Little is known about Haqvirdi, the former secretary to a Safavid envoy to Northern Germany, who worked for two orientalists studying Persian, Adam Olearius and Jacobus Golius, between 1639 and 1650. Nevertheless, Haqvirdi’s manuscripts and letters, now distributed between Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Leiden, and Oxford, are an important and mostly unstudied source on the history of oriental studies, casting light on the conditions of oriental philology in non-Ottoman Europe in the seventeenth century, as well as the dynamics of scholarly collaboration across cultures. In particular, Haqvirdi’s manuscripts show how the work of orientalist scholarship was rooted in distinct and identifiable material contexts. This paper will reconstruct and follow these contexts across Haqvirdi’s European career, from Gottorf to Leiden and back. Haqvirdi worked in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic, copied and vocalized manuscripts, compiled dictionaries, translated, and composed original works. He was unlike many other scribal assistants in early modern Europe, in that he performed work far beyond the ability of the scholars who employed him, acting as an intermediary between Western European scholars and Islamic intellectual and literary traditions. In this, Haqvirdi’s work with Olearius and Golius provides a study in contrasts. Olearius, for whom Haqvirdi compiled several works on Persian history and religion, employed him as a cultural and linguistic informant. For Golius, a trained philologist and the most important Western European Arabist of his day, Haqvirdi acted rather as a surrogate reader of manuscripts in Leiden’s collections, performing particular forms of textual work specified in a contract signed by both parties. The varying success of these collaborations demonstrates how the delegation of scholarly work—like the ability to read and translate foreign languages—was a skill, and the differing approaches of Olearius and Golius to their work with Haqvirdi frame a fundamental question about the role of textual mediation in orientalist knowledge production: to what extent is the history of oriental studies in Europe the history of an encounter with Islamic manuscripts?