History

Nakhichevan is both the name of a city and historical region located in the Armenian highlands in the South Caucasus.^[7]^[8] Until the demise of Safavid Iran, Nakhichevan was under the administrative jurisdiction of the Erivan Province (also known as Chokhur-e Sa'd).^[9] Shortly after the recapture of Yerevan in 1604 during the Ottoman–Safavid War of 1603–1618, then incumbent king (shah) Abbas I (r. 1588–1620) appointed as its new governor Cheragh Sultan Ustajlu, who, after his brief tenure, was succeeded by Maqsud Sultan.^[10] Maqsud Sultan was a military commander who hailed from the Kangarlu branch of the Ustajlu tribe, the latter being one of the original Qizilbash tribes that had supplied power to the Safavids since its earliest days.^[11]^[10]

The Kangarlu were described by J. M. Jouannin as “a small tribe established in Persian Armenia on the shores of the Aras".^[11] Later that year, as Ottoman forces threatened the area during the same war, Shah Abbas ordered Maqsud Sultan to evacuate the entire population of the Nakhichevan region (including the Armenians of Julfa, who, in the following year, were transplanted to Isfahan, Qaraja Dag (Arasbaran) and Dezmar.^[11] Persian rule was interrupted by Ottoman occupation in 1635–1636 and 1722–1736. It officially became a fully functioning khanate under the Afsharid dynasty. Initially, the territory of Nakhichevan was part of the Erivan Khanate, but later came to be ruled by a separate khan.^[12]

Following the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783 between the Russian Empire and the east Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, Kalb-Ali tried to establish contact with Russia. This action angered the Qajar king of Iran, Agha Mohammad Khan (r. 1789–1797), who as a result had Kalb-Ali seized and taken to Tehran in 1796, where he was blinded.^[13] Another khan, Mohammad Khan Qajar of Erivan, had attempted the same, but his Qajar ancestry saved him from the same punishment; he was instead put under house arrest.^[14] Following the assassination of Agha Mohammad Khan in 1797, Kalb-Ali went back to Nakhichevan, where he was appointed as its khan by Agha Mohammad Khan's successor, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar (r. 1797–1834).^[15] In return, Kalb-Ali supplied Fath-Ali Shah's army with soldiers from the Kangarlu tribe. In 1809, Prince Abbas Mirza annexed Nakhichevan and sent Kalb-Ali to Erivan. In Nakhichevan, he installed Kalb-Ali's sons, Nazar-Ali Beg and Abbas Qoli Agha, as his deputies.^[16]

In 1808, during the Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813, Russian forces under general Gudovich briefly occupied Nakhichevan, but as a result of the Treaty of Gulistan, it was returned to Persian control.

In 1827, during the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828, Abbas Mirza appointed Ehsan Khan Kangarlu as commander of Abbasabad, a fortress of strategic importance for the defense of the Nakhichevan Khanate.^[17] After heavy losses in an attempt to take the fortress by escalade on July 14, the Russians mounted a siege. Ehsan Khan secretly contacted the Russian commander, General Paskevich, and opened the gates of the fortress to him on 22 July 1827. With the Treaty of Turkmenchay, in 1828 the khanate became a Russian possession and Ehsan Khan was rewarded with the governorship,^[17] conferred the rank of major-general of the Russian army and the title of campaign ataman of the Kangarlu militia.

Population

Demographics of the Nakhichevan Khanate in 1826^[18]
Group	Families	Males	Females	Total
Iranian elite/army	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	3,000
Turks and Kurds (settled, semi-settled, and nomadic)	3,863	9,033	8,105	17,138
Armenians	530	1,404	1,286	2,690
Total	22,828

Administration

It appears that Nakhichevan had a much higher proportion of private property than Erivan because it was less centrally organized, which allowed the illegal conversion of state lands into private property. This was caused by the lack of state lands in Nakhichevan.^[19]

Taxes

Every adult male over the age of fifteen living in a city had paid an income or head tax, known as the bash-puli ("head money") in Nakhichevan. Despite Nader Shah's removal of the poll tax paid by Eastern Armenian Christians at Catholicos Abrahim III's request in 1736, Armenians (including in Nakhichevan) often paid more taxes than Muslims did.^[20]

On Nowruz and other holidays, the khan and senior administrators received taxes in the form of presents. These were initially given as gifts but quickly transitioned to formal taxes and were commonly sought as bribes or tribute. These type of gifts were known as pishkesh, salamane and bairamlik / nowruzi / eydi.^[21]

Coinage

The coins minted in the Nakhichevan Khanate were in the abbasi currency and equal to that of the coins minted by Karim Khan Zand, with the verse shod and the exclamation ya Karim on them. There are only a dozen of these extremely rare coins in existence, being minted between 1766–1777. Compared to Iranian coins that weigh a mithqal, these Nakhichevan coins are a little lighter. The few coins produced reveal their supposedly philanthropic and non-economic purposes.^[22]

References

^ Bournoutian 2016a, p. xvii.
^ Hambly 1991, pp. 145–146.
^ Swietochowski, Tadeusz (2004). Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920: The Shaping of a National Identity in a Muslim Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0521522458. (...) and Persian continued to be the official language of the judiciary and the local administration [even after the abolishment of the khanates].
^ Pavlovich, Petrushevsky Ilya (1949). Essays on the history of feudal relations in Armenia and Azerbaijan in XVI - the beginning of XIX centuries. LSU them. Zhdanov. p. 7. (...) The language of official acts not only in Iran proper and its fully dependant Khanates, but also in those Caucasian khanates that were semi-independent until the time of their accession to the Russian Empire, and even for some time after, was New Persian (Farsi). It played the role of the literary language of class feudal lords as well.
^ Homa Katouzian, "Iranian history and politics", Published by Routledge, 2003. pg 128: "Indeed, since the formation of the Ghaznavids state in the tenth century until the fall of Qajars at the beginning of the twentieth century, most parts of the Iranian cultural regions were ruled by Turkic-speaking dynasties most of the time. At the same time, the official language was Persian, the court literature was in Persian, and most of the chancellors, ministers, and mandarins were Persian speakers of the highest learning and ability."
^ Hewsen, Robert H. Armenia: a Historical Atlas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001, map 149.
^ Sinclair 2014.
^ Tsibenko 2021.
^ Floor 2008, p. 171.
^ ^a ^b Floor 2008, p. 248.
^ ^a ^b ^c Oberling 2010.
^ Bournoutian, George A. (1992). The Khanate of Erevan Under Qajar Rule, 1795–1828. p. 32.
^ Bournoutian 2021, pp. 258, 283. For information about the treaty, see p. 16.
^ Bournoutian 2021, p. 264.
^ Bournoutian 2021, p. 283. For information about Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar's death and his succession, see pp. 20–21.
^ Bournoutian 2021, p. 283.
^ ^a ^b Ekbal, Kamran. "ʿAbbāsābād". Encyclopædia Iranica. Archived from the original on April 29, 2011. Retrieved 2009-02-01.
^ Bournoutian 1980, p. 12.
^ Bournoutian 1982, p. 115.
^ Bournoutian 1982, pp. 125, 128.
^ Bournoutian 1982, p. 126.
^ Akopyan & Petrov 2016, p. 2.

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v t e Khanates of the Caucasus
Baku Khanate Derbent Khanate Erivan Khanate Ganja Khanate Karabakh Khanate Nakhichevan Khanate Quba Khanate Shaki Khanate Shirvan Khanate Talysh Khanate

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