Esfahân

Isfahan surrendered to Timur in 1387 and was at first treated with relative mercy, until the townspeople rose against his punitive taxes and killed the tax collectors and some of his soldiers. Timur ordered a massacre; his men reportedly killed 70,000 people, and an eyewitness counted more than 28 towers, each built of about 1,500 heads.

The city's great age began in 1598, when the Safavid shah Abbas the Great moved his capital here from Qazvin. He resettled Turkish, Armenian and Persian craftsmen in the city, gave the Armenians brought from Old Julfa a quarter of their own, New Julfa, and laid out the Shah Square and the Chahar Bagh avenue, with the Shah Mosque rising on the south side of the square. The splendour lasted little more than a century. In 1722 the Afghan army of Mahmud Hotak routed the Safavids at Gulnabad and blockaded Isfahan, and after months of famine Shah Sultan Husayn abdicated in favour of Mahmud, who rode into the Safavid capital as its new master.