ABSTRACT
Premodern Central Asia was a flourishing node of international trade. Its cities of Bukhara, Samarqand, and Herat particularly thrived under the Timurids, the immediate descendants of Timur Lang. The region’s prosperity gradually declined under the Uzbeks, who conquered it in the early sixteenth century. Meanwhile, Isma‘il, a teenager who was a descendant of a Sufi shaykh as well as a Byzantine princess, created a new Iranian power, the Safavid Empire. He is responsible for introducing Twelver Shi‘ism to it. His great-grandson ‘Abbas I strengthened the central government, making the Safavid Empire one of the world’s most thriving countries in the seventeenth century. It suddenly collapsed in the first half of the eighteenth century.
