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Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic in Spain
1926 · 330 pages
Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic in Spain
Originally published as Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic, 1560–1604 (G. Le Strange's title, 1926)
by Oruj Beg Bayat (Don Juan of Persia)
Why our edition. In the free scan at least 1 word in 206 is garbled. Ours corrects the damage. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic in Spain, and which translation this edition uses.
The 1604 memoir of Oruj Beg Bayat, a Persian Muslim nobleman and secretary to Shah Abbas’s embassy to Europe, who was baptized a Catholic at Valladolid in January 1602 with Queen Margaret of Austria standing sponsor. Most of the book recounts Persia, Safavid history, and the long overland journey from Isfahan to Spain, with the conversion at its close. It is the rarest item in the genre — a Muslim’s own published account of his conversion, printed three centuries before the missionary-era testimonies.
The changed life
A courtier and secretary to Shah Abbas’s 1599 embassy, he converted to Catholicism in 1602 knowing apostasy meant death and that he could never return home; he was baptized at Valladolid on 14 January 1602, published this book there two years later, and stayed in Spain for the rest of his life.
Summary
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.
Who was Oruj Beg Bayat (Don Juan of Persia)?
Oruj Beg Bayat (born about 1560) was a nobleman of the Bayat, a Turkic tribe long settled in Safavid Persia, and served as one of the secretaries of the embassy Shah Abbas I sent to the courts of Europe in 1599 to seek allies against the Ottomans. He was a courtier and a soldier’s son, not an evangelist, and his book is far more the report of a well-traveled diplomat than a work of religious persuasion.
In Spain he broke with Islam and was received into the Catholic Church, taking the name Don Juan of Persia under the patronage of Philip III. His memoir survives as a singular document — the earliest published first-person conversion account by a Muslim-born author — and it is his one book that keeps his name.
Which translation of Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic in Spain is this?
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.
Common questions
- Is this book mostly about his conversion?
- No. Most of it describes Persia, Safavid history, and the embassy’s overland journey from Isfahan to Spain; the conversion narrative comes at the end. Oruj Beg was a courtier and diplomat rather than an evangelist.
- Did Oruj Beg write it entirely himself?
- The Spanish text of 1604 was produced with heavy help from his friend Alfonso Remón, so it is best read as autobiography by way of a collaborator, with a pro-Spanish and pro-Catholic frame. The events and the first-person account of his life and conversion, however, are his own.
- Was Don Juan murdered soon after the book appeared?
- That is the old story, and it is wrong. Le Strange, translating in 1926, believed Don Juan was killed in a Valladolid street brawl on 15 May 1605. The fuller text of Pinheiro da Veiga’s Fastiginia reverses the participants: Don Juan was the accused, not the victim. He was imprisoned for eighteen months, released, and is documented in Madrid in 1607 with a wife and a newborn daughter and still petitioning the king in November 1616. When and where he died is unknown.
A note on the text. Don Juan of Persia: A Shi'ah Catholic in Spain is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free text is already well proofread — we measure about 1.0 errors per 1,000 characters. What our edition adds is the typesetting, not a rescue: one clean file, in the formats above, without the archive boilerplate.
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