Tus

Tus was a historic district and city of Khorasan, northwest of Mashhad. Its principal towns included Tabaran and Nuqan, surrounded by many villages in a fertile valley. The poet Ferdowsi was born in a village near Tabaran and devoted much of his life to the Shahnameh, the great Persian epic of kings and heroes. His burial place made Tus a landmark of Persian literary memory.

The Mongol invasions devastated Khorasan in the thirteenth century, but Tus recovered and continued to be fought over by rival powers. In the later fourteenth century Timur appointed the Sarbadar leader Khwaja Ali to govern the city. After a rebellion against Timurid authority, Timur's son Miran Shah besieged it in 1389. The city was taken, plundered and devastated, with many inhabitants killed. Its decline helped shift the region's urban importance toward nearby Mashhad, which had grown around the shrine of Imam Reza. Even after its destruction, the name of Tus remained attached both to the district and to the memory of its poets and scholars. The surviving earthworks of Tabaran evoke the city that once stood at the heart of this old Khorasan district.