1 This is an earlier and longer version of what eventually became a chapter of the same name in K. Aghaie and A. Marashi eds. Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity: Histories and Historiographies, (University of Texas Press, 2014): 25-47 which should be used for citation. Franz Babinger and the Legacy of the “German Counter Revolution” in Early Modern Iranian Historiography ALI ANOOSHAHR The conventional narrative of the rise of the Safavid Empire runs as follows: A twelve year old boy rose up in revolt and declared his intention to unleash the apocalypse. Bands of Turcoman tribes (Qizilbash) fully devoted to the mystical doctrine of their semi-divine king marched to battle at his call and willingly sacrificed themselves for him. The combination of the boy Ismail’s charisma and the devoted and disciplined militancy of his Qizilbash gave birth to a new empire—the Safavids which ruled in present-day Iran and the Caucasus in the early modern period. The Safavids are generally viewed as the founders of what eventually became modern Iran. The advent of the empire is often referred to as a “revolution”. 1 Of course “revolution” implies a major socio-economic transformation and yet surprisingly, the field suffers from a dearth of economic explanations (as opposed to religious/psychological ones) for this event. What is the reason for this? Much of this conceptualization was first formulated immediately after the end of World War I by a German Orientalist named Franz Babinger (d. 1967), perhaps the most famous scholar of the Ottoman Empire from the foundational period of the early twentieth century. In addition to publishing numerous articles, Babinger wrote the still standard work of bibliography on Ottoman historians, 2 composed the only biography of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, 3 and contributed to the founding of the institute for Turkology at the University of Munich. It is less known however that soon after his return from military service in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, Babinger composed an early article that touched on the origins of the Safavid Empire. Babinger explicitly rejected the usefulness of a historical-materialist analysis for understanding the rise of the Safavids, focused primarily on spiritual (geistig) explanations, and connected the dynasty to Anatolian religious upheavals (whereas his British contemporary Edward Granville Browne primarily described the reign of Shah Ismail and his successors in terms of Persian dynastic history). As such, Babinger projected tropes from the German counter-revolution of the post-World War I era (i.e. the reaction of the German right against two communist revolutions in the country) into the subject matter about which he wrote, and his perception of the Safavids has continued to be influential to the present day. In 1919 Babinger joined and fought alongside the proto-fascist militias, the Freikorps, who overthrew the Munich Soviet Republic and committed many atrocities in that city, killing hundreds of non-combatants. Some of the Munich Freikorps then got involved in politics. The Nazi movement subsequently arose in Munich among some of the very men who were in, or had led, Babinger’s unit (such as Ernst Röhm and Franz Ritter von Epp). In other words, I contend that our perception of Safavid origins as an ideological revolution, fought by fanatical warriors, and led by a charismatic leader, actually owes a great deal to the experiences of the German Freikorps, including Babinger himself. This is of course not to say that there exists an easy one-to-one correspondence between Babinger’s medieval Anatolia