A Century of Princes

Sources on Timurid History-and Art

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Selected and Translated by

W. M. Thackston

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A CENTURY OF PRINCES
"Bibi Khanim" Mosque, Samarqand. Peter M. Brenner © 1988.
 A Century of Prince~/
Sources on Timurid History and Art

Selected and Translated by

w. M. Thackston

*
Published in Conjunction with the Exhibition
"Timur and the Princely Vision,"
Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, 1989

*
The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
Cambridge, Massachusetts 1989
 · - n

-_I ,I

The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

at HarvardUniversity and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Copyright © 1989 M.I.T. LIBRARIES

ISBN 0-922673-11-X JUN 2 198~
RECEIVED as.=-- __
 .\ Contents

MAPS vii

GENEALOGICAL CHARTS x

INTRODUCTION 1

HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

History: Retrospective on the Timurid Years

Mir Dawlatshah Samarqandi's Tadhkirat al-shu'ara ll

Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama 63

Khwandamir's Habib al-siyar l01

Synopsis of the House of Timur 237

Autobiography: From Within the Ruling House

Babur Mirza's Baburnama: A Visit to Herat.. 247

Observations of the Outside

Ghiyathuddin Naqqash's Report on a Timurid Mission to China 279

Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi's Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar 299

THE ARTS

Artistic Production

Arzadasht 323

Miscellaneous Documents 329

Calligraphers and Artists

-\ Dost-Muhammad's Introduction to the Bahram Mirza Album 335

Malik Daylami's Introduction to the Amir Husayn Beg Album 351

v
 CONTENTS

Mir Sayyid-Ahmad's Introduction to the Amir Ghayb Beg Album 353

Mirza Muhammad-Haydar Dughlat's Tarikh-i Rashidi 357

Literary Conceits: Self-Images

Sultan-Husayn Mirza's "Apologia" 363

Mir Ali-Sher Nawa'i's Preface to His First Divan .373

GLOSSARY OF TI1l.ES AND TERMS ..........................•....•......•....................................... 379

BIBLIOGRAPHy 389

VI
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xvi

In the years between the death of the
conqueror Amir Timur in 1405 to the
death of his great-great-grandson Sultan-
Husayn Mirza in 1506 that comprised the
"century of princes," the vast territory
conquered by Timur, from Anatolia and
Syria in the west to the Indus and Turk-
istan in the east, underwent many and
varied political changes, shifts, conquests
and reconquests. Timur's empire was
weakened by the disunity of his suc-
cessors, who fought constantly with each
other, until gradually the western portions
of the realm were lost to the Turcomans
and the eastern and Central Asian por-
tions fell to the Uzbeks. Ultimately central
Iran and the heart of the empire, Khura-
san, fell to the Safavids, and the Timurids
lost power altogether. Throughout the
period, however, in the midst of the po-
litical instability', the dominant Persian ate
literary and artistic culture remained re-
markably stable, firmly ensconced, un-
challenged in its supremacy and unified in
its development.
The Turco-Iranian synthesis of Persian
cultural hegemony and Turco-Mongolian
political and military domination to which
the Timurids fell heir had long been in the
making and had held sway throughout the
area of Iranian cultural influence since the
fourteenth-century successors to Genghis
Khan and the Mongolian invasion of the
previous century. The successors to the
Mongolian Ilkhans, short-lived dynasties
conquered by Timur-the Jalayirids in
Baghdad and Azerbaijan, the Injus and
Muzaffarids in Shiraz, the Karts in
Herat-maintained and sponsored a re-
1
Introduction
fined and lively literary and artistic pro-
duction. The artistic milieu that had been
created under the Ilkhans and their suc-
cessors produced splendid examples of
the arts of the book, while in literature
there appeared the incomparable Persian
poet Hafiz of Shiraz.
The Barlas, the Chaghatay Turkic tribe
to which Timur belonged, had long been
Islamicized and had adopted Sufi shaykhs
in place of their former Buddhist sha-
mans; but apparently religion rested fairly
lightly on them. Ambiguously situated
between the Mongolian culture of eastern
Central Asia (Mughulistan) and the Is-
lamic culture of Persianized western
Central Asia, the Chaghatayids nurtured
tribal memories of greatness under the
Mongols. The the un-Islamicized Turks
and Turco-Mongolians of Mughulistan,
however, called them qaraunas, half-
castes, for their adoption of non-Mon-
golian ways. Perhaps in compensation for
such denigration, when Timur sought to
legitimize his de facto rule over vast
newly conquered areas, he 'consciously
evoked the Mongol empire of Genghis
Khan. Never using a rank more preten-
tious than "great commander" (amir
kabir), Timur gloried in the Mongolian
title of "son-in-law" (karagan) he
adopted when he married Saray Malik
Khanim, daughter of a Genghisid khan.
Timur's repeated patronage of Genghi-
sids like Soyurghatmish Khan, his son
Sultan-Mahmud Khan, and Toqtarmsh
Khan shows that for him legitimacy lay in
investiture by a Genghisid, not through
appeal to the Islamic allegiances of Per-
2 A CENTURY OF PRINCES
sians, a race despised by steppe peoples
for being settled villagers and city-
dwellers yet ardently admired at the same
time for their cultural, literary and artistic
superiority. For Timur, Genghis Khan's
tor« and yasa (codes) were of at least
equal importance with the Islamic sha-
ri (a, for all the attempts by later historians
of the dynasty to portray Timur as a
model Muslim ruler. After Timur's death
his youngest son Shahrukh eventually
triumphed over his major rivals, Khalil-
Sultan, who used his Genghisid descent
through his mother to gather support.,
and Iskandar-Sultan, another grandson
who claimed designation by Timur.
Later dynastic historians portrayed
Shahrukh as a fully Islamicized, Per-
sianized monarch who justified his claim
to legitimate rule by appealing to the reli-
gious elements in society and resting his
claims upon a show of good works, piety
and dispensation of justice. The differ-
ence in emphasis is quite clear in the titles
on the tombstones of Timur and Shah-
rukh in Samarqand. On both the marble
slab covering Timur's grave in the crypt
of the Gur-i Mir and on the nephrite
cenotaph in the mausoleum Timur is
called "great sultan and most noble kha-
qan," with no further titles and no spe-
cifically Islamic epithets-instead, the in-
scription gives the lineage the Timurids
claimed back to the Mongolian progeni-
trix Alanqoa and stresses the Barlas'
claim to collateral relationship with
Genghis Khan. Shahrukh's tombstone,
on the other hand, placed by his daughter
Payanda Sultan, has typically Islamic
phraseology. Beginning with the Muslim
testament of faith, it continues: "This is a
garden of paradise wherein rests His
Majesty the pious sultan and emperor,
sultan of sultans, succor of the state, the
world and religion, Shahrukh Bahadur
Sultan, may God Most High cause him to
dwell on the throne of His pleasure and
crown him with the diadem of benefi-
cence,"!
Four of Shahrukh's sons well illustrate
the various paths open to Persianized
princes of the Timurid line. Ulughbeg
became the scholar-king, ruling in
Samarqand and not only patronizing but
actually contributing to a standard work
on astronomy; Baysunghur became the
patron of the arts, sponsoring during his
short lifetime the production of outstand-
ing examples of the arts of the book;
Ibrahim-Sultan was the pious governor
who earned his livelihood by copying
Korans; and Muhammad-Juki, insofar as
he is known for anything, gained a repu-
tation as a warrior athlete. And if Shah-
rukh succeeded in gaining the general
support of the religious elements in Per-
sian society, his son Ulughbeg and his
grandson Sultan-Muhammad did not al-
ways enjoy such cordial relationships
with the religious hierarchy, as several
incidents in history show (pp. 167-68,
161). Even Shahrukh was not beyond a
rebuff from the religious (p. 158).
By the end of the century a Timurid like
Sultan-Husayn Mirza could justify his
claim to legitimacy entirely by appeal to
Islamic sentiment. In his "Apologia" (pp.
373-78) Sultan-Husayn glories in his
eradication of heresies, his erection of
charitable institutions, his support of Is-
lamic learning through madrasas, his pa-
tronage of Sufis through khanaqahs, his
concern for the well-being of the peas-
antry and his laborious administration of
the religious endowments, carefully em-
phasizing that "others" had impiously
allowed heresies, ignored charitable insti-
tutions, impoverished the learned classes,
raped the peasantry and embezzled en-
dowments. It is interesting that, despite all
this appeal to Islamicization, Babur Mir-
za's comments on the society of early
ISee A. A. Semenov, "Nadpisi na nadgro-
biyakh Timura i ego potomkov v Gur-i Emirc,"
Epigraftka Vostoka 2 (1948): 49-62; 3 (1949):
46-54.
 INlRODUCTION
sixteenth-century Herat reveal that social-
ly the Genghisid tora was still very much
alive. Court etiquette and ritual were ob-
viously still functioning much according
to the tora, even if the legal foundation of
legitimacy was no longer based upon
Genghisidism. By Babur's time the
Timurid hold on legitimacy had become
so strong that warlords in Central Asia
carried Timurid princes in their retinues to
legitimize their activities much as Timur
had used Genghisid khans to the same
purpose.
A significant trend manifested during
the Timurid period is the emergence of
identifiable individuals. In literature the
individual begins to emerge from the ty-
pologized class to which he belongs. Of
course, Persian biographical works had
always given the relevant information of
birth, death, and works, perhaps along
with some anecdotes for notables, but
over the course of the fifteenth century
something more is added, at first an al-
most imperceptible heightening of indi-
vidual characteristics and traits, even of
psychological motivation, a development
that blossoms during the Safavid and
Mughal period. Makarim al-akhlaq,
Khwandamir's panegyric on Mir Ali-
Sher Nawa'i, paved the way for such
full-fledged biographies as Nihawandi's
Ma' athir-i Rahimi, a biography of the
sixteenth-century Mughal grandee Abdul-
Rahim Khankhanan. And Babur's auto-
biographical memoirs, perhaps the first
true autobiography in all of Islamic liter-
ature, and certainly the first royal auto-
biography, was followed by his daughter
Gulbadan Begim' s memoirs of her
brother, the Humayunnama, and his
great-grandson Jahangir's memoirs, the
Tuzuk-i Jahangiri.
Even artists and artisans emerge from
the obscurity of centuries of anonymity
and are recorded by name-previously,
as in medieval Europe, artists and artisans
were generally nameless and unnamed
craftsmen, and only exceptionally were
3
the names of artists and calligraphers re-
corded. The trend can be seen already in
the Ilkhanid period with the emergence of
calligraphers as recognized artists in their
own right who signed and dated their
works. Painters emerge somewhat later.
During the Jalayirid period in Baghdad
and Azerbaijan painters became re-
nowned for their individual labors and
had works of art attributed to them. The
result of this trend is seen in Herat, where
artists, artisans and calligraphers are
mentioned by name in royal histories and
tadhkiras (notices of members of a given
class, region, profession, etc.).
The first portraits of individuals as in-
dividuals also appear in the late Timurid
period. To be sure, before this time pic-
tures purporting to be portraits of par-
ticular individuals were painted, but they
were not true portraits but depictions of
types-the prince, the scholar, the Sufi,
the warrior. Only with Bihzad and his
contemporaries do portraits begin to cap-
ture the essence of an individual with
distinctive features. When looking at the
portraits of Sultan-Husayn and Mir Ali-
Sher, the viewer feels that he might now
recognize them if he ran across them in
life. In literature too the individual begins
to emerge from the stereotypical class to
which he belongs.
*
The readings in this volume were se-
lected to accompany the exhibition,
"Timur and the Princely Vision" (Arthur
M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institu-
tion, Washington, D.C., and the Los An-
geles County Museum of Art in 1989).
Their aim is not to introduce the whole
kaleidoscope of changing rulers and war-
ring princes, but to provide selections
from texts that are representative of the
period or tell something about it-history,
biography, foreign mission reports, auto-
biography, miscellaneous documents and
4 A CENTURY OF PRINCES
petitions, short histories of calligraphy
and painting, and artful prose.
Historical selections are taken from Mir
Dawlatshah Samarqandi's Tadhkirat al-
shu'ara (1487), Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi's
Zajarnama (1425), and Khwandamir's
Habib al-siyar (1523-24). Most of the
histories contemporary with Timur have
perished, although by and large their texts
survive as they were incorporated into
later histories.s One of the surviving his-
tories, Nizamuddin Ali Shami's Zafar-
nama was utilized or incorporated into
Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi's more literary
work of the same name produced for
Ibrahim-Sultan in Shiraz, and several ex-
tracts of this latter work are given here.
As can be seen in Yazdi's introduction, in
which he outlines the methodology by
which the Zajarnama was composed (pp.
64-65), the histories and chronicles pro-
duced in Timur's time were generally pa-
tronized and controlled by Timur himself
and therefore, despite disclaimers, they
can be viewed as entirely self-serving and
self-aggrandizing.I Most surviving his-
tories of the early period, like Yazdi's
Zafarnama, Abdul-Razzaq's Matla'<i
sa'dayn (ca. 1470), Fasihi Khwafi's
Mujmal, Hafiz-i Abru's works, and Mir-
khwand's Rawdat al-safa, were written
either under the direct patronage of Shah-
rukh and his house or by men who were
intimately connected with Shahrukh, and
therefore a Shahrukhid bias predominates
in the histories. Given for a different per-
spective-is a translation of a little-known
synopsis of the House of Timur written
in 1413 for Timur's grandson, Iskandar-
Sultan, who ultimately lost out to his un-
2See John E. Woods, "The Rise of Tlmurid
Historiography," Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 46 (1987): 83-85.
3An interesting contrast to sponsored histories
is the account by Ahmad Ibn Arabshah, which
was written totally without official patronage and
is blatantly hostile to Timur. English translation
by J. H. Sanders, Tamerlane or Timur, the
Great Amir (London, 1936).
cle Shahrukh in his bid for control of the
empire.
Few texts dealing directly with artistic
production and/or methods have sur-
vived. Unique for the Timurid period is
the arzadasht (report) translated on pages
323-28 and attributed to Baysunghur's
atelier, in which individual artists and ar-
tisans are listed along with their current
projects. Included here are translations of
several prefaces written in the sixteenth
century for Safavid albums of calligraphy
and painting. They contain a great deal of
information relevant to book production
in the late fifteenth century, particularly
for master-pupil relationships among cal-
ligraphers and painters. However, from
the Timurid period itself there are no texts
like Dost-Muhammad's Preface or Mirza
Muhammad-Haydar's critical apprecia-
tion of calligraphers and artists from his
Tarikh-i Rashidi.
Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers
on the arts seldom state their eesthetie cri-
teria explicitly. There are manuals on the
production of tints and paints, such as
Simi of Nishapur's treatise and Sadiqi
Beg's sixteenth-century Qanun al-suwar;
but these give no hint of an eesthetic for-
mulation for artists. Sultan-Ali Mashhadi,
Majnun Rafiqi and Mir-Ali Harawi all
wrote treatises on calligraphy, but none
gives the slightest indication of the res-
thetic criteria by which calligraphy should
be judged. The tantalizing vocabulary
Mirza Muhammad Dughlat uses (for cal-
ligraphers: "a swift hand:' "a forceful
hand:' etc.; for artists: "good articulation
and draftsmanship," etc., pp. 357-362)
leaves the reader in doubt as to the precise
significance of his terminology because
there are so few parallel texts with which
to make a comparison. The treatment of
artists and calligraphers, even in later
tadhkiras, is so stereotypical and cliche-
ridden that it is usually difficult to gauge
the relative merits of the artists under
discussion.
 IN1RODUCI10N
.. With no native tradition of theater, the
Timurids nonetheless understood how to
impress with court ceremony and reveled
in spectacle and "ritualized theatricality."
Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi speaks of the for-
eign ambassadors and others who "en-
joyed the spectacular celebration and were
staggered by such magnificence" at the
gala qurultay outside of Samarqand in
1404. In 1456 Sultan Abu-Sa'id Kuragan
held a celebration in Herat "that was in no
way defective in splendor," says Dawlat-
shah.s Princely births, circumcisions and
marriages were celebrated by impressive
public feasts, and deaths were commem-
orated by public feedings on a vast scale.
During military campaigns and after bat-
tles the "carpet of revelry and enjoyment
was spread." Court historians take time
from their chronicles of battles, invasions
and court intrigue to notice novelties like
a clock with moving figurines made for
Mir Ali-Sher and a representation on
glass of various artisans made for Sultan
Abu-Sa'id.>
Timurid emissaries to foreign courts
particularly noticed spectacle and novelty.
Both Ghiyathuddin Naqqash on his mis-
sion to China (pp. 279-97) and Abdul-
Razzaq on his mission to south India (pp.
299-321) describe at great length the
spectacle of court entertainment, acrobats,
jugglers, singers and dancers, as well as
elaborate court ritual and the splendor of
throne rooms.
A text like Ghiyathuddin Naqqash's
report on the legation to China, written by
an artist, is revealing for the observations
made of a foreign environment. Ghiyath-
uddin is predictably taken with the ritual
of the Ming court and makes many ob-
servations about the carvings and statuary
of Buddhist temples. Nowhere, however,
does he mention that he has illustrated his
report with drawings or that he has made
drawings of what he saw, and nowhere,
4Dawlatshah, Tadhkira, p. 534.
5Khwandamir, HS. IV, 84.
5
in fact, does he mention Chinese painting
at all. Any attempt to connect Ghiyath-
uddin with existing Timurid chinoiserie
and Chinese-inspired painting, tempting
though it may be, must remain as sheer
speculation.
The "imperial sumptuousness" charac-
teristic of the age, reflected both in paint-
ings of court ceremony and in architec-
ture, was also manifested in the literary
style of the day. Prior to the Timurids, the
historians of the Ilkhanid period had rev-
eled in the injection of the most recherche
Arabicate vocabulary possible into a Per-
sian prose whose sentences wend their
way through labyrinths of subordination
and parallelism.f Writers of the Timurid
period discarded this unwieldy, often in-
comprehensible style in favor of a prose
that is fairly simple, straightforward Per-
sian. The simplicity of the vocabulary,
however, is overlaid-"studded," as the
practitioners of the style might have
said-with "jewels" of jingly rhyming
phrases and a liberal interspersion of po-
etry, the latter serving either to highlight
or to repeat the prose, never to explicate
or continue the narrative. The overall ef-
fect is not dissimilar to the visual effect of
a Timurid book illumination-arabesques
of elaborated simplicity, harmonious ele-
gance and sumptuousness.
Rhyming epithets, the eupheuistic
"gems" with which the prose is studded,
are not merely common but seemingly
indispensable. The Timurid army is never
simply "the army": it is lashkar-i zafar-
asar (the army that leaves footprints of
triumph) or siptih-i ptidisluih-i muzaffar-
/iva (the army of the padishah whose
banners are emblazoned with victory).
When the troops set off for battle, it is not
6The quintessential writer of this style is
Wassafu'l-Hadra, Shihabuddin Abdullah Shirazi,
whose history of the Mongol empire in Persia,
Tajziyat al-amsar wa-tazjiyat al-a'sar (The
break-up of metropolises and the passing of
epochs), has been compassionately characterized
as "turgid."
6 A CENnJRY OF PRINCES
the soldiers who move out led by the
prince but the rayat-i nusrat-ayat (ban-
ners [inscribed] with Koranic verses of
divine assistance) that are unfurled and
process in such-and-such a direction. A
prince's court is not simply a court: it is a
court at which the world takes refuge
(dargtih-i dlam-pandh).
Historiographic prose was also imbued
with elaborate metaphor drawn from Per-
sian poetic style. In a typical passage,
Khwandamir introduces autumn with the
following:
In early fall, when the cold foe began to plun-
der and pillage around the fringes of the garden
and orchard, and, as the frigid winds of the
autumnal army began to blow, when the
warmth of the summer air turned to retreat, the
emperor entered the plains of Mazanderan,?
When they indulge in such metaphors
historiographers draw upon the narrative
technique of the classical Persian poets
most admired at the time. To establish a
mood, both Firdawsi in the heroic Shah-
nama and Nizami in the romance Layli u
Majnun introduce episodes in the story
by means of metaphorical sketches of the
seasons of the year and the times of day.
For instance, Nizami writes in description
of dawn:
Shabglr chu charkh-i liijawardi I
arast kabudi-i ba zardi /I
Khandidan-i qurs-i an gu/-i zard I
afaq ba rang-i surkh-i gu/ kard.8
When the imprisoner of night tinged the
purple of the azure sphere with yellow, the
laughing (blossoming) of the disc of the yel-
low rose tinted the horizons a rosy scarlet
And in an autumnal metaphor introducing
a passage in which the death of one of the
major characters is to occur, Nizami
writes:
7Khwandamir, Habib al-siyar, III, 563.
8Nizami Ganja'i, Layli u Majnun, in Ku/-
liyyat-i khamsa (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1351), p.
518.
Shart ast ki waqt-i bargrezdn, r
khunaba shawad zi barg rezdn. /I
Khiin-l ki buwad duriin-i har shiikh I
biriin chakad az masiimm-i surakh.9
It is a condition of the time of leaf-shedding
that ruddy sap pour from leaves: the blood that
is inside every branch drips out through pores.
The reader will also note that the mixed
metaphor, so deplored in English stylis-
tics, is in Persian style not considered
faulty; it is unabashedly used by some of
t~e best stylists of fifteenth-century Per-
SIan.
The devices employed by writers of
historiography serve, in addition to cre-
ating an "artful" prose, to set the events at
a remove and, to an extent, to mask what
must have been an unpleasant reality, in
which almost constant war, devastation
and despotism played major roles, and
transform that reality into a cool, stately
image of regality and control, the image
the Timurids were always careful to cul-
tivate.
Although Persian was the major lan-
guage of Timurid letters and historiogra-
phy, it was not the only language used.
Persian had held the highest literary status
ever since it re-emerged as a court lan-
guage in the tenth century, and the pres-
tige of Persian literary culture was unas-
sailable. However, the Timurids' native
tongue was not Persian but Chaghatay
Turkish. Throughout the period various
attempts were made to turn this dialect of
Turkish into a literary vehicle. Early in the
period, under Timur and Shahrukh,
Turkish scribes called bakhshis wrote
documents in Turkish using the Uighur
script of eastern Turkistan, in a vertically
oriented variant of which Mongolian is
still written today. Although most of the
examples of Chaghatay from Timur and
Shahrukh's time are decrees, writs of fief,
etc., there were also some literary mani-
festations, including the anonymous (and
now lost) Turkish versified history of
9Nizami, Layli u Majnun, p. 587.
 INTRODUCTION
Timur's campaigns and Turkish poetry
written by Haydar Khwarazmi for Iskan-
dar-Sultan. Outstanding calligraphic ex-
amples of Turkish in the Uighur script are
the lavishly illustrated Bibliotheque Na-
tionale Mi'rajnama and the Mongol-
Timurid genealogy in Istanbul (Topkapi
Sarayi Miizesi, H.21S3, foIl. 32-43). By
the middle of the century, the Uighur
script was abandoned in favor of the
dominant Arabic script. With no native
literary tradition to speak of, Chaghatay
literature developed completely under the
influence of Persian, accepting wholesale
not only a massive amount of vocabulary
but also the literary conventions of Per-
sian-rather as Middle English developed
under the domination of French.
Several examples of truly ornate, artful
prose are also included. A good illustra-
tion of the extent to which Persianization
in Chaghatay could be carried is Mir Ali-
Sher's preface to his first Chaghatay
divan (pp. 363-72). Divan prefaces of-
fered poets an opportunity to exercise
their wits and prose skills to produce a
text that was as ornate, elaborate and re-
plete with metaphor, allusion and quota-
tion as possible. The preface to a divan
was called debacha, the same word used
to refer to the elaborate illuminations at
the beginning of costly and regal books.
Debacha means "brocade," and not only
do the intricately intertwining patterns of
an illumination resemble brocade designs,
but also the similarly intricate verbal pat-
terns of a divan preface are shot through
with multifarious rhetorical ornamenta-
tion. As an illustration, the sample text
from Mir Ali-Sher's debacha given be-
low consists of approximately 70 percent
Persian words (indicated by boldface):
Fasahat dtvanrnrng gazalsaraylarr tab'
maxzanIdIn ~oridabal 'a~iqlar xirman-i
janIga ot salgu dek, bir ata~in la'i nazm
silkiga tarta alrnagaylar, agar soz debacasln
01 sanl' javahir-i hamdi bila m urassa'
qrlmagaylar kim 'i~q ahlin almas·i lisan
~arafi va gawhar-i bayan lutfi bila sayir.i
insannIng durratuttaJi qIldI.
7
When the ghazal singers of the divan of
eloquence hurl fire from the repository of
poetic nature into the tinder of distracted
lovers' souls, they cannot string one fiery
ruby onto the cord of poetry if they do not
stud the introduction to their poetry with
gems of praise for the Creator, who estab-
lished the inamorati as the jewel in the
crown of all humanity through the nobility
of their diamond tongues and the pearls of
their graceful expression.
Equally Persianate in both vocabulary and
tone is Sultan-Husayn Mirza's Chaghatay
"Apologia" (pp. 373-78).
In contrast to these, in a typical para-
graph of Babur Mirza's memoirs, a text
in which the author makes practically no
attempt to write artful prose, and which
can be assumed to be much closer to
Chaghatay Turkish as it was normally
used by an educated speaker, the Persian
vocabulary not only is of much less fre-
quency (roughly 20 percent) but is gen-
erally limited to specifically Persian ate
terms like suhbat (convivial gathering),
sunih; (long-necked bottle), and Islamic
terminology like nass-i qdti (bindingI
text, absolute stipulation):
A~ tartlldi, Bavujiid kim sub bat yok edi, a~
tartrladurgan yerda ~ira qoyup altun va kiimii~
surabtlamt ~ira ustiga qoydIlar. Burunlar biz-
ning ata-aqa Cinggiz torasini garib ri'ayat
qilurlar edi. Majlista va divanda, toy va asta,
olturmaqta va qoymaqta, xilaf-i tOra i~ qil-
maslar edi. Cinggiz Xannmg torasi nass-l
qati' emastur kim albatta kisi anmg bila
'amal qIlgay. Hac kimdin yaxst qa'Ida qalgan
bolsa, aning bila 'amal qilmaq kerak, Agar
ata yaman i~ qilgan bolsa, yax~I i~ bila badal
qilmaq kerak, A~tIn song atlanip W~kanycrga
keldim, Bizning ordu bila mtrzalarnmg or-
dusrnmg arasr bir ~ar'i bolgay edi.l?
Food was served. Although it was not a
convivial assembly, in the place where food
was being served trays were put, and gold and
silver vessels were set on the trays. In former
times our fathers and forefathers meticulously
observed the Genghisid Code. In assemblies
and court, at feasts and dinners, in seating and
serving, they did nothing counter to the code.
lOBabur, Baburnama. fol. 186b-187a.
8 A CENTURY OF PRINCES
However, Genghis Khan's code is not a bind-
ing text according to which a person must act
absolutely. One must act in accordance with a
good rule when someone leaves one behind;
if, however, an ancestor has done a bad thing,
it should be replaced by a good one. After
dining we mounted our horses and returned to
where we were camped. Between our camp and
the mirzas' camp was one league.
Chaghatay literature had a brief flores-
cence in Herat at the end of the fifteenth
century, when Chaghatay letters were ac-
tively patronized by Mir Ali-Sher Nawa'i
and Sultan-Husayn Mirza. The eventual
fall of Herat to the Safavids, however,
ended Chaghatayid domination in the
area, and Chaghatay Turkish quickly dis-
appeared from the literary scene. Al-
though the Safavids themselves were
speakers of the closely related Turcoman
dialect, and many of the royal family, in-
cluding the founder Shah Isma oil I, com-
posed poetry in Turcoman, no serious at-
tempt was ever made to make Turkish a
rival of Persian within the Iranian heart-
land.
Babur Mirza and his followers took
Chaghatay Turkish into the Indian sub-
continent, and many of the Chaghatay
elite composed Turkish poetry within the
first and second generation, but particu-
larly in India, where Persian had been the
sole language of administration and bu-
reaucracy since the eleventh century, the
Persian ate tradition was much too domi-
nant to challenge, and by Akbar's gen-
eration in the mid-sixteenth century
Babur's memoirs had to be translated into
Persian.
* Toqtamish, also spelled Toghtamish and
The reader will undoubtedly find the
array of Timurid princes, all of whom are
styled Mirza (from amirzada, offspring
of the amir, Amir Timur), even more be-
wildering because of the frequent occur-
rence of princes who bear not only the
same name (Baysunghur, Pir Muham-
mad) but also similar names (Sultan-
Muhammad, Muhammad-Sultan, etc.).
Fairly complete genealogical tables are
given for reference (pp. x-xiv).
It would have been desirable to indicate
in the gealogical tables the marital rela-
tionships among the Timurids, but given
the problems posed by multiple marriages
of both sexes, and the limitation imposed
by a sheet of paper with but four direc-
tions and two dimensions, it has proved
impossible. Suffice it to say that by con-
stant intermarriage most of the House of
Timur were at least double cousins to
each other by the third generation. Sultan-
Husayn Mirza's lineage (p. xv) illustrates
the point.
Personal names and terms of Arabo-
Persian origin are rendered as normally
transliterated but without those encum-
brances, diacritical dots and macrons,
meaningless to those who do not know
the Arabic script. The e and 0 vowels that
in Iran later merged with i and u have
been retained in order to reflect the fif-
teenth-century pronunciation (Ali-Sher,
not Ali-Shir; Koh, not Kuh). Culturally
important terms without English equiva-
lents are fully transliterated and explained
in the Glossary of Titles and Terms (pp.
379-87).
Names and terms of Turkic origin are
written with front-back vocalic opposi-
tion indicated (iii, idu, 010, iila). The
spelling of Turkic and Turco-Mongolian
names and terms in Arabic script was far
from standardized during the Timurid pe-
riod. In order to avoid needless confusion
a normalized spelling has been adopted
throughout (e.g., Qutlugh, which is also
often spelled Qutluq in the sources; and
Tokhtamish),
Tamerlane's given name was Temtir
("iron"), but the Persianized form, Timur,
from which the adjective Timurid is de-
rived, has been adopted throughout. All
others with this name have been spelled
as "Temiir."
 INTRODUCTION 9

A hyphen distinguishes names com-

pounded with elements like Sultan, Mir
and Shah (e.g., Sultan-Ahmad, Mir-Ali,
Shah-Husayn) from names in which
those elements are titles (Sultan Abu-
Sa'id, Mir Ali-Sher). Discounting the
frequently occurring names in -uddin, the
second of two consecutive given names is
generally a patronymic, i.e., Shamsuddin
Muhammad Ali is Shamsuddin Muham-
mad son of Ali.
Place names are given their generally
accepted English spellings where one ex-
ists (Herat, Kerman, Delhi). Note partic-
ularly that, unless specifically stated as
"Arab Iraq," throughout the text "Iraq"
refers to "Persian Iraq," which is more or
less equivalent to modern western Iran.
"Arab Iraq" refers to Mesopotamia, and
the two regions are often referred to to-
gether as "the two Iraqs" (Iraqayn).