ʿAbdullah Khan’s Political Rise and Concentration of Power in Bukhara

Both R. D. McChesney and Martin Dickson have outlined the political dynamics in the Abu’l-Khairid khanate across the sixteenth century. Dickson adumbrates the different concepts of rulership in the Safavid and Abu’l-Khairid realms by describing how Shah Tahmasp “headed” his dynasty, while the designated great khan Muhammad Shibani and his successors through the 1570s “represented” the Abu’l-Khairid administration.³ The early Abu’l-Khairid political system, initiated by Muhammad Shibani Khan (d. 1510) when he took Samarqand from the Timurids in 1501, was essentially a confederation of independent city-states. Bukhara, Balkh, Tashkent, and Samarqand were the larger power centers, governed by hereditary chiefs related to Muhammad Shibani’s grandfather Abu al-Khair. Following the death of Shibani, the designated Abu’l-Khairid head—the khāqān (great khan)—was typically the oldest dynastic member, who presided in Samarqand. By the 1530s, however, Bukhara had become the unofficial seat of whoever was the most powerful Abu’l-Khairid appanage leader in terms of culture and/or military prowess.

Abu’l-Khairid administration converted from this shared power structure around 1550, at which point, according to Dickson, it began to shift “into a sub-variety of the ‘Irano-Islamic’ model for dynastic succession.”⁴ Power ultimately came to be concentrated in the hands of ʿAbdullah Khan in 1561, after his initial arrival in Bukhara in May 1557. He inherited the domestic and foreign political entanglements of the appanage heads who had preceded him.

Prior to this, in the middle of the century, ties between the Abu’l-Khairids and the Ottomans had strengthened to such an extent that diplomatic exchanges went beyond written words. Sultan Süleyman I (r. 1520–66) not only proclaimed his friendship to the great khan in Samarqand, ʿAbd al-Latif (r. 1540–52), but also offered military aid. After a Bukharan embassy visited Constantinople in 1551, the Ottomans promised three hundred janissaries and cannons (tūp va żarb-zanān) “all worthy of the generalship of Süleyman” in 1554.⁵ It is not known whether codices also traveled at this time, alongside soldiers, ambassadors, and weapons. According to a surviving record requesting safe passage for these personnel and arms that was dispatched by Ottoman authorities to a messenger who presented it to the Giray khans of Crimea, the transported objects followed a northern route to avoid Safavid territory. The specific route on which they journeyed stretched from Edirne to Kefe (Caffa), traveling from the shores of the eastern Black Sea to the lower Volga through Or and Azaq (Azov) in Crimea, across the Caspian Sea to reach Khwarazm, and onwards into Abu’l-Khairid lands. In 1555, some of these janissaries were still found in Khwarazm.⁶

The war aid arrived after ʿAbd al-Latif’s death. It was delivered to his successor in Samarqand, Baraq/ Nauruz Ahmad Khan (r. 1551–56), who became well known in Istanbul through the exchange of several embassies with Süleyman I. The Ottomans’ offer of military assistance stipulated that it primarily be for domestic security, but it could also be used to conduct a protracted campaign against their common enemy, the Safavids.⁷ As adherents of Hanafi Sunnism, both the Ottomans and the Abu’l-Khairids disapproved of the Shiʿi Safavid state located between their domains during the first half of the sixteenth century. Iran’s neighbors to the east and west at times attempted to engage the Safavids in a war on two fronts, which benefited the sultans and khans. But sectarianism on religious grounds frequently hid greater political and economic concerns. The arrival of Ottoman arms and weapons engendered a violent era of inter-appanage warfare that preoccupied the Ottomans’ ally in Transoxiana, hindering serious Abu’l-Khairid engagement with Iran for the next three decades. Attention was directed inwards on domestic issues when external struggles against Safavids, Qazaqs, and Khwarazmians were at a lull.

Given this context, the human tendencies of ambition, competition, and rivalry are in part to blame for a shift to Abu’l-Khairid political centralization. Previously, in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the Abu’l-Khairids frequently skirmished with the Safavids in Khurasan, the main Abu’l-Khairid appanages had their own relatively independent lines, which offered stability in their shared governance. This held until the deaths of the Bukharan appanage leader ʿAbd al-ʿAziz in 1550, and the great khan ʿAbd al-Latif in Samarqand in 1552. In the aftermath of these events, Abu’l-Khairid offenses against the Safavid qizilbāsh (red-headed, implying Safavid partisans based on their headwear) stalled, despite Ottoman pleas.⁸

With the power and prestige of Bukhara steadily growing, ʿAbdullah arrived there in 1557 intent on heading the broader Abu’l-Khairid state from that base. A power struggle ensued, with the heads of Balkh, Samarqand, and Tashkent, along with their progeny, becoming allies and enemies of the main rivals in Bukhara between 1557 and 1582.⁹ By 1561, ʿAbdullah was the dominant player, and he deferentially bestowed the title of great khan upon his father, Iskandar, in Samarqand. Despite this seemingly respectful act of filial devotion, ʿAbdullah was really the Abu’l-Khairid head. As the unquestioned leader and policymaker, he installed select relatives as governors of the other appanages. Having eliminated competing claimants to the Chinggisid mantle—including his own brother, whom he had assassinated—ʿAbdullah besieged Samarqand in 1569, initiating a civil war that lasted until 1578.¹⁰ The following year, with the aid of the elite Juybarid family, leaders of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, ʿAbdullah finally defeated his main rival and seized full control of both Samarqand and Bukhara.

ʿAbdullah’s domestic reforms deserve greater attention than scholarship has heretofore acknowledged. Existing studies describe a unified Safavid order as oppositional to Abu’l-Khairid political decentralization without specifying the period, when in fact significant changes were made in the second half of the sixteenth century in both Iran and Transoxiana. Turco-Mongol traditions in the Abu’l-Khairid sector are explained as practices that markedly differed from those of the Safavids, who ruled in accordance with “a European theoretical concept of kingship … [with a] clear locus of power in a specific individual with succession automatically passing down from father to son.”¹¹ In contrast, within the Abu’l-Khairid realm, the “locus of power devolved upon the entire ruling Dynastic House rather than an individual.”¹² Hereditary succession was the norm in the Safavid political sector since its inception, but more factors are involved in political centralization than monarchical, “European”-style traditions. Upon ascending the throne in 1588, Shah ʿAbbas I curtailed qizilbāsh administrative and military power, and unified it under his direct control, extricating the Safavid dynasty from tribal factionalism.¹³ ʿAbdullah Khan’s similar policies to unify his state actually predate the Safavid reforms of ʿAbbas I. ʿAbdullah declared Bukhara the official Abu’l-Khairid capital in 1583, and stimulated trade and domestic pilgrimage through architectural patronage.¹⁴ In comparison, Safavid reliance on older Mongol models completely ceased when ʿAbbas moved the capital from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1598.

In 1578, envisioning a new and enduring monarchy, ʿAbdullah initiated a line of succession, passing authority to his son, who was installed in Balkh as heir apparent. He then steadily consolidated his own power. Upon the death of his father, in June 1582, ʿAbdullah was proclaimed supreme khan after an enthronement ceremony held near Istaravshan (present-day Tajikistan) in which he ascended a white felt carpet anointed with water from Zamzam.¹⁵ With this act, Bukhara would officially supplant Samarqand as the dynastic capital, and from there ʿAbdullah administered his newly unified domain.¹⁶ McChesney has contrasted ʿAbdullah’s reputation in Transoxiana as a builder with Chinggis Khan’s infamy as a destroyer.¹⁷ Due to the strength of the urban infrastructure that developed at this time, Bukhara would remain a base for rulers of Transoxiana until the late nineteenth-century Russian conquest.

ʿAbdullah was personally determined to portray himself as a second—but less nomadic—Muhammad Shibani (who had established the dynasty), seeking to return the Abu’l-Khairid state to its original borders, as established by his predecessor. ʿAbdullah actually surpassed this aim in holding power in Khurasan and Khwarazm for a longer duration and adding Khotan and Kashgar in the east. Under ʿAbdullah, the Abu’l-Khairids reached the height of their power, and the empire witnessed its greatest expansion, seizing Khurasan from the Safavids and holding the region between 1588 and 1598.¹⁸ The dynasty and these territorial holdings came to a precipitous end with ʿAbdullah’s death in February 1598, and the Safavid armies under Shah ʿAbbas soon after retook the province.

The Mid-Sixteenth-Century Bukharan Workshop

Museums and libraries today frequently eclipse and elide the nuances of Abu’l-Khairid book arts in Transoxiana by indiscriminately ascribing materials to Bukhara. B. W. Robinson originally classified all Abu’l-Khairid manuscripts and folios as specimens of a “Bukhara School/Style.”¹⁹ The term “Bukharan” has since become shorthand for the totality of Abu’l-Khairid manuscript production, without examining the era and materials fully. Future studies would benefit from including artistic developments and contributions by artisans in Samarqand, Shahrukhiya, Tashkent, Balkh, and the environs of Herat (such as Bakharz, Malan, Raza, Tus, Tun), in different periods.

Elite manuscripts were completed in Bukhara between the 1530s and 1570s, but with noticeable variations depending on the patronage and staff responsible for their production. It is only in the third quarter of the century that we discern distinct features and traits of a systematic “Bukhara school,” in which figures, compositions, and patterns transcend Timurid models, attesting to a tradition that has come into its own. ʿAbdullah Khan’s patronage of the Bukharan kitābkhāna testifies to the power and wealth amassed in that center during the late 1550s through the 1570s.²⁰ These decades were fruitful and prosperous years in the Abu’l-Khairid domain, marked by strengthened political, cultural, and commercial exchanges with India, Turkey, and Muscovy. Despite ʿAbdullah’s political success, art historians have tended to comment only on the dullness and derivative nature of the painting that was done for him and his courtiers in Bukhara during the second half of the sixteenth century. But the standardization of figures arranged in set compositions points to a well-run workshop and access to the resources necessary to produce so many manuscripts in a short amount of time.

It is revelatory to compare works of poetry copied in the Bukharan workshops during the reigns of the two greatest patrons of Abu’l-Khairid manuscript arts: ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, who kept the scribes and illustrators busy throughout the 1530s and 1540s (Appendix 1), and ʿAbdullah Khan, in the 1550s through mid-1570s (Appendix 2). They were prolific in part due to the duration of their time in power. In line with earlier conventions of the preceding Timurid dynasty that were later adopted by the Mughals, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ordered the completion of manuscripts that had previously been copied—though not illustrated—during the time that Sultan Husain Mirza Baiqara (r. 1469–1506) ruled Herat. In so doing, he thus fashioned himself as the sultan’s equal. Few of these older, pictureless texts were in circulation by the time ʿAbdullah assumed power since the workshops of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz had already worked on them in prior decades. However, some early Abu’l-Khairid productions written out by Sultan Muhammad Nur (d. 1539)—a student of the celebrated Sultan ʿAli al-Mashhadi, who worked for Timurid, Safavid, and Abu’l-Khairid patrons in his lifetime—were later illustrated, in the 1560s.²¹

Both ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and ʿAbdullah Khan were interested in the works of Jami and had individual copies of some stories bound as separate volumes (Yūsuf u Zulaikhā, Tuḥfat al-aḥrār, Ṣubḥat al-abrār, and Silsilat al-ẕahab being the most popular). This stands in contrast to the few copies of Nizami works that are contained together in Khamsa form. Based on the quantity of particular titles, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz seems to have preferred Saʿdi’s Būstān over the Gulistān, but these works were commissioned equally during ʿAbdullah’s reign, by both the ruler and his courtiers. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz perpetuated Timurid traditions and had collections produced of Navaʾi’s poetry, which the Ottomans also patronized. ʿAbdullah’s courtly workshop diverged, however, from this practice and eschewed Turkic poetry completely, expanding its Persian repertoire to copy titles not requested by the earlier khans, including Kashifi, Hatifi, Hafiz, Qasimi, ʿArifi, Hilali, Dihlavi, and, of central importance to this present study, Firdausi. The absence of a Firdausian Shāhnāma for the bibliophile ʿAbd al-ʿAziz does not prove that no copy was ever made for him. Akin, however, to a dearth of royal Mughal Shāhnāma copies, an assumption that one was never created can be derived from the materials of which I am presently aware.

ʿAbdullah Khan’s Shāhnāma of 1564 is the only known courtly Abu’l-Khairid production of this work. The timing of its patronage comes just as the leader was solidifying his control over the polity. In the colophon to the Shāhnāma copy, the scribe Muhammad Baqi states that he completed it in the workshop of Abu al-Ghazi ʿAbdullah Bahadur Khan (ʿAbdullah Khan’s full title) in August 1564, “in the splendid city of Bukhara.” The same calligrapher signed written specimens dated between 1557 and 1560 in a Safavid album once held in Ardabil (NLR Dorn 147, fols. 5v, 19r), which suggests that the scribe had some clout and that there was reason to collect his work.²² The late sixteenth century Ottoman chronicler Mustafa ʿÂli describes a calligrapher named “Baqi Muhammad of Bukhara” as an individual skilled in six scripts, and a “famous master of those with praiseworthy pens and elegant penmanship.”²³ Mustafa ʿÂli includes Baqi Muhammad in a list of scribes who found success in Rum, the Levant, and Tabriz, either through personal travels or through the circulation of written materials in these locations. We find proof of this in one of the scribe’s above-mentioned album pages, written out in Damascus several years before ʿAbdullah Khan’s Shāhnāma project.

The gilt leather binding on ʿAbdullah’s courtly Shāhnāma is impressed with a panel stamp covering thick paper board. The cover is nearly identical to that of another royal Bukharan manuscript of Nizami’s Makhzan al-asrār, completed under the direction of Sultan Mirak for ʿAbd al-ʿAziz in 1545 (BnF Suppl Pers 985). The perimeters of the boards in both bindings are embossed with cartouches filled with imaginary figures (waq) such as Chinese-inspired mythical beasts (qilin) interspersed with fox heads. In the center, a dragon with a squat tail assaults a deer and hisses at a confrontational simurgh above. At the top, spiraling clouds ascend like smoke, while a monkey rides a bear at lower left, beside rabbits and foxes congregating amidst a landscape dotted with oversized flowers. Given that some elements of ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma binding are mirror-image reversals of those on the BnF cover, and the shapes of animals and clouds have subtle differences in size distinguishing the two covers, separate tools and patterns were used to imprint the motifs into the two leather encasements. Nevertheless, ʿAbdullah Khan seems to be asserting that he and his patronage are on par with that of his bibliophile predecessor, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz.

The colophon, binding, and several illustrated folios repeat the name of the patron, ʿAbdullah Khan. Thirty-one illustrations follow ʿAbdullah Musavvir’s characteristic style. But twenty-nine blank spaces interspersed throughout the manuscript indicate that it was never fully finished. The work, which Barbara Schmitz has called significant, “contains the largest cycle of illustrations known in a royal Bukhara manuscript.”²⁴ Rustam is depicted most frequently, followed by Bahram Gur, whose exploits are the subjects of several paintings. To date, the only comprehensive analysis of the volume is that by Güner İnal, published half a century ago.²⁵ İnal compared its illustrations with those in another Shāhnāma, completed in Tabriz in 1522 (TSMK H.1485),²⁶ which, she suggested, was produced for the Safavid shah Ismaʿil I prior to the more elaborate Shāhnāma commission that would come to be known as the Shāhnāma of Shah Tahmasp. Comparing the composition of the death of Dara (fol. 382r) in the Ismaʿil copy (H.1485) with its Abu’l-Khairid counterpart (fol. 428r), İnal proposed that imagery created in Tabriz circa 1522 was transferred to Bukhara in 1564 by means of another Safavid Shāhnāma copy “from the same family [as] H.1485” taken during one of the Abu’l-Khairid occupations of Herat, in 1535: “Later, when the Uzbeck ruler wanted to have a Shahnameh designed for himself, the illustrator deliberately took a miniature of this manuscript as a model for his scene.”²⁷

İnal’s interpretation remains speculative, but other iconographic features in ʿAbdullah Khan’s Shāhnāma appear in manuscripts closer to it in terms of place and time. These were all produced in the Bukhara kitābkhāna. “Rustam defeats the white div” (fig. 1) might be a later version of the same scene painted on silk and attributed to mid-sixteenth-century Bukhara that was once located in the Keir collection (present whereabouts unknown).²⁸ Both render Rustam garbed in green with a tiger-skin tunic trimmed in white fur, a cobalt-blue quiver of arrows at his waist. Rustam’s facial features in the Keir painting recall faces attributed to Mahmud Muzahhib, an artist prolific in his contributions to elite Abu’l-Khairid manuscripts in the 1540s, which suggests a continuity of traditions in Bukhara across several decades, impervious to the whims of various patrons. A young Rustam lassoing the colt Rakhsh in ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma (fig. 2) is derived from depictions of Dara and the herdsmen that originated in the Būstān of Saʿdi illustrated by Bihzad in 1488 (DAKM Adab Farisi 22, fol. 10a). This composition was subsequently emulated multiple times for Abu’l-Khairid patrons.²⁹

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Rustam defeats the white div. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, dated 1564. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Ms. H.1488, fol. 94a. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library)

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Young Rustam lassoing the colt Rakhsh. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, dated 1564. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Ms. H.1488, fol. 66b. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library)

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Verse and prose accounts of Timur’s life by Hatifi (d. 1521) and Yazdi (d. 1454), respectively, were more frequently produced during the reign of ʿAbdullah Khan than was the Shāhnāma. Several illustrated manuscripts survive either as complete copies or dispersed folios.³⁰ Although some scribes employed in the Bukhara kitābkhāna wrote them out, none in this Tīmūrnāma group is explicitly dedicated to a specific ruler. The combined number of their illustrations pales in comparison to the quantity in ʿAbdullah’s single royal Shāhnāma volume, leading to the conclusion that the Tīmūrnāma copies needed fewer resources and were produced for courtiers and military elites. Most are copies of the poet Hatifi’s text, suggesting their readers’ predilection for Persian poetry over prose.

Despite having incomplete or missing colophons, the illustrations to several Tīmūrnāma manuscripts look to have been executed at the same time as, or after, the completion of ʿAbdullah Khan’s Shāhnāma from 1564. What might be the earliest, now just a detached folio in the Harvard Art Museum (HAM no. 1965.477, fig. 3), is a rare example derived from Yazdi’s Tīmūrnāma (Ẓafar-nāma) in our group. It depicts Timur’s troops hunting, elements of which are echoed in the Abu’l-Khairid Shāhnāma. Yazdi’s text also comprises an assembled manuscript that has an array of illustrations from earlier periods, as well as other literary works, that are at odds with the altered date of 1615 indicated in the rubbed colophon (BL IO Islamic 3448). Pasted paintings are derived from earlier Turkman and early Safavid Shiraz workshops, and two Bukharan double pages from the 1570s are inserted at the beginning and end of the manuscript.³¹ Confusingly, the text might have been copied at any point and illustrations from older workshops were adhered to the pages after the writing was completed. The period when this composite production was compiled is suspect, but it eventually made its way to India and onwards to Oudh. However, the Bukharan components to the manuscript and the Harvard Art Museum folio suggest that ʿAbdullah Khan or a courtier may have had a complete illustrated text of Yazdi’s prose work, which has since been dispersed. Beside obvious figural and sartorial parallels, the arc of the horizon depicted on the Harvard folio and on several illustrations in ʿAbdullah Khan’s Shāhnāma (figs. 1, 2, 4, 7, 12) is punctuated with hatch marks in black ink. Lobed trees and shrubs in the Harvard Art Museum folio and in ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma have prominent protruding twigs painted against golden hillsides.

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Timur hunting. Folio from a manuscript of the Ẓafar- nāma, by Yazdi. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of Meta and Paul J. Sachs, 1965.477. (Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

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Manuchihr in battle. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, dated 1564. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Ms. H.1488, fol. 41b. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library)

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According to the colophon of a Tīmūrnāma of Hatifi in the Biruni Institute (ARB 2102), it was completed by the scribe ʿAli Riza al-Katib in 1568.³² Going by only the colophon, one would assume its three illustrated diptychs post-date ʿAbdullah’s 1564 Shāhnāma. For example, Timur’s troops laying siege to a fortress in Khurasan (fig. 5) recall soldiers scaling the walls of Kai Khusrau’s castle as defensive archers take aim in ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma (fig. 6). In the Biruni’s Tīmūrnāma, a soldier in red on the left plunges his dagger into the chest of a fallen warrior, taking the same pose as Rustam killing Suhrab in ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma (fig. 7). The same light pink ground, punctuated by red, blue, and green rocks, that is depicted in the Biruni’s painting of Timur surveying his troops beneath an umbrella (fig. 8) is also found in the battlefield scenes of ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma. Timur’s soldiers (fig. 8) sport helmets topped with colorful flags and small black tufts, and one wields a lance with a black feathered puff. One of the troops even dons a tiger skin tunic akin to that worn by Rustam, and there are similar features of headwear and tasseled horse armor. Despite these similarities between the 1564 and 1568 works, the illustrations in the Biruni’s Tīmūrnāma are pasted to the pages and could be another rare case in which the visuals predate the text. They appear to have been produced around the same time as ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma was illustrated but could have then been pasted into the manuscript a few years later, after the text was finished.

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Timur’s troops lay siege to a fortress in Khurasan. Hatifi, Tīmūr-nāma, dated 1568. Tashkent, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies, Ms. 2102, fol. 45v. (Photo: courtesy of the Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies)

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Attack on Kai Khusrau’s castle. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, dated 1564. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Ms. H.1488, fol. 297b. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library)

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Rustam kills Suhrab. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, dated 1564. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Ms. H.1488, fol. 116a. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library)

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Timur surveying his troops beneath an umbrella. Hatifi, Tīmūr-nāma, dated 1568. Tashkent, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies, Ms. 2102, fol. 69v. (Photo: courtesy of the Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies)

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The frontispiece to the Biruni’s Tīmūrnāma (fig. 9), however, betrays a subtle pictorial shift from the precise style of ʿAbdullah Musavvir, and was likely painted closer to the 1568 date of transcription. Francis Richard has observed that by that time, the calligrapher Mir Husain Husaini (known as Kulangi) had been appointed kitābdār of the Bukharan workshop and may have shared duties with his colleague ʿAbdullah Musavvir prior to the latter’s death in 1575.³³ After this point, the quality of the Bukhara kitābkhāna productions weakened, although output was not completely halted.

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Illustrated frontispiece. Hatifi, Tīmūr-nāma, dated 1568. Tashkent, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies, Ms. 2102, fols.105r–106v. (Photo: courtesy of the Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies)

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Yet another Tīmūrnāma of Hatifi, this one in the British Library (BL Add. 22703), has a frontispiece similar to that of the Biruni copy. It was divided in half, with one folio pasted at the beginning and the other at the end of the manuscript. Putting them together (fig. 10), we see a ruler presiding over an outdoor gathering. His attendant grasps the handle of a wine ewer resting on a low table set with three other vessels, features also found in the Biruni’s version. On the left side of the original diptych in the British Library manuscript, there are musicians and inebriated guests swooning in front of a gate bearing the same checkered pattern as in the Biruni copy. Golden hills rising above blossoming pink and white trees also adorn both versions. These illustrative schemes prove a post-1568 provenance, since they are executed in a style that persisted into the early years of the following century in Transoxiana.

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Reconstituted illustrated frontispiece. Hatifi, Tīmūr-nāma, undated. © British Library Board. British Library, Ms. Add. 22703, fols.1r (right), and 87v (left). (Photo: courtesy of the British Library)

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The British Library Tīmūrnāma (Add. 22703) is an incomplete excerpt of Hatifi’s original text and lacks a colophon. Its illuminated margins bear pasted flanking medallions cut from colorful papers that resemble borders attributed to ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s workshop. The dimensions of the volume (28.6 cm x 17.8 cm) conform to others that he commissioned; however, the production of manuscripts of similar sizes, with sprayed stenciled borders and colored paper appliqués, persisted in Bukhara—albeit rarely—until the very end of the century.³⁴ It is thus unknown when the text was written, but it could have been copied anytime between the 1540s and 1570s. Beside the divided frontispiece, the other illustrations to the British Library manuscript reflect later trends in India and Transoxiana after the downfall of the Abu’l-Khairids, which is beyond the scope of this present article.

There exists another undated and damaged copy of Hatifi’s Tīmūrnāma in the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS 305A).³⁵ Two badly abraded illustrations in it have fighters and horses that appear to have been painted under ʿAbdullah Musavvir, late in his supervision of the Bukharan workshop. A warrior in a blend of tiger and leopard skin with a red shield in the top right section of the first illustration (fig. 11) has the long face and sad eyes of figures associated with the artist Mahmud Muzahhib mentioned above, but stylistically the RAS composition can be dated to the late 1560s. In it, a soldier atop a horse caparisoned in brown and gold skewers a warrior falling from his black mount, saddled in blue. A mirror image of this pair appears in the lower section of the scene in ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma in which Kai Khusrau battles Shida (fig. 12); here, blood flows from the lance making contact with the victim’s rear end.

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Battle scene. Hatifi, Tīmūr-nāma, undated. London, Royal Asiatic Society, Ms. Persian 305A, fol. 70r. (Photo: courtesy of the Royal Asiatic Society)

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Battle between Kai Khusrau and Shida. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, dated 1564. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Ms. H.1488, fol. 290a. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library)

Citation: Muqarnas Online 40, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/22118993_0040_009

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A final detached folio connects to the Bukharan Tīmūrnāma corpus. Now held in the Grassi Museum of Applied Arts (fig. 13), its rendered floor tiling, figural types, and decorated fabrics resemble other works supervised by Kulangi in the 1570s through 1590s.³⁶ Paired hills on the horizon have anthropomorphic forms that are akin to composite figures popular in Khurasan in this period.³⁷ An inscription at the top identifies the illustration as depicting “Amīr Tīmūr ṣāḥib qirān,” but this is an admittedly tenuous linkage to the Tīmūrnāma. While the seated ruler on a platform with bent leg comports with depictions of the dynastic founder, Philipp Walter Schulz has noted the painting’s similarities to an illustration from a Gulistān of Saʿdi copied by Kulangi (BL Or. 5302, fol. 25v).³⁸ Schulz attributes the latter scene to the painter Shaikhm, who originally trained in Bukhara but later migrated to India where he served in the kitābkhāna of the Mughal emperor Akbar (d. 1605). Kulangi states in the colophon of this Saʿdi manuscript that he finished writing it in 1567, a year before the scribe ʿAli Riza completed the Biruni Tīmūrnāma (ARB 2102).³⁹ Their chronological proximity suggests simultaneous coordination between the two manuscripts, which might be extrapolated to the Grassi folio as a means to deduce its original date of production.

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Loose folio inscribed amīr Tīmūr ṣāḥib qirān, undated. Leipzig, Grassi Museum of Applied Arts, B.11.5r. (After Philipp Walter Schulz, Die persisch-islamische Miniaturmalerei [Leipzig: Verlag von Karl W. Hiersemann, 1914], pl. 75)

Citation: Muqarnas Online 40, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/22118993_0040_009

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These different threads—multiple Tīmūrnāma texts, Bukhara-trained artists and scribes, connections to Akbar’s courtly workshop in late-sixteenth century India—contribute to our understanding of the period and its arts. Bukharan artisans, who would naturally be alarmed by dwindling royal patronage in the late 1560s, might have prepared Tīmūrnāmas to appeal to a lucrative book market in India. Whereas some copies were produced for local clients and may have remained in Transoxiana (such as ARB 2102, and the original manuscript once containing HAM no. 1965.477 [fig. 3]), others completed in Bukhara (RAS 305A, GMAA no. B.11.5r) appear to have been taken to the subcontinent, where they could have served as models for other works locally produced in India. Besides these physical objects migrating, local Transoxianan artisans themselves relocated, picking up skills in India and applying them once back home in the region of their birth. Kulangi himself left for India with or without ʿAbdullah Khan’s agreement to do so, worked on Akbar’s Ḥamza-nāma as a scribe in the 1570s, and then copied manuscripts while on his pilgrimage to Mecca, before returning to Bukhara prior to his death.

When primary sources are lacking, we can look to the stylistic characteristics of Tīmūrnāma paintings to speculate on the targeted audiences in Transoxiana and India. The British Library’s Tīmūrnāma (Add. 22703) has multiple layers of value: as an original Bukharan manuscript with text and marginal stenciling and illumination perhaps from ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s workshop, with later interventions by artists connected to ʿAbdullah Khan’s patronage, and then finished a few decades later by the finest manuscript artists in Transoxiana at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries to include abundant Indian elements—figural, sartorial, and architectural. Such an eminent volume seems intended to appeal to a subcontinental (perhaps royal) recipient, even befitting an emperor. With regard to the purpose and appeal of this Bukharan Tīmūrnāma manuscript and others in India, what could be better than a laudatory chronicle of Timur, the Chaghataid ancestor of the Mughals, that had been prepared in the Mughals’ ancestral homeland? As for their attractiveness to Abu’l-Khairid elites within Transoxiana, the stories provided excitement but also evoked the latest heroics and territorial conquests of the leader ʿAbdullah Khan.

As noted above, the ambitious Shāhnāma produced in 1564 appears to be the only copy of Firdausi’s text made for a member of the Abu’l-Khairid elite. Karin Rührdanz, however, has identified two detached folios from a common manuscript (ROM 970.268.1 and 2) as evidence of another Shāhnāma intended for ʿAbdullah made around the same time.⁴⁰ Further dispersed folios with the same page dimensions, short-legged figures, and square-jawed horses are also from this same manuscript. The Dallas Museum of Art holds several pages (fig. 14 is one example); a folio is in the possession of Lady Homayoun Renwick; and other pages were auctioned in recent years.⁴¹ Although Rührdanz describes them as a “modest offshoot of ʿAbd-Allah’s commission,” they stylistically resemble Bukharan productions of the 1570s through the 1590s, when ʿAbdullah Khan’s patronage of illustrated manuscripts ended. Manuscripts completed in Bukhara during this period were for regional courtly, religious, and military elites, with some destined for markets further afield in India.

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Battle scene from dispersed manuscript. Firdausi, Shāhnāma, undated. Opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper. The Keir Collection of Islamic Art, on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art, K.1.2014.750. (Photo: © The Dallas Museum of Art, with kind permission from the Trustees of the Keir Collection of Islamic Art)

Citation: Muqarnas Online 40, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/22118993_0040_009

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Despite the domestic turmoil that resulted from ʿAbdullah’s pursuit of power prior to 1582, his kitābkhāna produced multiple illustrated manuscripts. After this date, ʿAbdullah’s patronage of the workshops ceased. His manuscript commissions declined when he officially became the great khan upon his father’s death in 1583, resulting in greater responsibilities requiring his attention and resources. With military successes expanding his domain’s borders, it likely took all of his effort to maintain his greatly enlarged empire. For example, his troops had seized Khurasan in 1588 only to loosen their grip on the region in the campaign to take Khwarazm in 1592. By 1593, the Abu’l-Khairids had taken Khwarazm but at the expense of various centers in Khurasan, necessitating their recapture.⁴² ʿAbdullah’s abandonment of the workshops also coincided with the loss of the kitābdār and artist ʿAbdullah Musavvir, whose style had dominated manuscript production from the 1550s up until his death, posited to be sometime in the 1570s. Following this, manuscripts previously completed in the Bukharan kitābkhāna went on to have greater utility beyond Abu’l-Khairid domains. ʿAbdullah leveraged illustrated works of poetry from his own collection as a diplomatic tool in his new role as a singular monarch lording over his domain.

Gift-Giving (Pīshkash) and the Politics of Presenting Manuscripts

The presentation of manuscripts as diplomatic gifts by Abu’l-Khairid envoys was not only a prevailing custom among Turco-Persianate political elites of the larger Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires but also a well-established practice throughout the broader Muslim world. In a major exhibition highlighting such exchanges, Linda Komaroff has explained how gift-giving creates an obligatory system of presenting and receiving that does not conform to universal rules.⁴³ In the Turco-Persianate world, the word for these exchanges is pīshkash, and it has played various roles in Islamic courtly cultures during the last fourteen hundred years. In Ann Lambton’s nuanced interpretations of the Persian term as a tribute, tax, bribe, or gift, it demarcates the status of the giver and recipient within the dynamics of political power and comes with obligations to give, accept, or reciprocate.⁴⁴ Hedda Reindl-Kiel’s examinations of Ottoman gift exchanges articulate political and social dimensions “which precisely made the status of the present’s receiver visible and tangible. Thus gifts established not only real values but also what we might call symbolic capital in kind.”⁴⁵

In the case of manuscripts, this symbolic worth, however, was lost after it was accessioned by the library or treasury, but it could be revived when given to another person.⁴⁶ In Sinem Arcak-Casale’s examinations of Ottoman-Safavid gift-giving, she similarly interprets the objects as indicators of “economic, symbolic and artistic values” and the circumstances of their distribution as “a courtly performance” involving spectators, recipients, and bestowers. For the Ottomans, “there was the expectation to not only reciprocate, but to return the favor through the giving of a comparable or even more valuable object or sum of money worth twice the value of the original given item.”⁴⁷ Thus the gift functions as a financial transaction, and an immediate second gift can eradicate the indebtedness created by the first. This secondary exchange provides a way for a ruler to express his superiority while still accepting the original gifted item.

As the above scholarship attests, Ottoman and Safavid pīshkash transfers, and information on the dispatch and receipt of illustrated manuscripts as part of them, inform our analysis of similar Abu’l-Khairid exchanges with other dynastic heads. Lâle Uluç’s findings on the Ottoman predilection for illustrated copies of Firdausi’s Shāhnāma are particularly relevant.⁴⁸ Overlooking the earlier period of Abu’l-Khairid diplomacy and pīshkash due to a paucity of sources concerning transfers of books between courts in the first half of the sixteenth century, the present discussion will focus on the better-documented second half and on manuscripts that were likely transmitted during the reign of ʿAbdullah Khan (Appendix 3).

ʿAbdullah’s victories over all the appanages and control of the Bukhara kitābkhāna made him the main patron in the late 1550s and throughout the 1560s. As such he also had at his fingertips the illustrated manuscripts that had been previously assembled in Bukhara for ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, Nauruz Ahmad, and Muhammad Yar. Later in his rule, however, he gifted some of his own commissioned copies—and perhaps those originally owned by his predecessors—to foreign powers. Based on provisional findings, three manuscripts given by the Abu’l-Khairids to the Safavids have so far been identified, with over thirty codices presented to the Mughals, and twenty-eight others sent to the Ottomans. Regrettably, most of the manuscripts either lack records regarding their transfer or there are limited seals and notes that might better indicate previous ownership, impeding thorough analysis. Fortunately, there is sufficient documentation regarding ʿAbdullah’s gifting of his Shāhnāma to Sultan Murad III in 1594 to permit a case study of Abu’l-Khairid pīshkash. By analyzing the complex, intertwined Ottoman-Abu’l-Khairid political and artistic relationships surrounding the volume, we can discern the intended impact that the Abu’l-Khairids desired in giving it, and the actual outcome after the Ottomans accepted it.

The Safavids were the main enemies of the Abu’l-Khairids, and neither made few attempts to broker sustained peace agreements that would result in the exchange of gifts. It is, then, not surprising that a very small number of manuscripts found their way from courtly Abu’l-Khairid workshops into the hands of the Safavids. Nevertheless, at least three manuscripts produced under Transoxianan patronage were presented to Safavid royalty and remained in Iran for a few centuries. These must have been gifted to Shah ʿAbbas I in Isfahan after the death of ʿAbdullah Khan, when Iran and Transoxiana were on better terms. Later owners commissioned artists to conduct further amendments on some of the manuscripts. Based on added illustrations, seal impressions, and inscriptions, two were regifted by the Safavids: they went to the Mughals (Appendix 3a, nos. 2 and 3), with one continuing onwards to the Ottomans (Appendix 3a, no. 2).

A more systematic review of the extensive holdings of Abu’l-Khairid manuscripts in Mughal libraries (Appendix 3b), provisionally numbering thirty volumes, deserves treatment elsewhere. Here it will suffice to say that some of those given by emissaries on ʿAbdullah’s behalf were intended to cement alliances against the Safavids, while others were directly taken by artists originating from Transoxiana to India. Paratextual elements in some of these volumes await analysis that could shed light on their accession. Many of the works lack such explicit documentation but bear features that merit their inclusion, such as Mughal overpainting and ownership seals that prove the objects spent time in the royal libraries of India.

Of all the dynastic powers, the Abu’l-Khairids’ gifts of manuscripts and albums to the Ottomans were the most numerous (Appendix 3c). Some were delivered by Bukharan ambassadors visiting the Sublime Porte, while others could have been given to Ottoman dignitaries in Bukhara to then transport back to Istanbul.⁴⁹ The majority of the illustrated manuscripts believed to have been gifted by Abu’l-Khairid rulers to their Ottoman counterparts are still preserved today in the Topkapı Palace Library, with a few subsequently acquired by other collections outside of it (Appendix 3c, nos. 24–28). Around 1900, the Swedish diplomat and dealer F. R. Martin acquired objects from the Ottoman collection. Scholars have since noted Martin’s infamy in “returning to his villa in Florence with important paintings and manuscripts removed surreptitiously or with the tacit approval of unscrupulous librarians from the libraries of Istanbul.”⁵⁰ This explains how some illustrated manuscripts of Bukharan manufacture known to have been gifted to the Ottomans left the Topkapı Palace.

There are other unillustrated texts that have remained in the Topkapı collection, such as original copies of ʿUbaidullah’s and Shibani’s Dīvān compositions of personal poetry, and it is quite feasible that these too were gifted.⁵¹ It is easy to believe that these precious volumes of the premier Abu’l-Khairid dynastic leaders would have been presented to Ottoman rulers in a display of fraternity and literary pretension. Since they contain only illuminated headings and have no other visual schema, they are not included in the list but are important examples of Uzbek-Ottoman exchanges of manuscripts.

Manuscripts sent to the Ottoman court did not come for free; they accompanied letters asking for political favors or were tendered after the conclusion of peace and trade agreements. This was true for ʿAbdullah Khan’s Shāhnāma when it was gifted to Sultan Murad III in 1594. Although Rührdanz claims that ʿAbdullah’s Shāhnāma “was specially made with the intention of being presented at Istanbul by an embassy negotiating Ottoman help against the Safavids,” the work does not seem to have been created with the aim of passing it along. Firstly, it had been in ʿAbdullah’s collection for three decades and remained there despite other, earlier occasions to part with it. Secondly, characterizing ʿAbdullah’s offering of the manuscript as an act of subservience and supplication downplays important circumstances surrounding its transfer.⁵² ʿAbdullah’s gift was actually intended to convey his equal stature with its intended recipient while concurrently securing political favor. His selection of this particular title implies his knowledge of a prevailing Ottoman predilection for illustrated Shāhnāmas. By extension, it also reflects his awareness of Firdausian Shāhnāmas given by other dynastic leaders to the Sublime Porte.

The earliest documented exchange of a Firdausian Shāhnāma manuscript between Transoxiana and the Ottomans occurred in 1514 when the last Timurid ruler of Herat, Baiqara’s son and brief successor, Badiʿ al-Zaman (d. 1514), seeking refuge in Istanbul, presented a copy to Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20). Scholars suspect it was the manuscript completed in 1493 for Sultan ʿAli Mirza, the Turkman ruler of Gilan, dubbed the “Turkman” or “Big Head” Shāhnāma on account of its figures’ exaggerated proportions.⁵³ Over ensuing decades, the Ottomans became avid collectors of Firdausi’s work and Safavid workshops were prolific in producing copies of the title, with some sites designated specifically to satisfy this demand (such as the commercial manuscript manufacturing center of Shiraz).⁵⁴

In 1567, Shah Tahmasp dispatched Shah Quli Khan Ustajlu as his ambassador to the enthronement ceremony of Selim II in Edirne. There, Shah Quli presented the shah’s own opulent Shāhnāma on 16 February 1568.⁵⁵ Commenced in 1522, during Ismaʿil’s reign, the manuscript, encased in a jewel- and pearl-encrusted binding, was later completed for his successor Tahmasp in 1537.⁵⁶ It was the most extravagant rendition of the Shāhnāma that the Safavids or any other dynasty ever produced. Its presentation to the Ottomans by the Safavid ambassador is featured in an illustration within Selim’s biographical chronicle, the Shāhnāma-yi Salīm Khān, by Sayyid Luqman. It renders Shah Quli deeply bowing in a very subservient posture.⁵⁷ Rather than simply signifying Tahmasp’s full allegiance and devotion to the Ottoman ruler, the bestowal of this opulent gift served critical cultural and political aims on both sides. The Safavids and Ottomans each viewed themselves as arbiters of taste and refinement, and the ultimate connoisseurs. The Safavids knew the impact that the gifted object would have and sought to assert their superior refinement in having had their artisans complete the manuscript. Once deaccessioned, the Tahmasp Shāhnāma—truly the pinnacle of Turco-Persianate arts of the book, with its rich and compelling illustrative pictorial scheme—would later inspire Ottoman artists to reproduce some of its compositions. This directionality of inspiration proves it exerted a powerful influence, and Ünver Rüstem has noted how Tahmasp’s gift stimulated production of truncated and illustrated Shāhnāmas in the Ottoman Empire.⁵⁸ Safavid artistic prowess could also convey political mastery.

As a window into the power dynamics between the two empires, the presentation of richly-illustrated manuscripts became a way for the Safavids to obtain concessions in political and military negotiations with the more powerful Ottomans.⁵⁹ Tahmasp may have gifted his valuable manuscripts as a result of his second Edict of Sincere Repentance in 1556, in which he decreed new standards of public morality and piety, denounced the arts, and disbanded his kitābkhāna. Tahmasp’s acts of gifting thereby may have also served as a conspicuous display of the shah’s newfound ascetic humility—and Shiʿi spiritual superiority—to the Sunni Ottomans as a form of religious power play that elevated the position of the giver over the receiver. It appears, however, that the acquisition of precious works of Safavid manufacture as diplomatic gifts, such as Tahmasp’s Shāhnāma, also reinforced Ottoman notions of their own superiority as deserving recipients of exquisite objects matching their status. Thus, the Ottomans and the Safavids each in their own way thought they were the stronger party through the exchange of illustrated manuscripts.⁶⁰

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Safavid representatives continued to present lavishly prepared Shāhnāma manuscripts as gifts to Ottoman royals and nobles. This was in spite of, and even enhanced by, the Safavid-Ottoman wars taking place between 1578 and 1590.⁶¹ Before them, in 1576, Tahmasp sent another embassy, led by Tuqmaq Khan, and gifted illuminated manuscripts, including a Shāhnāma copy, to congratulate Sultan Murad III’s succession two years earlier; however, no Bukharan ambassador was present at this assembly. The first embassy sent by ʿAbdullah Khan to the Ottomans, led by ʿAli Bahadur Hajji, left Constantinople just as the Safavid ambassador had arrived.⁶²

Even before ʿAbdullah Khan was officially declared great khan in June 1582, Murad III had invited him to the eight-week circumcision festival of the sultan’s son (Şehzade) Mehmed. The start of the courtly gathering was to be held in Constantinople the same month as ʿAbdullah’s coronation in Transoxiana. Unable to attend in person, he sent an emissary in his stead who brought some manuscripts from the Bukharan workshops to the festivities taking place in the Topkapı palace and outside it in the Hippodrome. The Safavid shah Khudabanda (r. 1578–87) also sent his ambassador, Ibrahim Khan, to the circumcision of Prince Mehmed. This time Mustafa Âli reported that the Safavid emissary “presented gifts both to the Sultan and the young heir [which included] a gilded Qurʾan, [and] manuscripts of the Shāhnāma and a Khamsa of Nizami, both decorated by famous Persian artists.”⁶³ In turn, ʿAbdullah Khan dispatched seven deste (Ottoman measurement of ten to twelve units) of sable furs, sixty-three musk grains, two decorated amulets to guard against the plague, a Qurʾan, and a Shāh u gadā manuscript of Hilali with miniatures.⁶⁴

Incidentally, in May 1582, a month before acquiring these goods sent by “the Khan of the Uzbeks” (as articulated by an unnamed official compiling the gift inventory), the Ottoman grand vizier Osman Paşa received orders about the dispatch of weapons and soldiers to the Uzbek ambassador when his entourage arrived at Demirkapı.⁶⁵ Thus in the early modern era—much as today—we see diplomacy paired with international arms deals. Rifles and janissaries were dispatched using the same northern route to Bukhara that avoided Safavid territory as Sultan Süleyman’s dispatch in 1551 to ʿAbd al-Latif, discussed above.

The importance of the 1582 pīshkash from the foreign delegations is documented textually and visually in the second volume of the Shāhanshāhnāma, in which queues of figures process through the Gate of Felicity in the Topkapı Palace bearing these manuscripts and gifts.⁶⁶ The Safavids continued to give Shāhnāma volumes to the Ottomans through the 1590s.⁶⁷ However, after both Safavid and Abu’l-Khairid ambassadors were present and observed one another’s offerings in 1582, this viewing engendered a rivalry in pīshkash among the Safavid and Abu’l-Khairid emissaries to the Ottoman court, as seen in the respective exchange of gifts that took place in 1594.

Through his ambassador, ʿAbdullah must have heard reports of what the Safavids presented to Murad III at the 1582 circumcision festival, and perhaps he sought to curry favor with the Ottoman sultan by offering the only royal Shāhnāma manuscript in his collection when the next opportunity arose. Fortunately, the Ottoman historian Selânikî (Mustafa Efendi, ca. 1545–1600) chronicles the visit of the Uzbek envoy Adtash Bahadur, from his arrival at the Sublime Porte in Istanbul at the onset of 1594 until his departure six weeks later.⁶⁸ He recounts how the ambassador “tendered gifts and presents” including pelts, readymade fur garments, and five yak tails to be hung around the necks of horses, all of which were “no doubt intended to show that ʿAbdullah had healthy trade links with Muscovy and Siberia.”⁶⁹ In addition, Adtash Bahadur also presented two Qurʾan manuscripts (or one in two volumes), a Khamsa of Nizami, and of course the Shāhnāma manuscript under discussion.⁷⁰ With time, the Safavids and Abu’l-Khairids both knew to pander to Ottoman appetites for Persian poetry by Firdausi and Nizami. In comparison to the gifts presented earlier at the 1582 circumcision ceremony, the objects the Uzbeks offered in 1594 were of greater monetary value. Perhaps the bestowal of both a Khamsa and a Shāhnāma volume that year acknowledges the Safavid ambassador Ibrahim Khan’s offerings made fourteen years prior. What is more, as opposed to 1582, by 1594 ʿAbdullah Khan’s status had steadily risen after consolidating his power over the Abu’l-Khairid appanages and declaring himself the great khan. He no longer had to share power with Samarqand; it was centralized solely in Bukhara.

ʿAbdullah dispatched the ambassador Adtash Bahadur to Istanbul immediately following his conquest of Khwarazm. Along with the gifts, Adtash carried a letter written in Turki, addressed “from the Ruler of the Vilayet of Samarkand and Bukhara.”⁷¹ ʿAbdullah’s choice of title flaunts his unification of Samarqand and Bukhara to his Ottoman recipient. By 1594, ʿAbdullah had undertaken campaigns against the Khwarazmians, Qazaqs, Tajiks, Turkmans, Mughals, and Safavids with the aim of recapturing the full extent of territory briefly ruled by his ancestor Muhammad Shibani Khan.⁷² This was the justification for ʿAbdullah’s attack on Iran to secure control over the province of Khurasan in 1588. ʿAbdullah’s military quest to restore the original Abu’l-Khairid borders caused great alarm. Alliances frantically formed among the Safavids in Iran, the Mughals in South Asia, and the Qazaqs based in the Central Eurasian Steppe. The Russian tsar Feodor of Muscovy (r. 1584–1598) also appealed to ally with a Qazaq coalition to help Iran against ʿAbdullah of Bukhara.⁷³ Despite a one-year lag in correspondence given the technology of the times, across the sixteenth century the Ottomans and Uzbeks attempted to coordinate attacks on the eastern and western flanks of the Safavid Empire to keep the Iranians engaged and their military distracted and divided. This strategy seems to have been foremost in ʿAbdullah’s mind at the height of his military power in the 1590s.

The scholar Audrey Burton has described how, by 1589, the friendly bond between the Sublime Porte and Bukhara had actually frayed. Murad III “consider[ed the] Uzbeks rulers of a petty state, anxious to curb schemes for expansion which seemed excessive and inconsistent with [their] insignificant status.”⁷⁴ This was in comparison to earlier in the century, when the Ottomans were the predominant power in the region and “relations were and remained friendly, and [an] unequal partnership flourished, bringing benefits to both sides.”⁷⁵ But by 1594, the relationship between khan and sultan had become strained, with the Uzbeks poised to conquer parts of Iran near Turkey. Murad III sent no congratulations on ʿAbdullah’s success in Khurasan in 1588, only an acknowledgement of the takeover of Herat.⁷⁶ Burton recounts:

ʿAbdullah must have resented the Sultan’s strongly expressed disapproval of further Bukharan expansion in Khurasan. … This, surely, was an intolerable attempt to curtail his freedom of action and … it was clear that their earlier friendship had not survived the news of ʿAbdullah’s victories. All traces of Ottoman goodwill for the khanate had in fact disappeared … for it was thought that ʿAbdullah might follow such a conquest with an attack on Iran proper, after which he would become Turkey’s dangerous and unwelcome neighbour. [ ... ] In August 1592, [Murad III] went so far as to promise that he would support the Shah against “Osbeck Tatares.”⁷⁷

Burton’s observations illuminate the context of Ottoman political machinations when the Abu’l-Khairids presented their Shāhnāma: the Ottomans would secretly aid the Safavids over the Uzbeks!

When ʿAbdullah Khan acted through Adtash to present his Shāhnāma to Murad III in 1594, it was in the midst of the Abu’l-Khairids’ occupation of Khurasan and recent victory over the neighboring Khwarazmian ruler Hajjim Khan, who fled Khiva. After the Khivan khan’s defeat by ʿAbdullah, when an “innumerable Tatar army … poured like a raging flood upon the Khan of the Vilayet of Khwarazm,”⁷⁸ the vanquished ruler took refuge with Shah ʿAbbas in Qazvin. ʿAbdullah’s letter circuitously asked his assumed allies, the Ottomans, to plead with the Safavids to expel Hajjim Khan from Iran and into the hands of the Abu’l-Khairids so he could obtain vengeance and secure his control over Khwarazm. Instead, the Ottoman ruler replied that “now is not the time” to vex the Safavid shah into giving up the Khwarazmian refugee.⁷⁹ A few years prior, in 1590, the Ottomans and Safavids had concluded their twelve-year war and signed the Ferhad Paşa Treaty, which favored the Ottomans by allowing them to keep Azerbaijan. Along with a few precious manuscripts, Haidar Mirza (d. ca. 1596), the nephew of Shah ʿAbbas, was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court to ensure peace would hold, so long as he lived.⁸⁰ Moreover, since 1593 the Ottoman Empire had been pursuing a new and costly war against the Habsburgs in Serbia. Therefore, the Ottomans had multiple reasons not to acquiesce to ʿAbdullah; geopolitical agreements and antipathies now rotated on different axes than in prior decades.

Conclusion

A contemporary account of the Ottoman-Abu’l-Khairid relationship by a seemingly impartial witness provides final insight into the historical dynamics of this period. Anthony Sherley (1565–1635), one of Elizabeth I’s envoys to the Safavids between 1598 and 1601, presents the Uzbeks as “uncouth frontiersmen who do the bidding of the Ottomans ‘whose religion they professe.’”⁸¹ Despite his criticisms, Sherley accurately portrays the power dynamic between Iran’s neighbors to the west and the east as an alliance of convenience couched in confessional terms. The Ottomans were still the authoritative power, however, and wished to keep it that way. This was borne out in the Ottoman response when ʿAbdullah wished to pursue a two-pronged attack against Iran in 1594.

Edward Allworth’s general remarks on diplomacy in Central Asia are relevant to the present study on pīshkash practices in, or by inhabitants of, Transoxiana. Diplomacy “was a metaphor for sovereignty in Central Asia [raising] the problem of parity. … Central Asian rulers who participated in diplomatic exchanges aspired to recognition and permanence in their sovereign roles and wanted to impress the rulers they dealt with.”⁸² Seen in this light, ʿAbdullah Khan’s presentation of his Shāhnāma is an expression of power, patronage, and opulent gift-giving—not tribute—to a head of state whom he viewed as his equal.

With his Shāhnāma, ʿAbdullah Khan approached the Ottoman sultan with an offering that was both typical and unusual. Manuscripts presented as diplomatic gifts were more often completed with all textual and visual components already added. In this case, however, the volume remained only half-illustrated.⁸³ It is as though the empty picture boxes beg the Ottoman sultan to commission his naḳḳaşḫāne (design house) to complete the grand designs initiated by the Uzbeks—a metaphor for ʿAbdullah’s aims at territorial conquest and his desires for Uzbek-Ottoman collaboration to dominate Safavid Iran, infilling the expanse separating their empires. But much like the state of the manuscript today, Ottoman interaction is only attested to by its absence, and Abu’l-Khairid efforts remained one-sided and incomplete.

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford