Sharafkhan Bidlisi’s career crossed Safavid and Ottoman frontiers. His Persian Sharafnama preserves dynastic history, autobiography and accounts of the wider political world, with manuscripts and editions that can be identified.
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A childhood shaped by exile
Sharaf al-Din Khan was born on 25 February 1543 at Karahrud near Qom after his father Shams al-Din had entered Safavid service. The family’s political base was Bitlis and the Rojeki/Ruzagi tribal community. Osman Gazi Özgüdenli describes initial instruction from local judges, followed by three years of religious study at Shah Tahmasb’s court from the age of nine. [1] This supplies a documented educational setting without inventing specialist training in mathematics or a surviving body of paintings.
From Safavid office to Ottoman Bitlis
Erika Glassen traces appointments in Gilan and Shirvan, followed by promotion under Ismail II and transfer to Nakhchivan amid court rivalries. Mediation through Kurdish rulers brought Sharafkhan into contact with the Ottoman commander Khusraw Pasha in 1578; he received the governorship of Bitlis. He subsequently served in Ottoman campaigns and gained Muş. [2] These changing allegiances place his authority within imperial competition. They should not be recast as uninterrupted sovereignty or command of every Ottoman war against Iran. His career contextualises his writing.
What the Sharafnama records
Written in Persian, the work brings together histories of Kurdish ruling houses and territories, reports from written sources and eyewitnesses, and the author’s own autobiographical account. Its correlated second part follows Ottoman sultans and contemporary rulers of Iran and Turan. [2] The book therefore combines dynastic history with a wider political chronology. Its account is evidence both about earlier rulers and about the way a sixteenth-century prince represented his own family and position. Reading it critically requires distinguishing reported genealogy, inherited narrative and events within the writer’s experience.
A dated manuscript and a cautious chronology
Özgüdenli identifies the author’s manuscript dated 13 August 1597 as Bodleian MS.Elliott 332. He also records an 8 September 1606 copy, MS.Elliott 321, read and corrected by the author. [1] That claim should be compared with the same entry’s conventional death heading, 1603–04; a precise death year remains unsuitable as an unquestioned fact. The 1597 transfer of government to his son Shams al-Din belongs to a different question from the dating and later transmission of the book. Manuscript identifiers allow readers to pursue those questions beyond a general biography.
Persian editions and later translations
The Turkish Historical Society library catalogues a 1965 Tehran Persian edition prepared by Muhammad Abbasi, based on the 1860–62 St Petersburg publication associated with Velyaminov-Zernov. Its record explicitly identifies both the original work and that earlier edition as Persian. [3] Velyaminov-Zernov should therefore be credited as an editor of this text, rather than called its English translator. The distinction separates the language of composition, the publication of a manuscript text and later translation. Readers comparing versions should record editor or translator, volume, publication date and the section being cited.
Sources and further reading
- Osman Gazi Özgüdenli, Şeref Han, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi38(2010),pp.548–550; biography and manuscript dates.
- Erika Glassen, Bedlīsī, Šaraf-al-Dīn Khan, Encyclopaedia Iranica IV/1(1989),pp.76–77; career and structure of the Sharafnama.
- Turkish Historical Society Library,record533159:Şerefnâme,Persian edition,Tehran1965; original and1860–62source-edition notes.
- Unidentified1597artist,Council of the Prince of Botan,Bodleian MS.Elliott332,folio43a;Wikimedia Commons public-domain reproduction.