Timurid Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Timurid Renaissance produced its own version of chess, invented by the conqueror Timur himself and known as Tamerlane Chess. That invention sat alongside mosques, mausoleums and observatories built across an empire stretching from Samarkand to Herat. Between the late 14th and early 16th centuries, this movement revived Islamic arts and sciences in the wake of the Mongol invasions. Its influence spread throughout the Muslim world. Some describe its glories as equaling the Italian Quattrocento, even though the movement began slightly earlier than Europe's Renaissance.

  Scholars still argue over what to call it. The French word renaissance, meaning rebirth, is borrowed to describe the era. Some see it less as a rebirth than as a swan song for Timurid culture. What turned a conquering dynasty into a patron of scholars, artists and astronomers? And just how far did its buildings, books and ideas travel after the empire itself was gone?

• 2. Twin Capitals

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  In 1370, Amir Tamerlane founded the Timurid Empire after conquering several successor states of the Ilkhanate. Samarkand became his capital. The city had already been leveled once, during the Mongol conquest of Khwarezmia, after functioning as a hub of scholarship and study. The movement these conquests eventually produced reached its high point in the 15th century, once the Mongol invasions and conquests had ended. Whenever Timurid armies took a city, they typically spared its artisans and deported them back to Samarkand. Late in his life, Timur also established Islamic Sharia law there, reinforcing Samarkand's rise as a center of Islamic art. Timur's reign also brought a revival in classical Persian art, a foundation the empire built on for generations. Persia fell to Timurid conquest in the early 15th century, and Islamic artistic traditions there began to interweave with the Mongol art the empire carried.

  By the middle of the 15th century, the Timurid capital moved to Herat, which became the new focal point for Timurid art. During the reigns of Shah Rukh and his consort Gawhar Shad, Herat's court was said to rival Florence of the Italian Renaissance. As Samarkand once had, Herat drew artisans and intellectuals from many ethnic backgrounds. They built the city into its own center of arts and culture. Their traditions blended with those already established elsewhere, so that many Timurid cultural expressions became mixed with outside influences. Unlike the earlier Buyid dynasty, this new culture would not just revive classical Persian models. It would broaden them, drawing in more colloquial styles of the Persian language itself.

• 3. Palaces and Tiled Domes

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  Timur commissioned the Summer Palace in Shahrisabz, the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, and the Registan during his own lifetime. Building on this scale continued throughout the empire, producing mosques, mausoleums, madrasas and kitabhane, the medieval Islamic workshops where books were made. His architects drew on the older forms of Seljuk architecture, wrapping building facades in turquoise and blue tiles arranged into intricate linear and geometric patterns. Interiors sometimes received the same treatment, with painted surfaces and stucco relief adding further detail.

  Samarkand and Herat filled with spectacular, stately edifices raised by Tamerlane and his successors, work later called the pinnacle of Islamic art in Central Asia. The style started earlier, with the sanctuary of Ahmed Yasawi in what is now Kazakhstan, before culminating in Timur's mausoleum, the Gur-e Amir in Samarkand. That 14th-century tomb was covered in what one description calls turquoise Persian tiles. Nearby stood a Persian style madrassa and a Persian style mosque, both built under Sultan Ulugh Beg.

  Turquoise and blue-tiled domes crown the mausoleums built for Timurid princes, structures still ranked among the most refined examples of Persian architecture. Axial symmetry runs through every major Timurid structure. It appears at the Shah-e Zenda in Samarkand, the Musallah complex in Herat, and the mosque of Gawhar Shad in Mashhad. Double domes of varying shapes recur throughout these buildings, their exteriors covered in brilliant color. Beyond these grand buildings, Timurid artists were just as ambitious on a smaller scale, filling pages instead of facades.

• 4. Arts of the Book

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  The Arts of the Book, an older Persian tradition, gained new life under Timurid patronage as painters shifted from parchment to paper. These new illustrations stood out for their rich colors and elaborate designs. Suzan Yalman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has called the Herat school of manuscript painting "the apogee of Persian painting."

  Landscapes drawn from both Persian and Chinese tradition filled Timurid wall paintings, extending the empire's artistry well beyond manuscript pages. Although the subject matter came from outside sources, these wall paintings eventually developed into a unique style of their own. Mongol influence persisted too: the highly stylized human figures found in 15th century Timurid art trace back to that earlier culture.

  Sultan Husayn Bayqara's reign brought a further rise in the arts, and he became known as a generous benefactor and patron of learning. Among his projects was a famous school he had built himself, part of the learning centers established under his rule. One account called him the quintessential Timurid ruler of the later period in Transoxiana. His court drew particular admiration from his cousin, Babur of Mughal India. Patronage like this did not stop at paintings and books. It reached craftsmen working in metal, clay and stone as well.

• 5. Metal, Clay and Jade

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  Steel, iron, brass and bronze all passed through Timurid workshops, producing metalwork admired across the empire. Among these pieces, silver-inlaid steel is often singled out as being of particularly high quality. After the empire itself collapsed, several cultures in Iran and Mesopotamia adopted Timurid metalworking techniques as their own.

  Chinese-style ceramics also came out of Timurid workshops, alongside a smaller practice of jade carving. The same courts patronizing potters and metalworkers were, at the same time, funding astronomers mapping the night sky.

• 6. Mapping the Heavens

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  Shah Rukh and Queen Goharshad gave immense support to Jamshid al-Kashi, whose work in mathematics and astronomy shaped the era. Both were keenly interested in the sciences and encouraged their court to study them in depth. Their period of rule produced numerous scholarly achievements, though the scientific peak of the empire came later, during the reign of Sultan Ulugh Begh.

  Under Ulugh Begh's rule, al-Kashi calculated sine tables accurate to four sexagesimal digits, equivalent to eight decimal places, for every degree. He also worked out the differences for each minute. Separately, he built tables converting between coordinate systems on the celestial sphere, including the shift from ecliptic to equatorial coordinates. His work Sullam al-Sama solved problems earlier scholars faced in measuring the distances and sizes of the Earth, Moon, Sun and stars. A separate treatise on astronomical observational instruments catalogued a wide range of tools. These included the triquetrum, the armillary sphere, and instruments built by Mo'ayyeduddin Urdi, including equinoctial and solsticial armillaries and a sine and versine instrument. It also listed al-Khujandi's sextant and the Fakhri sextant at the Samarqand observatory. Al-Kashi added two inventions of his own: a double quadrant azimuth-altitude instrument and a small armillary sphere fitted with an alhidade.

  Al-Kashi also invented the Plate of Conjunctions, an analog computing device. It calculated the time of day when planetary conjunctions would occur and performed linear interpolation. A second invention, the Plate of Zones, worked as a mechanical planetary computer. It could graphically solve a range of planetary problems. These included the true longitudinal positions of the Sun, Moon and planets along elliptical orbits. It also handled the latitudes of the Sun, Moon and planets, and the ecliptic of the Sun. This instrument, too, incorporated an alhidade and a ruler.

  Ulugh Begh founded an institute in Samarkand that soon grew into a prominent university, drawing students from across Central Asia and beyond. Among the scientists he gathered there was Ali Qushji, who advanced astronomical physics as a field independent from natural philosophy. Qushji provided empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy. He considered it his most important astronomical work. He helped found the Sahn-i Seman Medrese, one of the first centers in the Ottoman caliphate for studying traditional Islamic sciences. He also contributed to Ulugh Beg's own work, the Zij-i-Sultani, and wrote several other scientific works and textbooks on astronomy.

  Islamic theologians of the period opposed any interference of Aristotelian thought in astronomy, and Qushji followed their lead. He rejected Aristotelian physics outright, separating natural philosophy from Islamic astronomy entirely. This let astronomy become a purely empirical and mathematical science in its own right. Freed from Aristotle's assumption of a stationary Earth, Qushji explored the alternative idea of a moving Earth. The historian Emilie Savage-Smith notes that no Islamic astronomer actually proposed a heliocentric universe. Qushji found empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation through his observations of comets. He concluded that a moving Earth was just as likely to be true as a stationary one, based on observation rather than speculative philosophy. Qushji's empirical method did not stay confined to Samarkand's classrooms. It would travel with the scholars trained there, long after the Timurid dynasty itself began to fade.

• 7. After the Timurids

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  By the late 15th century, the Timurid Empire itself was in decline, but its artistic traditions did not disappear with it. By the beginning of the 16th century, the empire had also achieved mastery over firearms, even as its political fortunes faded. The Ottomans, the Safavid dynasty, Mughal India and other Gunpowder Empires each took up Timurid art and made it their own.

  In architecture specifically, the Timurid style passed directly into Mughal India, while also leaving a significant mark on Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Iran. Its monumental buildings had already carried the influence of the Ilkhanid school of art as far as India. There, that influence gave rise to what became known as the Mughal, or Mongol, school of architecture. Timur's own dominance of the region had strengthened Persian architecture's pull over the Indian subcontinent. The Timurid Renaissance had itself followed the Islamic Golden Age, an earlier era of Islamic scholarly achievement. Its architecture, science and art outlived the Timurid dynasty, carried forward by the very empires that succeeded it.