Tamerlane, Prince of Destruction
On June 19, 1941, Soviet anthropologists under the direction of Professor Mikhail Gerasimov were commissioned to exhume the body of Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, the Prince of Destruction.1 They were motivated by scientific curiosity and racial theory to prove Tamerlane a Mongolid barbarian conqueror.2 In Russian and Soviet historiography, Tamerlane was long loathed as a pitiless, fanatical Muslim invader even more so than either Genghis Khan or Batu, who were at least tolerant shamanists. Timur was condemned for perpetuating the Tartar yoke by restoring Tokhtamysh, Khan of the White Horde (although these historians conveniently omitted the fact that Timur later returned to punish his wayward vassal to the ultimate benefit of the Grand Princes of Moscow).3 Hence, Professor Gerasimov set out to prove the racial inferiority of the Mongolid ruler. Furthermore, the Soviet leadership inherited the Tsarist policy of denigrating Tamerlane lest his memory act as a rallying cry among Muslim Turkish-speakers in Central Asia against the rule by Moscow. Upon exhuming the body four days later, the scientists were surprised to find that Timur was of mixed ancestry, although they did verify literary sources that reported that Timur had sustained an injury in his right leg and hand, and walked with a limp. Based on their findings, portraits of the fearsome conqueror have been reconstructed because no contemporary images exist. Hours after the exhumation, Soviet news agencies reported that the Wehrmacht had just invaded the Soviet Union. Rumors immediately circulated that Tamerlane had cursed all those who would disturb his remains, and for five years, many Soviet citizens likely believed this curse.4 Tamerlane’s remains were interred after the examination, and rest in his mausoleum, Guri Amir, the tomb of the Grand Emir.5
Guri Amir still stands in Samarkand, in the Republic of Uzbekistan. The stately azure domed maqbarasi has been heavily restored by the Turkish-speaking Uzbeks, who proudly hail Timur as their progenitor and are eager to lure tourists to the final resting place of the celebrated conqueror. Visitors are still awed by the beautiful gilded paintings combining the best of Iranian and nomadic decorative arts, and the türbe of Timur, his sons, grandsons, and spiritual mentor Sayyid Baraka, which are memorial markers (for the actual remains in simple shrouds lie below the floor in the Muslim tradition). Guri Amir still conveys the power, and dignity, of the last great conqueror from the Eurasian steppes. Yet it also stands as testimony to a most unusual conqueror. Timur, while he reveled in campaigning with his nomadic warriors, also delighted in pursuing his aesthetic and intellectual interests at his capital, Samarkand, during the brief respites between campaigns. Tamerlane was as much a product of the high civilization of Eastern Islam as the Eurasian steppes. He poured his wealth and patronage into beautifying Samarkand, which still stands as an architectural jewel of Eastern Islam.6 Furthermore, Tamerlane, while he based his power on nomadic horse archers, conceived of his empire in terms of cities, yielding tribute, and governed by his kinsmen or loyal lieutenants.7
The fascination with Tamerlane has long survived his death, and he shares with Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan an infamy as a ruthless barbarian conqueror. Although Tamerlane styled himself as the Sword of Islam, he sacked numerous Muslim cities, and he slaughtered many more Muslims than victims of other faiths.8 Ironically, Tamerlane was most respected by contemporary Western Europeans, who never experienced the fury of Tamerlane’s hordes. At a safe distance, the Pope and princes of Latin Christendom saw in this conqueror a possible ally against the Ottoman sultans who threatened Constantinople and the Christian kingdoms of the Balkans. The Castilian nobleman Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo journeyed to the court of Tamerlane as the envoy of his king Henry III, who fancied himself a Crusader pledged to battle the Ottomans in the Balkans rather than in Outremer, which had been lost over a century earlier. Clavijo and his party were accompanied by Tamerlane’s envoy, whom the conqueror had sent to sound out alliances with the Christian princes of the far west. It took nearly sixteen months for Clavijo to find Tamerlane, and in September 1404 the Spanish diplomat at last arrived in Samarkand.9 Clavijo was awed by what he saw. Gangs of laborers raised splendid domed buildings; orchards and fountains offered glimpses of Muslim paradise; and the size and wealth of Samarkand far exceeded any European city.10 Tamerlane generously received the Christian envoys even though they were the least important among those seeking an audience with the Grand Emir. The observant Clavijo penned our best description of Tamerlane, noting his physical deformity, his powerful intellect, and his charismatic manner.11 Based on Clavijo’s portrait, the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe wrote a play, Tamburlaine the Great, that has influenced subsequent Western perceptions of Tamerlane that were immortalized in the poem by Edgar Allan Poe.12 Marlowe’s play is more legend than fact, with wild fantasies about Tamerlane’s conquering Africa and Babylon and filled with Classical allusions about monstrous races and beasts. Marlowe painted Tamerlane as the Prince of Destruction, a mighty and yet sadistic conqueror whose physical deformity marred his character. Marlowe’s Tamerlane, the incarnation of unrepentant evil, delights in breaking his word and overthrowing every moral principle. The play shocked Elizabethan audiences. His critics seized upon it as proof of Marlowe’s own amorality, and so persuaded the Privy Council to issue a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest, but Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl before the warrant could be executed.13 The play was deemed so offensive to Baroque and Victorian sensibilities that it was not produced again until the late twentieth century, when it was successfully adapted for the tastes of modern audiences fascinated with sinful tyrants delighting in the sadistic humiliation of their victims.14
The historical Tamerlane, however, is even more extraordinary than the Tamerlane of legend, for his career inspired Muslim historians and biographers of his day to record his deeds. Their accounts in turn inspired an unknown author to compose the purported memoirs of Timur, Tuzk-e-Taimuri, which the scholar Abu Taleb Hosaini presented to the Mughal emperor Jahan in the seventeenth century.15 It is an entertaining work of fiction rather than fact, but many anecdotes ring true in the spirit of Tamerlane’s character, if not in the actual deeds. During his siege of Damascus in 1401, Tamerlane received and conversed with the city’s most celebrated resident, the historian Ibn Khaldun, who penned the definitive analysis of the political rise and fall of Islamic dynasties.16 Ibn Khaldun was impressed by Tamerlane’s mastery of history and statecraft, even though he deplored the cruel fate of his adopted city at the hands of Tamerlane’s warriors. Based on contemporary accounts, two accomplished historians recorded the deeds of Tamerlane, who is thus the best known of all the conquerors of the steppes. Twenty years after Tamerlane’s death, Sharif ad-Din Ali Yazdi, an Iranian historian and scholar of wide-ranging interests, composed the Zafarnama (Book of Victories), more a panegyric than a biography.17 The historian was a native of the caravan city of Yazd, which had prospered under Mongol rule, and he penned his work in honor of his patron, Tamerlane’s grandson Ibrahim Sultan. The finest surviving manuscript of the Zafarnama is illustrated with beautiful miniature paintings of the notable incidents of Tamerlane’s life.18 The historian Yazdi conveys Tamerlane’s humanity, praising his subject’s virtues and minimizing his atrocities as acts of policy. Yazdi dwells on incidents revealing Tamerlane’s character, such as Tamerlane’s inconsolable grief for the premature death of his favorite son, Jahangir, his summary execution of corrupt officials in the interests of justice, and above all, his charismatic, even reckless, bravery on the battlefield. In 1379, against the pleadings of his officers, Tamerlane accepted, before the walls of Urgench, single combat with Yusuf Sufi, ruler of Khwarazm, who never expected Tamerlane to accept the challenge.19 Within easy bowshot of the Khwarazmian archers on the city walls, Tamerlane defiantly called out the cravenly Yusuf Sufi. When his challenger failed to leave the city, Tamerlane heroically galloped back to his siege works to the cheers of his men. For Yazdi, Tamerlane remained a heroic conqueror, a pious patron of Muslim arts and letters, and a serious intellectual who debated on equal terms with the most accomplished scholars of his day. In contrast, the Arabic historian Ahmad ibn Arabshah writes from the perspective of the victims, and his history’s title betrays this perspective: Aja’ib al-Maqdur fi Nawa’ib al-Taymur (The Wonders of Destiny of the Ravages of Timur).20 As a boy of thirteen, Arabshah and his family fled from their native Damascus when Tamerlane invaded Syria. Arabshah took service with the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet I, the son of the ill-fated Bayezit Yildirim, who was defeated and captured by Tamerlane at Angora in 1402. In 1425, Arabshah returned to his native Damascus, where he completed his history a decade later. Arabshah despises Tamerlane for his low birth, and repeatedly denounces Tamerlane as a sadistic tyrant and deplores the conqueror’s gruesome massacres. Yet at the conclusion of his history, even Arabshah must grudgingly concede the virtues and accomplishments of Tamerlane, but Arabshah never ceased to despise the conqueror as a barbarian and sacker of cities. To him, Tamerlane was always the Prince of Destruction rather than the Sword of Islam.
In 1336, Timur was born to Taraghai, a lesser emir of the Turkish-speaking tribes comprising the Barlas confederation, and his consort Tekina Khatun.21 His parents pitched their tents on the grasslands of Mawarannahr (Transoxiana) near the city of Kesh (today Shahrisabz), fifty miles southeast of Samarkand, which was then in the Chagataid khanate. Timur later favored Kesh as his place of birth, constructing a magnificent palace, Ak Saray (“White Palace”), and complexes of mosques and medresses.22 Modern Shahrisabz, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, attracts thousands of tourists each year to see Tamerlane’s birthplace. The Uzbeks have erected a monumental bronze statue of their national hero Tamerlane amid the ruins of Ak Saray to greet the visitors.
The tribes of the Barlas confederation claimed descent from Mongol regiments settled in Mawarannahr by Chagatai, second son of Genghis Khan.23 Later historians claimed that the family of Timur descended from a loyal noyan of the Great Khan himself. Tamerlane, just like his exemplum Genghis Khan, was born into a turbulent world of perpetual raids among rival clans and tribes. The Chagataid Khanate, the central ulus of the Mongol Empire, had fragmented into a kaleidoscope of city-states in Mawarannahr and unruly Turkish-speaking tribes on the central Eurasian steppes who protested a nominal allegiance to the Chagataid khans who ruled from Samarkand. To the west, the Ilkhanate had collapsed into a constellation of warring regional states under Turkish warlords.24 In Mawarannahr, wealthy merchant princes dominated the caravan cities, notably Bukhara, Samarkand, and Balkh, and they patronized mosques and the high Persian culture of Eastern Islam.25 Turco-Mongolian emirs, who commanded tribal regiments of horse archers recruited from the pastures surrounding the cities, exercised military power. These emirs warred with each other over personal rivalries and trade routes in the name of the distant Chagataid khans. On the central Eurasian steppes, the tribes adhered to traditional nomadic ways and resented demands from Chagataid khans in Samarkand. These emirs ruled virtually independently on the grasslands of Ferghana (the lower Jaxartes valley), Moghulistan (between the Tien Shan Mountains and Lake Issyk), and Semirechye (the lands south of Lake Balkhash and along the banks of the Ili River). In 1347, the Chagataid khanate, called by European chronicles the “Middle Empire” (Medium Imperium), divided into two competing khanates.26 In the Western Khanate, Bayan Quli (1348–1358) ruled as a figurehead dominated by his leading emir and kingmaker, Abdullah ibn Qazaghan (1358–1359), who ruled the powerful clan of Qara’unas.27 In 1359, ibn Qazaghan was deposed by the rebel Barlas and Suldus tribes led by the emirs Hajji Bey and Buyan Suldus, respectively.28 Thereafter, the Western Khanate lapsed into anarchy as each rival emir declared his own puppet Chagataid khan. Meanwhile, in the Eastern Khanate of Moghulistan, Tughluq Temür (1359–1370) imposed himself as khan over the tribes.29 In 1360, he exploited the political confusion of the Western Khanate, and invaded Mawarannahr and captured Samarkand. Tamerlane, then age twenty-four, promptly submitted to Tughluq Temür, who deposed Hajji Bey and appointed Tamerlane emir of the Barlas tribes.30
In 1360, Tamerlane had already established his reputation as a warrior in the seasonal raids and retaliatory attacks of nomadic warfare.31 As emir of the Barlas tribes, Tamerlane drilled his warriors to the standards of the horsemen of Genghis Khan and extended his sway over the tribes of Mawarannahr. He made common cause with Husayn, the son of Abdullah ibn Qazaghan and emir of the Qara’unas.32 Tamerlane and Husayn, sworn brothers since their youth, shared a friendship comparable to that of Temujin and Jamuka. Tamerlane married Aljaz Turkhan Agha, sister of Husayn, but her early death contributed to the waning of the friendship between the two men. Together, Tamerlane and Husayn raided the camps of rival tribes and lent their swords to their overlord Tughluq Temür, Khan of Moghulistan, or to lesser rulers of Mawarannahr and Iran. In 1362, while in the mercenary service of the emir of Sistan, Timur sustained a wound from an arrow to his right hip, and when the bones knitted, his hip and femur fused so that he walked thereafter with a pronounced limp, dragging his right leg.33 He also sustained an arrow wound in his right hand. He must have battled pain throughout his life. Yet Tamerlane never failed to fight in the forefront of his warriors due to his injuries, and if anything, his followers viewed his deformity as proof of their lord’s courage. When Clavijo met Tamerlane, then age sixty-seven, the Castilian envoy noted the pronounced height of Tamerlane’s left shoulder from decades of dragging his right leg. By then, Tamerlane also suffered from boils and sores, and he lost mobility so that he was often conveyed by a litter, even on campaign.34 Yet he never lost his iron will, exceptional discipline, and boundless energy to the day of his death. In 1405, he could still command and inspire his army to trek across the winter snow fields and ice of Central Eurasia in a surprise attack on Ming China.
In 1363, Tamerlane and Husayn joined hands to oust the oppressive Ilyas Khoja, son of Tughluq Khan, who ruled as his father’s governor of Samarkand.35 Ilyas Khoja fled to Moghulistan, where he eventually succeeded to his father’s throne. Meanwhile, Tamerlane and Husayn soon fell out and clashed for mastery over the tribes of Mawarannahr over the next seven years. In 1370, Tamerlane decisively defeated and captured Husayn at Balkh. Tamerlane avoided the odium of executing his former sworn brother, and instead handed Husayn over to a subordinate, Kay Khusrau, who quietly murdered Husayn to avenge a blood feud.36 Tamerlane thereupon entered Samarkand in triumph, and proclaimed himself Grand Emir and protector of the Chagataid khan Soyurgatmish (1370–1384). Tamerlane married Saray Mulk Khanum, the widow of Husayn and a direct descendant of Genghis Khan.37 Given her ancestry and prestige, she conferred legitimacy upon Tamerlane. Until her death thirty-five years later, she presided over the court of Samarkand as the principal wife and confidante of her husband, even though they never had children and Tamerlane took other wives with whom he fathered children.38
In 1370, Tamerlane, age thirty-four, had achieved mastery over the tribes of Mawarannahr and the caravan cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Balkh, so that he possessed the wealth and manpower to restore the empire of Genghis Khan. Even more important, Tamerlane had the vision and charismatic leadership skills to do so. To his northeast reigned the khans of Moghulistan, who resented their loss of Samarkand, and they commanded the tribes dwelling on the steppes stretching from the Upper Jaxartes (Syr Darya) and Tien Shan to Lake Balkhash. As late as 1397, Tamerlane still had to wage one more campaign to chastise his recalcitrant vassal khan in Moghulistan.39 To the northwest, the independent dynast Husayn Sufi ruled Khwarazm, which had once been within the Chagataid khanate. Khwarazm straddled the fertile valleys of the lower Amu and Syr Darya Rivers that emptied into the Aral Sea. The principal cities, Kart and Urgench, were celebrated for their cotton and silk plantations, while the deltas sustained great herds of cattle, and flocks of sheep grazed on the grasslands surrounding Urgench and Kart. Merchants from Saray and Bulgar on the Volga brought furs, honey, flax, timber, and slaves from the distant forest regions of Russia. Tamerlane claimed both Moghulistan and Khwarazm as his domains.40 To his immediate west, the Ilkhanate of Hulagu had fallen in 1353. In its place ruled rival Turkish and Iranian dynasts and the Christian kings of Georgia. Farther west, the Ottoman sultans aspired to unite Anatolia, and the Mamluk sultans of Cairo, implacable foes of the Mongols, aimed to occupy the Levant and retake Baghdad. On the Pontic-Caspian steppes from the Dniester to the Volga, the heirs of Batu partitioned and fought over the khanate of the Mongol west and the hegemony over the Russian principalities. Finally, in 1368, the armies of the Ming emperor of China, Hongwu, stormed the Mongol capitals of Dadu and Shangdu (the Xanadu of Marco Polo), and ended Mongol rule over the Middle Kingdom.41 The last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, retreated to Mongolia, where he and his heirs fought an unequal struggle against the imperial armies of China. Tamerlane, as Grand Emir, saw both the Ilkhanate and Batu’s khanate as domains within his reach. But Tamerlane rendered a respectful homage to the Ming emperor Hongwu as the successor of Great Khan Kublai until he was ready to march east against China.
Tamerlane, convinced of his imperial destiny, consulted his court astrologers with the same respect and frequency that Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan had paid to their shamans.42 They hailed him the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, but Timur never permitted ill forecasts to sway his decisions to fight on the eve of battle. He communicated this sense of destiny to his warriors, ninety thousand to one hundred thousand strong, recruited from the steppes of Mawarannahr. He imposed, for the last time, on nomadic warriors the discipline and organization of the Mongol imperial army so that his tumenler were the equal of those of Genghis Khan.43 Tamerlane replaced clan and tribal leaders with officers promoted from his kinsmen and loyal comrades. At the head of such a devoted field army, Tamerlane could campaign relentlessly for months over great distances and under adverse conditions to achieve strategic surprise. Tamerlane was just as innovative as Genghis Khan in the art of war. He added to his army a corps of Iranian engineers and a siege train. In 1399, he returned from India with an elephant corps that proved decisive at the Battle of Angora.44 His governors or vassal princes of Ferghana, Moghulistan, Khwarazm, Khurasan, and Azerbaijan served along with their horse archers, while infantry was recruited from the subject populations to assault and garrison cities.45 But the decisive arm of Tamerlane’s army remained his horsemen of Mawarannahr.
In 1381, Tamerlane crossed the Oxus River and marched against Ghiyas ad-Din Ali, the ruler of Herat.46 Herat, boasting over four hundred thousand residents, was home to celebrated poets, miniaturist painters, and theologians. Its clay brick domed mosques, medresses, and minarets faced with glazed blue tile dominated the surrounding arid landscape. Its markets were filled with silks, cotton textiles, metalwork, and exotic objects traded along the Silk Road. Today, Herat is a shadow of its former self. In 1885, the British demolished the historic monuments to deny them to the Russians, who never arrived. Warlords and the Taliban have plundered the remaining treasures and museums in the past two decades.47 Ghiyas ad-Din Ali meekly submitted and ransomed his city. Tamerlane carried off savants and craftsmen, and carted off the city’s treasures, which were displayed in a spectacular triumphal return to Samarkand.48 Two years later, the citizens of Herat rebelled, and Tamerlane dispatched his son Miranshah, who ruthlessly massacred the population, piling skulls of the decapitated in huge towers as warnings to would-be rebels.49
The capture of Herat was a turning point, for it opened the first of six major campaigns waged outside of Mawarannahr over the next thirty-five years. In the manner of previous conquerors from the steppes, he was ever in need of booty and slaves to reward his warriors, so he was a consummate practitioner of the principle “war sustains itself” (bellum se ipsum alet).50 But Tamerlane also aimed to reunite the empire of Genghis Khan. In two successive campaigns, in 1381–1384 and 1386–1389, Tamerlane overran the domains of the Ilkhanate of Hulagu, receiving the submission of many famed cities along the Silk Road, and regional Turkish and Iranian dynasts.51 In the spring of 1382, Tamerlane subdued the Mazandaran, the fertile land between the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and the Elburz mountains, whose ruler, Amir Wali, threatened Tamerlane’s hold over the cities of northern Iran.52 Then in the next two years (1383–1384), Tamerlane turned southeast, and conquered the Helmand valley, Zaranj, which he sacked and razed to the ground, and Kandahar, thereby securing Afghanistan and the strategic Bolan and Multan passes, which are the gateways to the middle Indus valley.53 Tamerlane devastated the surrounding countryside and massacred defiant populations to terrify other cities into surrender. As another grim warning, he ordered two thousand prisoners immured alive within a tower of Isfizar, a small town south of Herat.54 Then, in autumn 1384, he suddenly turned west again, raced across northern Iran, and entered unopposed Sultaniya (today Soltaniyeh), the former capital of the later Ilkhans and equal in splendor to Herat.55 The dusty modern village of Soltaniyeh, northwest of Tehran, still possesses the mausoleum complex of Ilkhan Ojeytu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as a reminder of its glorious past.56 Sultan Ahmad Jalayir fled from Sultaniya to Baghdad, where he intrigued to regain his ancestral throne for the next fifteen years in league with Qara Yusuf, chieftain of the Kara Koyunlu (Black Sheep Turks).57 These Shi’ite Turkmen tribes, who dominated eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, and northwestern Iran, proved implacable foes to Tamerlane.
Tamerlane followed up his capture of Sultaniya with the occupation of Tabriz, the first and principal capital of the Ilkhans.58 In just four years of spectacular campaigning, Tamerlane emerged as the political heir of Hulagu, but success also advanced his borders to those of three rivals: the Mamluk sultan Sayf ad-Din Barkuk (1382–1405), the Ottoman sultan Murad I (1360–1389), and, by far the most dangerous, Tokhtamysh (1376–1395), heir to the Mongol ulus of Batu, with pretenses to the title of Great Khan.59 Three times, Tamerlane had backed the exile Tokhtamysh to recover his throne of the White Horde in 1376–1378.60 In 1380, Tokhtamysh reunited the legacy of Batu and took the crown of the Golden Horde.61 Tamerlane expected loyalty from his vassal Tokhtamysh, who was five years his junior. Tokhtamysh, proud of his descent from the Great Khan, must have despised the lame conqueror of lowly origin. Tokhtamysh certainly underestimated the Grand Emir. In 1385, the khan crossed the Derbent Pass and sacked Tabriz at the head of fifty thousand horsemen. Tokhtamysh acted out of a mixture of alarm and confidence.62 He viewed with suspicion Tamerlane’s conquest of Azerbaijan, which Tokhtamysh’s predecessors had long coveted. Tokhtamysh was confident due to his victories over the Russians three years earlier.63 The khan of the Golden Horde, however, provoked a ruinous war over the mastery of the western Mongol domains for the next decade.
In the next spring, in 1386, Tamerlane launched his second western campaign to regain Iran and Azerbaijan in the next three years. He quickly retook Tabriz, and then punished erstwhile allies of Tokhtamysh. Tamerlane’s wrath fell first on King Bagrat V of Georgia (1355–1393), and then Qara Yusuf. As the Sword of Islam, he proclaimed jihad against Christian Georgia.64 Tamerlane sacked Tbilisi (Tiflis) on November 21, 1386. King Bagrat was compelled to submit and to convert to Islam, but Bagrat renounced Islam as soon as Tamerlane withdrew.65 Tamerlane returned to ravage Georgia in the spring of 1387, and twice again in later years. Tamerlane then crushed the Kara Koyunlu (Black Sheep Turks) and secured the cities of western Iran. When Isfahan, which had surrendered on terms, revolted, Tamerlane returned, stormed the city, and slaughtered the population, although craftsmen were deported to Samarkand. Tamerlane ordered twenty-eight towers of human heads, each of one thousand five hundred, stacked before the city’s walls for a total of forty-two thousand citizens.66 Meanwhile, during the same summer of 1397, Tokhtamysh retired north of Caucasus, boldly marched his army across the central Eurasian steppes, crossed the Jaxartes River, and invaded Mawarannahr.67 Tamerlane hastily withdrew east and raised the siege of Bukhara by Tokhtamysh, who escaped north. For the next three years, Tamerlane had to stamp out revolts in Azerbaijan, Khurasan, and Moghulistan.
In the winter of 1390–1391, Tamerlane planned his most daring campaign to date against Tokhtamysh. In April of 1391, Tamerlane departed from Tashkent with his entire field army of one hundred thousand, or ten tumenler, in a campaign comparable in strategic surprise, speed, and logistics to Genghis Khan’s campaign of 1219–1221.68 His horsemen, with numerous remounts, advanced swiftly over pastures cleared of all inhabitants and livestock, pressing seven hundred miles north to the Upper Tobol River. Then Tamerlane swept west, traversing another one thousand miles along a ten-mile front, driving his men at a relentless pace in early summer. Tamerlane surprised Tokhtamysh, whose hastily assembled army was crushed in a savagely fought battle on the banks of the Kondurcha River, a tributary of the Volga, on June 18, 1391.69 Tokhtamysh’s cavalry on the right flank had nearly won the battle. But Tokhtamysh threw away victory when he fled with his banner before Tamerlane’s furious charge in the center. The Kipchak Turks were cut down in flight. Tokhtamysh escaped, abandoning his tent, his harem, and treasure. Tamerlane, however, withdrew to winter in Tashkent, cognizant that the new Mamluk sultan Barkuk was threatening the western frontiers.
Tamerlane, upon his return to Samarkand in the winter of 1391–1392, quickly planned and launched a new western expedition against Iran and Iraq (1392–1397). In the spring of 1392, Tamerlane opened his fourth campaign by subjecting rebels in the mountainous region of Mazandaran along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea.70 In 1393, Tamerlane returned to ravage Georgia, then subjected Fars, and in August expelled from Baghdad sultan Ahmad Jalayir, former ruler of Sultaniya, who fled to the court of Mamluk sultan Barkuk. In 1394, Barkuk marched the Mamluk army into Syria, and concentrated at Aleppo, while Tamerlane again devastated Armenia and Georgia. Tokhtamysh, acting in concert with Barkuk, crossed the Derbent Pass and ravaged Shirwan in Azerbaijan.71 Tamerlane retaliated the next spring. After wintering his army in Azerbaijan, he crossed the Caucasus in early spring, and on the banks of the Terek River annihilated the army of Tokhtamysh on April 15, 1395.72 In the course of the battle, many of Tokhtamysh’s allies on his left wing deserted to Tamerlane. Tokhtamysh fled north, and then east into the steppes, where he died an exile in 1406. Tamerlane ravaged the steppes of the Kuban, sacked the Genoese port of Kaffa, and then turned east, ravaging the steppes of the lower Volga and sacking both Saray and Astrakhan. He installed a Chinggisid puppet, Khan Temür Qutlugh, to rule over a ruined Golden Horde.73 In spring 1396, Tamerlane withdrew forever from the Pontic-Caspian steppes and retired south over the Caucasus. Tamerlane ravaged the lands of the Circassians and Alans, and the kingdom Georgia, once again in the name of jihad. In 1396, Tamerlane returned to Samarkand in triumph with immense hauls of booty and captives, and so he initiated a great building program in his capital over the next two years.74 Tamerlane had waged a brilliant campaign and broken the power of the Golden Horde, but he failed to leave any imperial administration. His vassal Khan Temür Qutlugh (1395–1401) was hard-pressed to impose his authority over the Kipchak and Uzbek tribes, so that the khanate fragmented into the khanates of Astrakhan, Kazan, and the Crimea in the fifteenth century. The khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan fell to the Tsar Ivan IV, the Terrible (1533–1584). The Tartar khans of the Crimea escaped Russian rule by submitting to the Ottoman Porte.75
In 1398, Tamerlane suddenly shifted his strategic direction against the sultanate of Delhi, which was then ruled by the ineffectual Nasir ad-Did Mahmud Shah II (1393–1413).76 The Tughluq Sultans had ruled over the Indus valley, Doab, and upper Ganges for nearly sixty years. They were members of the third dynasty of Turkish sultans to rule Delhi ever since Qutb ud-Din Aibak had captured the city and entrenched Muslim power in the Doab, the fertile lands between the Indus and Ganges Rivers. Successive Turkish rulers, however, depended on Persian officials and Turkish warriors to rule over a vast subject Hindu population. Ultimately, the Turkish invaders failed to transform India into a Muslim land in the same way as their western kinsmen did in Anatolia. The climate and terrain could not sustain the horses vital for Turkish cavalry; the Muslims remained too few in numbers; and the Hindus accommodated the members of the new faith of Islam as just one more caste. Furthermore, no Muslim sultan in Delhi could ever subject the proud Hindu warriors, the Jats and Rajputs, and so they had to co-opt rather than rule their Hindu vassals.
In many ways, Tamerlane and Nasir ad-Din Mahmud Shah were unlikely foes, for they shared the same culture, faith, and court language that should have enabled them to reach an understanding. But Tamerlane was determined to win booty, slaves, and glory for his warriors and the abject submission of the sultan.77 The sultans of Delhi had repeatedly repelled Mongol attacks.78 In 1299, the generals of the Khilji sultan Ala-ud-Din ambushed a Mongol army, and publicly executed the Mongol prisoners by decapitating the soldiers and ordering the officers trampled by elephants.79 The Chagataid khan Tarmashirin avenged the defeat in 1327 when he invaded the Punjab, sacked Multan, and compelled the Tughluq sultan to ransom his capital, Delhi.80 Tamerlane thus saw the sultanate of Delhi as part of the Mongol imperial legacy to which he was heir.
In March 1398, Tamerlane departed Samarkand at the head of ninety thousand men, and he paused to hold court and receive envoys at Kabul in April.81 Then Tamerlane crossed the Khyber Pass and descended into the Land of the Five Rivers, penetrating to the Sutlej River by October. He detached his general Pir Muhammad against Multan.82 This strategic city fell only after a six-month siege. In the name of jihad, Tamerlane waged a gruesome war of destruction, sacking temples and massacring populations during the height of the monsoons. In December, when the monsoons relented, Tamerlane reunited his army and invaded the Doab, compelling Mahmud Shah to fight for his capital, Delhi. On December 17, 1398, Tamerlane crushed the Tughluq army outside of Delhi under dark skies and against the dire predictions of his astrologers. Tamerlane, who faced long odds, ordered the massacre of tens of thousands of captives lest they rebel and pillage the camp during the battle.83 In this battle, Tamerlane displayed his greatest tactical genius to date. He countered the sultan’s armored elephant corps, supported by infantry, in the center, by preparing the battlefield with trenches and caltrops to lame the beasts. Tamerlane directed his men to shoot the mahouts, and to open ranks should any elephants reach their battle line, thereby offering lanes for the beasts to rush harmlessly off the battlefield. Those elephants reaching Tamerlane’s center encountered a stampede of camels bearing burning stacks of hay so that these elephants turned about, and plunged into the ranks of the Tughluq army. Tamerlane’s cavalry then charged and swept the enemy wings, and put the Tughluq army to flight. Tamerlane promptly occupied and looted Delhi in a three-day orgy of rapine and massacre.84 Tamerlane, however, did not stay long in India. He received submissions from Indian princes over the next several weeks, and then withdrew. On his retreat in early 1399, Tamerlane plundered at his leisure Hindu temples and Muslim mosques so that he entered Samarkand with a dazzling array of spoils, including captured elephants. With the profits of this expedition, Tamerlane initiated another major building program at Samarkand, including a major restoration and refurbishing of ulu camii.85 Tamerlane basked in the jubilant acclaim of the city’s residents, and he ostentatiously rewarded his warriors who had waged a lightning campaign of nearly three thousand miles.
Tamerlane returned to Samarkand after an absence of eighteen months to receive news of threats on his western border posed by the Mamluk sultan Nasr ad-Din Faraj (1399–1412) and the Ottoman sultan Bayezit Yildirim (1389–1402). The two implacable foes had put aside their differences to oppose Tamerlane. The new Ottoman sultan Bayezit Yildirim disputed the eastern lands of Anatolia and the al-Jazirah so that he and Tamerlane had long exchanged acrimonious letters, each accusing the other of bad faith.86 In 1394, the then Mamluk sultan Barkuk had supported Sultan Ahmad Jalayir to recover Baghdad, while Tamerlane was waging his campaign against the Golden Horde.87 Tamerlane also received disturbing reports about his son Miranshah, who ruled from Sultaniya the western domains as his father’s deputy.88 Miranshah was married to Khanzada, the reluctant widow of Tamerlane’s first and favorite son, Jahangir, who had died prematurely in 1376. She reported the decadent behavior of her despised husband and the corrupt practices of the prince’s officials. Furthermore, the indolent Miranshah had failed to retake Baghdad from Ahmad Jalayir. Tamerlane, after a respite of only four months, summoned his field army, and appointed his grandson and heir presumptive Muhammad Sultan as viceroy of Mawarannahr.89 In April 1399, Tamerlane marched west on his sixth great campaign of seven years (1399–1404) across Khurasan and Iran to winter in Azerbaijan and Qarabagh, the rich grasslands on the upper Aras River. At Sultaniya, Tamerlane executed corrupt officials, relieved his son Miranshah of his princely throne, and commissioned him as an officer so that he could learn self-discipline and the art of war.90 On news of Tamerlane’s approach, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir fled for the court of Bayezit Yildirim, and Baghdad surrendered.91 In the course of subsequent fighting in 1400–1402, Baghdad changed hands four times, endured two sieges, and suffered another dreadful sack.92 Baghdad, while of limited strategic value, was too symbolic as the former capital of the Abbasid Caliphate to ignore.
In the first two years of this campaign, Tamerlane aimed to subject the grasslands of the al-Jazirah and eastern Anatolia, which were homes to the Black Sheep Turkmen cavalry of his redoubtable foe Qara Yusuf. In 1400, Tamerlane invaded eastern Anatolia along the northern invasion route taken by the Mongol army in 1243. In August 1400, Sivas, home to beautiful Seljuk mosques and medresses, surrendered after a brief siege; the Muslim population was spared, but the Christians were enslaved.93 Tamerlane had promised not to shed the blood of the three thousand men of Sivas’s Armenian garrison, so they instead were buried alive in a hollow. Tamerlane then turned his army southeast, marching via Malatya and Gaziantep, to arrive before Aleppo, the Mamluk capital of northern Syria, in October 1400.94 The Mamluk court at Cairo was stunned, and could not mount an expedition into Syria, so Aleppo fell after a brief siege and suffered a four-day massacre.95 Tamerlane then swiftly marched against Damascus, before the Mamluk court could reinforce the garrison. Between January and March 1401, Damascus endured a siege as Tamerlane negotiated with the city’s elders for a surrender.96 The youthful Mamluk sultan Faraj briefly appeared with a relief expedition, but he retired, abandoning the city to its fate. During negotiations, Ibn Khaldun slipped over the city walls, and sought an audience with Tamerlane, who was delighted to converse with the celebrated historian.97 Tamerlane promised to spare the city’s religious scholars and sent the artful courtier Ibn Khaldun on his way. Ibn Khaldun, as much a master of court intrigue as dynastic history, made his way to Cairo, where he wrote apologetic letters justifying his high opinion of the Prince of Destruction. When the Damascenes were unable to pay a ransom of ten million dirhems, Tamerlane ordered the sack of the city on March 17, 1401.98 To the shock of the Islamic world, the great dome of the Umayyad mosque collapsed; the mosque’s interior was gutted by fires. The mosque today is a heavily restored Ottoman version of the sixteenth century.99 Tamerlane then retired across the Euphrates to punish Baghdad, which had risen against the Timurid garrison. In June 1401, Baghdad suffered a second Mongol sack on orders of Tamerlane. Again the Islamic world reeled from reports of yet another Mongol atrocity. Each of Tamerlane’s soldiers had to present two heads of the citizens, and so many captives were massacred lest Tamerlane’s soldiers fail to have the required heads and risk their master’s wrath. The skulls, numbering ninety thousand, were then piled into 120 gruesome pyramids in a macabre reenactment of Hulagu’s sack in 1258. Tamerlane again retired to winter in Azerbaijan, and in spring 1402 invaded Anatolia for a second time. This time, he was determined to reckon with sultan Bayezit Yildirim.
The Ottoman sultan Bayezit Yildirim had been too distracted by his campaigns in the Balkans to respond to Tamerlane’s invasion of Anatolia in 1400. On September 25, 1396, he had defeated a crusade led by Sigismund, King of Hungary and future Holy Roman Emperor, at the Battle of Nicopolis.100 Bayezit, hailed as the Sword of Islam, had ordered the ghastly slaughter of thousands of prisoners. In fulfillment of his vow to Allah, he constructed Bursa’s ulu camii, the serenely beautiful great mosque with twenty domes.101 The sultan then resumed his siege of Constantinople, because he knew that the Byzantine emperor Manuel II was the architect of the crusade to rescue the dying Byzantine Empire.102 But the Theodosian Walls defied the Ottoman army, and the Venetian and Genoese fleets supplied and reinforced the imperial capital. The city’s citizens once again paraded the icon of Mary Theotokos, the Hodegetria, atop the walls and implored God’s intercession. Their prayers were seemingly answered when Tamerlane and his horse archers crossed the Euphrates.
Tamerlane advanced swiftly across central Anatolia, along the southern banks of the Halys River (today Kizil Irmak), feinting toward Tokat, the fortress guarding the strategic pass into northern Anatolia.103 Bayezit broke off his siege of Constantinople, transported his army to Asia Minor, and marched east over fields and grasslands torched by Tamerlane’s army. Bayezit’s army arrived on the battlefield of Angora (today Ankara), famished and exhausted, on July 20, 1402. Tamerlane had occupied the field first, and his engineers diverted the course of the Çabuk Çayı so that the Ottoman army was denied water at the height of the summer heat.104 Tamerlane, commanding a cavalry army of perhaps one hundred thirty-five thousand men, with an elephant corps from India, forced Bayezit, commanding perhaps eighty-five thousand, to risk battle. The Timurid elephant corps smashed through the Ottoman infantry center (which had occupied a ridge), while Tamerlane’s cavalry flanked the Ottoman army. The Ottoman army collapsed, although the Serbian knights under Prince Stefan Lazarevic fought desperately to rescue the sultan. Bayezit was captured, and died of illness en route to Samarkand. The ever-hostile Arabshah reports that the Ottoman sultan, bound as if a bird, was compelled to witness Tamerlane’s victory celebrations. Rumor turned a metaphor into the legend of the hapless sultan conveyed in an iron cage to Samarkand. Instead, Tamerlane, according to the historian Yazdi, ordered Bayezit carried in a regal litter—a courtesy extended to defeated sovereigns who had submitted.105
News of Tamerlane’s victory at Angora raced across the Islamic world and Christendom. The Mamluk sultan Faraj sent envoys, offering submission and acknowledging the superiority of Tamerlane—a triumph that had eluded Hulagu and all subsequent Mongol Ilkhans. The rival Popes at Rome and Avignon and the monarchs of Europe hastened to seek alliances with Tamerlane, while Venice, Genoa, and the Byzantine emperor promised naval assistance should the Grand Emir invade the Ottoman Balkans.106 Tamerlane, however, was content to plunder the rich cities of Asia Minor and reward his warriors rather than press west. He targeted the defiant Hospitallers and, in a supreme feat of engineering, breached the walls and captured their island castle in the bay of Smyrna (today Izmir, Turkey). The Christian fleet arriving too late to raise the siege was greeted with a ghastly bombardment of the severed heads of the knights. The demoralized Christians turned about and set sail west, spreading rumors of the invincibility of Tamerlane.107 In the next year, Tamerlane withdrew east of the Euphrates, punished Georgia once again, and arrived in triumph at Samarkand in 1400.
The Western campaign of 1399–1404 was a strategic masterpiece on par with his campaign against the Golden Horde in 1395–1397. He had outmaneuvered both the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans, and inflicted a decisive defeat on Bayezit. With the death of Bayezit, Tamerlane partitioned the Ottoman sultanate between Bayezit’s two sons, Suleiman, ruling the European provinces from Edirne, and I˙sa Çelebi, who at Bursa held sway over Anatolia.108 The Ottoman Empire lapsed into civil war for the next decade. Yet just like his campaigns that broke the Golden Horde and the sultanate of Delhi, victory over the Ottoman sultanate netted Tamerlane no strategic gains. Tamerlane accepted protests of loyalty from the sons of Bayezit and the lords of Anatolia (beylikler), but he left no imperial administration. Instead, he looted famed cities, showered his warriors with booty and slaves, and left. The Byzantine emperor, reduced to ruling little more than his capital of Constantinople, gained a respite for the next fifty years. It took the genius of Sultan Murad II to restore Ottoman power, defeat yet another crusade sent to rescue Constantinople, and bestow a brilliant heir, Mehmet Fatih, who not only conquered Constantinople but forged the imperial Ottoman state, the Porte, destined to dominate the Islamic world for the next five centuries.109
In 1405, the ever-restless Tamerlane, sixty-eight years of age, set out from Samarkand on his seventh and last great campaign for the conquest of China. Although Tamerlane had previously exchanged diplomatic niceties with the Ming emperors Hongwu (1369–1398) and Yongle (1402–1424), he resented Ming pretensions to universal lordship.110 The Grand Emir, after subduing the three western ulus of Genghis Khan’s empire, dreamed of adding the fourth ulus of Mongolia and China, the realm of Kublai Khan. He also looked suspiciously from afar at the return of Chinese armies to the Tarim Basin. Tamerlane, just like he had supported Tokhtamysh to regain his throne, now championed the cause of Örüg Temür Khan (1402–1408), ruling in northern Mongolia and the Yuan pretender to the Chinese throne. In December 1404, the Castilian nobleman Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo witnessed Tamerlane fly into a rage against the Ming ambassador.111 The Grand Emir likely staged the drama to declare war, and ordered the hapless ambassador and his retinue cast into prison. He immediately ordered his army to concentrate at Tashkent for its first winter campaign—a decision often criticized by modern scholars.112 Tamerlane, however, timed his invasion to surprise the Chinese garrisons in the Tarim Basin and seize the winter stores so that his army would have reached the Gansu corridor in the spring, where he expected to rendezvous with his ally Örüg Temür Khan. In January 1405, Tamerlane’s army crossed the Pamirs in exceptionally low temperatures and heavy snows. The exertions of the crossing proved too much. At Otrar, Tamerlane died of fever on February 17, 1405.113
Tamerlane died at a most auspicious moment, invincible and indomitable to the end. Early in the campaigning season, Tamerlane might well have surprised the Chinese garrisons in the Tarim Basin. He might have even rallied support from the Mongol tribes against the Ming emperor Yongle. But he might just as well have gone down in ignominious defeat once he ventured beyond the Jade Gate into China, because he lacked the imperial army of Kublai Khan. His horse archers alone could never have conquered the Middle Kingdom. Fate kindly assured that he would be forever remembered as the invincible Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction and the Prince of Destruction. Yet his imperial legacy did not long survive his death, for his heirs lacked the charisma and character to inspire his warriors to new feats of conquest. His three grandsons, Muhammad Sultan, Khalil Sultan, and Shahrukh Mirza, warred over the succession rather than collaborated to maintain and expand the empire.114 The Timurid Empire soon fragmented, and declined to a regional power in the fifteenth century. At the same time, a revolution in military technology produced new weapons, first artillery and then handheld firearms, that ended the dominance of the nomadic horse archer forever. Tamerlane unknowingly represented the climax and end of the Eurasian nomads’ military dominance of over two millennia. But while the equal to Genghis Khan on the battlefield, Tamerlane, quite unlike the Great Khan, failed to forge enduring institutions, nor did he leave brilliant heirs. Perhaps it is fitting to conclude with the words of the Roman historian Livy, who judged Rome’s greatest foe, Hannibal, as a general who, with the favor of the gods, could win great victories, but he did not know how to use them.115 The same may be said of Tamerlane.