Together Again: Discovering a Missing Piece of the 1411 Iskandar Sultan Anthology

The Timurid prince Iskandar Sultan (1384–1415) is well known as a patron of numerous illuminated and illustrated manuscripts produced during his governorship of Shiraz. Many of these manuscripts are majmuʿas (anthologies) of poetical and prose works, with each forming a not-quite-pocket-sized handbook personalised to the prince’s varied interests. In a 1992 publication, Priscilla P. Soucek convincingly argued that three illustrated, dispersed manuscripts produced for Iskandar Sultan in 1411 were once part of the same codex: LA 161 in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Wellcome MS Persian 474 in London’s Wellcome Collection and NEKFY01418 in the Istanbul University Library, the latter two of which were published by Fateme Keshavarz and Zeren Akalay (Tanındı), respectively. However, as Soucek pointed out, some titles listed in LA 161’s fihrist (table of contents) have remained missing, until now. This article demonstrates that the remaining part of the missing codex is present in the second part of a manuscript in the Süleymaniye Library (Lala İsmail 288M, fols 33a–91b). The article describes its contents, examines its production contexts and compares its physical properties and decoration to known manuscripts made for Iskandar Sultan. The present work also traces the journey of the dispersed codex from Fars to the royal library of Bayezid II, and to the collections of Europe and Istanbul.