Nader Shah went from selling firewood to conquering Delhi
Orphaned at 13, the future Nader Shah supported his mother by hauling sticks to market for firewood. Decades later, returning in triumph from Delhi, he led his army to his birthplace and told his generals that his rise should teach them never to look down on people of humble origins. He himself, though, showed the poor little compassion.
Born Nadr Qoli in the fortress of Dastgerd in Khorasan, in either 1688 or 1698, he was the son of a herdsman from a semi-nomadic clan of the Afshars, a Turkoman tribe that had helped the Safavid dynasty win power. He learned Persian but preferred speaking Turkic, and only learned to read and write later in life. A legend says Uzbek raiders carried him and his mother off as slaves around 1704. At 15 he enlisted as a musketeer for a governor and rose to become the governor's right-hand man.
His chance came amid collapse. In 1722 Afghan rebels under Mahmud Hotaki besieged Isfahan until the weak Safavid shah, Soltan Hoseyn, abdicated. Russia under Peter the Great seized Caspian provinces including Baku and Gilan, while the Ottomans took Georgia, Armenia and Iranian Azerbaijan. Nader built a private army in Khorasan, backed the fugitive Safavid heir Tahmasp II, and over the following years drove out the Afghans and the foreign invaders.
By 1736 he felt strong enough to set aside the Safavids, who had ruled for more than two centuries, and crown himself shah. He admired Genghis Khan and Timur and copied both their generalship and, increasingly, their ruthlessness. Victories at places such as Herat, the Khyber Pass, Karnal and Kars briefly gave him an empire reaching across parts of modern Iraq, the Caucasus, Central Asia, India, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf, earning him the label 'the last great Asiatic military conqueror'.
The cost was enormous. Constant campaigning drained the Iranian economy, and in 1747 he was assassinated during a rebellion. His empire broke apart and civil war followed. His grandson Shahrokh was the last Afsharid ruler, deposed in 1796 by Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar, who founded the Qajar dynasty that same year.
Source: Nader Shah
