Many more travellers visited – and eulogised[1] – the commercial version of the maydan, successively flanked as it was by glorious monuments.
Publication delays, however, significantly affected the order in which travellers’ accounts could be read by – and so, be influential upon – their Western audiences.
For example, Pietro della Valle visited in 1617-23 but the first volume of his letters was only published in 1650. He had “needed three decades to prepare the letters he had written … Two thick volumes of manuscripts in the Vatican Library testify to the amount of work he invested in adapting his originals to the tastes and mores of the public”[2].
Other delays reflected other publishing problems. The memoir of Figueroa’s 1617-19 journey was only published, in a French translation, in 1667[3].
Even Chardin and Kaempfer – now frequently lauded as providing uniquely accurate details about Isfahan[4] – both had to wait three decades before their narratives were published.
[1] Even the merchant Tavernier (visiting six times between 1631 and 1668), who described Isfahan as “nothing except the strongly disagreeable”, grudgingly made an exception for the
maydan. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier,
Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier,… : qu’il a fait en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes (Paris: 1676), 387 & 394
[2] Sonja Brentjes, in her “Immediacy, Mediation, and Media in Early Modern Catholic and Protestant Representations of Safavid Iran,”
Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009),180-81 explains that della Valle: “did not merely cut out the naughty passages, as he claimed in his introduction, nor did he limit himself to correcting earlier mistakes and oversights. He rephrased or deleted entire passages for no obvious reason … He also omitted his careful efforts to record the names of peoples and places in Arabic, Turkish, or Persian. Too much local flavour was apparently as undesirable as inelegant diction or salacious detail”.
[3] One of Figueroa’s letters about Persia was published earlier: (
Garciae Silva Figueroa de Rebus Persarum epistola v. Kal. an. M.DC.XIX Spahani exarat ad Marchionem Bedmarii, Antwerp, 1620, translated as
A Letter from Don García Silva Figueroa Embassador from Philip the Third King of Spaine, to the Persian, Written at Spahan, or Hispahan Anno 1619 to the Marquese Bedmar Touching Matters of Persia, in S. Purchas,
Pilgrimes IX, London, 1625, pp. 1533-35). Michele Bernadini, “Figueroa, García De Silva Y”. Accessed Jan 1, 2013. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/figueroa
[4] See, for example, Sussan Babaie with Robert Haug, “Isfahan x. Monuments”, Accessed Jan 1, 2013. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/isfahan-x-monuments; E.Galdieri, “Les Palais d’Isfahan”,
Iranian Studies, 7 3/4 (1974): 387.
