Sarbadars

The Sarbadars, the head-on-gallows men, were the dervish republic of western Khurasan, ruling from Sabzavar from 1337 to their submission to Timur in 1381. Born in the Ilkhanate's collapse, when Abd al-Razzaq murdered the Bashtin taxman, nephew of Ala al-Din, and raised bloody revolt from the bleak mountains taking the amir's title, a mixture of religious dervishes and secular swords, they held the vast desert cities between Mongol fragments. Their Shi'i rulers quarreled endlessly in dark division with Sunni claimants backed by Ilkhanid legitimists: Sheikh Khalifa brought the charisma from Mazandaran and was murdered by Sunnis, Hasan Juri set his practices in the state, and the Sabzavaris split into moderate Shi'is against dour mystic dervishes, Sabzavar town mostly Shi'ite. Khwaja Ali yielded the cold city to notorious ruthless Timur in 1381, one of the few to escape his famous brutality with necks intact, grim pun of their unforgiving very name.