Place · Timurid capital · Afghanistan
Herat
Also known as Herat, Harat, Timurid Herat
Shāh Rukh's capital and the centre of Timurid painting, poetry and bookmaking, from which ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī was sent as envoy to Vijayanagara in 1442. The embassy is the reason the fullest Persian description of fifteenth-century south India exists.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.353, 62.204
Worth knowing
The Herat workshops under Shāh Rukh and his son Baysunghur produced the manuscript painting that the Mughal atelier descends from directly, so the court that sent an ambassador to Hampi is also the source of the style Akbar's painters were taught.
Connections (1)
- Court associationHampi / Vijayanagara
Herat and Vijayanagara exchanged embassies because both wanted the same thing from the other: Vijayanagara needed Persian and Arabian cavalry horses, which the subcontinent could not breed at scale, and the Timurids wanted the pepper and the gems. The horse trade is the reason a Persian ambassador was received at the Mahanavami durbar at all.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Herat”. ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī, Maţlaʿ al-saʿdayn, trans. in R.H. Major, India in the Fifteenth Century (1857); Thomas Lentz and Glenn Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision (1989).
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