The Timurid Legacy: Courts, Books and the Mughal Connection

Timurid political power in Central Asia and Khorasan, the region around Herat and northeastern Iran, contracted in the early sixteenth century, but members of the ruling family and the works made in its courts entered new political settings. Babur, a Timurid prince, established Mughal rule in northern India and presented descent from Timur as a basis for his authority. Later patrons commissioned books that joined Timurid artistic practice with local traditions, while scholars carried texts and methods into new classrooms.

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Babur’s memoir for Akbar’s court

Babur descended from Timur through his father, who ruled Fergana in Central Asia. After losing his earlier foothold in Samarkand, Babur seized Kabul in 1504 and used it as a base. He later argued that his descent from Timur gave him a claim to lands his ancestor had conquered. After several campaigns into northern India, he defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in 1526 and took Delhi and Agra, founding Mughal rule there.

Babur recorded his life in the Baburnama, an autobiography written in Chagatai Turkic, a literary language of Central Asia. His grandson Akbar commissioned Abd al-Rahim Khan to translate the memoir into Persian in 1589 so Mughal nobles and officers could read the founder’s account. A surviving imperial manuscript in the British Library dates to about 1590–1593 and contains 143 illustrations. It is now bound in four volumes.

Another early imperial copy, now represented by a folio at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was supervised by Abd al-Rahim and presented to Akbar in November 1589. The 1589–1590 painting shows an episode from June 1494 at Kuva, in Fergana, now eastern Uzbekistan: on an overcrowded bridge, horses and camels were pushed over the side into the water, while an epidemic also killed horses in the camp. The painter included two dead animals and a cooking tent beside the river. By pairing the memoir’s written recollection with a painted scene, Akbar’s workshop made Babur’s Central Asian experience legible to a later Mughal court.

Herat painters in Safavid and Mughal books

Herat, in present-day Afghanistan, was a major Timurid court and bookmaking center. A manuscript of Saadi’s Persian poem Bustan, made for Sultan Husayn Bayqara’s library and dated by the text’s closing note to 1488, includes illustrations by the painter Behzad. Text panels were fitted into the painted page design, and the calligrapher Sultan Ali Katib worked closely with Behzad. The writing, lettering and pictures were arranged as parts of the page.

Behzad probably spent the last years of his life in Tabriz, at the Safavid court in northwestern Iran. Sources record his employment by Shah Tahmasp, although the date and circumstances of his move are unknown. Paintings signed by or attributed to Behzad later inspired artists at the Mughal court; some of his compositions were used there as models. His career and the later reuse of his designs show how painters and particular page layouts could move between rival dynasties.

The Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp also sponsored an illustrated Shahnameh, the Persian epic known as the “Book of Kings.” Artists in Tabriz’s royal workshop worked on the manuscript across two generations, creating 759 written leaves and 258 paintings. The book combined visual approaches associated with Timurid Herat and earlier Turkmen centers such as Tabriz and Shiraz. After its completion, Tahmasp sent it as a diplomatic gift to Ottoman Sultan Selim II in 1568. It remained in the palace library at Topkapi, where readers around 1800 added Ottoman Turkish descriptions of its paintings. The manuscript therefore served first as a Safavid royal commission, then as an Ottoman court object that continued to invite interpretation.

Jami’s grammar commentary in later schools

The poet and scholar Jami worked in the Timurid court city of Herat. In the last year of his life, 1492, he wrote a commentary on an Arabic grammar primer as a textbook for his son. The work soon acquired commentaries of its own and remained a teaching text into the nineteenth century. Printers later produced editions in Istanbul, India and Persia, extending Jami’s family teaching book into classrooms far beyond his court.

Qushji’s astronomy from Samarkand to Istanbul

At Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan, the Timurid ruler Ulugh Beg supported a madrasa, or college, and an observatory where scholars measured the sky and calculated astronomical tables. Their Zij-i Sultani, completed in 1437, was a handbook containing the positions of 992 stars, calendar calculations and trigonometric tables used to work out astronomical angles. Ali Qushji studied with scholars in Ulugh Beg’s circle and directed observational work used for the handbook. He also helped prepare and correct it, then wrote a commentary that pointed out errors in its calculations.

After Ulugh Beg’s death in 1449, Qushji and his students spent time in Herat and Tabriz. Around 1472 he moved with his family and pupils to Istanbul, where Sultan Mehmed welcomed them. Qushji taught mathematics first at the Sahn-i Thaman college and then at the Ayasofya college. His Persian astronomy treatise, written at Samarkand in 1458, survives in more than eighty manuscript copies and was commonly used for teaching. It was translated into Turkish and Sanskrit; the Sanskrit version carried this work of Islamic astronomy into the Indian subcontinent. In Istanbul, Qushji’s teaching and books gave the methods learned in the Timurid scholarly circle new students and institutional homes.

For a broader account, see Timurid History and Society.