So, hello everyone wherever you are and in whichever time zone, it gives me huge pleasure to welcome you to our symposium, the idea of Iran in transition to a new world order. I'm sorry that we can't host you itself today and enjoy time together and of course to the speakers we'll miss the much look forward to dinner at the end of the day. This symposium which is hosted traditionally by Mrs Fatima Sudeva Farman Farmayan. But it has to be said that conducting the symposium remotely and this is of course the first time we've done this, we've been able to attract a global audience. I think we've had an excessive 500 registrations all in all, which is wonderful. And I'm very pleased to welcome those of you in Iran who are able to join. I don't know if any of you, but no doubt if I could I'd find it rather daunting. So my name is Sarah Stuart and I teach Zoroastrianism in the Department of Religions and Philosophies at SOAS, and co-chair the Sa'a Sharpochee Palangi Institute for Zoroastrian Studies. I co convene this series with Professor Charles Melville who is the founder of the Cambridge Charnamay Project and fellow of Cambridge of Pembroke College Cambridge. He is also the president of the British Institute of Persian Studies, VIPS, and has taken over as editor of the published proceedings of this idea of Iran series. So I'm just going to share the screen with you because normally we would have the bookshop outside our lecture theatre. And of course we can't do that. So these are the most recent, recent books in the series. Here we have the today's programme. And then the last symposium last year was the proceedings volume nine, the Team Ridge Century edited by Charles. And then, sorry, last year was Safavid Persha in the Age of Empires, again edited by Charles. And you can order from Ivy Tourists at a discount the Team Ridge volume. Now let me go back to stop sharing the screen just a second. Now the Sudaba symposia come under the, the auspices of the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS and this is chaired by Nagas Farzad, who's a lecturer in Persian language and literature at SOAS. And she'll be chairing the first session today so it's on behalf of all these various entities that I welcome you today. So over to Charles Melville, who will tell you a bit more about the programme. I want to thank the Sudaba Memorial Foundation for their ongoing support of the series. Without them, we would not be where we are today. We're actually in our 16th year. I think we skipped one year, but then we had two symposia in another year. It's been going a very long time. And we greatly appreciate members of the family, the Sudaba family for their, not only their support but also their input they've helped to shape the series as we've gone along and remain closely involved with it, particularly Mrs Fatima Sudaba. I'd like to thank my co-convener Charles Melville, who's largely responsible for the content of the series and as well as the publication, as I mentioned. And then a big thank you to Angelica Bashira, Aki El-Bozi and Joe Turtle for organising today's event so efficiently. So we have an outstanding line up of speakers for you today. And they're going to be dealing with one of the more complex areas or eras of Iranian history. The transition from the rather turbulent post-Safavid era to the establishment of the Qajar dynasty at the very end of the 18th century. We're also going to be looking sideways as it were to perceptions of Iran and Iran's relations with other regions in particular Russia, Central Asia, Afghanistan and India. So I'll just end with a little bit of housekeeping. I think chairs will remind you as we go along, but we're going to take questions at the end of each panel session. And the questions will be selected by the chair. So if you have written a question, make sure that you put your name and of course stay around till the end of the session. If you want to hear the answer, although I should add that questions are the discretion of the chair, so don't be disappointed if yours doesn't come up, there may not be time to ask all of them. And so now I'll hand over to Charles, who'll talk to you about the content of the program. So thank you. Thank you, Sarah. And of course you've mentioned some of the things that need to be mentioned. I particularly would like to thank you. That's the first remark that needs to be made because Sarah has not only continued her heroic work in helping to put the program together from the organizational point of view but has actually had to really fight for the continuation of this series and the symposia at SOAS. After the finishing of the LMEI which has been responsible for helping put the program together in the past, there was obviously a vacuum at SOAS and Sarah has heroically taken it on and has been determined that we continue to be able to host this there. Of course, as she said, we're not actually hosting it at SOAS today which is a great pity but it saved me an early train ride and several other people no doubt. And the whole team in fact has changed as a result of the alterations at LMEI and I'd like to join Sarah in thanking everybody for making this happen and the rather more complex arrangements that have been necessary due to Zoom. I'd also like to echo Sarah's thanks to Fatima Sudavar, Phamon Phamayarn. She's been a very, very active sponsor of this series and a regular contributor from the floor. And so it's rather nice I think that this year she will actually be taking her place on the podium and giving us the benefit of her considerable wisdom and knowledge of the Khaja era in particular. And I'd also like to thank Leila Diba who's not speaking but of course we're now entering the period in which she is herself a very substantial specialist on Khaja period art. And with Fatima she's also been extremely productive with ideas and suggestions for who to invite and the shape of the program. I'm very grateful to her and of course to all the Sudavar trustees for their support. Well, one of the consequences of having to be on Zoom and not everybody living in the same country is that the program of course is a little bit later than usual. And to accommodate people and audience from both East and West, we have this sort of rather unusual situation. Because ideally, in that situation one would have all the speakers in the UK and Europe speaking first and then all the speakers from America, speaking when they've woken up but of course the sort of logic of academic research and the period we're talking about respect time zones and so the result is that in a way we're starting at the end today I think it would be reasonable to say that our first panel is mainly addressing the later part of the period we're discussing which is really focused on the transition between the Safavid era and the collapse of the Safavids in 1722 and a little bit after and the rise of the Khajas and of course there's this sort of infamous period of the 18th century which has been very much neglected and where Iran seems to sort of slide into chaos and of course the collapse of centralized government. A period that our late lamented colleague Michael Axworthy did so much to revitalize and it's a great shame that he can't be here to present today. But anyway, the point is that the main focus of the papers will be on the 18th century and the transition to the Khajas and that will be starting towards the end of that period. The 250 odd years of Safavid rule of course did end in the ignominious fashion and by the 18th century large areas of the former empire were falling out of central government control. But nevertheless the Safavid Golden Age as it's sometimes viewed and the formative issues of the role of the Shi'i clerical establishment in society and the nature of and legitimacy of royal authority continued of course to be debated and very much in the air during the Khajas century that followed. Well our first panel deals with these questions I say starting at the end looking back on the Safavids from the viewpoint of the Khaja historiographers and examining the results of the first disastrous encounter of the Khajas with the Russians in the Caucasus. No longer the apparently brutish neighbors they were perceived to be in the Safavid era but now a sophisticated European power. And then finally, in this panel we step back to the late 18th century mid to late 18th century and explore earlier stages of Russia's developing interest, commercial interest and territorial encroachment on the Caspian sea. I'm going to transition from this brief introduction to chair the first session now I guess far as I very kindly agreed to chair the final session. And so it seemed more logical that I would lead straight on into sharing the first one. I will introduce the three speakers now and their papers as Sarah said will follow consecutively 30 minutes each, leaving half an hour for a general discussion at the end through the Q&A.  We're reminding the speakers to stay muted and invisible when they're not speaking and also I'll remind them when they have five minutes to go and then hope that we can wind up without me having to mute anybody, which of course would be an extreme way of dealing with the situation. So I'll start now with the introductions and then I think we'll be on time for our first speaker to start at 12 o'clock. So Asif Ashraf, the 100 words they were allowed for their bios was not enough really to give the full flavor of the sort of history of our speakers. So Asif Ashraf is the lecturer in Islamic Eastern Islamic lands and the Persian speaking world at Cambridge. And I'm happy to say he was my replacement when I retired in 2018 and it's very nice to see that he's actually sitting in my old office. So he did, he graduated from NYU in 2005 where he received the Rumi Biruni Prize for excellence in Persian studies, and then went on to do his doctorate at Yale. And then he came on at with whom he has co-edited a book called the Pursuant World Rethinking a Shared Space published by Brill in 2019, which his own introductory essay, in which his own introductory essay is a thoughtful examination of the rise and use, and value of the term Pursuant in studying Iran and her neighbors. So who better to start our symposium. Speaker for is Abdul Ava is a graduate at St. Petersburg University, where she received a training that would have killed off most modern British students, a PhD in Iranian philology art and Islamic studies in 1989. And the guidance of academician, Mikhail Nikolayevich Bogolubov was on the text of the Lahore, the ancient Lahore tafsir. And she was also able to benefit from the teaching of Gazellian and Ivanov at the Hermitage Museum. Fantastic resources there of course. It's exceptionally well placed to talk about the artistic and literary aspects of early Russia Persian relations. And our third speaker Kevin Gled Hill is also a product of the splendid department at Yale, led by Professor Amarnat. One of my students now doing a PhD, one of my own students is now doing a PhD at Yale. And this sort of interaction between these two great centers is a very good way of keeping alive and vital our field of person studies. He graduated as an undergraduate from Lassell University, did his MA in Chicago at the Center for Middle East Studies, and he completed his PhD congratulations Kevin at Yale, just in May this year 2020 on the subject of his presentation today, which is I say takes a step back into the middle of the 18th century. So I think without more ado. I think we're on time. Kevin over. Sorry, Asif over to you for our first talk. Thank you. Thank you for that kind introduction Charles. Thank you. Thank you also to Charles and to Dr Stewart and the other organizers for inviting me to speak in today's symposium. It's very nice to be here. And I'm grateful to be included among this wonderful group of scholars who are working on Iran's 18th and early 19th centuries. I'm only sorry that we could not meet in person because of the circumstances. But I do hope that our paths will will cross in person sooner rather than later. What I'd like to do is to just share my screen. Although it says host disabled participant screen sharing. I think I may need to be given permission to share my screen. Thank you. So hopefully you all can see this now. So who in this presentation is to speak a little bit about the memory of the Safavids in early God jar historiography. This is a this is a topic that is related to and in some ways grew out of the project that I've been working on for several years now, which is on the formation of God jar Iran, how it was that the government formed a new and relatively stable polity formed a new empire out of the cauldron of Iran's 18th century. In doing the research for that project. I've had to read the chronicles of the early God jar period that is the chronicles that were written during the reigns of the first two monarchs of the God jar dynasty. And I was interested in finding answers to a range of questions as I read those chronicles, mostly having to do with what the administrative and governance practices during the early God jar period were things like land management, and petitioning marriage alliances and so on. But I was also interested in how the authors of these chronicles depicted and presented the God jars, and in how they situated the God jars within a longer history and tradition of kingship in the Iranian world. And this is where that larger projects overlaps with what I want to speak about here today. It occurred to me that there might be room to explore how the early God jar chronicles depicted the Safavids specifically, and how they depicted the God jars relationship to the Safavids. One place to begin the story would be with our Muhammad Khan's coronation. In March 1796, our Muhammad Khan, the founder of the God jar dynasty crowned himself Shaw. But his coronation had been a long time coming. Since 1779 when he fled Shiraz after carrying Khan Zan's death, we've been holding him captive. Our Muhammad Khan had carefully and painstakingly consolidated political power. Beginning first with his homeland of Mozambican in northern Iran. He began a series of military campaigns aimed at conquering the various corners of what the sources call the guarded domains of Iran. Malik and madam say Iran Persian resting control of provinces from the Zans and building alliances with tribal cons. By 1794 of our Muhammad Khan had conquered the provinces of farce and caravan in central Iran and defeated his remaining Zan rival rival local. And yet, he did not declare himself Shaw at that point. He waited until he had conquered Georgia and made headway in Horasan two provinces which had been part of the erstwhile Safavid Empire. And he had achieved those goals that he crowned himself with the so called key on it crown, which you can see here. In an elaborate coronation ceremony, which saw Rui the author of the most important chronicle of our Muhammad Khan's career, the tariqa Muhammad II, also known as Asana Tabarif, described in detail. That all our Muhammad Khan only felt fit to take the title of Shaw in 1796 after he had conquered most of the former Safavid territories. Suggests not only that the Safavid Empire remained vivid in the cultural memory, even seven decades after the Empire's collapse, but also that for our Muhammad Khan specifically associating himself with the Empire was a critical part of his and by extension the Ajar's political legitimacy. Of course, scholars have been long aware of this. Historians such as Gavin Hamley and Lampton, Abbas Amanat, and Nobuaki Kondo, among others, have in one way or another pointed out that the early Ajar's attempted to link themselves back to the Safavids. And historians such as Ernest Tucker have written on 18th and early 19th century historiography and have also alluded to this point. In recent years, attention has been turned to sources like travel logs and other commemorative texts like Tasker is to try to determine how the collapse of the Safavid Empire may have shaped people's sense of identity, belonging and kinship to one another. The question of how early Ajar chronicles and historiography remembered and depicted the Safavids and what role that that may have played in the construction of our political legitimacy has not been the subject of any sustained study as far as I'm aware. What I would like to suggest in this paper and I should confess that my claim is a tentative one. I have not exhaust exhausted all of the sources. But nevertheless, what I would like to suggest is that the memory of Safavids was strong in early Ajar chronicles and can be detected in the sources, but more than that, the authors of chronicles drew connections between Safavid and Ajar rule, usually in subtle ways, sometimes in an explicit manner as part of a broader effort to present the Ajar as legitimate rulers. In other words, Ajar legitimacy was built in part on claiming to have, if not resurrected the Safavid Empire, at least restored justice balance order and other characteristics associated with kinship and with the rule of the Safavids. Perhaps it would make sense to pause here for a moment and explain which chronicles I mean when I refer to the early Ajar chronicles. As I mentioned a little earlier, these are the chronicles that were written during the reigns of Arama Ahmad Khan and Fatali Shah, that is from the period of roughly 1785 to 1834. You can see a list of the chronic, some of the chronicles here. One of the chronicles, Saurulis Tariqa Muhammadi was written mostly during the reign of Arama Ahmad Khan, while the other five you see here were written during the long reign of Fatali Shah. This is not a comprehensive list. There are other chronicles that one could include from this early Vajar period, including for instance, Zinaat-e-Tawarif and Tariqa Mulkara. But the list here represents in my estimation the most important and most comprehensive chronicles of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As you can also see, several of the chronicles have been published, but two of them, Mufar-e-Al-Qulub and Tariqa Jahan-e-Ara are still only available as manuscripts. In their length, their level of detail, which events and individuals they focus on and even in their style of writing. The six chronicles here exhibit a fair degree of variety. There are some features with which they share in common. First, they were all written by court chroniclers, ministers, or in the case of Tariqa Sahib Qirani by Qajar Prince Mahmoud Mirza, the author of Tariqa Sahib Qirani was the 15th son of Fatali Shah. And therefore should be read as texts that articulated a vision and projected an image of the Aajar dynasty, which the Aajars would have wanted to be projected. They are for the most part sympathetic to and indeed have a bias towards the Aajars. Beyond who the authors were, there are other aspects having to do with the structure and content of the chronicles that are important to bear in mind when thinking about how the memory of the Safavids would have been presented. Most of the chronicles begin by recounting the exploits of Fatali Khan Qajar and Muhammad Hassan Khan Qajar, the grandfather and father, respectively, of Agha Muhammad Khan. Fatali Khan Qajar, the grandfather, had served as a military commander during the final years of the Safavid Empire, and following the siege of Esfahan in 1722, became one of the closest advisors to the young Safavid prince, Tahrmas II, even earning for himself the titles of It-Tamada Dole and Vakila Dole. He was eventually killed in 1726 in the wake of increasing tension with his main rival, Tahrmas Quli, who of course later would become known as Nader Shah. But the point here is that by beginning their accounts with the career of Fatali Khan, authors of early Qajar chronicles were in effect arguing that the ascendancy of the Qajars in the late 18th century really had its roots in the late Safavid period. One other feature shared between the chronicles that is worth mentioning here is that many of them discussed the genealogy of the Qajars, what the sources refer to as Zikr-e-Nasab-e-Ila Javila Qajar. Sarwee's Tarikh Muhammadi only mentions in passing that the Qajars are descendants of the Turks, claiming that they are from Syria, but other chronicles go into more detail. All of the chronicles claim Turkic ancestry for the Qajars, although there is discrepancy between the accounts of what exactly that ancestry was and who the Qajars were actually descended from. Professor Kondo has recently argued in an article that the lack of a consistent genealogy for the Qajars suggests that the Qajars did not rely on genealogy as a way of legitimizing their rule, unlike other earlier Central Asian rulers or indeed even the Safavids, and saw as he puts it, quote, no benefit in forging a legendary genealogy. While this may very well have been true, I would propose that this seems to neglect that there is in fact a common theme in the genealogies of the Qajars. This is almost always presented in the context of Qajar service to the Safavids, and in fact sometimes mentioned that the Qajars had served as one of the original members of the Fezalbash Confederacy that helped bring the Safavids to power in the 16th century. But it is really in how the chronicles portray the rise of Agha Mohammad Khan, his accession to the throne in 1796, and the beginning of Qajar rule in Iran that one can detect just how important the memory of the Safavids was to the claims of legitimacy. The chronicles make a point of contrasting the Qajars with the Zans, Afsharids, and Afghans who had preceded them. The Afghans who besieged Isfahan are almost universally described as having brought about oppression and tyranny, and caused the desolation of Iran. But even the scions of Nader Shah and Karim Khan Zand are the object of scorn in Qajar chronicles. Consider, for instance, how Mahmood Mirza, the author of Tarifa Sahib Tarani writes here, that Agha Mohammad Khan, and I'm paraphrasing here, Agha Mohammad Khan crowned himself Shah, only after having, and here's the bit I want to draw your attention to, having purified Iran from the stain of the impure existence of some of the children of Nader Shah and Karim Khan Zand, or as it says here in the Persian, Mamnikat-e-Iranra as los-a-bujud-in-a-haqqan, chand-a-o-lada, Nader Shah, Afshar, and Karim Khan Zand, haqqat. There's another interesting aspect to highlight in this particular quote from Tarifa Sahib Karani, this bit underlined here, and that has to do with the extent and reach of Qajar rule. As the underlined bit states, from Tbilisi to Horasan, from Gorgan to the coasts of Oman, the commanders and governors of the country and the Khans and the heads of the army near and far, obedient and rebellious, all tied the band of service and obedience, and place their head upon the neck of royal decree. This is an administratively rough translation of what you see here, but one which hopefully makes the point clear. The chronicle claims that Agha Muhammad Khan had acquired the loyalty of provincial notables and tribal Khans from west to east, from north to south of Iran. Whether all of these notables across so vast the territory had in reality pledged their allegiance to Agha Muhammad Khan is not really the issue. Instead, it is that the chronicle claims that they did and seems to be suggesting that Agha Muhammad Khan had finally reunited the far flung regions of Iran under his command. I'll return to this theme of the vast expanse of Iranian territories and their reunification or at least their alleged reunification under the Qajars in a few minutes. For now, I'd like to dwell on this topic of how the chronicles contrast Qajar rule with the Zans and Afsharids before them and more specifically to a theme which appears in these texts that the Qajars had restored a sense of justice, balance and order to Iran. This is a theme that often does not appear explicitly in the chronicles, but rather as a kind of a subtext in the chronicles. The extended passage in Sarawes Tariqa Muhammadi about the coronation ceremony of Agha Muhammad Khan, to which I alluded earlier, goes on for several pages in the published edition, describing in detail the Qayanid crown and the jewels worn by Agha Muhammad Khan, the gifts that were offered to him, the olama and the sayeds who came to pay their respect to him, the prayer leaders who gave sermons in his honor, the drummers and musicians who played in celebration of him, the wine bearers who held feasts for him, and so on. Agha Muhammad Khan himself then went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, according to Sarawes, and then went on a hunting expedition. The tone and tenor of the passage is one of celebration in honor of someone who was supposed to have been a rightful ruler and who therefore received and perhaps even indeed deserves to be celebrated by his subjects. One can find other ways that the sources made an effort to place the Qajars in a succession of rightful monarchs as the latest example of rulers who were every inch a king. Sources like Tariha Jahanara include lengthy sections on the virtues and attributes of Fatali Shah, emphasizing his kingly attributes. In this folio from the Mageless Library's copy of the Tariha Jahanara, you can see here the section which begins to describe some of these kingly virtues of Fatali Shah. It's that, and what it says in the Persian, this bit that I've kind of highlighted here, it says it brings attention to Fatali Shah's Akhlar-e-Mu'l-Khaneh, Patshah-e Jahang-u Shah, so Fatali Shah's kingly virtues. And it's that last bit which introduces the section of the chronicle as being in praise of Fatali Shah's virtues, both physical and spiritual, by the way, as it mentions here in the chronicle. And his kingly temper or ethics, Akhlar. Or take, for example, the Khatameh-e-Ruznamche-e-Homayun, which the chronicler Khavari wrote as an appendix to his history, Tariha Zul-Ghar-Ning. As you can see in the table of contents here, the text begins with a lengthy section describing, again, the attributes and virtues of Fatali Shah. In introducing these attributes, Khavari writes that they are the essence of kingship, as la bozima zaat-e-saltanat. That these and other early Rajah chronicles, and there are others, these are just two examples that I'm bringing to your attention. That these and other early Rajah chronicles include passages in praise of the Shah's virtues and make a point of remarking on his kingly character makes clear, I hope, that there's a recurring theme in these sources of the Rajahs having restored rightful kingship, a sense of balance to Iran's political order, last seen under the Safavids, and in contrast, I would argue, to the Zans and Afsharids. In the Persian tradition of advice literature and political ethics, the idea that balance and order are brought about in the world as a result of a rightful and just ruler is most famously presented in the form of the so-called circle of justice. As Linda Darling and others have argued, the origins of the idea can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia, but its most well-known formulation is attributed to the Sasanian ruler, Adishir, who is reported to have said that there is no kingdom without an army, no army without wealth, no wealth without prosperity and no prosperity without justice. Of course, various iterations of this adage were used in political ethical literature over the centuries, but what I would like to highlight here is its use during the early Rajah period. In his Mufarah al-Khulub, Nadeem Bar-Farooshi begins with five long sections on the moral virtues that everyone, but especially kings, should cultivate, including proper speaking etiquette, modesty, discernment, intelligence, bravery, and humility. A lengthy appendix, a Khatameh, then provides an account of the reigns of Ahram Muhammad Khan and Fatali Shah to the year 1220 in the Hidri calendar, so 1805, 1806. And then in a noteworthy passage which begins on the folios you see here, Nadeem writes that the order of the world and of the kingdom are contingent on justice, idolat, and that injustice leads to the destruction of the realm. Nadeem goes on to describe Fatali Shah as having restored order before finally writing as he appointed his sons to provincial governorships to uphold justice in their respective realms. He then quotes for his sons, according to Nadeem, a variation of the adage attributed to Adish here. There is no kingdom without men, no men without wealth, and no wealth without prosperity, and no prosperity without justice and punishment. And actually what the bit I've highlighted here is actually Fatali Shah giving this advice to his sons. So my mistake that this this folio here describes Fatali Shah giving this advice to his sons. This sense of a return to order pervades the sources, especially those from the reign of Fatali Shah, who is often depicted as a just and fitting king. One might wonder what does that have to do with the Safavids? How was this idea of balance being restored to link to the Safavids specifically? So here I would like to return to Khavari's Tarikh Azul Dayanay. Towards the beginning of the chronicle, which you see here, Khavari describes all of the various provinces and regions, from the Caucasus to Khurasan to Fars, that comprise the guarded domains of Iran. He describes their geographical features, their agricultural production, and their economies. So here subtle but still clear, these are all of the regions that make up Iranian lands, and any ruler who claims to rule Iran should rule over all of these regions. But then in case that was too subtle a way of putting it, Khavari proceeds a little later in the passage you see here, to compare and contrast the Safavids, Afsharids, Zans and Hajars. He says that Shah Tahmas, the Safavid Shah Tahmas, were reigned in the middle of the 16th century, and Shah Abbas used force, Zarbashamshir and governance, or Taddeer, to expand the Safavid Empire's borders before continuing. And here I'm translating the passage that's highlighted here. But then during the time of the Afghan conquests, it was all lost. Nader Shah accomplished courageous acts, but he did not have the acumen to ensure his longevity, while the Zans lost due to their ineptitude, the Orzagi. When it became this glorious dynasty's rule to turn, nobate darae kede inselsele jalile recid. Despite the conquests made by the Ottomans, Russians, Afghans and Uzbeks, kingly deeds which shall be recorded in this book were restored within Iran's boundaries. The praise for the Hajars and the harsh words for Nader Shah, and especially for the Zans, can be explained by the fact, that the Qajar Shah was Qawari's patron and should be read with some skepticism. But Qawari's passage provides a few crucial clues to how the Qajars articulated their legitimacy. First, the Qajars are legitimate because they reunited all of the territories and kingdoms of the guarded domains of Iran. Second, like the Safavids, they did kingly deeds. And finally, those kingly or regal deeds and accomplishments included conquests, but perhaps more importantly, they included things like governance and political acumen and political skill. The link Qawari draws between the Qajars and the Safavids in this passage is among the clearest and most explicit I have found so far in an early Qajar Chronicle, articulating the claim that the Qajars were heirs to the style of rule embodied by the Safavids. But if one were to look beyond the Chronicles, one would find other ways that the Qajars sought to present themselves as heirs to the Safavids. The administrative offices created by Ahmad Khan and Fatali Shah wore resemblance to those that existed under the late Safavids. In some cases, even the individuals who held those offices could trace their family lineage back to the Safavid period. A note where the example is the Farahani family, whose prominence in the early Qajar court rivaled that of even the Prime Minister, who were close advisors to Fatali Shah and the Crown Prince Abbas Mirza, and ancestors of the Farahani had served successive Shahs and by the late Safavid, successive Shahs through the centuries and then by the late Safavid period where the keepers of the seal of the Safavid Shahs. And there are other examples one can point to in the realm of art and architecture even. There are certain ways, certain interesting ways that the Qajars in some ways continue the tradition of the Safavids, although I don't want to overstate the case. As Susanne Boboy has recently argued, there are some notable differences between Qajar, the Qajar patronage of architecture and the Safavid patronage of architecture. One final point I would like to make before ending. I want to suggest that early Qajar chronicles placed the Qajars in a tradition of royal authority and rule that was exclusively associated with the Safavids, or even that it was only the memory of the Safavids, which was retained in the chronicles. And there are numerous examples of how the chronicles placed the Qajars within a much longer historical tradition beyond the Safavids, stretching back to the Ilhanate and even in some cases to pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties. Again, you can see evidence of this in numerous sources, you can see evidence of it in the titles that Ahram Muhammad Khan and Fatali Shah took for themselves, you can see it in some of the practices that Fatali Shah engaged in, things like rock reliefs. Fatali Shah was known to have resuscitated this ancient practice of constructing rock reliefs during the early 19th century. So one could, in a sense, argue that over-emphasizing the links between Safavid and Qajar rule erases some of these other links between the Qajars and earlier rulers. And nor do I want to claim that it is only in early Qajar chronicles that one can detect a sense of nostalgia for the Safavids. In fact, it would be interesting to compare the early Qajar sources with other sources from the 18th century. Nevertheless, the memory of the Safavids is there in the early Qajar chronicles. And while it may be expected to find that theme running through Qajar historiography, it is worth considering how that theme appears in the chronicles. But in the context in which the Qajars rose to power in the late 18th century, and both the basis and the limits to their claims in royal authority, more attention to this topic may illuminate how the Qajars consolidated power and a new polity formed under their rule. Thank you. Thank you very much, Asif. That was a very splendid talk and an excellent way of getting our topics today started. Thank you very much. So we'll take some questions at the end. I have one. I'm sure some other people already have some. And we'll progress straight away now. We're dead on time, maybe one minute quicker. Thank you very much for that. And don't forget speakers to look in your chat box because actually I did send Asif a message saying he had five minutes to go, which obviously he was up to already but I will remind you when it when you have five minutes to go. I think we'll turn straight now to Farooza Abdullaiva for her talk, which as I mentioned is going to be very slightly different from the advertised title but concentrating on artistic and cultural interactions. So thank you very much. Hello everyone. I'll try to share my screen. Is this fine for everyone? So I would like to start my talk with apologies as Charles just mentioned. And thanks again for the beautiful introduction. My paper is called Russell Persian cultural diplomacy, but when I started to write my paper I decided to concentrate on the diplomatic gift exchange which is of course a part of the cultural diplomacy. Even the talk is, I mean this subject is so rich that I will have to restrain myself with just speaking on about two diplomatic missions of 1829 and the impact on the cultural life of both countries with some glimpses before and after. There have been several huge exhibitions or parts of them, especially dedicated on the subject, like those held in the Museums of the Kremlin, LACMA and of course Iran in the Hermitage of 2004. And the latest the gifts down to the Imperial Court. I personally like exhibitions. Again, in the Hermitage and between Paul Fortress on Mihai Zici's visual chronicle of Mr. Rudin Charles visit to the Court of Alexander the Second. My colleagues there, especially at the Grand Adam of and late, and actually Alex H. Ivanov and Daria Vasily have done a lot to identify some very important objects. Diplomatic gifts often are a remedy for the damage produced by the guns. Supposedly, the more expensive and sophisticated the gift, the more effective the result. And they're mentioned in ancient chronicles in classical literature, including our beloved Shana man. And from that high monetary value, they would have a strong political message, elegantly ciphered in exotic objects aiming to impress and to in use. But the main aim is to connect the two countries with different cultures. The first film on kings and paintings by Siren Hojumi is one of the best and most recent proofs of how the Kajar mastered the use of Western visual art for promoting the image of a great imperial ruler by merging it with much more ancient native artistic paradigms and motives. The first Kajar rules were particularly effective in appropriating the visual propaganda imagery, both from the Western courts, projecting the image through both worlds, East and West, Christian and Islamic, ancient and contemporary. And when this now iconic image of Fatali Shah was distributed among the main European courts. The Western recipients would only recognize the famous prototype of the greatest empire of that time, the contour of the universe, contemporary Alexander the Great. Although the more enlightened about Persian culture were expected to see the chronic epitome of ancient kingship. They would remain with the hope of wisdom, instead of the eagle of war as his attribute. There was a period when the British envoys, instead of trying to impress and then use the Shah with some sophisticated objects, start to present him just with coins as the most reliable gift. Quite often the gifts were evaluated and not always the Shah was particularly satisfied. So when the newly appointed envoy, Alexander Gribayev was assembling the gifts for the Shah to be presented together with his credentials. He also decided to follow his advice, I mean, the advice of the British in fact. Apart from the standard set of diamond eagles, egrets, bejewels, daggers, snuffboxes, swords and guns, which unfortunately was stopped in the port of Anzili and arrived already after the reception with the Shah. The only precious object he had to give to the Shah were the set for 55 exotic and those platinum coins from the Euro mountains. A platinum had just been discovered there and those coins were the first ever minted. However, the Shah was not impressed. He was waiting for the promised jewels and guns, which arrived in Tehran as it happened to several hours before the fatal attack when the embassy was about to leave. And this is a short list of those valuables which disappeared during the attack. There are all gifts the Shah was giving to the Shah and to the Shah's welcoming farewell gifts, a salary for all members of the two Russian missions, they ran into this for the whole year ahead, a sack of gold and for farewell distribution, the most precious possessions of the UNICOM, who was the treasurer of the Shah's heart for 15 years, and personal capital of Ivan Maltsov who wrote quite a lot of money to start his crystal and glass business in Traja. In Russian historiography, Maltsov is presented as a marginal coward and traitor. However, I think that his role was something rather different. Maltsov's father was one of the richest men in Russia, being a glass and crystal tycoon. He also owned factories producing steel in the euros and wine in the Crimea. His mother was Princess Misherskaya, so he was very well connected. Often at a very young age, this extremely wealthy aristocrat with the palaces and the capitals and mansions in the Black Sea joined the mission hoping to start his business in Traja. He was one of the main private sponsors of Greba Yadav's great plan to establish in Georgia, the Russian Transcaucasian Company emulating the existing Russian American company and the British assistantia company. For Greba Yadav, that was a good chance to create his own little empire where he could quietly compose music and poetry after he was miraculously extracted from the most horrible political prison in the Petronfall Fortress by his brother in law, Vaskevich. And he was kept there for participation in the December's anti-monarchist uprising. Those with whom he was in jail were hung a month later, while he was promoted and sent to Tehran when Vaskevich replaced the dismissed Yermol. In the middle here in the picture above are supposed to be relieved the treasure of the Russian American company, which was the most profitable state business in the whole history of the Russian Empire. And Greba Yadav's link with him was quite obvious. Greba Yadav's proposal submitted to desire only two months before his death was rejected, but Maltsov, who became the right hand of the Russian foreign minister, Kalmisa Hoda, managed not only to make his celestial career in the foreign office, but to establish the Transcaucasian Society, which was successfully trading tax-free glass and crystal with Praja. It was in his factories in Gutskostalny, and this is just some objects from the museum of this factory, that the crystal Kalyans and Estakans started to be produced, especially for the Praja market. And before then the Russians were aware about the particular fascination of the presence of sparkling glass and mirror work, which was the reason why desire decided to send to Patelysha a very special gift, crystal throne. And it was a true masterpiece of engineering design and made of turquoise crystal. And due to its special mechanisms, seven fountains in vases, sprayed running water on all corners of this dirt. The construction of metal and crystal was huge, extremely complicated and very heavy. All together its weight was more than eight and a half tons. The bed was commissioned by Alexander I, but when it was finished, it was already Nicholas on the throne, who was very keen to show that despite the uprising, his power was stronger than ever. And the bed was sent to Disha on the occasion of his coronation. This is just one of the Russians why this happened. It took half a year for it to arrive in Tehran, full packed with many separate boxes accompanied by military convoy and two technicians to assemble the construction. On the way they were jailed is by the time Abbas Mazar had started his military campaign. In the end the precious load arrived safely in Tehran, but both technicians were dead. It was the convoy officer, Ivan Naskov, who managed to put the pieces together and even make the mechanisms work. The legend goes that it was a beautiful autumn evening. Disha was sitting on this dirt crystal throne, admiring the sparkles in the rays of the setting sun. It sounded the enchanting noise of the fountains. At this particular moment, the courier brought the news about the Russians occupying Tabriz. Disha got off the start and ordered it to be taken away at once to avoid any other bad news like that. Quite a similar legend is known about the Persian gift to Ivan the terrible. This time it was the elephant. It had to walk all the way to Moscow. Unfortunately, it was the year 1571, the plague pandemic arrived in Russia and it was associated with this poor animal, which was slaughtered. This picture is actually from the Russian Shahnameh, compiled for Ivan the terrible, and it was decorated with 16,000 paintings. Senator Shav also sent to St. Petersburg 14 elephants. However, they did not last long, not only because of the unsuitable climate, but because of the greed of their carers who were using elephants food mainly for their own consumption, especially the buckets of water. In 2015, the Embassy of Miss Abul Hassan Khan was sent to St. Petersburg to renegotiate the Gulistan Treaty. Many luxurious gifts were carried by the whole caravan of elephants along the palace embankment. However, despite those presents, the embassy achieved almost zero results. The next mission of 1829 led by Prince Khosrow, who was sent to apologize for the murder of the Russian envoy, had no elephants whatsoever and much less impressive gifts. However, the embassy had a truly overwhelming success. If by some miracle Khosrow, after his return from St. Petersburg, could have become the next Shah, he probably would have played the role of Miseridin Shah, a whole generation earlier, sharing similar aims and passions, including one for Balai. Miseridin Shah was preparing for his European tour. He was going thoroughly through Khosrow Mirza's diary and wearing his regret, supposedly this one according to the description, which Khosrow received as a farewell gift from Bazaar. To choose the right person, all the dimensions I received from our Bonactar, who is now writing the Facebook of the Java Herod Museum. To choose the right person for this mission was a real challenge. In fact, the Shah was not sure if it wouldn't be a good idea, instead of sending the apology and the indemnities to join the Ottomans and try to regain the lost territories. It was in fact Abbas Mirza who sent his favorite son, on his own initiative from Tabriz, before the final decision was made in Tehran. He was around the Russians, whose intelligence was aware about the negotiations between the Ottomans and the Kajars. There were two main reasons why it was Prince Khosrow who was appointed for this very special mission. Firstly, Abbas Mirza was preparing him for his own replacement as the head of the Kajar Foreign Office, when he would become the Shah himself. And in these well-known pictures his status is clearly shown. It is only him and his father who represent the Persian side during this very important meeting. And secondly Khosrow had no hope for the throne in the long queue for potential successes. So he was easily expendable because there was a serious why that he might be kept as a hostage. Am I not at the Russian court or the rival to the throne, like in case with Muhteza Kulifan, Fatali Shah's uncle and the court of Catherine the Great. The insignificance of the envoy was enhanced by his entourage and the gifts. However, his personality contributed a lot to the success of his mission. Khosrow was very young and handsome, he was only 16 at that time, and became a real fashion of the day at the Russian court, where only he would wear a ball, masquerade or a hunting party, a bali with theta performance without his presence. The entourage was indeed very strong. Out of 40, there were 17 VIPs and out of them there were four VIPs and you know all these people very well. Fatali Khan Farahani, the famous Samir Kavir, he was only 22 in those days, Mirza Masoudan Serigir Valdiv, who is the foreign minister, Mirza Saleh and the doctor, very famous doctor Mirza Khadjibaba Afshar. The movements of the mission were recorded from both sides in great detail, apart from the daily reports to the Tsar by the National Ahmadar Council. Almost all of them were keeping their diaries, which, including Pasir Mirza's personal diary, disappeared in the Serudin Shah's library. What we have now surviving is the mission's diary completed rather compiled by Mustafa Afshar, who was Mirza Saleh's secretary. Afshar's diary is now kept in several copies, all of them produced at least 20 years after the journey, and they are now in London, St. Petersburg and in Tehran. Possibly the texts was deliberately prepared for distribution among the European courts in the same manner as the portraits of Afshar. During the apology ceremony in the winter palace, these are closed to Tehran case for posterity. The Russians were eagerly keen to draw a line under this episode, as the troops were already on the Ottoman front. In fact, the embassy did seal the long interbellum period of the Russian Persian Wars, five years together since 1651. The significance given to Afshar's embassy by the Russians was exceptional. The whole ritual of receiving the prince was designed in great detail and was used as a template for all other foreign delegations afterwards. The pomp of Kassel Mirza's spectacle was unprecedented. He arrived with his entourage on the royal yacht from Peterhof, which is Catherine de Grey's summer residence, and was greeted by 21 gun salute from the Peter and Paul fortress, with the crowd cheering from the embankment. The success of Kassel Mirza's mission was beyond expectations. To say the least, one of the remaining two crews of the indemnities was left, and the payment of the second was postponed and in fact never paid. The hospitality expenses of the Russian side were much higher than those spent on any other mission before or after. In St. Petersburg, Prince Kostro and his entourage were staying in this magnificent three-day palace for three months, even longer, with all their costs covered. Even wine and beer were included, although I would imagine that it was probably consumed mainly by the Russian guards. Just to remind you, this palace was built by Catherine de Grey for her favorite, Petronkin, and later it became the seat of the Russian parliament. What is remarkable is that the pheromone from the Shah, confirming Kostro's credentials and his apology letter to the Tsar, arrived when the prince was already in Peterhof, outside St. Petersburg, waiting for the Tsar to come back from the Ottoman front. Exactly like Greba Yadav, whose presence was stopped in the port of Anzili, Kostro arrived for his first audience with the Tsar, almost empty-handed, with some token gifts which he managed to buy in Moscow from the Persian merchants on the way. When the gifts eventually arrived, they considered all the following objects. The Khun Bahar diamond for the envoy, now it is in the Kremlin Museum, there is a very interesting letter by Minowski describing how they were calculating the price. It has three names engraved on it, the two mobile emperors, Nizam Shah, Shah Jahan and Fatali Shah, with the date, and the date is three years earlier. And what's remarkable is that according to Masoud Bounakdar, who is dealing with the crown jewels at the moment in Tehran, there is no documentation relating to this piece. Then we have gold, lots of gold, the sword for the crown prince, 18 manuscripts from Fatali Shah's personal library, and 13 of them represent Persian poetry. The rest are medieval chronicles and didactic works, and only six manuscripts have illustrations. From the artistic point of view, probably the most impressive is the copy of the Dorsey Shah and the man commissioned by Kocheb Hashem Uthada Kolyakhan for Shah Abad II, and probably the most curious is the divan of Fatali Shah himself. Very rich, illuminated. Looking at this list, it seems that the objects were collected in haste, and that the Shah did not have many resources, or wanted to show that his treasure is in a very poor state, or that he had nothing to do with those valuables that disappeared from the Russian embassy. However, the reciprocal and the farewell gifts to the prince and his entourage were more than impressive. And among them, there were orders and decorations, including diamond eagles with egregates, metals, individual daggers, rings and snuff boxes. At the imperial porcelain and crystal factories, they were commissioning porcelain dinner sets, crystal and glass tea and sherbet services, as well as vows, mirrors, lamps, textiles and guns. To carry all those gifts, the mission was supplied. They were supplied because they were trying to delay more and more the return. 193 horses, 16 carriages and 31 coaches. And when the caravan was leaving Moscow, the loads almost tripled. Kostro became a true celebrity among the Russian ability during his long stay in Russia for months all together at the court. And the half a year in the country. He was eager to learn the local habits and manners, like greetings, ladies by kissing their hand. The very first time he was actually taught how to do this. It was just before the ceremony of apology in the winter powers with the templates for style. Both present Russian records in his state, so that he was extremely enthusiastic visiting various institutions, universities, schools, museums, libraries, drug stores, hospitals, lunatic asylums, printing houses, arsenals, factories. And for example, the state meant he had the traditional coin coin minted in his own. The most tragic part of the story is that such splendid spectacle in which he was given the main role in Russia was rather misleading for young. Having spent so long time with the Russian court, he believed that he was destined for the throne, with the help of the power, his powerful friend, the Russian Emperor. And this was probably the reason why he was so meticulously recording in his diary everything which could be beneficial for his country, hoping to introduce reforms when he would have the chance. When he was in St. Petersburg, Kostrova's commissioning his portraits are from various artists partly emulating his father and grandfather and partly his predecessor, Mr. Mr. Abu Hassan Khan in London, who had his portraits painted five times, among which they were truly outstanding by Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir William Beach. It is almost possible that in St. Petersburg, Kostrova saw the portrait of Abbas Mezar by Mohammad Jafar, who was sent to St. Petersburg to study painting at the Fine Arts Academy. In the end of his two year course, Mohammad Jafar produced a full length portrait of Abbas Mezar for the annual student exhibition. He received a silver medal for it, although according to the rules of the academy, only oil paintings could be accepted. And this one, despite its monumental size, was painted in watercolor. There is a description of how he was sitting next to this portrait during the show in his colorful dress, watching the reaction of the public. Another person whose example Kostrova's open to follow was Tsai Peter, about whom he had so many legends in St. Petersburg, and especially his ability to drastically reform his country, turning it from a rather backward state to a superpower of his time after his trips to Europe. Kostrova's commissioning his portraits not only on canvas but also in porcelain, emulating those cuts which he presented himself to the emperors with the portraits of his father and grandfather. We have now known how many cups are actually there in the diamond chamber of the hermitage, there are eight of them, two more now in Tbilisi, two others were sold recently at Bonham's. However, only the emperors cups, emperors cups, have the most splendid gold holders in the Minai technique. And it is exactly the holders that make these cups, such as plenty of examples of multiculturalism in the early 19th century, which had probably a hidden message. The cups were manufactured at Worcester by Flight and Bar, and probably the shaft might have been inspired by the pieces lined as well, which he received from Alexander, which is now in the Afghanistan Palace. Apart from this cabinet, the cups of Flight and Bar produced the medallions and spilt vases with the same portraits. The design was based on Thomas Dudley's prints using care-ported watercolors and mirror reflection thanks to Moira for the suggestion, and there were two versions of them in color and monochrome, which are now in the Gullistan Palace. The Gullistan cups are of special interest as they present an attempt to merge two national coats of arms, Persian and British, possibly to commemorate the 1801 Anglo-Persian Treaty against the French and the Russians. And even a more multi-layered message could be applied when the cups were prepared for the Russian Tsar. The Persian King on the British Cup was inserted into the Persian holders made in the technique of polychrome naval, traditional in both Persian and Russian. So, so far, I've been unable to locate any of Kassarov's own portraits, or in Poland, even possibly when Muhammad became the Shah. He confiscated his and his brother's young gifts for properties after their plot was revealed and they both were blinded and sent to Ramadan. Kassarov's portraits were probably destroyed at the same time. It is remarkable that already in the late 1840s when Muhammad became the Shah, he was still sending the portraits of his grandfather, this time in the shape of the embroidered with traditional forage. And thanks to Daria Vasilievna, I'm showing you this picture. These are in the warrants of palace in the Crimea and this is how they were probably hanging in the soup of palace when the fashion to decorate the oriental rooms in the big palaces was quite popular. And this embroidery was sent to Alexander after the visit of Nasser-e-Din Shah. I should probably stop here. I've got a couple of examples from contemporary perception by Puskin and Gogol, but I'm just hearing from Charles that I have to wrap up. If there are any questions about Shostakovich's opera with the role of Kassarov Mirza in it and Gogol's novel, I will be very happy to answer this question. But at the moment, I should say that while Kassarov's embassy made a series impression on the Russians view of the pashens, the Russian monarchs, especially Peter and Catherine, were perceived as models for transforming the country for the rest of the state and inspired the members of the mission like the young Amir Kabyev for their reforms in Pasha. Thank you very much. Thank you for is I'm sorry we had to miss the bit about Puskin and Shostakovich, but maybe we'll be able to come back to them. So maybe you could stop sharing your screen also. Well done. Right, so now we're nicely on schedule. And I'm going to hand over straight away to Kevin, who's going to do a sort of wine back in time a little bit from the early Kajar period to the even earlier Kajar period. Okay, you've got half an hour. Kevin, thanks very much. Thank you so much, Professor Melville. Professor Stewart both for inviting me for including me and for everyone that suit of our foundation and so as and my fellow presenters who have made this this possible for assault to be together and to present on such a fascinating range of topics. I feel kind of lucky in being able to present. After Dr up the live and Dr ashrath because in some ways I'm drawing on on fairly similar themes if in a somewhat earlier period talking both about diplomacy between Iran and Russia. But also on the idea of the staff of it inheritance and how it plays into the diplomatic connections across the Caspian sea in the post staff of the era. So I'll be starting with the 1720s and 1730s and continuing forward to the expedition of naval commander Marco Voynovich to ask the robot to try and open a commercial factory. And with the permission of Aga Muhammad Khan was ultimately a failed expedition in 1781 and talking about the ways in which the idea of a single Iranian state in continuity with the staff of it was supported, really on all sides of these diplomatic exchanges by Russian consoles and naval officers and merchants, as well as by the God jars themselves for various reasons and incentives. I'm drawing on chronicles including saw Ruiz, which us as mentioned, but largely working from the body of diplomatic correspondence in Russian archive from the console that and the lead to the College of Commerce, the forerunner of the Ministry of Commerce in Russia, and dispatches from military officers to Gregorio Potemkin in his role as vice regent for the south of the Russian Empire. And this correspondence contains a lot of materials and letters from prominent Iranian elites, including Aga Muhammad Khan, the founder of the God jar dynasty, which I will mention today. My central argument then will be that from all sides there are incentives to recognize a kind of fiction that there remains a single unified Iranian polity throughout the 18th century, even at times where it is quite fractured, and where Zand authority in the north is somewhat nominal and indirect. In part, on the Russian side, because of a series of treaties signed in the 1830s, which promised tariff free trading throughout all of Iran. I'll give you with the God jars, this sort of fiction of a single Iranian state at this time of Safavid continuity, as part of both a commercial interest in establishing relations with Russia, and a kind of ideological project. The God jars, both Aga Muhammad and even his father Muhammad Hassan Khan engaged in efforts at Empire building expressed in an idiom of Safavid restoration. At the endpoint of the Russian central state, by which I mean the imperial court, the presidents and boards of the colleges of commerce and foreign affairs. The legal basis for relations with Iran was rooted in a series of bilateral agreements signed between 1718 and 1735. After the great sent an embassy to Shah Sultan Hossain led by future Astrohan governor Artemis Volinsky in 1715, and he sent the Lindsay as part of a larger outreach to the south, hoping to redirect trade in Asian commodities from Iran from India Central Asia to Western Europe via the Caribbean Volga and Baltic route. And this, of course, became much more feasible with Russian victory in the Great Northern War over Sweden, guaranteeing access to the Baltic sea in 1721. The embassy concluded Russia's first commercial treaty with the Safavid, while was part of a larger series of expeditions to map the Caspian, and to extend Russian influence into Central Asia which included the disastrous mission of Alexander Bekivich Charkovsky to Hiva in 1717. The fall of Esfahan in 1722 to to the Afghans was followed by a Russian invasion of Shirvan and the northern coast of Iran. But this was always framed in Emperor Peter's correspondence and his war manifesto as an effort to restore the Safavid state in the spirit of long standing friendship between the two dynasty. He cited the loss of Russian lives and property from uprisings and Shemahi is the immediate cause of war. But he added that his only mission in Iran was to punish insurgents and to prevent disrespect to the Shah's authority, a claim that is repeated in 1723 in a treaty signed with Tathmos the second, working to restore the Safavid Empire. Peter's negotiators secured the sale of horses and supplies of meat and salt under this treaty for his occupying troops in northern Iran, who were framed as sort of invited guests defending the Safavid restoration and Tathmos ceded the coast as far as Osterabad. The terms of the Valensky Treaty and of this treaty with Tathmos the second are kind of reaffirmed as the Russians similarly engaged in diplomacy with Ashraf Gilzai in 1729. So there's a kind of building up of treaties upon one another. But the decisive moment is really in the 1730s when the Empress Anna Ivanovna seeking to sort of extricate Russian forces from a costly and difficult military presence on the north coast of Iran, negotiated two commercial treaties with Nader still nominally the Safavid court. In exchange for this military withdrawal, General Vasily Levashov, commander of the Nizavoye Corpus, the Russian military force in Iran, secured numerous concessions under the Treaty of Rasht of 1732. The last treaty set the terms of state-to-state relations across the Caspian Sea and created a legal regime of trade, diplomacy, and travel that lasted until the Russo-Persian Wars of the 19th century. Its text begins by reaffirming the historical friendship between the two states and dynasties, showing Empress Anna as standing in continuity with the Petrine era policy of supporting the legitimate claims of the Safavid Shahs to their ancestral throne. She committed to withdrawal from all lands south of the Korah River and pulled Russian troops out west of the Sethedraud in Gilaun within only one month of ratification. But most of the treaty consists of commercial and diplomatic terms, which assured tariff-free trading rights for Russian subjects throughout all of the territory of the former Safavid Empire, and assured them of recovery of goods lost to theft, robberies, shipwrecks, and so on. These terms are then reaffirmed in the Treaty of Gange, which extends the border forth further north to the Sulak River in Dagestan, and pledges both Nader Shah and the Russian Empire to anti-Ottoman alliance in the event of war in the Caucasus. As Oleg Nikonov has noted, the Russian Empire benefited from all these treaties by legitimizing its diplomatic and military presence in the Caspian, by institutionalizing its diplomatic services in Iran, even if it withdrew from strategically valuable territory, and gained a foothold in the silk trade and transit trades of the Caspian. The Bash treaty under Article III gave Russian subjects the right to tariff-free trading and travel throughout Iran, and it required Iranian officials to not make any claim or take any customs or taxes from Russian subjects. The treaty also prohibited Iranian bureaucrats from compensating for any of these lost revenues by other means, such as compelling gift exchange. The treaty gave a means for petition against any abuses, called for the founding of consulates, storehouses, and caravanseries, and required local officials to account for and send back inheritances of subjects of either state in their territory. The Sanjay Treaty then further elaborates the idiom of state-to-state relations and long-standing alliance. It included an appeal that both exalted monarchies' interest demand that favorably established trade be upheld, and that there be no disturbances to subjects of both sides setting out for trade, which depends the common benefit. To this end, both the Russian Empire and what is called the Persian state, Persitskaya-Gasudarsk in the treaty, were to grant each other subjects access to piers and storehouses without any interference. So what I'm arguing here is that these treaties provide a strong basis and rhetoric and idiom in which relations can take place, but also incentive for Russian merchants, Russian consuls to participate and frame their diplomatic practices in the terms of these two treaties, and of relations with a single post-Saphavid state. The protection of commercial privileges became a leading preoccupation of the consuls and repeated almost at times with verbatim quotations from the treaties in the instructions to consuls from the 1730s straight through to the 1780s. The consuls would invoke these treaties, first as consuls based in Rasht, and then from the 1750s at Anzali, and with a second consul in Baku in the 1760s. They would invoke the treaties frequently in their relations with local Iranian elites and with Karim Khan-Zan. In 1768, the consul, Gavrila Bogolubov, composed a set of reforms for consular administration and the conduct of trade with Iran, in which he favored the petitions of Astrohan-based Russian traders, over more recently arrived Armenian subjects of the empire, and attempted to sort of challenge the Khmende-based systems on which they traded in Iran. But in his proposal he cited what he called violation of the Ganje Treaty of 1732, so he kind of conflated the two treaties and their dates as one. By head Ayatollah Khan of Rasht, to advance his position for a proposed relocation of the consulate to Thalesh. In article six of the treaty then at Rasht, which is often cited, here the residencies and the consulates were also allowed to maintain frequent exchange of goods and to ensure full satisfaction and justice for their subjects. And this had become the basis for the Russian consuls to mediate disputes to refer criminal cases to the Astrohan governorate magistrate over the 18th century. Bogolubov now suggested new ways, citing the treaty as his legal basis to structure judicial authority and mediate disputes, where both he and the ruler of Elan, autonomous ruler within the Zan polity, would each appoint two to three merchants to mediate their disputes and render judgments that would then be submitted by joint review of Khan and consul. As relations with Rasht deteriorated for the Russian consuls in the 1780s, the new envoy Ivan Tumenovsky denounced what he called treaty violations in the collection of Rahtari road tolls from Russian subjects and invoked the Rasht and Ganje treaties again. So, none of this suggests that Russian representatives are only operating through contact with some supposed central Iranian state. They're frequently seeking in the 1760s new ports and harbors in which to build consulates and appealing to Karim Hansen as the necessary central legitimate central authority who could give this permission, but simultaneously the consuls reach out to Muhammad Khan, Savad Kuhi in Mozand Iran, and to the rulers of Thalesh as well for this same purpose. And again, I'll cite Nick enough here that that rulers of Iranian coastal honnets were cultivating ties with the Russian courts in competition with one another, and with Shiraz. So the treaties provide on the ground between local and central interest, and merchants are often filling an important intermediary role, and advocating for themselves and helping to shape Russian policy in Iran. But the treaties provided a means with which they could advocate and speak in the to a single Iranian state which guaranteed their commercial privileges in full continuity with the Safavid Shahs, who extended those privileges and signed the treaties. Now, I want to pivot here a bit and think about the incentives for the Khajars to participate in diplomacy on these terms, because however weak Zand control may have been beyond the Al-Bors and the Aras. There's a kind of normative appeal in the post-Safavid world to the idea of a single state and dynastic continuity. But the Russian representative, the translator Yvonne Vonslo, writing in 1778, was very critical of Karim Hansen for allowing local autonomy that he blamed for disorders in the north. Nonetheless, he said in a dispatch to the College of Commerce, rumors are circulating that the Vakil is very ill, sometimes that he has already died. The truth is, he is very ill and this will occur sometime. Then God knows a river of blood will flow in Persia until such a time as one of the dividers makes himself Shah or Vakil, as Karim Han has no appointed successor. True enough, on Karim Han's death, a series of conflicts broke out across the north as local rulers struggled for control of key economic spaces, particularly the silk producing region of Gilan. But as they did so, many of these local elites expressed their ambitions in terms of Safavid revival and restoration. The Khateli Khan of Goba, the sort of predominant military power in Shirvan and southern Dagestan, had for a long time maintained distance with the Zand court in Shiraz. But in the late 1770s and 1780s, he launched a new series of campaigns into Talash and against the Khan of Karabakh, and even to restore Hedaiyat al-Ahman to power enraged. According to reports of the Russian commanders in the North Caucasus fortress line, he retained a pretender under his control, calling himself Abbas Mirza of the Safavid line. Armenian merchants on whom the Russians depended for information in this area, noted that Abbas had appeared in Salyan, an important port for the Russo-Iranian trade on the mouth of the Korah river in today's Azerbaijan. Rumors had circulated that he intended to gather an army and march on the Safavid ancestral home of Ardabil in 1783. But he lacked the funds or the support and was held in check by Fatali Khan, who retained him under his subject ruler at Baku through the summer, and Abbas Mirza never pressed his claim to the throne. As Dr. Ashraf has told us then, also the Qajars at Osterabad were always much more closely sort of bound to the ongoing narratives of Safavid legitimacy and restoration. John Perry has argued that Safavid pretenders in the 1720s took on a significant role of organizing resistance to Afghan or Ottoman occupations by offering a symbol of legitimate authority around which to rally. But that this paradigm of rule, that paradigms of rule shifted a bit with the time of Nader Shah, and Safavid pretenders took on less and less significance, although their claims were taken up by the Qajars only in the latter half of the 18th century. Indeed, Muhammad Hassan Khan, the father of Agha Muhammad, the founder of the Qajar dynasty, launched several bids after Nader's death to restart his control around Osterabad, relying on his network of alliances with the elites of the Yamut Turkmen and others in the region. By 1749, he had also emerged as a key player in an effort at Safavid Revival and Restoration in Mashhad and Horasan, centered on the person of Mir Sayed Muhammad Marashi, who briefly ruled under the name of Suleiman II, of whom he was a maternal descendant. Taking on his grandfather's name in 1749, when he was declared Shah in place of the overthrown Shah Rukh Afshar. Suleiman II's youngest son, Sultan Hashem Mir Zah, wrote an account of this period, and of projects of Safavid Restoration, in which he identified 16 Kizilvash and Mirs, who presented his grandfather with a firm petition in ardent faith. They were ordered to approach unarmed and according to Safavid law, kiss the ground before the Shah, before standing. The pioneers included Muhammad Hassan Khan Gajar of Osterabad, as well as various other Turkic and Kurdish speaking elites of the northeast. They had, Sultan Hashem argued, accepted for a time Shah Rukh's enthronement because his mother possessed the essence of the exalted Safavid lineage. As a result, they followed the people of Iran in placing their faith in Shah Rukh and binding on the belt of service, showing inclination and obedience we had for him. However, they found that, and I'm quoting again, none other than the servants of the holy, that is the city of Mashhad, and the shrine of which Mir Sayyid Muhammad, Suleiman II, was administrator, possessed the aptitude and personality and mentality and judiciousness for the purposes of sultanate and possessions of the domains of Iran. They explained that they would follow his order if given and recognize him as their pod Shah, passing day and night in defense of his honor. This change of regime then is justified as a restoration of the old Safavid order, upheld by faithful dynasties of Amirs and sanctified by association with the shrine of Imam Reza. These Amirs were identified as those whose population, those of the populations whose fathers and grandfathers had given service to the exalted Safavid dispensation, the dolata aliae Safavi, since its appearance. Suleiman II commended the Amirs, the service of their grandfathers and fathers to the exalted Safavid dolata during that time. So the early, the early cauldrons then incorporated this vision of Safavid justification, and even if they glossed and sardui does not, in fact, mention this, this episode, in which Agha Muhammad's father was named as the Eshik Agha Sibashi, the sort of keeper of the palace of the palace gate and sort of master of ceremonies to Suleiman II. He nonetheless borrows this rhetoric of Safavid restoration and as Dr. Ashraf has told us, you know, creating narratives of faithful Safavid service throughout the 18th century and indeed even before. Sardui finds, also finds occasion to link Muhammad Hassan Khan with the Safavid, and with the defense of Iran and its religious identity, when describing Khajar conflicts with Afghan polities during this period. Under the command of Hossain Khan Davul-Ukhajar, who he calls one of the greatest, one of the great Amirs of the exalted threshold, Khajar forces battled the Doranis west of Nisha poor in 1750. Sardui describes how the advance guard of the appointed armies of the Kizilbash engage those of the Afghans and put them to flight in terror, turning on their commanders and hurriedly fleeing through Sabzavar and Holy Mashhad without turning back. Sardui also uses this language when speaking of Muhammad Hassan's wars with Azad Khan Gilzai in Tabriz. When he says in the 1750s and 60s that the free men of Azerbaijan were brought under Afghan bondage, the servants of God prayed for relief, for which the slaves of the Sultan went to Azerbaijan to remove them by force. The battle is depicted in religious but also linguistic cultural terms, the Sunni left flank and the Shia right flank and the left and right flanks of the reverse, and the Afghan center and the center of the army of Torz and Tajik clashed. In defense of their camp, the Afghans are described as attacking the Sepah-Kizilbash, but the Kizilbash pressed on, responding fearlessly to the call of the Hadith of that time to take up arms. And from dread of their hawn and fear for their lives, put their shields behind them and bore their chests as shields. So the Ghajars had developed separately an ideology of Safavid restoration, rooted in a notion of Iran that is both dynastic and religious linguistic cultural as well, claiming their place as the last faithful servant of the of the Safavid dispensation and of the original Kizilbash who made it up. Where do these two threads then come together, the Russian commercial interest and reference to the treaties of the 1730s with sort of the neo-Safavid ideology of the 18th century Ghajars. And here I've selected one episode of negotiations where we can focus on on these issues and this is in the Voynevich expedition of 1781. This is a somewhat well known episode in the history of early Ghajar Iran. A migrant military naval commander Marco Voynevich a captain and commander of the Caspian flotilla, along with a group of sailors merchants translators often Turkish speakers, Greeks brought in from the Ottoman Empire, during the 1768 to in the Mediterranean, traveled to the Bay of Osterabad, hoping to open trade with Iran and via Iran. Further into Asia, as Carl van Goebbels, an officer of the expedition said, the outbreak of the American war in which all the first ranking European powers participated, provided a favorable opportunity to fulfill long term desires. And this is the first time that we have access to Indian transit trades via Iran in 1775. This is as some, this is not as sometimes claimed the first episode of contact between the Ghajars and the Russian Empire, but it is a significant moment and one, it which sets some of the terms and the, the under the mutual understanding which will persist into the 19th century. And the failure with the arrest of Voynevich and his crew, after they attempted to fortify their positions in the Bay of Osterabad, while Agha Muhammad was on campaign. The episode does reveal ways in which Ghajar expansion was linked to both the effort to cultivate commercial links to Russia, but also to the idea of staff of it revivalism and we see this in the early negotiations to set up a factory before Voynevich's arrest. While waiting for his emissary to return, Voynevich, he had sent the Greek merchant Johannes Varvaki so later caviar magnate and funder of the Greek War of Independence, he had sent him as his emissary to Agha Muhammad. Voynevich began his explorations of the Bay of Osterabad, and hope to receive the city of Ashraf as the site of the new factory. He wrote to Gregorio Potemkin in September of 1781 with updates from the squadron and praise the city as the choice of settlement. That it was the most beneficial for the establishment of commerce. It is possible to trade throughout Persia to India with the Turkmens, heathens, Buharans and all other eastern nations. Ships may be comfortably brought into the Bay here, and it is possible to receive caravans from these places. There is possibly no place equally suitable in this sea for its geographic position. And so he appealed to Agha Muhammad Hong for permission to begin his operations there. And to rename the city of Ashraf, Melesopo, meaning city of honey. Voynevich was particularly drawn to the area not only for its geographic position and its harbor, but for its sapavid era of palaces and fortresses, which he felt were easily defendable. However, Agha Muhammad Han's responses to this request to see Ashraf reveal both the scope of his political ambition and to continue to appeal to sapavid revivalist ideology. One letter, which survives only in Russian translation in the papers of Gregorio Potemkin was given to Varvakis the intermediary at Sultanyeh by Agha Muhammad and carried back to Mozandron. This document supports the argument that Muriel Atkin made that Agha Muhammad viewed even his earliest contact with Russian officials as an exchange between equal sovereign powers, rather than a local governor or a potential client with his imperial neighbor. He informed Voynevich that the friendship between the Russian and Iranian states is unbreakable. And whereas such instructions have been given by the Empress to the highly esteemed, that is, Voynevich, I have officers and notables in Ostrobot and Mozandron, who are entirely at my disposal. Your court has given you instructions. I give orders to my own officers and notable that if there should be any proposal from you, my designee and he's talking here about Rahim Han, who he had established as governor in his absence, may negotiate it with you. Agha Muhammad creates that a parallel, and he repeats it in this document between himself and the Empress Catherine, stating that he commanded subordinates in the same sense as the Russian Empress. He also undertook responsibility for the maintenance of the unbreakable friendship between Iran and Russia, which had its origins in the Safavid period and the treaties of Rashtenganje. He therefore makes an implicit claim to act as the leading figure of a single Iranian state inherited from the Safavid Empire. If you would like any port on the shores of Mozandron or of Ostrobot, he told Voynevich, for a commercial establishment found it so that there may be friendship between the two states and of mutual benefit. I'm sorry, I'll just take another minute. I see that I'm running out of time. Agha Muhammad did refuse to cede the city of Ashraf itself on the grounds of his continuing loyalty to the Safavids. Voynevich reported he cannot give us Ashraf because it belongs to the sovereign and he greatly hopes to restore respect for the Shah throughout Persia, which respect would decline if it were given over to Russian rule. Agha Muhammad doesn't claim the authority to alienate land beginning to the Shah, even on a temporary basis to a foreign power. And Voynevich uses the word the phrase the sovereign's land, to refer to Ashraf in this correspondence. It's impossible that this refers to all of Mozandron's designation of as Khause or crown lands in the Safavid period from the time of Abbas I, which Menorsky noted in his commentary on the Tazkir Athol Maluk. But at the very least it associates the city with Shah Abbas I, a central figure of the area of Safavid history, and establishes Agha Muhammad as protector of that legacy. Finally, the expedition broke down. Voynevich and his crew were arrested for building fortifications and their perceived threat to the city of Osterabad. It is not the end of these relations. And while Agha Muhammad's conciliatory mission to St. Petersburg was famously rejected, as was his authority from the point of view of the Russian court. Masby and Flotilla returned only a year later and Agha Muhammad invested the equivalent of 20,000 rubles according to his new commander Nikita Baskakov, and set up a trading establishment at Gorodovine near Galuga in eastern Mozandron. Even from this episode, the ways in which Safavid restorationism had many different meanings and valiances within Iran and within Russia during the 18th century, but it provided a shared language and a shared understanding of what the Iranian state was, and the terms on which diplomacy could take place. And I'll stop there. My apologies. I know I went a little over time. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Nevertheless, I'm in another very interesting talk and I think we've had a very wide ranging, both in terms of chronology and subject matter in this panel. I'm going to abuse my position as chairman to ask a couple of questions while we wait for some of the others to come in but we have one or two questions for the first two speakers and doubt for something for Kevin will appear in a moment. If you ask, ask if, if I could. Well, one question and one point. As far as the question goes, of course, it would be difficult to imagine that there are many sort of specifically anti car jar historians writing once the car jar period has started but nevertheless, sort of towards the beginning of the era. Ever any sort of sense. But in fact, the car jars were a ghastly load of upstarts and they were in fact undermining the staff of the legacy rather than in some way continuing it in other words if there's any sort of counter perception to the one that is obviously putting out the approved version. So that's the question. And the, the comment is just it's rather interesting to see the definition of the, the, the territories of Iran in the Tarihi side. And then you mentioned from Tiflis to Khorasan and from Georgia to the coast of Oman if you compare this with the with the Mongol period and with Stofi, who says it goes from Darban to Abadan which is not so dissimilar but then from the Euphrates to the And when you mentioned towards the end, that, you know, the car jars were also drawing on some sort of Ilhanid precedence as well as more ancient Iran, you know that they obviously their ambitions haven't quite gone from Euphrates to the oxes having it's just an interesting The real, you know, the realistic perception is that this actually it's not not going to be as big as the Ilhanid and indeed obviously not as big as the Sasanian period either. So that's me and then while you're answering those I'll field the other questions that have come in. So sorry, should I just go ahead and answer. Yes, please go ahead. Thank you. Thanks for those Charles. I'll start, I guess, with the I just respond briefly to your comments about the Ilhanid and the comparison between the kind of the conception of Iran under the Ilhanids as represented in most of these texts and the way it's depicted in early I mean, I think you're right that by the early by the late 18th and early 19th century chroniclers had a had a bit more constrained and realistic conception of what comprise the guarded domains of Iran. And recognized that certainly parts of Mesopotamia Iraq, even the, even the ports of Basra and kind of some of the islands in the Persian Gulf, for instance, had been ceded to. Well, by this by this point to the, essentially to the British. And so, for instance, in the tariff was all learning the chronicle by Hawaii, where he has that extended passage in which he describes the different provinces of Iran and sort of goes into some detail about the agricultural output the geographical features, some descriptions of the towns and cities in these places. I mentioned the port of Basra specifically, and, and some of the islands in the Persian Gulf as as being connected to Iran or connected to farce as he puts it, I think the term that he uses. To to farce, but in reality, I mean, these, these, these areas, I mean, the auto certainly tried to assert control over some of these areas but in reality they had very little control over these areas so you're right you're right that by the early 19th century. It was a much, much diminished idea of Iran, compared to the old haunted I guess I was just trying to make the point that in terms of some of the titles associated with the shots and some of the terminology that you find in the chronicles I mean many of these have their origins in the old haunted period. Actually, part of that question and the answer refers to the question by Sakhi Barboury about how much do the car jobs regard the Persian Gulf as within the definition of Iran in fact I think to some extent you've already answered that. Yeah, yeah, so I tried yeah I did I didn't see that question so thank you for that question and I and I tried to, I tried to allude to to that in what I just said, but yeah the short answer is that the Rajars made attempts to assert control over the Persian Gulf and the coastline but in there were interesting examples actually of the Rajars trying to assert sovereignty and control over the Persian coastline, Persian Gulf coastline that I can talk about but the short answer is that in effect they lost a lot of the control over the Persian Gulf. In terms of the question that you had Charles of a counter counter narratives of the Rajars I mean this is kind of an interesting this is a really important question actually. And one that I think I need to do a little bit more research on and look at some of these earlier chronicles specifically to know how how some of these earlier chronic chroniclers under the Afshars and the Zans for instance may have written about the Rajars who were fighting essentially the scions of the Afshars and then the the scions of carrying on Zand as well. I haven't done that work yet to go back and look and see kind of take note of how these chronicles portray the Rajars but I think it is an important question and certainly something that I need to pay attention to so yeah thank you for raising that. Well, thank you as if just quickly perhaps because we've only got half an hour for this and while we're on on you there's a question also about how to what extent the car just referenced the Shah Naameh which is an interesting point I think if you could give a quick. Sure. Yeah, I mean I think the answer to that is that there are subtle references to the Shah Naameh, and there are kind of perhaps less subtle ones as well. I mean, the fact that all of Muhammad Khan would crown himself with this so it's called Qiyamid crown. This that being that being the term that that being the name of that of the legendary dynasty that was memorialized in among other places, the Shah Naameh is itself you I mean you can one can read that as kind of an illusion to the stories that one would find in the Shah Naameh. Under Fatali Shah, of course, he Fatali Shah had his chief poet, the court poet Sabah Fatali Khan Sabah write a an epic poem history about the rise of the Rajars and particularly about Fatali Shah's reign. More specifically, this text is called the Shah and Shah Naameh so that's kind of a bit more of an explicit, if you will reference to the Shah Naameh this is not the only by the way it's not the only example of a of a text that was written to emulate Fatali Shah Naameh, you can find other. There was another one as well, wasn't there. Yeah, so it's not I don't mean to say that it's just the Rajars or anything but certainly the there is this effort to to to draw on that cultural tradition and cultural heritage of the Shah Naameh in the Rajar period. So you can find yeah I mean you can find some some some some interesting ways that the Shah Naameh is used by the Rajars. Well, thank you. Yes, if I could turn to Farooza I mean it's probably the logic of the questions of course following each talk. There's one for Manu Chertakeen which actually could also apply to Farooza I think although I've got a couple, or at least one for myself. Could the speakers comment on the role of French policy of involvement in Persia in competition with the other powers. I suppose this may have some bearing on the, you know, at least the prominence of Napoleon at the period that we've been talking about. I don't know if Farooza wants to answer that very briefly or move on to a rather more specific things but it's some perhaps slightly. Well, I mean it sort of fits in what we've been talking about but not terribly directly. Do you want to say anything I do either Farooza or I said on this. Very briefly, I'm sure there will be some other comments because of course you're in the Napoleon times. The competition was very strong but only after the fall of Napoleon, there were two superpowers which didn't really have any strong competition and after that we have so many interesting and prominent characters coming to the Middle East, or even India, who used to serve in the Napoleonic army. And for example, one of them was Simeon, who was actually accompanying Khosrow-Mirza on his mission to St. Petersburg, and he was his French teacher. And then there was Jean-Pierre Etier, who was serving as a military advisor to Abbas-Mirza. And then he was trying to go to India but he ended up in Moscow and it was actually under recommendation of Gribayedov, he got this job, his post in the high echelons of the inability, Russian ability in the court. So there were so many interesting people and they all had very different faiths. Yeah, probably someone else would like to comment on this because it's a very rich topic. Well, maybe for now, if no one asks if it doesn't have anything specifically to add on that perhaps. I'd like to ask my own question, well I got two for Farooza just to get to going and then there's a couple of nice ones also. The first one is I was rather intrigued to hear that Khosrow-Mirza bought some things in the shops in Moscow from Persian merchants.  Because it would be quite interesting to see what Persian merchants thought would appeal to the Russians if they were setting up their shops. That's the first question. The second one is, I mean, it's quite striking that they thought manuscripts would be a good diplomatic gift. I mean, I know there's a precedent for this with gifts to the Ottomans, but it seems a funny choice of things. Anyway, from the Iranian point of view, these precious books, especially illuminated books in their literature actually is a precious gift. It's not just something that might have been set aside by the Russians, but I think it doesn't necessarily mean that the gifts were rather modest. I mean, I think it's a sign that the person's really treasured their artistic heritage and their manuscripts. Thank you very much, Charles, about the presents he could buy in Moscow. And I think I can actually link it to the question by Ernest Tucker about the textiles, because I think the Persian thought, maybe this assumption was based on some practice and experience, that the Russians loved particularly the so-called Kashmir shawls, which were called Rizai. And of course, the fashion was established during the Napoleonic times when he was bringing this sash, beautiful passive decoration of the latest dresses. And that was one of the probably main features of the ampere style of the fashion. But yeah, so there were mainly shawls. And then there were quite, I think I mentioned them in the list when I was giving the list of the presents. So decorations for the horse armor embroidered saddles, because the question I think was about this embroidered portraits. In fact, this particular style, which is associated with Russia, comes to Russia between early 1840s and maybe for about 20, 40 years. And this is it. And for example, those embroideries with the portraits of Fatali Shah, which used to be in the Yusupov Palace. And Yusupov took them from the Moika Palace to his Bakhchetsar I mentioned in the Crimea. And they perished there during the Second World War. And the same happened to those some pieces which he moved to his residence outside St. Petersburg in Tarskoye Selo. That was the summer residence of the Russian tsars, and they also disappeared. So there were obviously more the Russian court in Russia of this particular style of embroideries and textiles, but only very few survived. Oh, yes, about the manuscripts. I think I can refer to the previous question to ask about the Sharnameh, because as I mentioned, probably the most important manuscript, which was brought among those which were brought by Khristarov to the Russian court, was the manuscript of the Sharnameh. It's absolutely incredible. It has 192 miniature paintings produced by the groups led by three very famous artists. And obviously from his point of view, from the Shah's point of view, that was the most precious gift, comparable only with a diamond or with his own divan. And of course that what Asif was saying that that was the movement, which we would call bas-gash, because he was trying to emulate his ancient glorious predecessors. Exactly like the Shah Mohammad Reza was doing, trying to cash on the glory of the previous centuries. So it's the same idea. But it would be, I've been thinking about this phenomenon for many years, because European monarchs wouldn't send the manuscripts of their chronicles to the Persian or the Ottoman kings. That was something very peculiar to the mentality of the Shahs and sultans in the Persian world. Because this is how the manuscript and the wisdom in this manuscript would be treasured, not only for themselves, but for spreading this wisdom among the intraders. No one would be able to read it. Anyway, anyway, we better keep moving. A few shows got a nice question. I mean, you did get a bit brief towards the end. Would you like to expand very quickly on what you meant about the message behind the flight and bar cups? Yes, I think I tried to mention that probably there was a hidden message in this combination of sending the British cups to the Russian court. Yes, I was thinking that was a special message in this. If there is a problem with negotiating the things with the Russians, there is also the British Empire who would be helping to solve this problem. But on the other hand, the answer could be even more simple, because the presents were really collected in haste. Because the Shah was really considering that he shouldn't really send the apology but join the Ottomans and regain his territory from the Russians. So when it was finally decided that the embassy should be sent, they collected this ready pieces. The only things I think were added and specially commissioned were these gold holders in this very traditional style of Minai. And that was probably what would enhance the message that this is Persian but has a very, very strong connotation with the Russian traditional technique of this particular enamel style. Polychrome enamel, yes. Okay, well, Kevin, we've got some questions coming in for now. I don't know if you've spotted them already on your zoom on your thing, but would you like to talk about the role of the your moot and the other Turk commands maybe though they feature in the negotiations. Yeah, this is something I wrote it, you know, what I've talked about here is kind of drawn from a much larger project and I've reflected on the Turkmen Khajar relationship there. The first thing I want to say is that, you know, there are very deep sort of relations between the Khajarat of Asturabad and the Yamut, or at least some of the leading figures of the Yamut. There's not really a sort of central leadership that's kind of a bit more fractured that we find really throughout the 18th century. So if we look at Sarwe's text, we see that Fatali Khan, the grandfather of Aga Muhammad Khan, fled for a time and found refuge among the Yamut. When Muhammad Hassan Khan sort of falls out with, or rebels against Nader Shah, he goes to the Yamut again in this text. And Muhammad Khazim Marvi, the Afsharid chronicler, actually mentions a maternal uncle among the Yamut from Muhammad Hassan Khan, so there may be some kind of marriage relationship there. But certainly, you know, as he makes his, as he rebels against Nader in 1744, Hanway mentions the presence of Turkmen soldiers in his army. That Muhammad Hassan Khan intervenes to prevent the Turkmen from carrying off Hanway's interpreter for the slave markets of Central Asia. And so these connections are very deep and we see them recurring repeatedly throughout this period. So one of the things I end up saying in the larger dissertation is that Aga Muhammad actually brings the Yamut back in for a brief period in the 1780s to his military, to his coalition if you will. And in fact, the return of the Russian traders to Osterovod after Voinovich the following year is part of that because we see Yamut coming down the coast to trade at Gorodovin where the Russians have set up their factory. When Zand armies come north and lay siege to Osterovod in 1784, both Zand and Khajar chronicles tell us that Turkmen soldiers helped to break the siege. And so there's clearly some very deep Yamut connection here, I don't know that I've worked out every piece of it. But from the mid 1780s as Aga Muhammad has taken control of Esfahan has asserted some more explicit claims to sovereignty. He won't call himself the Shah until after the capture of Tiflis as Asif told us. But some of his supporters of the landholders of Gilan and Talish are using this title for him when they write to the Russians. And it's at this time that he's starting to make more demands to control the Yamut to expand into the Turkmen step. And by 1786 he he actually puts down a Yamut rebellion. When Murtaza Golihan rises against him in Gilan and Shirvan, the Russian Navy is actually coordinating between him and Yamut rebels against Aga Muhammad on the other side of the Caspian. So this this this link is broken in the 1780s and 1790s but it's a very important piece at of the early for 18th century Khajar military coalition to be sure. Kevin thank you we're we're beginning to run a bit down on time and there's some interesting questions coming in one from Suzanne Babayi. Hi Suzanne and also from Samuel Hodgkin who would like to hear about as we all would. The poetry I wonder if the panelists could maybe type an answer to those I wanted to give Kevin a chance to answer one more which is quite interesting I think about the one that came in a little earlier about the monetary value that the Russians might have gained from this we've got two or three moments so if you three or four minutes so if you could just answer quickly and maybe ask the other questions if the panelists could you can type an answer to the questions or follow it up later with the with the question. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, so the monetary value of this trade fluctuates quite a bit over the course of the 18th century the Russian consulate is sometimes withdrawn in the immediate aftermath of Nader's assassination by 1749 the Russians have pulled out of. Elon they do again in 1759 when there's a plague out breaking Elon. There are periods of interruption there are periods where the roads into central and southern Iran are cut off. The console skiddy she writes very bitterly that he's failed to acquire wine from Shiraz for Potemkin at one point in the 1780s. But the trade does grow significantly under Nader Shah. Osterhan is probably the third leading port of the Russian Empire during this time by most estimates, or certainly one of the most significant of course the European trades are expanding in Russia. Why, you know, if we take the statistical studies that are done for the port of Osterhan by you can put kind of a in, you know, from the 1970s to 1990s they wrote these works. You know, we're seeing, you know, well over a million rubles a year in trade at Osterhan in this mid 1780s so it does spike quite substantially. Yelka who writes this very extensive multi volume work on the Russian economy in the 1780s says that there's something like 30,000 poods of raw silk a year that's over 540 tons. 83,000 man of silk coming from Gilan to Russia in the 1780s. And Gilan estimated it at 100,000 man in 1777 so this may exceed some estimates even for the Safa video although the statistics on that are a little hard to pin down. One of the things I concluded in the dissertation actually is that the north while much of Iran is sort of economically devastated in the 18th century. The north is actually quite robust and Gilan is almost always a sort of key prize when there are new struggles for power that that claimants will fight over because they want to control this commodity. The port of Anzali the silk trade to Russia, because you can distribute this revenue to solidify alliances and so after not there's assassination, you know, Abraham Shah Afshar invades Gilan. In 1779 we see multiple invasions of Gilan from Talesh and from places south of the Alborz. And when the ruler of Talesh fails to hold Gilan, he burns the mulberry trees to prevent anybody else from building on the basis of this economy. So it's extremely lucrative and the northern trade is very important to the Russian state. So, you know, all of these Iranian born merchants who sort of move at least part of their family to Russia to claim the subject status that gives them tariff free trading. They become key intermediaries in the liminal spaces between these two diplomatic sides. Excellent. But I think we're going to have to stop there. So I'd like to thank our audience who's held up pretty well. And I'd like to thank our speakers, our three panelists for giving such a stimulating and good introduction to today's symposium. We're going to cut out almost immediately now but if any of the panelists can all talk among themselves which they may wish to do with the link that Aki has sent us. So thank you very much and we'll be rejoining in half an hour for the second panel. Thank you very much everybody. Thank you.