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IRAN
AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts
Subrahmanyam, Dr
Sanjay
, Oxford University, The Oriental Institute, Oxford
, An Infernal Triangle: Portuguese, Mughals and Safavids
in the first decade of the reign of Shah Abbas I
The late 1580s and early
1590s saw an important shift in relations between the Portuguese
and the Mughals, owing largely to the insistent pressure put by
Mughal armies on the Sultanates of the Deccan, and thus implicitly
on the Portuguese possessions in Daman, Chaul, and even Goa.
Seriously worried, the Portuguese even began to consider
moving the center of their operations to Sri Lanka, where they
thought they might be safer.
In their efforts to resist the Mughals, successive
Portuguese governors and viceroys also sought to shore up an
alliance with the Safavids, whom they had long considered to be
their 'natural' allies in the struggle with the Ottomans for
influence in the Persian Gulf and western Indian Ocean.
Successive Safavid envoys were thus sent to Goa at the time
of the governors Matias de Albuquerque (1591-97) and Dom Francisco
da Gama (1597-1600), in order to make common cause over the fate
of Sultanates such as Ahmadnagar and Bijapur.
The Mughals watched these
developments with some interest, as we see from the reports sent
from the Deccan to Akbar by the Mughal poet-laureate Faizi in
1591-92. Yet, they
seem to have been confident of their capacity to continue their
penetration into the Deccan despite periodic setbacks, in which
the Portuguese had a role to play. Mughal concern with the rise of Shah Abbas was real, however,
for they feared that a vigorous ruler in Iran would cause problems
with them on their northwest frontier, where they counted on a
continued consolidation after their annexation of the Kabul
kingdom in the 1580s and the fall of Sind in the early 1590s.
Shah Abbas I's horoscope was hence scrutinized by them, and
the military strength of the Safavids was evaluated in some detail
in the years prior to the death of Abdullah Khan, the Shaibanid
ruler of Transoxania (in 1598).
From
a Safavid viewpoint, this was a crucial period, when a traditional
set of alliances was experimented with, and then at last set
aside. By the early
seventeenth century, Safavid-Portuguese conflict was clearly on
the cards, through first Kamaran (Gombroon) and Qishm, and finally
Hormuz. But in order for that to happen, new actors had to appear and
a fresh conjuncture had to come into place.
The first decade of Shah Abbas I's rule thus represents an
important moment of transition, between an older system of
alliances, and the new international commercial and political
regime that the Shah would help put into place in the western
Indian Ocean between about 1598 and 1622.
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