Iranian Studies in the Netherlands

Summary

Up to the end of the Middle Ages, the opportunities to acquire information about the world of Islam were very few in the Low Countries. Moreover, the little knowledge which could be derived from books, from participation in a crusade or from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land did not reach much further than the coasts of the Mediterranean. The Iranian hinterland of the countries inhabited by Saracens and Turks remained beyond the horizon of the Dutch, intellectually as well as in terms of actual experience.

Direct contacts with Iran developed only in the early seventeenth century when, shortly after the establishment of an independent republic of the Netherlands, the “United Provinces,” Dutch trade began to expand to the four corners of the world. The first journey of a Dutch fleet to the East Indies and back was completed in 1597. This success led to the establishment of several companies engaging in Asian commerce, which in 1602 merged into the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (United East India Company). By its charter the Company held a monopoly of all Dutch trade, extending from the Cape of Good Hope eastwards to the Strait of Magellan. This mercantile empire, with settlements all over Asia, was controlled from Batavia (the modern Indonesian capital of Jakarta) by a governor-general. The director of the western sectors, including the operations of the Company in Iran, held office at Surat on the west coast of India.

In 1623 Huybert Visnich, a merchant in the service of the Company, arrived from Surat to establish a trading post at Bandar Abbas, which was called “Gamron” or “Gombroon” by the Europeans. Soon afterwards, Shah Abbas the Great granted capitulations to the Dutch, thereby guaranteeing freedom of trade, exemption from duties and several other rights pertaining to the residence of non-Muslim merchants in Iran. The Company also established a residence at Isfahan where its representatives could get in touch with the Safavid court. The Company was most of all interested in the purchase of silk from Gilan. It paid for it partly in money and partly through the bartering of spices from the East Indies, textiles from the Coromandel coast (south-east India) and other imported goods.

The Dutch enterprise in Iran continued to flourish until the downfall of the Safavids.