Nader Shah: The Afsharid Conqueror Who Sacked Delhi

Nader Shah was the soldier who rescued Iran from collapse after the fall of the Safavid dynasty and then made himself its king. Born in Khorasan around 1688, he rose from tribal raider to commander of the Safavid armies, was crowned shah in March 1736 and led campaigns from the Caucasus to Delhi, which he sacked in 1739. His reign ended with his assassination in 1747, and his empire broke apart almost immediately.

Early life

Nader was born, most probably in 1688, into the Qirqlu clan of the Afshar, a Turkic-speaking tribe settled in Khorasan in north-eastern Iran. His family was of modest standing. According to tradition he and his mother were captured by Uzbek raiders as a boy, though the details are uncertain.

As a young man he served local governors and gathered a band of followers, gaining a reputation as a fighter and leader in the disorder of Khorasan. His original name was Nader Qoli (“servant of the Wonderful”, that is, of God).

Much of what is known about Nader comes from his official historian, Mirza Mahdi Khan Astarabadi, whose chronicle presents him in heroic terms, and from European merchants, missionaries and envoys who met him. Modern biographers such as Laurence Lockhart and Michael Axworthy have combined these sources while warning that both can be partial.

Rise to power under Tahmasp II

In 1722 Afghan forces under Mahmud Hotaki captured the Safavid capital in the Fall of Isfahan. Russia and the Ottoman Empire seized Iran’s northern and western provinces. The surviving Safavid prince, Tahmasp II, held only parts of the north.

In 1726 Nader joined Tahmasp’s cause and soon became his leading general, taking the title Tahmasp Qoli Khan. In 1729 he crushed the Afghans of Ashraf Hotaki at Mihmandust near Damghan and again at Murchakhort, north of Isfahan, retaking the capital. A third victory near Shiraz in early 1730 ended Afghan rule in Iran.

The partnership between Nader and Tahmasp was uneasy from the start. Tahmasp resented his general’s growing power, and Nader had already removed rivals at court, including Tahmasp’s previous commander, Fath Ali Khan Qajar, who was executed in 1726. Nader also secured his home base by taking Herat from the Abdali Afghans in a series of campaigns between 1729 and 1732.

Nader rebuilt the army around disciplined infantry armed with muskets and a strong force of cavalry, and he paid great attention to artillery. His troops were drawn from many groups, including Afshars and other Turkmen tribes, Kurds, Afghans, Uzbeks and Persians.

Wars with the Ottomans and Russia

Nader next turned on the Ottomans. In 1730 he recaptured Hamadan and Tabriz, news of which helped provoke the Patrona Halil revolt in Istanbul. While Nader was away in the east, Tahmasp II led his own campaign, lost, and in 1732 signed a treaty giving up territory. Nader repudiated it, deposed Tahmasp in 1732 and placed Tahmasp’s infant son on the throne as Abbas III, ruling as regent.

In 1733 Nader besieged Baghdad but was defeated near Samarra in July by an Ottoman army under the veteran commander Topal Osman Pasha. He rebuilt his forces within months and defeated and killed Topal Osman later that year. In June 1735 he won a major victory at Yeghevard (Baghavard) near Yerevan, which led the Ottomans to give up their gains in the Caucasus.

Russia, under the treaties of Resht (1732) and Ganja (1735), returned the Caspian provinces taken during Peter the Great’s campaign of 1722–1723. By 1735 Iran’s frontiers had been largely restored.

Coronation on the Mughan plain

In early 1736 Nader summoned leading officials, tribal chiefs and clerics to a great assembly on the Mughan plain, in today’s Azerbaijan. They were invited to choose a ruler, and the expected result followed: Nader was proclaimed shah in March 1736, ending the Safavid dynasty in all but name.

Nader set conditions for accepting the throne. He wanted Iranians to abandon practices offensive to Sunnis, and he proposed that Twelver Shi’ism be treated as a fifth school of Sunni law, the Ja’fari school. The proposal aimed to make peace with the Ottomans and to unite his mixed Sunni and Shia army, but it was never accepted by the Ottoman authorities and had little lasting effect in Iran.

Nader also moved the centre of power away from Isfahan to Mashhad in his home province of Khorasan, near the shrine of Imam Reza. The young Abbas III was sent to Khorasan, where he died a few years later, and the Safavid family lost its last hold on the throne.

The Indian campaign

In 1737 Nader besieged Kandahar, the last stronghold of the Hotaki Afghans, which fell in March 1738. Many Afghans, including Abdali (later Durrani) Pashtuns, entered his army. He then crossed into Mughal territory, taking Kabul in June 1738 and advancing through the Khyber Pass and across the Punjab.

On 24 February 1739 he defeated the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah at the Battle of Karnal, north of Delhi. Nader entered Delhi in March. When a rumour of his death led to attacks on Persian soldiers, he ordered a massacre on 22 March in which an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people were killed.

Nader left Delhi in May 1739 with an immense treasure, including the jewelled Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Muhammad Shah was restored to his throne but had to cede the lands west of the Indus. The booty was so great that Nader remitted taxes in Iran for three years.

Nader did not try to annex Delhi or rule India directly. His aim was wealth and security on his eastern frontier rather than conquest, and he returned to Iran through the Punjab and Sindh, forcing the ruler of Sindh to submit in early 1740.

Later wars, cruelty and assassination

In 1740 Nader invaded Central Asia. The khan of Bukhara submitted, and the khanate of Khiva was conquered. Nader’s power now reached from the Caucasus to the Amu Darya and the Indus.

His campaigns in Daghestan from 1741 onwards were a costly failure against mountain peoples who avoided pitched battle. A new war with the Ottomans from 1743 brought sieges of Mosul and Kars and a victory near Yerevan in 1745, but no lasting gains. The Treaty of Kerden in 1746 largely confirmed the earlier frontier.

Nader also tried to build a navy in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, buying ships and setting up bases at Bushehr and elsewhere. The effort achieved some successes, such as campaigns in Oman, but did not survive him.

In 1741 Nader survived an assassination attempt in the forests of Mazandaran. Suspecting his eldest son, Reza Qoli Mirza, he had him blinded in 1742, and afterwards expressed bitter regret. From then on his rule grew harsher. Heavy taxes to pay his armies provoked revolts, which he suppressed with mass executions and towers of skulls.

By 1747 even his closest officers feared him. On the night of 19–20 June 1747, at Fathabad near Quchan in Khorasan, a group of officers led by commanders of his guard, including Saleh Khan and Nader’s kinsman Muhammad Qoli Khan, broke into his tent and killed him.

Aftermath and legacy

Nader’s nephew Ali Qoli took the throne as Adel Shah, but the Afsharid state fell apart within months. Ahmad Khan Abdali, commander of Nader’s Afghan contingent, took part of the treasure and founded the Durrani Empire, the basis of modern Afghanistan. In western Iran, Karim Khan Zand eventually established control, while Nader’s blind grandson Shahrokh ruled Khorasan from Mashhad until 1796.

By the numbers

Nader’s achievement was military: he reunited Iran after the Safavid collapse and briefly made it the strongest power in western Asia. Yet he built no lasting institutions, and the cost of his wars fell heavily on his subjects. Much of the wealth taken from India was stored in the fortress of Kalat in Khorasan and scattered after his death rather than invested in the country. Iranian historians have long viewed him with mixed feelings, admiring the restorer of the country’s borders while recording his cruelty.

The Indian campaign also had far-reaching effects. It exposed the weakness of the Mughal Empire, encouraging Maratha, Afghan and later British expansion in India, and transferred famous treasures such as the Koh-i-Noor out of the subcontinent.

Timeline

• c. 1688: Nader is born in Khorasan.
• 1726: He enters the service of Tahmasp II.
• 1729, November: He defeats the Afghans and retakes Isfahan.
• 1732: Nader deposes Tahmasp II and installs the infant Abbas III.
• 1735, June: Victory over the Ottomans at Yeghevard.
• 1736, March: Nader is proclaimed shah on the Mughan plain.
• 1738, March: Kandahar falls after a long siege.
• 1739, 24 February: Nader defeats the Mughals at Karnal; Delhi is sacked in March.
• 1740: Campaigns against Bukhara and Khiva.
• 1747, 19-20 June: Nader is assassinated near Quchan.

Why it matters

Nader Shah saved Iran from partition and showed the military power a reunited Iran could wield, while his sack of Delhi hastened the decline of the Mughal Empire. The rapid collapse of his state after 1747 shaped the emergence of modern Afghanistan and the political map of Iran and India in the later 18th century.