Registan: The Rise of Madrasa-Anchored Urban Squares in Central Asia, 15th–17th Centuries

Abstract

Samarkand’s Registan square is defined by three monumental madrasas built across three centuries. Why did these structures come to anchor the Registan? More broadly, why did madrasa-anchored urban squares emerge across Central Asian cities (Samarkand, Bukhara, and Balkh) between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries? The remaking of the Registan under the amir-governor Yalangtush Bahadur (d. 1655/56), this dissertation argues, was not a derivative continuation of a Timurid model, but a deliberate urban project with its own formal and institutional logic. The dissertation traces the three-dynasty transformation in which the madrasa rose from one component within larger dynastic complexes into the dominant architectural and institutional anchor of major public squares. Moving from the fifteenth-century Ulugh Beg madrasa to sixteenth-century Bukhara and the seventeenth-century Registan, the study combines architectural analysis with waqf documents, chronicles, epigraphy, and evidence for school curricula and postgraduate careers. This evidence examines the madrasa across two interlocking registers: the architectural — forms, functions, and typological relations — and the social and institutional — patronage, endowment, education, residence, and lived experience. Such an approach expands this building type beyond its pedagogical function and repositions the madrasa as an engine of urban economy and centrality. Post-Timurid architectural innovation, in turn, emerges as a form of institutional strategy and urban problem-solving.