Samarkand

Its greatest age began in 1370, when Timur made Samarkand his capital. Over the next thirty-five years he rebuilt most of the city and filled it with artisans and craftsmen brought from every corner of his empire. His grandson Ulugh Beg turned it into a centre of science: between 1417 and 1420 he built a madrasa on the Registan and invited astronomers and mathematicians from across the Islamic world, and in 1428 he completed an observatory whose great wall quadrant had no equal.

The Uzbek Muhammad Shaybani took the city in 1501 and was crowned khan here, but in 1533 the khanate moved its capital to Bukhara. The khans of Bukhara still came to Samarkand to be crowned, yet the city itself slowly emptied, and by the early 1720s it stood largely abandoned. Its revival began only after the Manghit Muhammad Rahim took power in Bukhara in 1756.