Ulugh Beg Governs Samarkand

1419

Timur's astronomer grandson took permanent charge of Samarkand at age fifteen and immediately began transforming the city into the intellectual capital of the Islamic world. He would build madrasas on the Registan square, attract mathematicians from Persia, Syria, and Anatolia, and personally calculate star positions with a forty-meter sextant whose precision would not be surpassed until Tycho Brahe worked in Denmark a century and a half later.