Show Notes
Saladin, the Kurdish general who would later retake Jerusalem, arrives in Egypt in 1164 as a young officer serving his uncle Shirkuh, in the service of Nur al-Din, the ruler of Syria. Within five years, and after a vizier named Shawar burns his own capital's trading city, Fustat, rather than surrender it to the Crusader king Amalric I of Jerusalem, Saladin finds himself vizier to the Fatimid caliph al-Adid at the age of thirty-one. This episode closes out the four-part "Fatimids: Cairo Begins...
More from Archives Islamic History
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...
Ali-Shir Nava'i was a senior official and adviser at the court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, ruler of Herat from 1469, and head of the sultan's supreme council from 1472. Over his lifetime he founded, restored, or supported some 370 institutions, including, in Herat alone, forty inns for travelers, nine bathhouses, and nine bridges: infrastructure that reached ordinary people far beyond the palace. This episode follows two threads of that patronage. Nava'i wrote his own poetry mainly in Chagatai ...
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....
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...