All The Wives Of Reza Khan
Reza Shah Pahlavi was born in the city of Alasht in Savadkuh County, Mazandaran Province, in 1878, to the son of Major Abbas-Ali Khan and his wife Noush-Afarin. His mother was a Georgian Muslim immigrant from Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), whose family had emigrated to Qajar Iran when it was forced to cede all of its territories in the Caucasus following the Russo-Persian Wars several decades prior to Reza Shah's birth. His father was a Mazanderani, commissioned in the 7th Savadkuh Regiment, and served in the Siege of Herat in 1856. Abbas-Ali died suddenly on 26 November 1878, when Reza was barely 8 months old. Upon his father's death, Reza and his mother moved to her brother's house in Tehran. She remarried in 1879 and left Reza to the care of his uncle. In 1882, his uncle in turn sent Reza to a family friend, Amir Tuman Kazim Khan, an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, in whose home he had a room of his own and a chance to study with Kazim Khan's children with the tutors who came to the house. When Reza was sixteen years old, he joined the Persian Cossack Brigade. In 1903, when he was 25 years old, he is reported to have been a guard and servant to the Dutch consul general Fridolin Marinus Knobel