Carpet

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire stretched over most of the western Islamic world, at times expanding into North Africa. While Morocco always remained outside the empire, Moroccan textiles and carpets from this period testify to the cultural reach of the Ottomans. The design of the main field of this carpet, with its central lozenge and diagonally cropped corners, derives from sixteenth-century Ottoman medallion carpets produced in the Ushak region of western Anatolia for the sultan's court in Istanbul. The border designs are reductions of those prevalent in many classical Ottoman embroidered textiles.