A herder's son from Khorasan rebuilt Iran's largest empire since the Sasanians
Nader was born into a humble semi-nomadic family and began as a local warlord. Within about fifteen years he had expelled Afghan invaders, forced Russians and Ottomans to hand back land, crowned himself shah, and routed a Mughal army in under three hours. His empire barely outlived him.
Iran was falling apart in the 1720s. In 1722 the Ghilzai Afghan leader Mahmud Hotak toppled the Safavid shah Soltan Hoseyn, while Russia seized territory in the Caucasus and the north and the Ottomans invaded from the west; in 1724 the two powers agreed to split their gains. Nader belonged to the Afshars, a Turkoman tribe that Shah Abbas the Great had resettled in Khorasan in the early 17th century to guard the frontier against the Uzbeks.
He sided with the exiled heir Tahmasp II, took the title Servant of Tahmasp, recaptured Mashhad in late 1726 and drove the Afghans from the capital in 1729. When Tahmasp bungled a Caucasus campaign and lost ground to the Ottomans, Nader deposed him in 1732 in favour of his baby son. Treaties in 1732 and 1735 got Russia to return its conquests, and the Ottomans were forced out of western Iran and the Caucasus. In 1736, confident at last, Nader had himself proclaimed shah on the Mughan plain, ending Safavid rule.
He then pushed east. After taking Kandahar in 1738, he used Afghan fugitives sheltering in India as a pretext to invade the rich but militarily weak Mughal empire, outflanking defenders at the Khyber Pass through nearly impassable mountains. At Karnal on 13 February 1739 he crushed a vast Mughal host and marched into Delhi with the captured emperor, where a false rumour of his assassination led to a violent sack of the city. At its height his realm stretched across Iran, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia, India, Iraq and Arabia.
It did not last. After his death the empire fractured among the Zands, the Durranis and the Khanate of Kalat, and the Afsharids were reduced to a small state in Khorasan. In 1796 Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar overthrew them and founded the Qajar dynasty. Officially the state kept an older name, the Guarded Domains of Iran, an idea of shared language, monarchy and Shia faith that dated back to Safavid times.
Source: Afsharid Iran
