Person · Timurid envoy and chronicler
Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi
Also known as ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī, Abd-al-Razzaq Samarqandi, Abdur Razzaq, Abdur Razzak, Kamal-ud-Din Abd-ur-Razzaq ibn Ishaq Samarqandi
Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi (1413–1482) was a Persian chronicler and the qazi of Shah Rukh's Timurid court at Herat, sent as ambassador to Calicut from January 1442 to January 1445. His 45-page narrative of the mission, a chapter of his chronicle Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain, describes Calicut under the Zamorin, the Indian Ocean shipping trade and the grandeur of Vijayanagara under Deva Raya II, and is among the fullest Persian accounts of fifteenth-century south India.
- Date
- 1413 – 1482
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The same chronicle preserves the first-hand account of the embassy Shah Rukh sent to Ming Beijing in 1420–1422, written by its participant Ghiyath al-din Naqqash.
Connections (4)
- AnalogueNiccolo de' Conti
Conti and Abd al-Razzaq reached south India within the same quarter-century, one a Venetian merchant on Muslim ships, the other a Timurid envoy from Herat, and both described Vijayanagara in the age of Deva Raya II. Their verdicts run in parallel: Conti thought its king the most powerful in India, Razzaq that nothing in the world equalled the city, and both remarked on the harem. Their narratives were published together in R. H. Major's India in the Fifteenth Century (1857).
- Court associationHerat
Abd al-Razzaq was born in Herat on 7 November 1413, the son of Jalal-ud-Din Ishaq, qazi and imam of Shah Rukh's court there, and after his father's death in 1437 was himself appointed the court's qazi. It was from Shah Rukh's Herat that he was sent as ambassador to south India in 1442, and in Herat that he compiled his long chronicle of Central Asian history from 1304 to 1470. He died there in 1482.
- Traveller routeKozhikode / Calicut
Calicut was the formal destination of Shah Rukh's embassy, and Abd al-Razzaq's narrative is valued above all for its picture of the port's society and culture under the Zamorin and of the Indian Ocean shipping trade in the 1440s. He reports that the Zamorin, though independent, feared and respected the Vijayanagara king, and his account of the plot against Deva Raya II was itself written in Calicut around 1443.
- Traveller routeHampi / Vijayanagara
Abd al-Razzaq also served as ambassador at the court of Deva Raya II and saw the city at Hampi. He wrote that nothing equal to Vijayanagara had ever been heard of, described its seven citadels and walls, counted three hundred ports in the king's dominions and an army of eleven lakh, and was an eyewitness to the plot in which a royal brother beheaded nobles at a feast and then stabbed the king.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi"; "Deva Raya II". R. H. Major (ed.), India in the Fifteenth Century (Hakluyt Society, 1857); H. M. Elliot & John Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, vol. 4 (1871); Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (2007).
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