Gifts and livelihoods of Safavid emissaries in early seventeenth‑century Spain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, goods and people circulated between Safavid Iran and the Spanish monarchy at unprecedented levels. However, relatively little analysis has been devoted to the circulating of objects and artefacts and to the people involved in practices of international diplomacy between these kingdoms, even though the diplomatic entanglements created by sending emissaries and ambassadors from Safavid Iran to the Spanish court gave rise to multiple problems. This article aims to highlight, on the one hand, the problems faced by these emissaries on their missions to the peninsular territories, specifically focusing on the case of Khvāja Safar, and, on the other hand and linked to the circulation of goods, the problems the court of Madrid faced when selecting and preparing its gift to Shāh ʿAbbās. As these two examples show, the diplomatic practices of the European courts, and especially the court of Madrid, differed from the Islamic customs in the early modern period. This contribution consequently aims to explore the difficulties that the Spanish court encountered in dealing with transcultural procedures and to showcase the socio‑political and cultural complexity that affected relations between the two kingdoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".