Who Ruled Persia
Persia: Empire and AfterwardsThe List
From the late tenth century to the eighteenth, the dynasties that governed Iran were, with few interruptions, of Turkic or Mongol origin. Ghaznavid, from 977, Turkic. Seljuk, from 1037, Turkic. Khwarazmian, from 1077, Turkic. Ilkhanate, from 1256, Mongol. Timurid, from 1370, Turco-Mongol. Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu, through the fifteenth century, Turkic. Safavid, from 1501, Turkic. Afsharid, from 1736, Turkic. That is roughly eight centuries.
What That Does and Does Not Mean
It means the ruling houses and much of the military elite were of steppe origin. It does not mean Iran was governed as a foreign colony or that Persian culture was suppressed. Those same dynasties governed in Persian, employed Persian viziers, endowed Persian poets, and adopted Persian court ceremony — in several cases within a generation of arriving.
They Ruled It in Persian
Ferdowsi presented the Shahnameh to a Ghaznavid court. Nizam al-Mulk ran a Seljuk empire in Persian. The Mongol Ilkhans became patrons of Persian historiography and built the observatory at Maragha. Timur's descendants made Samarkand and Herat centres of Persian painting and poetry. Shah Ismail wrote poetry in Turkish and founded the most distinctly Iranian state there had been. The consistent pattern is not that these dynasties vanished into Persia, but that they ruled it in Persian.
The Other Half of the Population
Iran was never only Persian in any period of its history. The Achaemenid empire was multi-ethnic by design and advertised the fact on the stairways of Persepolis. Today Azerbaijani Turkish is the mother tongue of millions, concentrated in the northwest around Tabriz, and there are Turkmen, Qashqai, Kurds, Arabs, Baluch and others. Iran's census does not record ethnicity or mother tongue, so every figure you will see is an estimate, and the ranges are wide.
How to Hold Both Facts
Eight centuries of Turkic and Mongol dynasties, and a continuous, deepening Persian civilisation that those dynasties funded. Both are true, and neither diminishes the other. The version that says Turks ruled Iran misses that they ruled it in Persian. The version that leaves the dynasties out misses eight hundred years.
Key Dates to Remember
- 977 — Ghaznavid — Turkic
- 1037 — Seljuk — Turkic
- 1256 — Ilkhanate — Mongol
- 1370 — Timurid — Turco-Mongol
- 1501 — Safavid — Turkic
- 1736 — Afsharid — Turkic