Abstract:

It was decided by Sultan Abdülhamid I to send an envoy to Iran to inform about his accession to the throne (1774), the conclusion of the long Ottoman-Russian war (1768-1774) with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, and to confirm the Treaty of Kerden signed between the Ottomans and Iran during the reign of Nadir Shah (1736-1746). Despite these apparent reasons, in reality, Sünbülzâde Mehmed Vehbi, one of the famous poets of the period, was sent as an envoy to Shiraz in order to reveal the real intentions of Karim Khan Zand, the Regent of Iran, who was in the process of gathering troops and considering the possibility of an attack on Baghdad and Basra, and to eliminate this intention through mutual goodwill. Vehbi Efendi, one of the Imperial Court hacegans who was known as the Sultan of Poets of the period, who proved himself with the eulogies and histories he wrote, and who was fluent in Persian, was appointed as envoy and traveled to Shiraz in 1775. In this study, the purpose of Sünbülzâde's ambassadorial mission, which has been misrepresented in the literature, will be evaluated through Abdülhamid I's decree and Ottoman chronicles, and then Vehbî Efendi's five and a half month long ambassadorship to Iran, including his journey from Baghdad to Shiraz, the reception of the Ottoman ambassadorial delegation, his political meetings with Karim Khan Zend and other state officials in Iran, and the political account in which he describes his observations will be discussed. With this article, the details of Vehbî Efendi's ambassadorship to Iran, which have not been published until now, will be revealed and the points that remain in the dark will be illuminated. The publication of this account, which emerged as a result of the first official contact with the Zand Dynasty that seized power in Iran in the second half of the eighteenth century, will make an important contribution to the history of diplomacy between the Ottoman Empire and Iran.

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