Matrakçi Nasuh’s miniature of Sultaniyya, 16th century. Yildiz T 5964, folios 31b and 32a; Courtesy of Istanbul University Library
AHVA postdoctoral fellow Atri Hatef Naiemi will share her research on Tuesday, April 1, from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. in Room 1002, Audain Art Centre. All are welcome!
From Imperial Capitals to Provincial Centres: Urban Legacies of the Ilkhanids
April 1, 2025
12:30–2:00 p.m.
Room 1002, Audain Art Centre
6398 University Blvd.
The period following the Mongol conquest of Iran in the thirteenth century, that of the so-called Pax Mongolica, witnessed the emergence of a new visual language in Persian art and architecture. Various Islamic and non-Islamic visual traditions that permeated the whole body of the arts of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iran played a pivotal role in the formation of the hybrid style characterizing the art and architecture of the Ilkhanid period. Operating as an interconnected network of people, buildings, and institutions, the Ilkhanid city perfectly represents different aspects of cross-cultural encounters in medieval Iran.
This lecture will first explore the capital cities established by the Ilkhans (Mongol rulers) in northwest Iran during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It will then examine how regional dynasties in southern Iran responded to these imperial initiatives—either by adopting or rejecting them—during the Ilkhanid period and in the decades following the dynasty’s collapse in the 1330s.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
