Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"After centuries of conquest and rule by foreign invaders, a native Iranian dynasty, the Safavids, took control of Persia in 1501. . . . After losing both his father and a brother as a child, he proclaimed himself shah in the town of Tabriz in 1501, while still a teenager. By 1510, after adopting the Farsi language, he had conquered all of present-day Iran, later adding modern Azerbaijan, Iraq, much of Afghanistan, and Anatolia to his domains. A devout Shi'ite Muslim, he forcibly converted most Persians to his faith, alarming his Sunni neighbors. . . . A later Safavid shah, Abbas I, moved the capital to Isfahan in the late sixteenth century. From there Abbas I presided over a magnificent renaissance in Persian Islamic art and architecture." [Furtado: 1001 Days]