Nīshāpūr

Nishapur, founded by the Sasanian king Shapur I, was one of the four great cities of Khorasan, on the Silk Road between the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, with turquoise mines nearby that supplied the world for two thousand years; Persians called it the turquoise city. The Mongols destroyed it in 1221, and quakes and later raids wrecked it again and again. The Ilkhans Ghazan and Abu Sa'id worked to revive it, and the inhabited city now lay northwest of the old one, around the mausoleum of the poet Attar and the congregational mosque, both built in this period. When Ibn Battuta passed through about 1332 he praised its gardens and madrasas.

Timur's empire took Nishapur in the 1380s. In 1404 Ruy González de Clavijo, envoy of Henry III of Castile, found it a rich farming centre with forty mills turning day and night. In 1592 the Safavid shah Abbas took the city back from the Shaybanids and built a caravanserai there. After Nader Shah's death in 1747 the Bayat chiefs ruled it as an independent khanate until Ahmad Shah Durrani seized it with heavy guns in 1754. The Qajars conquered Nishapur in 1800.