Shahrukh, Ulugh Beg and the Timurid Cities
The wisest king of the Timurid dynasty was Shahrukh, who placed his son Ulugh Beg in Samarkand as governor of Transoxiana while he ruled Khorasan from Herat. Under Timur's successors these two capitals, in rivalry with each other, became the chief centers of Tatar culture and progress and held their own against the advanced and prosperous cities of Europe (1405–1449). Shahrukh was an able commander who loved peace and encouraged literature and art, and he founded a celebrated library at Herat. One Timurid prince called Herat "paradise on earth".
Ulugh Beg honored scholars and built in Samarkand the greatest observatory of his age. One Muslim biographer describes him warmly: learned, just, active and powerful, he reached a high rank in astronomy and was skilled in rhetoric. In his reign the standing of scholars reached its peak. He studied the subtleties of geometry and wrote commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest. No such king, the biographer says, had ever sat on a throne. With leading scholars he recorded observations of the stars, and in Samarkand he founded a madrasa unrivaled in beauty and standing anywhere in the seven climes.
This patron of learning was killed in 1449 by his own unworthy son. Yet the high culture of the Timurids lived on through the reigns of Sultan Abu Said and Sultan Husayn Bayqara, until the end of the fifteenth century. In 1501 the Uzbeks took Samarkand and Bukhara and shattered the dynasty's power. When Shah Ismail Safavi, whose dynasty had just arisen, took Herat in 1510, Babur, the last Timurid ruler, fled to India and founded the Mughal dynasty there. Under its kings the Muslim city of Delhi became a magnificent capital, like Rome under the Medici.
The Mamluks of Egypt, 1340–1517
While Islam in Asia was undergoing invasions and upheavals, Egypt was governed, with a relatively safe and stable policy, by the Mamluks (1252–1517). The Black Death briefly disturbed the country's prosperity, but the Mamluks managed to stay in power through statecraft and patronage of the arts, and also through cruelty and embezzlement. In 1381, with the reign of Sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Barquq, a new line, the Burji Mamluks, came to power, and it showed little besides love of luxury, intrigue and injustice, which led to Egypt's fall.
Its sultans debased the currency beyond all custom and taxed even people's daily needs. They abused the state monopolies on sugar and pepper as far as they could, and they imposed customs duties so heavy on Europe's trade with India, which passed through Alexandria, that Western merchants were forced to look for a new route to India around Africa. A generation after Vasco da Gama's voyage (1498) Egypt lost most of the great profits it had made from trade between East and West. The financial blow brought the country such poverty and decline that Sultan Selim I was able to end Burji Mamluk rule and annex Egypt to the Ottoman empire without serious resistance.
Cairo: The Wealthiest City of Islam
From 1258 until 1453 Cairo remained the richest, most beautiful and most populous Muslim city. Ibn Battuta praised it eagerly in 1326, and Ibn Khaldun, who visited in 1383, wrote of it as the capital of the world and a paradise on earth, a hive teeming with humanity and the seat of kingship. He described a city adorned with palaces, monasteries and madrasas and lit by the stars of learning, and a land so generously watered by the Nile that it seemed to offer its fruit as gifts to its inhabitants. The toiling peasants of Egypt might have disputed that.
Mosques as Fortresses
The mosques of Egypt in this period reflected the strength of a forceful regime more than the soft colors of heaven. The porches and glazed brick or tiled portals common in Asian mosques gave way to massive walls and stone facades, making the house of worship look like a strong fortress. The mosque of Sultan Hasan (1356–1363), a wonder of its time, is still the most magnificent example of Mamluk architecture. To the famous historian al-Maqrizi it was finer than any mosque yet built, though he was a Cairene patriot.
The tradition says that Sultan Hasan gathered the most famous architects of several countries and asked them to name the tallest building on earth, so that he could build one taller. They named the palace of Khosrow I at Ctesiphon, whose surviving arch still rises 32 meters. Workers, taking fallen stones from the pyramids of Egypt, raised the new mosque's walls to 30 meters, added a cornice 4 meters higher, and put up a minaret at its corner 85 meters tall, according to the book. The huge, gloomy bulk of the building awes the European visitor but is hardly to his taste. The people of Cairo were so proud of it that they invented, or repeated, a story that the sultan punished the architect after completion so that he could never design another masterpiece. This legend is mentioned only as a legend.
More beautiful than this mosque were the tombs the Mamluks built outside Cairo's walls to hold their bones. Sultan Barquq, who began life as a Circassian slave, rests in one of the loveliest of them in quiet grandeur.
Qaitbay and the Crafts of the Mamluk Age
Among the Burji Mamluk sultans, the one who built most was Qaitbay. Although he was deeply involved in war with the Turks, he found the money for important and splendid buildings in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. In Egypt he repaired the Citadel of Saladin and the university and mosque of al-Azhar, built a caravanserai famous for the arabesques of its stones, raised an ornate mosque in the capital and built over his own tomb a monument of marble and granite. With its fine decoration, tall minarets and carved geometric dome, it counts among the finest small triumphs of Islamic art.
Under Mamluk rule the crafts also flourished. Carvers produced thousands of original designs in ivory, bone and wood, making beautiful objects from pen boxes to pulpits with taste, skill and constant effort. A witness is the pulpit from Qaitbay's mosque kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Gold- and silverwork reached their peak under these bloodthirsty dynasties.
Egypt's pottery, which had invented countless things over unremembered millennia, now gave the world enameling on glass. From then on lamps, goblets and vases of colored enamel, with human figures and decorative patterns and sometimes gilding, spread everywhere. By making these objects, and in many other ways, the artists of Islam gave eternal forms to the idea of beauty, as if to atone for the savagery of their rulers.