This miniature painting in the Safavid style shows a pair of royal lovers
with an attendant. Such paintings, which took months to produce, were
commissioned to illustrate manuscripts for royal or aristocratic patrons,
and were a symbol of power and wealth.
Painting by Manya Saadi-nejad,
based on a sixteenth-century original by Mohammad Yusuf of Esfahan
Th e Tu r k s
73
in the Persian miniature tradition. They also built some of Central
Asia’s most important monuments, including two of the three semi-
naries now framing the Registan Square in Samarkand,
the Shir-Dar
(Lion-Bearing, completed 1636) and the Tilla-Kari (Gold-Work,
completed 1660).
As for Babur, he set up his capital at Kabul, from whence he spent
the next two decades launching raids into northern India. After con-
quering Delhi in 1526, Babur decided to stay, becoming the founder of
the so-called Mughal
10
dynasty which lasted until 1857. Babur wrote
a fascinating memoir, the
Babur-nama
, in Chaghatay Turkish, which
is sometimes referred to as the first autobiography by a Muslim writer.
It is deeply personal and filled with nostalgia
for his lost Central Asian
homeland. His descriptions of India, by contrast, are less than flat-
tering: “Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its
people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understand-
ing, no etiquette, no nobility or manliness.”
11
Under Babur’s grandson Akbar the Great, the re-located Timurid
Empire in India would grow into the richest and most powerful state in
the world, visited and envied by
European traders from Portugal, England,
France, and Holland. This wealth also attracted a wave of talented indi-
viduals from Iran, intensifying the Islamization and Persianization of
India that would continue into the twentieth century. Though Muslim
sultanates had been in place in Delhi since the eleventh century, it was
only under the Mughals that Perso-Islamic culture spread to the general
population in a major way, in part through government land grants to Sufi
masters whose personal charisma attracted large followings of villagers.
While the Mughal elite retained a sentimental
attachment to their
Central Asian homeland, with the gradual displacement of long-distance
trade from the Silk Roads to the Indian Ocean the Uzbek-ruled lands
of Central Asia (broadly referred to as “Turkestan”) lost their central
importance in the global economy, and what remained of Turkic cul-
ture among the Mughals was mostly for show. They liked to hold cer-
emonies in tents, for example, though these
tents were lavish to an
extent one can scarcely imagine—massive in size and embroidered with
gold thread and intricate designs. In his Persian-language memoirs, the
Emperor Jahangir felt it necessary to boast in the early seventeenth
century that “I am not ignorant of how to speak or write Turkish.”
12
In fact, the Mughal administrators were mainly ethnic Iranian
immigrants or the children of Iranian mothers, and the elite culture was
Persian. Government records were kept in Persian, court poets com-
posed their verses in Persian, Iranian musicians
worked with Indian
I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
74
colleagues to create the new genre known as “Hindustani music,” and
painters imported from Iran ran the royal ateliers staffed by local art-
ists. Together with the Safavids, their contemporary rivals who ruled in
Iran, the Turkic Mughals of India presided over the greatest expansion
of Persian culture in all of history.
While Timurid rule remained in place in eastern Iran throughout
the fifteenth century, western Iran during the same period was dom-
inated by Turkmen tribes of nomadic origin, first the so-called Black
Sheep confederation (Qara Qoyunlu) from 1406–1468,
then the White
Sheep (Aq Qoyunlu) up to the end of the century. With their capital at
Tabriz, the Turkmen rulers drew their military support from bands of
independent-minded nomads living throughout Azerbaijan and Anatolia.
These nomadic groups had been only superficially Islamicized, and
they retained many aspects of their original shamanistic culture. They
considered the first Shi‘ite caliph, Ali, to be a divine figure. This has led
some scholars to refer to them as Shi‘ites, but it would be more accurate to
simply attribute them with “shi‘izing tendencies,” since their beliefs were
quite heretical by orthodox Shi‘ite standards. Nevertheless, Shi‘ite sym-
bolism was very effective in mobilizing them against the Sunni Ottomans.
Th e Tu r k s
75
Being unlettered and unschooled in any formal Islamic legal tradi-
tion, the Turkmens were easily impressed by the charismatic authority
of Sufi masters. One Sufi brotherhood which
had been established in
the region since the late thirteenth century was the Safavids, originally a
Sunni order that moved toward Shi‘ism as a way of appealing to their res-
tive Turkmen following. The latter were known as
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
