Ismail III.

Abu Turab Ismail III ( Abū Turāb Ismāʿīl ; * around 1733; † 1773 ) was the last ruler from the Persian Safavid dynasty and without real power. He was born the son of the daughter of Sultan Hosein and Mīrzā Mortażās. In 1722, Afghan rebels from the east of the country overthrew his grandfather and established the Hotaki rule . As early as 1726, however, General Nadir Chan succeeded in driving the Hotaki out of Isfahan . The Safavids were reinstated, but they were only puppets of Nadir Chan, who appointed himself king in 1736 (see Afsharids ). After Nadir Shah's death, Persia was in danger of sinking into chaos, but was saved from it by the Bakhtiar leader Ali Mardan Chan and his general Karim Chan . The eastern territories were then lost to the Afghans and thus formed the core of the Durrani Empire and later Afghanistan .

In 1750 Ali Mardan and Karim Chan moved into Isfahan and raised Ismail, the then seventeen-year-old Safavid offspring, to king. This enabled them to legitimize their power as “servants” of the king and to appease the people. After Ali Mardan was murdered, Karim Chan - who founded the Zand dynasty - appointed himself sole patron and deputy (wakil) of the young Shah and ruled southern Iran from Shiraz until 1779. Ismail, however, exercised no power and became like a prisoner in held at the fortress of Abada , where he died in 1773.

Web links

• Ismail III. . In: Ehsan Yarshater (Ed.): Encyclopædia Iranica (English, including references)