The Safavid Queens of Iran

The state models most accessible to the founders of the Safavid state, were those of adjacent Mongol states, as they were for their Mughal neighbors. But they also harked to militant Shiite Sufi ideals. A short while after its foundation as a state with a messianic mission of world rule, the Safavid Empire suffered a harsh defeat at the hands of the Ottomans. But while the frustrated reigning shah, Ismail I, withdrew from the day-to-day running of state affairs, his intrepid wife, Tajlu Khanum, took control. She was followed by her daughter, Shahzada Sultanum, who soon became her brother’s co-ruler and governed the kingdom wisely for many years, building connections with both the Mughal Hamida Begum and the Ottoman Hurrem Sultan. Her niece, Parikhan Khanum, still a young child when she died, took over as the shah’s leading counsel, ran the empire’s foreign relations, and after his death was even formally recognized as sovereign for a while. Parikhan herself was assassinated on orders of her sister in law, Mahd-I Ulya, who took over from her. The last great queen of the Safavids was Parikhan’s younger half-sister, Zaynab Begum, who mentored a series of shahs until the mid-seventeenth century.