This is a critical translation to the introduction to Żiyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī's (ca. 1285-1357) Tārīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī. Żiyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī was a leading intellectual of fourteenth-century Delhi during the reign of Muḥammad b. Tughluq (r. 1324-51). Born in Baran around 1285, an important province east of Delhi, Baranī spent the most important years of his adult life serving the Sultan in the role of councilor and advisor, an appointment he held over a period of seventeen years. In the introduction to the Tārīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī Baranī discusses his method of history writing and the knowledge of history (ʿilm-i tārīkh) and why it is a noble subject for study. History, in his view, has the ability to teach great men about the proper conduct of ruling. In this sense, the introduction provides further information about his ideas of rule expressed in the Fatāwā-i Jahāndārī (Edicts of World Rule). Baranī's ideas and arguments about the knowledge of history have been little discussed. This translation is an attempt to bring those ideas to a broader audience and also to show a representative example of how a leading intellectual living in the medieval Persianate world viewed history and history writing. This translation is based on Sayyid Aḥmad Khān's 1862 Calcutta edition of Tārīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī.