The founding of the Safavid dynasty in Iran (1501–1722) came as the culmination of a century of religious and political ferment, and as the result in particular of the millenarian strivings of the “red-head” (Qizilbash) adherents of the militant Safavid Order. Over several decades, in the teeth of resistance and oppression from Turkmans, Ottomans, Uzbeks, and others, they managed not only to survive and expand, but eventually to carve out a Twelver Shi’i state of lasting duration. At the center of these events was a charismatic action-hero in the person of the leader of the Safavid Order, Shah Isma’il I. He took leadership of the movement at the tender age of twelve and led his devoted followers to a series of victories over the course of some fifteen years, and although his meteoric career ended definitively at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, he had still made an indelible impact on the history of western and central Asia.

The story of the founding of the Safavid dynasty, in other words, was not only a signal event in Iranian history, it also makes for a cracking good yarn. The historian is therefore justified in asking: How did that story take root and develop in the cultural memory and imagination of the people who lived in the world that resulted from the events it describes? In one sense, the story is well preserved at the top of the social pyramid, namely in the official chronicles of the dynasty, from Khwandamir onward. The events and individuals described in these court histories, however, inhabit a rarefied dimension of ornate prose and erudite self-referentiality – excellent material for the prestigious and privileged, but likely out of reach of the common citizens. It was precisely this latter, though, whose mental landscape is so interesting in a context like this. For their view of the past was uncontrolled, as it were, by the need to match the facts too precisely; people were free to rewrite history according to their own valuestandards, whether noble (e.g., the desire to see injustice punished) or ignoble (e.g., sectarian bigotry).