Herāt

Timur took Herat in 1380 and brought the Kartid dynasty to an end a few years later. In 1397 his youngest son Shah Rukh was named governor, and under his patronage the bazaar was restored and enlarged and the Musalla complex rose, with the madrasa of his wife Gawhar Shad. Herat became the main capital of the Timurid empire, and its greatest glory came under Sultan Husayn Bayqara in the late 15th century: his minister, the poet Mir Ali-Shir Nava'i, built and endowed on a lavish scale, and the painter Behzad headed the royal library as Herat's miniature painting reached its height.

After Husayn Bayqara's death Herat became a frontier prize. The Uzbeks took it in 1507 and Shah Isma'il's Safavids in 1510, and the two fought over it for a generation more. Under the Safavids it was the school of princes: every shah from Tahmasp to Abbas the Great governed Herat in his youth, and Abbas was born here. In 1716 the Abdali Afghans rose and made it the seat of their own sultanate. Nader Shah took it back for Iran in 1732, and on his death it passed in 1747 to Ahmad Shah Durrani's new Afghan kingdom.