Six centuries
of illuminated kings

Probably commissioned by the Ilkhanid sultan Abu Sa'id, the Great Mongol Shahnameh was planned as the most ambitious Persian manuscript of its century. It was likely never completed; the dynasty collapsed shortly after. The manuscript still survived intact through the early sixteenth century in Tabriz, then entered the Safavid royal library, where it was photographed in the late nineteenth century — still bound, still recognizably one book.

Then in around 1910, the Belgian art dealer Georges-Joseph Demotte bought the manuscript in Paris. He dismantled it and sold its leaves individually. The mutilation was so brutal that scholars have called it "infamous." The dealer's name became, against his survivors' objections, attached to the manuscript itself — and the alternative name "Great Mongol Shahnameh" was promoted to escape it.

Today, 57 miniatures from the manuscript have been identified across the world's great museums:

• The Freer Gallery / National Museum of Asian Art in Washington holds the largest group — sixteen pages
• The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin holds eleven folios with seven miniatures
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the British Museum, museums in Berlin, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Geneva, and Montreal hold the rest

The illustrations are described as "doom-laden," reflecting the political uncertainty of the late Ilkhanid period and the Black Death then ravaging Persia. Themes given emphasis include the enthronement of minor kings, dynastic legitimacy, the role of women as kingmakers, and scenes of murder and mourning. Borrowings from Chinese art — gnarled trees, round-topped wave-like rocks, tightly curling cloud strips — dominate the landscapes, evidence of the Mongol Empire's east-west cultural traffic.

Commissioned by Prince Bayasanghor (Baysunghur), grandson of Timur (Tamerlane) and a major patron of the arts in early-fifteenth-century Herat. Where the Great Mongol Shahnameh was dismembered and the Tahmasp Shahnameh was given away as a diplomatic gift, the Bayasanghori has remained in Iran from its creation to today, surviving 600 years of dynastic change unbroken.

The manuscript is housed at the Golestan Palace Library in Tehran, where it is one of the crown jewels of the collection. In 2007, UNESCO inscribed it on its Memory of the World Register — a list of the world's most significant documentary heritage objects, alongside Beethoven's Ninth Symphony manuscript, the Magna Carta, and the Bayeux Tapestry.

Bayasanghor himself was, by Persian Timurid royal tradition, both a connoisseur of literature and a figure depicted in his own manuscripts. The frontispiece (folio 4r) shows Bayasanghor attending a hunt, the patron-prince at leisure within the very book he commissioned. The Persian aristocratic class is here perpetuating the Iranian heroic ideal Ferdowsi preserved — a king who hunts, who rules, who reads the Shahnameh.

Begun around 1522 by Shah Isma'il I, founder of the Safavid dynasty, as a gift for his young son Tahmasp — the future Shah Tahmasp I. Work continued for nearly two decades, into the 1530s. The result was a single book of 759 folios with 258 miniatures, many nearly full-page, painted on gold-sprinkled fine paper. The most luxuriously illustrated copy of Ferdowsi's epic ever produced.

Among its supreme paintings are: "The Court of Kayumars" (folio 20v) by the master Sultan Muhammad — depicting the first king of Iran with his court of leopard-skin-clad nobles, in a landscape of tightly woven flora; "Esfandiyar's Third Course: He Slays a Dragon" (folio 434v); "Bahram Gur Pins the Coupling Onagers" (folio 568r); "The Angel Surush Rescues Khusrau Parviz" (folio 708v).

In 1568, Shah Tahmasp — by then aged and uninterested in painting — chose to make the manuscript a diplomatic gift. He sent it on a thirty-four-camel caravan to the Ottoman sultan Selim II, marking Selim's succession. The manuscript was sequestered in the Topkapi Palace library in Istanbul for the next three and a half centuries, where it was rarely consulted (as the lack of fingerprints and creases shows).

By 1903 it had been removed from Iran via unclear circumstances and entered the collection of Baron Edmund de Rothschild in Paris. In 1959 it was acquired by Arthur Houghton Jr., a Steuben Glass executive — hence the alternative name "Houghton Shahnameh." In the 1970s and 80s, Houghton broke up the manuscript and sold the folios individually. The most beautiful Persian manuscript ever made was destroyed as a single object in living memory.

Today the folios are scattered. The Metropolitan Museum has a major group. The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto holds the Court of Kayumars. Single sheets have sold at auction for nearly a million pounds.