6. Nader Shah and the Caspian: A Sea too Far

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Ernest Tucker

Published:

2025

Nader Shah, like most military chiefs in Iran and Central Asia over many centuries, became a commander by showing his martial skills in leading land cavalry forces.Like many of his predecessors, he had limited real experience with substantial bodies of water, much less any awareness of the strategic and tactical use of naval forces.His origins in the foothills of the northwestern borders of Khorasan shaped his military and political outlook in a context far from any coastline.Nevertheless, despite his humble origins in a distant corner of Iran quite remote from the sea, he gradually developed a strategic vision for creating an enormous empire designed to rival that of his model: the Turko-Mongol steppe conqueror Timur. 1 Such a vision eventually included expansion into territories on the shores of major lakes, seas, and oceans.Closest of these to Nader's homeland in northwestern Khorasan was the Caspian Sea.By Nader's time, numerous cities along the western and southern Caspian coasts had long since developed into important entrepts of overland trade, well established for centuries.Major commercial avenues linked east and west from Central Asia via Khorasan through such towns as Astrakhan, Derbent, and Astarabad (modern Gorgan). 2 By the 1720s and 1730s, the volume of trade carried on the Caspian

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