Politics, Patronage and the

Transmission of Knowledge
in 13th–15th Century Tabriz

Edited by
Judith Pfeifffer

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2014

© 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-25539-5

 CONTENTS

List of Contributors  ........................................................................................ vii

List of Illustrations .......................................................................................... xi

Introduction. From Baghdad to Marāgha, Tabriz, and Beyond:

Tabriz and the Multi-Cephalous Cultural, Religious, and
Intellectual Landscape of the 13th to 15th Century Nile-to-Oxus
Region ............................................................................................................ 1
 Judith Pfeifffer

PART ONE
INTELLECTUALS, BUREAUCRATS AND POLITICS

Hülegü and His Wise Men: Topos or Reality?  ....................................... 15

 Reuven Amitai

ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla Simnānī’s Religious Encounters at the Mongol

Court near Tabriz ....................................................................................... 35
 Devin DeWeese

“Tabrizis in Shiraz are Worth Less Than a Dog:” Saʿdī and Humām,
a Lyrical Encounter  ................................................................................... 77
 Domenico Ingenito

Confessional Ambiguity vs. Confessional Polarization: Politics and

the Negotiation of Religious Boundaries in the Ilkhanate ............ 129
 Judith Pfeifffer

PART TWO
THE TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE

In Pursuit of Memoria and Salvation: Rashīd al-Dīn and His

Rabʿ-i Rashīdī  .............................................................................................. 171
 Birgitt Hofffmann

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vi contents

Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allāh al-Hamadhānī’s Manuscript Production

Project in Tabriz Reconsidered  ............................................................. 187
 Nourane Ben Azzouna

What Was the Purpose of Astronomy in Ījī’s Kitāb al-Mawāqif

fī ʿilm al-kalām? ........................................................................................... 201
 Robert Morrison

New Light on Shams: The Islamic Side of Σὰμψ Πουχάρης  ................ 231
 F. Jamil Ragep

PART THREE
TABRIZ AND INTERREGIONAL NETWORKS

Civitas Thauris. The Signifijicance of Tabriz in the Spatial

Frameworks of Christian Merchants and Ecclesiastics in the
13th and 14th Centuries  ............................................................................ 251
 Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

“Rich in Goods and Abounding in Wealth:” The Ilkhanid and

Post-Ilkhanid Ruling Elite and the Politics of Commercial
Life at Tabriz, 1250–1400  .......................................................................... 301
 Patrick Wing

Tabriz: International Entrepôt under the Mongols .............................. 321

 Sheila S. Blair

Tabrizi Woodcarvings in Timurid Iran  .................................................... 357

 Joachim Gierlichs

Imperial Aqquyunlu Construction of Religious Establishments

in the Late Fifteenth Century Tabriz  ................................................... 371
 Ertuğrul Ökten

Index  ................................................................................................................... 387

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 TABRIZ: INTERNATIONAL ENTREPÔT UNDER THE MONGOLS

Sheila S. Blair

In the autumn of 1271, the seventeen-year-old Venetian globetrotter Marco

Polo set offf on a journey to China with his father Niccolò and his uncle
Mafffeo. Traveling overland from Acre through Anatolia, the group reached
the city of Tabriz in the spring of the following year. In memoirs dictated
to the romance-writer Rustichello of Pisa nearly three decades later while
in prison, Marco Polo opened his description of the Ilkhanid capital thus:
Tabriz is a large city in a province called Iraq, which has many cities and
towns. Since Tabriz is the most splendid city in [the] province I will tell you
about it. The people of Tabriz live by trade and industry; for cloth of gold and
silk is woven here in great quantity and of great value. The city is so favor-
ably situated that it is a market for merchandise from India and Baghdad,
from Mosul and Hormuz, and from many other places; and many Latin mer-
chants come here to buy the merchandise imported from foreign lands. It is
also a market for precious stones, which are found here in great abundance.
It is a city where good profijits are made by traveling merchants.1
Marco Polo’s description of Tabriz and other cities in his Travels is the
product of an observant merchant and a professional romancer, an
account that highlights his commercial interests and his desire to eulogize.
By looking at material culture, we can learn more about this cosmopoli-
tan city, for buildings and objects are not just illustrations to history but
are themselves sources for history. The historian David Morgan recently
acknowledged history’s debt to art history, for it was the study of visual
culture that opened up new paths of inquiry into this period, showing it
to be one not just of conquest but also of culture.2
There are two ways to approach this investigation into the artistic evi-
dence for the cosmopolitan nature of Tabriz under the Mongols from the
late thirteenth to the fijifteenth century. First, we can examine what art can
tell us about the varied sources available in this international entrepôt,
and second we can look at what things—whether goods, techniques,

1  Marco Polo, The Travels, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin books, 1958), 57.
Marco Polo used the name Tauris in the original.
2 David Morgan, “The Mongol Empire in World History,” Beyond the Legacy of Genghis
Khan, ed. Linda Komarofff (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 425–37, esp. 426.

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322 sheila s. blair

motifs, or ideas—were taken from Tabriz and adopted elsewhere. In other

words, we can examine both the import and the export sides of the situ-
ation. I will do both here.
Let us begin with the question of what sources were available in Tabriz
at the turn of the fourteenth century around the time that Marco Polo
(and other travelers) passed through the city. The answer is a great many,
as Tabriz’s range of contacts traversed Eurasia, from England to China.3
One of the easiest ways to grasp the extraordinary breath of available
sources is to look at a new artistic project undertaken at this time: the
Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh or Compendium of Chronicles, written by and produced
for the Ilkhanid vizier Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 718/1318).4
The idea of ateliers to produce illustrated books was new to Iran, as
was this kind of world history. Books with pictures had been produced
earlier in the region, but they had not been a major artistic form.5 The
Rabʿ-i Rashīdī, the scriptorium that Rashīd al-Dīn fijinanced in his pious
foundation outside Tabriz, was one of the fijirst centers in Iran for the pro-
duction of illustrated manuscripts. Furthermore, following stipulations
laid out in the addenda appended to the endowment a few years after it
had been drawn up in Rabīʿ I, 709/August 1309,6 the author required his
workers to produce two large copies of his works (one in Arabic, the other
in Persian) every year. The artists were thus pressed to complete work
quickly.7 Extant copies of the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh show that they carried out
their instructions faithfully.
The new text was an extraordinary enterprise, quite unlike anything
produced previously by Muslim historians. The fijirst part, begun for the
Ilkhanid sultan Ghazan (r. 1295–1305), treated the history of the Mongols.
As one of the sources closest to its subject, it has received much scrutiny
from historians. No copy survives intact from Ilkhanid times, but some
detached illustrations mounted in albums in Istanbul and Berlin are

3 See also the paper by Patrick Wing in this volume.

4 See also Birgitt Hofffmann’s paper at this conference.
5 Sheila S. Blair, “The Development of the Illustrated Book in Iran,” Muqarnas 10 [Essays
in Honor of Oleg Grabar] (1992): 266–74.
6 For the dating of these addenda, which are conflated in the published edition of
Rashīd al-Dīn’s endowment, see Nourane Ben Azzouna’s paper in this volume.
7 Sheila S. Blair, “Writing and Illustrating History: Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-tavarikh,”
Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts, papers
from an international conference held in Istanbul in 2001, eds. Judith Pfeifffer and
Manfred Kropp, Beiruter Texte und Studien 111 (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen-
Morganländischen Gesellschaft, 2007), 57–66.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 323

thought to have illustrated this part of the text.8 These paintings include
large double-page compositions that typically show important events
from the reigns of various Mongol rulers, such as one double page in the
Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (Diez A, folg. 70, s. 7 and 4) usually identifijied as
illustrating Hülegü’s capture of Baghdad in 656/1258.9
The second part of the Compendium of Chronicles, composed for
Ghazan’s brother and successor Öljeytü (r. 1305–15), is a history of the
non-Mongol peoples of Eurasia. Less well studied by historians, it is, par-
adoxically, more innovative historiographically, as it represents the fijirst
attempt to write universal history. It testifijies to the global vision of the
Mongols. It also illustrates their desire to link themselves with past rulers
of Iran, thereby legitimizing themselves as present rulers of the world.
About one half of an Arabic copy of the history of the non-Mongol
peoples dated 714/1314–15 survives, divided between Edinburgh University
Library (ms. Arab 20) and the Khalili Collection in London (ms. 727).10
Its illustrations show the diverse range of sources available to artists in
Ilkhanid Iran to illustrate their global vision. Since the text was such a
new enterprise, often based on oral information, the artists had to devise
new strategies to illustrate it, gathering pictorial material from whatever
models they could fijind.
To illustrate scenes from the lives of Muḥammad and other fijigures from
the Old Testament, for example, the artists in Rashīd al-Dīn’s scriptorium
turned to Christian devotional texts that Western travelers had brought
to the Ilkhanid court. One well-known example is the scene showing the
“Birth of the Prophet Muḥammad” (Edinburgh University Library, ms. 20,
fol. 44a).11 We do not know about any earlier illustrations of this subject
in the Islamic tradition. Rather, as Sir Thomas Arnold pointed out already

  8 Karin Rührdanz, “Illustrationen zu Rašīd al-Dīns Ta⁠ʾrīḫ-i mubārak-i Ġāzānī,” L’Iran

face à la domination mongole, ed. D. Aigle (Tehran, 1997), 295–306; Linda Komarofff and
Stefano Carboni, eds., The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia,
1256–1353 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), nos. 17–32; Dschingis Khan
und seine Erben: Dar Weltreich der Mongolen (Munich: Nirmer, 2005), nos. 279–302.
  9 Dschingis Khan und seine Erben, no. 279.
10 David Talbot Rice, The Illustrations to the ‘World History’ of Rashīd al-Dīn, ed. Basil
Gray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976); Basil Gray, The World History of
Rashid al-Din: A Study of the Royal Asiatic Society Manuscript (London: Faber and Faber,
1978); Sheila S. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din’s Illustrated History of
the World, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. XXVII, ed. Julian Raby
(London: The Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford
University Press, 1995).
11  Komarofff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan, fijig. 130.

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324 sheila s. blair

in 1928,12 the artists in Rashīd al-Dīn’s scriptorium readily adapted a

scene of the Nativity, transforming the Three Magi of the Christian story
into waiting women and Joseph into the Prophet’s uncle, although these
fijigures play no part in Rashīd al-Dīn’s narrative.
This is but one case in which artists in Tabriz copied from Western
sources to illustrate the history of the non-Mongol peoples in Rashīd
al-Dīn’s Compendium of Chronicles.13 Another is “The Death of Moses”
(fijig. 1), whose setting is loosely modeled on “St John on Mt Patmos,” the
opening illustration in copies of the Apocalypse.14 The last book of the
New Testament, also known as Revelation, this admonitory text with
the visions of the Apostle John became particularly popular in England in
the mid-thirteenth century, as shown by at least twenty surviving man-
uscripts. The text’s description of the struggle of good against evil, the
persecution of the Church, and the fijinal establishment of the Heavenly
Jerusalem seems to have had historical resonance there, where some even
connected it with the coming of the Mongols from the East and rumors
about their taking of Jerusalem. The fijirst English copies of the text were
probably made for clerics, but others were increasingly produced for the
private devotions of aristocratic lay readers.15 In the opening illustration
in these English manuscripts, St John is typically depicted reclining amidst
the mountains of Patmos, as in the Dyson-Perrins Apocalypse in the Getty
Foundation, attributed to 1255–60 (fijig. 2), and in another manuscript in
the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, attributed to 1265–70.16 Illustrations
in both manuscripts are done in colored washes, the same technique used

12 Sir Thomas Arnold, Painting in Islam: A Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim
Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), reprint (New York: Dover, 1965), 99.
13 See also Terry Allen, “Byzantine Sources for the Jāmiʿ al-tāwarīkh of Rashīd al-Dīn,”
Ars Orientalis 15 (1985): 121–36.
14 Komarofff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan, fijig. 174; Grove Dictionary of Art, ed.
Jane Turner: “Apocalypse” by Suzanne Lewis.
15 The Lambeth Apocalypse, for example, was made for Eleanor de Quincy, Countess
of Winchester. It is the only surviving manuscript whose patron is specifijied. Nigel John
Morgan: The Lambeth Apocalypse: manuscript 209 in Lambeth Palace Library: a critical
study (London: Harvey Miller, 1990).
16 The Dyson-Perrins Apocalypse, named for its former owner, the bibliophile and busi-
nessman whose family fortune derives from Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, is now
in the Getty Foundation (ms. Ludwig III, 1); see the museum’s description at http://www
.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=1574. A facsimile of the Gulbenkian
Apocalypse (ms. L.A. 139) was published as Apocalipsis Gulbenkian (Barcelona: M. Moleiro,
2001). The codex probably belonged to Pope Clement IX (1667–1669). In the latter half of
the nineteenth century, it passed to Cesare Battaglini de Rimini whose wife was a descen-
dant of Clement IX and then to Henry Yates Thompson who owned it from 1899 to 1920,
when it was bought by Calouste Gulbenkian.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 325

Fig. 1: “The Death of Moses” from a copy of the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh dated
714/1314–15 and probably made at Tabriz. Folio 37.0 × 25.5 cm. The Nasser D.
Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, London, ms. 727, fol. 54b.

in copies of the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh, but on parchment, as opposed to the

paper used as the support for the Compendium of Chronicles.
English manuscripts of the Apocalypse may well have served as sources
for Mongol artists in Iran, for there were direct contracts between the
two empires. Both Plantagenet Kings Edward I and II, for example, sent
missions from London to the Ilkhanid court in hopes of securing an alli-
ance against the Mamluks.17 The embassy led by Sir Geofffrey Langley
reached the court of the Ilkhanid Gaykhatu in 1292.18 Documents from the
embassy’s mission from Genoa to Tabriz preserved in the Public Record
Offfijice in London show that in addition to Langley, the group comprised
several esquires, a chaplain, four men-at-arms, a trumpeter, a barber,
three falconers, a cook, and several garçons. The mission brought several
gyrfalcons as diplomatic gifts, but the chaplain and others may well have
carried personal devotional literature as well.

17 Laurence Lockhart, “Relations between Edward I and Edward II and the Ilkhans of
Persia,” Iran 6 (1968): 23–31.
18 See also Langley’s biography by D.O. Morgan in Oxford Dictionary of National Bio-
graphy, available on-line at http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.bc.edu/view/article/60822
?docPos=2.

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326 sheila s. blair

Fig. 2: “Saint John on Mt Patmos,” from the Dyson-Perrins copy of the Apocalypse,
probably made 1255-60 at London. Folio 31.9 × 22.5 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles, Ms. Ludwig III 1, fol. 2.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 327

In a parallel fashion, artists in Tabriz looked to Chinese models to illustrate

the history of China in the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh.19 In the section recounting
the reigns of individual emperors, the artists copied from Chinese wood-
block-printed scrolls, but without understanding all the implications of
the original iconography. For example, on the page depicting the emper-
ors Shi Huangdi of the Qin dynasty and Gao Zu of the Han dynasty (fijig. 3),
the emperors are shown reclining, but seem to float awkwardly in mid-air
as the artist did not depict the requisite pillows used in the originals. The
Ilkhanid artists also did not understand all the implications of the sarto-
rial details. Emperor Shi Huangdi, for example, wears inappropriate head-
gear, the soft cap with tails donned by servants rather than the imperial
mortarboard. In other cases (e.g., Khalili Collection ms. 727, fol. 14a), the
emperor is shown with his hands covered like a servant.
In a similar way, artists in Rashīd al-Dīn’s scriptorium adapted illus-
trations in Chinese geographies. The scene depicting the “Mountains
between India and Tibet” (Khalili Collection ms. 727, fol. 21a), for exam-
ple, resembles the map of the Yinxian border (Ningbo) in a copy of the
Baoqing Simingzhi, a gazetteer of the Siming region printed in 1272.20 Not
only is the general composition similar in both illustrations, but so is the
way in which rivers are represented by segmented patterns.
This borrowing between cultures has often been explained as a con-
sequence of the so-called pax Mongolica, when Mongols ruled much of
Eurasia between 1250 and 1350, but as the historian Peter Jackson pointed
out recently, there was not much peace in this pax.21 Trade flourished
despite—rather than because of—political rivalries, with the Mongols
not merely a medieval UPS (United Parcel System), shuttling around the
steppe delivering packages of “influences” but rather active enablers in
facilitating cultural transmission in a wide range of fijields from histori-
ography, geography and cartography, astronomy, agriculture, cuisine,
medicine, and printing to art.22 This was a period of active trade in com-
modities and ideas, artistic and otherwise.

19  Blair, Compendium of Chronicles.

20 Komarofff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan, fijig. 162; Yuka Kadoi, Islamic
Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 169–70
and fijigs. 5.8 and 5.9.
21  Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Harlow: Persona/Longman,
2005), 309–10.
22  Thomas Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997) and idem, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia

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328 sheila s. blair

Fig. 3: “Emperors Shi Huangdi of the Qin dynasty and Gao Zu of the Han dynasty,”
from a copy of the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh dated 714/1314–15 and probably made at Tabriz.
Folio 37.0 × 25.5 cm. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, London,
ms. 727, fol. 11a.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 329

The Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh exemplifijies such active exchange between cultures.

The text contains a long section on the history of Tibet. Such a focus
on that region is not surprising because of the Mongols’ interest in the
Red-hat Buddhism practiced there. The Great Khan Qubilai adopted this
form of Buddhism in China under the monk Phagspa (1235–80). Qubilai’s
brother Hülegü, founder of the Ilkhanid line in Iran, may also have
adopted Buddhism, which grew particularly strong there under his grand-
son Arghun (r. 1284–91) before Ghazan’s offfijicial conversion of the Ilkhanid
state to Islam in 695/1295.23
Such an interest in Tibetan Buddhism was furthered by trade mis-
sions, as shown by the survival of Mongol textiles in monasteries in this
mountainous region. Virtually none of these textiles has survived in the
lands where they were made, where they were literally worn to death,
but scholars have begun to document their production through survivals
elsewhere, fijirst from European treasuries and tombs and more recently
from Tibetan monasteries. Following the dissolution of these monasteries
after the Chinese occupation of the region in the 1950s, many textiles have
appeared on the art market, though their provenance is hard to document
and often conjectural.
Textiles said to have come from Tibet include a group of fijive carpets,
all showing stylized animals with raised forelegs.24 The largest and best
known of the group is an intact carpet in New York (fijig. 4).25 A similar car-
pet showing a stylized animal with raised foreleg is depicted in the great-
est manuscript produced for the Ilkhanids: a magnifijicent, though sadly
dismembered, copy of the Persian national epic dubbed the Great Mongol
Shahnama. The carpet is shown there in the opening illustration, spread
under the throne of the evil Zahhak in the scene of his enthronement
(fijig. 5).26 On the basis of this comparison, Jon Thompson and other
scholars have recently pinpointed Tabriz and the surrounding Ilkhanid

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also the comments by Morgan in
“Mongol Empire in World History,” 426–27.
23 Sheila S. Blair, “Religious Art of the Ilkhanids,” Legacy of Genghis Khan, 104–33.
24 Jon Thompson, “Carpets in the Fifteenth Century,” Carpets and Textiles in the Iranian
World 1400–1700 (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2010), 30–57, especially note 54.
25 Daniel Walker, “Animal Rug,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Fall 1990), 12–13.
26 Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations
of the Great Mongol Shahnama (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980),
no. 1. Richard Ettinghausen, “New Light on early animal carpets,” Aus der Welt der isla-
mischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel, ed. R. Ettinghausen (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann,
1959), 93–116.

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330 sheila s. blair

Fig. 4: Wool animal carpet, Tabriz or environs, fourteenth century. 153 × 125.7 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Harris Brisbane Dick
Fund, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, Louis V. Bell Fund and Fletcher, Pfeifffer and
Rogers Funds, 1990 (1990.61).

domains as a major center of carpet production in the early fourteenth

century.27
The Ilkhanid realm and its capital Tabriz were certainly the center for
the production of other textiles, including the luxurious lampas weaves
of silk and gold called nasīj in Persian, nakh in Arabic, and panni tartarici

27 See the evidence in Thompson, “Carpets in the fijifteenth century.”

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 331

Fig. 5: “Enthronement of Zahhak” from the Great Mongol Shahnama, prob-

ably Tabriz, 1330s. Painting 24.3 × 19.7 cms. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington DC, Purchase F1923.5.

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332 sheila s. blair

(Tartar cloths) in the Italian sources.28 The most spectacular set, also said
to have come from Tibet, comprises large panels, each measuring more
than 2 × 1 meter, decorated with double niches that form an arcade when
fijitted around the interior of a tent to create textile architecture. Parts of fijive
panels are now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (TE.40), with a fur-
ther half-panel in the David Collection in Copenhagen (40/1997).29 These
sumptuous silk panels have been localized to eastern Iran or Central Asia
ca. 1300 because of their technique and iconography that mixes Chinese
motifs such as peonies, lotus flowers, and dragons with standard Iranian
ones such as roundels with paired birds.
One example of such “Tartar cloth” can be fijirmly localized to the
Ilkhanid court, almost certainly at their capital Tabriz, specifijically men-
tioned by Marco Polo as a center for production of this “cloth of gold:” a
striped silk now in the Dom and Diocesan Museum in Vienna (fijig. 6).30
The design on it comprises a wide band of staggered polylobed medallions
and ornamental diamonds with peacocks in the interstices. This band is
flanked by narrow bands of running animals and inscriptions, including
one with the name and titles that the Ilkhanid ruler Abū Saʿīd (r. 1318–35)
assumed after 1319. This silk must therefore have been an offfijicial fabric
(ṭirāz), not a commercial trade good produced for export. After Abū Saʿīd
died without direct heir, the textile with his name was no longer useful,
and it probably passed into the hands of an Italian merchant, who quickly
exported it to Europe. There, the textile was clearly deemed a luxury good
because it was soon transformed into the burial robe of the Hapsburg
prince, Archduke Rudolf IV, who died in Milan a mere three decades later
in 1365 and was buried in it in the ducal crypt in St. Stephen’s Cathedral
in his capital, Vienna, the city where the silk remains today.

28 Anne E. Wardwell, “Panni Tartarici: Eastern Islamic Silks woven with Gold and Silver
(13th and 14th Centuries),” Islamic Art 3 (1988–89): 95–174.
29 Jon Thompson, Silk: 13th to 18th Centuries: Treasures from the Museum of Islamic
Art, Qatar (Doha: National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage, 2004), no. 19; for the
Copenhagen panel, see Komarofff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan, no. 73 and Sheila
Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen
(Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum at Boston College, 2006), no. 12.
30 Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250–1800,
Pelican History of Art (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 20; Marcus
Ritter, “Kunst mit Botschaft: Der Gold-Seide-Stofff für den Ilchan Abū Saʿīd von Iran
(Grabgewand Rudolfs IV. in Wien)—Rekonstruktion, Typus, Repräsentationsmedium,”
and Márta Járo, “Der Metallfaden im Wiener Gold-Seide-Stofff für Abū Saʿīd,” Beiträge zur
Islamischen Kunst und Archäologie, vol. 2, eds. Markus Ritter and Lorenz Korn (Wiesbaden:
Reichert, 2010), 105–35 and 136–42.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 333

Fig. 6: Striped silk made for the Ilkhanid ruler Abū Saʿīd, probably at Tabriz,
1319–35, and then used for the burial robe of the Hapsburg prince, Archduke
Rudolf IV (d. 1365). Dom and Diocesan Museum, Vienna.

Textiles, whether carpets or cloth of gold, were not the only export from
Tabriz. The city was also the locus for the difffusion of ideas, including
architectural ones.31 We can trace this chain of transmission by looking at
the few architectural remains that have been preserved in Tabriz. By far
the largest is the Mosque of ʿAlī Shāh, sometimes called the Arg or cita-
del as it was used in this fashion by the Qajars in the nineteenth century
(fijigs. 7a and b).32 It comprises a single giant īwān (a barrel vaulted space

31 The basic survey of architecture in this period is Donald Wilber, The Architecture of
Islamic Iran: The Il Khanid Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). The major
buildings are covered in Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam 1250–1800, chapter 2,
5–20. See also “Ilkhanid architecture” by Sheila Blair in the Encyclopaedia Iranica and
“Religious architecture in Iran under the Ilkhanids and their successors” in the Cambridge
History of Religious Architecture (forthcoming).
32 Wilber, Architecture of Islamic Iran, no. 51; Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture
of Islam, 11–12 and fijig. 13; Sheila S. Blair “Arg-e ʿAlī Shāh,” Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif-i Buzurg-i

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334 sheila s. blair

Figs. 7a–b: Interior and exterior views of the qibla īwān in the Mosque of ʿAlī
Shāh in Tabriz, ca. 1315. Author’s photos.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 335

open at one end), measuring 65 × 30 meters. Enormous walls ten meters

thick were needed to support the vault, whose springing lines are set some
twenty-fijive meters above ground level. Contemporary sources report that
this tremendous construction was intended to surpass the celebrated
Sasanian īwān at Ctesiphon, which measures 50 by 25 meters and likewise
was roofed with a huge parabolic vault thirty-fijive meters high.33 The arch
at Ctesiphon was the focal point of the palace probably built by Khosrow I
Anushirwan (r. 531–79), and by imitating—and slightly surpassing—the
major pre-Islamic structure in the Ilkhanid winter capital, the mosque
of ʿAlī Shāh was undoubtedly meant to show that the Ilkhanids had sur-
passed even the greatest of the pre-Islamic kings of Iran.
While the mosque of ʿAlī Shāh may have looked backward for its pro-
totype, it in turn provided the model for future constructions, both in
Iran and elsewhere. Like many other buildings in the Ilkhanid period,
the mosque of ʿAlī Shāh was part of a multi-functional complex that pro-
vided instruction for both scholars and sufijis. The Moroccan globetrotter
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who visited the site in 1327, reported that it included a theo-
logical school (madrasa) to the right as one faces the qibla and a hospice
(zāwiya) to the left.34 The architectural historian Donald Wilber recon-
structed the plan of these buildings (fijig. 8), noting that their footprint is
conjectural, based on the plans of contemporary buildings and sized to fijit
his reconstruction of the original īwān, which may have fallen because it
was weakened by the doorway in the western wall to the madrasa.35
Although only the bare brick remains of this enormous construction,
further details about its original decoration are included in the description
by a handsome dawādār who accompanied the Mamluk amīr Aytamish on
a mission to the court of the Ilkhanid ruler Abū Saʿīd in 1322.36 According
to the Egyptian envoy, the īwān faced a huge and splendid court paved
with marble and surrounded by an arcade. In the center of the court was

Islāmī (Great Islamic Encyclopedia) (Tehran: Markaz-i Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif-i Buzurg-i Islāmī,
forthcoming). English synopsis trans. as “Arg-i ʿAlī Shāh.” Encyclopaedia Islamica 3 (2011):
610–614.
33 Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1996), 18:
483–84 “Ktesiphon” by G. Herrmann.
34 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa A.D. 1325–1354, trans. H.A.R. Gibb (reprint Delhi:
Manoharlal Publishers, 1993), 2: 345.
35 Wilber, Architecture of Islamic Iran, no. 51.
36 Donald Little, “Notes on Aytamish, a Mongol Mamluk,” Die islamische Welt zwischen
Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Festschrift für Hans Roemer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. U. Haarmann
and P. Bachmann, Beiruter Texte und Studien 22 (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen-
Morganländischen Gesellschaft, 1979), 387–401.

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336 sheila s. blair

Fig. 8: Plan of the Mosque of ʿAlī Shāh in Tabriz, ca. 1315. Adapted from Donald
Wilber, The Architecture of Islamic Iran: The Il Khanid Period (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1955), pl. 30.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 337

a square pool that measured one hundred fijifty cubits on a side. In the
center of the pool was a platform whose sides had statues of lions that
spurted water. Above the platform was an octagonal fountain with two
jets. None of this has survived, but the statues of lions that spouted water
recall the bases of the four columns around the pool in the tālār of the
seventeenth-century Safavid palace of Chihil Sutūn at Isfahan.37
The Mosque of ʿAlī Shāh in Tabriz also provided the model for build-
ings erected by the Ilkhanids’ rivals, the Mamluks in Cairo, notably the
Mosque of Sultan Ḥasan (1357–64), the largest and most impressive of all
Mamluk buildings in the city (fijig. 9).38 According to the Mamluk historian
al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), the īwān in the mosque was meant to be fijive
cubits wider than the arch at Ctesiphon, but several features of its lay-
out and function suggest that it also evoked Ilkhanid models. One telling
architectural feature is the position of the tomb chamber behind the īwān,
an arrangement used often in Ilkhanid architecture, both surviving (e.g.,
the tomb of Öljeytü’s son at Basṭām) and destroyed (e.g., Rashīd al-Dīn’s
tomb in the Rabʿ-i Rashīdī in Tabriz).39 One functional feature is the simi-
larity between the prayer rituals carried out in the tomb chambers in both
Tabriz and Cairo, notably the continuous reciting of the Qurʾan round the
clock near the window grille.40
Not surprisingly, patrons in both Ilkhanid Iran and Mamluk Egypt com-
missioned similar large Qurʾān manuscripts with which to carry out such
readings in their tombs. The classic type of Ilkhanid imperial Quran is a
thirty-volume manuscript copied on very large “baghdādī”-size sheets of
paper measuring some 70 x 100 cm. A single volume of one such manu-
script commissioned by Rashīd al-Dīn for his “pious foundation,” prob-
ably the Rabʿ-i Rashīdī in Tabriz (Istanbul, TKS EH 248), shows the typical
format of fijive lines per page used in these imperial manuscripts.41 These
enormous copies were designed for public display, as the spacious layout

37 Often illustrated; Sussan Babaie, Isfahan and its Palaces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008), 187 and n. 79, sees the lions as alluding to the well-established
Solomonic iconography of kingship.
38 Abdallah Kahil, The Sultan Hasan Complex in Cairo 1357–1364: A Case Study in the
Formation of Mamluk Style (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Würzburg, 2008).
39 Robert Hillenbrand, “The Flanged Tomb Tower at Basṭām,” and Sheila S. Blair, “The
inscription from the tomb tower at Bastam,” Art et Société dans le Monde Iranien, ed.
C. Adle (Paris: Institut français d’Iranologie de Téhéran, 1982), 237–61 and 263–286; Sheila S.
Blair, “Ilkhanid architecture and society: an analysis of the endowment deed of the Rabʿ-i
Rashidi,” Iran 22 (1984): 67–90.
40 Kahil, Sultan Hasan, 68.
41  David James, Qurʾans of the Mamluks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), no. 46.

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338 sheila s. blair

Fig. 9: Qibla īwān in the Mosque of Sultan Ḥasan in Cairo, 1357–64. Author’s
photo.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 339

was a prodigious waste of paper, meant to exemplify the power of the

patrons. The paper used in them is as fijine as the illumination, with large
frontispieces showing block patterns based on tile decoration. Such exqui-
site illumination is also found in other manuscripts prepared for the same
patron, notably copies of his theological works, the Majmūʿa al-Rashīdiyya,
one in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. arabe 2324) and the
other in Doha (fijigs. 10a and b), both transcribed by Muḥammad ibn
Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad al-Amīn known as zūd-nivīs al-baghdādī, the
“speedy writer from Baghdad.”42 The copy in Doha is particularly impor-
tant, as it is the only one of these volumes prepared for Rashīd al-Dīn that
specifijies Tabriz as the site of production.
Tabriz set the model for Cairene architecture not just in the scale of
buildings and their furnishings, but also in their decoration. The spring-
ing lines of the qibla īwān in the mosque of Sultan Ḥasan, for example,
are decorated with a large (two-meter) band of exquisitely carved stucco
decoration with a Qurʾanic text set on a foliate ground. The upper part
of the band displays a palmette frieze superbly carved on three levels.
Such fijine stucco carving with inscriptions on a foliate ground and pal-
mette friezes on several levels was a typical feature of Ilkhanid architec-
ture, seen, for example, in the magnifijicent miḥrāb that the Ilkhanid sultan
Öljeytü ordered added to the congregational mosque in Isfahan in 710/1310
to mark his conversion to Shiʿism.43
The Iranian technique of carved stucco had been introduced to Cairo
already in the early fourteenth century under the reign of Sultan Ḥasan’s
predecessor al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (r. 1294–1330 with interruptions). His
madrasa erected between 1295 and 1303 on Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, the main
street of Cairo, for example, preserves a stucco miḥrāb with pierced stucco
bosses.44 This type of pierced stucco had long been used in Iran, as in the
miḥrāb in the mosque of Urumiyya (formerly Riżāʾiyya) to the west of
Tabriz, signed by ʿAbd al-Muʾmin ibn Sharaf Shāh, the designer of Tabriz

42 For the Paris copy, see the preliminary comments by Francis Richard, Splendeurs
persanes: Manuscrits du XIIe au XVIIe siècles (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1997),
no. 12 and the fuller discussion by Nourane Ben Azzouna in this volume; the Doha copy
is still unpublished.
43 Sheila S. Blair, “Writing about Faith: Epigraphic Evidence for the development of
Shiʿism in Iran,” People of the Prophet’s House ed. Fahmida Suleman (London: Oxford
University Press, forthcoming).
44 K.A.C. Creswell, Muslim Architecture of Egypt, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1959), 234–40; Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Cairo of the Mamluks: A History of the Architecture
and its Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 152–56.

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340 sheila s. blair

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 341

Figs. 10a–b: Frontispiece and text page from a copy of Rashīd al-Dīn’s theo-
logical treatise, Majmūʿa al-Rashīdiyya, dated Shaʿbān-Ramaḍān 711/December
1311–January 1312 and copied at Tabriz. Page 46.3 × 34.5 cm; written area 37.5 × 26
cm. Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, ms. 6, folios 22a and 259b.

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342 sheila s. blair

(al-naqqāsh al-Tabrīzī) in 676/1277.45 Although provincial, the miḥrāb in

Urumiyya suggests what must have been available in the capital itself,
especially as the craftsman designates himself as a “Tabrizi.”
Other kinds of architectural decoration used in the Ilkhanid lands
were also introduced to Cairo at this time. The most colorful is the tech-
nique known as complete tile mosaic (meaning that it covers the surface
completely) in three colors: light and dark blue and white. According to
the Mamluk historian al-Maqrīzī, a team from Tabriz came to Cairo to
make minarets like those (now destroyed) in the mosque of ʿAlī Shāh.
The German art historian Michael Meinecke documented the Tabrizi arti-
sans’ presence in Cairo in the 1330s and 1340s, when they decorated such
buildings as the minarets of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s mosque on the citadel,
begun in 1318 and enlarged in 1335.46
Exactly this type of multicolor tile mosaic had been developed in Tabriz
and surrounding areas of northwestern Iran at the beginning of the four-
teenth century.47 Fragments found in the 1930s at the Ghazaniyya, the
tomb complex erected west of Tabriz by the Ilkhanid sultan Ghazan, show
two colors of blue (light and dark blue). Others from the Rabʿ-i Rashīdī
erected east of Tabriz contrast these two colors against a plaster or terra
cotta ground and use three colors (light and dark blue and black). The
tomb of Ghazan’s brother and successor Öljeytü, erected at Sultaniyya
between 1305 and 1313, shows tile decoration in the same two blues (light
and dark blue) on the exterior cornice and spandrels. The interior, redeco-
rated some time after 1313 but before 1320, adds a third color, white. It is
these three colors that are used on the minarets of al-Nāṣir’s mosque on
the citadel, and hence the tile mosaic there must have been part of the
renovations in 1330, rather than the original construction in 1318.
These architectural forms and techniques were transferred from Tabriz
and its environs not only to sites outside Iran but also to others within
it, particularly in the central Iranian cities of Isfahan and Yazd, which
flourished under the patronage of the Muzafffarid dynasty that ruled the
region from 1314 to 1393. The founder, Sharaf al-Dīn Muẓafffar, had been
appointed governor of Maybud near Isfahan. In 1314 his son Mubāriz

45 Wilber, Ilkhanid Architecture, no. 16.

46 Michael Meinecke, “Die mamlukischen Fayencemosaikdekorationen: Eine Werkstätte
aus Tabriz in Kairo (1330–1350),” Kunst des Orients 9 (1976–77): 85–144.
47 Donald Wilber, “The Development of Mosaic Faïence in Islamic Architecture in
Iran,” Ars Islamica 6/1 (1939): 16–47.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 343

al-Dīn Muḥammad (r. 1314–58; d. 1364) succeeded him in this post, and in
turn added Yazd (1319), Kirman (1340), Shiraz (1354), and fijinally Isfahan
(1356) to his domains, wresting much of southern Iran from the control of
the rival Inju governors and even briefly holding Tabriz.
Looking at buildings preserved in Yazd allows us to trace the trans-
mission of architectural ideas from northwestern to central Iran. One
example is the Shamsiyya, the tomb complex of Rashīd al-Dīn’s son-in-law
Shams al-Dīn that was completed in 733/1332–33.48 Like his father-in-law’s
complex in Tabriz, the one in Yazd combined a mosque and adjoining
madrasa, library, hospital, hospice for descendants of the Prophet, bazaar,
and bath. Surviving parts include a narrow arcaded forecourt with a mon-
umental īwān flanked by rectangular halls and leading to the rectangular
tomb chamber (fijig. 11). According to the local history, the Tārīkh-i Yazd,
after Shams al-Dīn died in Tabriz, his body was shipped to Yazd in a fancy
ebony and sandalwood casket along with his marble tombstone. The text
also tells us that plans for the tomb complex were drawn up in Tabriz and
sent to Yazd.
The major innovation in the plan of the Shamsiyya is the use of mul-
tiple rectangular halls.49 These rectangular halls must have had some sort
of innovative transverse vaulting. As a dome can be used to cover only a
square, diffferent forms of vaulting are needed to cover other spaces such
as a rectangle, a form often desirable because of its directionality and flex-
ible dimensions. The simplest covering for a large rectangle is a barrel
vault, but its walls cannot be pierced lest they collapse, exactly what hap-
pened in Tabriz in the mosque of ʿAlī Shāh. To circumvent the problem of
piercing the walls of a barrel vault and thereby admit light into a rectan-
gular hall, architects in Iran developed a sophisticated system of throwing
transverse arches across the long sides of a rectangle and then joining
these transverse arches with ramping vaults that can be pierced with lan-
terns. The use of multiple rectangular halls in Shams al-Dīn’s tomb cham-
ber whose plans were developed in Tabriz suggests that builders there
were already playing with such methods of transverse vaulting, although
no examples have survived in the capital city and its environs.

48 Īraj Afshār, Yādgārhā-yi Yazd (Tehran: Ziba, 1965–1975), no. 137.

49 There are at least four rectangular halls in the complex: one for the tomb chamber
behind the īwān, two flanking the īwān, and a fourth in the back corner.

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344 sheila s. blair

Fig. 11: Qibla īwān in the Shamsiyya complex at Yazd, completed in 733/1332–33.

Author’s photo.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 345

Yazd underwent a building boom under Muzafffarid rule, when at least

twelve mosques, one hundred madrasas, and two hundred tombs were
erected in addition to a new congregational mosque.50 Such a spate of
building encouraged more technological innovation in tile decoration and
vaulting, as shown in the spectacular additions to the Friday Mosque, espe-
cially the winter prayer halls added between 765/1364 and 777/1375–76
(fijig. 12).51 These new methods of breaking up space then became the
basis for the innovative forms of squinch net vaulting developed under
the Timurids in Central Asia.52
Builders working under the Muzafffarids in central Iran also developed
the palette of complete tile mosaic that had been initiated earlier in the
fourteenth century under the Ilkhanids in Tabriz and northwestern Iran,
adding yellowish brown and green to the black, light and dark blue, and
white used previously. Together with the unglazed surface, these colors
comprise the full palette or haft rang (seven colors). The geometric designs
typical of northwestern Iran early in the century were also softened into
more curvilinear floral patterns. The Madrasa-yi Imāmī erected in Isfahan
in the middle of the fourteenth century is the fijirst dated example of the
full palette to survive, but many examples can be found in slightly later
buildings in both Isfahan and Yazd.53
We know little of what happened in Tabriz later in the fourteenth
century and early fijifteenth when it became the capital of the Jalayirids,
the Mongol dynasty that took over in western Iran after the dissolution
of the Ilkhanids in the middle of the fourteenth century. Sultan Uways I
(r. 1356–74) moved the capital from Baghdad to Tabriz, where he built the
Dawlatkhāna, a huge palace described (probably hyperbolically) as hav-
ing twenty thousand rooms decorated with paintings and used into the
following century.54 The Spanish traveler Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, who
passed through the city in 1404 en route to Timur’s capital in Central Asia,
mentions the palace as one of the few standing buildings in a flourishing
city with at least 200,000 householders.55 The Timurids captured Tabriz

50 Afshār, Yazd.
51  Lisa Golombek and Donald Wilber, The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), no. 221.
52 Golombek and Wilber, Timurid Architecture, 110–11.
53 Douglas Pickett, Early Persian Tilework: The Medieval Flowering of Kāshī (Cranbury,
NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997), 127.
54 Golombek and Wilber, Timurid Architecture, 30–31.
55 Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane 1403–6, trans. Guy Le Strange
(London: Harper, 1928), 151–55.

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346 sheila s. blair

Fig. 12: Transverse vaulting in the west prayer hall added to the congregational
mosque at Yazd, 765–77/1364–76. Author’s photo.

repeatedly, destroying many of its public monuments and carrying its

artisans offf to western Central Asia.
We can glimpse some idea of these splendid but now destroyed build-
ings in Tabriz from manuscripts made there, such as a copy of Niẓāmī’s
Khamsa transcribed at the capital (dār al-salṭanat) Tabriz circa 1405–10 by
Mīr ʿAlī ibn Ḥasan al-sulṭānī, the canonizer of nastaʿlīq script. The depic-
tion of Khusraw in front of Shīrīn’s palace (fijig. 13) shows a stunning multi-
story pavilion completely covered in blue and gold tile. It represents a
generic version of the Persianate pavilion.
Unfortunately no traces of such palaces survive in Tabriz, but the
major building that does—the Muẓafffariyya, the tomb complex erected
in 870/1465 for the Qara Quyunlu sultan Abū al-Muẓafffar Jahānshāh—
shows that such buildings lavishly covered with tile decoration must
have existed.56 The Muẓafffariya has long been known colloquially as
the Masjid-i Kabūd or Blue Mosque because of its exterior and interior
sheathing in tile mosaic, predominantly dark blue. The building preserves
some of the fijinest glazed revetment in all of Iran, not only tile mosaic

56 Golombek and Wilber, Timurid Architecture, no. 214.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 347

Fig. 13: “Khusraw in front of Shīrīn’s palace” from a copy of Niẓāmī’s Khamsa

transcribed ca. 1405–10 by Mīr ʿAlī ibn Ḥasan al-sulṭānī at Tabriz. Painting 25.7 ×
18.4 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Purchase
F1931.36.

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348 sheila s. blair

(fijig. 14) but also luster tiles (quite exceptional in Iran at this time), tiles
stenciled with gold, and underglaze-painted tiles.57 Such quality and vari-
ety shows that there must have been a continuous tradition of tilework-
ing in Tabriz over the course of the fijifteenth century, and indeed we can
document that tradition through the work of Tabrizi émigrés elsewhere.
One well-known example of work by Tabrizi émigrés is the Yeşil Cami
at Bursa (1419–20), the tomb complex ordered by the Ottoman sultan
Mehmed I Çelebi in 1412, with construction completed in 822/1419–20.58
Like the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, the building once had a porch with fijive
domes and is remarkable for its lavish tile decoration on both exterior
and interior.59 The spectacular decoration includes a dado of hexagonal
monochrome tiles with stenciled gold patterns and an elaborate miḥrāb
(height 10 meters) with a molded frame and pyramidal muqarnas hood
executed in a combination of tile mosaic and underglaze cuerda seca,
exactly the techniques used in the Blue Mosque. The tilework is signed
on the colonette to the right of the miḥrāb “work of the masters of Tabriz.”
An inscription over the loggia states that the decoration was fijinished by
ʿAlī ibn Ilyās ibn ʿAlī in 827/1424. Better know as Naqqāsh ʿAlī (ʿAlī the
designer), he had been carted offf to Samarqand,60 and while it is possible
that the workers in the atelier could have come directly from Samarqand
to Bursa, the wording of the inscription, ustādān-i Tabrīz, rather than
ustādān-i Tabrīzī, suggests a more direct connection to Tabriz.
Tabriz remained a center of art and patronage at the end of the fijif-
teenth century. Walter Denny suggested that the layout and motifs in the
Blue Mosque fijind close parallels in the carpets woven in western Anatolia
in the Uşak district,61 and both he and Jon Thompson now attribute the
group known as Para-Mamluk carpets to fijifteenth-century Tabriz.62

57 Sandra Aube, “La Mosquée bleue de Tabriz (1465): Remarques sur la céramique
architecturale Qarā Qoyunlu,” Studia Iranica 37 (2008): 241–77; Bernard O’Kane, “Tiles of
Many Hues: The Development of Iranian Cuerda Seca tiles and the transfer of Tilework
Technology,” And Diverse are Their Hues: Color in Islamic art and Architecture, eds. Jonathan
Bloom and Sheila Blair (London: Yale University Press, 2011), 175–203, esp. 189.
58 Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam, 142–44.
59 The porch was not built, but arch springs on the façade indicate that one was
intended.
60 Lisa Golombek, “Timurid Potters Abroad,” Oriente Moderno n.s. 15/2 (1996): 577–86.
61  Walter Denny, The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets (London: Scala, 2002) and
“Anatolia, Tabriz and the carpet design revolution,” Carpets and Textiles in the Iranian
World 1400–1700 (Oxford: Ashmolean, 2010), 58–71.
62 Ibid. and Thompson, “Fifteenth century carpets.”

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 349

Fig. 14: Tile mosaic decoration on the interior of the Muẓafffariyya complex in

Tabriz, 870/1465. Author’s photo.

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350 sheila s. blair

Although little secular architecture of the period has survived in Tabriz,

we can get an idea of what it looked like from manuscript illustrations
and textual descriptions. The earliest depiction of the city (fijig. 15) is found
in the unique copy of the Mecmûʿ-i Menazil (Compilation of the Halting
Places), compiled in 944/1537–38 by Matrakçı Nasuh, the Ottoman math-
ematician and historian who accompanied Sultan Süleyman on his cam-
paigns in Iran and Iraq.63 The city views in this manuscript are stylized
and schematized. All use an architectural shorthand in which buildings
are enumerated by type using similar conventions.
Matrakçı Nasuh’s depiction of Tabriz shows a walled city bisected by a
river, with several buildings depicted on the left or north side of the city,
an area developed by the Aqquyunlu around the Bāgh-i Ṣāḥibābād. The
structure in the center is clearly a religious building, identifijiable by its
dome and flanking minarets. It represents the mosque of Ḥasan Pādshāh,
part of the complex of buildings by Abūʾl-Naṣr Uzun Ḥasan and also
known as the Naṣriyya.64 Founded by his father Sultan Yaʿqūb in 882/1478
and fijinished seven years later, the Naṣriyya was destroyed in 1780, and
the site rebuilt by the Qajars. The Safavid chronicler Iskandar Beg men-
tions the mosque’s minaret as the place from which Shāh Ṭahmāsp had
an unfortunate rebel, Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ, encased in a wine jar and hurled
to his death.65 Ottoman chroniclers such as Ḥājji Khalīfa add that the
mosque was even larger than the Blue Mosque (the Muẓafffariyya) and
had beautiful marble work.66
In Matrakçı Nasuh’s depiction of Tabriz, the religious complex in the
center of the northern quarter is set between by two garden precincts,
both walled and rectangular. The smaller one at the top or east represents
the Bāgh-i Ṣāḥibābād. The larger one at the bottom or west is larger, with
several buildings beyond the pool near the entrance gate on the south
towards the rivers. The largest structure is a multi-story pavilion with tile

63 Naṣūḥüʾs-Silāḥī (Maṭrāḳcī), Beyān-ı Menāzil-i Sefer-i ʿIrāḳeyn, ed. H.G. Yurdaydın

(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1976), fols. 27b–28a; Albert Gabriel, “Les étapes
d’une campagne dans les deux Irak d’après un manuscrit turc du XVIe siècle,” Syria 9/4
(1928): 328–349; Walter Denny, “A Sixteenth-century Architectural Plan of Istanbul,” Ars
Orientalis 8 (1970): 49–64.
64 Charles Melville, “Historical Monuments and Earthquakes in Tabriz,” Iran 19 (1981):
159–177.
65 Iskandar Munshi, History of Shah ʿAbbas the Great, trans. Roger Savory (Boulder, Co.:
Westview, 1978), 1: 177, reading Nasriya instead of Basriya.
66 ʿAbd al-ʿĀlī Kārang, Āthār-i bāstānī-yi Āzarbayjān, vol. 1 (Tehran: Anjuman-i āthār-i
millī, 1351), 327–31; Melville, “Historical Monuments,” 171.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 351

Fig. 15: Double-page showing the city of Tabriz from a copy of Matrakçı Nasuh’s
Mecmû‘-i Menazil, compiled at Istanbul in 944/1537–38. Folio 23.0 × 21.5 cm.
Istanbul University Library, ms. 5964, fols. 27b–28a.

decoration. It represents the palace precinct built in 891/1486 by Sultan

Yaʿqūb on the site of an earlier palace built by Jahānshāh.67
The precinct with multi-story pavilion matches the detailed descrip-
tion of Uzun Ḥasan’s palace (dawlat-khāna) given by a Venetian merchant
who visited the city in 1507.68 The precinct was set in a large and beauti-
ful garden that incorporated not only the palace in the center but also a
mosque with attached hospital and the harem. The palace itself was set
on a raised marble terrace a yard and half high and fijive yards wide, like
a piazza. It incorporated a marble channel for a stream and bronze drag-
ons at the corners that spouted water. Measuring some 30 paces high by
70 to 80 yards around, the palace had a central domed room surrounded
by eight parts, each consisting of a room and anteroom. The interior walls
were decorated with murals depicting battles, embassies, and hunts; the
ceiling had beautiful gilding and ultramarine; and the floor was covered

67 Melville, “Historical Monuments,” 170 and n. 83.

68 Gray, The World History of Rashid al-Din, 173–78; Golombek and Wilber, Timurid
Architecture, 178–79.

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352 sheila s. blair

by a round silk carpet woven to shape to fijit the room and the place where
the ruler gave audience. The anonymous Venetian merchant specifijically
called the building a Hasht Bihisht (“Eight Paradises”).
Although Uzun Ḥasan’s palace in Tabriz has been destroyed, this type
of palace pavilion is known from many later examples from Istanbul to
Agra, including the Safavid palace of that very name in Isfahan.69 The
earliest extant example of the Hasht-Bihist type of palace is the one in
Istanbul known as the Çinili Köşk, the Persianate pavilion completed
in 1472 for Mehmed the Conqueror’s new palace complex.70 But such
types of palatine pavilion had already existed some two centuries earlier
in northwest Iran. We know this from a late thirteenth-century draw-
ing by an anonymous Venetian traveler now mounted in an album in
Berlin (Staatsbibliothek, Hamilton 390, f. 85).71 The Venetian artist shows
the same type of multi-story pavilion as Matrakçı Nasuh did two and a
half centuries later, but instead of the colorful blue tile revetment of the
fijifteenth-century building, the thirteenth-century one is decorated with a
brick diaper pattern of the type used in Ilkhanid architecture.
The British art historian Deborah Howard has suggested furthermore
that such diaper patterns in brick were the model for the decoration on
the exterior of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, constructed mainly between
1309 and 1324, shortly after Marco Polo had been imprisoned in the city
and dictated his memoirs.72 The Doge’s palace became a hallmark of the
city, standard in later depictions. A typical example shows the Polo fam-
ily embarking from Venice in Li livres du Graunt Caam added ca. 1400
by Johannes and his school in England to a Flemish manuscript of the
Romance of Alexander produced in France at the workshop of the Flemish
illuminator Jehan de Grise between 1338 and 1344.73 The type of the loggia

69 Lisa Golombek, “From Tamerlane to the Taj Mahal,” Essays in Islamic Art and
Architecture in honor of Katharina Otto-Dorn, ed. A. Daneshvari (Malibu, CA, 1981), 43–50;
Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam, 195–96.
70 Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam, 214 and fijig. 270.
71  Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt, Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen,
1300–1400, part II, Venedig, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1990), 1: 37 and pl. 53; cited in Deborah Howard,
Venice & the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100–1500
(London: Yale University Press, 2000), 58 and n. 120.
72 Howard, Venice & the East.
73 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 264, part 3, fol. 218r, facsimile edition with introduction
by M.R. James, The Romance of Alexander: A collotype facsimile of MS. Bodley 264 (Oxford:
The Clarendon Press, 1933); online facsimile at: http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=
bodleian&manuscript=msbodl264.

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 tabriz: international entrepôt under the mongols 353

seen in the Persianate pavilion in Istanbul might also be the source for the
one in the Doge’s palace in Venice.74

Tabriz in the Mongol period was thus an international emporium whose

connections extended across Eurasia. Although only two major buildings
survive, they and other works of art made there or by artists from the city
show its wide range of connections as well as the extensive impact the city
had on other cultural traditions, in both east and west. Such interaction
was not limited to the realms controlled by Ilkhanids’ governors, vassals,
or successors in Iran such as the Injus, Muzafffarids, or Jalayirids. Rather,
material culture shows that this interaction occurred also with their rivals,
both Muslim (e.g., the Mamluks) and non-Muslim (e.g., Christian Europe
and China). As the noted historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook
concluded in reference to the ready adoption in tenth-century Cordova
of the most recent styles afffected by their rivals, the Abbasids of Iraq,
“Umayyad genealogy was no bar to ʿAbbasid hairstyles.”75 Similarly, as the
widespread wearing of blue jeans today shows, political enmity does not
preclude cultural interaction. And this was certainly the case in Tabriz
under the Mongols.

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