Person · Afsharid shah & invader · Iran
Nāder Shāh
The Afsharid ruler of Iran who destroyed a far larger Mughal army at Karnal in February 1739, entered Delhi, and after a riot ordered a general massacre in which tens of thousands died — leaving with the Peacock Throne, the Koh-i-Noor, the Darya-i-Noor and enough treasure to suspend taxation in Persia for three years.
- Date
- 1688–1747
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 29.686, 76.990
Worth knowing
He is the person who gave the stone the name it now has: seeing it, he is said to have exclaimed koh-i-noor, mountain of light. He was assassinated by his own officers in 1747, after which the stone went to his Afghan general rather than to his heirs.
About the place
Placed at Karnal, where he destroyed the Mughal army in an afternoon and from which he marched on Delhi. He was Iranian and is buried at Mashhad.
Connections (3)
- CampaignRed Fort, Delhi
Nader entered Delhi after Karnal as a guest of the emperor and the city was quiet for a week; then a rumour that he had been killed produced attacks on Persian troops, and he ordered a general massacre that ran from morning until he was persuaded to stop it. Contemporary estimates run from twenty to thirty thousand dead. He left with the Peacock Throne, this stone and a treasure convoy that took weeks to leave, and the Mughal empire never recovered its finances.
- Life routeAhmad Shāh Abdālī
Abdali commanded a division of Nader Shah's guard and was in the camp when Nader was murdered in 1747; he rode for Kandahar with the treasury escort and the Koh-i-Noor, and was elected head of the Afghan confederacy within weeks. The Durrani state is the piece of Nader's empire that survived him, and the diamond travelled with it.
- Power passed toKoh-i-Noor
Nader Shah seized the Koh-i-Noor during his 1739 invasion of India after defeating Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah at the 24 February 1739 Battle of Karnal and sacking Delhi. The Persian forces carried off the Peacock Throne (into which the Koh-i-Noor had been set by Shah Jahan in 1635), the Darya-ye-Noor and approximately ₹70 crore of Mughal treasure to Iran. Muhammad Kazim Marvi's biography of Nader Shah is where the diamond is first called 'Koh-i-Noor' ('Mountain of Light'). The stone was Nader's personal possession until his 1747 assassination.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nader Shah”. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (2017); the Treaty of Lahore, 1849.
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