Qazvin: The Second Safavid Capital

Qazvin was the capital of Safavid Iran for about half a century, from around 1548, when Shah Tahmasp I settled his court there, until Shah Abbas I moved to Isfahan in the late 1590s. Tahmasp built a new royal quarter of gardens, palaces and a tree-lined promenade north of the old city. Two of its buildings survive: the Chehel Sotoun pavilion and the Ali Qapu gate.

Why Tahmasp left Tabriz

The first Safavid capital, Tabriz, was a great commercial city, but it lay only a few days’ march from the Ottoman frontier. Ottoman armies occupied it after Chaldiran in 1514 and again in 1534 and 1548. Qazvin, about 500 kilometres to the south-east, offered more safety. It stood on the main road from Azerbaijan to Khorasan, close to the Alborz mountains and the Caspian provinces, in a fertile plain watered by qanats. It was also an old city with a long Islamic past and a population used to hosting courts.

Iranica dates the settling of the court at Qazvin to 1548, while other historians give 1555 or 1557 for the formal transfer. The difference reflects a gradual move: the court spent more and more time there through the 1550s, and the new palaces were finished in about 1557, after the Peace of Amasya had brought quiet to the western frontier.

A garden city beside the old town

Tahmasp did not rebuild old Qazvin. He laid out a new royal quarter next to it, centred on the garden of Sa’adatabad, “abode of felicity”. Within it stood the palaces of the shah and his household, offices of state and pavilions set among channels and trees. The court poet Abdi Beg Shirazi, who lived through these years, celebrated the gardens in verse, and his poems remain one of the main sources for what the quarter looked like.

A straight, tree-lined promenade, the khiyaban, linked the old city to the new quarter, passing through two squares. When the German traveller Engelbert Kaempfer saw it in 1684, he described a long avenue planted with plane and mulberry trees in alternating rows. Abdi Beg says ordinary townspeople liked to stroll there. The idea of a royal avenue joining city and palace garden would be repeated on a grander scale at Isfahan; see Isfahan, “Half the World”.

The Chehel Sotoun pavilion

The building now called Chehel Sotoun, “forty columns”, was originally known as the Kolah Farangi, a name used for a type of domed garden pavilion. It is usually attributed to Tahmasp, though no building inscription survives to prove it. The pavilion has two storeys on an irregular eight-sided plan. Eight heavy columns carry a gallery around the upper floor, and thirty-two slender wooden posts hold up the gallery roof. The ground floor has a central room opening onto four porches; upstairs is a cross-shaped hall.

The design looks forward to the later palaces of Isfahan, above all Hasht Behesht. Both Ismail II and Abbas I were enthroned here. In the nineteenth century the Qajar governor Sa’d al-Saltaneh remodelled the interior and added the tiles now seen outside. Restoration in the 1970s uncovered Safavid wall paintings on both floors, including a figure in European dress of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The pavilion now houses a museum of calligraphy.

The Ali Qapu gate

The royal quarter was closed by seven gates. Only one survives: the Ali Qapu, “Sublime Gate”, the southern and most important entrance, at the start of today’s Sepah Street. Its present form dates from the reign of Shah Abbas I, and it carries an inscription in thuluth script by the calligrapher Ali Reza Abbasi. The French traveller Jean Chardin recorded the Persian verse over the gate, a prayer that the doorway might always stand open by God’s grace. It should not be confused with the better-known Ali Qapu palace in Isfahan, built for the same purpose a generation later.

Fifty years of court drama

Qazvin was the stage for the most dangerous years of the dynasty. Suleiman’s rebel son Bayezid was held there before his death in 1562. In May 1576 Tahmasp died in the palace, and the city filled with armed Qizilbash supporting rival princes. The winner, Ismail II, was crowned in the Chehel Sotoun in August 1576 and killed many of his relatives before his own sudden death the next year, as told on the page about Ismail II and Mohammad Khodabanda. In 1579 the queen Khayr al-Nisa Begum was murdered inside the palace precinct by Qizilbash chiefs.

In 1587 the young Abbas rode into Qazvin with his Qizilbash guardian and took the throne from his father. Here, in December 1598, he received the English adventurers Anthony and Robert Sherley, whose role in his reforms is discussed under Shah Abbas’s military reforms.

After the court left

From the mid-1590s Abbas spent more time in Isfahan, which he made his capital by 1598. Qazvin lost the court but not its importance. It remained a major provincial city on the road between Tehran, Tabriz and the Caspian, and the old royal quarter was gradually absorbed as the town grew northwards. For the city today, with its Qajar caravanserais, Jameh Mosque and the route to the Alamut valley, see the city guide to Qazvin.