 My name is Sarah Stewart, and I've been the SOAS co-convener since the outset of the series. We are, of course, indebted to the Sudavar family for this series, as it's built up over the years and has become a flagship of SOAS events annually, and in particular we thank Mrs Fatima Sudavar for her continued involvement in the series and her advice and working with all of us to take it forward. I should say that today we're going to miss Mr Abolala Sudavar and his lively presence in the proceedings and wish him a speedy recovery. As you know, this series is hosted by the LMEI, the London Middle East Institute, and its director, Dr Hassan Hakimian, who's here today, of course. It was from the LMEI that the Centre for Iranian Studies was established in 2010, and that, of course, focuses entirely on Iran events. There are a great many of them. You only have to check in to the website. There are all the usual social media channels for it announcing what it does. Indeed, in your conference pack today, there is one of the Middle East in London magazine issues, which is devoted to Iran, so that's a nice thing to have for today's event. Before I introduce the main convener of this series, Professor Charles Melville, I'd just like to draw your attention to the fire escapes, which are on either side. In the event of a fire alarm, please make your way to one or other of them and then up the stairs. There is one slight program change. It doesn't matter for now, but after lunch, we have only given Dr Dan Shefffield half an hour instead of three quarters of an hour. That's a mistake. Of course, he will have three quarters of an hour, which will push the tea break forward a little bit by 15 minutes. Now it just remains for me to welcome Professor Charles Melville, who will talk to you about this particular series. Professor Melville is president of the British Institute for Persian Studies, BIPs, and also the director of the Shah Na Me project at Cambridge. Welcome to you all, in particular our wonderful line-up of speakers, and I'll turn over to Charles. Thank you, Sarah. Well, very briefly for me, because we need to get started. First of all, to reiterate the thanks of Sarah to Fatima Sudala, and also to the team who have allowed this event to take place at all, which takes a surprising amount of organising. You'll be glad to hear that even I don't think we can call the Safavid period an intermezzo. I know that this aroused a lot of confusion when I tried to say that the Timurid period was an intermezzo last year. But in fact, of course, the Safavids lasted longer than any other dynasty since the Sasanians. It's a very long period, so much so in fact that it's been very difficult to try to encapsulate what one might think about Iran and what was going on in the Safavid period into one day. The plan at the moment is to have a second day in May next year, partly because a lot of people who were invited to come this time can't come. You'll see from the programme there's a certain focus on the one aspect or one or two aspects of the Safavid period today. We're a bit lacking in some departments, especially Iran's relations with her neighbours, which I particularly mean Central Asia and India, and various other topics. Nevertheless, we have a very full day. Nine papers I think is another innovation. I'm looking forward myself to seeing and hearing my colleagues and friends give their presentations. I'd like to apologise to Negar for being the only lady on the programme. Some people have already noticed some more violently than others that it's a male-dominated event today, but of course this is not deliberate, and I'm sure that the balance will be redressed at the next one. I'd like to just very briefly, since we're talking about Iran and some of the people who've contributed so much to this, who've passed away recently, especially Esan Yashater, who essentially was in the embodiment of the idea of Iran himself, I think, with his incredible energy and love for the culture and history of his country, and the work he did which set the foundation for so much subsequent and continuing scholarship. Gilbert Lazar, also another of the Buzzorgarn, who did so much for Persian language and literature. More recently, Lenny Lewisen, who suddenly and unexpectedly died in America while running, or having finished running, I've always thought running was a very bad idea. I don't run myself. Just to remember their contributions briefly and think that we're all being able to build on the work they've done in the past. Without more ado, our first session is dominated by questions of history and historiography, and I think it's best if we have questions at the end of each paper. I certainly prefer this myself, so we'll have about 30 minutes or so, and then time for some questions, 35 minutes, time for some questions. I'm going to chair the first session, and I hope set an example of rigorous timekeeping to the extent of coming up and hauling people who go over their time off the podium. But I know that won't be necessary, and I'd like to first of all introduce Ali Anusha, who has come from America and who's working on Indo-Persian historians. He has an article coming up shortly in the Zoas Bulletin called Indo-Persian Histories and Sindo-Persian Historians about the Torihimasumi, which is about basically the historiographical productivity of Sind. And a nice article recently in the Royal Asiatic Society Journal called The Elephant and the Sovereign in India around about a thousand. So he's working very much in the field of Persian studies and Persian connections with India. So, over to you, Ali. Thank you very much. Okay. Well, good morning, everyone. First of all, I would like to thank the Sudolar Foundation for sponsoring the conference and Zoas for hosting it, Charles Melville and Sarah Stewart for inviting me. And I'd like to thank Vincenzo Pachi for getting us all here. It was a lot of hard work to coordinate everything, but he worked at that really well. And I'm honored to be here. And thank you all for being here on a cold morning. I think we'll channel the shivers into having a joyful and vigorous conference. So I was asked by Charles to analyze the question posed by the conference by looking at how Persian historians of the early 16th century dealt with the transition from the Timore to the Safavith period. So in other words, the Safaviths are considered to be having laid the foundation for modern Iran. How did people at the time perceive this change? So, obviously, in order to do that, we have to get as closely as possible to people who wrote about these events at the actual time. And there are three main prose chronicles, and there is a verse chronicle that are written at about this time by people who were present, alive at the time and witnessed it. And I'm going to focus on one of these texts called Fotohate Shahi by Amini Haravi, Royal Victories or Conquest. And Amini actually died in 1534. Now, at first glance, we might think there is nothing special about Amini, because just like the other three contemporaries, Khan Damir, Haatefi, and Fazolah Rwzbahan, Khunji Esfahani, Amini was just a Persian language author and he was not a direct participant in the events that he wrote about. And, you know, he wrote about it basically retrospectively. But there is one important fact that distinguishes him from the others, and that is the circumstances of the composition of the chronicle, because in the preface of his texts, and this is actually, it's a big universal history that the whole text has not been edited, only the part in the Safavids has been edited in Iran some years ago. What's unique about him is that he says in the preface that Shah Ismail himself commissioned him to write this. And in order to provide him with informants, he actually told, you know, whoever of the veterans of the early times of his battles in the early 1500s, whoever had survived all this to actually go and tell him what happened. So he has oral sources from the people who actually witnesses. He identifies two of them, Hossein Beglale and Farrokh Agha. And he says there are others who were present in those battles. So we're, you know, talking about a composite authorship. They're telling him what happened and he's turning it into a Persian rhetorical narrative. So I think that sets him apart from Khan Damir and Khunji. Khan Damir actually specifically mentions Fautu Haad and he probably used that as a source. And Khunji Esfahani, he is writing, he's very much against the Safavid. So it's a hard, it's not an unproblematic text. So he hates the Safavids actually. Based on his evidence, I can argue with the following today. There was no idea of something called Iran in this transition period. The word Iran only shows up in Amine's book twice. Back to back. Once it's paired with Turan, Iran and Turan, as a kind of a geographical region, meaning specifically Choraosan and Transaxania. And then again immediately afterward, when a Rumi, Roman, Envoy shows up on behalf of the Ottoman emperors. And here I like to use the word Roman. If it's a little unusual, I'm referring to what we call the Ottoman Empire. But if the topic today is to look at how people perceive their own territoriality, then we shouldn't call it the Ottoman Empire because they didn't call it that. They call it the Roman Empire, ruled by the Ottoman family. So what does this all mean? It means that as far as the people of the time were concerned, the actual participants in these events, they had no idea of Iran. And this was not because they were alien or unpatriotic. In fact, they were non-patriotic because there was no patriotism. This was because they had a radically different view of territory than we do today. So in our modern conception, people are defined as a nation. They own the land that they live on. And this land has a particular characteristic that is shared between it and the people for all eternity, way into the past, 2,500 years, 5,000 years, whatever. And so the people also have exclusive rights. In the modern sense, the people, the nation has exclusive rights of sovereignty over the land, which is exercised over it by a government that is supposed to represent them in one form or another. This conception does not exist in the 16th century. Land is essentially property. It's owned by the king and a few noble families. Everybody else is considered a subject, rai at. Either the king, in some cases, the king and the nobility actually own the people, or most of the people are just renters and they work on the land for the king or the lord or whoever. Kingdoms don't have clear borders because it's just various property that the king holds in all sorts of places. My king might actually, and the elite, might hold property over a vast area that is not contiguous. Now, today, our practice is to sublimate territory, to kind of give this eternal value to land, and we fetishize it. But in the 16th century, it's not the land that's fetishized but kingship. And the word kingship and kingdom are used interchangeably, that means that not the property of the king, the land, but his body is mythologized. The body politic was actually the body of the king. And in the particular case that I'm going to talk about, where land is mythologized, it's sublimated by treating the areas that the king holds as a kind of heaven on earth for its inhabitants. So, when Amini writes about territory, he sublimates it by using the Koran and comparing it to heaven. He doesn't connect it to any kind of territorial identity at all. So, that means that in the case of the followers of Shah Ismail, it meant that the lands ruled by their king was basically where their libidinal drives for wealth, power, sex, whatever was fulfilled. The establishment of 12 or she-ism based on this text does not seem to be that important. And then the re-establishment of a kind of ancient Persian empire is actually not on their agenda. Again, based on the evidence that I'm using. So, I'll spend a few minutes going over Amini's narrative with a particular focus on the period between 1501, which is the conquest of Tabriz, the Apo-Yunlu capital by the forces of Shah Ismail, and 1504, when all the Apo-Yunlu territory came under control by Shah Ismail and his soldiers. I've written about this text earlier somewhere. I'm not going to kind of deal with that too much here. But basically, Shah Ismail comes out of Gilan and initially they're just kind of a band of soldiers roaming around in the Caucasus and Anatolia, looking for wealth, looking for people to join him. But when they conquer Tabriz, this is quite momentous because that kind of represents the proper moment at a state is actually formed. And so I'm going to go through the story of how this happens for three reasons. One is because I think we'll get a better sense of Shah Ismail's conquest as it develops. It's very clear from the narrative to me anyway that it's quite unplanned and basically opportunistic. They're not out there to really do anything on purpose. It's just opportunities arise and they take advantage of it. Second, we'll see how geography is actually discussed. And again, it doesn't seem to be a pre-planned agenda at all. And thirdly, we can kind of see how they insert the religious language at particular cases to talk about how they understand the area that they're controlling. So let's begin. So the events surrounding the conquest of Tabriz are worth looking at. And this is how Amini describes it. So there's a battle that takes place between Shah Ismail's soldiers and Sultan Alvan of Goyunlu outside of Nachjavan, which is today in the Republic of Azerbaijan, summer of 1501. And immediately once they win this battle, Shah Ismail begins to move south towards Tabriz, the capital, because now there's nobody standing between him and the city. And the distance today on the map, if you take the most direct route is about 100 miles, you go through Nachjavan, Jolfon, Maran, and then you get to Tabriz. And this should take about 33 hours, 33 hours, three miles per hour, which you could do in about three days. Ten hour march, sorry, yeah, ten hour march, 33 hours a day gets you there in three days. So this is how Amini describes it. Along the way, first all the important people of the city and the surrounding countryside come out to offer official welcome to their new king. These include Sayyids, judges, Baziun, peasant headmen, Cathoda, guild leaders, sort of crafts and so on, and merchants, tojar. And then Ismail meets with the Sayyids and the jurists, who are, quote, embellished with obedience to the 12 imams. The author claims that Ismail actually helped these men nullify all the errors towards which their belief had gravitated. Ismail is 12 years old at this point, which is probably pretty unlikely anyhow. But because it had been influenced by miscreants, Ahle Chalaf. Then, I think this part is very short, but I think it's very important, with the help of other ulema who have now joined his camp during the march to Tabriz, they arranged a sermon in the proper, meaning 12-er, Shiite matter. This is important because we're used to thinking of Shia Ismail showing up in Tabriz and then forcing everybody to follow 12-er Shiism, and everybody is a Sunni Muslim. That's not what how Amini describes it at all. It looks like that the Shiite ulema actually come out and join him, and then they kind of work out what the sermon should be, and at that point, they force everybody else, Ahle Chalaf, to kind of follow it. So they're establishing the symbolic aspect of the new rule, which is the Friday Sermon. It's, from this account, the mass conversion that we read about later does not take place, where their force, I mean, what kind of conversion is in their force to curse the 4K lives at the pain of death. This doesn't, I mean, it doesn't talk about this. The goal seems to be co-opting a minimum number of collaborating members of the religious and legal elite. And this, I would argue, reflects the perspective of those early veterans who were in the camp, and this is happening, because they're not really all that interested in substantial religious change. So in some ways, based on this account, it seems like it's the ulema and the sayids of Tabriz that use Shah Esmael to reconfigure the power structure in the city, not the other way around. Now, so this is in the summer of 1501. Fall arrives, so they think it's going to get cold pretty soon up in the mountains, so they wait out the cold season. And then during the winter, according to Amini, the winter was spent in countless sessions of revelry and pleasure that lasted well into the night. At night, he writes, the city looked like a flower garden, blooming with the red color of wine and torch flame. The destitute soldiers who had gambled and joined the teenage Esmael in the previous year were now able to reap the benefits of their wager. Esmael's soldier would also profit the city. I guess I didn't mention it. Anytime Esmael wins an early battle, it's emphatic that he does not keep any of the plunder for himself. He always gives it away. So all these soldiers now have treasure in their pockets, and now they can spend it in the town markets, which is what they do. So then they complete the cycle of rapid circulation of cash. Finally, there's a brief mention of ministers and deputies who are appointed to manage the affairs, very sort of off the cuff remark. Amini does not specify what specific administrative tasks were seen to by these men. As we saw above, the narrative of these events was recounted to him by the top commanders who were busy performing the rites of revelry, Rosum Eishrat. Now, while they're doing this, there are spies and informants that are sent all over the region in search of news. And they hear that the recently defeated Akmionlu Prince, Alvan, is out in the mountains. So when spring arrives, these individuals return, and they tell him that he's in Azerbaijan and getting ready for battle. So this time Esmael personally leads his army in pursuit in the direction of Arzenjan, which is in eastern Turkey today. But it doesn't really lead too much. It's kind of a cat and mouse game where they kind of follow each other and nothing comes out of it. And after a while, Alvan runs away, and Esmael and his men kind of wait out a little bit in the town of Turjan in eastern Anatolia. And then they release their pent-up energy by engaging in a hunt on a large scale, beginning with several rounds of fathconry by the king and ending with a slaughter of large quarries of deer, onagers, and gazelles by the soldiers. And then they stop in Baku, which is where the main treasury of the Akmionlu was. They fill up their pockets and they return to Tabriz and they spend the next cold season in drinking, revelry, and justice. Now, so there's two years that go by. This brings us to 1503. And the pattern is pretty similar to the early phases of Shia Esmael's uprising before Tabriz. The army is very cautious. Most of the work is done by spies and informants. It is avoided at all cost. The only military activity and preparation involves a large hunting expedition. Besides the changing sermon, there is no overt ideological or religious reform. Revelry and expenditure of money by the soldiers is promoted, benefits the local economy, and there is some kind of justice that we were not told what it was. And the timing though is really good because at this point there is no major adversary. The summons are not coming. The Timores are too busy and the Akmionlu have fallen apart. So nobody comes to lay siege to the town. But it leaves enough time for the Akmionlu to regroup somewhere else. And we are told that over 70,000 soldiers, and they're identified as Turkmen infantry and horsemen, had rallied around Sultan Murad Akmionlu, who's another one of the princes. And they're all gathering the southern parts of the old kingdom. This is called Fars and Eragha Ajam, technically the Persian Iraq, although Ajam is not as ethnic as the Persian is. Anyhow, deciding that it would be wiser to attack Murad first, the army starts to head south. Now they're not called the Safavid army or the Sufis or called the Ghazi army. Ghazi means kind of a holy warrior army. And so they mobilize and they head south and they first go to Hamadan where they can get more information about the enemy. The problem is they have no idea of what this area is like and they run out of water real fast. So it takes them a while and they suffer from thirst and then eventually they dig wells and they get some water. And this is then the author connects these to the hydraulic miracles of Noah and Moses using the Quran. So again it kind of tells you they have no idea where they're going and they don't quite understand the landscape at all. So once they're refreshed, they set out and they encounter the enemy. The author makes a lot of the sort of better numbers and equipment of the adversary. He says they were made up of horsemen from Fars, spearmen from Erawa Arab, the Arab Iraq, and archers from Western Iran, Erawa Ajam, all in armour and lots of camels carrying their weapons. And he says but even though they were bigger they quickly switched to a defensive strategy and they built a barrier around themselves using carts and mud walls, mud and straw. This is what the Ottomans use usually in battle but the Ottomans have cannons. I don't know why they do this. Anyhow, they exhaust themselves by working all night on the construction project. And so the next day when they wake up they're tired and the Sahabit army knows this so they charge their fortification. And Esmael actually himself, we're told he prayed, he put on his crown, mounted his horse and rode out as well. But he doesn't actually fight. It's kind of a symbolic presence on the field. And again, it's the old veterans that managed most of the campaign. He's 14 now. So again, you've got this 30, 40 year old guys who've been around with Haydad and the Caucasus. They know what they're doing. So they kind of manage what happens. He just kind of stands there and watches. What he does is kind of inspiration. And so this is how Amini describes it. He gives speeches to the soldiers and it draws in the rhetoric of Holy War. So he says, he uses the Quranic verses or Amini uses the Quranic verses 41-30. Charles last night was saying that when we write papers and history is full of jargon we should write like our medieval contemporaries or our medieval colleagues wrote so I'll try somebody to see how he goes. If you like it, we'll write more like this. Lo, those who say our Lord is God and afterward are upright, the angels descend upon them saying fear not nor grieve but hear good tidings of the paradise which you are promised. Apparently Ismail is saying that. And 865, O prophet, exhort the believers to fight. If there be any of you 20 steadfast they shall overcome 200 and if there be any of you 100 steadfast they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve because they, the disbelievers are a people without intelligence. Later on in the heat of the battle we saw a 250 and when they went into the field against Goliath and his host they said our Lord bestell upon us endurance make our foothold sure and give us help against the disbelieving folk. Coffering. How was that? All right. So it works. So the choice of the verses is crucial. The inspiration is Holy War and the friends of God against pagans like the battle of Ohud and things like that. But the references are not apocalyptic. We are used to thinking of Shai Ismail's uprising as this kind of attempt to bring the apocalypse and so on. It's not mentioned here but there's a lot of novelty here because in the 15th century if you're familiar with the Timorid the rhetoric of Holy War is not usually used inside the Islamic lands. Persian chronicles dealing with the wars amongst the Timorids, Gharaguyunglu, Aquyunglu don't do this. The places where you find a lot of Holy War rhetoric and Quranic references like this are used are in the frontier regions of the Islamic world in the Ottoman Empire in India and so on. So it's not a surprise that the leadership Ismail here of the army named the Ghazi army the Holy Warrior army whose soldiers were actually recruited primarily from the frontier regions of the Caucasus or the former Ottoman territories that the leadership would evoke for these men the same rhetoric that had inspired the soldiers in their earlier careers or perhaps their elders. So appeal to what we might call sectarianism is used here in the absence of a clearly identifiable religious other, Christians. In other words, Shiaism and whatever form was understood here was not merely cause of Ismail's uprising but the logic of its continuation as it helped create sharp binaries for soldiers who were accustomed to motivation through a piercing dualism in the frontiers of Christendom. In other words, you take the daughter of Islam and you treat it like it's not by using sectarianism. The actual fighting, he says that in the beginning of the fight the Javanon on horseback with spears and daggers and so on they attack and then the Ghazis are shooting arrows into the Aquyunglu camp they initially come back the Aquyunglu come out and they push the Safavids back a little bit but the Safavids push back again there's a lot of charges and counter charges and basically as they get chased the Aquyunglu get over their own mud walls and carts and reach their own center and disrupt it. This happens twice in the early carrier of Shiaismail. It's not what they're doing, it's what the enemy does to itself that causes them to win. And so it's only at this point where it's clear that they're going to lose that Shiaismail himself enters a battle Jangisultani and they charge en masse and they shout Allah Allah and they attack and in accordance to the theme of Holy War again Amini talks about passages from David and Goliath and the Prophet Muhammad's Battle of Uhud and so they defeat them and they kill many of them and the message is pretty clear that this is a Raza, a Holy War but it's not against Christians inside the domain of Islam. Now I think it seems it seems pretty clear to me that they're actually not planning on even conquering the actual Aquyunglu territory but it kind of opens it up once Prince Murad is defeated the western part of the Iranian plateau is open and there's a lot of plunder they divide that among the Ghazis they send out victory proclamation and then they wait out the hot season in the meadow of the mountains of Alband near Hamiddon and then when summer ends they hear that Murad has escaped to Shiraz in the south and the scattered Aquyunglu soldiers have gone east towards Rey today's Tehran and they've regrouped under the banner of a local king called Husankia When he hears this one of the veteran commanders Elias Pegg Oigodoglu is sent to deal with Husankia and then Esmael himself starts to head south they have to secure their rear before they go deal with the other enemy and so they go from Hamiddon to Esfahan for a little bit then they go to Fars when they get there Murad escapes and goes to Shustat in Khuzestan and so they don't follow him they just go into Shiraz unopposed because now they have three cities on Esfahan and Shiraz Again, it seems in the narrative at this point they saw the entry into Shiraz as a completion of the initial or the second campaign now who's basically the Esmael as a contested master of much of the former Aquyunglu territories and the way the Safavid army behaves in Shiraz shows essentially caution or satisfaction they want to stop and we are told that they didn't want to want to go into Khuzestan because they were afraid that he would draw them out further into what is today Iraq and they didn't want to go that far so they go back to Shiraz and they stay there and then they decide to go and consolidate by visiting Qom and Qashon as well Again looking at how Amini describes the stay in Shiraz and these battles we are using the rhetoric of monotheism monotheist versus polytheist as I mentioned above when they talk about the taking of the city certain allusions to the apocalypse judgment day are made but to show the destruction when it uses the passage from the Quran the earthquake of the hour of doom is a tremendous thing etc so you have battle holy war apocalyptic scene of defeat followed by paradise wine, music, sexual pleasures that recall heaven and for example verses on like hoodies in heaven this is the fair ones who are closely guarded in pavilions or therein are those of modest gays who neither man nor genie will have touched before them they are from Qom Qashon they go from Shiraz and again verses referring to the garden of Eden in the Quran praise be to God who has put away grief from us or a fair land and an indulgent Lord so essentially you can kind of see a narrative progression holy war, turbulence, terbulence, heaven Amini might have put these verses in the text but I think it also reflects the expectations of his followers if you know that Chai Ismail's poetry often evokes the possibility of the apocalypse, what have you people kind of see this as he thinks the end of time is coming he might have thought that but the soldiers if they are going to be at the end of time they want to go to heaven and heaven's right now in Tabriz and Shiraz where there's a lot of wine and sex and money to be spent right so again it could have stopped here but new circumstances pushed them further to the east because remember that I said that Eliasbeg had been sent to deal with this Hosencia well Hosencia gets the better of him in 1504 he pushes him he basically defeats him Eliasbeg goes into Varami and fortifies himself Eliasbeg tricks him sorry, Hosencia tricks Eliasbeg brings him out and murders him and so Chai Ismail has to go and avenge this action and here the level of violence really picks up so he heads east first they go to this place called Golchandan which is sort of central Iran which was loyal to Hosencia and they don't open the gates so the Safavid mine the dig tunnels under the wall put some gunpowder and blow it up then they go inside and the order is given by Ismail to massacre all the men and to enslave all the women and the children in order to show audacity and insolence against this crew Ferghe only results in damage and loss and again he makes reference to the Quranic chapter of the earthquake to talk about this then they go east 90km to Firu Sku and Hosencia has escaped there too I think it's his brother Ali Kio in charge of the fort the siege here lasts 10 days then the fort submits again the men are massacred women and children are enslaved and he's rewarded for his bravery he's given a crown and a rope and then the final infamous battle takes place at the fort of Ustai and apparently it's possible that one of the Akwionlu has actually joined him there has joined him there and he talks about in order to set us up he talks about how terrible a person Hosencia was and he says to show his terribleness he talks about his wastefulness his men possess 1,500 silver saddles and 500 gold saddles what was worse he took his many women and hunts with him and whatever hound belonging to each of his wives brought back the kill first Hosencia would honour that particular wife with the pleasure of his company that night now all of this is meant to the author is trying to make us feel revulsion towards Hosencia because of what's coming it's a difficult battle in the process we were told that a brother of Ismael we've never heard of called Haja Sayed Mahmood is killed in the battle and this really enrages the Shah so when they take over again massacre everybody after three days of battle and then Hosencia is taken and put on a cage and displayed to everybody the cage is lifted up so everybody can see him now this is a particular passage that people like to talk about because one no two Safavid sources later on say that Hosencia roasted him and had his soldiers eat him cannibalism and distributed the profit now Amini does not say this doesn't talk about cannibalism cannibalism in the early 20th century some Turkish nationalists historians that dealt with this but as well as some right wing German scholars and Swedish scholars, Nazis or fascists like Franz Bobinger or Stig Wiccander they saw this as a sort of survival of some kind of an ecstatic pagan cult into the Islamic period under the Safavid followers Shahzad Bashir has recently written an article that debunked these arguments that there is no, this is not a sign of an ecstatic religious cult or anything like that there's no other evidence for it it's a tie it to Sufi discipline but I think even that is questionable because again only one source ties this to religion everybody else just says that he was trying to make an exemplary punishment here and by the way the idea of putting somebody in the cage as punishment was done by the Timorids by as if the first is put in the cage and it happens once when they take over Ismahan five minutes alright so it's only at this point that he's conquered the eastern part of the Akhoyun Lod that they run into the Timorids and here the word Iran is used because one of the Sultan Hossein Baikara sends an envoy to him but Sarasmael feels like the envoy didn't treat him as an equal so he begins to think about maybe attacking the Timorid territory and he says he realized that the scope of kingdom conquering is not limited to the two Iraqs and Azerbaijan but rather can extend to Iran and Turan so it's used as a kind of a geographical term meaning Khurasan and Transaxania and soon after this an envoy arrives from the Ottoman Empire and he is shown generosity but then this is a scene where Amini says and they took Hossein Qiyar, they kill him and they set his body on fire in front of the Ottoman envoy to really scare him and here the word Iran is used because then he goes to Ismahan and gives people money and he says the houses that had been ruined were revived by the army of Iran so it's kind of rhyming it but it doesn't seem to be a big role here alright, conclusion so like I said based on the most direct evidence the followers of Sarasmael and even apparently contemporary chronicles did not view the concord territories of the Apoyunlu as Iran in fact they seem to see territory as basically property and if they sublimated and mythologized territory it was to see it as paradise on earth filled with pleasures of heaven that means that their notion of a political identity which is today projected onto an immortal land Iran, Germany, Italy, whatever was actually projected onto something else in the 16th century how was the body politic conceived it comes to be conceived as the body of the king and let's see if I can get to my power point here how do I get out of this screen and escape there we go on that we don't need the first one so that's how we see Sarava territory today right now when I said the body of the king right and this if you read the work you might have heard of this through the work of Ernst Cantorovitz who in 1957 wrote the king's two bodies and he had this idea that the notion of the mystical quality of the nation state that is the political community that was inviolable, sovereign and external and eternal was essentially derived from a similar function in the early modern period embodying the king who was supposed to have an actual body that came to power and died and a mystical body that would not die and this in turn was derived from medieval Christian theology that had come up with the two bodies of Christ corpus naturali which is a natural body and the corpus mysticum the social body of the church is a metaphorical body now in our field scholars have been kind of eager to indicate a similar phenomenon in the Middle East and South Asia but I feel like some of these have been rather content to just cut and paste Cantorovitz without working out the detail usually as a kind of a historical phenomenon and we don't see in these works how Cantorovitz actually develops change over time in his work and it doesn't make sense why something derived from Christian theology should have meaning in the Middle East or in the Islamic world anyway so I think I can't deal with all this here but I would like to show you a few instances of the body of the king actually being used in a symbolic way in some of the era productions well what we call a country today would be defined as a kingdom quesvar or mulch these terms were used metaphorically especially in the 16th century for example Amir Mahmood Ebnechon Damiir who writes in 1550 at some point expresses his hope that the appointment of Shah Tahmas with the governorship of Khurasan was meant to heal the wounds that had been inflicted on the body of the kingdom by that emulch by the blade and assault of rebels he describes the entry of Ibrahim Sultan into Harat in these words he says the sultan in the land balad is like the soul in the corpse jasad a few decades later the philosopher Sheikh Bahai writes quote kynchship for the subjects is like the soul for the corpse and the head for the body the metaphor is sometimes reversed describing the execution of the Kurdish ruler Khosrobig Sharafuddin Bitlisi writes in the late 16th century the sultan exiled his sacred spirit from the kingdom of his body earlier Idris Bitlisi had written in the Vaunune Shahan Shahi that in the kingdom of human existence Mamlikate wujude insani the spirit has the rank of leadership and kynchship so I'm not suggesting that the Sahafids are inventing this metaphor it was certainly older there are echoes of this in Bayhagi or Al Ghazali where the king conceived of the kingdom as a body with the king as its head and since the kingdom was made up of a number of smaller tributary kingdoms you're the king of kings Shahan Shah you're the king of other kings as the Sahafids state was then this body itself was made of a number of other smaller bodies other kingdoms with the king at its head and this image might remind you or reminded me anyway of the front piece of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan the king is up here and that's the body and the body is filled with other people and this is the original drawing for it the heads are all there this is done by French Huguenot painter Abraham Boss and in the 17th century and Hobbes was in Holland and then went to France for this now I don't know of the Sahafid version but I think there's a similar idea that existed elsewhere because another 17th century this time a Dutch painter Willem Schelling's has this picture done for the Mughal empire where you see where you see there's supposed to be Shah Jahan and his sons but the thing they write on is made up of these people it's a composite animal pretty common in the Islamic art but this might be a kind of orientalist exoticising because it's filled with women dancing and what have you but the actual idea does exist in Mughal paintings and here I think we can kind of see that where so in Mughal India following old Indian custom kingdom is the king and his elephant the kingdom is the elephant and the king is the elephant driver so you see the kingdom conceived as bodies inside the elephant both human and animal and the king himself is made up of other bodies so I think this is probably how the subjects of the Safavids view the Safavid kingdom or kingship and not this the birds eye view fetishized cut out of Iran that we now associate with an inviolable sovereignty thank you my paper is about periodisation where do we draw the boundaries between periods it is traditional in Iranian historiography to divide the timeline according to dynasty we speak of the Achaemenid period and the Abbasid period the Al-Khanate and the Timurids as the primary building blocks of the Iranian story it is a useful way of structuring Iranian history especially since the surviving source material tends to emphasize political events but dividing the timeline in this way can obscure as well as reveal it may give the impression that all changes even all political changes are concentrated at the beginnings and endings of dynasties which of course is not true and so it is with the Safavids we are accustomed to thinking of the Safavids as a unique period in Iranian history distinct from what came before and setting the stage for what would come after they get credit for making several long lasting changes to Iran they established Shiism as the predominant religion they re-established at least it said a Persian dynasty after centuries of non-Persian rule they are credited with establishing the modern boundaries of Iran they ruled Iran during its first extensive contact with the west some of the traits attributed to the Safavids are probably unwarranted regarding the establishing of the boundaries of Iran really only the western boundary was solidified in the Safavid era the northern and eastern boundaries were still fluid through the Qajar period defining the Safavids as a Persian dynasty is problematic because it presumes national identities that are more relevant to the modern world than to the period of the Safavids as Ali has just talked about contacts with the west increased gradually over many centuries beginning well before the Safavid period began and accelerating well after with regard to the conversion of Iran to Shiism that definitely happened during the Safavid period but we know very little about the process in fact we probably will never know much about the process there is just too little source material to go on we do know that Esmael was not exactly a conventional 12 or Shi and it stands to reason based on the evidence we have that Sunni Islam maintained a presence in the Iranian population for several decades after 1501 but we just do not know enough to venture a timeline for the process of conversion so I will set that aspect of the Safavids aside for this paper but if we consider the conventional picture of the Safavid era I would venture that what comes to mind is a certain urbane refinement after centuries of rule by nomadic pastoralists we picture the elegant architecture the literary and intellectual discussions the Safavids are considered often portrayed as the revival of Persian culture setting the stage for the emergence of modern Iran I would argue that what is implied by that depiction of the Safavids is that they restored an urban based Iran modern Iran is urbanized the classical Persian civilization is conceptualized as urban and in that light the period in the middle ages when Iran was dominated by nomadic tribes might seem backward by comparison so the Safavids with their cities and their urban culture might seem like a return to civility I personally do not share the moral judgment of urban being superior to nomadic but I do think there is something qualitatively different about the Safavids as compared with the preceding dynasties and that difference is in the place the city held in Safavid culture now that said when scholars talk about the Safavid period they typically define the period as the years of the dynasty as a whole from 1501 to 1722 or otherwise from 1501 to 1736 depending on how one defines the end of the dynasty but treating the Safavid period as a block can lead to some misunderstandings about what these changes came about very little about Iran changed in 1501 or in the immediately following years the traits we normally attribute to the Safavids emerged only much later so I think it would be helpful for us to use a three-fold division of the Safavid dynasty with the periods named after the three nominal capitals the Tabriz period encompassing the first half of the 16th century the Qazvin period the second half and the Esfahan period which would include all of the 17th century down to the siege of 1722 each of these periods has a unique character that makes it distinct from the others and we only begin to see the emergence of a new distinct Safavid Iran during the middle period the Qazvin period I hasten to add that I used this terminology loosely the very idea that Safavid Iran had a capital city is one of those characteristics of the Safavids that we take for granted but that did not exist during the reign of Ismael I I have discussed this matter in more detail elsewhere just briefly I will note that Tabriz did not function as the permanent residence of the Shah and its status as capital was an honorific one in fact this is one reason for treating the first half of the 1500s as distinct from the rest of the Safavid history I will return to this point in a moment but first I want to address why we should not consider 1501 a special year in Iranian history that 1501 was not a major watershed moment is of course true on the simplest political level Ismael's enthronement and Tabriz did not bring the Akunilu to an immediate end the Safavid wars of conquest continued for several more years it was only in 1508 that the last regions of Akunilu power finally fell to Ismael with his conquests of Diarbacur and Baghdad in fact Ismael's new reign was in a way a continuation of the Akunilu since Ismael himself was a grandson of Uzun Hassan the most famous of the Akunilu rulers and the Akunilu leaders he defeated Alvan and Murat for example were his cousins Ismael's reign was a continuation of the Akunilu in another way also Ismael's regime was structurally very similar to that of the Akunilu and of other Turkic polities that had ruled in one part or another of Iran for centuries these polities were based on the military power of the Turkic nomadic pastoralists who had come to dominate Iran from the time of the Mongols and the new Safavid regime was likewise based on the military power of the Turkic nomadic pastoralists even within the Safavid movement this military power had begun decades before Ismael captured Tabriz in 1501 another grandfather of Ismael aside from Uzun Hassan was Sheikh Junaid the leader of the Safavid Sufi Order who had militarized the Safavid in the middle of the 15th century he gathered a following of Turkic pastoralist tribes living in Anatolia and became his devoted disciples these tribes known as the Ghazalbosh formed the core of the newly reinvented Safavi movement they had stayed loyal to the Safavid Sufi line at the end of the 15th century as the leaders of the order came under Akunilu persecution and went into hiding the Ghazalbosh were Ismael's army when he emerged from hiding and when he launched his campaign at Akunilu and afterward Ismael granted the conquered lands to the Ghazalbosh tribes in the same way that the rulers of the previous Turkomongolian polities had done of course Ismael did have the habit of appointing his sons as provincial governors but these were only nominal appointments his sons were young children and in practice these were land grants to Ghazalbosh tribes with Ghazalbosh emirs serving as the real commanders of the provinces so Ismael's new regime was in fact very much like the tribal confederations that had ruled Iran for centuries the only difference was that now the family and power was a line of Sufi peers this difference had consequences for how succession in the Safavid dynasty would be handled but there was no practical difference between how Akunilu leaders or Karakunilu or Timurid leaders for that matter governed their tribal confederations and how Shah Ismael I governed the Safavid state nor was there a practical difference in how these polities were structured not only was the new Safavid regime similar to the Akunilu in being dominated by nomadic tribes they even included some of the same tribes both the Mosulu and the Ghazalbosh had been part of the Akunilu confederation before becoming Ghazalbosh it is after all no accident that Ismael proclaimed his new reign in Tabriz Tabriz had been the capital city of the Akunilu established as such in the 1470s by Ismael's grandfather Uzun Hasan but Ismael spent much of his reign away from Tabriz which brings me to another point about what I call the Tabriz period Shah Ismael I lived the lifestyle of a nomadic pastoralist pastoralists must move from one pastor to another during the year to provide for their herds commonly in Iran they will move from lower elevations in the winter to higher elevations in the summer and then back again in the period after the Mongol conquests we see many examples of rulers of Iran moving regularly from one place to another rather than being settled in a capital city and when they did visit a city they often camped in a garden beside the city rather than staying in a palace in the city center Ismael continued this tradition by staying in a tent and participating in the seasonal migrations every spring he set out with his court and with herds of sheep to spend the summer in a high altitude pasture the sources report a variety of locations usually around Iran and Azerbaijan Sahand a high volcano outside of Tabriz was a favorite of his but he also summered farther away in Sultaniye winters were often spent in Tabriz but he also spent winters elsewhere he was sometimes absent from Tabriz because he was on a military campaign but he maintained the nomadic lifestyle even when not on campaign even during the last decade of Ismael's reign following his disastrous defeat at Chalderon in 1514 that according to the Safavid historians left him dejected and uninterested in campaigning even then he still spent much of his time moving about the country spending two winters in Nakhcevan and one in Esfahan so his habit of moving about the country was not always due to military necessity it was simply the normal way of life for him he was fully adapted to the Turkic nomadic lifestyle in this regard as in others Ismael presents a striking contrast to the habits of the Safavid Shahs during the last century of the dynasty who spent their whole lives in the palace of Esfahan while Ismael partook of the lifestyle of the rural nomadic Turks the late Safavid Shahs were adapted to the gentile lifestyle of the urban Tajiks Ismael died in 1524 in the preceding Turkomongolian regime such as the Timurids and the Akunulu wars of succession were common in which the tribes divided into factions supporting different sons or other male relatives of the recently deceased leader significantly the Safavid succession in 1524 did not follow that pattern Esmael had four sons who by Turkomongolian reckoning would each have been equally qualified to succeed Esmael but the oldest son, Tachmasp, took the throne without incident or challenge this is undoubtedly due to the Sufi character of the Safavid Ghazalbosh movement in that one normally became the leader of a Sufi order by being designated to that office by the preceding sheikh and that is in fact what happened in 1524 Esmael designated Tachmasp his successor both as ruler of the Safavid territories and as peer of the Safavid Sufi order otherwise court culture during the early reign of Tachmasp continued as it had been under Esmael I just as Esmael had usually taken part in the seasonal migrations so did Tachmasp this pattern is obscured during the first dozen or so years of Tachmasp's reign by the near constant series of crises presented by invading Uzbex invading Ottomans and the occasional internal rebellion when that settled down in the 1530s Tachmasp spent most of his summers in summer pastures at various locations usually around Azerbaijan he mainly spent his winters in one of two cities either Tabriz or Ghazvin he spent more and more time in Ghazvin as he got older until he finally settled there permanently in 1558 this is not a matter of the Shah moving the capital from Tabriz to Ghazvin rather the Shah was transitioning from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary one from 1558 until his death in 1576 Tachmasp spent every summer and every winter in Ghazvin here finally we see the sedentary habit so familiar in the late Safavid Shahs who stayed in Esfahan year round with the settling of the Shah in Ghazvin a new urban based Safavid culture began to emerge the cities of Safavid Iran already had an urban culture of course but now for the first time that urban culture became integrated with the court the close association between the court and the arts both literary and visual that we associate with the late Safavid period had its roots here in Ghazvin this morning I will discuss just one aspect of this of a particular of the Safavid historiographical tradition history writing under the Safavids obviously took place before that but there is a difference between history writing in the first half of the 16th century and history writing in the second half there is a unity to history writing in the latter part of the century that did not exist early on we have several historical works from Safavid Iran during the first half of the century from the Tabriz period we just heard about the Futohat-i Shahi from Ali Yanushar suffice it to say for now that the Futohat-i Shahi is almost entirely focused on the reign and exploits of Shah Ismail down to the year 1513 the early chapters recount events before Ismail's birth and they prelude in preparation for Ismail's coming Khan Damir's Habib-e Siar is a universal history divided into three volumes the first volume covers the ancient world up to and including the time of Muhammad and the first four caliphs the second volume surveys the history of the world from the rise of Islam to the coming of Cengiz Khan and volume three covers the period of the Mongol rule up through the Safavids this organizational scheme recalls the words of the Ilhanid historian Rashida Dean when he wrote what event or occurrence has been more notable than the beginning of the government of Cengiz Khan that it should be considered a new era Khan Damir structured his world history around two big historical watersheds the career of Muhammad and the career of Cengiz Khan another chronicle was written in the early part of Tachmasb's reign Mir Yahyaw in Nabda Latif al-Husani al-Qasbini wrote the Lubba Tawarig in 1542 under the patronage of Bahram Mirzaw the younger brother of Shah Tachmasb Qasbini the author was later accused of being the leader of the Qasbini Sunnis and was imprisoned where he died in 1555 the Lubba Tawarig is divided into four unequal parts part one covers the life of Prophet Muhammad and his family part two and three covers secular history both before and after Muhammad respectively and part four which is very short summarizes the history of the Safavids part three covering the history of the world from the time of Muhammad to the rise of Shah Ismail is by far the longest part of the chronicle encompassing more than two thirds of the text the part dedicated to the Safavids by contrast just a brief few pages these chronicles are quite different from each other in what they emphasize and in how they structure Iranian history and that is the point at this stage there was no historiographical discourse particular to the Safavid era Hawn Damir wrote a history of the world essentially in the Timurid style it could very easily have been a Timurid history the events of Shah Ismail's reign tacked on at the end the Futhahat-e-Shahi is essentially a panagyrical biography and then there is the Lubb Tavariq an interesting text which is supposed to be a history of the world up to the present which at the time was 1542 but whose author seems to be half a denial that the Safavid period had even happened now contrast this with historical writing in the Ghazvin period as I said Ghazvin became Tachmasb's permanent capital in 1558 not that 1558 is in itself significant for historical writing but it gives us a convenient boundary date four more histories were written in Ghazvin after 1558 either during Tachmasb reign or as immediately after the first of these was written by Ghazi Ahmad Ghifari Ghazvini the author of the Nusikh-e-Jahanra Ghifari spent his career in Ghazvin which by that time had become Tachmasb's capital and worked for the Shah's brother Saum Mirzaw later after Tachmasb had Saum arrested Ghifari moved to India where he wrote his summary of world history the book recounts the lives of Muhammad and the Imams reviews the dynasties of world history and then devotes considerable space to a year by year chronicle of the history of the Safavid period up to 1565 another historian closely associated with court culture in Ghazvin was Abdi Beg Shirazi who wrote the Tachmilat al-Akhbar Abdi Beg worked in the Daftarkhane or Chancellery in Tachmasb's administration the Tachmilat al-Akhbar was another universal history of which only the last part covering the Safavid period has been published it reports the reigns of both Ismail and Tachmasb up to the year 1570 then there are the two historians writing right after Tachmasb died Burak Munshi Ghazvini wrote the Javach al-Akhbar at the behest of Shah Ismail II in 1577 this was again a history of the world with a substantial section devoted to the Safavid dynasty and the famous Ahsan at Tavariq by Hassan Rumlu well known to English speaking scholars because it is one of only two Safavid chronicles translated into English it is also supposed to have been a universal history oh three now that I think of it three Safavid chronicles it is also supposed to have been a universal history but only the last two volumes survive covering the end of the Akunylu and the entire length of the Safavid history through the year 1577 Both Burak Munshi Ghazvini and Hassan Rumlu relied in part on their own personal experiences serving in the royal court it has already been noted by Shulah Quinn and Charles Melville that the quote real flourishing of Safavid historiography began during the reign of Shah Tachmasb I would go a step further and say the real flourishing began during the Ghazvin period after Ghazvin became the permanent capital the historians of Ghazvin were all engaged in a common project to tell the history of the Safavid dynasty in all cases that was an essential aspect of their text so I will close with this thought we can see in the Ghazvin historians a new tendency toward conceptualizing themselves as Safavid as living in a Safavid period of Iranian history distinct from previous periods and of embracing that as their identity or as part of their identity we do not see this reflected in the historians of the early 16th century this is so far as our sources indicate a new sensibility which happens to coincide with this new urban oriented phase of Safavid rulership and this Safavid sensibility continued in Iran in the early 17th century with the flourishing of dynastic histories the late 17th century with the fashion for quasi-historical romances through to the end of the Safavid period thank you this paper is part of a larger project on Turkish literature and ideologies of language in the medieval and early modern Persianate world in general and Safavid Iran in particular there I will discuss and contextualize a short polemical treatise entitled the story of the story of the story of the scorn and refutation of the hypocrites and the verification of the firm conviction of the people of belief written by an otherwise little known Turkish literature by the name of Gharibi who flourished sometime in the second and third quarters of the 16th centuries on the one hand the paper draws to the presence of learned polemical religious prose literature in Turkey produced in the Safavid context and sponsored by the Safavid elite on the other hand by trying to contextualize this short treatise to connect the disappearance of such genres in Turkey from the Safavid literary horizon with a changing political and religious environment around the turn of the 16th and the 17th centuries which also had a profound impact on literary patronage. The Safavid period resulted in the religious and political separation of Ottoman Anatolia and Central Asia from Iran leading in turn to their social and cultural and in a different way also linguistic separation. One of the problems this paper therefore grapples with is the search for a place for such non-precision literary idioms as Turkey in Iran in early modernity an age when both religion and state as well as language and state became more closely associated. Due to the compartmentalisation of scholarship along modern nationalist lines the study of Turkish literary culture in Iran has been almost entirely neglected. Most scholars of Iran accepting the simplified account of vernacularisation that Islamic Iran turned Persian in the 9th and 10th centuries for literary purposes and end of story. At the same time for nationalist Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijani scholarship the Turkic output of the Safavid period is far more significant than Persian. So two parallel universes. According to the drawing of Safavid history Roger Savery, at the Safavid takeover there was an acute shortage of Shiite books in Iran. While this statement still waits qualification and the numbers behind it are still yet to be specified. There does seem a fair leap in the production of Shiite religious learning in the latter half of the Safavid rule. An important development of this as discussed by scholars like Saeed Adraman, Rulal Bissab and Rassu Jafarian was the translation of religious learning into Persian rendering much of Shiite pious literature accessible to the broader populace and greatly facilitating the actual conversion of Iranian society to Shizin. While it's possible to see religious works in Persian coming out of Safavid Iran against the background of this popularisation of Shizin Turkic literature practices were taking place in a larger patrimonial context depending on the on end of patronage of various Kizilbash Amirs and remaining at the level of popular culture. It is significant that Ghalibi composed his work in the story of Johanna in Turkic. As is well known for example from western terrible travel accounts not only were various Turkic dialects widely spoken in Safavid Iran but also the court had a large number of Turkic speakers. As Wilhelm Floor and Hasan Javadi remind us Esfahan, the capital city from 1597 had a quarter by the name of Abbas Abad where Turkic speakers from Tabriz were settled and the court as well as the Safavid dynasty converged in Turkic on a daily basis. Of course, Turkic had not only communicational or utilitary but also symbolic functions. Part of the cultural make up of the Safavids and the Turkmen-Kizilbash elite Turkic poetry was practised in the households of Kizilbash Notables and Safavid Princes. This is as tested by three biographical anthologies of poets. Samirza's from some time around the middle of the 16th century Saadiki Beg's Majmau Chavass both of which dedicated a special section to Turkophone poets in the Safavid realm. While Samirza composed his anthology in Persian, Saadiki Beg wrote his in Cagatai Turkic in express reference to the Timurid literary tradition and its best known and most spread paradigmatic proponent, Mira Lyshina who died in 1501. And we should also mention the third biographical diction of poets written by our own hero today Gharibi on the title Taskirata Shuarach which lists Turkophone poets in the land of Rum whom the author characterises in terms of confessional ambiguity as lovers of the house of Ali and many of whom were associated with the Safavids. However, while there was a significant amount of poetry written in Turkic and Safavid around all through the tenure of the dynasty and in fact also afterwards down to our very own days the other Turkic literary tradition constituting a robust literary continuum the production of learned prose in the Safavid period in Turkic was meagre quite in contrast with the plethora of historical biographical or religious works in Persian. It seems that in the period under discussion literary prose was practised in but a few genres in Turkic and even in these genres the number of such works was limited. In Saitran poetry there was also a tradition of legendary story cycles most prominently about such messianic figures as Abu Muslim expressive of the antinomian messianic spirit of the early Safavids and the Qazubash a religiosity that was subject to persecution from the late 16th century on. We can assume albeit there is little in scholarship about language practices in early modern Iran that the scarcity of learned religious prose had to do with the social context for Turkic. Theology is connected to Madrasa context and by extension to an urban environment and is alien to the nomadic tribal milieu aristocratic orders didn't that work? I don't know how to make that into an adjective. So it was alien to the milieu of the Qazubash tribal following of the Safavids. As cities were Persian speaking or largely Persian speaking literary production in Turkic in the higher genres of Islamic religious learning was at a low rate. This holds true even with the caveat that the field of Turkic literary culture in Iran is so much neglected in scholarship and so much of the pertin source material is still lying in manuscripts that our knowledge is still in considerable flux. It seems that under the Safavids most Turkic learned religious literature was intended for the adherence of the Safavid Tarika. We can deduce hagiographical works such as several Turkic translations of the Safa to Safar. The dates are several times modified official history of the Safavid Order which was originally written in Persian by Tavakulidin Asmalidin Bazzars in 1358. One of the Turkic translations itself was made in 1542 in Shiraz by a certain Muhammad al-Qatib Neshartiy under the patronage of Shahkulu Khalifa of the Zuqadar Qazubash Oymak. And in 1538 Neshartiy also translated under the title Shohadar Name Khashifi's Rosetta Shohadar and Alid Martyrology. This is not the only Turkic rendition of Khashifi's work. Fuzuli's translation entitled Hadikata Suadar is much better known. Indeed, although Fuzuli is usually mentioned in the Ottoman context the Persian and Turkish literary output his Persian and Turkish literary output had Safavid patrons too. We know of two figures from Erdabil who each composed the work in Turkic on the tenets of twelve seasons. One was Kamaluddin Hossein El-Ahial Erdabili run in 1543 who was first a protégé of Haida Safavi. Then studied with Jalaududdin Davoni Amir Geyasuddin Dastraki and was also patronised by Ernavai Prince Gari Mirzaib Nesultan Hossein Baikara in Timurid Herat. After the death of his Timurid patron he returned to Iraq and Azerbaijan became an instructor in the Safavid Order and died in 1543. He was a prolific author with poetry, religious treatises and commentaries in Persian and Arabic. But he is also said to have written a treatise on the imamate in Turkic and then translated it into Persian. Another prose work we know to have come from the ranks of religious scholars from Erdabil who joined the Safavids is the Aqaidul Islam written by Ahmad ibn Muhakkuk Erdabili also known as Al-Muqaddas Al-Ardabili an influential Shiite scholar from the latter half of the 16th century. From the 17th century one could mention the Isbate imamate by one Khudavadi Tabrizi who was commissioned sometime between 1624 and 1629 by Shah Abbas to give a concise summary of the basic tenets of Shizm in an attempt at converting a criminal prince as part of the Safavids ongoing at anti-Ottoman war effort. We know few but significant details of Divan Igaribi's life all of which come from the manuscript of his complete works bearing the title, Divan Igaribi the unique copy of which executed in 1590 by one Muhtaridin Mirza Zaki Maraghi can be found at the Majlis Library in Tehran. This is the first page of the folio. This misbound Divan is one large composition and the constituent parts of which are loosely arranged giving the narrative framework of the four seasons eulogising the reign of Tachmasb and also including Shah Ismail I whose poetry Igaribi imitates on multiple occasions in the form of Nazirans parallel poems and and mochem masses which are kind of five line stroke extending individual lines from a previous poetry. In a dissertation Zainab Aaltoch makes the case that the emphatic descriptions of gardens and palaces at the end of the volume are related to the construction of the palace complex Sardat al-Bard under Tachmasb in his new capital Kazvin. This would date Igaribi's work between the early 1550s and Tachmasb's death in 1576. However, in a story about Johanna Igaribi quotes a Shiite scholar Mojtahid Zainuddin Ali who is likely identical with Ashahid al-Sani in 1558 and whom Igaribi indicates to have already been dead. This dates to her work between 1558 and 1576 unless of course the Rahmatullah after Zainuddin's name is the interpolation of the copies. In an autobiographical prose piece, Igaribi informs us that his late father was Hajimusli Hauddin Amir Khan from the Khalifahs or agents of Sheikh Safi Hauddin in the province of Mantasher in southwest Anatolia important elements of which were prominent supporters of the Safavids. So they were coming from the Mantasher Confederation. According to Igaribi's description his father was a Talidehaq or Derish. He lived at a place called Bozayuk which was his hereditary seat. Igaribi received an allergic introduction to the mystical path from his father a training that was cut short by the latter's death when Igaribi was 10 due to the persecution of the Khazilbash and Shiites during the reign of Selim I between 1512 and 1520. His father was executed after a show trial conducted by Sunni Ulamar. After that he joined the Safavid Order of Movement becoming a meddag, ancomias, a court poet to Shahid-e-Smail. During these early years he seems to be also affiliated with the Mavlavids through Shahid-e-Dada the well-known lexicographer and with the Halverties and Gulshani through Ibrahim Gulshani whose hands he claims to have kissed when in 1528 the letter that is Ibrahim Gulshani was brought to Sultan Suleiman's court in Istanbul. The story Igaribi tells is simple. Not on typical of religious polemics. A Jew from Egypt by the name of Yohanna having studied with Jewish and Greek scholars, the letter means philosophers, converts to Islam. He studies the teachings of the four Sunni legal schools and because of the contradictions between them and because he finds certain things in Sunnism unsettling he goes to Baghdad and interviews four religious scholars Qabi's representing each of these four schools. In the process the scholars contradict each other and also reveal anomalies in their legal approach. Only in one thing are they united, the condemnation of Shizm. Predictably, Yohanna becomes convinced of the superiority of the Shizm and converts to it. Unfortunately the volume that is the manuscript has been misbound and some of the leaves are missing. Therefore several of Igaribi's works including the Hecariate of Yohanna and the subject of today's paper are defective. We only have roughly two contiguous chunks misbound and separated from each other. The story has other variants too in Arabic and Persian. The exact relationship among which is yet to be elaborated on in the future. These versions go under such titles as attributed by the 18th century biographer Mirza Abdullah Effendi Esfani to Abu Futuhar Ar-Razi who died in 1157. A prominent Shiite scholar of the 12th century. Better known for his Quran commentary Ar-Rozul Jinnan. An identification that has been subject to doubt more recently. The Arabic and Persian versions can be found in over 40 manuscripts. Mostly 19th century copies. The following schema is a rudimentary model for the mutual relationships between the individual versions based on just a handful of manuscripts and catalog descriptions and there's no critical addition or study of the paper trail relating. This is really the first step in establishing the story of the story as it were. A lot of further work is needed and the schema is no more than preliminary hypothesis. But it will perhaps help us to demonstrate a number of conclusions with regards to Garibi's version. I posit that the versions go back to the same variety of the story or varieties close to each other. The dotted lines indicate versions and hypothetical relationships. The earliest version I know of is actually Garibi's with a number of distinguishing features a few of which I will list in just a minute. The next versions date from the late 17th century. They are in Persian and go back to an unknown Arabic rendition which is also related to later Arabic versions, one of which in turn was published in Karbalaugh in the bottom in 1960s. We also have another group of Persian manuscripts, one of which formed the basis for a lithographic edition in 1889. As far as Garibi's concern there are two basic conclusions this schema suggests. One is that his was the earliest version and another that it is separate from the other groups. Indeed at this point it seems that the work was retranslated in the late 17th century into Persian and that new translation and that new translation was based on a very different model. Indeed even from the truncated state of the work as it has come down to the present it is apparent that Garibi introduced new features several of which were tailored to the sapphire context. For example at a certain point in the story Dervish by the name of Booth-a-Far joins Garibi and the force of Nicades and points out some of the grievances of Shiites such as the story related to the last military campaign led by Osabah Ibn Zaid during the time of the Prophet and how Abu Bakr and Umar didn't want to participate in it. For they received word from Aishah about the approaching death of Muhammad. On the incident of the order of Fadak which Abu Bakr confiscated from Fatima although it had been left to her by the Prophet and Umar even tore up Muhammad's handwriting proving her ownership. Dervish concludes in reciting in reciting a lengthy Tabarra Tabarra Litany cursing the companions the first two caliphs the Ottomans etc. This is very interesting if we recall during the reign of Tahmosp with the promotion and control of Shiite public piety so with the promotion and control of Shiite public piety in view the Tabarra or public cursing was institutionalized in the form of a separate group funded by the treasury. The presence of a Tabarra text in Garibi might also be taken as indicative of the social and ritual context of such Turkic texts under the Safavids and the highly performative character similar to for example Qashif is a foreset alid maturology the Rosetta Shohadah or Shah Ismail's poetry as illustrated by Garibi in his entry on Shah Ismail in his biographical compendium. Similarly Messianic proselytising Isis and performative public possibly ecstatic oral context should be seen in the poem as illustrative of Ali's bravery during the battle of Uhud made up of quaterins the poem is a Morabah and is the elaboration of a theme well known from popular Turkic poetry the most famous rendition of which was written by the 14th century Khurufi poet Nesimi a poet that was also misattributed to Isismail the first as I have argued elsewhere. In other instance, Garibi tries to appear to Safavid royal or rather Sufi audience by quoting the eponymous founder of the Safavid order, Safiordin Arabili quote a sound report Naqli Sahih taken from the noble magis of Sheikh Safiordin may God most high perpetuate the guidance of his progeny over the heads of the two worlds In it, Sheikh Safi reports that before his death the prophet left instructions that after his death he be interred at night he be interred at night lest Abu Bak should find out about it and participate in the ceremony. As I've already alluded to it he also quotes a report from the prominent Shiite scholar Zain or Dean Ali the Ashahidus Saani on how Umar prevented Muhammad from registering Ali's succession in writing by not letting writing accessories be brought to him Hasbuna kitabulla the Quran is enough for us Various further subjects are discussed over which the force in the Qad is intensely clash such as the ritual of ablution inheritance, the legal status of children coming from illicit relationships, the Hanafi and Shafi use of chaos or analogy, prayer rituals purity regulations some of which particular succession form the focal point of Shiite political writings along with issues of religious orthopraxy The close comparison with some other versions of the Johanna story and other representatives of popular religious polemics written at the time will likely suggest further venues for understanding the shifting of saith with religious space but that would require another occasion and cannot be undertaken here In as much as it was worked into the grand panodiric framework holding together Gariby's entire divan his story of Johanna was the product of a court culture perpetuated on the shahis mode I and Tachmasp, which was characterized by the Sufi intellectual outlook of the early Sephavids and the heated anti-Sunni, anti-Ottoman and anti-Husbeck religious polemics of the time As I have hypothesized above his version remained isolated from the rest of the renditions of the story including the late 17th century version or versions which follow different models Gariby's work was the product of a highly versatile and multifaceted self-religious discourse ranging from the explicitly messianic to the establishment friendly scholarly to attempt at reformulating the messianic isos As is well known by the early 17th century the Sephavid venture greatly shifted orientation Abbas's reformism and fiscal economic administrative and military centralization an increasingly crystallizing 12-ish had taken over from the popular religiosity perpetuated by the Cazilbar to the present state of our knowledge few religious treatises were produced in the 17th and early 18th century i.e. the rest of the Sephavids were just as much as the urban culture of the Iranian city notables and bureaucrats was enshrined in the Persian literary and bureaucratic traditions the nascent orthodoxy and orthopraxy was targeting the urban populace and the Cazilbash military elite and together with them the popular shizm with the heavily sulfur bent was quickly losing ground arguably this brought about the diminishing of Turkic literacy not in terms of its linguistic use in everyday life or popular entertaining literary context but in terms of its symbolic power thank you very much my understanding that this is the 14th such symposium on the idea of Iran at various stages and intersections of ancient classical and medieval Iranian history and while many here would likely agree that we can point to a general geographical space which constituted and perhaps and does continue to constitute Iran the question of idea of Iran should give us pause it introduces some fairly complicated notions regarding how Iranian culture is conceived or understood how Iranian culture is recorded and how Iranian culture is preserved perhaps we should use the word re-articulated during successive periods of alternating stability and extreme traumatic violence the fact that there have been now 14 symposiums thus far with dozens of insightful conversations on these issues tells me that there is no one overarching understanding of the idea of Iran and nor should there be one necessarily if we accept an amalgamative approach I would argue that the idea of an enduring sense of bureaucratic corporate identity amongst Persians is an important and enduring one the rubric of scholar bureaucrat in quotations a term fashion perhaps by our colleague Jamal Qafadar readily applies to those administrators who wore multiple hats in a typical Medieval personal Islamic or turco Islamic court by the light of day they filled and checked columns in financial deftas they counted and double counted tax records toured and assessed various ikthaws and so on by the light of candles at night by the light of mirrors of love whether or not it was superlative calligraphy from Nizami's Chomsay a super commentary on Althussi's commentary on Ibn Sina a regional history of Herat a grand universal chronicle and the spirit of Chondemire and so on I would argue that such individuals believed themselves to be part of a greater historical corporate continuity the men of the pen and it was this sense of corporate continuity arwanio i ddodiau'r pwyfeidliadau a'rnghysbethau'r boblhynion yn gyllewddol i ddatgani'r idea yn Blan. Yr gyflwynum yma, y ddwy'i dargwm gyda'r cyfalion iaithio Yn Gwrdd ynghylch yn gyntaf o'r ddwybedu llwyddon a'r ysgrorau oiggrarydd ymlaen ynghylch. Mae hynny o ddweud o'r ffrwng sylmwynt, oherwydd y cyflawn i ddech ac rwy'n meddwl gweld hynny yw gweld hyd am hyn? I dweud y fanyllurell a'i cyfnod i gwahyddiad ac yw'r populariadau ac yn gwneud y llôl dechrau cyfnodol wedi'u gyda gyda y cyfnodol sy'n cymorthiad y dyfirestau a'r cyfnodol yn y meddwl yma wedi cyffredin isen o hy baseuf ar gyfer y cyfnodol a'r syddiad ychydigau now sleepingel yr amser. Felly y cyfnodol ymddurir i ddod o'i chywch gweiths i ddweud o gwriant ydy'r cyfnodol yw'r dechrau o'r cyfnodol y saf yng nghyd y vertiol o'r rhaid i'r ddechrau'r 1 ysgolion o'r rhwyl ar ysgolion o'r 1588, 89, 1610, 1611. A i'r ffordd, rwy'n dechrau'r unig cyfrifau o'r 1 hathymbeg o'r Dubaodd, yn cyfrifio'r ffordd o'r llwyddiad o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r Llywodraeth Cymru, y Pylir o'r Stryd. Fynd yw'r ddysgu, ar ystod, i ddysgu, yn ystod y tari ddysgu a'r ysgolion o'r Ffordd o'r Ysgolion o'r Ffordd o'r Rhaid i'r 1588. Rwy'n ddod amser yn ddod i'r dechrau, yn ddiddordeb yn ysgolion o'r Bheirion, yn ysgolion o'r Fffyddol, ddiddordeb yn ysgolion o'r 1606. Rwy'n ddiddordeb yn ysgolion o'r ffordd, a ddydw i'r 1588. Ysgolion o'r Bheirion, ac yn cael y cyfnod o'r Fyfrnedd ac yn cael y Fyfrnedd. Mae'r ffyrdd yn gwybod i'r ffrnedd yw'r hynny'r ffyrdd hwnnw, ac yn cael y ffrnedd yn y Cyfnod Chyfnod. A'r hynny'r ffrnedd yn cael y ffyrnedd yn ffyrnedd yw'r Fyfrnedd, o'r Fyfrnedd o Ordubad. A dwi'n rhaid i'r map ar ymlaen yw, ac rhaid i'r ffyrnedd. Oes. Fyfrnedd. Mae'r cyfnod. Mae'r cyfnod. Felly, mae'r Tabriz a'r Natrovan o'r Nôr West. Ysgawdd er fawr hwnnw yn gyflawni'r campain sydd yn George ac mae'n gweithio'r stwyff yn Ordu Bawd o'r plan a'r oeddennau'r cyfnod yng nghymru sydd o Siirvan. Yn y gweithio, Hothenbeig byddai Isgandir Bigh i'r company i'r hwnnw i'r honno a'r ffyrdd i'r ffaith yn ffyrdd yn ysgandir Bigh yn hynny yn erioedu'r exrwysgwyr mewn hynny'n mynd i ddiolol, y cantyr sgol yn ei ddweudio nifer iawn ddod o'ch cynnigol gyda'r adyniodau a'i cyd-diud i'r ddiweddol ac yn yr oedd amlwg ymweithio'n ddefnyddio, a'u ddiddurio'r gyffredinol iawn yn eu degol. Mae'r lleolau wych o Ordubad ymwneud yn Ceredd o ddynnal Tusi. As both Sufi masters and Shiite emperors, the Safavids, first in Ardabil and later in Tabriz, were well connected with this region and it appears that the Nasiriyah notable served the Safavids on a client basis as early as the 15th century. The first named Nasiriyah patriarch of note is Malik Bahram, who had fled to Egypt around the year 1501 as a young man but was later invited by Shah Ismail to return to Odubad. When exactly this happened, it's not clear, but we do know that Husein Begglala, Ismail's vaquil, had informed the Shah that Malik Bahram was a kinsman of Ismail's first chancellery official, a person named Khodja Atiq Ali, and it was Atiq Ali who had first designed and affixed the Shah's Tugra. Tugra is kind of like a heraldic device that appears on official documents. He was the first to design and affixes to Shah Ismail's first decrees. Shah Tahmas formally named Malik Bahram later as the Calentar of Odubad in the 1530s, while Mirza Khawfi, another member of Malik Bahram's extended family, served as the Munchiyama Malik, which is a position, kind of like the chief epistemographer, the writing of letters, during the 1530s. As both Qazi Ahmed and Iskander Begg Munchiy noted, by virtue of their excellent service to the Safavid dynasty, the Odubadis were found in the high offices of the royal court. This marked the beginning, in fact, of a new role for the Nasiriya of Odubad, serving as administrative guides for a new and ambitious dynasty, which was in the midst of establishing a 12er Shiite polity. Haughton Begg was one of five male children who all served in various administrative and visereal positions for a wide spectrum of Safavid nobility and notables during the 16th century. All trained as secretaries and comptrollers, the five were from oldest to youngest, Mirzak Begg, Adham Begg, Haughton Begg, Abu Tarab Begg, and Abu Talib Begg. It was the middle son, Haughton Begg, who would become largely the most famous of Bahram's progeny and the only one to directly serve Shah al-Bos. Haughton Begg cut his administrative teeth in the early 1570s in Azerbaijan by serving the governor of Khoi Dalu Budak Rumlu for roughly a year before eventually relocating to the distant city of Karaman following the turbulent reign of Shah Ismail II in 1576-77. Right. And without getting into the somewhat complicated narrative of the late 1580s in the region of Fars and Yazd, in which prominent Kizilbosh, notables like Bektash Khan, Jakub Khan Zolkador, and Yusof Khan Afshar were in various stages of conflict with the Shah and with one another, suffices it to say this was a critical stage for the recently enthroned Shah. By 1591 he had purged a wide swath of seditious elements in what I call his sovereignty showcase tour through Shiraz, Yazd, and Karaman. And he also began assembling the future elements of his new Divan-e-Ala, his supreme council, of which included in this was, of course, Haughton Begg himself. Iskander Begg-Monshi presents Haughton Begg in this period as a mediating force who is trying to convince his master Bektash Khan to respect Shah al-Bos' decrees and to actually take up his governorship in Karaman, which he won't do. So we have Haughton Begg on one side. On the other side we have the large-scale property owner, sinister kingmaker and general rabble-rouser, the demontalahi sheikh, Mire Miran, who is depicted as a very kind of sinister evil person who is giving bad advice to Bektash Khan. As Rudy Mathe has demonstrated in his excellent article on the final stage of the Civil War, which appeared in Charles Melville's Festschrift, these rebellions were as much about money and cupidity as they were about loyalty and hubris. Moreover, Fazli Begh Chwazani, the author of the Asal Tavariq, describes or details how sizeable properties, treasuries, and court baggage were seized from various Afshar tribesmen after the death of Bektash Khan. The demontalahi and the people of Yazd were also targeted for their disloyalty with extraordinary taxes and property seizures. It is amidst these developments that we read that the Shah arranged for Haughton Begg to be in direct royal service while in the city of Yazd. As various prominent positions were reshuffled in this purging time in the Divan-e-Ala, new governors are being nominated throughout Iran, Haughton Begg was named as the replacement Mustafa al-Mamalik, kind of the chief accounting officer. Fazli Begh gives us evidence to suggest that Haughton Begg had indeed remained in Yazd in the months following Bektash's rebellion to oversee the political and financial reparation of the region. For instance, the Calantar of Karaman, a person named Haja Abdel-Rashid, and various other regional notables arrived in Yazd with gifts and money to express their loyalty to the young Shah Abbas. These were presented to Ordu Badi, who in turn remitted them, or so it said he remitted them, to the central court in Kazvin. Likewise, various lords from places like Bam, as well as Rish Safidan, white bearded ones, or elders, who had been in the service of Bektash Khan in Yazd, arrived and were reconfirmed in their positions by Haughton Begg himself. Ordu Badi even embarked on financial assessments and reviews of the properties, the amlach of people like, that are named Shahryari, Oqazeynauddin, and Myr Tawajauddin Mahmood, who had all been servants of Bektash Khan, while also inspecting Nimautalahi properties and accepting cash money and gifts from Khalilalaw, the repentant successor to the evil Myr-e-Miran. It was only when the Vizier was stopped in Qashan during the winter of 1590, on route to the royal court in Kazvin, that Ordu Badi was officially proclaimed to be the Mustafiel Mamelach, with appropriate pomp and ceremony. My suggestion here is that we often depict such centralising initiatives as the one in Yazd, in this case a military one, in fairly simplistic terms. A ruler suppresses a rebellion, executes the principal transgressors, and everything falls into order. What is interesting in this case is that we witness the ripple effect that the rebellion had with regards to the significant disruption as to finances and administration, but we also see how Hatanbeg, at least I believe, earned his first major nomination on account of his ability to smooth out these ripples and bring in various constituencies in and around Yazd, back into the Safafid fold. Hatanbeg clearly impressed Shahbaz when he arrived in the royal court in the spring of 1591. He was about 20 to 25 years his senior, he's senior to the young ruler. Hatanbeg was referred to as Babal, not only within court documents, but also by Shahbaz himself. Within six months of his earlier nomination to the Dada Istifa, the Accountancy Office, or Dubai was promoted again to the position of Grand Vizier and honoured with the rank of the pillar of the state. This would be the beginning of a 20-year relationship, a period in which the Safafid state would undergo most of its significant changes. While on the basis of my reading of the sources, Hatanbeg should share at least some of the credit as he fulfilled a variety of roles. Financial Comptroller, Senior Diplomatic Envoy, Military General, Chancellor of Reformer, and Auditor General. As Anasariya notable, he also participated actively in the shaping of the official propagandistic profiling of Safafid she-ism. In this way, monarch and reformer work together in such a way that is perhaps reminiscent of, and here I'll probably risk orientalism, orientalist, what's the term I'm looking for? Relativism, by comparing it to someone like Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, which was so well presented in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantle. According to the Afzal Tavariq, one of Hatanbeg's first assignments as Grand Vizier was to head up an ambassadorial mission to Dillon at the end of 1591 to convince Khan Ahmed, the local potentate, to reconfirm his sozirinti to the Safafid House by agreeing to marrying his daughter to Abbas's son Safi Mirza. Indeed, Khan Ahmed was already married to the sister of Shah Abbas. Safi Mirza had just been named as the Valiata, the heir apparent to the Safafid state and also the governorship of Hamaton, and whose vizier was Mirza Abdullah Hussein, who was the nephew of Hatanbeg and future compiler of the epistolary Mwèd, Mwenshawd, Tartusi. Obviously, the marriage of the heir apparent to this Ghilani family, who had no male heirs, was highly advantageous to the Safafids. And Khan Ahmed knew this very well, and he initially declined to the match on the premise that his daughter, Ykan Begum, was legally a minor. As Devin Steward has noted in his article on the lost biography of Sheikh Bahayy, a team of legal scholars, including Bahayy himself, produced a fatwa, which allowed for this particular marriage. The presentation of this fatwa was charged to Hatanbeg, and a fellow envoy by the name of Bistan Aqayy Torqman. Interestingly, in the Afsalatawarik, there is no mention of the fatwa itself, but simply that it was Hatanbeg's intelligence and Cani ability to argue, which convinced Khan Ahmed to quote, tie the knot between that jewel of the kingly crown with this prescient imperial pearl. The diplomatic concord appears to have been short-lived. Iskander Begmunchi, who makes no mention at all of Hatanbeg's ambedor soriol mission, simply narrates that Khan Ahmed had acted duplicitously with the Ottomans, and an enraged Shah Abbas ordered a major invasion and subjugation of Gilan in 1592. Two years later, the Afsalatawarik makes a note that 25 blank parvances, already affixed with the royal togron, the white paper which was blank, were given to Hatanbeg, and on each parvanche, an imperial order was to be written by the Vizier and dispatched on behalf of Shah Abbas. Literally given blank slates in which to initiate policy, Hatanbeg's position is described as unparalleled by Fazle Beg in the history of those men, those men of the pen who serve emperors. It is with these parvanches in hand that Hatanbeg undertook a number of land-holding assessments, ars-haw, amongst Amir's living in Arabistan, Cwya Gilwya, and other regions of the south. Intrigunly, it was in the following year, 1595, that Urdu Badi toured the recently conquered kingdom of Gilan, and which resulted in a restructured system of tax collection and land tenuring in this prosperous new province of the Safafid Empire. This reorganisation was presented to the Shah in a formal document translated as the regulatory ledger of imperial taxes, which is unfortunately now lost. We don't have it, but it's referred to. Hatanbeg's treaty so impressed the Shah that he ordered that it be used as a template for the remaining provinces of the empire. Clearly Abbas has sustained military campaigns on numerous frontiers during this period played a central role in recalibrating the Safafid state, and after 25 years of territorial gains at the expense of the Ottomans and Uzbeck's, the Iranians were now in control of parts of the Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Khurasan, and Khurasum. Post-Bellum, after conquests of a new province, it was often Hatanbeg who served as a diplomatic contact and mediator in many of these conflict zones. For much of his career, he oversaw negotiations and brokered reconciliations with many non-persephone communities as vassals of the Shah. Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Ghilakis, Turkmen, Uzbeck's, as well as Bakhtiari's and Kashkari's. While his ethnicity is up for debate, he was likely an Azari Turk, he was fluent in multiple languages and was thus culturally and linguistically capable of handling the diversity of the frontier zones of Safafid Iran. In 1594, he personally negotiated the reintegration of the semi-autonomous region of Hubeza in Arabistan, while also dealing directly with the rebellious Afshar tribesmen of Qigluya two years later. As mentioned, he took the lead in the reorganisation of the Ghilan province and its Ghilakis-speaking people after its formal annexation. In 1598 and 1600, respectively, he was the chief bureaucrat appended to the Shah's military during two campaigns in Khurasan and Khurasum. He personally brokered the surrender and vassal status of the Shibani Uzbek claimant, Nur Mohamed Khan. He played an important diplomatic role in the negotiated 1603 peace treaty with the Ottomans, and his last service before dying in 1611 was an attempt to subdue the Kurdish region of Uromir while overseeing the conquest of the formidable citadel Dhamdum. However, arguably one of the most successful negotiations of this variety came at the end of his career in 1609 when some 20,000 Jalal-i Turkish tribesmen rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, and they then decided to migrate eastwards to find refuge within Safavid Dominion. Quote, it was royally decreed, writes Monad Jamiazdi, that itimad al-Dawla Mirza Hatembe go to Tabriz for the winter season so as to rank and appoint that group. General Beg Monshi describes the enormity of this initiative in some detail and how Hatembeg, along with notables, Amirs and teams of bureaucrats orchestrated a sizable field operation in the environs of Tabriz to process, organize and document tens of thousands of Ottomanized Turks who are now surfing the Safavid Shah. Royal letters and investigers were dispersed while elaborate roll lists were prepared to enumerate these newly-installed Turkish clans and their tribal leaders. Regarding chancellery culture, an arena in which Hatembeg was nominally in charge and I've done some work on this area, I can state somewhat reasonably that the royal letters produced during Hatembeg's tenure were not only shorter but demonstrably less impressive as exercises in deliberative rhetoric and the use of literary devices in poetry. In those letters which we can positively identify as being written by Hatembeg, some appearing in the Monsha Taltusi, others being replicated in the Afzala Tavariq, there are textual admonitions against excessive prose to quote, hyperbole and prolixity as a violation of good custom. While certain short formulaic components of these letters were clearly being copied from well-known manuals of epistolography, the most famous I think is Kaushafis, Maksanael and Shaw, which presents literally thousands of kind of model verses and titles that you can just kind of cut and paste and put into your letter. These all combine to suggest that traditional perceptions of imperial epistolography where letters could function as vehicles of debate regarding political philosophy, ethics, advice as well as contemplative theology and theosophy were being routinised with symbols, formulas and rhetorical expressions which conveyed rather than explicitly arguing concepts like sovereignty, like power, like obeisance. In essence it constituted a recalibration whereby chancellery missives were now formalised and bureaucratised to such an extent that their deliberative and rhetorical function were the rhetorical function of arguing and persuading celebrated for half a millennium by poets, literatures and philosophers was being pointedly marginalised. I feel like this is cutting in and out but while we encounter a linguistic downturn with respect to style and substance, certain components of letters, seals, formulas, prayers, benedictions, signatures actually grow in size and complexity in the early 17th century. The Toghra had been in Timurid and Cada slash Aquilodimes at the top and centre of a chancellery missive. During the Safaviv period it was replaced with a different performative utterance which was inked in gold and appeared as the beginning words in the first line of a document. Quote, a royal decree found the honour of being issued, pharmane hwmae hwnshod effe na ffaz iawft. Different formulaic phrases were later introduced and popularised during the period of Hathambeg's vizieret. Thus, hwch me jahan mwthar shod, the world obeying order has happened is a common feature in later Safaviv documents as is pharmane hwmae hwmae hwnshod a royal order has taken place. Interestingly, as Bert Fragner has demonstrated, the official Safaviv seal was moved by chancellery functionaries from the bottom of documents to the top and no longer were they round, they were pear shaped which was designed so that they could accommodate not only the name of the ruler but also the names of the 14 immaculity moms. It's clear that it was part of a larger genealogical programme by jurists and religious scholars to connect these early modern kings with the prophet and his pre-eternal and infallible progeny. Safaviv seals became increasingly complex and varied in terms of their design and text and as such one could argue that their diversification and use in multiple chancellery spaces reflected the degree to which agents of state could operate independently of the ruler but in still enjoy the full symbolic weight of his sovereignty. In an absolutist monarchical context a chancellery without access to some form of visual and recognisable imperial sanction cannot do business. In this way, the great seal, mohre humayun and you may think of the successor to Charles James who threw the seal into the river when he was trying to escape that kind of great seal was complicated by smaller seals, mohre asar which in turn could be affixed to signet rings they would have these special rings with little seals on them so that when documents came before them they just could just very quickly put the phrase literally hwch me johawn mohre humayun they would just stamp it onto the document with their special ring. Two of our more valuable 17th century sources which explicitly discussed the proliferation of seals document typologies and their varying formulas were both written by descendants of Bahramahle these Nasiriya's. One was Abdullah Al-Sain Al-Tusi who I mentioned who was prominent in the 1630s and he was a nephew of Hatanbeg. The other one is Abul Al-Qasim Ibn Muhammad Reza Nasseri who was himself the nephew of Abdullah Al-Sain Al-Tusi and he also served as the mentionless navies in the late 17th century. Their respective epistolary compilations were written by Abdullah Al-Tusi in 1633 and by Reza Al-Ayeh in 1669, 1676 Sandy Morton wrote a really good article about that when focused on that text. Both of these compilations contain explicit sections on the different seals used in the Chancery. What's interesting is that Hatanbeg himself designed a series of new seals to herald the new imperial profile in the early 17th century and I have to give a bit of backdrop before I can get to his seals. After a successful campaign against the Ottoman boss chose to show his piety and gratitude by performing a pilgrimage across Iran to the massive Shrine complex in Mashhad. In the afterglow of this pilgrimage a boss decreed that sizable numbers of royal properties and businesses, primarily in Isfahan were to be categorised as Waqf. Muna Jamiazdi describes also various Waqf deeds that were re-enacted from previous Savva family members such as Shah Tath Mosb and Shah Ismail as well as other princely royals including Sultan Mohammed Mirza, Sultan Hassan Mirza, Hamza Mirza himself. In places like Kazvin, Qashan, Mahmudabad and Isfahan. A prodigious amount of money was generated according to the terms of these trust deeds which were drawn up by Sheikh Bahai and the moneys in turn were divided into 14 shares of various sizes. The largest share belonged to the Prophet Mohammed and then so on and so on smaller as they went down through the different imams. It should be noted perhaps coincidentally that this new invigorated imperial piety by Shah Abbas came on the heels of his aforementioned visit to Ordubad to visit the Hatunbeg and his interaction with the Nasiri descendants. It was into this context that Hatunbeg and a chief religious overseer or Sadra named Mirza Reza together designed the 14 specific seals to be used for these new legal endowments. Hatunbeg ordered his chancellery staff to research appropriate histories and Shiite hagiographies so as to recreate the signet seals purportedly used by the 14 imams themselves. According to Hatunbeg in the 7th and 8th centuries the daily transactions, the Dado Sattad of each imam were routinely blessed with their own personal seal. By recreating these seals Hatunbeg claimed to be enacting the notion of deputyship Neyabet on behalf of the imam's Holy Spirit Nefse Nefse Homayun. Indeed the question of the pre-eternality of the imams, a subject of central doctrinal importance to medieval Shiite thought directly connected with this issue of imam's official seals. The 11th century scholar Sheikh al-Mofid had indeed quoted imami traditions that the angel Gabriel had handed to the Prophet Muhammad al-Tablet which contained the names of the 12 imams. In another tradition the angel delivered a folder containing 12 seals that had been created before time and were meant for each of the imams. How am I doing for time? Okay, I should be good. In conclusion, I would argue that an investigation of Hatunbeg or Dubai raises certain questions and gives us pause to offer some tentative insights. First of all I would remain somewhat convinced that Shah Abbas's policy of centralisation and his ability to extend Safavid dominion beyond the Iranian plateau was facilitated by Hatunbeg's ability to mediate newly subsumed individuals and groups while also assessing their socio-economic worth through extensive reviews and assessments. The bureaucracy under Hatunbeg was tasked with ushering in a new era of centralisation whereby extensive properties, cities and provinces were classified or reclassified as private royal property and taxes and revenues reached unsurpassed levels in the 1590s and early 1600s. Concurrent with Hatunbeg's activities in this regard the Safavid state was also expanding the Olam program in the Caucasus. Throughout the early 1600s thousands of Georgians, Circassians and Armenians were incorporated into the Safavid Imperial Project as new military leaders, as governors, as administrators, as courtiers. As Suzanne Babayee observed and she couldn't be here for this conference so I quoted her a few times to try to make up for that. As Suzanne Babayee observed they were uprooted from their indigenous socio-political networks the slaves were transplanted into a reconfigured imperialist court where they were invested through conversion with a new Muslim identity predicated upon Shiite loyalty to the Safavid state or to the Safavid Shah. This golamification clearly had an effect on the transory and the decision by Hatunbeg to simplify imperial documentary and epistolary language his decision to do so may have been a response to these new non-persephone elements in the Safavid state. By the end of the Shah, bosses reign, eight of the 14 major provincial governorships were held by Caucasian elites. Chancellery configurations and documentary output may very well have been shifted to reflect these new geopolitical realities. Again, as Suzanne Babayee noted the metamorphosis of Caucasian slaves into elite members of the Safavid household coincided with an official Shi language of authority that altered hierarchies of loyalty and consolidated a patriarchal family. I would add that much of the Shi language of authority was increasingly conveyed thanks to Hatunbeg through slogans, symbols, and routinised language and here I'm talking strictly about the court I'm not talking about what's happening in religious circles that are in addresses in Isfathon and elsewhere. Obviously it's very complex. With regard to the question I invoked at the beginning of this paper regarding corporate bureaucratic identity and the idea of Iran the landscape appears to only become further muddled. Older paradigms of perso Islamic literary and bureaucratic culture first formed in the Seljuk and Mongol periods were now being fused with the theological and juridical demands imposed by the Safavid ruling family as custodians of this new 12 or Shiite state. I would argue that this marks the beginning of a diluted or perhaps even fractured sense of corporate identity amongst the Iranian bureaucrats which did little to help conditions in Safavid Iran as it began to face more and more challenges internally and externally. Thank you.