Talysh

The Talysh are the indigenous Iranian people of the southwestern Caspian shore, and speak a Northwestern Iranian language regarded as a descendant of Old Azeri. Tradition and several Iranists derive them from the ancient Cadusii; al-Tabari records them as mountain folk who never submitted to the Arab caliphate.

The Sufi master Zahed Gilani, who died in 1301 and numbered the Safavids' ancestor Safi ad-Din among his disciples, was likely of Talysh stock. Talysh chieftains became some of the earliest backers of Shah Ismail, receiving the governorship of Astara, hereditary in the family of Bayandor Khan after 1539.

The region was partitioned between Russia and the Ottomans in 1723 and reconquered by Nader Shah by 1735. After Nader's murder in 1747, Jamal al-Din Qara Beg founded the Talysh Khanate at Lankaran, whose rulers balanced between the Qajars and Russia until the nineteenth-century Russian conquest.