How to Maintain Persian Preeminence?

I mean that's just the problem isn't it? They require enormous structural reforms, but if that could be done the Safavids could lead Persia to greatness.

Well, that is true enough. However, seeing as the dynasty was founded by a drunkard religious fanatic (evidently he didn't care very much for the bit where Muhammad prohibited drinking fermented grape juice) who is on record as being one of the nastiest men in Persian history (and when that history includes Tamerlane, Agha Muhammad Qajar and Khosrau II, that is sayin' something) I doubt that the dynasty could build the institutions and traditions it needed to do better.

Actually, the real divergence between Europe and the Middle East began in the Middle Ages.

I am very dubious of this idea - to me it seems that any early divergence of this sort is more the product of cherry-picking data, rather than being the product of a real divergence before the mid 1700s.

The more I've read into the matter, the more it looks like the divergence is a later event, and mostly caused by the sudden collapse of populations across the Middle East, North Africa and the Indus-Ganges basin in the mid 1700s.

fasquardon
 
Well, that is true enough. However, seeing as the dynasty was founded by a drunkard religious fanatic (evidently he didn't care very much for the bit where Muhammad prohibited drinking fermented grape juice) who is on record as being one of the nastiest men in Persian history (and when that history includes Tamerlane, Agha Muhammad Qajar and Khosrau II, that is sayin' something) I doubt that the dynasty could build the institutions and traditions it needed to do better.



I am very dubious of this idea - to me it seems that any early divergence of this sort is more the product of cherry-picking data, rather than being the product of a real divergence before the mid 1700s.

The more I've read into the matter, the more it looks like the divergence is a later event, and mostly caused by the sudden collapse of populations across the Middle East, North Africa and the Indus-Ganges basin in the mid 1700s.

fasquardon

What's so bad about Khosrau II?
 

Deleted member 1487

The more I've read into the matter, the more it looks like the divergence is a later event, and mostly caused by the sudden collapse of populations across the Middle East, North Africa and the Indus-Ganges basin in the mid 1700s.

fasquardon
Do you have any info about that? What caused it?
 
What's so bad about Khosrau II?

Quite alot it seems. The short version is that he was a capricious tyrant who would (and did, regularly) betray friends, family and allies for the sake of his own vanity projects (mostly conquering land just for the sake of conquering), he also suffered from Napoleon disease (didn't know when to stop), which meant that every conquest he made was swiftly lost. He created the power vacuum in Arabia into which Muhammad stepped and weakened Persia enough that within another two generations the Arabs had conquered his entire empire.

In short, one of the men who created the modern world as we know it. But not for good reasons.

Do you have any info about that? What caused it?

Apparently it is very mysterious - at least to English-language historians. I've run across some sources that speculate about it being caused by Cholera. But mostly it turns up as this unexplained yet significant discrepancy in the population statistics that happens to occur at the same time that the economy of the Persian and Ottoman Empires enter a nose-dive and experience a significant weakening of governing institutions.

I would love to read what Arabic, Iranian and Turkish historians write about this period in their own languages. Often these mysteries simply exist because of Anglocentric neglect resulting in no-one going to the well-maintained public archives that may exist and asking to look at the source documents...

fasquardon
 
Top