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 built it was gone. Bihzad, the orphan-turned-master painter introduced earlier in this series, resurfaces in 1522 as head of Shah Ismail's royal library and painters at Tabriz. His pupil Shaykhzada went further east, to Bukhara, and worked for the family of the very Uzbek ruler who had ended Herat's golden age. Meanwhile Timur's own bloodline, driven out of every city it once ruled, found an unlikely second life: Babur, who had visited Herat as a young prince, took Delhi in 1526 and founded the Mughal empire, whose later painters drew on the tradition that had grown up at Herat.

Across this seven-day arc, mothers, sons, advisers, poets, and painters built mosques, observatories, and illuminated manuscripts under Timurid patronage, and every one of them eventually lost the power that made it possible. This episode closes the series by tracing what survived that loss: not a throne, but a craft, carried by the people who knew how to practice it into the courts of the very dynasties that had replaced their patrons.

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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 Turkic, the everyday language of Central Asia, and in 1499 finished The Trial of the Two Languages, arguing that Turkic was as rich and precise as Persian. At the same time, he backed Jami, one of the leading Persian poets of the age, a follower of the Naqshbandi Sufi order who wrote around eighty-seven books and letters before his death in 1492. Nava'i also backed Bihzad, an orphan raised by the painter Mirak, who became head of the royal painters of Herat in 1486. The episode walks through how a Persian book painting was actually made: paper polished with an agate stone, blue ground from lapis lazuli, gold beaten thin between sheets of deerskin, and brushes of only a few hairs.

Together, the poet, the painter, and the adviser who backed both of them help explain why about half of all surviving Timurid building projects date from Sultan Husayn Bayqara's nearly forty-year reign, and why the young prince Babur, later founder of the Mughal empire, described Herat as full of learned men.

Sources for this episode include the surviving accounts of Nava'i's own writings, including The Trial of the Two Languages, and the historical record of Bihzad's life and the Herat painting workshop drawn on by art historians studying this period.

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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. A workshop of twenty-five craftsmen, calligraphers, painters, decorators, bookbinders and pattern-makers, some of them artists brought back from a captured Tabriz, spent four years producing a manuscript of 346 leaves and 21 paintings, the text copied by a calligrapher named Ja'far. In Samarkand, Ulugh Beg built an observatory around an enormous stone arc and, with roughly sixty scholars, measured the length of the year to within a minute of the true value, a result more accurate than tables built from Copernicus's work more than a century later.

Both men died before their time. Baysunghur at thirty-six, from apparent poor health. Ulugh Beg was overthrown and killed by his own son, Abd al-Latif, in 1449. The episode traces how a family capable of real internal brutality also produced, in the same generation, a manuscript still held in Tehran's Golestan Palace and a star catalogue that was printed in Oxford three separate times between 1665 and 1843, long after the empire that funded it had disappeared.

Sources for this episode include the historical record as verified against Archives' own fact-checked daily content on the Timurid Golden Age, covering the reigns of Shah Rukh, Gawhar Shad, Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg.

This is part 2 of a 4-part series on the Timurid Golden Age.

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