Timur’s grandson Mohammed, son of Shah Rukh, was a huge nerd. It’s hard to be born into a notorious warlord’s family when you really just want to sit up at night in an observatory measuring the stars, or calculate Pi to a few more places. Mohammed and his mother trailed around following the army while his father acted as one of Timur’s generals. When Timur died in 1405, Shah Rukh took his family back to Samarkand where the boy could finally get a steady education. But only four years later, Shah Rukh was the Great Khan himself, and he left Mohammed in Samarkand as governor while he moved to Herat; the boy was only 16. He governed the Samarkand region through Shah Rukh’s lifetime, though after his father’s death he kind of went off the rails.
Ruling Samarkand and the Transoxiana region was about right for his geek aptitude, because he really only wanted to set up a university. He had an ample budget for it. He built an impressive physical plant and hired Muslim astronomers and mathematicians from all over. Because he brought Samarkand back from the oblivion it had been in since Genghis Khan destroyed it, he became known as the Great King, Ulugh Beg. He had thirteen wives and many children, so as his sons got old enough, he doled out governing power so that he could avoid most administrative work.
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One of the early scholars at Ulugh Beg’s court is credited for the Law of Cosines, which in France is still called al-Jashi’s Theorem. He invented some astronomical calculation devices, which at the time were the cutting-edge of scientific technology by means of mechanical computing. He also wrote some very advanced mathematical works that were not translated into European languages until much later, or not at all. In his Key to Arithmetic, he calculated Pi to some extraordinary degree. (Here, gentle mathematician reader, I must bow out and point you to other summaries of al-Jashi’s work.)
In 1428, the Ulugh Beg Madrasa (Institute) built a very large observatory. At that time, they did not yet have optical telescopes, but their main task was measuring the position of stars, for which they needed a quadrant or sextant. This instrument was a piece of a circle, built very large so that it could be divided into minutes and seconds. Ulugh Beg’s sextant had a radius of 40 meters; it had stairs and observation platforms built along its three-story span.
Ulugh Beg is credited with compiling the most authoritative star chart of his time, in 1437. It remained in use into the 17th and 18th centuries. That same year, he calculated the length of the sidereal year within 58 seconds, a measurement that lasted until Copernicus improved it. He made other precise measurements, such as the Earth’s tilt. But that wasn’t all. In addition, he wrote out trigonometric tables to 8 decimal places and invented a medicine made of alcohol and garlic. I guess that last one isn’t a very good indicator of his love of precision, but it does show his interest in other fields. And he wrote poetry.
Sultan Shah Rukh lived to be pretty old, so when he died, Ulugh Beg was in his 50s. Foolishly, Ulugh Beg took steps to seize power from among the many other sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, but he was not good at either fighting or politics. Sure, he could order the massacre of the city of Herat in 1448, but that was a very basic Timurid skill level. Otherwise, he lost battles to nephews and failed to detect plots. His own oldest son ordered him assassinated when he went on Hajj to Mecca. He really should have stayed in the observatory; he was most suitably honored in 1830 when a Moon crater was named for him.
In 1449, once Ulugh Beg was safely dead, Muslim fanatics who disapproved of his scientific ways destroyed the observatory. In 1500, after the descendants of Shah Rukh had squandered their power by fighting each other, primitive Uzbek nomads overthrew them. They had been known as the Gray Horde and their rulers claimed descent from Genghis Khan through his oldest son Jochi. But their level of culture was far below that of the Persianized Mongols who had rebuilt Samarkand. They moved their capital to Bukhara, and at times, Samarkand was almost deserted.