By 1597, when Abbas had been
on the throne ten years, he was in a position to build a capital
worthy of the Empire he had created. Qazvin, not far from
the Safavid's homelands near the Caspian Sea, was in a region
torn by continual conflict. And it was provincial.
The site Abbas chose was on the high central plateau, nearer the
country's heart, on a fertile plain, enclosed by mountains and
watered by the only major river of the center. North of
the river was Isfahan, one of the oldest cities on the plateau.
The birth of Isfahan goes back
to the beginnings of Persia's urban history. The Greek
geographer Strabo (ca. 58 B.C. -ca. 25 B.C.) refers to it as
Gabae, describing it as one of the major Achaemenian
centers. At later periods it was called Aspadan by Ptolemy
the geographer (second century A.D. ), Spahan in Pahlavi, and
Esbahan by the Arabs. Yaqut mentions Isfahan as a meeting
place for horsemen, while other historians considered the word
Sepahan (the armies) to be at the origin of the city's
name.
Isfahan was the center of a
Sasanian satrapy, as well as a rallying place for the
army. After the Arab invasion, the city was governed by
the caliphates from 644 to 931 and, like the rest of the
country, took time to recover. Malek Shah (1072-1092)
chose Isfahan as the capital of the Saljuqus. At the time
the town was clustered around the Friday Mosque (Masjid-e
Jum'a). Malek Shah built a few palaces and had some famous
gardens laid out. Neither the Mongols in the thirteenth
century nor Tamerlane in the fourteenth destroyed the buildings,
although Tamerlane massacred seventy thousand inhabitants and
built a tower from their skull.
Shah Abbas made Isfahan into a
capital renowned throughout the world, shimmering with beautiful
surfaces and clothed in gardens. To achieve this, the
shah's builders used great expanses of land on the edge of the
old town, close to the river, and turned them into a royal
garden quarter oriented along three axes, thus creating a
multiplicity of patterns and contrast. First they flung a
magnificent bridge with thirty-three arches across the river
from the south. From this bridge ascended a grand
promenade 150 feet wide and running due north for more than a
mile to meet a three-story pavilion with latticed windows.
At the center of the promenade was a canal of onyx, down which
water spilled through channels, pools, and fountains
Avenues of plane trees and poplars flanked it on either
side. All along its length stood palaces and pavilions set
in gardens.
To the east of this complex,
called the chahar-Bagh, lay the Maydan-e Shah, its axis twisted
fifteen degrees away. Measuring 517 by 1664 feet, this was
one of the largest public squares in the world and was made to
appear even larger by the relatively low height of the two-story
arcade that walled it round. Breaking the wall
symmetrically were four monumental entrance signifying the power
and union of the community in all its facets: to the north, the
grand portal to the royal bazaar, the heart of Persia's
revitalized trade; to the south, the great Masjed-e Shah, the
royal mosque central to the Islamic state; to the west, the
entrance to the Shah's palace complex, the gate to the heart of
empire; and facing it on the east, the Masjed-e Sheikh
Lotfollah, the family mosque of the shah, a jewel connoting the
holy descent of the Safavids. In a lovely asymmetry, the
mosques were twisted at a forty-five-degree angle from the axis
of the great plaza, so that they were oriented toward the
southwest and Mecca, as Islam requires. In a way, the
Maydan-e Shah was like a giant courtyard, with four great iwans
serving as transitions to very different spaces.
This basic skeleton remains
today, but almost unclothed: The Chahar Bagh is a paved-over
traffic artery now. In the sixteenth century, however, it
took the breath away. The jeweler Chardin thought it the
most beautiful avenue ha had ever seen of heard of . As Donald
Wilber describes it in Persian Gardens and Garden Pavilions, the
central canal was flanked on each side by a pair of
watercourses, each with its own succe3ssion of pools, and by
eight rows of plane trees and poplars. The shah himself
supervised their planting, placing gold and silver coins among
their roots. Roses floated in the pools, and roses and
jasmine grew among the trees; when dusk came , and the promenade
was lighted by the flames of thousands of tiny lanterns, the
flowers scented the night air.
To be continued
