Shah Rukh Dies and Timurid Empire Fragments

1447

The death of Timur's cultured son plunged the Timurid realm into savage civil war among ambitious grandsons and great-grandsons. Herat and Samarkand became prizes fought over by rival princes with cavalry armies and portable siege weapons. The libraries survived the fighting, the miniature painters somehow continued their exquisite work, but the political coherence that had sheltered the Timurid Renaissance and its sciences was crumbling irreversibly into princely warlordism.