The Afsharid Dynasty

¹ The Afsharid dynasty takes its name from the Afshar, a Turkic tribe of Khorasan that had long supplied Qizilbash soldiery to the Safavid shahs. It never became a settled hereditary monarchy in the way the Safavids or Qajars did; after Nader Shah’s death the throne changed hands four times in less than two years.

² Nader Shah rose from poverty — his father was a herdsman, and Nader himself was briefly enslaved as a youth after Uzbek raiders killed his mother in captivity — to become one of the great conquerors of the era, sacking Delhi in 1739 and carrying off the Mughal Peacock Throne. He was assassinated by his own officers in 1747 after a increasingly paranoid and brutal later reign.

³ Adil Shah (born Ali Qoli Khan), Nader’s nephew, seized the throne after ordering the killing of nearly all of Nader’s own sons and grandsons. He was overthrown within a year by his own brother and was later captured and blinded.

⁴ Ebrahim Afshar deposed his brother Adil Shah in 1748 but held only fragile authority over western Iran; he was defeated and killed within roughly a year as rival claimants, including the Safavid-descended Shahrukh, contested the succession.

⁵ Shahrukh, a young grandson of Nader Shah, owed much of his legitimacy to his mother’s Safavid royal blood. After a brief deposition and blinding in 1749–1750, he was restored but his effective authority shrank to Khorasan alone, ruling from Mashhad as a local potentate while first the Zand and then the Qajars contested the rest of Iran. He was tortured for Nader Shah’s hidden treasure and died in Qajar captivity in 1796, ending the dynasty.