During his three months in the city, Clavijo was especially impressed by the well-stocked markets. Standing on the great Khorasan road running east from Baghdad to the border with China, Samarkand had become a major trade centre during Temur’s reign, the more so once the northern trade route had been diverted south after his destruction of the Golden Horde. In the bazaars Clavijo saw the furs, leather and linens from Russia and Tartary, the silks, rubies, diamonds, agates, pearls, musk and spices from China. The caravans from India brought nutmegs, cloves, mace and cinnamon, ginger and manna. Syria and Asia Minor provided cloth, glass and metalware. Rich in agricultural produce, Samarkand was also a centre for factories making silks, crêpes and taffetas. Some specialised in making fur linings for silk garments. During a later feast, Clavijo was amazed to see royal pavilions lined with grey squirrel and ermine, ‘the most precious fur in the whole world’.
If the Zarafshan watered the city, trade fed it and made it rich. Caravans regularly poured into town bringing plunder from the latest campaign, and tribute was always arriving from the growing ranks of vassal rulers. But commerce, and the taxes it generated for the imperial exchequer, was the backbone of prosperity throughout the empire, and was always attended to by Temur with the greatest care even if, as Clavijo suggested, this was for entirely selfish reasons. ‘Trade has always been fostered by Temur with the view of making his capital the noblest of cities,’ he wrote.
The Spaniard’s four-month overland journey from Trebizond to Samarkand allowed him to observe how trade operated within these lands. It was Temur’s boast that a child could carry a purse of gold unmolested from the western borders of his empire to its farthest reaches in the east, a claim Clavijo came close to endorsing with his observation that ‘the whole country was at peace under the rule and government of Temur’. As he travelled east towards Samarkand through some of the well-known centres of the caravan routes, he saw for himself the busy markets, astounding architecture and pockets of affluence that thriving trade had brought. ‘Tabriz is a very mighty city rich in goods and abounding in wealth, for commerce daily flourishes here,’ he wrote, admiring the well-paved streets and squares, the fine buildings decked in blue and gold tiles, the elegant drinking fountains, richly decorated mosques and elaborate bath-houses. On reaching Sultaniya, he saw that this city was an even ‘more important centre of exchange for merchants and goods’. It was ‘so full of commerce that a great sum in customs is brought in yearly to the Imperial Treasury’.
As he passed through these exotic Oriental cities, each step bringing him closer to the empire’s capital, Clavijo must have started to question his long-held assumptions of European supremacy over the savage, uncultured Orient. For several thousand miles he bore witness to the ruthless discipline with which Temur’s commands were enforced in towns and villages. ‘Wheresoever we might come and whensoever, no matter at what hour, if those of the settlement or township did not forthwith very quickly bring all that was required, they received merciless blows and beatings, suffering the same in a manner that we marvelled to witness,’ he observed. Envoys and messengers criss-crossed the empire on charging steeds, taking horses from the regularly-spaced posting stations and riding them so hard their corpses littered the routes. Whoever held sway over such territories must surely be a great emperor.
When he finally reached Samarkand in the first flush of autumn, drained from the travails of the road, Clavijo found it a revelation. ‘The richness and abundance of this great capital and its district is such as is indeed a wonder to behold,’ he exclaimed. Christendom, he had always believed, was unrivalled in the world. The rout of the Crusaders at the hands of Bayazid in 1396 had certainly challenged his confident outlook, but in his heart he was certain that the sword of Christianity would prevail over these heathens of the East. Now, as he gazed up at the shimmering portals of Samarkand, its gorgeous turquoise domes, its heavenly parks and palaces, he tried to suppress a host of troublesome thoughts. Even before reaching Samarkand he had seen enough of this empire to know that Christendom could boast no equal to the man who ruled these lands. Europe suddenly seemed a small place, a long, long way away.
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.
We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
JAMES ELROY FLECKER, Hassan: The story of Hassan of Bagdad and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand, 1922
There is nothing golden any more about the road to Samarkand. Here and there cottonfields pop up and disappear into the horizon, little changed since the days of Temur, but they tell a tale of sadness rather than romance. Cotton remains the key cash crop of Uzbekistan, where old communist habits die hard. As I approached the city from Tashkent on a clear autumn morning, passing through the drab poverty of the suburbs – originally part of Temur’s outlying districts of Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Shiraz and Sultaniya – a convoy of more than a hundred antiquated buses filled with young men and women passed in the opposite direction. I asked Farkhad, my travelling companion, who they were and where they were going.
‘Oh, they’re just students going to pick cotton,’ he replied.
I expressed surprise that such punishing work could attract such great numbers of volunteers.
Farkhad looked at me askance. ‘Of course they’re not volunteers. They have to pick cotton or they’ll be kicked out of university by the government. No cotton-picking, no degree.’
He himself had left university prematurely in the days of the Soviet Union because he could not cope with the physically gruelling, compulsory work. Then as now, students who refused to pick cotton were ejected from university without a degree. ‘These days it’s still the same. Nothing’s changed only now it’s better hidden. The cottonfields are mostly far away from the main roads, so foreigners like you can’t see what’s happening.’
The golden road to Samarkand was still tainted with the enduring stain of communism a decade after its collapse in Moscow. When James Elroy Flecker’s play first appeared, Samarkand simmered in the Western imagination as the most romantic of cities, distant and exotic – to many minds, it still does. Its very name conjured up images of caravans bearing spices and fabulous treasures, struggling against the fiercest desert sandstorms, of superb palaces and manicured gardens stretching enticingly before the eye. It was the essence of opulence and majesty, a blue-domed oasis of grace and serenity in a world of Oriental barbarism. But even in the first decades of the twentieth century these fondly cherished impressions were illusory. The Great Game, an age of elegance and chutzpah, was long over. The nascent Soviet empire was spreading south to encompass the former realms of Temur.
In 1917 the Russians seized Samarkand and the red flag fluttered over the great Registan (literally ‘sandy place’) Square. In 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was born, and a year later Samarkand was declared its capital, ushering in a new age of progress and modernity. The regime embraced the identikit paraphernalia of the Soviet experiment. Factories, schools, hospitals and high-rise housing sprang up. Broad, tree-lined avenues replaced the clutter of labyrinthine streets. The site of Temur’s Blue Palace became Lenin Square, repository of the new culture in the form of a House of Soviets, an opera house and ballet theatre. The sprawling, disorganised romance of Samarkand was tamed. As for the great monuments of the city, these were to be restored after centuries of abandon.
The Registan, the centrepiece of ancient Samarkand which for half a millennium has shocked visitors with its size and splendour, a trio of monuments rightly regarded as the apotheosis of the city’s Temurid architecture, is an ensemble which Temur would not have recognised. Each of its three madrassahs dates from after his death.
The Ulugh Beg Madrassah, named after his grandson, is the oldest of the three – built between 1417 and 1420, more than a decade after the emperor’s death – and dominates the western side of the square. Constellations of stars on the towering 110-foot portal pay tribute to the astronomer king, who also numbered mathematics, medicine, music, poetry, history, philosophy and theology among his interests. ‘This magnificent façade is of such a height it is twice the heavens and of such weight that the spine of the earth is about to crumble,’ boasts a Kufic inscription. Geometric patterns executed in glazed and unglazed brick zigzag splendidly across the exterior walls, a technique known as hazarbaf, or ‘thousand-weave’, tracing sacred names in turquoise cut tiles within borders of navy blue. Mosaic faience, for once, is used sparingly, above all on the intricate entrance iwan, while carved glazed terracotta, or haft rangi, dominates on the fading three-dimensional sections which make the rope moulding around the iwan arch. Smooth surfaces of marble appear from time to time, in the entrance iwan and along a low dado inset with strips of dark-blue-glazed tile.
Through this devastating portal the humbled visitor walks with craning neck, confronted at once by a courtyard over ninety feet square, which once housed fifty cell-like rooms on two storeys. Here a hundred of the brightest students pored over their Korans, wrapping themselves tightly against the icy draughts of winter, perspiring in the draining heat of summer. During the most irksome hours of recitation and exegesis, digging their fingernails into their hands to keep awake, they would have cast a weary eye on the portal of the mosque on the south-west side of the court, where an inscription reminded them of the fame of their institution, the greatness of its patron: ‘This portal is built to resemble Paradise … in it are teachers of the truths of the sciences useful to religion, under the direction of the greatest of sultans.’ High above the soft murmurings of the student rooms, among the gusting winds a pair of minarets loomed like watchful sentinels, laced with script in turquoise and navy blue like those of the madrassah on the eastern side of the square. Towards their summits, stretching into the skies, the script grew larger. In bold white letters, bordered with blue, the word ‘Allah’ ran continuously around the column.
The Ulugh Beg Madrassah remained a teaching school until the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, its ignominious fate would have horrified and infuriated its progenitor as the fabled college sunk first into absolute dereliction, then reincarnation as a grain warehouse. In the early twentieth century it returned to its roots, and once more the courtyard echoed to the ululating cadences of Koranic recitations, the sixty students being warned that it was not safe to enter the lecture-room area due to the frailties of the creaking structure.
Directly opposite, squaring up against the Ulugh Beg Madrassah with an equally imposing portal flanked by two minarets, is the Shir Dor (‘lion bearing’) Madrassah, built two centuries after the Ulugh Beg Madrassah between 1619 and 1636. What the visitor first notices about the portal – apart from its great size, since this applies equally to all three of the Registan’s monuments – are the stylised lions prowling after white does in front of two suns with human faces, another defiance of Islamic tradition. Legend has it that the architect paid for this heresy with his life. A similarly florid inscription – ‘The skilled acrobat of thought climbing the rope of imagination will never reach the summits of its forbidden minarets’ – decorates the portal. A little behind this superb façade, and partially eclipsed by it on either side, are two azure-blue cupolas, hallmark of the Temurid architectural style.
To the north, completing the ensemble, is the slightly later Tillya Kari Madrassah, built between 1646 and 1660. Of lower construction than its neighbours, it stretches farther across the square with a width of 230 feet, its two storeys of hujra (student rooms) topped on the western side by another cupola, larger and more dominant this time, resplendent with its sun-catching blue tiles.
The future viceroy of India George Curzon, who visited while a Tory MP in 1888, was one of countless visitors on whom the square made a profound impression. ‘The Registan of Samarkand was originally, and is still even in its ruin, the noblest public square in the world,’ he wrote. ‘I know of nothing in the East approaching it in massive simplicity and grandeur; and nothing in Europe … which can even aspire to enter the competition. No European spectacle indeed can adequately be compared to it, in our inability to point to an open space in any western city that is commanded on three of its four sides by Gothic cathedrals of the highest order.’
As an architectural set-piece the Registan, in its original state, was one of the brightest gems of the Islamic world. Its pleasing symmetry, the gorgeousness of the portals with their intricate floral motifs and epigraphic patterns, the elegance of the Kufic calligraphy, the rush of colour – azure, green, yellow and dark blue – against the desert beige, above all its sheer scale, are what grab the eye. But Curzon spoke before the Russians, and more recently the Uzbeks, set to work restoring the decrepit monuments. Today there is something inescapably artificial and new about the square. The restoration has been just that little too efficient, the mosaic details just that little too perfect, the blue majolica tiles impossibly lustrous for buildings of this age.
The Registan has become an Islamic Disneyworld, immaculate and almost devoid of flaws. The natural ageing process has been halted, wear and tear frowned upon and attended to in earnest. All this is understandable, given both the neglect into which the buildings had fallen and the desire for tourist dollars, but the effect is sterilising. After a few minutes contemplating the Registan I found myself genuinely relieved to see a wobbly-looking minaret on the Ulugh Beg Madrassah, a fault the restorers had yet to rectify. A policeman sidled up brandishing a key, and offered to take us to the top of Samarkand’s Leaning Tower of Pisa in exchange for two dollars.
Temur would not have been able to look down on the Registan from the top of this minaret, because neither it nor the rest of the ensemble had been built during his lifetime. (The vantage point would, however, be used a century later when Babur was fighting the Uzbeks.) But if the chess-playing conqueror had been able to ascend to such heavenly heights, he would have stared down on the crossroads of his capital, not on the Shir Dor or Tillya Kari madrassahs, but on a lofty domed bazaar in which the half-dozen principal roads of his city converged.
These arteries wended their way crookedly past the azure-domed mosques, madrassahs and mausolea, through a series of bazaars, located according to their trade. Here were weavers, ironworkers, goldsmiths, potters, bow-makers and tile-makers, an ever-swelling population of craftsmen from all corners of Temur’s burgeoning empire. Eventually the roads emanating from the Registan reached the six gates of the city walls, massive earthen ramparts with a circumference of five miles, surrounded by a deep ditch, that Temur had reconstructed after the devastation wrought by Genghis.
From the top of the minaret Samarkand was a sea of sparkling blue domes and iridescent portals almost as far as the eye could see. Only in the very farthest reaches of the horizon, where the brooding desert lurked on the shores of this ocean, as if ready to reclaim the city in an instant, was the effusion of light dimmed slightly. And there, in the midst of this fulgor of sunshine, several hundred yards north-east of the Registan, just south of the Iron Gate which lay between Afrosiab (ancient Samarkand) and the newly settled quarters to the south, stood the Bibi Khanum Mosque – Mosque of the Mother Queen – Temur’s pride and joy.*
The Cathedral Mosque was one of his greatest projects, a vast, towering edifice, among the most colossal monuments ever built in the Islamic world, a fitting tribute to his numerous victories. Its construction began in 1399, when Temur returned to his capital fired with zeal after the lightning assault on Delhi. According to Clavijo, it was ‘the noblest of all those [mosques] we visited in Samarkand’. Perhaps in these late years the emperor was growing increasingly aware of his own mortality and decided on a building to honour the Almighty, rather than a secular pro
ject as was generally his wont.
It may have been, as Hilda Hookham suggested, that the mosque Temur admired at Firuzabad in India inspired this new mosque. Alternatively, it might have been the Tughluk masjid of Jahanpanah in Delhi. Another possible inspiration, given the number of years his project took to complete, is the great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, which Temur had observed while camped in front of the city in 1401. ‘From whatever direction you approach the city, you see this dome, above everything, as if suspended in the air,’ gasped Ibn Battutah. In Temur’s earlier buildings, the domes tended to follow the Persian style – pointed without flowing outwards from their base. The Bibi Khanum Mosque and the Gur Amir mausoleum, with their majestic pomegranate domes, were harbingers of a new style, embraced by the Temurids after the emperor’s death and passed on to the Mughals of India, who used it to most notable effect in the Taj Mahal. The style was later exported to Russia, where it is seen in its full glory in the Kremlin.
Clavijo said the Cathedral Mosque was built in memory of the mother of Temur’s chief wife, Saray Mulk-khanum; others that it was erected in honour of the wife herself, hence its nickname of Bibi Khanum. The chronicles, for once, are silent on such details, but regardless of the inspiration, it was a project on which Temur unleashed his fearsome instincts for control. Two amirs, Khoja Mahmud Daoud and Mohammed Jalad, were put in charge of the work and sent him daily progress reports. They presided over a huge, highly skilled army of workers, each man selected for his special talents. Master craftsmen from Basrah and Baghdad joined stonemasons from Azerbaijan, Fars and India, crystal workers from Damascus and artisans from Samarkand. Among the greatest surprises for the local population were the ninety-five elephants hauling two hundred blocks of marble from Azerbaijan, Persia and India. The animals, which Temur made a point of showing off both on and off the battlefield, had never been seen before in Samarkand.
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