Custodial politics and princely governance in sixteenth-century Safavid Iran

Abstract

This chapter explores the roots of the Turco-Mongol political practice and how it was understood and implemented by Shah Esma‘il and his successors during the sixteenth century. The Safavid dynasty began its political transformation and, within ten years, Esma‘il was balancing his status as a mystical harbinger of the Apocalypse with more temporal claims to kingly sovereignty which was committed to stability, order, justice, revenue collection, and some degree of centralized authority. It was the Turkish Seljuk dynasty that first systemized the use of atabegs, and as Claude Cahen and Amalia Levanoni have both noted, this institution was particular to Seljuks and successive Turco-Islamic states; Lambton points to the possibility of it being an ancient Turkoman practice, but there is no existing evidence of this. Hitherto, Herat had been considered the only governorship of suitable rank for a Safavid prince. One of the first non-Herati appointments was made in 1538, when Alqas Mirza was named governor of Shirvan.