Timur the conqueror... and patron of arts and science

Hi all,

It's another week, another conference, and another amazing exhibition of the medieval world. This time I'm in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for the opening of the Center of Islamic Civilization. This new cultural, scientific, and educational complex has been a major project for the last decade and includes a museum as well as educational departments, libraries, and scientific labs. The Center is designed to show the world the long, fascinating history of Uzbekistan and Central Asia more broadly, and particularly their traditions of intellectual enquiry and high-quality artistic production.

I’m here to do research for a future issue of Medieval World magazine that I’m hoping we can develop. Some of the content is very familiar to me from my academic research but some of it is from much earlier or later periods that I know a lot less about. One of the big exhibitions in the museum focuses on the Timurid Renaissance. In many ways, it reminded me of the exhibition on Mongol history that I wrote about in July, which was a highlight of the International Medieval Congress for me. That exhibition introduced visitors to a culture that was so much more than its most famous conqueror, Genghis Khan, and the same is true here. Tamerlane – or Amir Timur, as he is known here – was indeed an astonishingly successful military commander, generally considered one of the most effective military tacticians in history and the founder of a great empire. However, Timur was also a huge patron of intellectual activity and the arts, in the longstanding tradition of Islamic empires. Earlier empires had sponsored scholars like Al-Farghani, an engineer and geography whose work inspired Christopher Columbus, Al-Biruni, a mathematician and geodist who calculated the circumference of the earth to within 2 degrees and realised the Americas had to exist, and Ibn Sina (often known as Avicenna), a philosopher and physician whose work inspired many developments in the European Renaissance.

One incredibly striking example from the exhibition of the Timurid Renaissance was about the astronomer and scholar Ulegh Beg and his observatory. This stunning construction was purpose-built to allow the leading scientists of the time to observe and calculate the positions of thousands of stars, despite the lack of telescopes at the time. Ulegh Beg used these observations and other research to calculate the length of time it takes the earth to rotate the sun to within 25 seconds (Copernicus would later produce an estimate which had an error of 30 seconds). The exhibition was filled with examples of this medieval learning: manuscripts, scientific instruments, 3D models of the observatory and learning institutes, projections and videos. It was really noticeable how similar much of this society was to the cities of the European Renaissance - a fascinating experience!

I have a few more days in this fascinating country and I'm looking forward to learning more. On the way home, I hope to read up on some European medieval chronicles and some recent work on the Vikings - there is always so much to learn about the medieval world, which is one of my favourite parts of this job!

Until next time,

Rhiannon