"Conquest of Baghdad by Timur", Folio from a Zafarnama (Book of Victory)

Two Folios from the Zafarnama

Although acquired by the Museum at two different times, these pages (67.266.1 and 55.121.17) were intended to be seen together. They were painted on adjoining folios of a manuscript that was copied in Shiraz in 1436 by Ya‘qub ibn Hasan, known as Siraj al-Husaini. The Zafarnama (Book of Victory) had been composed by Sharaf al-din ‘Ali Yazdi (d. 1454) only a few years earlier, in A.H. 828/1424–25 A.D.[1]

Yazdi’s narrative provides a vivid description of the siege of the Baghdad citadel by the Timurid army, an event that stretched over forty days in July and August 1401, a time of unrelenting heat. As was his custom, Yazdi describes the roles played by the different divisions of the army and the positions taken by the most important princes and amirs. He also delineates Timur’s part in directing his army and overseeing the battle. With respect to the citadel’s defenders, Yazdi stresses the fear instilled in them by the Timurid siege. The deafening tumult of a simultaneous attack on all sides of the citadel, which was situated on the eastern shore of the Tigris, led the besieged to imagine that the Day of Judgment had arrived. In desperation, many flung themselves from the citadel walls, only to be devoured by sharp-toothed creatures waiting in the water below.[2]

These two paintings re-create the mood and substance of Yazdi’s chronicle by contrasting the might of the Timurid army with the panic that has overtaken the Baghdad garrison. In one (55.121.17), the painter highlights Timur’s role, showing him directing the battle while protected by his royal umbrella. The siege itself and its equipment, described in detail by Yazdi, are alluded to by a soldier who shoots arrows from behind a wooden screen and by the massed weapons of the Timurid soldiers who populate separate pockets of the landscape surrounding Timur. The facing page (67.266.1) shows the beleaguered defenders within the citadel walls turning to each other in perplexity, unable to mount a counterattack against the Timurid forces. Even more desperate are their compatriots below, who must evade not only the Timurid army but the jaws of predators lurking unseen in the waters in which they swim.

This manuscript of Yazdi’s text appears to have remained intact until the early twentieth century, when its paintings were removed and sold. Eleanor Sims has conducted a painstaking reconstruction of this process that has enabled her to describe the illustrative program of the work. According to her calculations, the "Siege of Baghdad" once occupied folios 345 and 346 in this copy, which may also be the earliest surviving manuscript of the text.[3]

Priscilla P. Soucek in [Ekhtiar, Soucek, Canby, and Haidar 2011]

Footnotes:

1. Sims, Eleanor. "Ibrahim-Sultan’s Illustrated Zafar-nameh of 839/1436." Islamic Art 4 (1990–91), pp. 175–77.

2. Sharaf al-din ‘Ali Yazdi. Zafarnamah: Tarikh-i ‘umumi-yi mufassal-i Iran dar dawra-yi. 2 vols. Tehran, 1957, vol. 2, pp. 263–64.

3. Sims 1990–91(see footnote 1), pp. 175–76.


Timur Takes Baghdad

During his lifetime, Timur (c. 1330–1405) commissioned Nizam al-Din Shami (active early fifteenth century) to compose a work recording the events of his life, principally his many military campaigns and conquests. Shami completed his text, the Zafar-nama, in 1404. Ibrahim Sultan (1394–1435), Timur's grandson, commissioned the composition of another version of the text, which entailed an adaptation of its language and an expansion by the historian Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi (d. 1430 or 1454). The text was held up as a model of court historiography, its prose studded with choice poetry and internal rhyming. Yazdi completed his adaptation in 1425, but the earliest illustrated version to survive is from 1436, a manuscript also commissioned by Ibrahim Sultan that was completed about a year after his death, which occured on 15 May 1435.

In style and structure, the Zafar-nama resembles a second major manuscript commission from Ibrahim Sultan, a Shahnama (Book of Kings) by Firdausi (Abu al-Qasim Mansur, (940–c. 1020) of around 1435 (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ouseley Add.176), and both were produced during the prince's governorship of Shiraz from 1414 to 1435. The paintings have a stark, almost washed-out quality, with figures staged in dramatic poses. In the Zafar-nama, many paintings were arranged as double pages, such as Timur's assault on Baghdad. While Ibrahim Sultan's historiographic commission can be seen as one of many projects by which the Timurids wrote themselves into history—the activity of his father Shahrukh (r. 1409–47) was prolific in this regard—specific aspects of Yazdi's Zafar-nama make it, in the words of John Woods, an embodiment of 'the evolution of Timurid ideology' as much as a narrative of Timur's life. Woods has noted the Zafar-nama's full assimulation of Islamic socio-political structures through the purging of Genghisid elements and the creation of an image of Shahrukh as the 'renewer' (mujaddid)—the person God promised to the Islamic community every one hundred years to revive the faith. In yet another manipulation, Ibrahim Sultan's copy visually emphasised Timurid descent through Shahrukh—a feature observed by Eleanor Sims—by illustrating stories associated with Shahrukh and his sons. This had the effect of augmenting the lustre and legitimacy of Ibrahim Sultan.

Daniel J. Roxburgh in [Roxburgh 2005]

Jack S. Rofe, Scotland (until 1929; his sale, Sotheby's, London, December 12, 1929, no. 1531); [ Hagop Kevorkian, New York, by at least 1953]; [ Kevorkian Foundation, New York, until 1955; sold to MMA]

Venice. Fondazione Giorgio Cini. "Miniature Islamiche dal XIII al XIX Secolo," 1962, no. 32.

Indianapolis. Indiana University. "East-West in Art," June 1, 1966–October 1, 1966, no catalogue.

London. Royal Academy of Arts. "Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600," January 22, 2005–April 15, 2005, no. 171.

Robinson, Basil William. The Kevorkian Collection: Islamic and Indian Illustrated Manuscripts, Miniature Paintings and Drawings. New York, 1953. no. XXI, p. 24.

Grube, Ernst J. "from Collections in the United States and Canada." In Muslim Miniature Paintings from the XIII to XIX Century. Venice: N. Pozza, 1962. no. 32, pp. 44–45, ill. pl. 32 (b/w).

Bowie, Theodore Robert, and T. Brend. East-West in Art. Patterns of Aesthetic and Cultural Relationships. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Nickel, Helmut. Warriors and Worthies: Arms and Armor Through the Ages. New York: Atheneum, 1969. p. 92, ill.

Swietochowski, Marie, and Richard Ettinghausen. "Islamic Painting." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., vol. 36, no. 2 (Autumn 1978). p. 16, ill. p. 16 (b/w).

"Ibrahim-Sultan's Illustrated Zafarnameh." Islamic Art: An Annual Dedicated to the Art and Culture of the Muslim World (1991). p. 190, ill. fig. 21 (b/w).

Roxburgh, David J., ed. Turks . A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600. London, New York: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005. no. 171, pp. 219, 419, ill. pl. 171 (color).

Ekhtiar, Maryam, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Haidar, ed. Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1st ed. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. no. 124B, pp. 171, 184–85, ill. p. 185 (color).