The Origins of the Safavids

Iran had a profound historical tradition of imperial regimes and cultures. The Saljuq governments of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were built on prior ʿAbbasid and Sasanian and more ancient institutions. The Mongol and Timurid invasions continued many of the political and cultural achievements of the past but brought lasting demographic, economic, and political changes to Iranian societies. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, large numbers of Turkish and Mongol peoples settled in northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia, and, by the fourteenth century, a large Turkish population was also established in eastern Iran and in the Oxus region. Ever since, Turkish peoples have constituted about one-fourth of the total population of Iran.

The Turkish presence radically changed the economy of Iran. Substantial territories were turned from agriculture into pasturage. Villagers were induced to take up a migratory existence, farming in valley bottoms and pasturing sheep in adjacent mountain highlands. Only in the reign of Ghazan (d. 1304) did the Ilkhans attempt to develop a more balanced relationship between agricultural and pastoral activities and a system of property organization that maintained the position of both agricultural and pastoral peoples. The Ilkhans began to stabilize the division of Iran into two economic and cultural worlds – one, the world of the sedentary village; the other, that of the pastoral camp.