A teenage shah, and part-time poet, founded modern Iran
Ismail was no older than fourteen when he was crowned shah in Tabriz, and within a decade he ruled all of Iran, the first native dynasty to unify it since the Arab conquest some eight and a half centuries before. He also wrote poetry under the pen name Khatai, meaning the wrongful one.
He was born in Ardabil on 17 July 1487, heir to the Safavid Sufi order, whose founder, Safi-ad-Din, was probably Kurdish. His ancestry was a map of regional alliances: his mother was the daughter of the Turkoman ruler Uzun Hasan and a Greek princess from the Empire of Trebizond, making Ismail a descendant of both a Trebizond emperor and a Georgian king. The family later spread a made-up genealogy tracing Safi back to the Prophet.
Childhood was perilous. His father died in battle in 1488, and when the rival Aq Qoyunlu captured Ardabil in 1494, killing his eldest brother, the seven-year-old went into hiding in Gilan, where scholars tutored him. At twelve he emerged, backed by Turkoman tribesmen known as the Qizilbash. Popular accounts credit the boy alone, but a council of seven advisers actually steered the movement.
In 1500 he gathered about 7,000 fighters at Erzincan, took Shirvan and Baku, and won at Sharur despite being outnumbered four to one. After occupying Tabriz in 1501 he proclaimed himself king of Iran and made Twelver Shia Islam the compulsory state faith, enforced harshly, a turning point whose consequences still shape the region. By 1510 he held Iran, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Khorasan and eastern Anatolia. Expansion westward, however, collided with the Ottomans, who crushed his army at Chaldiran in 1514. The defeat ended his conquests, and he sank into depression and heavy drinking.
He wrote much of his verse in a southern Turkic dialect, a forerunner of Azerbaijani, aimed at his Qizilbash followers, as well as some Persian poems, few of which survive. He died on 23 May 1524 and was succeeded by his son Tahmasp. The Safavid dynasty lasted more than two centuries, built a bureaucratic state, revived Iran as a trading hub between East and West and left a rich legacy in architecture and the fine arts.
Source: Ismail I
