Our ambassadors arrive in the Russian city of Astrakhan on June 15, 1638, and stay until September 7. Bruggeman has a guilty conscience for his “many imprudent actions” during the journey. He also fears being punished by Duke Frederick upon returning to Holstein, a fear which causes him to make even more bad decisions.

They leave Astrakhan on September 7, after being informed by some local rogue Cossacks that they have successfully robbed so many people on the river that they are eager to see if they can also rob the Germans.

The Volga is beginning to freeze, and the three ships barely make Casan on November 6. The river is impassable the next morning, and the mayor of the city – who has a decidedly unfriendly view of the German trade mission – prohibits them from coming ashore.

They reach Moscow on January 2, 1639, staying at the ordinary house appointed for the reception of ambassadors.

Everyone is back at Duke Frederick’s home at Schloss Gottorp on August 1, 1639.

Olearius writes: “And so they concluded their Travels into MUSCOVY, TARTARY, and PERSIA. FINIS.”

It is the middle of April, 1638, and our German trade ministers are roughly two-thirds of the way through their 9,000-mile round-trip to Isfahan.

They are stuck in the city of Tarku, on the coast of the Caspian Sea, which today bears the name of Makhachkala and is the capital of Russia’s Republic of Dagestan.

They are stuck because independent warlords control every village, city, and river crossing in Dagestan, all of them have their own plans for robbing or killing the Germans, none of them want to let the other warlords get the upper hand, and none of them want to supply the Germans with the food they need to reach the Russian city of Astrakhan.

All of this makes Tarku most dangerous place of the entire journey.

Our ambassadors leave the city of Schamachie on March 30, 1638, keeping an eye out for highway robbers, and a week later arrive in Derbent.

The coastline of Derbent is pure rock, and serves as the foundation of the city wall, which is so broad that a wagon easily be driven on top of it. The city is sometimes called the Gate of Persia, since it lies on the extreme northwestern edge of the empire, and its walls extends from the sea to the top of a nearby mountain.

This long defensive wall is known as Dagh Bary, which literally means “Mountain Wall” from the Turkish word for mountain and the Persian word for wall. According to the Encyclopedia Iranica, it stretched “many kilometers” into the mountains and had numerous fortresses and towers of its own.

It is also called Alexander’s Wall because legend has it that Alexander the Great built the wall to defend against the tribes of Gog and Magog to the north.

An order comes down from the ambassadors that no one should tempt any citizen of Derbent to quarrel with them, lest the locals fall upon the whole company and murder them.

Before leaving, the ambassadors take stock of their weapons, counting 52 muskets and firelocks, 19 cases of pistols, two brass cannons, and four murdering-pieces (the stone-firing cannons), all fit for service.

“Having travell’d two leagues, we were got to the Caspian Sea-side, whence we saw the Countrey, which is all cover’d with Trees and Forests towards the North and South, spreading itself like a Crescent a great way into the Sea, on the right hand, from about Mesanderan and Ferahath, and on the left, from about Astara. We travell’d about a league along the Caspian Sea-side, and lodg’d at night upon the Torrent Nasseru, in a house call’d Ruasseru-kura, which had but two Chambers in all, so that being streightned for room, most of our people were forc’d to lie abroad, at the sign of the Seven-Stars.”

The date is February 1, 1638, and our ambassadors are roughing it on the coastal road of the Caspian Sea. That is, Secretary Olearius and the other gentlemen are sleeping in a two-room roadhouse while everyone else sleeps under the stars.

Our ambassadors are in the northern Persian city of Caswin, about 50 miles from the Caspian Sea, and near their lodgings is a tree full of nails and ribbons. A saint who once performed miracles is buried under the tree, and a holy man at the site collects alms and offerings from people who come for healing from toothaches, fevers, and other diseases.

The healing is not free, of course, and the alms collected by the holy man encourage impostors to set up shop at other trees where no saints are buried.

The Germans leave Caswin on January 20, 1638. Fifteen miles to the west, they spend the night in the small town of Achibaba, which, we are told, was named after an old man who lived there in the time of Sheikh Sefi, the mystic Sufi master whose name was taken by the Safavid dynasty.

Allah performed a miracle for the old man and his wife – who were then near 100 years old – by reviving what Olearius calls “the heat of younger years” and giving them a son.

The modern name of the town is Aghababa, but some sources refer to it as Aqbaba. Aside from census data and weather reports, there is very little information about the town, but one nugget makes up for all that is missing. To find it, we have to travel forward in time to the year 1921. For in 1921, the little town of Aqbaba served as the launchpad for a mostly-bloodless coup by Col. Reza Shah Pahlavi and the Persian Cossack Brigade that ended the reign of the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled the country since 1785.

Achibaba, Olearius tells us, is at “the foot of the mountain” – the mountain being part of the Alborz range between Caswin and the Caspian Sea – and the road passes through fruitful country where the people of Caswin graze their cows on plentiful, excellent good grass.

On January 23, the road leads through a forest of olive trees to a narrow passage, anciently called the Fauces Hyrcaniae, that leads to Kilan province and thence to the Caspian.

On the last day of January, the khan of Kurab greets the Germans with 100 horsemen, accompanies them to their lodgings, and sends them a gift of four wild boars.

The date is December 21, 1637, and we have made our way to Book 7 of the travel journal of Adam Olearius, the last of the series. Our trade ambassadors have survived the dangerous journey from Germany to the capital city of Persia, but, as we will see, Ambassador Otto Bruggeman’s actions have made the return trip even more dangerous.

On New Year’s Day they fire their cannons three times in celebration, listen to a sermon, make what Olearius calls “the ordinary prayers,” and then travel another five leagues to the village of Sensen.

As they leave Kom early on the morning of January 5, Olearius reports a near-total solar eclipse. The sun was “not quite three degrees above the horizon when the moon deprived us almost of all sight of it,” he writes, “and so overshadowed it, that, to my judgement, in the greatest obscurity, the eclipse was three parts of four.”

Sometime on January 6, Adam Olearius’ horse falls down dead in the harsh winter weather of the Persian plateau, and they slog through six inches of snow for the next 150 miles until they pass through the coastal mountains on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea.

Ambassador Bruggeman’s horse falls down under him, too, and not only is his right arm put out of joint, but he hits his head on the ground and his brains are so disordered that they fear he might never recover. They reach Saba that night, some 180 miles from Isfahan, and stay there all the next day in the hope that Bruggeman will recover his senses.

They reach the city of Caswin on January 11, and stay more than a week waiting for fresh horses and mules.

Welcome to The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors, the epic story of a 17th century trade expedition from Germany to Persia that failed so completely its leader was publicly executed upon his return. This is Episode 25: Dogs, Pigs, Camels and Silk.

Last time we heard about the suburbs and agriculture of Isfahan, and now we will learn why, according to Persian lore, certain animals hate each other.

The best silk is white, but yellow silk could also be quite good as long as it is clean and of good quality. Production estimates vary widely. At the turn of the 17th century, Robert Sherley said Persia’s total yield of silk was 34,000 bales. In 1635 the Dutch East India Company said a “normal” year’s production was 4,000 bales. Olearius claimed an annual harvest of 20,000 bales, but it is not clear where he obtained that figure.

Silk production in Persia was a local affair but a national business, and much of the trade was conducted door to door, bale by bale. Although transportation costs could have been minimized by going overland, Holstein was starting from scratch and paying significant tariffs to both Russia and Persia.

Some caravans traveled west to Aleppo, in modern day Syria, or northwest through Anatolia to Istanbul. Others west south, crossing mountains and deserts on the way to the Persian Gulf. The journeys typically took two to four months.

If the Holstein mission had succeeded, their caravans would have traveled north to the Caspian, up the Volga, and thence to the Baltic. The Caspian shipping season extended from April to October, and Russian winters dictated that the last ship had to leave Persia by late August. The cargo vessels typically used by the Russians each had a capacity of 250 bales and followed the coastline to Astrakhan, where the silk was reloaded onto smaller riverboats and sent upstream to Saratov. From Saratov, which our ambassadors saw in episode 6, merchandise was loaded onto wagons for the trip to Moscow.

The entire return trip on this new Silk Road envisioned by Duke Frederick would have taken about six months. But it never did happen, and as we reach the end of Book 6 and the end of 1637, our ambassadors are preparing for a discouraging trek back to Holstein.

We continue our exploration of Isfahan, which is the most commodious of any Persian city, Olearius writes, and is just as good in winter or summer because the mountains are nearby and there is always some wind stirring, which cools the air in all the homes of the city.

Surrounding Isfahan there are nearly 1500 villages, many of them engaged in manufacturing textiles. Every province in the country produces cotton, and the fields around Isfahan are intentionally flooded when the river rises with melting snow. If not for this, Olearius writes, the region would not be habitable because of the “excessive heats which reign there.”

In winter, although it does freeze, the ice is not even as thick as a man’s finger, and it thaws as soon as the sun appears over the horizon.

The city also has many large suburbs, and the fairest of all is New Julfa, which we have seen in several previous episodes and is occupied primarily by the Armenian Christians. No Christians live within the walls of the city, but Olearius says this is because they like it that way, preferring to “settle themselves in a place, where they might live quietly and enjoy the freedom of their conscience.”

In Kasan, the air is unwholesome and the pox is common even though that city is geographically “excellently well seated.” They also have tarantulas and the most dangerous scorpions in all of Persia.

The ordinary money of Persia is of silver and copper. Gold is rare, and available only in foreign coins. Olearius describes the different minting marks, and tells us that every Persian city has its own money that is changed every year, and that such money can be spent only in the place it was minted.

Centralized government control of economies is a history of failure, and inflation ravaged the entire region of Turkey, Persia, and India beginning in the late 1500s. Arriving from Europe, it was exacerbated by the Ottoman-Safavid wars and other factors.

By 1677, French traveler Jean Chardin said, “The money itself has been altered. One no longer encounters good coins.” He also called the Indian moneylenders in Isfahan “true bloodsuckers [who] draw all the gold and silver out of the country and send it to their own."

By 1684, most of the coins remaining in circulation were seriously debased, the bazaars at Isfahan were closed, and the shah ordered new money to be minted. By 1694, the population was suffering from heavy increases in taxation, a sharp decline in wealth, and a severe lack of gold and silver coin.

Trade had been irreparably damaged. Inflation increased even further. The shah was unable to pay the army. And the famed security of Persian roads – enjoyed by our ambassadors from Holstein – disappeared as caravans were attacked even within sight of the capital.

The Safavid Empire fell in 1722.