80

The Bāwandid Ispahbadhs

45–750/665–1349

The highlands of Ṭabaristān and Gīlān

1. The line of the Kawusiyya (Ṭabaristān), with their centre at Firrīm

2. The line of the Ispahbadhiyya (Ṭabaristān and Gīlan), with their centre at Sārī

3. The line of the Kīnkhwāriyya (vassals of the Il Khānids), with their centre at Āmul

The Bāwandids were the longest-lived of the petty Caspian dynasties, with a history extending over some six or seven centuries, a remarkable demonstration of how the region’s isolation from the mainstreams of Islamic Persian life allowed a degree of family continuity unusual in the Islamic world. They claimed descent from one Bāw and traced their genealogy back beyond this to the Sāsānid emperor Kawādh. Their original centre was at Firrīm in the eastern section of the Elburz chain running through Ṭabaristān.

That part of the dynasty’s history which can be reasonably well documented only begins with the Arab invasions of Ṭabaristān in the opening years of the ‘Abbāsid caliphate. This was the time when the Bāwandids and the rival house of the Qārinids were vying for power there, a rivalry which in the ninth century was to end spectacularly in the rebellion and fall of Māzyār b. Qārin (224/839). It was also at this last juncture that the Ispahbadhs at last became definitively Muslim. Subsequently, they opposed the Zaydi Imams in lowland Ṭabaristān, and were involved during the tenth century in the struggles of the Būyids and the Ziyārids (see above, no. 75, and below, no. 81) for control of northern Persia, being linked with both these houses through marriage; it was during the times when they became vassals of the Būyids that the Bāwandids adhered to Twelver Shī’ims.

This first line faded out, and the affiliation to it of the subsequent line is not certain. These Ispahbadhiyya were firmly Twelver Shī’īs. Within a framework of vassalage to the Great Seljuqs, they managed to preserve their local authority; at times they sheltered Seljuq claimants and made high-level marriages with the Seljuqs. The decline of Great Seljuq power in the mid-twelfth century allowed the vigorous and assertive Shāh Ghāzī Rustam to became a major, independent figure in the politics of northern Persia; he combated the Ismā’īlīs of Alamūt (see below, no. 101) and pursued an independent policy aimed at extending his principality south of the Elburz. However, the rising power of the Khwārazm Shāhs (see below, no. 89) in the early years of the thirteenth century brought this line to an end, with direct power exercised in Māzandarān (as Ṭabaristān becomes generally called after the twelfth century).

The Bāwandids were restored after an interval of three decades in the shape of a collateral branch, the Kīnkhwāriyya, who ruled as vassals of the Mongol Il Khānids, with their capital at Āmul, until another local family of Māzandarān, that of Kiyā Afrāsiyāb Chulābl, overthrew them and ended Bāwandid rule for ever.

Justi, 431–2; Sachau, 5–7 nos 3–5; Zambaur, 187–9; Album, 34–5.

EI²‘Bāwand’ (R. N. Frye); EIr ‘Āl-e Bāvand’ (W. Madelung).

H. L. Rabino, Tes dynasties du Māzandarān’, 409–37, with a genealogical table at p. 416.

G. C. Miles, The coinage of the Bāwandids of Ṭabaristān’ in C. E. Bosworth (ed.), Iran and Islam, in memory of the late Vladimir Minorsky, Edinburgh 1971, 443–60.

W. Madelung, in The Cambridge History of Iran, IV, 200–5, 216–18.