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Safavid Iran Through the Eyes of European Travelers Safavid Iran through the eyes of European travelers The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Matthee, Rudi. 2012. Safavid Iran through the eyes of European travelers. Harvard Library Bulletin 23 (1-2): 10-24. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42673648 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Safavid Iran through the Eyes of European Travelers Rudi Matthee Man kann von fremden Völkern immer, wenn man nur will, etwas Gutes lernen (Provided one is willing, one can always learn something good from foreign peoples). Adam Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reyse (Schleswig: Johann Holwein, 1656) Introduction ntil about 1600, Iran, though renowned as a land of great antiquity and biblical import, remained largely unknown to Europeans. Te Uestablishment of the Safavid dynasty at the turn of the sixteenth century had awakened a new curiosity in the country and especially its charismatic leader, Shah Isma‘il I (r. 1501–1524), but news about these developments mostly fltered through to Western Europe second-hand, by way of reports written by Venetian representatives stationed in Istanbul. For a full century, no more than a handful of Westerners, mostly Portuguese and Italian travelers, actually visited Iran, leaving only fragmentary descriptions of life and politics in the Safavid realm. At the turn of the seventeenth century, all this changed. Te rise to power of Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–1629) and his outward-looking agenda, epitomized by an energetic foreign policy, created a political and economic environment that attracted keen European interest in Iran as a land of religious, commercial, and strategic opportunity. Catholic missionaries at this time entered the country and, allowed to set up convents in various places, became residents. European diplomats began to frequent Isfahan in hopes of swaying Shah ‘Abbas to join Europe’s rulers in their struggle against the Turks. English and Dutch merchants, agents of the newly formed East India companies, established trading posts in various Persian Gulf ports and several towns in the interior. Te maritime network they created facilitated access to the country, bringing yet more Europeans, so that what had been a trickle in the sixteenth century soon turned into 10 Safavid Iran through the Eyes of European Travelers HLB 23_1-2 Rubies BOOK.indb 10 12/5/2012 10:43:33 AM a food. Te list of notable visitors between 1600 and 1722, the year of the fall of the Safavids, includes Don García de Silva y Figueroa, Pietro Della Valle, Adam Olearius, Cornelis Speelman, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Raphaël du Mans, Jean de Tévenot, John Fryer, Jean Chardin, Engelbert Kaempfer, François Sanson, Cornelis de Bruyn, and Artemii Volynskii, to name but the most prolifc, perceptive, and informative ones.1 Teir observations, brought out in dozens of travelogues, vastly enhanced and improved the volume and quality of knowledge in Europe about Iran, lifing the country out of the state of a fabled realm and turning it into a place explored and described from an experiential, empiricist perspective. Not to depict it as an imaginary world inhabited by followers of a false, perverse prophet, but to observe and analyze it without prejudice became the self-appointed task of the most insightful of these travelers. Information ofered by their accounts has long been an important component of our knowledge about early modern Iran. Recent critical research on the putative biases and ulterior motives of Western travelers to the Middle East has done little to detract from that importance. Te seventeenth-century ones have largely been spared the anti-Orientalist and post-colonial gaze of modern scholarship.2 What is more, recent years have seen the appearance of a number of valuable studies on aspects of their observations that, while paying full attention to the travelers’ backgrounds as well as to the motives and interests that inspired them to leave home, have sought out “similarity, convergence and complementarity, rather than stark diference” in their contribution to the formation of early modern cross-cultural knowledge.3 Te present essay follows this trend, arguing that, while their background and attendant assumptions clearly shaped their understanding of the Muslim world, 1 Anne Marie Touzard has counted thirty-six French visitors alone in the period 1600–1730 whose accounts have been published. Most of these were missionaries. Many were marginal in terms of the time they spent in Iran and the quality of their reporting on the country. See Anne Marie Touzard, “Les voyageurs français en Perse de 1600 à 1730,” Eurasian Studies 4:1 (2005): 41–47. 2 Edward Said’s Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) barely deals with early modern travelers to the Islamic world, and his acolytes have mostly followed him in focusing on the nineteenth century. 3 E. P. J. Marshall, “Aferword: Te Legacies of Two Hundred Years of Contact,” in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rugby, eds., Te Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2002), 223. Examples are Dirk van der Cruysse, Chardin le Persan (Paris: Fayard, 1998); Dirk van der Cruysse, Le noble désir de courir le monde. Voyager en Asie au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Dominique Carnoy, Représentations de l’Islam. Représentations de l’Islam dans la France du XVIIe siècle. La ville des tentations (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998); and Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Rudi Matthee 11 HLB 23_1-2 Rubies BOOK.indb 11 12/5/2012 10:43:34 AM precluding cultural transparency, the seventeenth-century travelers brought with them a set of specifc ways of seeing that facilitated the mediation of diference to the point of engaged empathy. Tey mark a unique moment in the history of alterity. Te typical sixteenth-century Western traveler, a pilgrim in the case of the Ottoman Empire and a diplomat in the case of Iran, fulflled a mission and a mandate. In his written account, he might describe the country but his own assignment and his own experience remained central to the narrative. He showed himself steadfast in his biblical convictions, dismissing Islam as a fraudulent faith. By the nineteenth-century the typical visitor, a civil servant, an explorer, or a military ofcer, had become a panoptic, omniscient European who operated in the context of institutions of power, knowledge, and culture. He, too, was frmly convinced of the superiority of his own world, which now had become a matter of civilization, of culture and race. Te late humanists and the protagonists of the early Enlightenment were the frst ones to ofer a panoramic picture of the alien society they visited. While still moved by ofcial mandates or motives of personal gain, they embarked on their journeys determined to gather empirical knowledge, to portray what they observed realistically and accurately. Te sense of the exotic is still there, as is the antiquarian interest, but the focus has shifed from the biblical past to pre-Islamic civilization. No longer unselfconsciously frm in their own faith, many now saw the world beyond Christendom largely within its own civilizational framework and as part of a universal theater, exhibiting what Joan-Pau Rubiés calls a transition from an “essentially theological language towards a fully secular understanding of nature and history.” (Rubiés, 353) Te best of these travelers are remarkable for shedding as much of their ethnocentric prejudice as might be expected of anyone traversing the boundaries of culture at a time when little information was available and the chances of seeing the other as grotesque and inhuman were much greater than the possibility of recognizing diference as just that. In their writings, we encounter self-refection, as well as a willingness to see and appreciate diference rather than self-evident superiority.4 Diversity of Background, Motives, and Interests Seventeenth-century Western accounts of travel to the Muslim world, including Iran, are simply too diverse in character and motivation to be brought under one rubric. Te authors range from Catholic men of the cloth intent on establishing missionary posts to diplomats dispatched to woo the shah into anti-Ottoman alliances, from merchants in search of proft to gentleman scholars driven by curiosity. Some represented commissioning agents, kings, or companies; others only spoke for themselves. 4 Paul Hazard, La crise de conscience européenne 1680–1715 (Paris: Boivin, 1935), 17, as cited in Cruysse, 1998, 25. 12 Safavid Iran through the Eyes of European Travelers HLB 23_1-2 Rubies BOOK.indb 12 12/5/2012 10:43:34 AM Travelers’ motives for writing their accounts were diverse as well. Some did their professional duty and simply reported back to their superiors—the king, the company directors, or the head of the religious order who had sent them. Teir writings were never meant for the public but composed only for the eyes of those who had commissioned them. Most travelers, however, were eager to have their accounts published for money, fame, or both. Returning home, they were faced with a book market that was as hungry for descriptions of far-away lands as it was competitive, thus breeding opportunities as well as anxieties. Tavernier, Chardin, and De Bruyn are good examples of the urge to appear in print. A few authors became instantly famous and widely admired in this manner.
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