Qajars (tribe)

The Qajars (Persian: ایل قاجار, Turkish: Kaçarlar); also spelled Kadjars, Kajars, Kadzhars, Cadzhars, Cadjars, Ghajars and so on) are a Turkic Oghuz tribe who lived variously, with other tribes, in the area that is now Armenia, Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran. They were Persianized in the nineteenth century.[1]

This article is about a Oghuz tribe. For other uses, see Qajar (disambiguation).

With the end of the Safavid era, they had split into several fractions.[2] These included the Ziyādoghlu (Ziādlu), associated with the area of Ganja and Yerevan, as well as the Qoyunlu (Qāvānlu), and Davālu (Devehlu) the latter two associated with the northern areas of contemporary Iran.[2]

Background

The Qajars were one of the original Turkoman Qizilbash tribes that emerged and spread in Asia Minor around tenth and eleventh centuries.[3] They later supplied power to the Safavids since this dynasty's earliest days.[3] Numerous members of the Qajar tribe held prominent ranks in the Safavid state. In 1794, a Qajar chieftain, Agha Mohammed, member of the Qoyunlu branch of the Qajars, founded the Qajar dynasty which replaced the Zand dynasty in Iran. He launched his campaign from his power base south of the Caspian Sea, capturing its capital Isfahan in 1785.[4] A year later, Tehran accepted Mohammed's authority.[4]

In the 1980s the Qajar population exceeded 15,000 people, most of whom lived in Iran. According to Olson et al., the Qajars are nowadays considered as a branch of the Azerbaijanis.[5]

A branch, attested only as ‘Kadzhar’ (i.e. ‘Qajar’ via Cyrillic transcription), lived in Russian Armenia in the 19th century and likely earlier. In 1873 they numbered 5,000.

See also

References
  1. Price, Massoume (2005). Iran's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. p. 346. ISBN 1-57607-993-7.
  2. Atkin 1980, p. 9.
  3. Fukasawa, Katsumi; Kaplan, Benjamin J.; Beaurepaire, Pierre-Yves (2017). Religious Interactions in Europe and the Mediterranean World: Coexistence and Dialogue from the 12th to the 20th Centuries. Oxon: Taylor & Francis. p. 280. ISBN 9781138743205.
  4. Black, Jeremy (2012). War in the Eighteenth-Century World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 141. ISBN 978-0-230-37002-9.
  5. Olson, James Stuart; Pappas, Lee Brigance and Pappas, Nicholas Charles. (1994) An Ethnohistorical dictionary of the Russian and Soviet empires page 333

Sources
  • Akiner, Shiran (1983) Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union Kegan Paul International, London, ISBN 0-7103-0025-5
  • Atkin, Muriel (1980). Russia and Iran, 1780–1828. U of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-5697-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Wixman, Ronald (1984) The Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook


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