The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat al-qulūb

Guy Le Strange (1854-1933) pioneered the study of the historical geography of the Middle East, and especially Persia, notably in his Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge, 1905) and the present work which contains an English translation of Mustaufī’s Nuzhat al-qulūb

Ḥamd-Allāh Mustaufī was a fourteenth-century historian and geographer. His Nuzhat al-qulūb (Hearts’ delight) sets out to give a description of Iran in the form of a gazetteer. Despite some repetition of previous accounts, there are many snippets of up to date information embedded in his descriptions of the various provinces and cities and villages of Iran, including altered circumstances and productivity, and changes in their names and prosperity, and his work gives a graphic account of the area in the latter days of the Īl-Khāns.

Mustaufī’s Nuzhat al-qulūb captures a moment in time caught between an old world and a new – the familiar but moribund universal Islamic Caliphate, fatally destroyed by the Mongol invasions, and the new dispensation of the Mongol Empire, within which Iran once more found independence and cultural self-determination. But this world too was in transition, as the Ilkhanate was in the process of collapsing and new insecurities threatened. This accessible new edition will make this important work, extensively used but little studied and long out of print available to a new generation of scholars.