Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic in Spain

Don Juan of Persia is the account of Oruj Beg Bayat, a Persian Muslim nobleman who traveled to Europe as a secretary to the embassy Shah Abbas dispatched in 1599. The journey carried him from Isfahan across Russia and central Europe — Moscow, Prague, Rome — to the Spanish court at Valladolid, and it is that route, together with a survey of Persia and its Safavid history, that fills most of the book.

The conversion narrative comes at the end. Don Alvaro de Caravajal, the Royal Almoner, superintended his instruction, and on 14 January 1602 baptized him by royal command in the Palace Chapel at Valladolid, with Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain, standing sponsor; he took the name Don Juan of Persia. Two of his fellow Persians were received with him — the ambassador’s nephew, to whom Philip III himself was godfather, and Buniyad Beg. He made the choice knowing what it cost: apostasy from Islam carried a death sentence, and it meant he could never return to Persia.

The book was published in Spanish in 1604 as the Relaciones de Don Juan de Persia, produced with heavy assistance from his friend Alfonso Remón — so it reads as autobiography by way of a collaborator, framed to please a Spanish and Catholic readership. What became of him afterwards was long misreported: his translator believed him killed in a Valladolid brawl in 1605, but the fuller text of Pinheiro da Veiga’s Fastiginia reverses the participants. Don Juan was imprisoned for eighteen months on a false accusation and then lived on — in Madrid in 1607, with a wife and a daughter born that year, and petitioning the king as late as 5 November 1616. The date and place of his death are not known.

Our edition is G. Le Strange’s 1926 English translation — itself made from the public-domain Spanish of 1604 — with his introduction and all 258 of his notes carried whole. His page numbers are kept as marks in the text, so each note taps through from the page it belongs to and the 1926 edition can still be cited. Four of his notes are corrected where a century of scholarship has moved, in square brackets and signed, and we link to a free source as well.

Oruj Beg Bayat of the Bayat tribe left Isfahan in 1599 as first secretary to the embassy Shah 'Abbas sent to the princes of Europe. He reached Spain, was baptised at Valladolid on 14 January 1602 with the Queen of Spain standing sponsor, took the name Don Juan of Persia, and never went home. Two years later he published this account of his country, its wars and his journey.

The English is that of Guy Le Strange (1854-1933), the historical geographer of the Islamic lands, whose Lands of the Eastern Caliphate reconstructed medieval Persia from the Arab and Persian geographers. He translated the Spanish, wrote the introduction, and supplied the notes. He was not a university man: Norfolk gentry, no degree, an honorary Cambridge M.A. in 1913 for the work alone.

What we changed, and why.

Dated English terms for Muslims and for Islam are modernized: Moslem and Mahomedan become Muslim, Alcoran and Coran become Quran. The Caliph Omar is given as Umar. Othman is NOT changed in Don Juan's narrative, because there he is almost always Othman Pasha, the Ottoman general, and only occasionally the caliph; in Le Strange's own notes, where the caliph is always meant, he is Uthman. The Prophet is Muhammad throughout. Le Strange wrote him Mahomed and the Ottoman sultans of the same name Muhammad, sometimes on one page; all twenty of his Mahomeds are the Prophet, and the spelling was the translator's, not the author's.

Proper names are settled on their plain modern English spellings. Le Strange transliterated with acute accents for long vowels - Shah, Khurasan, Qazvin - which was standard in 1926. That system is largely gone from the surviving scan, which carries the plain form far more often than the accented one, and the scanner damages the accents worse than any other character. European names keep their own accents, which are theirs by right.

Le Strange's notes are carried whole — 257 of them, including the ones that only cite a source: those citations are the provenance of the book, and show where a scholar of 1926 checked a Persian of 1604 against Botero, Minadoi, Purchas and the Venetian ambassadors. His internal cross-references, which pointed at his own pagination, have been resolved to this edition's numbering wherever the evidence decides it; one that it did not decide has been removed rather than left pointing nowhere, and that removal is why the count is 257 and not 258.

He keyed every one of those notes to a page of his own book, so his pages are kept. A mark like [p. 88] is the page that follows it in the edition of 1926, and where he wrote a note on that page the mark is a link: tap it for his note, tap back for the text. It doubles as a way to cite him. The scan destroyed the page numbers of two plates and of the leaf on which the Second Book opens; the note to the one lost page of text says which page it belongs to and hangs on the mark before it.

Four of his notes are corrected. Where we correct him, his words stand and ours follow in square brackets, signed. The largest correction is not in the notes but here: Le Strange believed Don Juan was killed in a Valladolid brawl on 15 May 1605, and his subtitle, "1560-1604", reflects that. The fuller text of Pinheiro da Veiga's Fastiginia reverses the participants. Don Juan was imprisoned for eighteen months on a false accusation and then lived on - Madrid in 1607, a wife, a daughter born that year, and a petition to the king as late as 5 November 1616. The date and place of his death are not known. We have retitled the book accordingly.

The paragraphing is ours. The text reached us as unbroken runs — every chapter a single block, one of them 9,565 words long — because the stage that produced these files never emitted a paragraph break at all. We have broken them at sentences the translator had already ended. Not one word is added, removed or reordered: the sequence is identical, and Le Strange's page marks, which carry his notes, are all 301 still in place.

The three maps and the index of the 1926 volume are not reproduced.

The 1604 Spanish text and the 1926 translation are both in the public domain. This edition is copyright T.S. Baker Books, 2026.