In the later decades of the fifteenth century, adherents of the Safavid order started raiding the regions of the northern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. As most of these raids involved Christian principalities, they have earned the Safavid shaikhs Joneyd and Haydar the reputation as ghāzis, as fighters for faith against the infidels. This paper explores how scribes from the sixteenth-century Safavid courtly sphere integrated the order’s early military activities into their narratives of the Safavid past. Further, it examines what sound information may be derived from the narratives on these poorly documented events. The paper concludes with the suggestions that a) those doing in history in Safavid times were much less concerned with Islamic “holy war” than modern historians are, and b) their narratives indicate that attempts to establish territorial rule may have outweighed the fight-for-faith motif.

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Since the very beginnings of modern Middle Eastern Studies, chronicles have formed one of its most intensively used genres of sources. This is especially true for the Iranian World, which has left particularly few textual remains. Whereas the respective approaches to pre-modern Persian chronicles changed substantially within the last one and a half centuries of research, the approach to one aspect of these texts has remained comparably stable: the historical detail, the most bitsy information these texts contain, forming the very basis of the normative narrative of the chroniclers’ patron’s rule. While the end of the age of scientism is debated more than ever, the handling of the historical detail has stayed remarkably untouched – it is still presumed