Crime and Public Order in Safavid Iran

Part of daily life in Safavid Iran unfolded in seventeenth-century Isfahan, then the Safavid capital in central Iran, where a city police chief and night watchmen dealt with street disorder and theft. Across the river in New Julfa, an Armenian community organized its own ward gates and internal affairs. Hunger, factional clashes and unsafe roads brought these arrangements into sharper view in the late Safavid period.

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City officers and night patrols

The dārūḡa was the city’s chief police officer. By the seventeenth century, the Safavid shah, or ruler, appointed him in Isfahan to maintain public security. Late-Safavid administrative manuals describe his work as preserving order in the city and its surroundings, preventing oppression and brawls, and policing conduct such as gambling or drinking wine. He could impose fines according to the offense and the offender’s means. When the chief judge, the dīvānbegī, took up a matter, it left the dārūḡa’s jurisdiction; the court’s role is explained in Safavid law and courts.

The dārūḡa coordinated a night watch. Guards called aḥdāṯ and other watchmen patrolled the streets under the mīr šab, the night-watch supervisor. John Fryer, who visited Isfahan in the late seventeenth century, described the dārūḡa supervising guards at the palace gate before making rounds through the city to disperse or apprehend people he considered idle or vagrant. Late-Safavid manuals also show how officers handled a concrete loss: if a theft happened in a watched quarter, the guards reported it the next day. A guard who recovered the property received one-third by custom and returned two-thirds to its owner. If the thief was not caught, the guards had to compensate the owner. The rule tied their reward to recovery and made a patrol answerable for losses in its beat.

Ward authority in New Julfa

New Julfa, the Armenian settlement within Isfahan, was divided into twenty wards. Each had a headman and a gate that closed at night. The ward headmen elected the community’s mayor, who then received official confirmation from the Safavid court. He relayed between the court and the Armenian community, helped assess and collect taxes, and presided over civil cases. A council of wardens decided civil and commercial disputes between Armenians and maintained internal peace and security. Criminal cases and disputes between Armenians and Muslims probably fell to Isfahan’s dārūḡa, since New Julfa appears not to have had its own police chief. This division joined community oversight to the city’s wider police authority.

Factional clashes in Isfahan

Isfahan’s old quarters were associated with two rival groupings, the Ḥaydari and Neʿmati. The French traveller Jean Chardin, who visited Isfahan in the seventeenth century, described public-holiday contests in which one faction tried to claim precedence; on other days, wrestlers and young men exchanged challenges. Some gatherings developed into fights on the main square. Chardin reported that hundreds could fight on each side with sticks and stones, leaving people killed or injured. Local authorities and the shah’s troops sometimes tried to stop clashes that escaped control.

Famine, protest and road security

Food crises made the city’s officers answer to crowds as well as to the court. In 1662, during a famine, people assembled before Isfahan’s royal precinct and demanded action against hoarding. Drought caused the famine of 1668–69, while grain hoarding by bakers and merchants worsened the shortage; the returning court also arrived before enough food had been arranged. In the late 1670s, high prices and deprivation led people to pelt political officials with stones during a bread riot.

The early eighteenth century brought danger beyond the city walls. In 1713, Bakhtiari and Lor brigands made the Isfahan region unsafe, and caravans could travel in or out only with a large military escort. During a bread-price riot on 20 February 1715, people hurled stones at the ʿĀli Qāpu palace and damaged the royal-kitchen gate. Shah Solṭān-Ḥosayn dismissed the dārūḡa, Qurčišāh Beg, who also held the moḥtaseb office overseeing the city’s food supplies. The shah appointed a replacement and sent officials to order a senior cleric to offer a large volume of grain for sale in the royal square, but unrest continued. In June, a crowd prevented the shah from leaving Isfahan and then threatened the palace. Reports from late 1716 describe theft, burglary and murder amid persistent high prices and poverty.