Persia

PERSIA

Persia is a mountainous region linking the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia (Modern Iraq) to India in the east and the Eurasian steppe in the north. in a natural commercial position, cities had sprung up there already in the fourth century BC. The most important of these was Susa, capital of Elam, which conquered Babylonia and was itself conquered on several occasions. In the 700s, the Medes, a tribe from northern Iran achieved regional primacy, only to be overthrown by one of their vassals, Cyrus from the Persian tribe around 550. His Achaemenid Empire took over the Medean territories and, in short order, conquered Babylonia, Lydia, Bactria, the Indus Valley and Egypt; essentially the entire civilised world. The next century they twice invaded Greece and twice failed to conquer it, but they nevertheless enjoyed general overlordship over the world, with a few wobbles, until Alexander the Great paid back the favour with his own invasion in 334 BC.

Iran and its surrounds

Within four years the Achaemenids were gone. A decade later, so was their conqueror. Civil war followed, and one of Alexander's former lieutenants, Seleukos, established control over Persia. His empire was largely a continuation of that of the Achaemenids but a largely Greek elite and a stronger western focus. The empire faced enemies on all sides, becoming embroiled in wars with the Hellenistic kingdoms in Egypt, Anatolia and Macedon, while the eastern territories were slowly picked off by the Parthians, a nomadic tribe from what is now Turkmenistan. Their decentralised kingdom controlled most of the region from around 150 BC, and retained control, despite constant challenges from the Romans, until a rebellion by the Persians in AD 224 rapidly toppled them.

The rebels established the Sassanian Empire, which presided over the second Persian golden age. During this period, the Zoroastrian religion was promoted as the state faith, and reached something like its modern form. The Sassanians clashed constantly with the Romans, and their successors the Byzantines, directly and through their Arab buffer kingdoms, with very little success for either side. In AD 602, Khosrau II changed this, invading and overrunning the entire Byzantine East and putting the Roman capital, Constantinople, under siege. The Arab buffer kingdoms, no longer necessary, were annexed. The war continued until 628, when the Romans struck back and the status quo was restored. Eight years later, in 636, the Arabs inspired by the new religion of Islam, invaded; the buffer kingdoms which should have given warning of invasion were gone and the Sassanids were too exhausted from their Roman war to put up much of a fight.

The new Muslims, soon fell into civil war, and the victors, the Umayyads based themselves at Damascus in Syria. They spent many years slowly putting down Persian rebellions from afar, as their armies expanded further and further afield. After a century, one of these Persian rebellions, based around the losers of civil war, overthrew the Umayyads and established the Abbasid Caliphate. This dynasty, based in Baghdad, developed a very Persian flavour and presided over an Islamic golden age in which great strides were made in art, poetry, literature, science and mathematics. With time, though, its governors acquired more and more independence. Tabaristan drifted into independence first, and then most of Persia under the Tahirids from 820, the Saffarids from 873 and the Samanids from 893. From 934, even western Persia, which included the Abbasid Capital, was under the de facto control of the Buyids.

These new Emirates all continued to recognise the Abbasid Caliph as a nominal ruler, but soon ran into trouble. They made use of Turkish slave soldiers, rather than the ambitious powerhungry Arab nobility. Inevitably, once these slave soldiers realised they were the sole instrument by which the rulers enforced theirr will, they rose up and took control for themselves. In Persia, the slave soldiers initially ruled from behind the Samanid throne, but were expelled, becoming the Ghaznavids. From 963 they campaigned against the Samanids, conquering most of Persia and much of India. In 1040, however, the Seljuq Turks, their distant cousins from the steppes invaded, seizing their Persian lands and control of the Caliphate and driving them into India. The Seljuqs, meanwhile, added Anatolia to their domains and promptly disintegrated. The Ghurids replaced them in the East from the 1150's, only to be themselves pushed into India by Khwarezm, which added Persia to its Central Asian domains in the early 1200s.

Khwarezm looked to be on its way to great things, when in 1218 an envoy arrived from the Central Asian steppes. Suspicious, the Shah had him executed. The envoy's master turned out to be the great Genghis Khan of the Mongols, who utterly destroyed Khwarezm in revenge. His son, Helugu, fervently opposed to Islam, continued the Mongol advance into Persia itself, culminating in the Sack of Baghdad in 1258. His successors, the Il-Khanate, discovered that ruling, especially as outsiders, was far more difficult than conquering. Ironically, they became both Muslim and Persianised before collapsing in 1337, becoming puppets of several competing dynasties: the Jalayrids, Chupanids, Muzaffarids and others. They were swept away in the 1380s by the fearsome Tamerlane, who hoped to restore the Mongol empire. His inept successors, the Timurids, saw these hopes rapidly dashed, but eventually came to rule all India as the Mughals.

Persia was fought over by the Timurids, the Kara-Qoyunlu Turks and the Aq-Qoyunlu Turks for a century until, in 1501, a Sufi Master rose up in the northwest and conquered Persia, establishing the Safavids. These firmly established Shi'ism as the dominant Islamic sect of Persia and became locked in a struggle with the Ottomans, which mirrored that with the Romans, so many years before (But Persia fared worse this time; Iraq soon passed into Ottoman hands). Constant nomadic raids and the decline of the Silk Road, after the European discovery of sea routes to China, led to their decline, in 1736 they were replaced by the Afsharids, who successfully invaded India, but were themselves replaced by the Zands from 1750.

The Qajars took over from them in 1794. On the one hand, they presided over the formation of the modern state of Iran, on the other hand this mostly consisted of being humiliated by the Russians in the north and by the British in the south. Strange, subversive ideas, like democracy entered their subjects' minds. Oil was discovered and, just to be safe, the European powers occupied Persia during World War I, leaving the Qajars, who proved powerless to prevent the occupation, deeply unpopular. In 1925, they were overthrown by the Pahlavi Dynasty, under whom Persia became Iran and ever more oil was discovered. Their Iran was a close ally of America in the Cold War, fiercely secular and despotic. In 1979 the people rose up in the Islamic Revolution founding the modern Republic of Iran which is hostile to America, fiercely Islamic and still despotic.