Show Notes
Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg were sons of Shah Rukh and Gawhar Shad, grandsons of the conqueror Timur, and two of the central figures of the Timurid Golden Age in fifteenth-century Herat and Samarkand. Baysunghur governed Herat and was himself a trained calligrapher. Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand and was a working astronomer, not just a patron of one. This episode follows both men's signature projects. In Herat, Baysunghur commissioned a new copy of Firdawsi's Shahnama, the Book of Kings, in 1426....
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Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last great Timurid ruler of Herat, died in 1506 while setting out on a military campaign to hold his kingdom together. The next year, an Uzbek army led by Muhammad Shaybani took the city, and a hundred years of rule by Timur's own descendants came to an end. Herat changed hands again in 1510, when Shah Ismail, the first Safavid ruler of Iran, took it from the Uzbeks. This final episode follows what happened to Herat's royal painting workshop once the dynasty that bu...
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Shah Rukh was a son of Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror whose armies had carved out an empire stretching from the Mediterranean toward India. When Timur died in 1405 without a settled succession, that empire became something to fight over. Shah Rukh's nephew Khalil Sultan seized the capital, Samarkand, along with its treasury, and held it for four years before Shah Rukh finally took the city back in 1409, without a fight. What Shah Rukh did next is the real subject of this episode. Ins...
Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, spent nearly his entire adult life at war, building an empire that ran from the edges of China to the Mediterranean coast. In the winter of 1405, in his late sixties and still leading his army in person, he set out to conquer Ming China. He never got close. A fever caught up with him at a camp near Otrar, and the man who had outlasted nearly every rival he ever faced died the same way he'd made countless ene...
Timur, the Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent 1402 to 1404 doing two things that seem to contradict each other and turn out to be the same story. At Ankara, his army broke the strongest military power in Anatolia and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, known as the Thunderbolt, the only Ottoman sultan taken alive in battle across six hundred years of that empire's history. Then, rather than holding the territory he had just won, Timur restored several of Anatol...