The Timurids

Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane from the Persian Timur-e Lang, 'Timur the Lame', was a Turkic-Mongol commander from near Samarkand. From 1370 until his death in 1405 he campaigned across Iran, Iraq, Syria, Anatolia and northern India. Chroniclers describe towers of skulls raised at Isfahan and elsewhere. Yet he also carried craftsmen home from the cities he took and set them to work on the blue domes of Samarkand. A famous story tells that Timur, having taken Shiraz, summoned the poet Hafez to reproach him for a verse offering Samarkand and Bukhara in exchange for the mole on a beloved's cheek. Hafez is said to have replied that such generosity was why he was now so poor. The story is almost certainly a later invention, but it captures the Timurid paradox: conquerors who wanted to be admired by poets.

Herat and Mashhad

After Timur's death his son Shahrukh made Herat, in today's Afghanistan, the centre of his realm. Shahrukh's wife, Gawharshad, was one of the great patrons of the age. In 1418 she completed a mosque beside the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, its courtyard sheathed in tile mosaic, and in Herat she founded a mosque and college whose surviving minarets still stand over the city. In Samarkand, Shahrukh's son Ulugh Beg, himself an astronomer, built an observatory in the 1420s whose star tables were among the most accurate of their time. The lower part of its huge meridian arc can still be seen, cut into the hillside.

The last flowering

The Timurid court reached its most refined under Sultan Husayn Bayqara, who ruled Herat from 1469 to 1506. His friend and adviser Ali-Shir Nava'i wrote poetry in Chagatai Turkish as well as Persian, while Jami, poet and mystic, was the leading Persian writer of his age. Herat's painters were led by Kamal al-Din Behzad, whose crowded, lively scenes of builders, beggars and princes set a standard that later painters copied for generations. In 1507 Herat fell to the Uzbeks, and Behzad's later career belongs to the next dynasty, the Safavids. For all their wars, the Timurids fixed a pattern that lasted for centuries: Turkic rulers, Persian courts, and a shared culture of verse, painting and tilework stretching from Anatolia to northern India.