Isfahan: “Half the World”

Shah Abbas I made Isfahan the capital of Safavid Iran in 1598 and rebuilt it as a planned royal city: a vast new square, a palace quarter, a tree-lined avenue running down to a new bridge over the Zayandeh Rud, and suburbs for resettled merchants. The result so impressed its inhabitants and visitors that the city earned the rhyming nickname اصفهان نصف جهان, Esfahan nesf-e jahan, “Isfahan is half the world”.

The city Abbas found

Isfahan was already old and famous. It had been a Seljuk capital in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its heart was the great Jameh Mosque and the old square beside it, the Meydan-e Kohneh, surrounded by the bazaar. The city had suffered under Timur, who massacred much of its population in 1387, but it recovered as a provincial centre on the trade routes of central Iran.

For Abbas it had clear advantages over Qazvin. It lay in the middle of the plateau, far from the Ottoman frontier, on the roads linking the Persian Gulf, Khorasan and the north. The Zayandeh Rud, “the life-giving river”, watered a broad, fertile plain. Abbas spent more and more time there from the early 1590s, and by 1598 the court had moved.

A new centre, not a rebuilt one

Abbas did not tear down the old city. According to Robert McChesney’s study of the contemporary sources, he first tried to renovate the old square near the Jameh Mosque, but met resistance from the local notables who owned property there. He turned instead to an open area to the south-west, the Naqsh-e Jahan garden, and built a new centre there. The old city, with its mosque and markets, stayed as it was, and a long bazaar linked old and new.

The new centre was the great square of Naqsh-e Jahan, “image of the world”, about 510 metres long and 160 metres wide. It was gradually surrounded by a two-storey arcade of shops, and by four landmark buildings: the Shah Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace gateway and the monumental entrance to the royal bazaar. How the square was built is told on the building of Naqsh-e Jahan Square; for a visit, see Naqsh-e Jahan Square and our article on Naghsh-e Jahan.

The plan of the royal city

The palace quarter

Behind the Ali Qapu, on the west side of the square, lay the Dowlatkhaneh, the royal precinct. It was not one large palace but a walled park of gardens, pavilions, offices, kitchens and the harem, built up over the century. Later shahs added the buildings that survive today, the Chehel Sotoun of Abbas II (1647) and the Hasht Behesht (1669). The palace quarter opened both onto the public square and onto the avenue behind it, so the shah could appear to his subjects or withdraw into his gardens.

Chahar Bagh: the royal avenue

From the Dowlat Gate, beside the palace quarter, a broad promenade called the Chahar Bagh ran south for several kilometres to the river and on to a royal garden at the foot of Mount Sofeh. Work began in about 1597. A stone-lined water channel ran down the middle, feeding pools at intervals, and the avenue was planted with rows of trees. The plots along each side were given to emirs and notables, who had to build gardens with gateways and pavilions in a matching royal style, according to the court chronicler Eskandar Beg Monshi. The gardens were finished by about 1616. The avenue was an enlarged version of the khiyaban Tahmasp had laid out in Qazvin, and it was meant as a public promenade as much as a royal road.

The bridge

Where Chahar Bagh met the Zayandeh Rud, Abbas’s commander Allahverdi Khan built a bridge of thirty-three arches, completed in about 1602 and known today as Si-o-se Pol. It carried the avenue across the river to the southern gardens and to the new suburbs. Later shahs added the Khaju bridge downstream; see Zayandeh Rud and Isfahan’s bridges.

Suburbs of resettled peoples

Abbas filled his capital partly by moving people into it. In 1604–1605, during his war with the Ottomans, Armenians from Julfa on the Aras river were brought to Isfahan and settled south of the river in New Julfa, where they became the leading merchants of the silk trade; see New Julfa and the Armenian merchants. Families from Tabriz were settled in a new quarter called Abbasabad, and Zoroastrians lived in their own suburb, Gabrabad. Georgians, Indians and European traders added to the mix. Isfahan became a cosmopolitan city in a way no earlier Iranian capital had been.

“Half the world”

The saying Esfahan nesf-e jahan is usually traced to the Safavid period, though its exact origin is unknown. European visitors in the seventeenth century, such as the French jeweller Jean Chardin, who lived there in the 1660s and 1670s, wrote long descriptions of the city’s size, gardens and crowds. Their population figures are guesses. What is clear is that Safavid Isfahan was one of the largest cities in western Asia and the centre of Iran’s government, trade, scholarship and art for over a century.

After Abbas

Abbas’s successors kept building: palaces under Abbas II, the Khaju bridge, and, under Soltan Hoseyn, the Chahar Bagh madrasa. The city’s prosperity ended with the Afghan siege of 1722, when famine killed a large part of its population; see the siege and fall of Isfahan. Isfahan never again became the capital, but its Safavid plan still shapes the city centre. For the city today, see the guide to Isfahan.