substantial amount of political influence, and appointed his son Sadr al-Din Musa as his heir, which demonstrates that he was resolute on keeping his family in power. Safi died on 12 September, 1334, where he was buried. Lineage Safi-ad-din was of Kurdish origins. According to Minorsky, Sheykh Safi al-Din's ancestor Firuz-Shah Zarrin-Kolah was a rich man, lived in Gilan and then Kurdish kings gave him Ardabil and its dependencies. Vladimir Minorsky refers to Sheykh Safi al-Din's claims tracing back his origins to Ali ibn Abu Talib, but expresses uncertainty about this. The male lineage of the Safavid family given by the oldest manuscript of the Safwat as-Safa is:"(Shaykh) Safi al-Din Abul-Fatah Ishaaq the son of Al-Shaykh Amin al-din Jebrail the son of al-Saaleh Qutb al-Din Abu Bakr the son of Salaah al-Din Rashid the son of Muhammad al-Hafiz al-Kalaam Allah the son of Javaad the son of Pirooz al-Kurdi al-Sanjani (Piruz Shah Zarin Kolah the Kurd of Sanjan)" similar to the ancestry of Sheykh Safi al-Din's father-in-law, Sheikh Zahed Gilani, who also hailed from Sanjan, in Greater Khorasan. Ascension as Murshid Safi al-Din inherited Sheikh Zahed Gilani's Sufi order, the "Zahediyeh", which he later transformed into his own, the "Safaviyya". Zahed Gilani also gave his daughter Bibi Fatemeh in wedlock to his favorite disciple. Safi al-Din, in turn, gave a daughter from a previous marriage in wedlock to Zahed Gilani's second-born son. Over the following 170 years, the Safaviyya Order gained political and military power, finally culminating in the foundation of the Safavid dynasty which established control over parts of Greater Iran and reasserted the Iranian identity of the region, thus becoming the first native dynasty since the Sasanian Empire to establish a national state officially known as Iran. Poetry Safi al-Din has composed poems in the Iranian dialect of Azari language. He was a seventh-generation descendant of Firuz-Shah Zarrin-Kolah, a local Iranian dignitary. Eleven quatrains of Sheikh Safi ad-Din Ardabili, recorded by Pirzada, are listed under the title "Talysh poems of Razhi". The Azeri language of the quatrains of Sheikh Sefi ad-Din was studied by B. V. Miller, who, in the course of his research, concluded that the dialect of the Ardebil people and the Ardabil region is the language of the ancestors of the modern Talysh, but already in the first half of the 14th century. Only a very few verses of Safi al-Din's poetry, called Dobaytis (double