Historians on the Move: Persian Chroniclers under the Safavids and Mughals

Persian historical writing in the early modern period is characterized by a number of practices. These include drawing on earlier Timurid models of history, expanding and modifying conventional elements in such models, or producing something completely unique. This paper seeks to examine Persian chroniclers writing for the Safavids who later migrated to Mughal India as a way of understanding whether or not, and to what extent, we may talk of a Persian cultural “whole.” Whereas political differences and boundaries divided the early modern empires, one sees a different picture upon examining literary traditions. The migrating chroniclers wrote in Persian, whether for the Safavids or the Mughals. Modern scholarship on these early modern empires, until very recently, has tended to study them separately, as if each existed in a cultural vacuum. By examining how the chroniclers, sometimes several members of one particular family, wrote under different political patrons, and understanding the connections between them, we have a better understanding of how history writing operated within a wider Persianate sphere. The chroniclers and in some instances the families of the chroniclers to be discussed in this paper include Khvand Amir, author of Habib al-siyar, Mir Yahya Qazvini, who wrote the Lubb al-tavarikh, and Fazli Isfahani, author of Afzal al-tavarikh.