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The Army of Nader Shah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Axworthy
Michael Axworthy*
Affiliation:
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter; Middle East History, University of Exeter
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Abstract

This article looks at the origins of the army of Nader Shah (reigned 1736–1747) and the nature of the Persian armies in the Safavid period before considering in more detail the composition and structure of the army at its peak in the early 1740s. It suggests, building on work by Rudi Matthee, that it was only under Nader's tutelage that Persia fully embraced gunpowder weapons and that this initiated a Military Revolution (not just a revolution in technology, but in drill, discipline, and army size as well as ethos) that, but for Nader's untimely death, could have brought about the wider social and economic changes that Geoffrey Parker and others have associated with the Military Revolution in Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 5 , December 2007 , pp. 635 - 646
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2007

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Footnotes

This article arises out of the research toward his book, The Sword of Persia (London, 2006) and was presented in early form at the 6th Biennial Conference of Iranian Studies, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 3–5 August 2006.

References

1 The need for a specialised study of Nader Shah's army was noted in V.J. Parry and M.E. Yapp, War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London/Oxford, 1975), 24. The need was partly met by Perry's article (J.R. Perry “Army IV—Afshar and Zand” in Encyclopaedia Iranica 2: 506–508), but new source material has become available since that time.

2 Rudi Matthee, “Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads: Firearms and Artillery in Safavid Iran” in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. Charles Melville (London, 1996). See also Rohan D'souza,“Crisis before the Fall: Some Speculations on the Decline of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals,” Social Scientist 30 (Sep. 2002): 18–19 (though I have some reservations about the wider argument there). For the Safavid army generally, see V. Minorsky, ed. and trans., Tadhkirat al-Muluk (Cambridge, 1943), 30–36 and Haneda “Army III—Safavid” in Encyclopaedia Iranica 2:503–506.

3 Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago, 1974).

4 Paul Luft, Iran unter Schah ‘Abbas II. (1642–1666), PhD dissertation, Goettingen, 1968, 35–36.

5 V. Minorsky, ed. and trans., Tadhkirat al-Muluk (Cambridge, 1943), 32–34.

6 V. Minorsky, trans. and ed., Tadhkirat al-Muluk (Cambridge, 1943), 33 asserted that the artillery commander died in 1655 and Abbas II abolished the artillery corps altogether. Luft showed that the artillery corps in some form probably survived until the reign of Shah Soleiman (1666–1694); Luft, Iran unter Schah ‘Abbas II, 36–38.

7 Rudi Matthee, “Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads: Firearms and Artillery in Safavid Iran,” in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. Charles Melville (London, 1996), 410.

8 The artillery corps had been re-established, though the part it played in the battle was less than glorious (Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 48–49).

9 For the Lezges, see the “Lettre du Pere Bachoud, Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jesus en Perse, Ecrite de Chamakie le 25 Septembre 1721” in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses Ecrites des Missions Etrangeres (Paris, 1780) 4: 118; for the Afshars and Kurds of Khorasan, see Mirza Mohammad Mahdi Astarabadi, Jahangosha-ye Naderi; translated into French by Sir William Jones as the Histoire de Nader Chah (London, 1770) (JN); (original Persian text, ed. Abdollah Anvar, [Tehran, 1377 /1998]), 1: 12. The Lezges, close to the Ottoman frontier, would have been influenced by the greater emphasis on firearms in the Ottoman military system.

10 Basile Vatatzes, Persica: Histoire de Chah-Nadir, ed. N. Iorga (Bucharest, 1939), 133. The importance of this early biography of Nader, which for many years was thought to have been lost, is explored in my article “Basile Vatatzes and His History of Nader Shah” in Oriente Moderno 2 (2006), 331–343.

11 See, for example, Abraham of Crete, The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete (CAC), ed. and trans., G.A. Bournoutian (Costa Mesa, 1999), 118.

12 Abraham of Crete, The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete, 118. It is evident from the description of their armor that Abraham of Crete was primarily describing Nader's heavy cavalry here (for the light cavalry, see note 17 below). The description fits the soldiers in the images painted in the 1750s to accompany an early text of Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi's Jahangosha-ye Naderi—published with an edition of that text by Soroush and Negar in Tehran in 1991 with an introduction by Abdolali Adib Barumand.

13 Mohammad Kazem Marvi Yazdi, Alam Ara-ye Naderi, 3rd ed., ed. Mohammad Amin Riyahi (Tehran, 1374/1995), 887–888.

14 In the intervening years, the army grew, fluctuating according to the flow of recruits, the necessities of garrisoning and the special requirements of particular campaigns; 100,000 fighting troops by 1733 (Abraham of Crete, The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete, 118, estimated between 120,000 and 180,000 in 1736); 150,000 by 1741. The campaign of 1743 represented a supreme effort, but the 375,000 total is plausible. Other sources give the main field army in the campaign of 1743 as 200,000 strong, which given the number of detachments sent to occupy the other towns of Ottoman Iraq, fits the overall total (for example, von Hammer, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches (Pest, 1831) 8:47 ‘…ein Heer von hunderttausend Persern, von eben so vielen Kurden und Arabern verstaerkt …’ ). See also note 18 below.

15 Jonas Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade Over the Caspian Sea…to which are added The Revolutions of Persia during the Present Century, with the Particular History of the Great Usurper Nadir Kouli (London 1753), 1: 253

16 The light cavalry were described by a Frenchman (De Voulton) who called them loutchis (probably misheard for the Persian luti, signifying a young, unruly youth). He saw them in India three years earlier: they wore the four-cornered hat, the kulah-e Naderi, eighteen inches high, with a goatskin or sheepskin wound round it; a woollen cloak on their shoulders; an open shirt that left the chest bare; short breeches; and leather boots. Each of them was armed with a sword, a musket, and an axe. The description is quoted in S Subrahmanyam, “Un Grand Derangement: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740–1800,” Journal of Early Modern History (Leiden, 2000): 4: 358 and Laurence Lockhart's article “De Voulton's Noticia,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4 (February 1926): 234; and also appears in the letter of Père Saignes—“Lettre du Père Saignes de Chandernagore, 10 Fevrier 1740” in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses Ecrites des Missions Etrangeres (Paris, 1780), 4: 230–277 which seems to derive from the same source. Saignes' version gives the horsemen a shield in addition, and says their coats were green, yellow or red.

17 Robert W. Olson, The Siege of Mosul and Ottoman-Persian Relations 1718–1743 (Bloomington, 1975), 122–124 and 165 (quoting Ottoman sources) shows how the army of 375,000 was divided up into subordinate or smaller corps for the campaign that followed.

18 Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Newton Abbot, 1974), 165. The Austrian army was 177,500 strong in 1756; the Prussian, 143,000 strong.

19 Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade, 1: 251–3.

20 The best description of these troops comes from the account by Abraham of Crete's account of Nader's coronation in 1736—“They held their very large firearms in their hands. Each of the guns weighed more than fifteen okka. They held their arms with the barrels pointing upwards. Half of each barrel was decorated with golden rings, the other half with silver rings. They leaned on the guns as if they were rods. On their heads they wore felt hats… [on which] there were the words Allah-yallah written in three ways.” (CAC, 78) The weight of the weapons would come on this basis (an okka was equivalent to 2.83lb) to about 19.25 kg (42.5 lb). A comparable eighteenth-century weapon from Persia in the Bern Historical Museum (Moser collection) weighs 27.5 kg (see Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 210 for illustration). This is heavy for an infantry weapon, but feasible if the jazayerchis were mounted on ponies or mules for strategic movement. Hanway and the VOC sources corroborate the use of very heavy muskets.

21 For example, The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete, 39.

22 Von Hammer 1831, 8: 48. Lockhart seems to have mistaken ‘hundert sechzehn’ for ‘hundert sechszig’ because he gives the number of cannons as 160 (L. Lockhart, Nadir Shah [London, 1938], 230).

23 See Barumand's edition of Astarabadi's Jahangosha-ye Naderi, 96, 322.

24 See The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete, 39 where the chronicler makes a clear distinction between Nader's field artillery and his zanburaks, saying also that the Persians fired their cannon more rapidly than the Ottomans. Vatatzes' account of the second battle of Baghavard, a decade later, says that the Persian artillery outclassed the Ottoman there too (Vatatzes, Persica, 283–284).

25 See, for example, Vatatzes, Persica, 282–3.

26 Quoted in Bellamy, Christopher, The Evolution of Modern Land Warfare: Theory and Practice (London, 1990), 214Google Scholar.

27 Willem Floor, Nader Shah (forthcoming).

28 For an extended discussion of Nader's religious policy, see Tucker, Ernest, “Nadir Shah and the Ja'fari Madhhab Reconsidered,” Iranian Studies 27, no. 1–4 (1994): 163–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his recent book Nadir Shah's Quest for Legitimacy in Post-Safavid Iran (Florida, 2006).

29 Most notably at the siege of Kandahar in 1738; see Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 184–5.

30 See Perry, J.R., “Forced Migration in Iran During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Iranian Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 199–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Astarabadi, Jahangosha-ye Naderi, 1: 162.

32 Vatatzes, Basile, Voyages de Basile Vatace en Europe et en Asie, ed. Legrand, E. (Paris, 1886), 223Google Scholar. See also Axworthy on Vatatzes in Oriente Moderno, 332–333 and note.

33 For further discussion, see Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 83–4. See also Gommans, Jos, “Indian Warfare and Afghan Innovation During the Eighteenth Century,” in Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000–1800, ed. Gommans, J.L. and Kolff, D.H.A. (New Delhi, 2001)Google Scholar. It is likely that many of the practices examined by Gommans (notably the use of short, blunderbuss-style cavalry carbines) originated in the army of Nader Shah, in which Ahmad Shah Durrani had served as commander of the Afghan contingent.

34 Abraham of Crete, The Chronicle of Abraham of Crete, 118.

35 Bayly, C.A., Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London, 1989), 23Google Scholar; Issawi, C., The Economic History of Iran 1800–1914 (Chicago, 1971), 20Google Scholar; Floor, W., The Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden, 2000), 2–3Google Scholar.

36 Willem Floor, “Dutch Trade in Afsharid Persia (1730–1753)” (article, forthcoming).

37 Axworthy, , The Sword of Persia (London, 2006), 169Google Scholar.

38 For the reforms, see Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 180, and Lambton, A.K.S., “The Tribal Resurgence and the Decline of the Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in 18th Century Islamic History, ed. Naff, Thomas and Owen, Roger (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1977), 123–7Google Scholar. Nader also confiscated, as an act of state policy, a large proportion of the over-expanded religious endowments (awqaf) that have been regarded as a major cause of the progressive enfeeblement of the previous Safavid dynasty (see Sefatgol, Mansur, “The Question of Awqaf Under the Afsharids,” in Studia Iranica: Cahiers vol 21/Materiaux pour l'Histoire Economique du Monde Iranien, ed. Gyselen, Rika and Szuppe, Maria [Paris, 1999]Google Scholar and Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London, 1989). One element that is missing is the expansion of a system of financial credit to permit large state loans for military purposes, as was important in the career of Wallenstein, in the development of English military and naval power, and in the military history of France in the eighteenth century (ending with disaster in the French Revolution when the state's insolvency brought collapse). But the significance in the Afsharid regime of Taqi Khan Shirazi, Nader's financial adviser among other things, and the prospect of expanded trade with India, raise the possibility that even that could have emerged in Persia in time.

39 Peter the Great ruled from 1682 to 1725 (forty-three years), and most of the modernizing reforms we associate with him took place in the latter part of his reign. Even if we include the years of his regency after 1732, Nader ruled for only fifteen years. The beginnings of administrative reform were there, and indications of a desire to protect trade. My argument is not that Nader had a grand plan for the modernization of Persia; rather, it is that, as happened in Europe, these things could have happened as a result of a process set in motion by his military innovations. But there was not enough time, and the picture is muddied by the contrary effects of Nader's avaricious derangement in the last five years of his life.