² Arberry, A.J., Minovi, M., and Blochet, E., eds., The Chester Beatty Library: A Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts and Miniatures (Dublin, 1959), 3: 50–51Google Scholar.

³ Chester Beatty Library (hereafter CBL) MS. Per. 278, fol. 245a. Interestingly, Shah Tahmasp's son Hamzah Mirza, who was murdered by supporters of Isma'il II following on the death of Tahmasp, is listed as having ruled for six months “in the time of Khudabanda.”.

⁴ For a brief introduction to the “anonymous histories” see McChesney, Robert, “‘Alamara-ye Sah Esma’il”, Encyclopedia Iranica 1: 796–97Google Scholar. Two of these manuscripts have been published, one as 'Alamara-yi Shah Isma'il (ed. Asghar Muntazir Sahib [Tehran, 1971]) and another as 'Alamara-yi Safavi(ed. Yad Allah Shukri [Tehran, 1971]).

⁵ CBL Per. 278, fols. 1b-2a.

⁶ Muntazir Sahib, 'Alamara-yi Shah Isma'il, 1.

⁷ I leave the analysis of specific differences between manuscripts to a literary historian.

⁸ See Shukri, 'Alamara-yi Safavi, xx; also McChesney, “‘Alamara-ye Sah Esma’il”, 796.

⁹ This is a tentative reading of a number which is illegible except for its final “4”, a reading also ventured by the authors of the Chester Beatty Library catalogue entry.

¹⁰ Muntazir Sahib, 'Alamara-yi Shah Isma'il, xxiv; Shukri, 'Alamara-yi Safavi, xxii-xxxviii.

¹¹ See Roemer, H. R., “The Safavid Period”, The Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge, 1968) 6: 305–06Google Scholar.

¹² See McChesney, “‘Alamara-ye Sah Esma’il”, 797.

¹³ A manuscript of these tales in the University Library in Tehran contains 'unvans like bishnaw az Husayn, bishnaw az sayyid dar Isfahan, and so forth (Nuskha-ha-yi khatti, ed. Muhammad Taqi Danishpazhuh and Iraj Afshar [Tehran, 1968] 5: 372). Could these be the names of actual storytellers?

¹⁴ The convoluted “Herati” style of history-writing had not gone out of fashion, of course. Vala-i Isfahani's voluminous Khuld-i Barin, begun in 1667, is just as syntactically complex as anything written by his predecessors. A section of this work was published in 1993 by Mir Hashim Muhaddis (see the review by 'Ali Al-i Davud, Sayyid, Spiktrum-i Iran 7 [1994]: 76–78Google Scholar).

¹⁵ McChesney notes that the text “describes the mythic, legendary, and ideological qualities of the Safavid exemplar [sc. Isma'il] rather than an objective sequence of actual events,” further remarking that such qualities make the work significant for our understanding of, for example, popular religious lore and the nature of Shah Isma'il as an ideological archetype (“‘Alamara-ye Sah Esma’il”, 797). A. H. Morton, too, notes that while the “Anonymous Histories” are “essentially worthless as historical narrative,” they are indeed useful for their revelation of late Safavid mythology and self-understanding and should be regarded as illuminating “fantasies” strongly influenced by the literary record (“The Date and Attribution of the Ross Anonymous. Notes on a Persian History of Shah Isma'il I,” History and Literature in Iran: Persian and Islamic Studies in honour of P.W. Avery [New York, 1990 and 1998] 203–206).

¹⁶ This point was most famously expressed by Eleanor G. Sims in her article “The Turks and Illustrated Historical Texts”, Fifth International Congress of Turkish Art (Budapest, 1978) 747–72. A perusal of Bregel's updating of Storey's Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, published as Persidskaya Literatura: Bio-bibliograficheskii Obzor(Moscow, 1972) also reveals the relative paucity of illustrated historical manuscripts in Iran, at least vis-à-vis other genres such as epic literature.

¹⁷ Swietochowski, Marie, “The Development of Traditions of Book Illustration in Pre-Safavid Iran”, Iranian Studies 7 (1974): 54–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Indeed, pre-Safavid dynasties occasionally seemed obsessed with historiography. One Timurid manuscript of Hafiz-i Abru's Majma' al-tawarikh had 148 paintings, while one manuscript of the great Jami' al-tawarikh of Rashid al-Din (supposedly written to legitimize the Mongols' place in history) was illustrated with almost 200 paintings.

¹⁸ One painting appears to be mislabeled. Fol. 149a, identified in red ink as “The battle of Ibrahim Mirza [i.e. Shah Isma'il's younger brother] with Jan-vafa Mirza [the nephew of Shaybak Khan],” contains not a battle but rather a parley between two clearly Uzbek figures, one of whom is labeled as “Yaqu Bahadur” (sic for the story's Biyaqu Bahadur). The point about the paintings' shift of emphasis remains true, though, since whichever was the intended scene (the battle or the parley), Shah Isma'il is still not involved.

¹⁹ Reproduced in Titley, Norah M., Persian Miniature Painting and Its Influence on the Art of Turkey and India: The British Library Collections (Austin, TX, 1984), 125Google Scholar (fig. 48).

²⁰ Sardadvar, Hamza, Dukhtar-i Qahriman: Sarguzasht-i Shah Isma'il-i Safavi (Tehran, 1371/1992)Google Scholar.

²¹ For a full discussion of this manuscript see Robinson, B. W., “The Shahnameh Manuscript Cochran 4 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1972), 73–86Google Scholar. 'Ali Naqi ibn Shaykh 'Abbasi and his known corpus are briefly described on page 76.

²² As remarked on by (inter alia) Titley, Persian Miniature Painting, 124.

²³ Morton, “Date and Attribution”, 179–212.

²⁴ One Shahnama manuscript in St. Petersburg (MS. Dorn 333) datable to Shah Sulayman's reign contains an eye-opening variety of painterly styles, indicating that stylistic diversity was acceptable even within the confines of a single volume.

²⁵ Morton, “Date and Attribution”, 182ff., 194–95.

²⁶ MS. Per. 279, fol. 41b (in shir-i yazdan-i sufi-nizhad).

²⁷ This text, like that of the Tarikh-i Jahanara, would benefit from the attention of a historian, as it seems to contain many interesting and potentially valuable tidbits, such as the names of military officers and lists of their promotions. There is even a description of the royal horse (ta'rif-i asp-i shahi).

²⁸ According to Aubin, Jean (“Chroniques persanes et relations italiennes: Notes sur les sources narratives du regne de Shah Esma'il Ier”, Studia Iranica 24 [1995]: 247)Google Scholar, the work was commissioned in 1521; according to Glassen, Erika (Die frµhen Safawiden nach Qazi Ahmad Qumi [Ph.D. dissertation, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität zu Freiburg im Breisgau, 1968], 59)Google Scholar, Amini began writing it in 1519–20. Either way, the fact that this commission took place well into Isma'il's post-Chaldiran period is interesting.

²⁹ Szuppe, Maria, Entre Timourides, Uzbeks et Safavides: Questions d'histoire politique et sociale de Hérat dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1992), 54Google Scholar, 157.

³⁰ There are at least two such mentions of the poet's own name, Amini, in this manuscript. In past scholarship there has been some controversy over the author of the Futuhat-i Shahi (Shahanshahnama). Early on it was listed in Storey's bio-bibliography of Persian literature as being by the poet Banna'i (sic, with two “n's”). This attribution, for which Storey gave no justification, was probably inspired by an erroneous reading of a verse on fol. 5b which features the word bana'i as part of a verb construct. The notion that this work could be by Bana'i was thoroughly demolished by the Soviet scholar Mirzoev, A.M. in his paper “About the Author of the Shahanshah Nama,” Akten des Vierundzwanzigsten Internationalen Orientalisten-Kongresses (Wiesbaden, 1959), 449–56Google Scholar.

³¹ It is unclear whether the calligrapher or Amini himself left the work unfinished.

³² For an in-depth analysis of this work and the issues it raises the reader is referred to my “The Shahnamah-i Isma'il: Art and Cultural Memory in Sixteenth-Century Iran” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2002)Google Scholar.

³³ For a good color reproduction of a painting in this manuscript see Titley, Persian Miniature Painting,86 (plate 12).

³⁴ Membré, Michele, Mission to the Lord Sophy of Persia (1539–1542), trans. Morton, A.H. (London, 1993), 52Google Scholar.

³⁵ Morton (“Date and Attribution”, 205 and 212, n. 123) notes, and dismisses, the historian Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont's theory that the oral tales of Shah Isma'il represent the residue of propaganda warfare undertaken in the early days of the dynasty.