Qajar Iran

Qajar Iran was the Persian state from 1789 to 1925, the last dynasty to rule from a tent tradition before the modern age. The Qajars were a Turkoman tribe of the Qizilbash; their eunuch chief Agha Mohammad Khan, mutilated as a boy by his enemies, reconquered Iran city by city in the 1790s, punished Georgia for defecting, and crowned himself shah in 1796 on a throne of skulls, ruling two years before assassination. His nephew Fath-Ali Shah, reigning thirty seven years with a hundred sons, lost two wars to Russia and signed away Georgia, Dagestan, Armenia and Azerbaijan at Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmenchay in 1828, fixing Iran's northern border where it runs today. Naser al-Din Shah, murdered in 1896 after fifty years, sold concessions to Europeans, faced the tobacco revolt, and left a bankrupt court. His son granted the 1906 constitution after the Constitutional Revolution, Persia's first parliament, but Russian and British officers ran the Cossack Brigade and the customs. In 1921 Reza Khan, a Cossack officer, marched on Tehran; in 1925 the assembly deposed the boy shah Ahmad and gave the crown to Reza, closing Qajar rule and opening Pahlavi Iran.