[2][10] The legacy of the Safavid Empire was also the revival of Iran as an economic stronghold between East and West, the establishment of an efficient state and bureaucracy based upon "checks and balances", its architectural innovations, and patronage for fine arts.

[2] He caused sectarian tensions in the Middle East when he destroyed the tombs of the Abbasid caliphs, the Sunni Imam Abu Hanifa an-Nu'man, and the Sufi Muslim ascetic Abdul Qadir Gilani in 1508.

His mother Martha, better known as Halima Begum, was the daughter of Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the Turkoman Aq Qoyunlu dynasty, by his Pontic Greek wife Theodora Megale Komnene, better known as Despina Khatun.

[6][7][8][9][29] In 700/1301, Safi al-Din assumed the leadership of the Zahediyeh, a significant Sufi order in Gilan, from his spiritual master and father-in-law Zahed Gilani.

[30] In 1488, the father of Ismail was killed in a battle at Tabasaran against the forces of the Shirvanshah Farrukh Yassar and his overlord, the Aq Qoyunlu, a Turkic tribal federation which controlled most of Iran.

Ismail's rise to power was made possible by the Turkoman tribes of Anatolia and Azerbaijan, who formed the most important part of the Qizilbash movement.

[31] In the summer of 1500, Ismail rallied about 7,000 Qizilbash troops at Erzincan, including members of the Ustajlu, Rumlu, Takkalu, Dhu'l-Qadar, Afshar, Qajar, and Varsaq.

[37] The successful conquest had alarmed the ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu, Alvand, who subsequently proceeded north from Tabriz, and crossed the Aras River in order to challenge the Safavid forces, and both sides met at the battle of Sharur in which Ismail's army came out victorious despite being outnumbered by four to one.

[38] He appointed his former guardian and mentor Husayn Beg Shamlu as the vakil (vicegerent) of the empire and the commander-in-chief (amir al-umara) of the Qizilbash army.

961/1554), a poet and bureaucrat of early Safavid era, states that he had heard from several witnesses that Shah Ismail's enthronement took place in Tabriz immediately after the battle of Sharur on 1 Jumada al-Thani 907 / 22 December 1501, making Ḥayātī's book entitled Tārīkh (1554) the only known narrative source to give the exact date of Shah Ismail's ascent to the throne.

[50] By 1510, he had conquered the whole of Iran (including Shirvan), southern Dagestan (with its important city of Derbent), Mesopotamia, Armenia, Khorasan, and Eastern Anatolia, and had made the Georgian kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti his vassals.

The Uzbek ruler, Muhammad Shaybani, was caught and killed trying to escape the battle, and the shah had his skull made into a jewelled drinking goblet.

[59] The Venetian ambassador Caterino Zeno describes the events as follows: The monarch [Selim], seeing the slaughter, began to retreat, and to turn about, and was about to fly, when Sinan, coming to the rescue at the time of need, caused the artillery to be brought up and fired on both the janissaries [sic] and the Persians.

The Persian horses hearing the thunder of those infernal machines, scattered and divided themselves over the plain, not obeying their riders bit or spur anymore, from the terror they were in ...

[60]He also adds that: If the Turks had been beaten in the battle of Chaldiran, the power of Ismail would have become greater than that of Tamerlane, as by the fame alone of such a victory he would have made himself absolute lord of the East.

[62] He retired to his palace and never again participated in a military campaign,[63] and left the affairs of the state to his vizier Mirza Shah Husayn,[64] who became his close friend and Nadeem (i.e. drinking companion).

[65] Mirza Shah Husayn was assassinated in 1523 by a group of Qizilbash officers, after which Ismail appointed Zakariya's son Jalal al-Din Mohammad Tabrizi as his new vizier.

The tribal rivalries between the Qizilbash which had ceased temporarily before the defeat at Chaldiran resurfaced intensely immediately after his death and led to ten years of civil war (930–40/1524–33) until Shah Tahmasp regained control of the affairs of the state.

[66] During Ismail's reign, mainly in the late 1510s, the first steps for the Habsburg–Persian alliance were taken with Charles V and Ludwig II of Hungary being in contact with a view of combining against the common Ottoman Turkish enemy.

When he reached Lahijan in 1494, he gifted Mirza Ali Karkiya a copy of the medieval Persian epic Shahnameh (Book of Kings) with over 300 illustrations.

From an Iranian perspective, Afrasiyab's kingdom of Turan was commonly identified with the land of the Turks, in particular with the Uzbek Khanate of Bukhara in Central Asia.

[70] Before his defeat at Chaldiran in 1514, Ismail not only identified himself as the reincarnation of Alid figures such as Ali and Husayn, but also as the personification of the divine light of investiture (farr) that had radiated in the ancient Iranian shahs Darius, Khosrow I Anushirvan (r. 531–579), Shapur I (r. 240–270), since the era of the Achaemenids and Sasanians.

The cultural aspects of the Safavids soon became even more numerous, as Ismail and his successors included and promoted Kurds, Arabs, Georgians, Circassians, and Armenians into their imperial program.

[72] Moreover, the conquests of Genghis Khan and Timur had merged Mongolian and Chagatai aspects into the Persian bureaucratic culture, terminology, seals, and symbols.

[77][a] Stephen Dale describes the language used by Ismail in his well-known propagandistic verse directed at the Turkoman tribesmen in Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia as the same precursor of Azeri Turkish (i.e. proto-Azeri) that he was able to converse in.

[79] According to Encyclopædia Iranica, "Ismail was a skillful poet who used prevalent themes and images in lyric and didactic-religious poetry with ease and some degree of originality".

[80] After defeating Muhammad Shaybani's Uzbeks, Ismail asked Hatefi, a famous poet from Jam (Khorasan), to write a Shahnameh-like epic about his victories and his newly established dynasty.

[15][82] Along with the poet Imadaddin Nasimi, Khatā'ī is considered to be among the first proponents of using a simpler Azerbaijani language in verse that would appeal to a broader audience.

Increasingly, members of the religious class, particularly the mujtahids and the seyyeds, gained full ownership of these lands, and, according to contemporary historian Iskandar Munshi, Persia started to witness the emergence of a new and significant group of landowners.

[88] An Italian traveller describes Ismail as follows: This Sophi is fair, handsome, and very pleasing; not very tall, but of a light and well-framed figure; rather stout than slight, with broad shoulders.