Life at the Court of the Early Qajar Shahs

This is a memoir translated into English for the first time, offers a uniquely intimate look at a world veiled by privilege and power. Its author, Soltan Ahmad Mirza, was a prince -- the forty-ninth son of Fath Ali Shah Qajar, who ruled Iran from 1797 to 1834. Looking back over the reigns of his father and two other shahs, he assembled a vast wealth of detail about life at the apex of Persian society: the role of the ruler, the hierarchy of the harem, court eunuchs, ceremonies, diversions, disputes, occasional violence, and -- as a nexus for it all -- an extraordinarily intricate web of connections by birth and marriage. Among members of the royal family, Soltan Ahmad Mirza was revered for his vivid recollections of the past. When he set about composing his memoir in 1886, he widened his own knowledge by drawing extensively on the memories of women of the court -- his mother (the favourite among his father's hundreds of wives), his sisters, aunts and other residents of the harem. As a