Quinn - Persian Historiography across Empires

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Sholeh A. Quinn 2021

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First published 2021

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ISBN 978-1-108-84221-1 Hardback

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For my husband

Stephen N. Lambden

This book has been a long time in the making, and it would not have been possible for me to complete it without a great deal of support and assistance from family, friends, and colleagues. I am grateful to Necati Alkan, Susan Amussen, Ali Anooshahr, Sussan Babaie, Shahzad Bashir, Jennifer Berry, Evrim Binba, Aditi Chandra, Ferenc Csirks, Devin DeWeese, Novin Doostdar, Massumeh Farhad, Kioumars Ghereghlou, Mana Kia, Nobuaki Kondo, Paul Losensky, Louise Marlow, Charles Melville, Firuza Melville, Colin Mitchell, Ruth Mostern, Judith Pfeiffer, Kaya ahin, Hamid Samandari, Ron Sela, Tun en, Marta Simidchieva, Sunil Sharma, Tilmann Trausch, Audrey Truschke, and Ernest Tucker for their assistance with various aspects of this project.

Many thanks to Maria Marsh, Daniel Brown, Atifa Jiwa, Thomas Haynes, and the team at Cambridge University Press, and Vinithan Sethumadhavan and his team at SPi Global for all of their assistance in helping this project reach completion. I am grateful to Pierke Bosschieter for preparing the Index. The three anonymous reviewers of my manuscript made many helpful comments and suggestions for improvement, and I am very thankful to them for their time and expertise. I take full responsibility, of course, for all errors and oversights.

I thank the University of California (UC) Merced Center for the Humanities and the UC Merced Faculty Senate Grant Program for providing research support for this project. UC Merced is a very special place. My distinguished colleagues in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Group, and the History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department have always been very encouraging and supportive. The remarkable students at UC Merced, past and present, graduate and undergraduate, have been a constant source of inspiration.

My professor and friend, John Woods, has always provided me with wonderful advice and generously shared with me his vast knowledge of the Persianate world. Thank you so much.

The love and support from my family continues to sustain me in a deep and profound way. I am grateful to my precious parents, Robert Quinn and Manijeh Samandari Quinn; my sister, Laleh Quinn; and her partner, Doug Nitz. Finally, my beloved and learned husband, Stephen Lambden, has not only helped me through every step of this journey but also filled it with laughter and happiness.

In 933/1527, after an eventful career as a diplomat, historian, administrator, and writer under multiple rulers a career that included composing a variety of texts for multiple patrons Ghiyas al-Din Khvandamir (ca. 880942/ca. 14751535/1536) left Herat, a town which had recently come under Safavid control, and made his way to Qandahar and Mughal territory. There, he authored his final composition: a short historical treatise for the Mughal emperor Humayun (r. 937963/15301556). Khvandamirs career represents movement in a number of ways. In addition to his physical journey from Khurasan to India, he moved effortlessly, it seems, from genre to genre in his writing, and from patron to patron, some of whom were distantly related to each other and others who ruled over rival empires. Khvandamir was not unique in terms of his movements. The early modern Persianate world was one connected by a common Persian language and a body of texts familiar to an elite that existed across empires. However, while we know what, where, and when Khvandamir wrote, we have only started to understand how and why.