At its height it controlled modern-day Iran, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, Qatar, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and parts of Iraq, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the Persian Gulf and the North Caucasus (Dagestan).

[8][17] The idea of the Guarded Domains illustrated a feeling of territorial and political uniformity in a society where the Persian language, culture, monarchy, and Shia Islam became integral elements of the developing national identity.

[18] The concept presumably had started to form under the Mongol Ilkhanate in the late 13th-century, a period in which regional actions, trade, written culture, and partly Shia Islam, contributed to the establishment of the early modern Persianate world.

[19] Nader Shah was born (as Nadr Qoli) into a humble semi-nomadic family from the Afshar tribe of Khorasan,[20] where he became a local warlord.

[21] His path to power began when the Ghilzai Mahmud Hotak overthrew the weakened and disintegrated Safavid shah Soltan Hoseyn in 1722.

While he was away in the east fighting the Ghilzais, Tahmasp waged a disastrous campaign in the Caucasus which allowed the Ottomans to retake most of their lost territory in the west.

Four years later, after he had recaptured most of the lost Iranian lands, Nader felt confident enough to have himself proclaimed shah in his own right at a ceremony on the Mughan plain.

Ashraf fled and Nader finally entered Isfahan, handing it over to Tahmasp in December and plundering the city to pay his army.

At the same time, the Abdali Afghans rebelled and besieged Mashhad, forcing Nader to suspend his campaign and save his brother, Ebrahim.

He ended up losing all of Nader's recent gains to the Ottomans, and signed a treaty ceding Georgia and Armenia in exchange for Tabriz.

Nader suggested to his closest intimates, after a hunting party on the Mughan plain (presently split between Azerbaijan and Iran), that he should be proclaimed the new shah in place of the young Abbas III.

[32] The small group of close intimates, Nader's friends, included Tahmasp Khan Jalayer and Hasan-Ali Beg Bestami.

[32] Nader approved of the proposal, and the writers of the chancellery, which included the court historian Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi, were instructed with sending out orders to the military, religious and nobility of the nation to summon at the plains.

[33] In the same month of January 1736, Nader held a qoroltai (a grand meeting in the tradition of Genghis Khan and Timur) on the Mughan plain.

Nader was crowned Shah of Iran on March 8, 1736, a date his astrologers had chosen as being especially propitious,[35] in attendance of an "exceptionally large assembly" composed of the military, religious and nobility of the nation, as well as the Ottoman ambassador Ali Pasha.

This once powerful Muslim state to the east was falling apart as the nobles became increasingly disobedient and the Hindu Maratha Empire made inroads on its territory from the south-west.

Nader used the pretext of his Afghan enemies taking refuge in India to cross the border and invade the militarily weak but still extremely wealthy Mughal empire.

[38] Following the defeat of Mughal forces priorly, he then advanced deeper into India, crossing the Indus River before the end of the year.

[42][43] However, the remaining plunder seized from India was so valuable that Nader stopped taxation in Iran for a period of three years following his return.

After his return from India, Nader fell out with his eldest son Reza Qoli Mirza, who had ruled Iran during his father's absence.

Having heard a rumour that Nader was dead, he had prepared to seize the throne by having the Safavid royal captives, Tahmasp and his nine-year-old son Abbas III, executed.

Nader was not pleased with the young man's behaviour and humiliated him by removing him from the post of viceroy, but he took him on his expedition to conquer territory in Transoxiana.

[48] The military forces of the Afsharid dynasty of Iran had their origins in the relatively obscure yet bloody inter-factional violence in Khorasan during the collapse of the Safavid state.

The small band of warriors under local warlord Nader Qoli of the Turkomen Afshar tribe in north-east Iran were no more than a few hundred men.

Although there were numerous Afsharid pretenders to the throne, (amongst many other), who attempted to regain control of the entire country, Iran remained a fractured political entity in turmoil until the campaigns of Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar toward the very end of the eighteenth century reunified the nation.

[56] Under the successive Qajar dynasty, Iran managed to restore Iranian suzerainty over the Georgian regions, until they would be irrevocably lost in the course of the 19th century, to Imperial Russia.

[58] Under the early Qajars, these territories in Transcaucasia and Dagestan would all be fully reincorporated into Iran, but eventually permanently lost as well (alongside Georgia), in the course of the 19th century to Imperial Russia through the two Russo-Persian Wars.

Nader was brought up as a Shi'a [61] but later sympathised and desired unity with the Sunni[62] faith as he gained power and began to push into the Ottoman Empire.

[59] Nader hoped that "Ja'farism" would be accepted as a fifth school (mazhab) of Sunni Islam and that the Ottomans would allow its adherents to go on the hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, which was within their territory.

[29] Nader's other primary aim in his religious reforms was to weaken the Safavids further since radical Shi'a Islam had always been a major element in support for the dynasty.