The southwestern Iranian city of Shiraz was a major center of illustrated manuscript production in the sixteenth century. Shiraz manuscripts were often executed at a level of quality that rivaled that of the royal courts in Tabriz and later Qazvin, and they were avidly collected by elites from both Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey. This fine mid-sixteenth-century manuscript of Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet) includes fourteen nearly full-page illustrations, whose heavily patterned architectural interiors and lively multifigural ensembles are characteristic of Shiraz painters at their best.