Diplomacy in Silk

By Heidi Noroozy

Polonaise carpet in the
Iranian Carpet Museum

Let’s take a trip back in time. We’ll set our time machine for early 17^th-century Isfahan at the height of the Safavid Golden Age and tour the city’s blue-tiled mosques, arcaded bazaars, and ornate bridges when they were still brand new. Maybe we’ll catch a polo match with Shah Abbas I and cheer his favorite team from our seats on the high balcony of the Ali Qapu Palace. Best of all, we’ll sink our bare feet into sumptuous wool and silk rugs and feel their soft pile tickle our toes. After all, like me, Shah Abbas had a special place in his heart for Persian carpets. Not only did he fill his palaces with the finest examples, he also made them an important element of trade and diplomacy.

Shah Abbas’s military accomplishments included consolidating a fragmented Persian kingdom and defending it against encroaching neighbors. The king also bolstered his country’s economy by intensifying trade between Persia and Europe, whose leaders he viewed as natural allies against his enemies, the Ottoman Turks. Abbas developed close ties with England’s East India Company by giving them special trade privileges and exchanging silk for English broadcloth. He also sent a large shipment of fine silk to King Philip of Spain and Portugal in an attempt to persuade him to give up the strategic island of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which the Portuguese had captured from the Persians nearly a century earlier. (This mission failed so completely that the Safavid ambassador to King Philip's court was executed when he returned home to Persia.) Not only silk yarn and cloth but luxury carpets also often made their way onto merchant ships and into diplomatic pouches.

Polonaise detail

Some of the finest carpets to come out of Isfahan’s royal workshops belong to a group that scholars today classify as “Polonaise.” The name, a French word meaning “Polish,” is a bit misguided, based on a misunderstanding (more about that in a bit), but Abbas spared no expense in commissioning these unique carpets to dazzle trade partners both at home and abroad. The carpets were made of silk in bold, vibrant colors and often had brocaded areas fashioned from threads wrapped in real gold or silver. Although the foundations were usually cotton to lend the structure durability, separate silk fringes would be sewn onto the ends, giving the appearance that the entire rug was made of the more costly material.

Polonaise weavers used motifs that are still recognizable in modern Persian carpets, with medallions in the center, twisting vines along the borders, and floral designs against contrasting fields that look like someone scattered a flower bouquet across a pool of calm water. Other Polonaise designs were more typically European, often incorporating emblems associated with Western royalty, which has led scholars to believe that they were commissioned and made to the customer’s specifications.

Polonaise carpet with the
Polish royal crest
(Residenz Museum, Munich)

But these Western influences also created the misunderstanding over the name “Polonaise.” Over several centuries, the carpets’ origins were forgotten, as many didn’t survive the ravages of time. When two antique rugs owned by Poland’s Prince Czartoryski appeared in a Paris exhibition in 1878, they were labeled as tapis polonaise (Polish carpets). This source was supported by the fact that their motifs and materials were not seen as being typically Persian. And these particular rugs featured the coat of arms of a noble Polish family worked right into the design.

Although some historians questioned the carpets’ European roots right from the start, many prominent textile experts persisted in attributing them to Polish carpet factories well into the 20^th century. But contemporary accounts show that Sigismund Vasa III of Poland commissioned eight carpets in 1601, and two years later Shah Abbas sent another to Marino Grimani, the Doge of Venice, as a diplomatic gift. Today, nearly everyone agrees that most Polonaise carpets were woven in royal Safavid workshops in the Persian rug weaving centers of Isfahan, Yazd, and Kashan from the time of Shah Abbas’s Golden Age right up until a devastating Afghan invasion put an end to Safavid rule in 1722. And yet the Polish-inspired name has stuck.

Polonaise carpets today are rare, with only around 300 of them known to exist. Some of these rugs belong to prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Residenz Museum in Munich, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Three of the photos I've featured on this page are of a Polonaise carpet I saw in the Iranian Carpet Museum in Tehran. At the time, I was writing my first mystery novel, which centered around the theft of a rare Safavid carpet. I took so many pictures of the Polonaise that I’m sure the guard suspected me of planning a forgery.

Border detail

The surviving Polonaise carpets leave only a hint of their former glory. Many have been worn down to the foundation, making them look more like loosely woven fabric than knotted pile rugs. The once vivid colors have faded to pastels (these dyes apparently adhere better to wool than to silk), and often the gold and silver brocade is either missing or tarnished. But you can still make out the lovely designs and with a bit of imagination reconstruct the vibrant colors in your mind. These carpets are prized as highly today as they were 500 years ago, with some commanding six-figure prices at auction.

Before we climb back aboard our time machine for the return journey to the 21^st century, let’s take a side trip to the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf (present day Iraq), where we’ll slip off our shoes and sink our feet into the soft silk of another of Shah Abbas’s precious commissions: a red and gold Polonaise that he presented to the shrine as a gift. Perhaps it was even another piece of diplomacy, since such a lovely carpet must have gone a long way toward unlocking the gates of heaven to its donor for his generosity. I hope so, anyway. Shah Abbas and his successors deserve a fine reward for giving the world such beautiful treasures.

Shah Abbas and The Remaking of an Empire

Shah Abbas I

The first time I visited Esfahan, I was captivated by a slogan flashing on a neon sign outside my hotel window every night. Esfahan, nesf-e jahan, it proclaimed to the dark neighborhood: Esfahan – half the world. The words had me imagining a cosmopolitan metropolis whose streets were filled with traders from around the world, intellectuals arguing the finer points of philosophy in a cacophony of languages, tourists thronging museums, mosques, and palaces. In reality, I didn’t see a single foreigner (besides myself) in all the days my husband and I spent exploring the city.

But there was a time when Esfahan’s bold claim did ring true. Five hundred years ago, it was the heart of a vibrant empire, an economic, cultural, and political powerhouse built by an ambitious and visionary king.

Shah Abbas I, who ruled Iran from 1587 to 1629 during the Safavid Dynasty, was sixteen when he seized power in a coup against his father, Mohamed Mirza, a weak-willed monarch who had allowed the country to descend into political chaos. Shah Mohamed had sat by as the Ottomans seized vast territories in the west, and he ceded much of the northeastern Khorasan province to the Uzbeks. Infighting between the powerful Qizilbash tribesmen, who governed the provinces and controlled the military, undermined the government’s central authority.

The new king set about rectifying his father’s mistakes, ruling Iran with a keen sense of military strategy, political savvy, and a combination of compassion and ruthlessness. He beat back the Ottomans and Uzbeks, strengthened central authority, reformed the military and government institutions, opened up trade with the West, and launched what is now recognized as the Golden Age of Iranian art and culture.

Naghsh-e Jahan Square, Esfahan

In 1597, Shah Abbas relocated his capital from the northern city of Qazvin to the more centrally situated Esfahan, which was better suited for overseeing his empire (encompassing present day Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey) and afforded more convenient access to the southern trading ports. He built a new city, partly with the help of Armenian artisans he’d forcibly resettled from his northeastern border to areas in the nation’s interior to establish a buffer between Iran and the Ottoman Empire. By depopulating the region, Abbas prevented the Ottomans from using the Armenian villages to launch attacks against Iran. Yes, he could be ruthless.

Shah Abbas’s military, economic, and political strategies were all intertwined and aimed at creating a strong nation. Peace in the border regions brought prosperity that allowed art and culture to flourish. The end to internal strife strengthened the king’s authority and helped fill the royal coffers, which gave Abbas the financial means to establish trade with the West and gain the support of his people. He saw Europe as a natural ally in his ongoing struggle against the Ottomans, and the flourishing silk trade he established with the Dutch and the British melded European economic interests with his own desire for stability.

Contemporary accounts describe Abbas as a highly intelligent and intensely curious man, a compassionate ruler who honored and valued human rights, freedom of religion, and education. He used Christian Armenian merchants to conduct the silk trade with the West on the principle that Europeans would be able to relate better to followers of their own faith. He built universities and hospitals and welcomed foreigners and their ideas to his court, something that would have been unthinkable in the days of his predecessors.

Vank Cathedral, New Julfa, Esfahan
Photo by Raeabileah

Although you could argue that the forcible relocation of Armenians was anything but compassionate (thousands died on the march south), once in Esfahan, these new residents enjoyed a certain amount of freedom and autonomy. Abbas built them their own town named New Julfa and allowed them to largely govern themselves, own property, and practice their religion (he even built them a beautiful cathedral that still stands today) – all notions that were rare among Muslim leaders of the time.

Unfortunately, Abbas’s compassion didn’t extend to his own family. Obsessed with fears that his progeny would overthrow him in a violent coup, he had his eldest son assassinated and two others blinded. According to the beliefs of the time, a blind man could not become king.

Subsequent Iranian rulers undermined many of Shah Abbas’s accomplishments, and the country again lost vast territories in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, this time to Afghanistan and Russia. But the ghost of this charismatic Safavid leader lives on in Esfahan, where the blue-tiled mosques and richly decorated palaces he built still sparkle in the desert sun, and his ornate bridges link two halves of the city across the Zayandeh Rud, a river (aptly named the Giver of Life) that snakes through the arid landscape. The city may not be host to half the world anymore, but it does mark a milestone in Iranian history – when a charismatic monarch unified his fragmented nation under the banner of religious tolerance and prosperity.

A Peacock in the Mosque

Photo by seier + seier

When the Safavid king, Shah Abbas I, moved his capital from Qazvin, north of Tehran, to central Iran in 1598, he transformed Esfahan from a sleepy desert town to a bright jewel on a branch of the Silk Road. He built palaces with fanciful names such as Hasht Behesht (Eight Heavens) and ornate river bridges such as Sioseh Pol (Bridge of the Thirty-Three Arches). At the very heart of his new city, Abbas constructed a vast square that he called Meydoon-e Naghsh-e Jahan, or Half the World Square. Modesty was not an issue with this king.

The Safavid royals were known for their piety—they were the rulers who made Shi’a Islam Iran’s official religion. So it comes as no surprise that Esfahan’s most magnificent structures dating back to Abbas’s time are the mosques. When the sun strikes their blue-tiled domes, they gleam like turquoise gemstones against the dusty brown landscape beyond the city limits. Incidentally, the practice of placing colorful, glazed tiles on the outside of a mosque's dome, and not only on the inside, is a Persian invention.

Meydoon-e Naghsh-e Jahan boasts two magnificent mosques. The larger one is a big blue structure that draws the eye toward the south end of the square. Its orientation is slightly skewed because the architect needed to fulfill two requirements, one aesthetic and the other religious. The main portal stands in smooth alignment with the two-story bazaar building that defines the limits of the rectangular square. But the mosque proper is angled catty-corner to the portal to ensure that its mihrab, or altar, has a southwest orientation and thus faces the holy city of Mecca.

The smaller and (to my mind) far prettier mosque lies straight across the square from Shah Abbas's Ali Qapu Palace. Built between 1601 and 1619, Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (named after the king’s father-in-law), has two unique physical features as well as a mysterious past. Unlike most Safavid mosques, Lotfollah’s dome is yellow, not blue, and the structure lacks minarets, those slender towers that rise on either side of a mosque’s dome. I can’t explain the unusual color, but the lack of minarets indicates that this mosque was for the royal family’s private use and not open to the public. Minarets are where the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, a function that is unnecessary in a private place of worship.

Photo by Hamid Parsi

In fact, Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque was built specifically for Shah Abbas’s harem (he was said to have had 200 wives). Guards were posted at the main entrance and a tunnel ran from the mosque to the Ali Qapu Palace—underneath the square—so the king's wives could walk to their prayers without having to shield themselves from public view. This is where the mystery comes in: no evidence of this tunnel has ever been found. So what happened to it? Was the tunnel filled in or did it never exist at all? No one knows.

Tunnel or no tunnel, the fact remains that this women’s mosque is a unique place of worship, on the inside as well as the outside. Most Iranian mosques have a portal that leads directly to a large open square, beyond which lies the main prayer hall and often many other rooms. The open square serves as a meeting place on weekdays and extra space for worshipers during Friday prayers and holidays.

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque has no central square. You pass through the portal into a narrow, beautifully tiled corridor. The hallway veers off to the left at a 45-degree angle then takes a sharp 90-degree turn and finally opens into the mosque’s one large chamber. Sixteen windows set high in the walls offer the only natural light, and the tiles cover walls in yellow, cream, and several shades of blue. Floral patterns with twisting vines that look like they came straight from an Esfahani carpet abound. Fine calligraphy outlines the mihrab, spelling out the names of the 12 Shiite Imams and the mosque’s master architect (Ostad Mohammed Reza Esfahani).

Photo by Nick Taylor

But I’ve saved the best for last: if you stand at the entrance to the prayer hall and peer up into the dome, you’ll see the shape of a peacock splayed across the ceiling. This is no manmade work of art. The peacock's head is its only physical attribute, formed by a pulley in the center of the dome. The bird's body and tail are nothing more than a trick of the light, created when the sun moves across the ceiling at just the right angle.

Persian mystics believe that the peacock represents the human spirit. A Sufi legend says that God created the human soul from the sweat of the peacock and that the bird's fanned tail represents the cosmic manifestation of the spirit.

I like to think that the spirits of Lotfollah’s designers still reside inside this exquisite mosque. Maybe they contribute to the special sense of tranquility that the interior inspires, so unlike the bustling square outside.

Paintings in Threads

Our house is filled with Persian carpets. Some were wedding presents, others housewarming gifts and still more were rugs purchased on trips to Iran. Our oldest one is a red and blue Kashani that my mother-in-law bought the year my husband was born. (I won’t say how old that one is.) The newest are two identical Qom beauties that hang on my office wall (that's it on the left). My personal favorite is a small black rug with a simple botteh design, better known to Westerners as the paisley. Over the years I’ve adopted one basic Iranian attitude: a house is not a home without handmade carpets on the floor.

My fascination with these paintings in threads became the inspiration for my first mystery novel, Frayed Silk, in which private investigator Leila Shirazi follows the trail of a stolen 17th century carpet and solves the murder of the thief. The book didn’t sell, unfortunately, but researching the novel gave me a whole new appreciation for carpet weaving. And in talking with friends and relatives about their own carpets, I gleaned another essential fact: Iranians consider carpet designs to be the highest form of Persian art.

The oldest known knotted rug is the Pazyryk Carpet, which Russian archeologists found in the frozen tomb of a Scythian chief in the Pazyryk Valley of Siberia. That rug has been carbon-dated to the 5^th century BC. Because of similarities between its designs and carvings at Persepolis, the carpet is believed to have been created by Achaemenid weavers of ancient Persia. Embedded in solid ice, this carpet was preserved almost intact and is now exhibited in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Let’s skip forward a thousand years to the Safavid Dynasty (1501-1722), when the Persian carpet as we know it was born—the ones with intricate floral patterns having central medallions and sprays of flowers scattered across a plain field. The Safavid kings took what was then a purely tribal craft and elevated it to an art form by building carpet workshops in Isfahan, Kashan, and Kerman (which remain major carpet weaving centers today). They hired artists to design the motifs and workers to knot the rugs. Initially they created these carpets specifically for Safavid palaces and mosques and as gifts for neighboring royalty and foreign dignitaries. Later, the Safavids developed a flourishing carpet trade with the rest of the world. The Portuguese played a key role in introducing Persian carpets to Europe, and they used their Indian colony of Goa as a major distribution point.

Safavid carpets are classified according to their designs, and although there are many different ones, here are a few of my favorites:

Vase: Unlike carpets with a central medallion surrounded by flowering vines, these rugs have an overall design. Sometimes they depict a realistic bouquet of flowers emerging from a recognizable vase. In other designs, the vases are figurative, abstract forms representing vases, leaves, and flowers that are repeated throughout the carpet. Vase carpets were woven in royal workshops in Kerman, where carpet designers were considered among the most inventive of the Safavid period. These rugs are rare and highly prized by collectors today; last year one fetched an astonishing price of 9.6 million U.S. dollars at a Christie's auction.

Hunting: Often worked entirely in silk, these carpets reflect two of the Safavid kings’ favorite pastimes: falconry and hunting. They depict dynamic scenes of hunters on horseback, wild animals, and birds. Some hunting carpets have a central medallion, others an overall pattern.

Polonaise: Also known as Polish carpets, these rugs owe their name to a misunderstanding. They were once believed to come from a workshop in Poland that was known for its Persian-inspired designs. Later, researchers found that these carpets were actually made in the royal Safavid workshops in Isfahan. Many had been woven specifically as gifts to European royalty, hence the designs catering to European tastes. They were floral-patterned carpets with central medallions, worked in silk, with real gold and silver brocading throughout. I love a carpet with a mystery, so this was the type I picked for the stolen treasure in Frayed Silk.

Not a great deal has changed since Safavid times. Good Persian carpets are still made the same way, by hand in village homes or city workshops, designed by artists and commissioned by manufacturing companies who then sell and distribute the rugs to local bazaars and stores around the world. The romantic notion of the young carpet weaver working her hopes and dreams into a rug of her own design is, I’m afraid, pure fiction.