The Fabric of Silk Power in the Sherley Portraits

Abstract

Taking as its starting point the background of Persian silk-trade negotiations with Europe in the early seventeenth century, this chapter offers a fresh view on the Sherley brothers’ place in the history of Safavid diplomacy as well as on the role and significance of some of the material propaganda ploys left by them. Focusing particularly on a set of portraits of Robert Sherley in his ambassadorial outfits and comparing them with other contemporary Persian ambassadors’ portraits, it re-examines Sherley’s oriental self-staging as part of a complex rhetoric of diplomatic self-legitimation and improvised trade negotiation rendered necessary by his ambiguous position as a non-Persian, non-trading agent with disputed ambassadorial claims. Despite all the religious and war-like rhetoric of anti-Turk alliance between Christian Europe and Shi’a Persia and the promise of opening the country to large numbers of Christian missionaries that we find in such fictions as The Travels of the Three English Brothers, trade, rather than religion or the prospect of a military alliance, played the key role in diplomatic negotiations with Persia under Shah Abbas I. In this respect, the Sherley portraits constitute a case study of how far the diplomacy of trade and transactional patterns can lodge itself in material objects.