Qasim Bayg Hayati Tabrizi. A chronicle of the early Safavids and the reign of Shah Ismaʿil (907-930/1501-1524) (2018)

Qāsim Bayg Ḥayātī Tabrīzī. A chronicle of the early Safavids and the reign of Shah Ismāʿīl (907-930/1501-1524). Persian edition and introduction in English by Kioumars Ghereghlou; Series: American Oriental Series, vol. 98. New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2018, XXX+384 p. ISBN 0940490013, ISBN 9780940490017

In this volume, Kioumars Ghereghlou presents an edition, with preface and indexes, of a previously unpublished sixteenth-century Persian chronicle. Written by Qāsim Beg Ḥayātī, a court scribe to Shah Ṭahmāsp (r. 1524-76), it covers Safavid history beginning with the early part of the fourteenth century and closing with an account of Shah Ismāʿīl’s (r. 1501-24) rise to power and military campaigns in Iran.

Dedicated to the Safavid princess Mihīn Begum (d. 1562), whom Ghereghlou credits as Ḥayātī’s coauthor, the chronicle is composed of two parts. Part one deals with the predynastic phase of Safavid history and ends with an account of Shaykh Ṣafī’s life and career. Part two tells the story of the Ṣafaviyya Sufi order, from the ascension of Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn Mūsā b. Shaykh Ṣafi (d. 1377) to the early years of Shah Ismāʿīl’s reign. Punctuating this account are two “tailpieces” (tadhʾīl), one on the history of the Safavid shrine in Ardabīl in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the other on the shrine’s superintendents who held this post in the early part of the sixteenth century.

This edition makes available for the first time a chronicle that had long been thought lost. Rich in new details about the Ṣafaviyya Sufi order (ṭarīqa) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is an important historical source for scholars interested in this period of Persian history.