1394 – 1449
Mirzo Ulugh Beg
Astronomer, mathematician, ruler
Timur's grandson, ruler of Samarkand for nearly forty years and the greatest astronomer of his age, remembered for his Registan madrasa, his giant observatory and the star catalogue Zij-i Sultani.
© 1425-1450 artist, Public domain
Timur's grandson
Muhammad Taraghay — known to history by his nickname Ulugh Beg, 'the great prince' — was born on 22 March 1394 at Sultaniya in Iran, during one of his grandfather's campaigns. His parents were Shah Rukh and Gawhar Shad. He grew up in Timur's camps under the care of Saray Mulk Khanum, and it is said that seeing the ruins of the Maragheh observatory as a boy first stirred his interest in the stars.
After Timur's death the capital moved to Herat, and in 1409 Shah Rukh made his fifteen-year-old son governor of Samarkand; from 1411 Ulugh Beg ruled all of Transoxiana. In 1425 he campaigned in Moghulistan and brought back a block of dark green jade for his grandfather's tomb; in 1427 he was defeated by Baraq Khan on the Kipchak steppe. A history, Tarikh-i Arba Ulus (History of the Four Uluses), is also attributed to him.
Samarkand, city of science
Between 1417 and 1420 his madrasa rose on the Registan, where Qadi Zada al-Rumi, Jamshid al-Kashi and other scholars taught. He also built madrasas in Bukhara (1417) and Gijduvan (1433), and the entrance portal of Shah-i-Zinda (1434–1435) dates from his reign. Babur later described the Chini-khana, or Porcelain House, and the Chihil Sutun pavilion that Ulugh Beg built in Samarkand.
In the 1420s a three-storey observatory went up on Kohak hill, its chief instrument the huge Fakhri sextant cut deep into the rock. Years of observation produced the Zij-i Sultani, also called the Zij-i Jadid-i Gurgani, listing 1,018 stars, most of them freshly measured — the most important star catalogue since Ptolemy. It gave the length of the sidereal year as 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes and 8 seconds. Published in Latin at Oxford in 1665, it made his name in Europe.
A tragic end
When Shah Rukh died in 1447, a struggle for power broke out. Ulugh Beg's own son, Abd al-Latif, rebelled and defeated him. Sent off on pilgrimage, Ulugh Beg was murdered on the road on his son's orders on 27 October 1449 and buried in the Gur-e-Amir beside his grandfather; when the tomb was opened in 1941, it confirmed that he had been beheaded. The observatory soon fell into ruin and was rediscovered only in 1908 by the archaeologist Vasily Vyatkin. Today a lunar crater bears Ulugh Beg's name.
