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. Instead of ruling from Samarkand, Timur's glittering capital, he governed the whole empire from Herat, the city in what's now western Afghanistan where he'd already served as governor for years. He sent his own son, Ulugh Beg, to govern Samarkand in his place, and ruled from Herat for forty-two years until his death in 1447.

That choice made Herat the center of a court that funded some of the most ambitious building projects of the fifteenth century, led by Shah Rukh's wife, Gawhar Shad. This episode follows her mosque and school complex at Herat, begun in 1417 and left with an unfinished gateway after twenty years of construction, and her mosque at Mashhad, built the following year and still standing today. It follows her through Shah Rukh's death and a decade holding real power in her own right, up to the moment a member of her own family had her executed in 1457, and the mosque complex's own later destruction in Afghanistan in 1885.

Along the way, the episode introduces the sons who will carry this golden age forward in the episodes ahead: Baysunghur, the calligrapher who will commission a legendary copy of the Shahnama, and Ulugh Beg, the astronomer who will measure the length of a year from a hillside in Samarkand more precisely than European scholars would for another century.

Sources for this episode draw on the historical record of the Timurid court at Herat and Samarkand in the fifteenth century.

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