Five Treasures made Nizami Persia’s romantic epic master
Nizami of Ganja—born Ilyas around 1141, dead by 1209—never haunted palace annals as a court flatterer, yet his Khamsa, or Five Treasures, set the gold standard for Persian romantic narrative. From Layla and Majnun to Seven Beauties, later Mughal ateliers still painted his scenes for emperors.
Born to a Persian urban family in Seljuq Ganja (now Azerbaijan), he likely spent his whole life in the South Caucasus. Orphaned early, he was raised by maternal uncle Khwaja Umar, who gave him a strong education. His mother Ra’isa was of Kurdish origin; his father Yusuf appears once in verse, alongside grandfather Zakki. Because he avoided courts, dynastic chronicles barely notice him; tazkereh memoirs lean on legend. He married three times. His first wife, an enslaved Kipchak sent by Fakhr al-Din Bahramshah of Darband, became—says Iraj Bashiri—his most beloved and bore son Mohammad. She died after Khosrow and Shirin was finished, when Mohammad was seven; Nizami later called the fourteen-year-old the apple of his eye and, in Haft Peykar, urged the youth to take responsibility as the father grew frail. Both later wives also died young, each death coinciding with an epic’s completion—prompting his bitter joke that every mathnavi seemed to demand a wife.
Patrons still mattered. Mid-twelfth-century Seljuq weakness left local princes hungry for Persian poets; Nizami dedicated works to Seljuqs, Eldiguzids, Shirvanshahs, the ruler of Ahar, and Ahmadilis, yet lived secluded. Called Hakim, the Sage, he wove Arabic and Persian letters with mathematics, astronomy, medicine, Koranic exegesis, Iranian myth, ethics, music, and visual art. He treated Ferdowsi as master of discourse and mined the Shahnameh for Haft Peykar, Khosrow and Shirin, and Eskandar-Nameh, while Vis and Ramin shaped his romantic rhetoric—especially Khosrow and Shirin’s metre and scenes. Makhzan al-Asrar answers Sanai’s Hadikat al-Hakika; Khaqani’s daring imagery marked him too.
The Khamsa—also Panj Ganj, Five Treasures—holds five long masnavi narratives: Makhzan-ol-Asrar (1163, some say 1176), Khosrow and Shirin (1177–1180), Leyli and Majnun (1192), Eskandar-Nameh (1194 or 1196–1202), and Haft Peykar (1197). The first is ethico-philosophical; the rest are medieval romances, three recentering Shahnameh heroes and one retelling Arabic Layla and Majnun, all substantially reworked. Later Persian and Mughal courts luxuriated in illustrated copies, including the British Library Khamsa made for Emperor Akbar in the 1590s. From Afghanistan and Iran to Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Tajikistan, that quintet still defines romantic epic Persian.
Source: Nizami Ganjavi
