First edition of a rare and enigmatic text, with its origins in a Persian-language travel diary of Uruch Beg Bayat (1560-1605), and one of the first Persian travel accounts of Europe.
Beg Bayat was a nobleman and secretary in the delegation sent to Europe in 1599 by the Safavid ruler Shah ‘Abbas I at the urging of Sir Anthony Sherley (1565-1635), author of his own Persian narrative (Relation of His Travels into Persia, London, 1613). Beg converted to Catholicism in Valladolid in 1601, altered the target audience of his text from an Iranian court to a Spanish public, and took for himself the name “Don Juan of Persia.” With the substantial help of his mentor, Alfonso Remón, he translated his text into Castilian, amplified its contents, and published it in 1604. All traces of the Persian “original” have been lost.
The Relaciones is divided into three parts, the first two treating Persia, and the third focusing on the 1599-1602 European embassy of Shah ‘Abbas. Part One presents details of Persian political structures, rituals, customs, and geography, adding to these a history of Islam up until the rise of the Ottoman state. Part Two focuses on the history of the Safavids from the household’s beginnings through their latest conflicts with the Ottomans in 1578-1590. Don Juan then offers intriguing first-hand information about the 1599 journey of the Safavid embassy, numbering some 50 people, traveling via the Caspian Sea and Russia to meet with European heads of state. Nominally led by the chief ambassador, Husain Ali Beg, the embassy was conceived in a meeting between Shah ‘Abbas and the English adventurer Sir Anthony Sherley, their objective being the opening of trade routes and, more pointedly, the cultivation of a European-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire. The embassy was not a success: Although received by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, the former Duke of Bavaria Wilhelm II, Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, and King Phillip III of Spain, the Safavids were denied a meeting by the Doge of Venice and plans to speak with the courts of France, England, Scotland and Poland were abandoned. Don Juan claims that Sherley sold off a fortune’s worth of gifts intended by the Shah for foreign potentates. Several diplomats converted to Catholicism in Rome, more in Valladolid (perhaps a better alternative than returning to Persia to face the wrath of Shah ‘Abbas). In 1605 Don Juan of Persia was killed in a street brawl in Valladolid.
Rare, according to OCLC we can only locate institutional copies in the United States at Yale, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, California Berkeley Univ., Columbia, BPL, University of Chicago.
Provenance: Delirium Rare Books, Spain; offered in partnership with Martayan Lan.
Palau, 223840. Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the West: A Critical Bibliography, p. 379. Don Juan of Persia: A Shi’ah Catholic 1560-1604, Guy Le Strange, trans., (London: Routledge, 1926).
