Around 1163, the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi completed his first major work, the Makhzan al-Asrar ('Treasury of Secrets'), a didactic masnavi poem of some 2,260 couplets offering ethical and spiritual counsel on twenty topics including justice, love, death, and the nature of poetry itself. Nizami, who spent his career in Ganja (in present-day Azerbaijan), went on to compose four further narrative poems — Khusraw and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, the Haft Paykar, and the Iskandarnama — that together form the Khamsa ('Quintet'), the most admired sequence of romantic epic poetry in the Persian literary tradition.

Nizami's Khamsa became the supreme model for Persian romantic epic and was imitated by dozens of poets across the Persian-speaking world, from Central Asia to Ottoman Turkey to Mughal India, over the following seven centuries. His Layla and Majnun in particular shaped the archetype of the mad lover-poet whose unrequited passion becomes a metaphor for the soul's longing for the divine — a motif that influenced Sufi poetry, Turkish literature, and through later translations, Romantic European writers including Byron and Goethe.