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The Ziyārids

319–c. 483/931–c. 1090

Ṭabaristān and Gurgān

In the early years of the tenth century, the backward and remote highland region of Daylam at the south-western corner of the Caspian Sea sent forth large numbers of its menfolk as soldiers of fortune in the armies of the caliphate and elsewhere. The Ziyārids arose out of one of the fiercest of these condottieri, Mardāwīj b. Ziyār, who was descended from the royal clan of Gīlān. On the rebellion of the commander Asfār b. Shīrūya, a general in the Sāmānid armies, Mardāwīj took the opportunity to seize most of northern Persia. His power soon extended as far south as Iṣfahān and Hamadān, but in he was murdered by his own Turkish slave troops and his transient empire fell apart. Only in the eastern Caspian provinces did his brother Wushmgīr retain a foothold, acknowledging the Sāmānids as his overlords, and in the ensuing decades the Ziyārids were closely involved with the Sāmānid-Būyid struggle for control of northern Persia. In Qābūs b. Wushmgīr, the dynasty produced an outstanding figure of the florescence of Arabic learning in Khurasan and the East, which his seventeen-year exile in Nishapur, while the Būyids occupied his lands, facilitated. A point which marks off the Ziyārids from almost all the other DaylamI dynasties of the time was their adherence, at least latterly, to SunnI and not Shī‘ī Islam.

In the early eleventh century, the Ziyārids had to recognise the overlordship of the new and vigorous power of the Ghaznawids (see below, no. 158), and the two families became linked by marriage alliances. The incoming Seljuqs appeared in Gurgān in and took over the coastlands, but the Ziyārids seem to have survived, in obscure circumstances as vassals of the Seljuqs, in the highland region. One of the last amirs, Kay Kāwūs b. Iskandar, achieved fame as the author of a celebrated ‘Mirror for Princes’ in Persian, the Qābūs-nāma, named after his illustrious grandfather. His son Gīlān Shāh was the last known member of his line to rule. He was apparently overthrown by the Nizārī Ismā’īlīs, who were spreading their power through the Elburz region (see below, no. 101), and with him the dynasty disappears from history.

Justi, 441; Lane-Poole, 136–7; Justi, 441; Zambaur, 210–11; Album, 35.

EI¹ ‘Ziyārids’ (Cl. Huart); EI² ‘Mardāwīdj’ (C. E. Bosworth). (The earlier acounts of the dynasty are all confused and unreliable in their chronology of the later Ziyārids.)

CE. Bosworth, ‘On the chronology of the later Ziyārids in Gurgān and Ṭabaristān’, Der Islam, 40 (1964), 25–34, with a genealogical table at p. 33.

G. C. Miles, ‘The coinage of the Ziyārid dynasty of Ṭabaristān and Gurgān’, ANS, Museum Notes, 18 (1972), 119–37.

W. Madelung, in The Cambridge History of Iran, IV, 212–16.