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Falling Out of Love with the Franks: The Life and Writings of an Armenian Catholic Diplomat in the Service of Late Safavid Persia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Henry R. Shapiro
Henry R. Shapiro*
Affiliation:
Polonsky Academy, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
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Abstract

This article provides a biographical vignette of the Armenian merchant and diplomat Eḷia of Erzurum (1689–1750?), based on his unpublished Armenian chronicle and personal documents which are housed in Russian archives. Eḷia’s biography demonstrates the growing influence of European missionaries and states in the eighteenth-century Ottoman and Safavid empires, while his documents yield a fresh perspective on late Safavid diplomacy and modes of socialization with Christians. Eḷia suffered twelve years of imprisonment in Russia and great disappointment seeking work in Europe. His last known act was to write a scathing critique of Roman Catholic religion and culture. In sum, Eḷia’s life provides an opportunity for exploring the dynamic of global connection and disconnection in the early modern Islamic world.

Keywords

Safavid HistoryArmenian HistoryTrans-Imperial BrokersArmeno-TurkishMissionaries in Persia
Type
Varia
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 3-4 , July 2021 , pp. 573 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2021

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Footnotes

He completed his PhD in August 2018 in the History Department of Princeton University and specializes in the history of the early modern Islamic empires (Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal), with a focus on the Ottoman Empire.

The author learned about Eia of Erzurum’s unpublished corpus from a conversation with Sebouh Aslanian at the Matenadaran Manuscript Library in Yerevan, Armenia in 2015, and is very grateful to him for his consistent encouragement of this project and for an invitation to present preliminary findings at a conference at UCLA, entitled “Armeno-Iranica Conference: A Shared History,” in January 2019. Funding for research in Moscow in summer 2017 was generously provided by the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. Thanks are due both to the Center and to Igor Fedyukin of the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, for facilitating my research in Russia. Finally, diverse feedback about this project has been provided by generous colleagues, including Jeremy Adelman, Jonathan Brack, Michael Cook, John-Paul Ghobrial, Dennis Halft, Jan Hennings, Elahesadat Naghib, Marc Nichanian, Michael Stone, and the anonymous readers at Iranian Studies. Hearty thanks to them all.

All translations of Armenian, Persian, and Armeno-Turkish texts are the author’s own. Thanks for help with other languages are noted as appropriate. This article provides an overview of Eia’s life and literary corpus, the first step in what it is hoped will become a larger project.

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