The beginning of the eighteenth century found Iran in a condition of steadily worsening administrative and military decay under the weak and misguided Shah Soltan Hosein. The death throes of the Safavid dynasty began with the Afghan invasions in the south and east, culminating in 1722 in the siege and capture of Esfahan by Mahmud Ghilji, while the west and northwest soon fell carrion to the voracious Ottomans and Russians, both newly freed from military commitments elsewhere to expand in the direction of Iran.

The frontiers of Iran in Shah Soltan Hosein's time were almost as they had been left by Shah ʿAbbas I: they included much of Georgia and Daghestan in the northwest, while Khorasan and large areas of presentday Afghanistan and Pakistan lay within Iran's eastern frontier. Some territory in the west had been lost to the Turks in the 1630s, but since the Treaty of Zohab in 1639 the frontier province of Azarbaijan had been so secure from invasion that it had for much of the time been counted as an internal province and ruled directly from the capital.