The Aq-Saray of Shahrisabz

The Aq-Saray, the White Palace, was the colossal summer palace built by the conqueror Timur (known in the West as Tamerlane) in his native town of Shahrisabz, the Green City, in the rich valley-country of Transoxiana to the south of Samarkand. Timur was a Turco-Mongol amir who rose in the fourteenth century to build, by relentless and often terrible conquest, a vast empire across Central Asia, Persia and beyond; like his heirs he was a great builder, and the Sunni Timurid chroniclers record both the conquests and the works. Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, in his Zafarnama, places the order to begin the Aq-Saray in 781 AH (1379-1380 CE), after Timur's campaign against Khwarazm, when captured craftsmen from that land were sent to Shahrisabz; the earlier Zafarnama of Nizam al-Din Shami and the Zubdat al-Tawarikh of Hafiz-i Abru carry the same building programme, and Ibn Arabshah, the Damascene who was himself carried off to Samarkand as a boy and wrote the hostile Aja'ib al-Maqdur, dwells on the masons and artisans deported from every conquered city to raise Timur's monuments. The palace was among the most ambitious of all those works: an entrance of overwhelming scale, a pishtaq flanked by two round towers, with a recessed arch reported at roughly twenty-two metres in span, among the largest ever attempted, the whole to be sheathed in mosaic-tile of cobalt, turquoise, white and gold. The work went on for years; the Castilian envoy Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, who passed through in August 1404 on his embassy to Timur, found craftsmen still labouring on it, which fixes the long span of the construction from an outside, non-Muslim witness. A famous boast is traditionally attached to the portal, that whoever doubts the builder's power should look upon his buildings; the saying is part of the building's lore rather than a securely read inscription, and is given here as tradition. Today only the two huge pylons of the gateway survive, towering and shattered, still glittering with their tilework, the rest having fallen. This scene does not show the ruin but reconstructs the gateway under construction: the lower facade already revetted in tile while the crown is still raw brick and scaffolding, masons raising the arch, and craftsmen in the foreground assembling cut-tile mosaic on the ground and laying out the pattern from a full-size drawing. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.