Dynastic History | Bibi-Khanym Mosque — The Congregational Mosque That Delhi Paid For

The foundation of Samarkand's congregational mosque — Bibixonim masjidi, the Bibi-Khanym mosque — was laid on 14 Ramadan 801 AH, in May 1399, a few months after Timur's army had finished with Delhi. Some accounts put the start of work on the site earlier, after his return from the western campaigns in 1396.

Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama, the court chronicle compiled around 1425, describes the workforce as the state saw it: two hundred men inside the mosque itself, stone-cutters among them from Azerbaijan, Fars and Hindustan, and five hundred more cutting stone in the mountains. The men from Hindustan had not applied for the work. Moving skilled craftsmen out of a conquered city was standard practice, and the same chronicle records ninety-five elephants brought back from India to haul stone for the columns. One account by a deportee survives: Ibn Arabshah, taken as a boy when Timur's army came into Syria in 1400 or 1401, went home to Damascus twenty-three years later and wrote a hostile biography of Timur that has been read ever since.

Timur was not descended from Chinggis Khan and so could not be khan. He ruled as amir and as gūregen, royal son-in-law, through marriage to Chinggisid princesses, and the mosque carries the name of the senior of them, Saray Mulk Khanum. The scale was the argument.

It outran the engineering. Ruy González de Clavijo, Castile's ambassador in the city in 1404, watched Timur order the finished gateway pulled down as too low and the work pressed day and night while his health failed. Bricks came out of the dome within a few years, the inner arch fell in an earthquake in 1897, and reconstruction began under the Uzbek SSR in 1974.

The complex stands beside the Siyob bazaar. Much of what visitors photograph was rebuilt within the last fifty years.

📸 Cover: The restored main portal of the Bibi-Khanym mosque, 2024, BeshevI, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons