User:Kansas Bear/Aḥsân al-Tavârikh

Aḥsân al-Tavârikh, is a chronological history of Iran, written in Persian by Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū.

Background

Hasan Beg Rumlu was a qurchi in the service of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I.

Contents

The Ahsan al-Tavarikh was a generalized history from the beginning of creation until Hasan's own time, written in twelve volumes. It is theorized by Mīrzā Muḥammad Qazwīnī that the first ten volumes were never written and that the present creation consists of the last two volumes. Although, it is suggest that the ten volumes would not have contained any origial information, since Hasan appears to have borrowed from the Matla-e sa dayn(for Sahrok and Timurid princes), from the Tarik-eDiarbakr(for Aq Qoyunlu Turkman histories), the Habib alsir(for Sultan Bayqara, ascension of Shah Ismail, and biographical entries for scientists). History of the Ottoman Empire was taken from Bedlisi's Hast Behest.

Volume one included the historical events of Iran, the Ottoman empire, and Transoxania from 1405-1494. Ḥasan goes into detail concerning the reigns of Sahrok (1405-47) and his son Ulug Beg, as well as their successors. He also follows the careers the Timurid princes Bāysonqor, Ebrāhīm Solṭān, and Moḥammad Jūkī.

Works cited

Aḥsan al-tavārīkh by Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū (b. 937/1530–1, d. c.985/1577) is an annalistic Persian chronicle in two volumes covering about two centuries of the history of Asia Minor, Transoxania, and Iran in the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries. 1. Content of the volumes Of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh (“The best of histories”), only two volumes, the so-called volumes eleven and twelve, have come down to us, one covering the ninth/fifteenth century and the other the tenth/sixteenth. Rūmlū originally organised his work into twelve volumes but appears never to have finished the first ten volumes (Tauer, 118; Qazvīnī, 3:345; Hinz, 319). On one occasion, Rūmlū alludes to “the previous volumes” of his chronicle (Rūmlū, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī, 1491; other references to “Rūmlū” are to this edition) as if, by 985/1577, the last year he covers in “volume twelve” of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh, these volumes had already been drafted, but there is no evidence for this. There are two other cross references, citing volumes six and seven (Rūmlū, 1077, 1545; Seddon, 311). These latter references are important because they involve events from the initial and final phases of the ʿAbbāsid reign in Iraq and Baghdad (132–656/750–1258) suggesting that perhaps, like its last two volumes, the other volumes of Rūmlū’s chronicle were planned to cover roughly one Islamic century each, with volume one being dedicated, conceivably, to the life of the prophet Muḥammad and the formative decades of Islam under the Rightly Guided caliphs, the Twelver Shīʿī imāms, and the Umayyad caliphate (41–132/661–750). The Aḥsan al-tavārīkh may thus be basically a history of Islamic dynasties and societies, not a “general” or “world” history, as it has misleadingly been put forward in scholarly literature (Petrushevskiĭ, 27; Dickson, apps., xlvii; Morton, 42; Quinn, 18). In the preamble to the concluding volume of his chronicle, Rūmlū mentions the Ṣafavid prince Ismāʿīl—later Shāh Ismāʿīl II (r. 984–5/1576–8)—as the dedicatee. He also refers to Shāh Ṭahmāsp (r. 930–84/1524–76) as the reigning ruler, praising him with the formula “may God perpetuate his kingdom and sovereignty” (khallad allāhu mulkahu), while depicting his son Prince Ismāʿīl as heir apparent (vārith-i sarīr-i shāhī) (Rūmlū, 899–900). It is evident from these comments that Rūmlū must have begun drafting the last volume of his chronicle before Shaʿbān 964/June–July 1557, when Prince Ismāʿīl fell into disfavour for his excessive pederasty (Ḥusaynī Qumī, 388; Bidlīsī, 2:209; Qavāmī Shīrāzī, 111; Junābidī, 545–7). At the time, Rūmlū was in his early thirties, a veteran qūrchī (mounted guard), who had been present, since age seventeen, in every one of the Ṣafavid ruler’s military campaigns (Rūmlū, 1280). This counters the claim that Rūmlū had written most of his chronicle in 980–5/1572–7 (Minorsky, 450; Morton, 42). There are three references to 980/1572–3 in the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh, under the years 948/1541, 958/1551, and 974/1566–7 respectively, indicating that Rūmlū was adding new details to the closing volume of his chronicle up to the final years of the reign of Shāh Ṭahmāsp (Rūmlū, 1348, 1450; Seddon, 309). Volumes eleven and twelve of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh are thus to be taken, respectively, as volumes one and two. Focusing on the Tīmūrids and their Uzbek rivals in Khurāsān and Transoxania, the Qarā Quyūnlū (Karakoyunlu) and Āq Quyūnlū (Akkoyunlu) Turkmens in Iran, Iraq, and eastern Anatolia, and the Ottomans in central Anatolia and Rumeli, volume one of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh chronicles the period from the death of Tīmūr Barlās (Tamerlane) in 807/1405 to the end of the ninth/fifteenth century. Volume two pivots on events in Iran under the early Ṣafavids following the death in 900/1494–5 of Sulṭān-ʿAlī, the older brother of Ismāʿīl I (r. 907–30/1501–24), with special reference to the reign of Shāh Ṭahmāsp, and it closes with an account of the first year of the reign of Shāh Sulṭān-Muḥammad Khudābanda (r. 985–95/1578–87). Here, Rūmlū’s narrative ends abruptly while describing an Ottoman invasion of Shora-Göl (present-day Shirak Province in the Republic of Armenia) early in the winter of 985/1578, around the time Sulṭān-Muḥammad Khudābanda was made shah. Late in the reign of Shāh Ṭahmāsp several septs of the Rūmlū clan led by Qarā Khān Beg Bāybūrtlū, a close relative of the Khūzānī Iṣfahānī family of bureaucratic notables, had been posted to Shora-Göl (Rūmlū, 1555; Iskandar Beg, 141). Given the vividness of his description of the situation in Shora-Göl in the winter of 985/1578, Ḥasan Beg may have witnessed these border clashes personally or even been involved in them, but there is no firm evidence for this. 2. Structure of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh The Aḥsan al-tavārīkh is a composite chronicle incorporating substantial portions of various ninth/fifteenth- and tenth/sixteenth-century Persian dynastic histories. Rūmlū’s use of Tīmūrid historian Ghiyāth al-Dīn Khvāndamīr’s (d. 942/1535–6) Ḥabīb al-siyar has already been noted (Rūmlū, 1019; Seddon, 309; Aubin, 252; Morton, 42), as with his borrowings from Abū Bakr Ṭihrānī Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb-i diyār-bakriyya (Ṭihrānī Iṣfahānī, 570–84; Woods, 220). The Maṭlaʿ-i saʿdayn va majmaʿ-i baḥrayn of the Herat-based ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī (d. 887/1482) seems to have been Rūmlū’s main inspiration for the annalistic format of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh (Hinz, 319). There is evidence that large parts of Samarqandī’s chronicle are also reproduced in volume one of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh. For example, Rūmlū has borrowed the section on the Tīmūrid prince Iskandar’s (d. 818/1415) capture of Qum in 815/1412–3 from volume two of Samarqandī’s Maṭlaʿ-i saʿdayn va majmaʿ-i baḥrayn (Rūmlū, 201–2, given in error under the year 816/1411–2; cf. Samarqandī, 2/1:171–2; abbreviated version in Faṣīḥī, 3:1062; cf. Mudarrisī Ṭabāṭabāʾī, 32–3). When dealing with the rise to power of Shāh Ismāʿīl I in Azerbaijan during the early years of the tenth/sixteenth century, Rūmlū reproduces verbatim large portions of Qāsim Beg Ḥayātī Tabrīzī’s (fl. 961/1554) chronicle (Rūmlū, 903–12, 940–4; cf. Ḥayātī Tabrīzī, 206–15, 232–8; see also Ghereghlou, 819). The use of the annalistic format in writing history gained ground under Shāh Ṭahmāsp. Rūmlū is, in fact, the third chronicler during the tenth/sixteenth century—after Yaḥyā Sayfī Qazvīnī (d. 963/1556) and Aḥmad Ghaffārī Qazvīnī (d. 975/1568)—to compose an annalistic chronicle. Major late-tenth/sixteenth- and early-eleventh/seventeenth-century chroniclers—such as ʿAbdī Beg Qavāmī Shīrāzī (d. 988/1580), Iskandar Beg Munshī (d. c.1043/1633 or 1634), Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Munajjim Yazdī (d. 1028/1619), and Faḍlī Beg Khūzānī Iṣfahānī (fl. 1045/1635–6)—followed with their annalistic histories. While Rūmlū differentiates cautiously amongst Turkish (animal), Islamic (lunar), Iranian (solar), and regnal systems of dating, later historians, such as Iskandar Beg Munshī and Faḍlī Beg Khūzānī Iṣfahānī, fall into the trap of blending them, producing a chronologically garbled account of the Ṣafavid reign (McChesney). 3. Publication history The importance of Rūmlū’s Aḥsan al-tavārīkh as a primary source on pre-modern Iran and its neighbouring countries has long been recognised. In 1858, Boris A. Dorn published a partial edition of the text covering the years 864–979/1460–1572, with special reference to events and trends in the Caspian provinces of Gīlān, Māzandarān, and Ṭālish (Dorn, 4:375–421). A Russian translation by A. K. Arendsa focuses on the Aba Turkmens’ “uprisings” in Astarābād during the Ṣafavid-Uzbek wars spanning the years 904–74/1499–1567. V. S. Puturidze and R. K. Kiknadze translated into Georgian, with annotations, parts of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh dealing with the history of Georgia in the tenth/sixteenth century and published them in a single volume (Storey and Bregel', 2:861). In 1931–4, Charles N. Seddon published an edition of volume two of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh and his abbreviated English translation of the Persian text in two volumes (for a detailed review of Seddon’s edition, see Minorsky).

Source

• Navāʾī, A. (2011). "AḤSAN AL-TAWĀRĪḴ". Encyclopaedia Iranica.