In Xanadu (23 page)

Soon the place began to prosper. The historian Mustawfi said that nowhere in the world were there such fine buildings. The bazaars had no equal in the whole Mongol Empire.

Everything imaginable could be found there. Precious
stones and costly spices from India; turquoises from
Khurasan and Ferghana; lapis lazuli and rubies from
Badakhshan; pearls from the Persian Gulf; silk from
Gilan and Mazandaran; indigo from Kirman, the won-derful textiles of Yazd; cloth from Lombardy and
Flanders, raw silk, brocade, lacquer, oils, musk, Chi-
nese rhubarb, Arab hounds, Turkish falcons, the stallions of Hijaz          

There was even a Catholic archbishop.

Yet the prosperity was illusory. Magnificent as it was, Sultaniya was the creation of one man and it died with him. The day Uljetu was buried fourteen thousand families left the town. They had been forced to live there on the whim of a foreign ruler, and they took the first possible opportunity to leave.

Cool and pleasant in summer, it was unbearably cold the rest of the year. There was an inadequate water-supply. It layoff the main Silk Route and was soon bypassed by merchants after they ceased to be forcibly rerouted there. Its star waned quickly. Uljetu's successors chose Tabriz as their capital. The population of Sultaniya drifted off; their mud-brick houses were washed away. It was not even a ghost town. The whole city simply disappeared. Only the vast mausoleum of Uljetu remained.

The first thing we saw was the great turquoise dome flashing in the early morning sun. It stood in the middle of an expanse of flat pastureland, completely alone, an artificial mountain of brick and tile. The minibus did not stop anywhere near it. It lay two miles off the main road and we had to walk.

The tomb would be an extraordinary building in any age, but as the first great monument to emerge from the ashes of the Mongol invasions it must rank as one of the supreme achievements of Mediaeval Man. The mausoleum was built only fifty years after the
medresse
at Sivas, but a great gulf separates the two. The architect not only equalled anything ever built in the Golden Age of the Seljuks, he completely surpassed it. He made the leap from the crude mediaeval splendour of Seljuk architecture to the subtle classicism that would reach its finest flowering in Mogul India. Already, in 1320, every idea in the Taj was fully expressed here in the plains east of Tabriz. The Taj is simply a refinement of Sultaniya; in its essentials it is restating an idea three hundred years old. Robert Byron wrote that the audacity of Uljetu's inventiveness made him think of Brunelleschi, but in fact there is no comparable leap in European architecture. It is as if St Peter's were to follow fifty years after Chartres.

The mausoleum is octagonal, rising to a parapet from which springs a crown of eight minarets and a bee-hive dome. The sides of the octagon are not equal. There is a main front, once the climax of the Mall of Sultaniya. On it a central doorway is flanked by six blind arches, three on each side, once filled with faience-work inlay. The wall of tobacco-brick rises up to an open, arcaded gallery. This, as Byron pointed out, is a facade, a new departure in Islamic architecture. It was built primarily to be looked at. Unlike almost all earlier Islamic buildings which were bounded by walls and faced inwards, the tomb of Uljetu is centred on the dome and looks out. It is a public building, built at the centre of an imperial capital, a concrete expression of the Emperor's power.

With its city decayed and its empire fallen, there could be something almost pathetic about so proud and vain a monument. Yet the building still retains great dignity and power. This is especially so of the interior. Nothing, except perhaps Hagia Sophia, prepares one for the sheer scale of the vast, unsupported, heavenward-thrusting dome. It encloses an enormous space, far greater than one would expect from the outside. It dwarfs the observer.

Because of this it is only gradually that one notices the fabulous detail of the stucco. Some of the colours and motifs are familiar from Seljuk tile work, yet as with the architecture the whole spirit of the design has been transformed. It is as fine and intricate as a lace ruff. In this subtlety, in the delicate pale colours and nervous, vibrant patterns, lies the key to the entire building. There is an unmistakable Central Asian or even Chinese spirit at work. Certainly those impulses are crossed with the native traditions, but their contribution is clear. For all the destruction wrought by the Mongols,
Pax Mongolica
allowed an unprecedented flow of artists and intellectuals over the length of the empire. When the apparently barren Mongol tree burst into flower in the early fourteenth century, it did so with a brilliance derived from cross-fertilization. It was from this fusion that all future Persian art would develop.

We wandered around the building all morning. To me, as remarkable as the structure itself was the eclecticism it revealed in the society that created it. As I circled beneath the dome I thought of the people who made up that world, who controlled the forces that must have been beginning to make themselves felt when Polo was here. Uljetu himself is a shadowy figure, clearly a great patron, but personally naive, even ridiculous. His vizier, Rashid ad-Din, however, can still be seen in sharp focus. Many of his writings and a large number of his letters have survived, and he emerges as a sort of symbol for the curiosity and learning of his age.

Born of a Jewish family, he converted to Islam and entered the household of the Ilkhans. He gradually rose in the service and finally became vizier under Uljetu. The post gave him enormous power and extraordinary wealth; in lands alone his private empire stretched from orchards and vineyards in Azerbaijan, through date palm plantations in southern Iraq to water meadows and cornfields in Anatolia. But his letters do not reveal him to be an ambitious sycophant. He was above all an intellectual, and it is his love of learning rather than his statesmanship that emerges most clearly in his correspondence. For such a powerful man there is a surprisingly donnish tone to his letters. He writes to one friend from India thrilled at his discovery of spices unavailable in Persia. To another he extends an invitation to visit a garden he has just made at Fathabad. He sends 'fowls, honey and yoghurt' to a monastery and 'choice garments and a horse' to a scholar who has dedicated a book to him. To his sons he takes a sterner attitude. He writes to one regretting that the boy is occupying himself with astrology (Rashid had just appointed him Governor of Baghdad, and thought there should be more pressing concerns on his mind); another receives a sermon warning him against sloth, wine-drinking and over-fondness for music and dissipation'.

These warnings are mixed with passages in which he enthuses about his schemes to revive learning in Persia. For him much the most interesting aspect of Rashiddya was its college, and he writes regularly to his sons describing its progress. He took great pride in the number of Koran readers and doctors of theology, the 'fifty physicians from Syria and Egypt', the oculists and surgeons and bonesetters, and particularly the seven thousand students from all over the Islamic world. Many of these students he Financed himself. 'It is most important that scholars should be able to work in peace of mind without the harassments of poverty,' he wrote. There is no greater service than to encourage science and scholarship.'

To large numbers, therefore, he gave not only houses but daily stipends, yearly clothing allowances and money for sweets.

It was to Rashid ad-Din that the llkhans entrusted the writing of the official history of the Mongol conquests. It was so well thought of that Uljetu went on to commission further histories, of the Turks, Indians, Chinese, Jews and Franks, along with a geographical compendium. It was planned to bind it all together into a single-volume world history, the
Jami al Tawarikh,
a vast historical encyclopaedia, unique in the Middle Ages. The administration of the realm filled the day so the writing of the
History
had to be fitted in between sunrise and morning prayer. It took Rashid the better part of his life. Today it still makes fascinating reading. Particularly interesting is the
History of the Franks,
the only Islamic work on Europe to be written until the Ottoman period. His sources sometimes let him down (a papal text misled him into thinking that the Pope was in the habit of using the bent head and neck of the Holy Roman Emperor as a step to mount his horse), but on the whole it is as reliable as it is unique, and is full of surprising details: he knew, for example, that there were no poisonous reptiles in Ireland.

As a historian Rashid was well aware of the transience of human achievement and in his old age he became haunted by the idea that his life's work would be forgotten by posterity. He made elaborate arrangements for the preservation of his books, putting aside the vast sum of 60,000 dinars for their copying and translation, and for the provision of binding, maps and illustrations 'on best Baghdad paper and in the finest and most legible writing'. It was just as well. Rashid's enormous power and wealth could only create envy among his contemporaries, and at the death of his patron Uljetu, Rashid's enemies managed to secure his dismissal. Two years later the seventy-six-year-old man was summoned to court and accused of poisoning his former master. After a brief trial he was put to death. His head was carried through the streets of Tabriz with cries of: This is the head of a Jew who abused the name of God; may God's curse be upon him!'

His family was disgraced and their estates confiscated. Rashiddya was looted and burned. All the copies of his works that could be found were destroyed. Like a fallen Stalinist, he was airbrushed out of history.

But the memory of Rashid ad-Din was not extinguished. Copies of his work survived in translation in the libraries of neighbouring Muslim states, and while the names of his murderers are long forgotten, Rashid's life remains one of the most fully documented of his age. Along with Polo's
The Travels
his
Jami al-Tawarikh
is today the main historical source for Mongol Asia.

As we left Sultaniya the oasis gave way to a wasteland. It was not the romantic desert of Doughty, Burton or Lawrence and there were no dunes or camels or caravanserai. It was simply an arid flatland, a desolate, echoing emptiness.

There was virtually nothing to break the monotony: the odd, sad peasant working away in a tragic attempt to wring vegetable life out of the land, two marooned mullahs inexplicably throwing great stones at each other, a burned-out bus, a lost nomad on a scrofulous donkey. Through the middle ran the road, and from it the dust rose in clouds and swept into the bus, blinding the eyes and gritting the mouth.

As we drove on the landscape became harsher still. The scrub turned to sand and the shallow line of mountains that formed the horizon to our right dipped lower and lower and then hit the plain. There was a gap, a last craggy outcrop and then nothing. Never has a landscape filled me with such a sense of melancholy. It felt as if some terrible biblical disaster had taken place, that its inhabitants had been caught committing sodomy or castrating Israelites, whereupon fire and brimstone had rained down from the sky, leaving only a few dazed-looking nomads and an awful lot of sand.

Laura had fallen asleep soon after we left Sultaniya, so it was left to me to entertain our fellow passengers, who, with nothing to look at outside the window, had without exception focused their attention on us. Dirty and unattractive we might be. but in contrast to the wastes outside we were objects of considerable fascination.

Where is your province?' asked a peasant across the aisle.

Scotland.'

They speak Farsi in Scotland?'