Abbas Mirza

Abbas Mirza (26 August 1789 – 25 October 1833) was the Qajar crown prince of Iran during the reign of his father Fath-Ali Shah ^{1 2}. As governor of Azerbaijan he commanded in the two wars against Russia and the war of 1821–1823 against the Ottoman Empire, and he is recognized for leading Iran's first reform and modernization attempts ¹.

He was born on 26 August 1789 in the village of Nava in Mazandaran, the fourth son of Fath-Ali Shah and of Asiya Khanom Devellu, a marriage arranged by his grand-uncle Agha Mohammad Khan to unite the Qovanlu and Davalu branches of the Qajars ¹. On 20 March 1799 he was made crown prince with the title Nayeb al-Saltaneh and appointed governor of Azerbaijan, with Tabriz as his regional capital and Mirza Bozorg Qa'em-Maqam as his tutor and minister ¹.

Designated commander against Russia after the fall of Ganja in 1804, when he was fifteen, Abbas Mirza fought through the first war to the defeats at Aslanduz and Lankaran and the Treaty of Gulistan of October 1813 ¹. In the second war, from 1826, he first won back most of the lost territory, then suffered the string of defeats that ended in the Treaty of Turkmenchay of February 1828 and the loss of the last Caucasian holdings; the losses broke his health and his enthusiasm for reform ^{1 2}.

In 1821–1823 he campaigned against the Ottomans alongside his brother Dowlatshah, taking Bayazit and Toprak Qala and marching on Erzurum before cholera forced peace at Erzurum in 1823 ^{1 2}. His answer to Russian superiority was the Nezam-e Jadid, a new-model army: Russian prisoners and deserters first, then French and mainly British instructors, uniforms, the title sarbaz for the soldier, student missions to Britain in 1811 and 1815, a printing press at Tabriz in 1812 for military manuals, a powder factory and arsenal ^{1 2}. The traditionalist clergy at first opposed the European-style uniforms as un-Islamic clothing, until the state persuaded them the reforms were required for the defence of Muslim lands ¹.

In the summer and fall of 1832 he campaigned east and northeast of Mashhad, taking Khabushan, Sarakhs and Torbat-e Heydarieh to bolster his claim and make up his losses ¹. Under continuous medical care by Western and Iranian physicians, he died of illness at Mashhad on 25 October 1833; his father died the following year and the throne passed to Abbas Mirza's son Mohammad Shah ^{1 2}.

No source read names a religion or a legal school for the man himself. He was crown prince of Twelver Shia Iran; the clergy appear in his story as opponents of his uniforms, persuaded in the end by the needs of defending Muslim lands, and in 1823 the Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam wrote to him in friendship ¹. Wikidata's religion value is the single structured value Twelver Shiism ³. Dynastic context and a structured value name no school in any text read, so his faith is recorded as unknown.

The Urdu article and one Wikidata value give his birth as 20 August 1789 against the English and Arabic articles' 26 August, and Wikidata also carries the impossible birth years 1783 and 1782 and stray death values in December 1833 and October 1834; the two agreeing articles are followed and the day recorded as debated ^{4 3}. His birthplace, the village of Nava, has no museum place record — Wikidata's Amol is the district city — so he carries no birth-place edge.