Patronage, networks and migration : Turco-Persian scholarly exchanges in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries

Abstract

In about two and half centuries from the invasion of the Mongols in the 1230s to the beginning of the 16th century, a large part of the Islamic world extending from Baghdad to central Asia witnessed a successive rise and fall of local rulers. Although a few of them ruled on some larger areas for a relatively longer time, it was in the late 15th and early 16th centuries that almost the entire land controlled by those minor governments was divided between two dominant but religiously opponent sovereignties : the Ottomans whose Empire lasted around five centuries and the Safavids that despite falling after 230 years, their influence continued even up to modern Iran. As a consequence, from the 1500s two powerful and competing courts appeared that, as the main patrons of the scholarly activities, shaped the cultural life in the Islamic World in a period coincided with the establishment of the modern era in Europe. This period is one of the most important periods in the cultural history of Islamic societies, which unfortunately has not been studied adequately. The present paper focuses on one of the many social consequences of the formation of those two adversary states and studies the history of cultural exchanges between the Transoxania, Persia and the Ottoman Empire before and after the establishment of the Shiite state of Safavids.