In the early modern period, European scholars located ‘Persia’. This pattern of localisation took place in the beginnings of globalisation and was both due to the Safavid-Ottoman rivalry and economic opportunities in Asia. As a result of this attraction, journeys to Safavid Iran undertaken by European travellers increased from the beginning of the 17th century. Their return home was often correlated with the publication of a travelogue. Moreover, this literary genre aimed at increasing European knowledge of the ‘East’ while paradoxically circulating distorted representations. In this regard, Pietro Della Valle (1586-1652) and Adam Olearius (1599-1671) are typical of this period, considering their invaluable contribution to the diffusion of Persian scholarship in early modern Europe thanks to their command of the Persian language and their acquisition of manuscripts in Iran. Della Valle visited Iran from 1617 to 1623 and made a long stay in the Persian Gulf region where he visited the court of Imām-Qulī Khān Ūndīlazah, the famous Iranian general who had defeated the Portuguese in Qishm and Hormuz (1621-1622), whom he met. In this context, the Italian traveller also bought several Persian manuscripts that he took back to his homeland. Among those were two mathnavī poems: the Fat̤ḥ-Nāmah and the Jang-Nāmah-yi Kishm, both written around the year 1622 and composed outside the Safavid court at Isfahan, as works of local historiography. Adam Olearius stayed in the Safavid state from 1636 to 1639 and can be viewed as the perfect Danish counterpart to Della Valle except for the fact that he reached ‘Persia’ from the Caucasus. According to investigations by Giorgio Rota (1998), there, Olearius purchased an untitled ‘compendium of Safavid history’ (1501-1636) in manuscript form, from someone who was a native of Azerbaijan on the outer edge of Safavid Iran. In this paper, I will try demonstrate how those three manuscripts shaped and located Iranian history from the margins before subsequently shaping European scholarly circles outside Iran. To do so, I will compare the aforementioned Persian sources in a connected perspective with the well-known travelogues of Pietro Della Valle, Viaggi descritti in 54 lettere famigliari (1650-1658) and Adam Olearius, Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reise (1647).