Although historians have examined many aspects of Qajar history, unexpected and unexploited evidence continues to come to light. The present study was prompted by one such piece of evidence upon which I stumbled a little more than two years ago.
In the course of researching the life of Albert Houtum Schindler,1 I learned of the existence of a group of letters sent to him, mainly by George N. Curzon (1859–1925). These had been inherited by Schindler’s son Leonard who, several decades after his father’s death in 1916, sold them. Eventually they were acquired in the 1960s by the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Scans of these letters were sent to me in January, 2023. Upon examining them I was surprised to find a letter in Italian sent by Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) to Mozaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1907) shortly after his accession in 1896 (Fig. 8.4).
How had Schindler obtained possession of Pope Leo XIII’s letter? Perhaps he had been asked to translate it for the recently crowned Shah and returned the translation but retained the original? Although one would have expected such correspondence to be filed in a government office, perhaps it pleased the Shah, who was known for his largesse,2 to give it as a gift to Schindler. We shall probably never know why Pope Leo XIII’s letter was amongst the papers that Schindler took with him to England when he left Iran in 1911, but its survival is a small miracle.
In any case, this letter set me wondering about the relationship between the Qajar Shahs, their Catholic subjects and the Vatican. Although Catholicism and Catholic missionary activity in Iran during the Qajar period have been treated by a number of writers,3 the fact that Catholic missionizing on the part of Parisian Lazarists became entwined with French diplomacy in the early and mid-19th century, and that this had a direct bearing on the course of Qajar diplomacy in Europe, particularly as it pertained to France, Italy and the Vatican, has not been fully appreciated. Nor has much attention been paid to the firmans issued by the Qajar shahs respecting their Catholic subjects, let alone their correspondence with the Vatican, or the gifts and pontifical orders given to Qajar shahs and princes. Yet, as the following pages demonstrate, the Qajar Shahs held the Popes in high esteem. They were viewed as earthly spiritual representatives of God who wielded enormous influence over hundreds of millions of followers around the world and, as such, were every bit as worthy of respect as any monarch, if not more so.
While the roots of Qajar diplomatic engagement with the Vatican ran deep, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Persian War they became part of a broader diplomatic offensive involving many of Europe’s major powers. Qajar-Vatican correspondence and contacts after 1857 — both by Persian envoys and the Shah himself — formed part of Naser al-Din Shah’s program of what might be termed ‘diplomatic diversification.’ While many studies have examined the achievements and disappointments of French, Russian, British, Prussian, Italian and Austrian diplomats in Iran, far fewer have documented the work and travels of Persian diplomats in Europe, one aspect of which involved establishing and maintaining contacts with the Vatican and its Papal Nuncios. One reason for this neglect is undoubtedly the paucity of official accounts and personal memoirs that shed light on the movements and negotiations undertaken by these envoys.4 Yet, this situation has now changed.
One unintended consequence of the mass digitization of library holdings by Google5 and other groups over the past twenty years has been to make accessible a huge amount of data hitherto ‘trapped’ in rarely consulted volumes in libraries. European and American newspapers,6 in particular, contain a wealth of information on day-to-day developments that are often ignored in personal memoirs and broader historical accounts. Historians who may have longed to have been ‘a fly on the wall’ at certain events, or to have a memoir by one or another diplomat who took part in such dealings, are now able to consult newspaper reports written with daily, diary-like regularity, detailing everything from the title of an opera heard by the Shah during a visit to a European capital, to the name of the hotel at which a Persian envoy stayed when visiting Turin. The potential of such sources for charting the steady march of events should be obvious. Moreover, their potential for providing insights into matters on which other, better known documentary sources are silent, should also be obvious. Two cases in point illustrate this. The first concerns Naser al-Din Shah’s envoy Farrokh Khan who negotiated the peace treaty that concluded the Anglo-Persian War and visited numerous European capitals in 1857 as part of his diplomatic duties. Farrokh Khan’s amanuensis, Hoseyn Sarabi, wrote up his travels in a book entitled Safarnameh-ye Farrokh Khan-e Amin al-Dowleh that was presented to Naser al-Din Shah after the envoy’s return to Tehran but was only made available to the public in a printed edition in 1982.7 A comparison between Farrokh Khan’s travelogue and contemporary newspaper reports of his appointments and itinerary shows that the travelogue is far less detailed in recording dates and events than the press reports are. In fact, many dates and engagements for which details are available are simply omitted in Sarabi’s Safarnameh. A second case in point is the well-known and reasonably well-studied visit of Naser al-Din Shah to Europe in 1873. We are fortunate in having published versions of the Shah’s own travel diary.8 Yet, like all diaries, Naser al-Din Shah’s was highly selective, and while many people, events and places are mentioned in it, just as many are not. Within this body of material, for example, is an account of a conversation between Naser al-Din Shah and the Papal Nuncio in Brussels which is nowhere else documented in official sources (see Ch. 7).
Moreover, Catholic periodicals and official Vatican sources published the texts of letters exchanged between several Shahs and the reigning Pope. They also provide micro-historical details of the lives and vicissitudes of the Lazarist missionaries active in and around Urmia that help us to better understand some of the diplomatic concerns of and manoeuvers by French envoys to Iran, particularly during the reigns of Mohammad Shah and Naser al-Din Shah, who saw France as the defender and protector of Catholicism in the East. These sources also offer an important perspective on the intense rivalry that characterized the relationship between the American Presbyterian mission and the French Lazarists, one that complements that contained in the copious American missionary literature. Although this was certainly not a rivalry that animated Vatican policy, it was one that was clearly recognized for it was reported upon in a steady stream of letters between several of the Lazarists, particularly the Apostolic Delegates, and their correspondents in Paris and Rome. Franco-American missionary tension simmered along for decades. Mohammad Shah, Naser al-Din Shah and Mozaffar al-Din Shah were all well-aware of it.
As I noted at the beginning of this Preface, I embarked upon this study out of pure curiosity, for I was intrigued by Pope Leo XIII’s letter and found little previously published work on the subject of relations between the Vatican and Qajar-era Iran. As I looked for evidence of those relations I necessarily encountered a wealth of information on Iran’s diplomatic relations with other European states, as well as primary literature, largely in the form of letters from Lazarist missionaries, about the ongoing trials and tribulations of Catholics and Catholic missionaries in Iran. While not always directly related to the Vatican, these two subjects — Iranian diplomatic contacts with European nations and Catholic-Lazarist developments in Iran — help to contextualize the Qajar attitude towards Catholicism in general and the Papacy in particular. It is for this reason that some of the discussion in the following pages is not limited solely to direct Vatican-Qajar ties.
Readers will see many titles in a variety of European languages in the bibliography. Wherever I have cited these in the text, I have provided English translations. Similarly, all documents originally written in Latin have been translated into English and for help in this regard I sincerely thank my NYU colleague Claire Bubb.
For looking over my manuscript and, unfailingly, providing me with useful feedback, I would like to thank my friend and sometime collaborator, Willem Floor. It may be a truism to say that he has probably forgotten more than I shall ever know about Qajar Iran, but it is nonetheless accurate. As always, much of the content of this work has been discussed with my wife Hildy, for whose love and input I am eternally grateful. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my grandchildren Ambrose, Iris and Greta. In time I hope that they may find something here that piques their interest in Iranian history.
Potts 2023b.
Thus Ivanovitch 1907: 215 wrote, ‘Much has been said and written about the late Shah’s profuseness. … He liked to scatter bliss around and to see happy faces. What better way to attain this benevolent end than in giving gifts. He might truly be called the gift-giving Shah.’
See e.g. Manet 1877; Bray and Touzé 1900; Le Cunuder 1952; Waterfield 1973; Corcket 1983; Bugnini 1981; Frazee 1984; O Flynn 2017; Maigret 2022. Gorder 2010: 66–68 paid hardly any attention to the Lazarists and the Vatican was largely ignored.
Dabashi 2020 focuses particularly on the self-reflective writings of a number of Persians who went to Europe, including diplomats like Mirza Abuʾl Hasan Khan, but omits a great deal of detail available in contemporary European sources.
For the history of the Google digitization project, see Marcum and Schonfeld 2021.
See e.g. Potts 2022a for American newspapers containing material on Iran, published between 1712 and 1848.
See the lengthy discussion in Vahdat 2017: 33–35.
Redhouse 1874; Salesse 2000. Cf. for commentary, e.g. Sohrabi 2012, Potts 2022a, Dabashi 2020.