriz. Rumlu proposed a triumvirate to the two leaders which was accepted, the terms were for sharing the office of . The triumvirate proved unsustainable, since all sides were dissatisfied with their share of power. In the spring of 1526, a series of battles in northwest Iran between these tribes expanded into Khorasan and became a civil war.; . The Ostajlu faction was quickly excluded and their leader, Kopek Sultan, was killed by order of Chuha Sultan. During the civil war, the Uzbeks raiders temporarily seized Tus and Astarabad. Div Sultan Rumlu was blamed for the raids and was executed. His execution was performed by Tahmasp himself.