afghan sultanates, 1260–1732two centuries this mercantile community had been the backbone of the
Safavid empire’s financial liquidity and its merchants had become very
wealthy indeed.
During the siege of Isfahan, Shah Mahmud had demanded 120,000
tomans as a ransom to prevent a general massacre of the Armenians and
their women and children being sold into slavery. This was a vast sum of
money, since the annual tax paid by the Armenians of New Julfa to the
Safavid treasury was only 800 tomans. The Armenian kalantar of New
Julfa, who was responsible for collecting taxes, declared it was impossible
to find such a sum and instead gave Shah Mahmud a promissory note
for 70,000 tomans. After the surrender of the city the cash was still not
forthcoming, so Mahmud sent his men into New Julfa to seize goods and
chattels equivalent to this amount. An Armenian eyewitness of these events
records how the bailiffs went from house to house, removing anything of
value. 42 New Julfa was thus stripped of most of its wealth and there was
an exodus of Armenians to Europe, India and Russia. The overland trade
with India also collapsed and even Kandahar’s commercial prosperity was
undermined.
Mahmud’s demands also included the surrender of sixty Armenian
virgins and several youths as a ransom for the lives of the rest of the com-
munity. The girls and boys were torn from their parents and handed over,
but some Afghan chiefs, disgusted by Shah Mahmud’s actions, returned
them to their families untouched. Even so, at least twelve Armenian women
ended up in the harems of Hotaki chiefs. When Shah Mahmud’s men had
finally ended their pillage of the mahala, he turned it into a ghetto by
constructing a wall of exclusion around New Julfa.
Shah Mahmud’s three-year reign in Isfahan was marked by many more
acts of pillage and bloodshed as the Hotaki king’s mental and physical
health declined, exacerbated by forty days spent in solitary confinement
in a Sufi cell, or chehela khana. The object of this Sufi exercise is to control
the power of jinn, but in Shah Mahmud’s case it was the jinn that ended
up controlling him. The ordeal also left Mahmud with a virulent parasitic
disease akin to scabies, and in an attempt to relieve the unbearable itching
he lacerated his skin with sharpened fingernails. In 1725 Shah Mahmud
was finally put out of his misery by an assassin hired by his cousin, Ashraf,
who seized control of the western part of the Hotaki empire. In Kandahar,
Mir Wa’is’ heirs appointed Shah Mahmud’s brother, Husain Khan, as ruler,
and so the brief Ghilzai empire was divided into two rival factions.
Persian power, meanwhile, began to reassert itself under Nadir Quli
Beg, a Turkman general of the Afshar tribe. In 1726, with the support of