The paper discusses the politics of language (Turkic, Arabic, and Persian) and literary patronage in Safavid Iran in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Focusing on a hitherto largely neglected physician and litterateur by the name of Masih of Tabriz (fl. late 1720s), I will try to outline the cultural and political dynamics of literary production in non-prestige languages, in this case Turkic, in the early modern Persianate world. Masih of Tabriz was active during the last years of centralized Safavid rule and saw the demise of the dynasty in 1722 with the fall of Isfahan to the Afghans, and that of Tabriz to the Ottomans. He was a physician at the court of Tahmasp II (r. 1729-40), and he also tried his luck by switching to the Ottoman side. In the second half of the 1720s he produced a short divan, which today survives in a unique manuscript. This collection of poetry reflects a remarkable attitude to the three main literary languages of the Turko-Persian world, Persian, Arabic, and Turkic. The majority of the collection is made up of maqlub (‘inverted’) poems. Some of the letters of these Turkic or Persian pieces can be rearranged in a given way to produce poetry in Persian, Arabic, and Turkic, and vice versa. Such poetic word plays are not at all unknown to the Persianate literary tradition, and beyond mere word play, in a symbolic sense they are illustrative of both the interconnectedness of and the cultural difference between these three literary languages. Further, I suggest that by connecting the three languages on a metalinguistic level, and also by elevating Turkic to a level equal to that of the other two idioms, i.e. Arabic and Persian, Masih’s poetic experimentation can be contextualized against the background of the Safavid and post-Safavid elite’s search for new patronage networks in the tumultuous years after the end of the dynasty.