The Hotak dynasty: Ghilzai rule from Kandahar to Isfahan, 1709–1738

Kandahar before the revolt

In the early 1700s Kandahar was a frontier province of the Safavid empire of Persia, contested between the Safavids and the Mughals of India. By then the two great Pashtun confederations of the region had been pushed apart. The Abdali, later called the Durrani, had been the Safavids' main local supporters. The Ghilzai, by contrast, had organised the armed opposition to Persian rule, and after Shah Abbas I moved the Abdali from Kandahar to Herat, the Ghilzai, and above all the Hotak tribe, became the strongest group in and around the city. [1]

The man who would change that was Mir Wais, the head of the Hotak. Under Safavid rule he held two useful posts: he was the city's kalantar, a kind of mayor, and he held the lucrative post of watching over the caravan traffic between Iran and India for the Safavids. [2]

Gorgin Khan and the uprising of 1709

In 1704 the Safavids appointed a new governor, Shahnavaz Khan, better known as Gorgin Khan, who was King George XI of Kartli in Georgia. At first Mir Wais cooperated with him. The relationship soured quickly, and in 1706 Mir Wais lost his post as caravan watchman. Chronicle accounts say Gorgin Khan's harsh rule angered the Sunni Afghans: his soldiers mistreated the local population, goods were seized and taxes were raised. Some of the stories told about the Georgian garrison are very grave, and they come from sources with their own reasons to blame him, so they are best read as reported accusations rather than established fact. [2]

Complaints sent to Isfahan were, according to the same accounts, intercepted by Gorgin Khan's men. In the end Gorgin Khan had Mir Wais arrested and sent to the Persian capital. There Mir Wais, through flattery and bribes, rebuilt his standing with the shah and persuaded him that Gorgin Khan was untrustworthy. Sent back to Kandahar as a kind of shadow administrator, he rallied the Afghans against the Georgians. [2]

Gorgin Khan was killed in 1709. The sources do not agree on how. In one version he was killed in his tent and the Afghans then took the city and massacred its Georgian garrison; in another he was cut down after the Afghans invited him and his entourage to a banquet. [2] In either version, a Ghilzai uprising led by the Hotak chief Mir Wais freed southern Afghanistan from Safavid control. [4]

Holding Kandahar, 1709–1715

Isfahan did not accept the loss. A force under Gorgin Khan's nephew Kaykhosrow (Khosrow Khan) was sent to avenge him. Short of money and hampered by rivals at court, it laid siege to Kandahar, and after two months the Afghans asked for peace. The Persian demand for unconditional surrender made the Ghilzai decide to fight on. Worn down by summer heat, lack of food and disease, and harassed by Baluch forces who had sided with the Afghans, the Georgians retreated in October 1711. In the pursuit Kaykhosrow and many of his men were killed. [2]

A second commander, appointed to Kerman and ordered to move against the Afghans, ran short of resources and fell ill, and his slow campaign fizzled when he died near Herat. Mir Wais used the time to expand his territory, taking the province of Zamindawar, in the Helmand valley, in 1713. He died in 1715. [2]

He was succeeded in Kandahar by his brother Abd al-Aziz, who was killed by Mir Wais's son Mahmud. Mahmud Hotak took power in 1717. [1]

The march on Isfahan, 1721–1722

The Ghilzai invasion of Safavid territory took place in 1721–1722, and Mahmud captured the capital in the second year. [1] [5] Safavid rule was already weak: in Isfahan, people had rioted over food prices in 1715, and the shah, Sultan Husayn, spent years away from the capital. [3] The Afghan army reached Gulnabad on 8 March 1722 and defeated a Persian army of about 40,000 men with a further 30,000 infantry, at least twice the size of the Afghan force. Only the Georgian contingent actually fought, and it was almost destroyed. The Safavid soldiers lost some 4,000 to 5,000 men on the field, and the rest withdrew into Isfahan. [3]

Mahmud and his tribal force then took the royal pleasure ground at Farahabad without a fight and seized the suburb of Julfa, where the inhabitants welcomed him with food and wine and accepted him as their new ruler. The citizens of Isfahan used the delay to strengthen the defences, and a long siege followed. The city ran out of food. By the end of the summer people were eating tree bark, leaves and worse, and eventually resorted to cannibalism. After a six-month siege the city fell to Mahmud on 23 October 1722. [3]

Isfahan lost a large part of its population and many of its buildings, and its economy was destroyed. The city survived, but it took until the 19th century to recover and it never regained its former importance. [3]

Ashraf and the end of Afghan rule in Iran

Mahmud was overthrown in 1725 by his cousin Ashraf, the son of Abd al-Aziz. Ashraf took the throne on 26 April 1725 and ruled for a little over four years, almost all of it at war. [1] [5] He fought the Ottomans, defeating them at Khorramabad on 20 November 1726, and signed a treaty in October 1727 that gave him recognition as shah of Persia with the right to mint coins and send pilgrim caravans to Mecca, in return for giving up his claims to territory the Ottomans had taken. A treaty with Russia at Rasht in February 1729 was a second sign that the neighbouring powers accepted him. [5]

At home, however, most Persians rejected the Afghan regime. Revolts broke out in several provinces, and the Safavid prince Tahmasp emerged as the only serious rival, backed by the Afshar chief Nader Qoli Beg, the future Nader Shah. Nader defeated Ashraf's tired army at Mehmandust near Damghan on 29 September 1729. Ashraf's troops sacked Isfahan as they pulled back, and he left the city on 13 November 1729. Nader pursued him south and defeated him again near Shiraz. Ashraf was killed by a band of Baluch on the Sistan border in the winter of 1729–1730. [5]

Daniel Balland's account in the Encyclopaedia Iranica is that the Shia–Sunni divide was not the root cause of the failure, since Sunni Turkmen and Kurds formed the spearhead of Nader's army. A much more important factor was disagreement among the Afghan tribes themselves, which cut the Isfahan regime off from its natural bases in Afghanistan and left it without reinforcements. [5]

Kandahar after the Hotaks

Back in Afghanistan the Hotak line continued for a time in Kandahar under Mahmud's brother Husayn. Nader Shah besieged Kandahar from 1737 and built a new city, Naderabad, a few miles to the southeast. The Ghilzai chief surrendered in 1738 after a siege of more than a year. Nader appointed an Abdali chief as governor and brought the Abdali back to Kandahar to replace the Ghilzai. Shah Husayn and large numbers of Ghilzai were deported to Mazandaran. [1] [2]

That settled the contest between the two confederations for a generation. After Nader Shah was assassinated in June 1747, the young Abdali leader Ahmad Khan, who had commanded a Pashtun contingent in his army, was chosen to lead; he took the title Durr-i Durran, and the Abdali became known as the Durrani. The year 1747 is the date Daniel Balland gives for the definitive appearance of an Afghan political entity independent of both the Safavid and Mughal empires. [4]

Reading the sources

The main written accounts of these events are Persian chronicles, European travellers and missionaries, and later Afghan histories, and they were written by people with strong opinions about the Hotaks. The details of Gorgin Khan's death, the scale of the damage at Isfahan and the motives of the leaders all vary between accounts. The facts in this article are limited to the dates and events on which the cited Encyclopaedia Iranica entries agree. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]