In the conventional historical narrative of the Safavid dynasty, there were two periods of civil war – the first at the beginning of Shah Tahmasp's reign, from 1524 to 1534, and the second in the years following Tahmasp's death, from 1576 to 1590. Scholars attribute both conflicts to rivalry among the Qizilbash tribes who had brought the dynasty to power and who formed its main bulwark during the sixteenth century.
The notion of a civil war in the years 1524–34 is based on the work of Roger Savory, who first characterized this period as a civil war in his Ph.D. dissertation of 1958 and carried it through all his subsequent work. He argued that Shah Ismail attempted to marginalize Qizilbash power, and when he died the Qizilbash took advantage of Tahmasp's minority to reassert themselves. Savory further argued that because the Qizilbash were organized into tribes, they were jealous of each other's power and inevitably fell into conflict, resulting in the First Safavid Civil War. While the study of Safavid history has greatly expanded in recent years, modern scholars have largely neglected this early period of the dynasty and still often rely on Savory for their understanding of Tahmasp's reign.
Using the sixteenth-century Safavid chronicles, this paper shows that Savory's argument is unwarranted and there was in fact no First Safavid Civil War in the conventional sense. While there were two brief episodes of inter-tribal fighting, the ten-year period as a whole did not see continuous armed conflict among the tribes. For most of these years, the Qizilbash were united under the Safavid leadership in their fight against Uzbek and Ottoman invasion. Moreover, even in those cases where intertribal conflict occurred, it always involved one tribe or a subset of a tribe against all other tribes and the Safavid central authority put together, which suggests that these are better understood as isolated rebellions rather than elements of a wider war.
