Mahmudabad

Mahmudabad was a medieval town of Shirvan on the Caspian shore near the many mouths of the Kura River. The fourteenth-century geographer Hamdallah Qazvini credited its foundation to the Ilkhan Ghazan, who took the Muslim name Mahmud. The town stood in the coastal plain known as Qavbari, in a landscape where the river divided into branches before reaching the sea.

Fifteenth-century Venetian travelers counted Mahmudabad among the political and commercial centers of Shirvan, alongside Baku, Shamakhi, Shabran and Derbent. It remained important after the Safavid conquest: a chronicle records the appointment of Ghazi Khan Tekkelu as governor there in 1540–1541. Its history belongs to a changing coast, where river channels, settlements and routes connected the Caspian shore with the inland plains.