Early Scholarship on the Bound Captives

This paper provides a critical examination of the “Turkoman Prisoner”: a collective descriptor given to a number of single subjects found primarily in albums. Except for an insightful Hermitage Museum catalogue entry by Adel Adamova and an article by Linda Komaroff treating one such version in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the oft-cited albeit cursorily-treated “Turkoman Prisoner” has not been examined as a larger group beyond three specimens following an iconographical formula. An elegant warrior with wispy beard and square jaw is in a kneeling posture, rendered in submission with one arm bent in an “L” shape. He is fettered by a palahang: a contraption of containment to prevent the man from reaching for his bow and shooting an arrow. The other arm rests on his knee. The dearth of research on this image type is remarkable for it is a repeated subject contained in albums of Persianate art assembled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Table 1: Attributions of Bound Captive Folios). I have collated thirty-five specimens in this study that are located in the collections of private individuals, museums, and libraries in Austria, Denmark, England, France, India, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. Some were discovered by tracking specific references in catalogues, and a few emerged by chance while looking through auctions, museum holdings, and hearing conference papers. There are surely others waiting to be discovered.

This paper's aim is to uncover the historical context of the rendered subject, here termed the Bound Captive, to temper the emphasis on ethnicity implied by the “Turkoman” term. It becomes apparent that it is not a Turkoman depicted, but is instead a member of the Uzbek troops who attacked the eastern flank of the Safavid empire across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Abulkhairid (Shibanid) and Tuqay-Timurid (Ashtarkhanid) dynasties carried out these military campaigns to secure the Khurasan region. My argument relies largely on period texts and visual materials painted by Safavid and Safavid-aligned artists. The majority of the artworks have a Safavid provenance, but my usage of the term “Safavid-aligned” acknowledges the few Prisoner copies that are attributed to Ottoman, Mughal, and Deccan realms.