Krusinski-Matthee Intro.pdf

Taken from the Memoirs of Father Krusinski, Procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan; Who Lived Twenty Years in That Country, Was Employ'd by the Bishop of Ispahan, in His Negotiations at the Persian Cour - Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski - Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski[a] (born 1675 – died 1756) was a Polish Jesuit who lived in the Safavid Empire from 1707 to 1725/1728. He acted as an intermediary between the Papacy and the Iranian court, and also functioned as a court translator. Proficient in Persian and well acquainted with the nation and its people, he was an inhabitant of the Safavid royal capital of Isfahan and a "first-hand witness" to the capture of the city by the rebellious Afghans in 1722. Krusinksi's accounts make him an important primary source on this particular period of the Safavid era.

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's " Reminiscences of the Maidan-i Shah " combine discussion of the development of Isfahan as imperial capital by Abbas I with the author's childhood memories of growing up in the Safavid royal quarters adjoining the Maidan in the house of his grandmother, a Qajar princess and " first lady of Isfahan. " The house had formerly been the residence of the last Safavid Chief Eunuch and stood amidst a number of other buildings surviving in various states of repair from the Safavid age. Bakhtiar recollects some of these now vanished buildings in vivid and precise detail and gives also fascinating glimpses of the life and uses of the Maidan during the first half of the 20th century. Charles Melville takes as his subject the apparent lack of interest in historical subjects among Safavid painters (in contrast to Timurid, Ottoman, and Mughal practice). An extensive survey of manuscripts allows him to qualify the previously held assumption of Safavid neglect of historical painting. First, he finds that the Timurid tradition of illustrating histories continued under the Safavids, though primarily in 16th century Shiraz before the consolidation of Safavid control there and not, as far as we know, through the patronage of Safavid princes. Second, he notes that while Safavid court chronicles were not illustrated, manuscripts of several popular, romanticized histories did frequently contain pictures. This type of history was preferred for illustration, Melville suggests, because of the epic-romantic nature of the text itself, which lent itself to the kind of pictorial treatment given to the Shahnama and other verse epics and romances. Melville does not challenge the consensus that the Safavids showed little interest in the illustration of contemporary historical events, but he argues that this may have been because the mythologized past, first and foremost in the shape of the Shahnama, provided sufficient outlet for the illustration of idealized royal exploits. The principle difference, he suggests, with Ottoman practice was that Safavid artists, whose patrons remain for the most part unidentified, preferred to depict an idealized past, while their Ottoman counterparts, working for official commissions, concentrated on the present. The final chapter by Paul Losensky is a gem of an article on Safavid architectural chronograms— poems inscribed on buildings to record their date of construction and other information. It opens with an introduction to the subject, based on a single simple chronogram that allows the non-specialist reader to understand the mechanics of this highly specialized genre of poetry. This is followed by a discussion of the variety and complexity of the Safavid chronogram and the breath-taking virtuosity of its exponents. An appendix listing the architectural chronograms examined in researching the chapter provides all that would be needed to introduce students to this class of inscription, which is so important for dating and contextualizing buildings. Regrettably, the book is marred by errors and typographic slips in several chapters. However, despite the uneven quality, this is a useful volume containing several contributions that will become essential reading for those working in the field of Safavid studies. The chapters by Matthee and Losensky also particularly lend themselves for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate teaching. In Persia in Crisis, Rudi Matthee focuses on political and economic trends and events that catalyzed the downfall of the Safavid dynasty in 1722. Drawing on a lifetime of research on socioeconomic history of late Safavid Iran, this book coalesces the conclusions Matthee had already drawn in his

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1996

The historiography of Safavid prefaces the early years of Shah Ismail in the "Afzal al-tavarikh" and elsewhere the iconography of the "Shah-nama-yi Shahi" kinship ties between the Safavids and the Qizillbash Amirs in late 16th-century Iran - a case study of the political career of members of the Sharaf al-Din Ogli Tekelu family le "Dar al-Saltana" de Qazvin, deuxieme capitale des safavides sufis, dervishes and mullas - the controversy over spiritual and temporal dominion in 17th-century Iran Shii rituals and Power II - the consolidation of Safavid Shiism - folklore and popular religion Shah Abbas and pilgimage to Mashhad "barrier of heterodoxy"? - rethinking the ties between Iran and Persian during the Safavid period - sketch for an "Etat de Langue" similar farmans from the reign of Shah Safi the rise of the Julfa merchants in the late 16th century the Dutch and the Persian silk trade the character of the urbanization of Isfahan in t...

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Taken From The Memoirs Of Father Krusinski, Procurator Of The Jesuits At Ispahan (1733) - Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski - Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski[a] (born 1675 – died 1756) was a Polish Jesuit who lived in the Safavid Empire from 1707 to 1725/1728. He acted as an intermediary between the Papacy and the Iranian court, and also functioned as a court translator. Proficient in Persian and well acquainted with the nation and its people, he was an inhabitant of the Safavid royal capital of Isfahan and a "first-hand witness" to the capture of the city by the rebellious Afghans in 1722. Krusinksi's accounts make him an important primary source on this particular period of the Safavid era.

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In order to explain the Safavid transformation from a peaceful Sufi order into a radical extremist movement, this paper will attempt to place them in the political- religious landscape of Persia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Safavids were a product of the political instability of the period, which can be traced back to the collapse of the Mongol Ilkhanate and in the fifteenth century the collapse of the Timurids and their empire, particularly from 1447 onward. My central argument is that the Safavids, in their development from peaceable Sufi order into militant and millenarian cult, were not entirely exceptional amongst other religious movements of the period, and that they were never formally Shi'ite Muslims prior to 1501, instead representing an entirely heterodox and extremist belief system that, as unusual as it may appear, was comparable to and built upon other millenarian movements of the era.

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JOAS - Journal of Oriental and African Studies, 2017

A quick and simple introduction to the issue

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J.M. Silverman & Caroline Waerzeggers (eds.), Political Memory In and After the Persian Empire (Atlanta 2015), 447-477, 2015

This article is an evaluation of the volume, edited by Jason Silverman and Caroline Waerzeggers, on Political Memory in and after the Persian empire. This book explores the ways in which people from Rome, Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, and Iran interacted with kingship in the Persian Empire and how they remembered and reshaped their own indigenous traditions in response to these experiences. The contributors are Björn Anderson, Seth A. Bledsoe, Henry P. Colburn, Geert De Breucker, Benedikt Eckhardt, Kiyan Foroutan, Lisbeth S. Fried, Olaf E. Kaper, Aleksandr V. Makhlaiuk, Christine Mitchell, John P. Nielsen, Eduard Rung, Jason M. Silverman, Květa Smoláriková, R. J. van der Spek, Caroline Waerzeggers, Melanie Wasmuth, and Ian Douglas Wilson. In my article I try to explain how complex and diverse the political memory of the empire was, even within ethnic or religious groups. The whole volume can be downloaded from SBL's website: www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9780884140894_OA.pdf

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The Idea of Iran, 2020

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In The Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, rubric of Modernity, Empire, Colony and Nation (1650-1950), eds. Gulru Necipoglu and Barry Flood (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, Blackwell Companions to Art History series, 2017), chapter 41, 1082-1101, 2017

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Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran, ed. R. Hillenbrand et al., 2013

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