Poems of Khvaju Kirmani (Baghdad, 1396), British Library Add. 18113

This manuscript of the poems of Khvaju Kirmani was completed in 1396 in the academy maintained by Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, himself a poet, calligrapher and artist; Norah Titley sees it as that academy's peak; it is in the British Library as Add. 18113. ¹ Its poems were written in nasta'liq by Mir Ali Tabrizi, who perfected the script under Sultan Ahmad's patronage, after which it became the predominant script of illustrated Persian manuscripts. ²

Its paintings take up the whole page and spill into the borders, the text reduced to a couplet or two in a panel above or below; for Titley they mark a stage between Mongol-Chinese influence and the development of Persian art at Shiraz and Herat. ² Titley compares its Sultan Sanjar and the old woman with the same subject in the Khamsa of Nizami of 1386–88 to show the development of painting at Baghdad. ¹ The paintings are probably all by Junayd of Baghdad, to whom (and to Sultan Ahmad) an inscription on one painting (folio 45b) refers. ²

The manuscript contains the romance Humay u Humayun, finished by Khvaju Kirmani at Baghdad in 1331 under Abu Sa'id, on the Persian prince Humay's adventures and courtship of the Chinese princess Humayun, and the Sufi poem Rawdat al-anwar. ³ Compositions from it recur in the Iskandar Sultan miscellany at Shiraz and served as models throughout the fifteenth century. ^{4 5}