NINE

The Caucasus and the Western Persian Lands before the Seljuqs

67

The Sharwān Shdāhs

83 to early eleventh century /799 to early seventeenth century

Sharwān in eastern Transcaucasia, with their original centre at Yazīdiyya

1. The first line of Yazīdī Shahs

2. The second line of Shāhs

The title of Sharwān Shāh may well go back to Sāsānid times. The Islamic line of Arab Sharwān Shāhs began with the governor Yazīd b. Mazyad, among whose extensive territories in Armenia, north-western Persia and eastern Transcaucasia was the region of Sharwān between the south-eastern spur of the Caucasus mountains and the lower Kur river valley.

Haytham b. Muhammad is said to have been the first governor specifically of Sharwān, one by now in effect independent and succeeding hereditarily, to assume the actual title of Sharwān Shāh. From the early fourth/tenth century, the Shāhs had their capital in Yazidiyya, perhaps the earlier Shammakhi, but they were also often to intervene in, and at times control, Bāb al-Abwāb or Darband on the Caspian coast (see below, no. 68). Over the decades, the Shāhs had to fight off the Georgians to their west, and, in the fifth/eleventh century, incursions from northern Persia of the Turkmens. After the notable reign of Fariburz I b. Sallār, the chronology and nomenclature of the succeeding Shāhs become somewhat fragmentary and tentative, for the detailed source for the history of the earlier period, a local history of Sharwān and Bāb al-Abwāb preserved in a later Ottoman historian, comes to an end; for subsequent rulers, we depend largely on literary references from the lands outside Sharwān and the evidence from coins. These Shahs seem to have been known as the Kasrānids (it has been suggested that this was a name or title of Farīdūn I b. Farīburz), though clearly connected with their predecessors; already, as is apparent from their onomastic, these original Arabs had by now become profoundly Iranised, and in fact claimed descent from Bahrām Gūr.

The line came to an end at the time of Tīmūr’s conquests, but the later Ottoman historian Münejjim Bashï supplies details of what he calls the second line of Sharwān Shāhs, carrying these up to the late sixteenth century, and coins are known from several of these rulers. During that century, possession of Sharwān oscillated periodically between Safawids and Ottomans, until by the early seventeenth century the indigenous Shāhs had finally disappeared and Sharwān became for some two centuries a governorate of the Safawid empire.

Justi, 454; Sachau, 12 no. 18; Zambaur, 181–2; Album, 53.

EI² ‘al-Kabk’ (C. E. Bosworth); ‘Shírwān Shāhs (W. Barthold and Bosworth).

V. Minorsky, A History of Sharvān and Darband in the 10th-llth centuries, Cambridge 1958.

D. K. Kouymjian, A Numismatic History of Southeastern Transcaucasia and Adharbayjān based on the Islamic Coinage of the 5th/11th to the 7th/13th Centuries, Columbia University Ph.D. thesis 1969, unpubl. (UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor), 61–6, 136–242, with a genealogical table at p. 242.

W. Madelung, ‘The minor dynasties of northern Iran’, in The Cambridge History of Iran. IV. From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs, ed. R. N. Frye, Cambridge 1975, 243–9.