Architecture in Iran and Central Asia under the Ilkhanids

Stucco mihrab in the Congregational Mosque at Isfahan, 1310

In the fall of 1253 the Great Khan Mongke, grandson of Chingiz Khan and supreme ruler of the Mongols in China, dispatched his brother Hulagu at the head of an army against the Isma'ilis in northern Iran and the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.

Hulagu moved speedily across Iran, conquering and devastating whatever areas did not capitulate, and took Baghdad in 1258.

This date marks the official establishment of the Mongol rulers in Persia known as Il-khdns or subordinates to the great khan in China. Hulagu and his immediate successors continued the nomadic practices of the steppe, wintering in the warmer lands of Mesopotamia and summering on the grassy plains of north-western Iran.

They preferred living in tents, and only a few monuments of secular architecture remain from the second half of the thirteenth century. The Ilkhanids controlled the lands from the Oxus almost to the Mediterranean and from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean, territory that is now western Afghanistan, Iran, southern Russia, eastern Turkey, and Iraq.

Earthquakes, invasions, and subsequent occupations have destroyed all but the odd building from their capitals at Maragha, Tabriz, Baghdad, and Sultaniyya; and their urban infrastructure can hardly be gleaned from textual descriptions.

Instead, it is provincial buildings in central and western Iran that have survived to provide an idea of the magnificence of architectural patronage under the Ilkhanids.' The Ilkhanids inherited a repertory of building types, forms, materials, and techniques of construction which had been developed in Iran in the previous period.

The congregational mosque had evolved its classical form of a court with iwans on the four sides and a domed chamber on the qibla, and this plan was standard for other types of religious buildings such as madrasas and khanaqahs and for secular ones such as caravanserais.
Graves were marked by tomb towers or by square or polygonal canopy-like mausoleums. The standard vocabulary of forms included iwans, domes, squinches, and minarets, and these were usually combined in predictable ways.

The standard elevation in a dome chamber, for example, was tripartite; a zone of transition with squinches bridged the gap from a square or polygonal room to the circular base of a dome. The main faqade was usually marked by a pishtdq, the high and formal gateway composed of an arch set within a rectangular frame and functioning like a shallow iwan.

Minarets were often used as framing devices, either at the ends of the faqade or at the sides of an iwan. High-quality baked brick was the preeminent medium of construction, and bricks were often laid in decorative patterns, although stucco revetment was also popular and inserts of terracotta and glazed tiles were used to enliven surfaces.

In this period the traditional vocabulary would be modified in several ways. Individual buildings were grouped in monumental complexes, often centered around the grave of the patron or a revered figure. The earliest complexes were haphazardly arranged, although a pishtdq and elaborate decoration were used to draw attention to the main fagade.

Proportions were altered as rooms became taller, arches more pointed, and minarets more attenuated. The new taste for verticality is combined with a refined sense of form, seen in monumental portals with soaring double minarets. Baked brick remained the major medium of construction, but new methods were developed for enlivening surfaces.
Color became increasingly important; glazed bricks were added to exteriors, and interiors were decorated with tile revetments and carved and painted plaster. Muqarnas units were no longer structural elements constructed of brick, but decorative ones made of plaster and suspended from vaults or walls.

ARCHITECTURE UNDER THE ILKHANIDS

One of the first actions by the Ilkhanid rulers after conquering Baghdad was to construct an observatory in their summer capital at Maragha in north-western Iran.
Located on a hill five hundred meters north of the town, the building was begun in 1259. Excavations have uncovered sixteen units, including a central tower containing a quadrant (forty- five meters in diameter), a foundry for the manufacture of astronomical instruments, five round towers, and several large buildings.

The large site and the quality of the materials, which included stone, baked brick, and glazed and luster tiles, show how important astronomy and astrology were to the shamanist Mongols.
Many structures from the early Ilkhanid period were built of degradable materials, for contemporary accounts state that the Ilkhanids used tents of horsehair and felt.

The sole surviving example of Ilkhanid palatial architecture is the summer palace begun by Abaqa ca. 1275 and continued by his son Arghun a decade later . The site, now known as Takht-i Sulayman, stands south-east of Lake Urmiya in Azerbayjan on the foundations of the Sasanian sanctuary of Shiz.

A huge courtyard (125 by 150 meters), oriented north-south, encompassed an artificial lake and was surrounded by porticoes with four iwans. Behind the north iwan was a domed room, which occupied the site of the Sasanian fire temple and probably served as Abaqa’s audience hall.
Behind the west iwan was a transverse hall flanked by two octagonal kiosks; it had served as the throne-room of Khusraw and became the living quarters of the Ilkhanid sovereign.
Plaster fragments on the ground indicate that the southern octagonal kiosk was covered with a muqarnas vault, composed of many individual plaster units.

The excavations also uncovered a stucco plaque fifty centimeters on a side; the incised drawing on it represents one-quarter of the dome and was evidendy used to guide the workmen in assembling the pre-cast units.

This unique document is one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the use of architectural plans in the Islamic world and confirms the historical sources, which state that plans were sent from the capital to the provinces.

" The walls of the northern octagonal kiosk were revetted with a superb dado. The lower two meters were covered with star- and cross-shaped tiles overglazed in a technique known as Idjvardma, from the Persian word for lapis lazuli.
This dado was surmounted by a frieze of square tiles, thirty-five centimeters on a side, depicting simurghs and dragons among other heroic subjects. The wall was crowned with a wide band of painted plaster. The quality and abundance of the architectural decoration, particularly the marble capitals, the luster and Idjvardma tiles, and the muqarnas dome, show that the Mongol sultans lavishly decorated their own homes.

Both the placement, considered by the Ilkhanids to be the site where the Sasanian emperors had been crowned, and the decoration, luster tiles with verses and scenes illustrating the themes of the Shdhndma, the Persian national epic composed by the poet Firdawsi ca. 1010 at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna, were deliberately chosen to affirm Mongol connections to pre-Islamic Iranian kingship.

Ghazan Khan’s accession in 1295 marked a change in both Ilkhanid society and architectural patronage. He severed links with the Great Khan in China, thereby accelerating acceptance of the culture of the sedentary Persians over that of the nomadic Mongols. He converted to Islam, taking the Muslim name of Mahmud.

He and his prime minister Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) also inaugurated a vast program of reforms which revitalized the economy and provided an economic basis for significant amounts of new construction, particularly religious buildings.
He ordered caravanserais built along the major trade routes and bath houses in every city; the revenues from these buildings could support the mosques he also ordered.
The effects of Ghazan’s reforms continued through the reigns of his two successors, his brother Uljaytu (r. 1304-16) and his nephew Abu Sa'id (r. 1317-35), and the major works of Ilkhanid religious architecture thus date from the period 1295-1335.

Ghazan’s single greatest project was his tomb complex in a western suburb of Tabriz. Earlier Ilkhanid rulers had followed Mongol burial practice and concealed gravesites, but Ghazan adopted the traditions of Islamic Iran and ordered a charitable foundation to surround his “lofty” tomb.

The complex included a hospice, hospital, library, obser¬ vatory, academy of philosophy, fountain, pavilion, and two madrasas for students of Hanafi and Shafi'i law. Only fragments of brick and tile remain, but texts describe the mausoleum as a twelve-sided structure containing a semi subterranean crypt, a chamber for the cenotaph, and a crowning dome.

Rashid al-Din followed royal precedent and ordered his own funerary complex in an eastern suburb of Tabriz. It too has disappeared, but the surviving endowment deed allows a reconstruction of the buildings and enumeration of the personnel and services provided.

Four structures were enclosed within a sturdy wall behind a monumental portal: a hospice, khanaqah, hospital, and tomb with winter and summer mosques. The deed also specified that copies of the Koran, collections of prophetic traditions, and Arabic and Persian copies of Rashid al-Din’s own works were to be commissioned annually by the supervisor of the endowment and distributed throughout the realm. The fragments glazed in light and dark blue and similar to those found at Ghazan’s tomb complex litter the site.

The imperial scale of Ilkhanid architecture can best be seen in the magnificent tomb of Uljaytu at Sultaniyya. Arghun had chosen the site, some one hundred and twenty kilometers north-west of Qazvin on the road to Tabriz, as his summer residence, and Uljaytu transformed it into the capital of the empire, hence its name “Imperial.”

Like most Iranian cities, it had an outer wall and an inner citadel. The outer ramparts measured thirty thousand paces around; the inner citadel was protected by a moat, sixteen round towers, and a single gate in a machicolated wall broad enough for four horsemen to ride abreast.

These features are visible in the earliest representation of the site, contained in Matrakci Nasuh’s account, made in i537~8, of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman’s campaigns in Iraq and Iran.

The largest monument within the citadel was the sultan’s tomb complex, which included a mosque, madrasa, hospice, hospital, guesthouse, and other buildings.

’ Uljaytu’s tomb is the only part of the complex at Sultaniyya to survive. It is an enormous octagon, some thirty- eight meters in diameter, which is oriented almost cardinally. The north wall projects to meet the lateral walls, thereby creating triangular compartments which house stairs to the upper stories. To the south, a rectangular hall measuring fifteen by twenty meters is attached to the central conversion to Shi ism and to a spurious tale of his desire to transfer the bodies of 'Ali and Husayn, the two most revered Shi'ite martyrs, from Iraq.

Inscriptions provide three fixed poles for the history of the building. The exterior decoration was complete in 1310; the interior decoration in brick and tile was finished in 1313, when the building was dedicated with much celebration, including the issuing of commemorative copper coins.

The redecoration in painted plaster was ordered within the next three years, before the sultan’s death in December 1316. These dates cannot be correlated with any shift in piety or taste, and the redecoration was probably ordered to commemorate the brief period when Ulja|tu was recognized as protector of the Holy Cities of Arabia.

Not only did Ilkhanid sultans and viziers erect charitable foundations around their own tombs, but the same patrons also commemorated the graves of Sufi shaykhs with monumental tomb complexes. Some were built around the graves of renowned historical figures. In northern Iran, the grave of Bayazid Bastami (d. 874 or 877), one of the most celebrated mystics in Islam, was a focus for much Ilkhanid work, including superb decoration in cut and painted plaster and a large, flanged tomb tower dedicated to Uljaytu’s infant octagonal space, which measures twenty-five meters in diameter and is surmounted by a fifty-meter high dome ringed by eight minarets.

The interior of the octagonal hall has eight arched openings with balconies. Above them, on the exterior, a ring of galleries overlooks the surrounding plain and provides a visual transition from the flat walls (which probably abutted subsidiary structures on several sides) to the ethereal blue-glazed dome.

The subtle design of interpenetrating volumes is complemented by the sophisticated gallery vaults . The two dozen vaults display a wide variety of carved and plaster motifs, painted in red, yellow, green, and white. Many of the strapwork panels closely resemble contemporary manuscript illumination, suggesting that Ilkhanid designers provided patterns used on different scales in architecture and manuscripts.

The lofty interior, one of the largest uninterrupted spaces of medieval times, comes as an awesome surprise after the stately ex terior. The spatial elegance and grandeur attest to the abilities of the designer(s), who were able to realize the sultan’s desire for monumentality with sophistication and grace.

Other shrines honored contemporary mystics. At Natanz in central Iran, the grave of 'Abd al-Samad (d. 1299), the leading Suhrawardi shaykh of the day, developed into a major shrine complex in the decade following his death.

The vizier Zayn al-Din Mastari (put to death in 1312 with his associate Karim al-Din Shugani) refurbished the town’s congregational mosque and built a tomb, minaret, and hospice adjacent to it. The builders attempted to unify these disparate structures behind a single slightly curved fagade.

Decorated in glazed tile, stucco, and terracotta and flickering in the shadow of an immense plane tree, it has often been compared to an illustration from a contemporary Persian manuscript.

The irregular depth of the iwans in the mosque, the uneven floor levels, and the haphazard organization of the interior show that the builders were constrained both by the topography of the site and by the structures already built on it.
The tomb is a chamber approximately six meters square erected on the site of 'Abd al-Samad’s residence across a lane from the mosque. As at Bastam, the shape is traditional, but the interior is decorated with the finest fittings Zayn al-Din could procure.

The walls were once revetted with a 1.3 5-meter dado of luster tiles, now dispersed in museums throughout the world, and often recognizable by a frieze of paired birds whose heads were later defaced by some zealous iconoclast.
Large, specially ordered luster tiles also decorated the mihrab and the cenotaph, but the glory of the room is still a spectacular twelve-tier muqarnas vault.
Eight screened windows admit a subdued light which plays across the faceted surfaces to reveal the sculptural richness of the vault and illuminates the superbly designed and carved stucco inscription band that encircles the base of the dome.

Traces of an equally fine inscription band in the north iwan of the mosque are signed by Haydar, the master carver who executed the finest sculptural achievement of the age, the mihrab added to Isfahan’s congregational mosque in 1310.

Natanz, Shrine of'Abd al-Samad, 1299-1312

Natanz, Shrine of'Abd al-Samad, plan

Over six meters high and three broad, the Isfahan mihrab exhibits the typical arrangement of concentric niches within rectangular frames. It is distinguished from other examples, such as that at the small shrine known as Pir-i Bakran at Linjan outside Isfahan, by the crispness of its carving.

Each area of the composition is worked in a distinct pattern; each pattern is worked simultaneously on several levels. The outer rectangular frame, for example, has a ground of double arabesque scrolls sprouting carved and stippled palmettes which supports an elegant inscription in Thuluth script.

The inscriptions include praise on the twelve imams revered by the Shi'ites and traditions of 'Ali, the Prophet’s successor,’ and the choice of texts suggests that the mihrab was commissioned to commemorate Uljaytu’s conversion to Shi'ism at the end of 1309.

Haydar, who signed the work beside the foundation inscription in the tympanum, was one of the most famous calligraphers of the day. He was one of the six pupils of Yaqut al-Musta'simi, the “cynosure of calligraphers”, and was himself the teacher of such calligraphers as 'Abdallah Sayrafi and such viziers as Taj al-Din 'Alishah and Rashid al- Din’s son, Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad.

Taj al-Din was a wily nouveau-riche cloth merchant who rose meteorically to the head of the vizierate, arranging Rashid al-Din’s downfall in the process. He curried favor by presenting the sultan with such gifts as an elaborate jeweled barge to float along the Tigris and underwriting such projects as a cloth bazaar for Sultaniyya. The vizier’s ambition is evident in the new congregational mosque he ordered in Tabriz ca. 1315. A large forecourt with a central pool one hundred and fifty cubits square preceded an elephantine brick iwan .

The vault, which subsequently collapsed, originally spanned thirty meters and sprang from walls ten meters thick and twenty-five meters high. I

n its own day it was lauded as larger than the iwan at Ctesiphon, the Sasanian palace outside of Baghdad considered to be one of the wonders of the world, and visitors marveled at its rich revetment in marble and tile, although only the baked brick walls remain.

Luster-painted frieze tile with paired birds from the Shrine of'Abd al-Samad at Natanz, 1308. H 36 cm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum

Other Ilkhanid mosques had two iwans. That at Ashtarjan, thirty-three kilometers south-west of Isfahan, was ordered in 1315 by an accountant in the Ilkhanid administration for his home town. The indifferent construction is covered with showy stucco and tile revetments.

The most common mosque plan, however, continued to have four iwans and a dome as developed in Iran several centuries earlier. It can best be seen in the now restored congregational mosque at Varamin, forty-two kilometers south of Tehran.

The mosque, ordered in 1322 during the reign of Uljaytu’s son and successor Abu Sa'id, is a freestanding rectangle sixty-six by forty-three meters. Lateral entrances lead to iwans on the court, but the major entrance is from the north .

Its elaborate portal, probably once flanked by minarets, pre¬ figures the faqade of the sanctuary iwan which leads from the court to the dome chamber. The dome chamber, just over ten meters in diameter, also presents the classic elevation developed in the Saljuq period. A square chamber supports an octagonal zone of four squinches alternating with four blind arches.

This in turn supports a sixteen-sided zone on which rests the dome. The building is disinguished from its Saljuq prototypes by its attenuated proportions, its small court, and its extensive but routine use of tile mosaic.