Monday, June 15, 2015

Thévenot Continues East

Stained glass windows of the Nasir al-Mulk 'Pink Mosque', Shiraz, Iran
Photo by Domiri Mohammad Reza Ganji.
Previously, we followed the progress of seventeenth century tourist Jean de Thévenot, noting his comments about glass as he traveled. He sailed from Rome to Malta to Constantinople to Egypt. He then continued overland through Syria and sailed down the Euphrates River toward the Persian Gulf.  At Basra he turned around and headed north, picking up the Tigris River to Baghdad where he continued eastward to Persia. In Isfahan he described numerous species of plants, animals and insects. Further south he took note of a city where glassmaking captured his attention:


The people of Schiras [Shiraz, Iran] are very witty and the city hath given birth to most of the best poets of Persia. There is much glass made there, and several glass-shops are in town, though they work not constantly in their glass-houses, but let the fire go out after they have employed a certain quantity of materials. They make their glass of a white stone, almost as hard as marble, which they get in a hill four days journey from Schiraz and it is very clear: especially they make great bottles as clear and delicate as in any other place in the world; but it is wonderfully strange how they can blow the great bottles they call ‘Caraba,’ which are as thick as one finger and hold nearly thirty quarts of wine; these bottles are covered with the straw of canes. [1]

Preceding Thévenot in Shiraz by a number of years (1627) was the British traveler, Sir Thomas Herbert, who stated that there was “…no part of the Orient showing better or richer wine.” [2] The mutually beneficial association between the production of wine and glass is one that appears in numerous locations throughout history. That both crafts should occur here, at the center of activity for this region’s premier vineyards should be no surprise. 

The region’s ‘Shirazi’ wines have been connected by various legends to the French Rhone variety now known as ‘Shiraz,’ but the vineyards in Iran are now defunct, and no definite conclusions have been reached, except that if a kinship exists, it is a very ancient one. In other quarters, Marco Polo mentioned Persian wines [3] and Omar Khayyam praised them throughout his Rubaiyat. [4]

At the same time that Thévenot passed through the region, so did fellow Parisian Jean Chardin (Sir John Chardin) who spent about eighteen months visiting (1666-7). It is unknown if the two travelers met. In his own published diary Chardin stated  “The art of glass-making; there are glass houses all over Persia, but most of the glass is full of flaws […] The glass of Chiras [Shiraz] is the finest in the country” and he went on to say that “Moreover, the art of glass-making was brought into Persia within these four score [80] years. A beggarly and covetous Italian taught it at Chiras for the sum of fifty crowns.” [5]

This last passage is often quoted in reference books without comment, to the point that it has become quite famous. At the risk of stating the obvious, the notion that one man, a foreigner, down on his luck, could single handedly bootstrap an entire industry that would fully mature throughout Persia in eighty years is absurd on its face. Beyond that, it is something of an insult to a culture that current scholarship credits with key developments in the invention of glass more than five thousand years ago. [6] Chardin’s condescendence toward Persian artisans and craft in general is well demonstrated throughout his book. His claim is plain enough, however if we want to be charitable, we could speculate that he misunderstood his source, who actually told him that the Italian was responsible for showing European style glassmaking to a well established technical community in Shiraz. Historian Stefano Carboni identifies a fifteenth century downturn and says “in Iran the industry was revived with the help of European, mostly Venetian, craftsmen in Isfahan and Shiraz from the seventeenth century.” [7]

[1] Thévenot v.2, p. 125, 126
[2] Thomas Herbert  “A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, Begunne Anno 1626.” (London: Stansby and Bloome, 1634), p. 133.
 By Thomas Herbert   also see http://www.saddleflasks.com  “An extensive reference site devoted to Late Persian glass.”
[3] By Marco Polo, “The travels of Marco Polo, the Venetian,” trans. by William Marsden (London: J.M. Dent, 1926), p. 41 (bk.1 ch. 15).
[4] Omar Khayyam, “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” trans. by Edward Fitzgerald (Boston: Branden Books, 1989), for example, stanzas VI, XI, XII, XLI, LVI.
[5] John Chardin “Sir John Chardin's Travels in Persia” (New York: Cosimo, 2010) p.275  (abridged English translation of 1724 original).
[6] For instance, see  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_glass http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/glass ,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_glass .
[7]  Stefano Carboni, “Glassware” in Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia edited by Josef W. Meri (New York, Routledge, 2005) v. 1, p. 298.

No comments:

Post a Comment