The years since Iran's revolution have witnessed a massive, indeed exponential, expansion in the publication of primary-source materials of crucial import to the study of the country's modern history, a period whose onset is usually dated to the Safavid capture of Tabriz in 1501. In particular for the Safavid period, often dated from that politico-military event to the Afghan capture of Esfahan in 1722, scholars now have to hand a vast array of primary materials in Persian and Arabic as well as in a range of European languages. These encompass religious writings, court chronicles, court, diplomatic and commercial documents and, of course, travel accounts. The languages include English, but also Dutch, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. Turkish- and Armenian-language materials are available as well.
The present volume, as the title suggests, is the translation of the full text of Silva y Figueroa's (d. 1624) commentary on his ten-year voyage to visit the Safavid Shah Abbas I (d. 1629). Originally conceived of in the 1970s, the project really only got started in the mid-2000s benefitting, as the opening remarks note (pp. 3-4), from the simultaneous, growing scholarly interest in Spanish and Portuguese activities in this period, both in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
The introductory remarks address the various manuscripts used for the text and such other points of interest as the anonymous illustrations that accompany the manuscripts, the author's prose style and his other literary forays, various reference to the Commentaries that pre-date the last century and the varying, and uneven, lengths of the text's seven ‘books’. A section herein (pp. 12-29) is devoted to situating the author's embassy within its larger ‘geostrategic’ context between the Safavid, Ottoman and the Luso-Spanish empires, and another (pp. 29- 48) to the man himself.
The seven books cover the 1614 voyage to India, the island and city of Goa, the voyage from Goa to Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, the journey from the Gulf to Qazvin and Silva y Figueroa's meeting with the Shah, a discussion of the various regions of the Persian ‘Empire’, a further meeting with `Abbas in Esfahan and the return trip to Goa, from July 1618 to December, 1620, a first, failed attempt to return to Spain and his final departure from Goa, from 1620 to 1624. In fact, Silva y Figueroa never reached home: he died at sea in July of 1624.
For Iran's history in this period, the Commentaries are perhaps especially interesting for the descriptions of Persepolis, as well the cities of Shiraz, Qom, Kashan, Esfahan and Qazvin, and others, through which Silva y Figueroa passed in his travels. Throughout the entire work he also offers many observations on cultural, economic and social life.
From the viewpoint of Safavid studies and Iran as a focus of European concerns, however, Silva y Figueroa's encounters with Abbas himself perhaps repay the most attention. Like many other foreigners in Iran at the time, regardless of their status, Silva y Figueroa had a rather high opinion of his own station generally and of the importance of his mission in particular; the latter included an exaggerated sense of the importance that the Shah, especially, should accord Spain's role in the regional scheme of things. Silva y Figueroa, as others, expected the court should rather more revolve around him as his king's representative than, for example, around other foreigners.
In Qazvin (454f), for example, he describes court behaviour as “haughty and arrogant” owing to the delays he endured in seeing the Shah privately while the latter was dealing with the Ottoman Çavuş. Careful attention to the background events, an international political ballet if ever there was one, suggests Abbas was trying to show the Turks his own power vis-à-vis the Spanish envoy as well as to show the Spanish where his primary concerns lay and where the Spanish – unless they could ‘deliver’ – might stand in the pecking order of such other foreign envoys as the English (p. 464). The Shah makes this perfectly clear when they do meet (465f): where were the Europeans, the Spanish especially? When would they make good on all the talk about moving against the Ottomans? Silva y Figueroa's reaction? he talks of the Shah's ‘arrogance’ (p. 467). In fact, it does seem the envoy is rather easily annoyed when things don't go exactly his way (e.g. pp. 266, 442, 490, 642, 646, 669, 697, 717, 734, 757). In his extremely useful 2015 English-language article on the subject, cited in the bibliography (p. 874) but not otherwise utilized, Luis Gil Fernández both notes further examples of the envoy's own haughtiness and unpacks well the interaction between Abbas and Silva y Figueroa over their several encounters.
The editors seem curiously reticent to question the motives or ‘analyses’ of their source, as are all too many western scholars of Safavid Iran who utilise accounts of westerners in Iran at the time. There are those within the field, Sonja Brentjes, for example, who question the western scholars’ uncritical over reliance on such accounts as that of Silva y Figueroa. The volume's otherwise excellent bibliography does not refer to Brentjes though her article on the travel account of the Italian Pietro della Valle, whom Silva y Figueroa actually met while in Iran, appeared in the same 2015 collection as that of Gil cited above.
The Introduction (p. 40) notes that Silva y Figueroa (as, it should be noted, but is not further mentioned within the book) and so many other travellers to Safavid Iran, neither spoke nor read Persian and therefore depended on translators and other European “authors and informants”. In the 2015 article Gil refers to Silva y Figueroa's dexterity (not) with the local language (p. 369): Chehel Minar he says is the Arabic for forty minarets/columns. Earlier (p. 305) bazaar is, also, apparently, an Arabic word. Only the first is remarked upon in the volume's critical apparatus. Indeed, Silva y Figueroa's description of the “regions of the Persian empire”, in Book V, is based, a bit, on those regions he had visited but also on areas that he had not, and on pre-Safavid history, he relies, also uncritically, on other sources. Compare Brentjes on della Valle.
Curiously too, and finally, the many Safavid-focused sources in the volume's bibliography are seldom cited either in the notes to the introduction or to the main text. Non-Safavid specialists, who are clearly a major target audience, might well remark why such material takes up so much space in the bibliography in the first place, given the introduction's rather conventional, and under-sourced, account of Iran's trajectory in the Safavid period.
To be sure, this is a fascinating account and the Herculean task of making it available to the English-speaking world was clearly a labour of love. But, as some scholars have finally begun to note, such materials need to be used with much caution. In an otherwise very lengthy work some space for a, however brief, reference to such concerns surely could have been found. Indeed, as many such accounts, this perhaps tells us as much, if not more, about the author as the subject(s) of his story.
