143

The Sarbadārids

737–88/1337–86

Western Khurasan

The Sarbadārids (roughly interpretable as ‘reckless ones’) ruled in the Bayhaq or Sabzawār district of Khurasan during the period between the death of the Il Khānid Abū Sa‘īd and the steep decline of his dynasty’s power (see above, no. 133) and the rise of Tīmūr. Rather than being a ‘bandit state’ or a millenarian Shī‘ī movement, the Sarbadārids represented an attempt by the local populations of western Khurasan to preserve some order and security there in the aftermath of Mongol rule over Persia; thus in some ways they form a later, and shorter-lived, counterpart to the earlier constituting of the Kart Maliks’ principality in eastern Khurasan (see above, no. 139).

The Sarbadārids movement began as a rising in 737/1332 against fiscal oppression under the Chingizid Toqay Temür. The rebels soon afterwards made an uneasy alliance with local Shī‘ī shaykhs. In 754/1353 they succeeded in overthrowing and killing Toqay Temür, the last of his line. Leadership within the Sarbadār movement was unstable and often contested. Under the last leader, Khwāja ‘Alī, Shī‘ism was explicitly adopted, but Khwāja ‘Alī also submitted to Tīmūr. When the former died in 788/1386, the Sarbadārids lands were divided among several commanders who also served Tīmūr.

Lane-Poole, 251; Zambaur, 258; Album, 50.

EI² ‘Sarbadārids’ (C. P. Melville).

J. Masson Smith Jr, The History of the Sarbadār Dynasty 1336–1381 A.D. and its Sources, The Hague 1970, with a list and discussion of the confused chronology of the Sarbadārids commanders, and the contradictory information of the sources, at pp. 52–4.

A. H. Morton, ‘The history of the Sarbadārs in the light of new numismatic evidence’, NC, 7th series, 16 (1976), 255–8.

H. R. Roemer, in The Cambridge History of Iran, VI, 16–39.