Founder of the Safavid Dynasty

Ismail I was born to Shaykh Haydar and his wife Halima Begum on 17 July 1487, in Ardabil. His father was the sheikh of the Safavid tariqa (Sufi order) and a direct descendant of its Kurdish founder, Safi-ad-Din Ardabili (1252-1334). In 1301, Safi-ad-Din had assumed the leadership of the Zahediyeh, a significant Sufi order in Gilan, from his spiritual master and father-in-law Zahed Gilani. The order was later known as the Safavid. Ismail also proclaimed himself the Mahdi and a reincarnation of Ali. Ismail was the last in this line of hereditary Grand Masters of the order, prior to his founding of a ruling dynasty.

His mother Halima Begum was the daughter of Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the Turkoman Aq Qoyunlu dynasty, by his Pontic Greek wife Theodora Megale Komnene, better known as Despina Khatun. Despina Khatun was the daughter of Emperor John IV of Trebizond. She had married Uzun Hassan in a deal to protect the Empire of Trebizond from the Ottoman Turks. Ismail was a great-great-grandson of Emperor Alexios IV of Trebizond and King Alexander I of Georgia.

A fabricated genealogy developed by the Safavids claimed that Sheikh Safi (the founder of the order and Ismael's ancestor) was a lineal descendant of the Seventh Twelver Shia Imam and therefore of Imam Ali and the Prophet Mohammad.

n 1488, Ismail's father was killed in a battle at Tabasaran against the forces of the Shirvanshah Farrukh Yassar and his overlord, the Aq Qoyunlu, a Turkic tribal federation which controlled most of Iran. In 1494, the Aq Qoyunlu captured Ardabil, killing Ali Mirza Safavi, the eldest son of Haydar, and forcing the seven-year-old Ismail to go into hiding in Gilan, where under the Kar-Kiya ruler Soltan-Ali Mirza, he received education under the guidance of scholars.

When Ismail reached the age of twelve, he came out of hiding and returned to what is now Iranian Azerbaijan along with his followers. Ismail's rise to power was made possible by the Turkoman tribes of Anatolia and Azerbaijan, who formed the most important part of the Qizilbash movement.

The Safavid era is often considered the beginning of modern Iranian history. Under Ismail, Iran was unified under native rule for the first time since the Islamic conquest of the country eight-and-a-half centuries earlier.

Ismail inherited leadership of the Safavid Sufi order from his brother as a child. His predecessors had transformed the religious order into a military movement supported by the Qizilbash (mainly Turkoman Shiite groups). The Safavids took control of Azerbaijan, and in 1501, Ismail was crowned as shah (king). In the following years, Ismail conquered the rest of Iran and other neighbouring territories. His expansion into Eastern Anatolia brought him into conflict with the Ottoman Empire. In 1514, the Ottomans decisively defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, which brought an end to Ismail's conquests.

After the Battle of Chaldiran, Ismail lost his supernatural air and the aura of invincibility, gradually falling into heavy drinking. He retired to his palace and never again participated in a military campaign, and left the affairs of the state to his vizier Mirza Shah Husayn, who became his close friend and Nadeem (i.e. drinking companion). This allowed Mirza Shah Husayn to gain influence and expand his authority. Mirza Shah Husayn was assassinated in 1523 by a group of Qizilbash officers, after which Ismail appointed Zakariya's son Jalal al-Din Mohammad Tabrizi as his new vizier. Ismail died on 23 May 1524 aged 36 and was buried in Ardabil. He was succeeded by his son Tahmasp I.

The consequences of the defeat at Chaldiran were also psychological for Ismail; his relationships with the Qizilbash followers were fundamentally altered. The tribal rivalries between the Qizilbash which had ceased temporarily before the defeat at Chaldiran resurfaced intensely immediately after his death and led to ten years of civil war (930-40/1524-33) until Shah Tahmasp regained control of the affairs of the state. The Safavids later briefly lost Balkh and Kandahar to the Mughals, and nearly lost Herat to the Uzbeks.

During Ismail's reign, mainly in the late 1510s, the first steps for the Habsburg-Persian alliance were taken with Charles V and Ludwig II of Hungary being in contact with a view of combining against the common Ottoman Turkish enemy.

Shah Ismail's death ensued after a few years of a very saddening and depressing period of his life. He was buried in Ardabil, next to the tomb of his illustrious ancestor Shayk Safi. The Tomb of Shah Ismail was built by his wife Tajlu Khanum in 1524, in the Sheikh Safi al-Din Khanegah and Shrine Ensemble.