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Rudeness and Revilement: Russian–Iranian Relations in the Mid-Seventeenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Rudi Matthee
Rudi Matthee*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware, USA
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Abstract

This article examines the nature of Iranian–Russian diplomatic relations in the half century after the death of Shah ᶜAbbas I in 1629, probing the conflicts and mutual interests that prompted the two states to exchange envoys in this period of diminishing high-level contact. In particular, it seeks to reconstruct the Russian mission that visited the court of Shah ᶜAbbas II in 1664. By all accounts, this mission was treated in a most humiliating way in Isfahan, seemingly in accordance with what outsiders describe the contempt the Iranians felt for Russians. A careful examination of the available sources shows that the poor treatment of its members was due as much to concrete geopolitical concerns and anxieties as to the sense of civilizational superiority the Iranians may have felt vis-à-vis Russians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Power Interplay Between Iran and Russia from the Mid-Seventeenth to the Early Twenty-First Century , May 2013 , pp. 333 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2013

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References

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36 The issue of fortress building and suspicions about Russian intentions would continue to be a sensitive point for the Iranians for centuries to come. It emerged as a major issue with the Artemii Volynskii mission that Peter the Great sent to Isfahan in 1717; it bedeviled Russo-Iranian relations under Nader Shah; and it would extend all the way into the early nineteenth century, when Russian expansionism resulted in the definitive conquest of the northern Caucasus.

37 Wolfgang Sartor, “Die Wolga als internationaler Handelsweg für persische Rohseide im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., Free University Berlin, 1993), 82, fn. 40.

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55 Ibid., 479.

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75 Ibid., 269–70; and Kleimola, Ann M., “Good Breeding, Muscovite Style: ‘Horse Culture’ in Early Modern Rus',” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 50 (1995): 221–22.Google Scholar See Iuzefovich, L.A., “Kak v posol'skikh obychaiakh vedetsia…” Russkii posol'skii obychai kontsa XV-nachala XVII v. (Moscow, 1988), 111.Google Scholar

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79 Chardin, Voyages, 10: 113–14.

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82 Chardin, Voyages, 10: 114.

83 See Matthee, The Politics of Trade, 192–97.

84 Bayburdyan, Vahan, Naqsh-e Aramaneh-ye irani dar tejarat-e beyn al-melali ta payan-e sadeh-ye 17 miladi, trans. Baghdasariyan, Adik (Tehran, 1375/1996), 142.Google Scholar

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86 Baibourtian, International Trade, 143–44.

87 Della Valle, Viaggi, 1: 613.

88 Matthee, “Facing a Rude and Barbarous Neighbor.”

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