Saffarid dynasty

The Saffarid dynasty was a culturally Persianate dynasty of eastern Iranian origin that ruled parts of Persia, Khorasan and eastern Makran from 861 to 1002, one of the first native Persian dynasties to appear after the Islamic conquest. Its founder, Ya'qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar, was born in 840 in a small town east of Zaranj, in what is now Afghanistan; a Sistani local and an ayyar, he worked as a coppersmith before turning warlord. He took control of Sistan, made Zaranj his capital and pushed east and west: his armies invaded the lands south of the Hindu Kush, overthrew the Tahirid dynasty and annexed Khorasan in 873, and by his death they had taken the Kabul valley, Tokharistan, Makran, Kerman and Fars, coming in 876 within a few days' march of Baghdad before the Abbasids stopped them. The Saffarids minted silver from the mines of the Panjshir valley, and the caliphate had to recognise Ya'qub as governor of Sistan, Fars and Kerman. He built no centralised state, and after his brother Amr was defeated by Ismail Samani at the Battle of Balkh in 900 the dynasty shrank to Sistan, a Samanid vassal and then a minor power, until Mahmud of Ghazni deposed Khalaf ibn Ahmad in 1002. Their patronage of Persian court poetry helped open the New Persian literary renaissance.