Shāh

Along the frontiers of Khwārazm and the lower Syr Darya, where Jand was held by the shāhs, there lived a number of Türkmen, and even though many of them were still pagan, the Khwārazm-Shāhs had to achieve some sort of modus vivendi with them.

Abbās’s achievement made it possible for Ṣafawid rule to survive a succession of largely ineffective shāhs for a further century.

From the early fourth/tenth century, the Shāhs had their capital in Yazidiyya, perhaps the earlier Shammakhi, but they were also often to intervene in, and at times control, Bāb al-Abwāb or Darband on the Caspian coast (see below, no. 68). Over the decades, the Shāhs had to fight off the Georgians to their west, and, in the fifth/eleventh century, incursions from northern Persia of the Turkmens. After the notable reign of Fariburz I b. Sallār, the chronology and nomenclature of the succeeding Shāhs become somewhat fragmentary and tentative, for the detailed source for the history of the earlier period, a local history of Sharwān and Bāb al-Abwāb preserved in a later Ottoman historian, comes to an end; for subsequent rulers, we depend largely on literary references from the lands outside Sharwān and the evidence from coins.

She was beating a fighting retreat when the Shāh caught up to her with sixty men. When she saw the Shāh, she said, “May I be a sacrifice to you! I heard that they had captured you and taken you to the Solṭān, so I came out to fight to the death.”