The paper takes as a premise that inasmuch as the Safavids were heir to the Aqquyunlu and the Timurds in terms of their political and social structure as well as cultural models, there were also strong continuities between the Turkic — in addition to the Persian — literary traditions these three regimes cultivated. Setting out from a discussion of certain general features of Turkic literary practices at the court of Shah Isma‘il I (r. 1501-1524) in Safavid Iran through the poetry of poets like Shah Ismail himself, as well as Kishvari and Habibi, it outlines how this tradition was embedded on the one hand in what may be termed Western Oghuz literature, from which Ottoman Turkish also derived, and in Chaghatay Turkic on the other hand, the cultivation of which connected Safavid Turkic litterateurs to the prestige of the Timurids. Instead of a dynastic vision of literary history, which is very often a mere disguise for nationalist frameworks, however, the paper also offers a new periodization scheme for the history of Turkic literature in Iran. I argue that the first period of a continuous Turkic literary tradition started with the Islamization of the Mongols around the turn of the fourteenth century and the collapse of Mongol rule in Iran in ca. 1335, this first period lasting until around the end of the sixteenth century, when fundamental changes took place in literary patronage, related to political, social, economic and religious centralization in Safavid Iran, as well as to the Turkic tribal aristocracy’s loss of most of its power.