The Mongols appear in history at the end of the twelfth century. In the opening decades of the thirteenth century, Chinggis (or Genghis) Khan (1167-1227) unified the Mongol tribes on the steppe lands to the north of China and thereafter Mongol armies invaded China and the Middle East. In 1220 Transoxania was conquered and in the 1220s roaming Mongol armies spread devastation in the Middle East as far west as the Caucasus. Mongol occupation of the Middle East to the south and west of the Oxus began in the 1250s. In 1256 they occupied northern Iran and in 1258 captured Baghdad and murdered the city's last Abbasid caliph. In 1260s the Mongols were defeated by a Mamluk army from Egypt at Ayn Jalut in Palestine, which prevented their further spread westwards. They established an Ilkhanate, a territorial principality that included Iran, Iraq, and parts of Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Ilkhan Ghazan (Ilkhan means "subordinate Khan") became a Muslim and from then on Islam was the official religion of the principality.
   Timur (also known in the West as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine), who had begun his career as a rustler and brigand in in Transoxania, made a determined attempt to reconstitute the Mongol world empire (two of his wives were descended from Chinggis Khan). The empire he ultimately created consisted essentially of Persia, Iraq, Khurasan, and Transoxania, but he also campaigned in Syria, Anatolia, the Caucasus , Russia, Afghanistan, and India and, at the time of his death in 1405, was preparing to invade China.

As has been said, in the early centuries of Islam there were no royal workshops as such, and craft workers were hired and brought together for specific projects. However, libraries seem to have become important centres for the sponsorship of the arts in the period after the Mongol invasion, under the Ilkhans and their successors in Iran. It is possible that the source of inspiration for this institutional innovation may have come from the Chinese academies of history and painting with which the Mongols had become familiar in the east. One broad consequence of this development is that illustrated books, and those who worked on books, on their calligraphy, their page layout, their gilding, and the designs of the leather bindings, became of central importance for developments in other fields of art and architecture. Thus under the Timurids designs that were first developed for books provided templates for work done in other media - in stone-cutting, tiles, ceramics, mother-of pearl, saddle work, and tent-making. Chinese influence may lie behind the restrained and sombre palette seen not only in the illustrations to books like the "Demotte" Shahnama, but also in the dark colours favoured in the Iranian Sultanabad and Lajvardina ceramic wares produced in this period. The Mongol elite and in particular the Ilkhan Ghazan took a great interest in the history of their people as well as of the wider world that they had plans to conquer. this taste, which resulted in the production of illustrated histories, continued in the Iranian and Turkish cultural area under the patronage of such dynasties as the Timurids and the Ottomans.
   Ghazan was credited by his vizier, Rashid al-Din, with a range of craft skills: the Ilkhan was reputed to be expert in woodwork and goldsmithery, he painted, and painted, and he made saddles, bridles, and spurs. The notion that a ruler, or indeed any leading member of the military elite, should possess some artistic or artisanal skill seems to have been widespread among the Mongols and Turks.
   Timur's son and successors, Shah Rukh, seems to have regarded Ghazan as his exemplar. His patronage and that of his wife, Gawharshad, were conceived of in largely religious terms. Here it is worth nothing that women played a much more important role both in politics and in art patronage in the Ilkhanid and Timurid empires than they had done under earlier Arab and Turkish regimes. Timur's chief wife, Saray Mulk Khanum, had built a madrasa opposite the Friday Mosque in Samarqand. Another queen, Tuman-agha, built a Sufi khanqa (foundation). Gawharshad commissioned a mosque-madrasa complex in Herat, as well as paying for restoration work or improvements on existing religious monuments.
   Baysunqur, the son of Shah Rukh, who predeceased his father in 1434, was an expert calligrapher and bookbinder who also painted and wrote poetry. However, what makes him particularly interesting to students of Islamic artistic patronage is his establishment of what was effectively a design workshop in 1420s. We know an unusual amount about this workshop because of an arzadasht, or petition document; this was a sort of progress report by the head of the establishment that was sent to Baysunqur around 1429. The workshop or kitabkhana (literally, a store for keeping books, but in practice a library and workshop for the production of manuscripts and other artefacts) employed forty calligraphers, plus designers, painters, bookbinders, stone-cutters, and workers on luxury tents. Some twenty-two projects in hand were reported on. Thus a great deal of artistic patronage was channelled through and overseen by a princely "library".
   Not all the great patrons of the Timurid period were of royal blood. Mir Ali Shir Navai (1441-1501) was the courtier and cup companion of Husayn Bayqara, the Timurid ruler in Herat from 1470 to 1506. Navai is chiefly famous today as the greatest poet to write in Chagatay Turkish. He was also a wealthy man and as such enormously important as a patron of architecture and art. He spent great sums of money perpetuating his memory through buildings; according to him: "Whoever builds a structure that is destined [to remain], when [his] name is inscribed therein,/For as long as the structure lasts, that name will be on the lips pf the people." Navai was also a patron of the arts of the book. Bihzad, who was to become widely recognized as the greatest miniature-painter of his age, was given a start in his career by being employed as head of Navai's library.
   It is in part thanks to Baburnama (The Book of Babur), the memories of the Timurid prince Zahir al-Din Babur, that we know about the activities of Navai and the Timurid artist-princes of Samarqand and Herat. Briefly ruler of Samarqand and later of Kabul, Babur ended up as ruler of north-west India from 1526 to 1530, where he founded the Mughal empire. Babur's memories reveal him to have been extremely aware of the beauty of landscape. His visual sensibility was shaped by his familiarity with Persian painting: When he saw a striking arrangement of apples and leaves on a particular tree, he commented that "if painters exerted every effort they wouldn't have been able to depict such a thing." Clearly, he was a connoisseur and critic of painting, but perhaps also a rather native one. Thus, in commenting on the art of Bihzad, he confined himself to remarking that " He painted extremely delicately, but he made the faces of beardless people badly by drawing the double chin too big. He drew the faces of bearded people quite well."

Islamic Art
Robert Irwin