Exploring Patronage, Genre, and Scholar-Bureaucracy: The Trans-Imperial Career of Ḫvāndamīr (d. 1534)

Abstract

This paper examines the life, career, and patronage of the great statesman and historian, Ghiyath al-Dīn Ḫ^vāndamīr. Ḫ^vāndamīr lived and worked during a dynamic period of early modern Islamic history, marking the terminus of the great Timurid empire and the genesis of no less than three major polities in Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia: the Safavids, the Uzbeks, and the Mughals. During the first three decades of the sixteenth century, Ḫ^vāndamīr produced numerous texts across a multitude of genres, all the while dextrously navigating violent dynastic upheaval and negotiating new terms of patronage in different imperial settings. This paper examines a number of these patronized texts towards the objective of understanding more about how such “men of the pen” understood the act of patronage; specifically, Ḫ^vāndamīr’s approach to text and genre may have been shaped by the terms and conditions of these different negotiated “trans-imperial” relationships.