Referencing familiar places: the London Royal Exchange

One of the ways that Herbert made his observations intelligible – and appropriately splendid – was by comparing the locales he visited in Persia with places that were already known to his audience.

Persian authors did this too: Natanzi, for example, declared the 1590 Isfahani qaysariya “like one that was [once] in Tabriz”[1].

While Persians compared the maydan and its surroundings to Paradise, the Europeans invoked more prosaic – if still sensational – analogies: Herbert – and also Coverte[2] – compared the maydan to London’s Royal Exchange.

I want to look in some more detail at this comparison as a way of trying to understand how Herbert saw – or at least portrayed – the maydan. It also provides some context about the Westerners visiting Iran. After all, modern Safavid scholars may well find early modern England as alien as the contemporary travellers found Persia. Remembering this also reminds me that even if the European visitors to Isfahan had managed to produce an “unmediated, immediate expression of observations, experiences, emotions and descriptions”[3], then we would still be reading it now from our own studious, twenty-first century perspective.

The Royal Exchange was built in 1569 by “that worthy citizen”[4], Robert Gresham, to allow the London merchants to gather in a more formal Bourse for international business (like they did in Antwerp), rather than standing out in Lombard Street in all weathers[5].

The analogy was not at all topographically accurate. As well as significant differences in layout, the maydan was much bigger. While in Isfahan there was room for polo; in London, there was not even enough space for an equine statue that Charles II wanted to donate[6].

Functionally, however, there were some noticeable similarities.

Both buildings were ‘royal’: in Isfahan, because it was the Shah who built it; in London, because Gresham persuaded Queen Elizabeth to officially open it (in 1571)[7]. After this, the Exchange became the place to do international business, as well as somewhere for the most fashionable socialites to visit the “gaudy shops” and be seen[8]. Just like the maydan, the Exchange was eulogised by foreigners as a splendid architectural construction[9].

Both structures audibly regulated city life: in Isfahan, via the martial music of kettledrums from the naggarkhaneh[10]; in London, a bell in the tower to one side of the chief entrance “summoned merchants to the spot at … noon and six o’clock in the evening”[11]. Both functioned night and day: the maydan had hanging lanterns and pitch torches (Figueroa noted how uncomfortably hot these were[12]); while the Exchange was illuminated “in the Italian style with coloured glass cups full of burning grease, and great wax torches burning in sconces on the walls”[13].

Although Herbert does not seem to have known this[14], both constructions challenged established trading patterns. In Isfahan, the 1602 incarnation of the maydan followed on Shah Abbas’ earlier failed attempt to renovate the old markets[15]; while the Exchange was intended to break the longstanding Hanseatic stranglehold over the London money-markets. Gresham was more successful than Abbas, who never quite managed to disrupt a thousand years of Isfahani business.

As well as the architectural mismatch, there were other important differences. For example, while the maydan seems to have been a Persian construction, the Exchange was almost completely foreign[16]. The rebuild of the Exchange in 1667-69, after the Great Fire of London, was an almost literal duplication of the original 1590 building[17] – while the 1602 re-incarnation of the maydan introduced important structural and functional changes. Since then, however, the maydan has remained relatively unchanged, while the Royal Exchange has been remodelled several times[18].

Since the referencing of familiar locations seems to have been more related to spectacle and function than layout, it is not surprising that it was not only the Isfahan maydan that English travellers compared with the Royal Exchange. In Qazvin, the bazaar that the Shirley party focused on so much[19] was suggested to be analogous to the Exchange[20]. Maydans in smaller Persian towns were compared with less glamorous London locations: in Kashan, for example, the Shirleys “were sent for to meet the King in the Piazza, which is a fair place, like unto Smithfield”[21].