Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c11.9

c11.9

It is very important to remember, also, that from motives of self-interest, and not from any respect for art, these ferocious invaders, who massacred wholesale men, women, and children of the general population, usually spared the artisans and craftsmen, and thus preserved for their own uses the art-traditions of the countries they ravaged and desolated. Skilled craftsmen were always the prizes of war, and when an uncivilised race like the Mongols triumphed over a highly cultivated one the craftsmen of the defeated became the teachers of the victors; this transplantation into a new soil often brought new vigour into art, and was the beginning of great developments. When Timur, the ancestor of the Indian Mogul dynasty, withdrew his hordes from Northern India in 1398, after ravaging it with fire and sword, he took back with him as captives all the masons who had built the famous mosque at Ferozabad, in order that they might build one like it at Samarkand. Thus Indian art fulfilled once more its civilising mission, and when, two and a half centuries later, Timur’s descendant, Shah Jahan, was building the famous Taj Mahal at Agra, some of the principal masons were brought from Samarkand—probably descendants of Timur’s captives.