Following the thread of political and intellectual history in fifteenth century Iran remains a daunting project. Reeling from the fracturing of the Timurid Empire at the beginning of the century, and not yet under the sway of more centralized Safavid Empire, the region saw the rapid rise and fall of a series of Timurid princes and Turkmen confederations throughout this period. In particular, knowledge of the second half of the century has thus remained murky, in no small part because of a dearth of contemporaneous sources. In other words, there are very few chronicle sources produced in the late fifteenth century in Iran on which one could rely to shed light on this crucial, liminal stage. This is not to say, however, that mid-fifteenth century Iran must simply be lost to time. One might turn, in this situation, to the genre of travelogues. By their very nature composed based on the destinations of a particular individual, a travelogue can provide a kind of trans-regional or provincial history that can fill in gaps left in the chronicles. Fortunately, exactly such a travelogue exists: the Khunkar-nama of Mu‘ali, composed in the second half of the fifteenth century. Written by an Ottoman official and ostensibly a history of the Ottoman line, this verse history nonetheless includes extensive firsthand information about Iranian lands and the leaders scattered throughout, including Timurid princes and commanders of the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu Turkmen confederations. In other words, this rarely-cited work should provide essential information for an otherwise impossibly confusing period. The paper will be particularly interested in the provincial, as it will focus on the author’s travels through what would now be southern Iran and Iraq, far from the oft-contested capital of Tabriz. This section of text fortuitously coincides with the emergence and rise of the Musha‘sha‘id movement, a messianic Sufi order active from 1436 onward, for which nearly no contemporaneous sources exist. The paper will also pay special attention to the manner in which an Ottoman official would have viewed territories to the East of the Empire. In other words, how did the imperial polity of Fatih Mehmed regard its neighbors in Iranian lands? Finally, the paper will draw some broader conclusions about trans-regional religious and political trends of the Islamic world that may be found in a text like the Khunkar-nama.