Ulugh Beg (1394–1449), the grandson of the conqueror Timur, is a speculative typing case given the distance and the limited personal record, but the available evidence converges on LII more cleanly than on any other type. The scholarly pursuits across four decades, the pluralist gathering of the best minds across the Islamic world, the personal participation in high-level science, the polymathic breadth, and the political failure when fractious circumstances finally required him to engage in politics — all of this is recognizable.
The LII scholarly commitment is the single most reliable typing evidence. The Liverpool Schools' Observatory website framing is direct and confirmed by every other source: "Unlike his grandfather and father, Ulugh Beg wasn't interested in war. He loved learning." He had been made governor of Samarkand at sixteen by his father Shah Rukh and held the post for thirty-eight years, for which he is remembered by posterity. He ordered the building the Samarkand observatory, one of the largest in the pre-modern world, with the Fakhri sextant of 40-meter radius as its central instrument. He invited more than sixty mathematicians and astronomers from across the Islamic world to staff the institutions — Jamshid al-Kashi from Kashan, Qadi Zada al-Rumi from Bursa, Ali Qushji from Samarkand itself, and others. The pluralism is characteristic LII: gather the best regardless of origin, on the merit-based criterion that the work requires. Al-Kashi's letters to his father describe the intellectual environment that resulted as remarkable, with sustained meetings where complex problems were discussed at the highest available level.
What distinguishes Ulugh Beg from the standard patron-prince like his father Shah Rukh is his personal participation. He was working in the observatory he himself sponsored. He contributed to the trigonometric tables (his calculation of sin 1° is accurate to remarkable precision and is still close to modern values), participated in the design of the observation program, and authored or co-authored the Zij-i Sultani of 1437 — the star catalogue of 994 stars, the most accurate produced since Ptolemy's Almagest thirteen centuries earlier (in fact, many of Ptolemy's mistaken measurements were corrected) and the most accurate that would be produced for another two centuries before Tycho Brahe. The ruler-scholar engaging alongside professional colleagues, rather than from above them, is a very LII pattern.
He also wrote poetry and studied history. The breadth is real but it is not the random roaming of an ILE-flavored polymath; every component served the integrated project of being a learned cosmopolitan ruler-scholar.
He is described as "a lover of science and the sky, but a poor politician and soldier". The type is indeed well-suited to stable institutional environments, and characteristically fails in fractious settings where the institutions are weak. Ulugh Beg ruled Samarkand for thirty-eight years under his father Shah Rukh's protective umbrella, and the work he produced under those conditions was permanent. The two years after Shah Rukh's death in 1447, when Ulugh Beg suddenly had to manage the fractious Timurid succession himself, were a disaster.
Shah Rukh's equilibrium depended on his personal authority and his ongoing acumen in matters dealing with power, and could not be transferred to an LII successor who was not himself willing or able to do the same. Ulugh Beg, after four decades of protection by his father, was suddenly required to do exactly what he was least equipped for. He won the initial military engagement at Murghab against his nephew Ala al-Dawla, advanced to Herat, was then defeated by Ala al-Dawla's brother, retreated to Samarkand, found his oldest son Abd al-Latif in rebellion against him, and was eventually beheaded on his son's order. The whole sequence took two years. He was clearly outmaneuvered by tougher operators who recognized his character as a liability.
Wikipedia says that Ulugh Beg's army "massacred the people" of Herat after he defeated Ala al-Dawla, making me think of his grandfather Timur, who was infamous for systematic mass slaughter of resisting cities (At Ishafan, after the city rebelled against his tax collectors, Timur deliberately ordered a punitive massacre, which implies that he wanted to do more killing than the standard fare done by a pre-modern army when it captures a resisting city, and left pyramids of skulls behind, while pointedly not doing much damage to the buildings). Sacking resisting cities was common across the whole planet, and while I don't have any actual translations of Persian chronicles, I haven't been able to find other sources, other than Wiki mirrors, that claim that what Ulugh Beg did was an Ishafan 1387/Magdeburg 1631-level horror. Sources like this one, claim that he spared the city, but "looted" the suburbs which were thought to support his rival, implying the common level of military cruelty, rather than something more drastic. It appears that by Timurid standards, this was unremarkable: a one-off act in a succession war against his nephew, in a political culture where mercy would have likely been read as weakness. He did not have a sustained record of brutality, and otherwise governed Samarkand for thirty-eight years without producing any particular atrocity list.
The relationship with al-Kashi confirms the typing through the surrounding intellectual relationships. Al-Kashi, the dominant figure at Samarkand after Ulugh Beg himself, was himself probably some sort of intermediate ILI/LII (maybe some LSI accent possible at most) — the cold-analytical-skeptical mathematician whose letters preserve characteristically cutting judgments of his colleagues' abilities, who took particular pride in his own work on the value of π (calculated to sixteen decimal places, a record that stood for over a century).
The observatory gradually declined after Ulugh Beg's death, and the Samarkand school of astronomers scattered. The Zij-i Sultani catalogue circulated in manuscript and was eventually published in London in 1650 in Latin, becoming part of universal astronomical inheritance. Ulugh Beg's scientific contribution was, in the end, preserved.
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