The Qajar Dynasty

¹ Agha Mohammad Khan was castrated as a child on the order of a rival Iranian ruler. He never married or had children, adopting a nephew, Fath-Ali, as his heir. Remembered for extreme brutality — notably the mass blinding and enslavement inflicted on Kerman in 1794 in reprisal for the city sheltering a rival — he was assassinated by two of his own servants in 1797, within a year of his formal coronation as shah.

² Fath-Ali Shah lost two disastrous wars with Imperial Russia, permanently ceding the Caucasus (present-day Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) by the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828). He is also remembered for a famously enormous harem and for the elaborate royal portraiture of the Qajar court style.

³ Naser al-Din Shah, the longest-reigning Qajar monarch, was Iran’s first ruler to travel extensively in Europe and pursued cautious modernization, but granted sweeping economic concessions to foreign powers that provoked major unrest, notably the Tobacco Protest of 1891. He was assassinated in 1896 by a follower of the reformist agitator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.

⁴ Mozaffar al-Din Shah reluctantly granted Iran’s first constitution in 1906 under mass popular pressure, creating an elected parliament, the Majles — the Persian Constitutional Revolution, a landmark in the country’s modern political history.

⁵ Mohammad Ali Shah attempted to reverse the constitution and had the Russian-officered Persian Cossack Brigade bombard the Majles building in 1908. Constitutionalist forces deposed him the following year in favor of his young son, Ahmad Shah.

Ahmad Shah ruled over a country effectively occupied and fought over by Britain and Russia, and briefly Ottoman forces, during and after the First World War. Parliament formally voted to depose the Qajar dynasty in 1925, inviting the army commander Reza Khan to found a new dynasty as Reza Shah Pahlavi.