In the years between the death of the conqueror Amir Timur in 1405 to the death of his great-great-grandson Sultan-Husain Mirza in 1506 that comprised the "century of princes," the vast territory conquered by Timur, from Anatolia and Syria in the west to the Indus and Turkistan in the east, underwent many and varied political changes, shifts, conquests and reconquests. Timur's empire was weakened by the disunity of his successors, who fought constantly with each other, until gradually the western portions of the realm were lost to the Turcoman and the eastern and Central Asian portions fell to the Uzbeks. Ultimately central Iran and the heart of the empire, Khurasan, fell to the Safavids, and the Timurids lost power altogether. Throughout the period, however, in the midst of the political instability', the dominant Persian ate literary and artistic culture remained remarkably stable, firmly ensconced, un-challenged in its supremacy and unified in its development. The Turco-Iranian synthesis of Persian cultural hegemony and Turco-Mongolian political and military domination to which the Timurids fell heir had long been in the making and had held sway throughout the area of Iranian cultural influence since the fourteenth-century successors to Genghis Khan and the Mongolian invasion of the previous century. The successors to the Mongolian Ilkhans, short-lived dynasties conquered by Timur-the Jalayirids in Baghdad and Azerbaijan, the Indus and Muzaffar ds in Shiraz, the Karts in Herat-maintained and sponsored a re-fined and lively literary and artistic production. The artistic milieu that had been created under the Ilkhans and their successors produced splendid examples of the arts of the book, while in literature there appeared the incomparable Persian
poet Hafiz of Shiraz.