Archives Islamic History

Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last great Timurid ruler of Herat, died in 1506 while setting out on a military campaign to hold his kingdom together. The next year, an Uzbek army led by Muhammad Shaybani took the city, and a hundred years of rule by Timur's own descendants came to an end. Herat changed hands again in 1510, when Shah Ismail, the first Safavid ruler of Iran, took it from the Uzbeks...

Ali-Shir Nava'i was a senior official and adviser at the court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, ruler of Herat from 1469, and head of the sultan's supreme council from 1472. Over his lifetime he founded, restored, or supported some 370 institutions, including, in Herat alone, forty inns for travelers, nine bathhouses, and nine bridges: infrastructure that reached ordinary people far beyond the...

Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg were sons of Shah Rukh and Gawhar Shad, grandsons of the conqueror Timur, and two of the central figures of the Timurid Golden Age in fifteenth-century Herat and Samarkand. Baysunghur governed Herat and was himself a trained calligrapher. Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand and was a working astronomer, not just a patron of one. This episode follows both men's signature proj...

Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, spent nearly his entire adult life at war, building an empire that ran from the edges of China to the Mediterranean coast. In the winter of 1405, in his late sixties and still leading his army in person, he set out to conquer Ming China. He never got close. A fever caught up with him at a camp near Otrar, and the...

Shah Rukh was a son of Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror whose armies had carved out an empire stretching from the Mediterranean toward India. When Timur died in 1405 without a settled succession, that empire became something to fight over. Shah Rukh's nephew Khalil Sultan seized the capital, Samarkand, along with its treasury, and held it for four years before Shah Rukh finally took th...

Timur, the Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent 1402 to 1404 doing two things that seem to contradict each other and turn out to be the same story. At Ankara, his army broke the strongest military power in Anatolia and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, known as the Thunderbolt, the only Ottoman sultan taken alive in battle across six hundred years of that empire&apo...

Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent the years around 1400 destroying three of the great cities of the Islamic world: Delhi, Aleppo, and Damascus, with Baghdad still to come. This episode follows his army south across the Indus into the Sultanate of Delhi, where a hundred and twenty armored war elephants met a line of burning camels, and f...

Saladin, the Kurdish general who would later retake Jerusalem, arrives in Egypt in 1164 as a young officer serving his uncle Shirkuh, in the service of Nur al-Din, the ruler of Syria. Within five years, and after a vizier named Shawar burns his own capital's trading city, Fustat, rather than surrender it to the Crusader king Amalric I of Jerusalem, Saladin finds himself vizier to the Fatimid...

Timur, the fourteenth-century Central Asian commander English readers usually know as Tamerlane, is the subject of this episode's opening chapter. Born near Kesh to the Barlas, a Turkic clan of Mongol origin, he rose through the wreckage of the Chagatai Khanate, the Central Asian successor state to Genghis Khan's empire, at a time when it had splintered into rival commands fighting over...

Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah became the sixth Fatimid caliph of Egypt in 996, at the age of eleven, and ruled in his own right for twenty-five years. In March of 1005 he opened a section of his own palace to the public as Dar al-Ilm, the House of Knowledge, a library and academy that taught Quran and hadith alongside logic, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics under one roof. The historian al-Maqrizi put...

In 969, the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, once enslaved and risen to command an entire army, conquered Egypt without sacking its capital, Fustat. Instead of moving into the existing city, he marked out a new walled enclosure beside it with cord, stakes, and a rope hung with bells, meant to signal the single astrologically correct instant to break ground. A bird landed on the rope early. The d...

Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i was an Isma'ili Shi'i missionary from Kufa who spent nearly two decades, starting in 893, living among the Kutama Berbers of North Africa's Kabylie highlands, earning their trust before ever asking them to fight. Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi was the man that mission was built around, the claimant descended from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) through his...

Bayezid I, known as Yildirim, "the Thunderbolt," was the fourth ruler of the House of Osman and the most powerful the family had produced: he crushed a European crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, blockaded Constantinople for years, and annexed most of the independent Turkish beyliks of Anatolia. In July 1402, on a plain outside Ankara, that empire collapsed in an afternoon. This episode close...

In June of 1389, Sultan Murad of the Ottomans leads his army against a coalition of Serbian and Bosnian lords under Prince Lazar on a plain in Kosovo. By nightfall both commanders are dead, killed in different ways and for different reasons, and Murad's son Bayezid has been acclaimed sultan on the same field where his father fell. Within hours, Bayezid has his own brother, Yakub Celebi, stran...

This episode follows the Ottoman dynasty's first sustained foothold in Europe, from the moment Orhan's son Süleyman Pasha crossed into Thrace as a mercenary fighting someone else's civil war, to the Ottoman victory over a Serbian coalition at the Battle of the Maritsa in 1371. The story turns on a single night in March 1354, when an earthquake tore down the walls of Gallipoli and em...

This is the third and final episode in a series on the devsirme, the Ottoman practice of levying Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia and raising them into the sultan's own household and army. It follows the institution from its founding logic through Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the devsirme boy who became grand vizier for three sultans, to its violent end. On 15 June 1826, the janissary co...

Osman was one of a dozen or more minor Turkish frontier chiefs operating along Byzantium's crumbling Anatolian border around the year 1300, and almost nothing about his own lifetime survives in writing. The only contemporary source, the Byzantine chronicler George Pachymeres, gives him a few lines: a defeated relief army at the battle of Bapheus in 1302, and a note that men came to join Osman...

This is the final episode of a four-part series on Al-Andalus, Muslim Iberia. It covers the century after Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492, tracing how a negotiated treaty protecting Muslim religion, property, and law unraveled into forced conversion, clandestine religious practice, and the mass expulsion of 1609 to 1614. The episode follows Cardinal Cisneros's f...

When Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492, the terms were negotiated, not imposed. The Capitulations of Granada guaranteed the kingdom's Muslims their religion, their property, their own law, and their language. This episode is the fourth and final installment in the Al Andalus series, and it covers the century that almost never makes the popular retelling: the slow...

Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad was the poet-king of Seville, ruler of one of the richest courts in the Muslim world and one of the finest Arabic poets of his generation. This episode traces how he ended his life a captive in a small Moroccan town, and why the century that ruined him is one of the strangest in the history of Muslim Spain. After the death of the hajib al-Mansur in 1002, the caliphate of...

This episode covers the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and the century and a half that followed, when al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain and Portugal, fractured into roughly thirty rival kingdoms known as the taifas, and then watched two North African dynasties, the Almoravids and the Almohads, arrive as rescuers and stay as rulers. It opens with al-Mansur ibn Abi Aamir's 997 raid o...

In 929 CE, Abd al-Rahman III, ruler of Cordoba, took the title of caliph, rejecting the lesser title his family had held for five generations and setting himself against two rival claimants to leadership of the Muslim world, in Baghdad and in North Africa. This episode follows what he built to back that claim up: Madinat al-Zahra, a purpose-built palace city on three stepped terraces outside Cordo...

In 929, Abd al-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, took the title his ancestors had refused for a hundred and seventy three years: caliph. Seven years later he began building Madinat al-Zahra, a palace city outside Cordoba with a reported four thousand marble columns and fifteen thousand doors, designed to make foreign ambassadors feel the size of his claim before a word of diplomacy was spoken. This epi...

In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber general serving the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr, crossed the strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic, opening a peninsula already fractured by a royal succession crisis. Within seven years, most of Iberia was under Muslim rule, won through a mix of battlefield conquest and negotiated treaties like the one signed wit...

In the year 711, a Berber commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the narrow strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated Roderic, the last Visigothic king, in a battle whose exact location history still cannot confirm. Within seven years, most of the peninsula had changed hands, not only by conquest but by negotiation, as the Treaty of Theodemir shows: a Visigothic lord who kept his la...