The Constitutionalists Take Tehran (1909)

On 13 July 1909 two constitutionalist armies, Bakhtiari tribesmen coming from Isfahan and revolutionaries coming from Gilan, fought their way into Tehran. Three days later Mohammad Ali Shah fled to the Russian legation and an emergency assembly deposed him in favour of his eleven-year-old son, Ahmad. The “conquest of Tehran” (فتح تهران) ended the year of royal rule that had begun with the bombardment of the Majlis and restored the constitution.

Revolts in the provinces

After the bombardment of the Majlis in June 1908, only Tabriz resisted at first. Its long defence under Sattar Khan (see the siege of Tabriz) showed that the shah’s victory was not complete, and in the first weeks of 1909 two more centres rose.

Isfahan and the Bakhtiari

In Isfahan, the governor was unpopular and the city’s clerics and merchants were sympathetic to the constitution. In January 1909 Najafqoli Khan Samsam al-Saltaneh, a senior chief of the Bakhtiari tribal confederation of the Zagros, rode into the city with his horsemen and took control. His kinsman Ali-Qoli Khan Sardar As’ad, who had been in Europe and had met Iranian constitutionalists in Paris, returned to lead the Bakhtiari north. The Bakhtiari khans had their own interests: rivalry with other branches of the tribe, a wish to defend their lands and, through the oil concession, links with British business in Khuzestan. But their armed horsemen made them the strongest force in central Iran. The role of the tribe is followed further on the page on the Bakhtiari and the revolution.

Rasht and the Gilan committee

In Rasht, the capital of Gilan on the Caspian, a secret committee of local constitutionalists and fighters from the Caucasus killed the governor in February 1909 and took over the city. The most effective of the fighters was Yeprem Khan, an Armenian from the Caucasus who had settled in Rasht and belonged to the Dashnak party. To lead the movement the committee turned to Mohammad Vali Khan Tonekaboni, the Sepahdar, a wealthy landowner from the Caspian who had commanded troops for the shah at Tabriz before changing sides. In May the Gilan force took Qazvin, on the road to Tehran.

The march on the capital

Britain and Russia urged the shah to restore the constitution and offered to mediate, and Russia landed troops on the Caspian coast and moved some towards Qazvin in early July as a warning. The shah promised elections but the revolutionaries did not trust him. The two armies advanced separately, the Bakhtiari from the south and the Gilanis from the west, and joined outside the capital.

On 13 July 1909 they entered Tehran. For three days they fought the Cossack Brigade and royal troops in the streets. Liakhov’s Cossacks held the area around the Tupkhaneh Square and the arsenal, but as more of the city went over to the revolutionaries and the shah’s support melted away, the colonel agreed to stop fighting.

The deposition

On 16 July Mohammad Ali Shah left his summer palace with his family and a few courtiers and took refuge in the Russian legation’s summer quarters at Zargandeh. The same day an extraordinary assembly of revolutionary leaders, former deputies, clerics and notables, known as the Majles-e Âli, met at Baharestan and declared him deposed. His son Ahmad Mirza, aged eleven, was proclaimed shah. As he was a minor, the assembly chose Azod al-Molk, the elderly head of the Qajar tribe, as regent.

The new cabinet reflected the conquerors: the Sepahdar became minister of war and Sardar As’ad minister of the interior, and Yeprem Khan took charge of the Tehran police. Mohammad Ali agreed to leave the country in return for a pension and went to Odessa in September.

The execution of Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri

A special court tried several royalists. The most famous was Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri, a senior Tehran cleric who had first supported the constitution and then led the clerical opposition to it, arguing for a “shari’a-based constitution” and backing the shah’s coup. He was sentenced to death and hanged in Tupkhaneh Square on 31 July 1909. His execution divided opinion then and still does: constitutionalists saw it as justice for a man who had sided with the coup, while many clerics and later the Islamic Republic regarded him as a martyr for Islam against secularism.

1. Jan 1909 Samsam al-Saltaneh and the Bakhtiari take Isfahan
2. Feb 1909 Revolutionaries seize Rasht
3. May 1909 Gilan forces take Qazvin
4. 13 Jul 1909 Bakhtiari and Gilani forces enter Tehran
5. 16 Jul 1909 Mohammad Ali Shah takes refuge with the Russians and is deposed; Ahmad Shah proclaimed
6. 31 Jul 1909 Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri hanged
7. 15 Nov 1909 Second Majlis opens

A divided victory

The second Majlis, elected under a new, simpler electoral law, opened in November 1909. Its deputies soon split into a Moderate party, close to the clerics, landowners and the Bakhtiari khans, and a Democrat party, led by Taqizadeh and allied with the fighters of Tabriz and the Caucasus. Political violence followed: the cleric Sayyed Abdollah Behbahani, one of the leaders of 1906, was assassinated in July 1910, and Democrats were blamed. In August 1910 the government used Yeprem Khan’s police and the Bakhtiari to disarm the irregular fighters in Atabak Park, wounding Sattar Khan.

The conquerors themselves became a new elite. The Bakhtiari khans held ministries and provincial governorships for years, and the Sepahdar served several times as prime minister. Historians such as Ervand Abrahamian and Janet Afary note that the conquest of Tehran restored the constitution but also transferred power to tribal chiefs and great landowners, a shift that weakened the radical side of the revolution well before Russia’s intervention in 1911 (see Morgan Shuster and the Russian ultimatum).

The event was remembered in popular art too. A five-panel painting of the “Conquerors of Tehran,” now in the Sahebqaraniyeh palace in Tehran, shows the revolutionary leaders in the style of coffee-house narrative painting. The wider context is on the page on the Persian Constitutional Revolution.