Die Basis der Erzählung. Das historische Detail in der persischen Historiographie des 16. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

Since the very beginnings of modern Middle Eastern Studies, chronicles have formed one of its most intensively used genres of sources. This is especially true for the Iranian World, which has left particularly few textual remains. Whereas the respective approaches to pre-modern Persian chronicles changed substantially within the last one and a half centuries of research, the approach to one aspect of these texts has remained comparably stable: the historical detail, the most bitsy information these texts contain, forming the very basis of the normative narrative of the chroniclers’ patron’s rule. While the end of the age of scientism is debatedmore than ever, the handling of the historical detail has stayed remarkably untouched – it is still presumed true all too often. Subject of this article are the chronicles written at the courts of Herat and Qazvin within the first decades of the 16th century under early Safavid rule. The study deals with the question of how stable these historical details really are, since the texts actually differ considerably in detail with respect to their stylising descriptions of one and the same historical event. In my view, these details
are not stable, but, quite the contrary, surrounded by an aura of coincidence, which
has to be taken into account when writing the political history of early modern Iran.