This presentation problematizes the long-assumed sectarian camps of the early modern Middle East (i.e. Sunni Ottomans vs. Shiite Safavids) from an often-neglected perspective, the lens of the Qizilbash (“red heads” in Turkish due to a crimson headpiece symbolizing the adherents’ allegiance to the Shiite Imams) and their authority as a convincing force in dictating the religious and political rhetoric of the era. While the Ottoman-Safavid relationship has been the topic of many academic works in Turkish, Iranian, and Western literatures; the Qizilbash have constantly been depicted as either the passive receivers of Safavid propaganda due to their alleged lack of proper Islamization and an archaic phenomenon with no relevance to the understanding of the early modern era, or as the subjects of a continuous Ottoman persecution. I, however, argue that as a unique population caught in between the power play of these two mighty Muslim empires the Qizilbash acted as a source of authority, dictating shifting notions of identity and policy via simple conversions and reconversions, and acts of tax evasion, migration, and rebellions. My approach synthesizing Ottoman, Safavid, and European primary sources that are rarely used in combination reveals the agency of the Qizilbash as an alternative “borderland authority” at shaping not only the nature of the relationship between the Ottoman and Safavid courts between the 1460s and 1630s, but also at directly influencing the formation and development of sectarian identities at both state and individual levels in the early modern era between Ottoman Sunnism, Safavid Shiism, and everything in between.

One of the less-understood curiosities of Persian historiography in the Safavid period is the decision of several chroniclers to organize their work based on an Iranian adaptation of the Chinese-Uighur zodiac system—in which each year starts with the March equinox (Nawruz) and corresponds to an animal sign, in a repeating twelve-year cycle—rather than making exclusive use of the lunar Islamic calendar, or avoiding the annalistic format altogether, as had often been done in preceding centuries. The adoption of the animal-cycle convention in Safavid texts, as part of a hybrid dating system, raises several questions. How, and when exactly, did this practice originate? Was it related to fiscal or military record-keeping? What purposes did solar animal years serve for court historians? Beyond these questions, the use of multiple calendars has led to confusion in the chronology of certain events—including the accession of Shah 'Abbas I, which took place in 995/1587 but is often dated to 996/1588. A few modern scholars, notably Charles Melville and Robert D. McChesney, have offered general commentary on these difficulties or investigated specific cases. This paper takes a different approach to the issue of the "Iranian zodiac system" in Safavid chronicles, by reviewing several works that make use of animal years and evaluating the ways in which they attempt, with widely varying degrees of success, to maintain concordance with the Islamic calendar. Particular attention is paid to the Takmilat al-akhbar (978/1570) of 'Abdi Beg Shirazi and the Khulasat al-tavarikh (999/1591) of Qazi Ahmad Qumi. We arrive at a few potential insights, including that it was advantageous for historians of the early Safavid period to set their annals on a calendar that tracked the seasons, since the military and the court were semi-itinerant, moving between summer and winter pastures (yaylaq and qishlaq, respectively). There may also be something deliberately Persianizing in adopting a format in which the year begins with Nawruz. Finally, the very fact that chroniclers felt compelled to use this system, despite the obvious, acknowledged technical challenges that it posed, may be viewed as evidence of its basis in society.

The Kiyayi dynasty came to power in Gilan, a region located on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the fourteenth century. The Kiyayis remained in control of the eastern parts of Gilan for over two hundred years, until the Safavid Shah ‘Abbas I conquered and incorporated Gilan into the growing Safavid realm. The interplay between local political events and Safavid intervention is part and parcel of the larger Safavid project of expansion and state formation. The incorporation of Gilan into the Safavid domain was a gradual process that had begun long before the ascension of Shah ‘Abbas, during the reign of his predecessors. After the demise of the Kiyayi dynasty and the gradual incorporation of the qizilbash in Gilan during the reign of ‘Abbas, the then loosely incorporated province was to witness several uprisings and local disturbances. Local Gilani and Safavid chronicles, in conjunction with travelogues and court documents, show a complex and multi-faceted relationship between local political actors and Safavid agents at this juncture. The occasional uprisings had different goals ranging from the re-establishment of Gilan’s semi-autonomous status to the scoring of political and economic points aimed at short-term crisis management. The economic incentives were high for both the locals and the Safavids, as Gilan was a silk-producing region with one of the highest outputs of silk in the empire. The disgruntled local elite were usually the central actors in these uprisings, yet the peasants were also present as participants. The long-standing tradition of a local structure of power centered on the division between Eastern and Western Gilan was more conducive to disunity than it was to coalitions among local elites, which meant for the most part these scattered rebellious movements did not achieve their intended goals. An overview of these uprisings will put into perspective the center-periphery relations in the early years of the seventeenth century and demonstrate the alliances and schisms that shaped the political landscape of Gilan as different antagonized classes navigated the new reality of the Safavid presence in the province.

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.