Afghan Invasion Topples the Safavids; Nader Shah Seizes Power
A besieged capital, a collapsing dynasty, and a soldier who crowns himself in its place
Quick facts
- Russo-Persian War
- 1722-1723
- Nader Shah crowned
- 1736
- Dynasty ended
- Safavid (1501-1736)
- Dynasty founded
- Afsharid
What happened
Safavid power collapsed in the early 18th century under pressure from every direction: Russia's Peter the Great pushed into the Caucasus in the Russo-Persian War of 1722-1723, the Ottomans reoccupied northwestern Iran, and Afghan rebels overran the weakening Safavid state itself. Out of this chaos, a military commander named Nader Afshar, originally a Safavid vassal, spent the 1730s reversing many of Iran's territorial losses to the Russians and Ottomans. Having restored much of Iran's territory by force, Nader had no interest in sharing power: in 1736 he deposed the infant Safavid claimant Abbas III and crowned himself shah, ending over two centuries of Safavid rule and founding the short-lived Afsharid dynasty in its place.
Why it matters
The Safavid collapse ended the dynasty that had made Iran officially Shia and built Isfahan, showing how quickly a once-dominant early modern empire could unravel under simultaneous pressure from multiple neighbors. Nader Shah's seizure of power set a pattern that would recur in Iranian history: a military strongman rising from the wreckage of a fallen dynasty to found his own, a cycle that repeated again with the Qajars and, in the 20th century, with Reza Shah.
How we know
The Safavid collapse and Nader Shah's rise are documented in Safavid and Afsharid court chronicles of the period and corroborated by Russian and Ottoman diplomatic records of the same territorial disputes.
Sources
- OpenStax / Rice University. 4.3 The Safavid Empire, World History, Volume 2: from 1400 · General sourceopenstax.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- OpenStax / Rice University. 4.3 The Safavid Empire, World History, Volume 2: from 1400 · General sourceopenstax.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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