"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [و‎‎١‎٨‎٧] (٨٦٢/٣٧٨)

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 263
maniya in 1781. After the invasion of Persian Ardalan in 1694 by
Sulaiman Beg, the first notable Baban, these rulers never ceased for
two centuries to attempt eastward expansion of their power. The
general division between Persian and Turkish Kurdistan which still
exists had been made by the peace of 1639, though the frontier was
never exactly determined (p. 268). Not till the beginning of the
nineteenth century was the tribal pattern fairly fixed; the Jaf Kurds
arrived in Shahrizor to strengthen the Baban in the early eighteenth
century and the Hamawand about 1830. The division of the Baban
house into rival Persian and Turkish factions dates from the Persian
ascendancy and wars of 1730-1743.
Greatest of the Babans was Sulaiman Pasha (1750-1764), who
extended his dominions south of the Diyala to Zuhab, and north of
the Little Zab into Ruwandiz territory to include Rania, and made
the Sorans of Koi Sanjaq his vassals. The region of Khanaqin was
added by Ibrahim Pasha, the founder of Sulaimaniya (1781). The
loyalty of these Babans and their disciplined Kurdish troops were
a main prop of their Mamluk overlords, particularly in the time of
the Mamluk Sulaiman the Great. The constant intrigues of rival
claimants were encouraged both by Mamluks and by Persians in
order to maintain their own ascendancy. The Baban dynasty, though
weakened by perpetual division and much dominated by Persia from
1810 onwards, was not replaced by direct Turkish administration
until 1850.
European Trade
European maritime penetration began with the establishment of
a trading station at Ormuz (Hormuz) in 1514 and of other posts by
the Portuguese along the Gulf coast. Their monopoly was challenged
in 1600 by the formation of the English East India Company, in
terested in the silk trade, whose first ship arrived at Jask, in the
Gulf of Oman, in 1616. English and Persians joined forces to expel
the Portuguese from Ormuz in 1622, and the English were given a
station at Bandar Abbas on Persian soil. This they shared with the
Dutch, vexatious allies and rivals, while the Portuguese moved to
Basra and still held Muscat in the gulf of Oman. A fierce triangular
struggle for trade supremacy followed. With the loss of Muscat in
1650 the Portuguese dropped out and the Dutch took the lead, almost
monopolizing the import trade of the Shatt al Arab, so that the first
British factory at Basra failed (1643-1657).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English also sought