A new royal centre laid beside the old city: the Maidan, 510 by 160 metres, ringed by arcades, with the Shah’s mosque, the palace gate, the court mosque and the bazaar gate on its four sides; the covered bazaar running north; the palace gardens and the Chahar Bagh avenue running south to the river.
In 1598 Shah Abbas I moved the Safavid capital to Isfahan and, rather than rebuild the old city round its Friday Mosque, laid out a new centre to the south-west. Its heart is the Maidan-i Naqsh-i Jahan, the ‘image of the world’: a rectangle of about 510 by 160 metres, used for polo, parades, markets and festivals, edged by a water channel and trees and enclosed by a continuous two-storey range of shops. On its four sides stand the four institutions of the state: the Shah’s congregational mosque to the south, the palace gate of Ali Qapu to the west, the court mosque of Shaykh Lotfollah to the east, and to the north the portal of the Qaisariyya, the royal bazaar, from which the covered bazaar runs on for two kilometres to the old square and the Friday Mosque.
The square is laid out on its own axis, but the mosques must face Mecca, about 225° from Isfahan. The builders reconciled the two by setting each portal square to the Maidan and turning the building behind it: at the Masjid-i Shah a domed vestibule makes the turn of 45°, at the Lotfollah mosque a bent corridor. West of the square the palace gardens held pavilions such as Chehel Sotun; beyond them the Chahar Bagh, an avenue with a water channel, pools and rows of plane trees between walled gardens, ran south to the Allahverdi Khan bridge over the Zayandeh river.
The French jeweller Jean Chardin, who lived in Isfahan in the 1660s and 1670s, described the city in detail, and his account is the main source for this model. The Maidan and its monuments survive; the extent of the gardens, the course of the bazaar and the length of the Chahar Bagh are simplified, and the houses are generic.