Page 196 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

sorts of metalwork. The lower inscription includes
the name of the Shirvanshah Farrukhyasar (1464-
1501) best known for his victory over the Safavid
leader Shaykh Haydar in 1492-1493. Farrukhya-
sar was a refined patron of the arts of the book, as
is shown by a splendid anthology in the Herati
style (British Library Add. 16561), copied at Sha-
makha in Shirvan by Sharaf al-DIn Husayn al-
Sultani in 1468-1469. This inscription, which is
surmounted by a lobed, scribbled border, is less
carefully dotted than the former; and its arrange-
ment and ungrammatical construction make it
difficult to suggest the order and parts of words.
Only a highly tentative reading can be proposed.
Turban helmets of this type, which seem to
have been made in Dagestan and sold in Derbend,
are associated particularly with the Aqqoyunlu
Turcomans. (Another helmet also bears a rare
c
legible dedication to the Aqqoyunlu ruler Ya qub
Beg.) Shirvan, now modern Soviet Azerbaydzhan,
was important both as a producer of raw silk and
as a winter military bivouac, but though nomi-
nally independent by the later fifteenth century,
the Shirvanshahs were little more than tributaries
of the Aqqoyunlu.
Helmets and armor found today in Turkish
collections must mostly have entered Turkey as
booty. David Alexander has observed in conversa-
tion that the substantial number of such pieces
in the Leningrad armories were almost certainly
seized by Russian forces from the Ottoman
arsenal at Erzurum, which they occupied
in 1827-1828. J.M.R.

84
This helmet, originally
decorated at its apex with
TURBAN HELMET a plume, recalls early fourteenth-century stucco
late i$th century work in Il-Khanid in Iran, rather than the Inter-
Iranian, Aqqoyunlu Turcoman national Timurid foliate or floral style fashionable
iron, heavily overlaid with silver in the late fifteenth century. The nose-piece
3
1
height 34 (ij /s); base diameter 23.4 (y /^ is missing.
inscribed: (upper) al-dawla wa'1-iqbal al-nusra The helmet bears two inscriptions in handsome,
wa'1-ifdal li-sahibihi; (lower) Sultan ibn Bsa rounded script. The upper one, placed between
c
QTAFS wa al wa ibn taj ijlal wa izz BR TIR AHSU thin, lobed bands filled with traces of scribbled
c
Farrukhyasar manba Bohl majma c [?] abyar [?anbar] Arabic, reads, 'Tower and good fortune, victory
al-muzaffar al-mansur al-mu'ayyad.
and favors to its owner/' These are a form of the
Askeri Miize, Istanbul standard prayers on arms and armor and other
EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 195