Persian secretaries in the making of an anti-safavid diplomatic discourse

In the immediate wake of the Ottoman arrival in Cairo, secretaries composed victory proclamations of recently conquered lands in Persian for Muslim courts in Iran and India, and in Arabic for the noble families of Mecca. The emigre secretaries frequently drew upon decades of administrative experience within courts in Iran and rekindled their trans-imperial networks of scholarly and professional affiliation in an effort to mould a unified international discourse of anti-Safavid opposition and advance the quickly evolving and complex Ottoman ‘eastern policy’ of Selim’s reign. Despite the frequent anonymity of these secretaries, examination of their work within the culturally inflected practices of Ottoman diplomacy permits us to expand the purview of diplomatic agents beyond rulers and leading statesmen to explore the roles played by largely forgotten actors who were, nevertheless, central to diplomatic processes and practices.