Kashan Rugs: Notes on a Small Silk Kashan Carpet

April 18, 2008: Today I attended a Textile Museum RTAM program by Daniel Walker. Walker was suggesting a link between a group of Jufti-knotted silk fragments that he owns and the so-called Small Silk Kashan rugs. Dan was suggesting that the Kashan attribution was probable. I asked him about the possibility that these rugs were from the court of the Sultan Ibrahim Mirza (Mashhad and Sabzavar). Walker proclaimed that there was no evidence of any court workshops prior to the reign of Shah Abbas. I understand what he meant but I feel he was wrong. I will concede that there is no record of specifically carpet workshops prior to Shah Abbas. However there was a court workshop that produced a very sophisticated level of art in Sabzavar and in Mashhad.

When I look at the rug above and the 13 or 14 other rugs in the group I see a level of art that had to have been designed by the same artists that produced court quality Persian miniatures. For someone to imagine that this rug was the product of a provincial workshop without the supervision of master artists stretches credulity. Great art comes from great artists not minor provincial towns with no record of artistic accomplishment in that period.

The rug is of a type that the rug literature commonly call this a Small Silk Kashan Rug.

The attribution of this small group of rugs to Kashan rests on few meager facts. there is evidence that Silk rugs were made in Kashan as early as 1601 or in other words the early part of the reign of Shah Abbas. The problem is that the rugs are earlier. Shah Tahmasp reigned until 1576 and Dimand, Maurice S. and Jean Mailey. Oriental Rugs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York: 1973 attributes this group of rugs to the second half of the 16th century reign of Shah Tahmasp. I agree with Dimand on this and I can find no warrant for royal workshops in Kashan before the reign of Shah Abbas

"Shah Abbas had established factories in the provinces of Shirvan, Karabagh, Gilan, Kashan, Mashad and Astarabad, as well as in Isfahan". Murray Eiland Jr. If Eiland is correct then we have to ask that if there were rug factories in Kashan why would Shah Abbas have to establish one.

see Small Silk Kashan (?) Rug

In 1601 King Sigismund of Poland sent Armenian merchant Sefer Muratowicz, from Warsaw to Persia, with instructions to order several rugs. It appears that this mission was an excuse to gather intelligence in preparation for the Papal Envoys visit.

On Sefer Muratowicz, an Armenian merchant and supplier to the royal court

"The travel account is Relacya (...) obywatela warszawskiego od Zygmunta III, krola polskiego, do sprawowania rzeczy wyslanego w Persyi w roku 1602... [Account (...) by a Warsaw Citizen Sent by Sigismund III, the Polish King, Persica: A Brief History of Polish-Persian Relations to Handle Matters in Persia in 1602...] by Sefer Muratowicz, an Armenian merchant and supplier to the royal court. As Jan Reychman writes, ‘He did not officially set out as a diplomatic envoy but his mission, camouflaged as a regular business trip, was designed to explore the possibility of strengthening diplomatic ties with Iran - not only by Poland, but also by the Roman curia. His task, directly related to examining the situation in Iran and studying its military power, was part of a larger diplomatic project aimed at inducing Iran to participate in an anti-Turkish coalition’.

After a voyage that took him through Wallachia, Erzerum, Kashan and Isfahan, Muratowicz finally arrived at the court of shah Abbas I, who presented him with a declaration of friendship addressed to the Polish monarch. The commercial aims of the journey were not forgotten, however, and so Muratowicz acquired for the royal court in Poland carpets embroidered with gold and silk (ordered in Kashan), precious stones, weapons and tents. His Relacya... survived until our times only as an extract recorded in the 18th century and added to Otia Domestica, a work by Kazimierz Ignacy Niesiolowski published in 1743. 3 The National Library’s collection contains an edition of the Relacya... which was republished in 1777 by Jozef E. Minasowicz from a manuscript donated (before 1757) by Niesiolowski to another Polish traveler - a Jesuit, Tadeusz Krusihski (shelfmarks BN. XVIII.1.828 adl.; BN XVIII.1.6989; (1777)). A copy of the latter edition was also kept at
the library of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski. It can be currently found at the Ukraine National Library in Kiev (shelfmark XXXIII.K.8 Reg. X, 810a).
A more recent part of the National Library collection, on the other hand, contains an edition of the Relacya... of 1807 and a contemporary one, dated 1980.

In the introduction to the later edition, Adam Walaszek provides the following commentary to Muratowicz’s account: ‘The text is not only worth recalling as the first account of a trip to Persia by a Polish memoirist. It also represents a significant source of information on customs in the capital of the land of the lion’ and on the artistic weaving industry

Upon his return from Isfahan, King Sigismund III Vasa conferred on Muratowicz the title of ‘servitor ac negotiator’, excluding him from the jurisdiction of ordinary courts. In addition, Muratowicz was made the exclusive purveyor of oriental goods to the royal court. Muratowicz’s expedition was the first of a series of political-diplomatic missions to and from Persia. In 1605, after the end of the Turkish-Persian war, the Polish capital hosted a legation headed by Mehdi Kuli ben Turkman, the aim of which was to bring together Persia, Poland and other European countries in an anti-Turkish alliance."

From Foreign Collections In Poland: A Historical Overview

Foreign Collections In Poland:
A Historical Overview Miroslawa Zygmunt
Persica: A Brief History of Polish-Persian Relations through Documents from the National Library

In 1604 the Roman Pope(Clement VIII) sent three priests and a brother to the court of Shah Abbas to try to arrange an alliance against the Turks. One of them Paul-Simon Rivarola of Jesus, from Genova, aged 28 is reported to have seen rugs of silk and gold produced in Kashan and Isfahan