English: An obituary listing eight victims of the Nizari Ismaʿili assassins

Accession Number:AKM40

Place:Iran, Herat

Dimensions:42 x 32.4 cm

Date:early 15th century

Materials and Technique:ink, watercolour, and gold pigment on paper

This folio, along with two others in the Aga Khan Museum Collection (AKM89 and AKM41), comes from a manuscript assembled at the court of Shahrukh (d. 1447) and disassembled by the art dealer Émile Tabbagh in the 1920s and 30s. The manuscript’s content draws primarily from a world history prepared by Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) for the Mongol Ilkhan Oljeitu in 1307. It is not a simple copy of Rashid al-Din’s work, but rather a hybrid manuscript with a tangled history made even more complex by its dispersal. This folio comes from one of the most heavily illustrated sections of the manuscript, a section that also helps reveal a secret about the work’s origins: Rashid al-Din was probably not its original author.

Shahrukh (d. 1447), the patron of the manuscript from which this folio has been taken, was deeply interested in history, and particularly the history of the Mongol Empire that his own Timurid dynasty sought to emulate. As part of this historical focus, Shahrukh’s courtier, Hafiz-i Abru, gathered major historical works from previous centuries, including Rashid al-Din’s dynastic history, and composed new sections to bridge the gaps in coverage between these earlier works. From these collected texts, he assembled a new universal narrative of the past, culminating with the career of his own patron, Shahrukh.

Hafiz-i Abru also seems to have taken a particular interest in preserving and emulating Rashid al-Din’s historical writings. He produced original dynastic and world histories and an associated geographical volume, just as Rashīd al-Dīn had done a century earlier. He also reconstructed incomplete copies of Rashid al-Din’s world history, and had paintings added to copies that had been left unillustrated or partially illustrated. This folio comes from one such reconstructed volume, from a section telling the history of Ismaʿili Shiʿism.[1] This portion of the manuscript has suffered more than any other from Tabbagh’s dismemberment of the original book: only about 15 of the 36 folios from the history of the Ismaʿilis are known to have survived. However, each of these contains an illustration. Among the many sections of the manuscript, only those dealing with the Oghuz Turks and the Chinese are as heavily illustrated.

Despite this rate of illustration—or perhaps because of it—the illustrations on many folios from this manuscript, including this one, are highly formulaic. Here, three enthroned and two standing figures appear against a plain hilly background. This image does not match the surrounding text, which lists the victims of Ismaʿili political murders in the mid-13th century. The fact of illustration seems to matter more than any contribution the image makes to a reading of the text. The illustrations of this and other manuscripts from early 15th-century Herat have been categorized as belonging to the “historical style” of Shahrukh. This style has been understood as a conscious attempt to approach the compositional style of Rashid al-Din’s own manuscripts, part of Shahrukh’s fascination with the received tradition from the earlier Mongol period. This style has been described as “rather simple though cheerful,” with bold colour providing the main visual appeal rather than the quality of drawing.[2] It stands in contrast to more voluminous and dynamic styles developing at the same time at other courts, most notably at Shiraz under Shahrukh’s nephew Iskandar (d. 1415) and subsequently Shahrukh’s son Ibrahim (d. 1435).

While Rashid al-Din provided an inspirational figure for Hafiz-i Abru, it has become increasingly clear in recent decades that he was not, in fact, responsible for writing the text on which this manuscript is based. Another historian at the Ilkhanid court, ʿAbd Allah Qashani, claims to have been the actual author of the Jamiʿ al-Tavarikh that Hafiz-i Abru so admired. Few manuscripts of Qashani’s original world historical writing have survived, but as they become available to study, they have consistently substantiated his claim. One of the first published texts to suggest the truth of Qashani’s claim was an edition of his history of the Ismaʿilis from which the text on this folio ultimately derives. It seems that Rashid al-Din edited Qashani’s work, presented it under his own name to Oljeitu, and received the significant payment that allowed him to build the scriptorium and other buildings in which he had the Jamiʿ al-Tavarikh and his other works recopied.