Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World

Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World Justin Marozzi A powerful account of the life of Tamerlane the Great (1336-1405), the last master nomadic power, one of history’s most extreme tyrants, and the subject of Marlowe’s famous play. Marozzi travelled in the footsteps of the great Mogul Emperor of Samarkland to write this wonderful combination of history and travelogue.The name of the last great warlord conjures up images of mystery and romance: medieval warfare on desert plains; the clash of swords on snow-clad mountains; the charge of elephants across the steppes of Asia; the legendary opulence and cruelty of the illiterate, chess-playing nemesis of Asia. He ranks alongside Alexander as one of the world’s great conquerors, yet the details of his life are scarcely known in the West.He was not born to a distinguished family, nor did he find his apprenticeship easy – at one point his mobile army consisted only of himself, his wife, seven companions and four horses – but his dominion grew with astonishing rapidity. In the last two decades of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, he blazed through Asia. Cities were razed to the ground, inhabitants tortured without mercy, sometimes enemies were buried alive – more commonly they were decapitated. On the ruins of Baghdad, Tamerlane had his princes erect a pyramid of 90,000 heads.During his lifetime he sought to foster a personal myth, exaggerating the difficulties of his youth, laying claim to supernatural powers and a connection to Genghis Khan. This myth was maintained after his death in legend, folklore, poetry, drama and even opera, nowhere more powerfully than in Marlowe’s play – he is now as much a literary construct as a historical figure. Justin Marozzi follows in his path and evokes his legacy in telling the tale of this fabulously cruel, magnificent and romantic warrior. TAMERLANE Sword of Islam,Conqueror of the World JUSTIN MAROZZI Dedication (#u1fa2d1fc-68c0-5b61-81c1-94b0cdfcec0a) This book is dedicated to my motherand to the memory of my father Contents Cover (#u02d614d7-a0ad-589f-9e4d-2acd4630ce76) Title Page (#u1870f627-c6bd-5a48-b1fa-2ee5ff165a39) Dedication (#u5023f209-5dff-5b03-926f-9106052f6e70) A Note on Spelling and Terminology (#u4f24be2a-3f95-5a4b-9f2e-92650c26a0bc) 1 Beginnings on the Steppe: 1336–1370 (#u0fac95bd-6c6f-5bca-8fa5-134d5fc53e67) 2 Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’: 1370–1379 (#u4a8174bf-756b-5ca9-bff5-12dedb47b7d3) 3 ‘The Greatest and Mightiest of Kings’ (#u391f9301-cb37-51c4-95a8-f25327da41a7) 4 Conquest in the West: 1379–1387 (#litres_trial_promo) 5 The Golden Horde and the Prodigal Son: 1387–1395 (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Samarkand, the ‘Pearl of the East’: 1396–1398 (#litres_trial_promo) 7 India: 1398–1399 (#litres_trial_promo) 8 ‘This Pilgrimage of Destruction’: 1399–1401 (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Bayazid the Thunderbolt: 1402 (#litres_trial_promo) 10 The Celestial Empire: 1403–1404 (#litres_trial_promo) 11 ‘How that Proud Tyrant was Broken & Borne to the House of Destruction, where he had his Constant Seat in the Lowest Pit of Hell’: 1404–1405 (#litres_trial_promo) 12 An Empire Dies, Another is Born (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix A: Chronology of Temur’s Life (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix B: Events in Europe in the Fourteenth Century (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) A Note on Spelling and Terminology (#ulink_b4e140be-5f0f-56e3-9b13-89b32ba08bec) A couple of years ago, Frances Wood observed in The Silk Road: ‘I think this is the most complicated book I have ever written when it comes to spelling place names.’ I know the feeling. Central Asia is a minefield. And it is not just place names. The world’s most famous Mongol conqueror is a case in point. Take your pick from Genghis Khan, Chinghiz Khan, Chingiz Khan, or even Chinggis Khan. The lands he bequeathed his son became the Juchid empire. Others call it Jochid. Still others prefer Dj??id. Scholars invariably favour the more obscure spellings, but I have tried to use terms familiar to the general reader. Central Asian names are complicated enough, it seems to me, without making things more difficult. Tamerlane was in fact Temur (or Timur). The longer name by which we in the West know him was a corruption of Temur the Lame. He was a Chaghatay (or ?aghatay if you like your diacritic symbols), or a Turkicised Mongol, or a Turk; but I have followed a long line of Europeans who describe him as a Tatar. Consistency in these matters is as elusive as peace and tranquillity were to Temur. As T.E. Lawrence so emphatically expressed it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom after a plea for clarity from his editor: ‘There are some “scientific systems” of transliteration, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to need helping, but a wash-out for the world. I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are.’ In a less brazen way I have followed his example. 1 Beginnings on the Steppe 1336–1370 (#ulink_17819d9d-9819-5b7a-b579-6d26e836e1d0) ‘Tamerlane, the “Lord of the Conjunctions”, was the greatest Asiatic conqueror known in history. The son of a petty chieftain, he was not only the bravest of the brave, but also profoundly sagacious, generous, experienced, and persevering; and the combination of these qualities made him an unsurpassed leader of men and a very god of war adored by all ranks … The object of Tamerlane was glory, and, as in the case of all conquerors ancient or modern, his career was attended by terrible bloodshed. He sometimes ordered massacres by way of retribution or from policy, but there were few that had their origin in pure savagery.’ LIEUT. COL. P.M. SYKES, A History of Persia At around 10 o’clock on the morning of 28 July 1402, from a patch of raised ground high above the valley, the elderly emperor surveyed his army. It was a vast body of men, spreading over the Chibukabad plain, north-east of Ankara, like a dark and terrible stain. Through the glinting sunlight the ordered lines of mounted archers stretched before him until they were lost in the shimmering blaze, each man waiting for the signal to join battle. There were two hundred thousand professional soldiers drawn from the farthest reaches of his empire, from Armenia to Afghanistan, Samarkand to Siberia. Their confidence was high, their discipline forged in the fire of many battles. They had never known defeat. For the past thirty years these men and their sons and fathers had thundered through Asia. Through deserts, steppes and mountains the storm had raged, unleashing desolation on a fearful scale. One by one, the great cities of the East had fallen. Antioch and Aleppo, Balkh and Baghdad, Damascus and Delhi, Herat, Kabul, Shiraz and Isfahan had been left in flaming ruins. All had crumpled before the irresistible Tatar hordes. They had killed, raped, plundered and burnt their way through the continent, marking each triumph with their dreadful trophies. On every battlefield they left soaring towers and bloody pyramids built from the skulls of their decapitated victims, deadly warnings to anyone who dared oppose them. Now, as the soldiers stared up at the distant silhouette of a man on horseback, framed against the heavens, they steeled themselves for another victory. Truly their emperor had earned his magnificent titles. Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction (of the Planets, a reference to the auspicious position of the stars at his birth); Conqueror of the World; Emperor of the Age; Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes. But one name suited him above all others: Temur, Scourge of God. On his vantage point beneath the smouldering midsummer sky, the emperor felt no disquiet. Moments away from the most important battle of his life, he felt nothing but the unshakeable faith in his destiny that had served him so well. Dismounting from his stallion, he knelt to offer up his customary prayers to the creator of the universe, humbly prostrating himself on the scorched earth, dedicating his victories to Allah and asking Him to continue bestowing divine favour on His servant. Then, with all the saddle-stiffness of his sixty-six years he rose to his feet and looked out over the field of battle, where the future of his dynasty lay with his beloved sons and grandsons. The left wing was commanded by his son Prince Shahrukh and grandson Khalil Sultan. Its advance guard was under another grandson, Sultan Husayn. Temur’s third son Prince Miranshah led the right wing, his own son Abubakr at the head of the vanguard. But it was the main body of the army, a glittering kaleidoscope of men under the command of his grandson and heir Prince Mohammed Sultan, on which the emperor’s clouded eyes may have lingered longest. From the midst of these men rose Temur’s crimson standard, a horse-tail surmounted by a golden crescent. Newly arrived from the imperial capital of Samarkand, unlike their battle-weary brothers in arms, these troops were splendidly attired, each detachment resplendent in its own colour. There were soldiers carrying crimson ensigns with crimson shields and saddles. Others were clad from head to toe in yellow, violet or white, with matching lances, quivers, cuirasses and clubs. In front of them stood a line of thirty exquisitely equipped purveyors of destruction, war elephants seized after the sacking of Delhi in 1398. On their backs, guarded behind wooden castles, stood bodies of archers and flame-throwers. The Tatar army was, wrote the fifteenth-century Syrian chronicler Ibn Arabshah, a devastating sight. ‘Wild beasts seemed collected and scattered over the earth and stars dispersed, when his army flowed hither and thither, and mountains to walk, when it moved, and tombs to be overturned, when it marched, and the earth seemed shaken by violent movement.’ Staring at them across the sweltering plain were the ranks of Temur’s mightiest enemy. The Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I, the self-styled Sword Arm of Islam, had put a similar number of troops into the field. There were twenty thousand Serbian cavalry in full armour, mounted Sipahis, irregular cavalry and infantry from the provinces of Asia Minor. Bayazid himself commanded the centre at the head of five thousand Janissaries – the makings of a regular infantry – supported by three of his sons, the princes Musa, Isa and Mustapha. The right wing was led by the sultan’s Christian brother-in-law, Lazarovic of Serbia, the left by another of his sons, Prince Sulayman Chelebi. These men, victors of the last Crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, where they had snuffed out the flame of European chivalry, were thirsty, exhausted and dispirited after a series of forced marches. Even before battle commenced their morale had been shattered by Temur’s brilliant tactical manoeuvrings. Only a week earlier they had occupied the higher ground on which their adversary’s army now stood. Feigning flight, the Tatar had outmanoeuvred them, diverted and poisoned their water supply, doubled back, plundered their undefended camp and taken their position. All was still on both sides. A ripple stirred through Temur’s lines of cavalry as the horses sensed a charge. Then, slicing through the silence, came the heavy rumble of the great kettle-drums, joined by cymbals and trumpets, the signal for battle. Now the valley echoed to the thundering of horses’ hooves, the swoosh of arrows and the clash of metal upon metal. From the first blows struck the fighting was ferocious. Charging across the plain came the formidable Serbian cavalry, bright globules of armour amid the choking wreaths of dust stirred up by their mounts. Under pressure, the Tatar left flank retreated, defending itself with volley after volley of arrows and flames of naphtha. On the right wing Abubakr’s forces, advancing against Prince Chelebi’s left wing under cover of a cloud of arrows, fought like lions and finally broke through their enemy’s ranks. Bayazid’s Tatar cavalry chose this moment to switch sides, turning suddenly against Chelebi’s Macedonians and Turks from the rear. It was a decisive moment which broke the Ottoman attack. Temur, a master of cunning, had engineered the defection of the Tatars in the months before the battle by playing on their sense of tribal loyalty and holding out the prospect of richer plunder. Seeing both the disarray of his own forces who were being overwhelmed by the Tatars, and the confusion of the Ottoman right wing, in desperate retreat from the mounted cavalry of Temur’s grandson Sultan Husayn, Chelebi judged the battle lost and fled the field with the remainder of his men. Temur watched history unfurl itself before him on the valley floor. He was interrupted by the rushing blur of a gorgeously armoured man on horseback. Throwing himself off his mount, Temur’s favourite grandson Mohammed Sultan went down on one knee and begged his grandfather for permission to enter the battle. It was the right time to press home the advantage, he insisted. The emperor listened gravely to the young’s man arguments and nodded his agreement with pride. Mohammed Sultan was a fearsome warrior and a worthy heir. The elite Samarkand division, together with a body of the emperor’s guards, charged the Serbian cavalry, who, observing with horror Chelebi’s departure from the field, buckled under the attack and followed him in retreat towards Brusa. It was a bitter blow for Bayazid, whose infantry were now the only forces left intact. Worse was to follow. The Tatar centre now moved forward to settle the affair with eighty regiments and the dreaded elephants. They held the ground. The Ottoman infantry was routed; anyone left standing was slaughtered on the spot or captured. Sultan Bayazid, the man whose name struck fear in the hearts of Europe’s kings and princes, stood on the brink of catastrophe. Most of his army had fled. Only the Janissaries and his reserves held on. Still he would not surrender, and the fighting continued furiously until nightfall, Bayazid’s forces defending their sultan valiantly. ‘Yet they were like a man who sweeps away dust with a comb or drains the sea with a sieve or weighs mountains with a scruple,’ wrote Arabshah. ‘And out of the clouds of thick dust they poured out upon those mountains and the fields filled with those lions continuous storms of bloody darts and showers of black arrows and the tracker of Destiny and hunter of Fate set dogs upon cattle and they ceased not to be overthrown and overthrow and to be smitten by the sentence of the sharp arrow with effective decree, until they became like hedgehogs, and the zeal of battle lasted between those hordes from sunrise to evening, when the hosts of iron gained the victory and there was read against the men of Rum the chapter of “Victory”. (#ulink_b66926bd-d490-526a-98e1-5f900d2f4b84) Then their arms being exhausted and the front line and reserves alike decimated, even the most distant of the enemy advanced upon them at will and strangers crushed them with swords and spears and filled pools with their blood and marshes with their limbs and Ibn Othman [Bayazid] was taken and bound with fetters like a bird in a cage.’ The battle of Ankara, and the career of Sultan Bayazid, had ended. Temur had achieved his most outstanding victory. ‘From the Irtish and Volga to the Persian Gulf and from the Ganges to Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in the hands of Timour,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘His armies were invincible, his ambition was boundless, and his zeal might aspire to conquer and convert the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already trembled at his name.’ Now he stood at the gates of Europe; its feeble, divided and penurious kings – Henry IV of England, Charles VI of France, Henry III of Castile – trembled indeed at the ease with which this unknown warlord had trounced their most feared enemy, rushing off sycophantic letters of congratulation and professions of goodwill to ‘the most victorious and serene Prince Themur’ in the hope of forestalling invasion. All feared his advance. In the Tatar camp there were no such fears. Temur’s men, from the highest amirs to the most lowly soldier, wondered what the emperor would do next. Perhaps he would lead the hordes farther west into Christendom to mete out more destruction against the infidel and store up greater credit with the beneficent Allah. Perhaps he would look east to another, more powerful infidel, the Ming emperor of China. Such decisions could wait. For now it was enough for the emperor and his forces to luxuriate in their greatest triumph. Soldiers sifted through the carnage on the blood-soaked battlefield, hacking heads from corpses to build the customary towers of skulls. Ottoman weapons were collected, horses rounded up and anything else of use stripped from the dead. Other, more agreeable, pursuits awaited. There was feasting to be had, dancing girls to admire and, most delicious of all, Bayazid’s harem to despoil. Who was this exotic Oriental warlord who had annihilated one of the world’s most powerful sovereigns and now stared so ominously across the Bosporus? To answer that question, to understand how in 1402 Temur literally catapulted into European consciousness, first by routing Bayazid, then by launching the severed heads of the Knights Hospitallers of Smyrna (#ulink_287d6a9d-beba-5295-ad82-f47159ea0e89) as missiles against their terrified brethren, we must travel back six momentous decades and 1,800 miles to the east, to a small town in southern Uzbekistan called Kesh. It was near here on 9 April 1336, according to the chronicles, that a boy was born to Taraghay, a minor noble of the Barlas clan. (#ulink_04cfad8c-9067-57d2-bdb5-4efa933f7b6a) These were Tatars, a Turkic people of Mongol origin, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had stormed through Asia in the thirteenth century. (#ulink_95666ec3-7da5-5742-a9e0-94e97b4a5556)‘The birthplace of this deceiver was a village of a lord named Ilgar in the territory of Kesh – may Allah remove him from the garden of Paradise!’ wrote Arabshah. The child was given the name Temur, meaning iron, which later gave rise to the Persian version, Temur-i-lang, Temur the Lame, after a crippling injury suffered in his youth. From there it was only a slight corruption to Tamburlaine and Tamerlane, the names by which he is more generally known in the West. (#ulink_efe1bfe0-5e11-5759-be8d-64ecdecc4712) According to legend, the omens at his birth were inauspicious. ‘It is … said that when he came forth from his mother’s womb his palms were found to be filled with blood; and this was understood to mean that blood would be shed by his hand,’ wrote Arabshah. (It is worth explaining at the outset the ill-will Arabshah bore towards Temur. (#ulink_89f3aab8-92c4-5b0a-98d6-2aeed9e6c472) As a boy of eight or nine, the Syrian had been captured by the Tatar forces who sacked Damascus in 1401. Carried off to Samarkand as a prisoner with his mother and brothers, he learnt Persian, Turkish and Mongolian, studying under distinguished scholars and travelling widely. Later, in a curious twist of fate, he became confidential secretary to the Ottoman Sultan Mohammed I, son of Bayazid, the man whose dazzling military career had been extinguished by Temur. He returned to Damascus in 1421, but never forgot the terrible scenes of rape and pillage enacted by Temur’s hordes. They culminated in the razing of the great Umayyad Mosque, ‘matchless and unequalled’ throughout the lands of Islam, according to the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah. (#ulink_ea0a5b67-3efc-5a44-ab03-1de404a4e1b3)) Shakhrisabz lay in the heart of what was known in Arabic as Mawarannahr, ‘What is Beyond the River’. On a modern atlas Mawarannahr extends across the cotton basket of the former Soviet Union, encompassing the independent Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, running into north-west Xinjiang in China. The territory was also known as Transoxiana, whose centre was a three-hundred-mile-wide corridor of land sandwiched between the two greatest rivers of Central Asia, the Amu Darya and Sir Darya. Better known by their more evocative classical names, the Oxus and the Jaxartes, these were two of the four medieval rivers of paradise, slivers of fertility rushing through an otherwise barren landscape. At 1,800 miles, the Amu Darya is the region’s longest, sweeping west in a gentle arc from the Pamir mountains before checking north-west towards the southern tip of the Aral Sea. The Sir Darya, 1,400 miles long, flows west from the snow-covered Tien Shan mountains before it, too, diverts north-west, almost watering the rapidly shrinking Aral Sea on its northern shores. On the banks of these hallowed waterways and their tributaries rose the noble cities of antiquity, whose names echoed with the distant memories of Alexander the Great and the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan: (#ulink_aedb06b0-7777-5884-882d-54bc0d6f54cb) Bukhara, Samarkand, Tirmidh (Termez), Balkh, Urganch and Khiva. Beyond the rivers the deadly sands of the desert erupted, fizzing across the landscape on hot, dry winds. West of the Amu Darya stretched the spirit-shattering wilderness of the Qara Qum (Black Sands) desert. East of the Sir Darya, the equally inhospitable Hunger Steppe unfurled, a vast, unforgiving flatness melting into the horizon. Even between the two rivers, the pockets of civilisation were under siege from the timeless forces of nature as the lush farming land gave way to the burning Qizik Qum (Red Sands) desert of the north. In the summer, the heat was stupefying and the skins of those who toiled in the fields blistered and turned to leather. In winter, snows gusted down without mercy on a lifeless land and the men, women and children who had made their home here, nomads and settled alike, retreated behind lined gers (felt tents) and mudbrick walls, wrapping themselves tightly in furs and woollen blankets against winds strong enough to blow a man out of his saddle. Only in spring, when the rivers tumbled down from the mountain heights, when blossoms burst forth in the orchards and the markets heaved with apples, mulberries, pears, peaches, plums and pomegranates, melons, apricots, quinces and figs, when mutton and horsemeat hissed and crackled over open fires and huge bumpers of wine were downed in tribal banquets, did the country at last rejoice in plenty. The Mongol conquests, which historians like to say ‘turned the world upside down’, began in 1206. Having subdued and unified the warlike tribes of Mongolia under his command, a Mongol leader called Temuchin, somewhere in his late thirties, was crowned Genghis Khan – Oceanic Khan or Ruler of the Universe – on the banks of the Onon river. The seat of his empire was Karakorum. Though the tribes subsumed under his command were many, henceforth they were known simply as the Mongols. Once created, this vast fighting force, which probably numbered at least a hundred thousand, needed to be kept occupied. If it was not, the likelihood was that it would quickly fracture into the traditional pattern of feuding tribal factions, undermining its new master’s authority. Genghis looked south across his borders and decided to strike the Chin empire of northern China. His army, noted for its exceptional horsemanship and superb archery, swept across Asia like a tsunami, flattening every enemy it encountered. In 1209, the Turkic Uyghurs in what is today Xinjiang offered their submission. Two years later, the Mongols invaded the northern Chinese empire and Peking, its capital, was taken in 1215. The Qara-Khitay, nomads who controlled lands from their base in the Altaic steppes of northern China, surrendered three years later, so that by 1218 the frontiers of Genghis’s nascent empire rubbed against those of Sultan Mohammed, the Muslim Khorezmshah who ruled over most of Persia and Mawarannahr with his capital in Samarkand. It is debatable whether Genghis was looking to fight this formidable ruler at this time, but after a caravan of 450 Muslim merchants from his territories was butchered in cold blood in Mohammed’s border city of Otrar on suspicion of being spies, and after reparations were refused, war was the only course open to him. In 1219 the Mongols swarmed into Central Asia. Otrar was put under siege and captured. Genghis’s sons Ogedey and Chaghatay seized its governor and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat. It was the first sign of the terrifyingly vicious campaign to come. Mohammed fled in terror, closely pursued to an island on the Caspian Sea where he soon died. The prosperous city of Bukhara fell, followed quickly by Samarkand, whose defensive force of 110,000 troops and twenty war elephants proved no match for the Mongols. The Islamic state felt the full force of Genghis’s fury. This was a man who revelled in war and bloodshed, who believed, as he told his generals, that ‘Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as nightshirts and supports, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of the breasts.’ Cities were razed and depopulated, prisoners slain or ordered to march as a shield before the army, in full battle formation. Even cats and dogs were killed. Marching through Azerbaijan, the invaders sacked the Christian kingdom of Georgia in 1221, flattening the capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi). Through the Caucasus and the Crimea and along the Volga they advanced, routing Bulgars, Turks and Russian princes as they hugged the northern shores of the Caspian Sea. Another siege was mounted against Urganch, homeland of the shahs. After seven months of resistance, the city was stormed. Artisans, women and children were gathered to one side and enslaved. The remaining men were put to the sword. Each of Genghis’s soldiers was ordered to execute twenty-four prisoners. North of the Oxus the Mongols fell upon the ancient city of Termez, where legend has it that a woman begged to be spared the massacre, telling her captors she had swallowed a pearl. Her stomach was ripped open and the gem removed, prompting Genghis to order his men to disembowel every single corpse. Balkh, the fabled former capital of the Bactrian empire, collapsed before the Mongol onslaught, followed by the city of Merv, where the forces of Tuli, another of the warlord’s sons, reportedly slew seven hundred thousand. (#ulink_eef06cb1-4f7f-5a24-947a-d59b3b62535e) Herat, Nishapur and Bamiyan likewise folded. In the dying months of 1221, Jalal ad-din, who had led the resistance to the Mongols after the ignominious flight of his father Mohammed, was defeated at the battle of the Indus, which marked the end of the campaign. In 1223, Genghis returned east. He died four years later, ruler of an empire which spanned an entire continent from China to the gates of Europe. Though none of his successors was possessed of such savage genius, the Mongol conquests Genghis initiated were vigorously expanded by his sons and grandsons. The territories he had won were distributed according to custom. Tuli, the youngest son, received his father’s seat in Mongolia. Jochi, the eldest, received lands farthest away from Karakorum, west of the Irtish river in what later became the regions of the Golden Horde, the Russian khanate which is discussed in Chapter 2. Ogedey, the third son and future Great Khan, or royal leader above all his brothers, was given the ulus (domain) of western Mongolia. Genghis’s second son Chaghatay received Central Asia as his inheritance. It became known as the Chaghatay ulus, the western half of which formed the Mawarannahr in which Temur grew up. By 1234, Ogedey’s conquest of the Chin empire was complete. The 1240s and 1250s saw Mongol rule spreading west across southern Russia into eastern Europe under the leadership of Genghis’s fearsome grandson Batu, founder of the Golden Horde. At the same time, another grandson, Hulagu, was conquering his own territories by the sword, establishing an empire which included Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the west, Baghdad and the Fertile Crescent in the south, and ranged as far east as Khorasan, eastern Persia. Founder of the Ilkhanid dynasty of Persia, Hulagu was helped in his conquests by Mongol troops belonging to his brother Great Khan M?nke, together with detachments from both Batu and Chaghatay. United, the khanates proved invincible. History suggests it is easier to carve out an empire than preserve it, and the fate of Genghis’s successors proved no exception to the rule. With the death of Great Khan M?nke in 1259, the great age of Mongol conquest ground to a close. In 1260, the Mongol army was defeated at the battle of Ain Jalut by the Egyptian army under Baybars, who became the first Mamluk sultan later that year. Africa closed her doors forever to the pagan invaders from the east. The Sung empire of southern China fell to Genghis’s famous grandson Kubilay in 1279, but by that time the Mongol empire had been torn apart by infighting for two decades. Instead of uniting to extend their dominions in the west, the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanid dynasty had embarked in 1262 on a long series of wars over the pasturages of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. At the same time in the east, the house of Tuli was disintegrating as Kubilay and his brother Arigh Boke fought a four-year civil war for the imperial throne. As the thirteenth century drew to a close, the Chaghatay ulus found itself at war with the three other Genghisid dynasties. The empires which the Ruler of the Universe had bequeathed to his sons were at each other’s throats. Genghis had been dead for more than a hundred years by the time of Temur’s birth, but the legacy of the Mongol conquests still hung over this land of desert, steppe and mountain. Many of the practicalities of daily life had undergone little transformation, and nomadism remained dominant in most of the regions Genghis had conquered. As John Joseph Saunders wrote in his classic account of the period, The History of the Mongol Conquests (1971), ‘Nomadic empires rose and fell with astonishing swiftness, but the essential features of the steppes remained unchanged for ages, and the description by Herodotus of the Scythians of the fifth century before Christ will apply, with trifling variations, to the Mongols of the thirteenth century after Christ, 1,700 years later.’ For centuries the Mongols had driven their flocks and herds across the endless, treeless steppe, roaming from pasture to pasture in migrations whose timing was dictated by the seasons. Sheep and horses satisfied virtually all their needs. From sheep came the skins to fashion clothes, wool to make the gers they lived in, mutton and cheese to eat, milk to drink. Horses provided mounts for hunting and battle, as well as the powerfully intoxicating fermented mare’s milk, or kumis. Though their ways of life were utterly different, though both sides regarded each other with suspicion, born largely from the predatory instincts of the wandering horsemen, the nomads and the settled populations of the towns and cities of Central Asia came together from time to time to trade. Among the most prized products for the nomads were the metals with which to forge weapons. Tea, silks and spices were luxuries. Such trade predated Genghis by many centuries. Central Asia had existed as a crossroads between East and West ever since the Silk Road – 3,700 miles from China to the Mediterranean ports of Antioch and Alexandria via Samarkand – came into being around the beginning of the first century BC. By the time of the Mongols, there were at least another three major trade routes linking East to West. First there was the sea route from south China to the Persian Gulf. Another artery began in the lower Volga, clung closely to the Sir Darya and then headed east to western China. Finally, there was the northern route which from the Volga-Kama region cut through southern Siberia up to Lake Baikal, where it diverted south to Karakorum and Peking. Eastbound along these routes came furs and falcons, wool, gold, silver and precious stones. Westward went the porcelain, silks and herbs of China. If nomadism was one feature of life which remained virtually unchanged from the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries, the military was another. Mongol men were all, almost by definition, soldiers, since any under the age of sixty were considered fit for service in the army. There was no concept of civilian men. In a desolate landscape, survival itself – primarily by the hunting of meat – demanded the same set of skills required on the battlefield. Military techniques were learnt from the earliest age. As soon as a boy could ride, he was well on his way to becoming a soldier. In the saddle, he learnt to master his horse absolutely and to manoeuvre it with the greatest finesse, to gauge the distance between himself and his quarry, and to shoot with deadly accuracy. It was the perfect training for a mounted archer, the backbone of Genghis’s army armed with the composite bow of horn, sinew and wood. As Gibbon remarked, ‘the amusements of the chase serve as a prelude to the conquest of an empire’. Genghis organised his army according to the traditional decimal system of the steppe: units of ten, one hundred, one thousand and ten thousand soldiers, a system which Temur retained. Soldiers were not paid other than in plunder from the enemies they defeated and the cities they stormed. Tribes which had once been hostile were deliberately divided into different units, thereby undermining tribal loyalties and creating a new force united in its loyalty to Genghis. This was in addition to his imperial guard of ten thousand, which functioned as the central administration of the empire. Temur would follow a similar strategy as he sought to weld together an army from the disparate tribes of Central Asia. There was continuity, too, in the tactics employed on the battlefield, particularly in the use of encirclement and the Mongols’ favourite device of feigned flight, which was the undoing of many an enemy. Religion was worn lightly by the Mongols. It consisted of the simple worship of Tengri, a holy protector in the eternal heavens, in whose name divine assistance was sought and victories celebrated. There were no temples, nor organised worship as it is understood today. Horses were often sacrificed to Tengri, and were killed and buried with a man when he died so he could ride on into the afterlife. Shamans, venerated figures in Mongol society, acted as mediators between the natural and supernatural worlds, falling into trances as their souls travelled to heaven or the underworld on their missions to assist the community. Clad in white, mounted on a white horse, resplendent with a staff and drum, the shaman enjoyed distinguished status among the nomads, distributing blessings to herds and hunters alike, healing the sick, divining the position of an unseen enemy and the location of the most favourable pastures. Religious tolerance has come to be inherently associated with the Mongols, for they demonstrated a remarkable open-mindedness towards the other faiths they encountered. Gibbon was much taken with this aspect of the Genghis legacy. ‘The Catholic inquisitors of Europe who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration,’ he wrote. So moved was the magisterial historian he even suggested that ‘a singular conformity may be found between the religious laws of Zingis Khan and of Mr Locke’. The Mongols proved less dogmatic than the monotheists who travelled through their lands, be they Christian, Muslim, Jew or Buddhist. In the course of their pouring west across Asia towards Europe, they came to accept the religion of the peoples they conquered, be it Buddhism in China or Islam in Persia and the Golden Horde of southern Russia. This did not prevent them clinging on to vestigial aspects of shamanism, however, one reason no doubt why the great powers of the Islamic world never ceased to consider Temur a barbarian rather than a true Muslim. If religion left only a light imprint on the Mongols, their contributions to culture were still less visible. Though their artistic achievements have been praised – they were talented carvers in bone, horn and wood, and produced handsome cups and bowls and elegant jewellery – theirs was not a literate world. An illiterate race prior to Genghis, they left virtually no written record of their time. The thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols, a document of questionable accuracy, is the only substantial survivor. An indication of their sophistication, however, is given by the yasa, an obscure body of laws codified by Genghis as head of a growing empire. It remains shadowy, because no complete code has ever been discovered. Historians have had to rely on the numerous references to it in the chronicles. According to Ata-Malik Juvayni, the thirteenth-century Persian historian of the Mongol empire, the yasa governed ‘the disposition of armies and the destruction of cities’. In practice it was an evolving set of regulations touching on all aspects of life in the horde, ranging from the distribution of booty and the provision by towns and villages of posting stations with horses and riders, to the correct forms of military discipline on the battlefield and how to punish a horse thief (the animal had to be returned to its owner with a further nine horses thrown in for good measure; failure to observe these terms could result in the thief’s execution). The yasa appear to have governed everything from religion (mandating toleration and freeing clergy of all taxation) to the uses of running water (prohibiting urination or washing in rivers, which were considered sacred). The descriptions of fourteenth-century Tatars reveal the obvious parallels with the thirteenth-century Mongols who had preceded them. In particular, observers remarked on their physical hardiness and legendary military skills. The Tatars, wrote Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, the Spanish ambassador sent to Temur’s court by Henry III of Castile in 1402, could withstand ‘heat and cold, hunger and thirst, more patiently than any other nation. When food is abundant, they gorge on it gluttonously, but when there is scarcity, sour milk tempered with boiling water suffices them … for their cooking fires they use no wood but only the dried dung of their herds, and it makes the fire for all purposes of roasting and boiling.’ Fighting was in their blood. Famed for their skill as archers, they charged across the steppe on horseback, raining down arrows upon their enemies. ‘They were archers who by the shooting of an arrow would bring down a hawk from the hollow of the ether, and on dark nights with a thrust of their spearheads would cast out a fish from the bottom of the sea; who thought the day of the battle the wedding night and considered the pricks of lances the kisses of fair maidens.’ They were great hunters, too, forming circles many miles in diameter and then riding inwards, driving all the wild beasts before them to their slaughter. It was a sport which honed their military talents and filled their stomachs, celebrated with wine-drenched banquets that lasted deep into the night. By day they tended their animals, riding out to pastures to allow their horses, camels, goats and sheep to graze. This was the currency of everyday life, and when a man wanted a wife, he bought one with animals or grazing rights. If he was rich, he bought several. Polygamy thrived in the upper reaches of society. For ordinary men and women, the clothes were coarse and simple, long buckram jackets which protected the wearer from the elements. Silks, fine cloths and gold brocade were the preserve of the princes. In battle they made a formidable sight. Their enemies found them terrifying to behold. Amir Khusrau, an Indian poet who was captured by Temur’s hordes at the close of the fourteenth century, recalled their appearance with horror. There were more than a thousand Tatar infidels and warriors of other tribes, riding on camels, great commanders in battle, with steel-like bodies clothed in cotton; with faces like fire, with caps of sheep-skin, with heads shorn. Their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel … their faces were set on their bodies as if they had no neck. Their cheeks resembled soft leather bottles, full of wrinkles and knots. Their noses extended from cheek to cheek, and their mouths from cheekbone to cheekbone … their moustaches were of extravagant length. They had but scanty beards about their chins … they looked like so many white demons, and the people fled from them in affright. Conflict between the Mongol khanates of Genghis’s successors, which held the lion’s share of Asia in an unforgiving grip, was the harbinger of conflict within them. In the late thirteenth century, serious strains began to emerge in the Chaghatay ulus. There were tensions between the settled nobility in the towns and villages, largely in Mawarannahr, which had embraced Islam, and the nomadic, military aristocracy to the east, which rejected it and clung on to their pagan beliefs. These aristocrats, for whom the settled life of the conquered peoples was anathema, came to refer scornfully to their neighbours as qurannas (half-breeds or mongrels), an insult returned by the western Chaghatays, who called them jete (robbers), or Jats. Within the ulus, the geographical divide between east and west – the Tien Shan, or Celestial Mountains, whose peaks soar more than twenty-three thousand feet – was as dramatic as the ideological gulf which separated them. Increasingly, both sides stared across it with hatred in their hearts. Tensions were further escalated by the system of privileges granted to the military by the khan. These imposed crippling burdens on the poorer members of the local population, who were forced to feed, clothe and arm the warriors. In 1266, the Chaghatay khan Mubarak chose to be enthroned in Mawarannahr, rather than in the nomad camp established by Chaghatay on the river Ili in south-eastern Kazakhstan, several hundred miles to the east, as was customary. For the military aristocracy, this symbolic ceremony, which expressed a preference for one way of life over another, represented a direct challenge to their traditions and authority. Worse, Mubarak was subsequently seduced by the siren calls of Islam, a conversion which sent seismic shocks across the heart of Central Asia and opened a growing chasm between East and West. A qurultay, an assembly of Mongol notables, was called in 1269 to determine the future of the ulus. In it, the warrior horsemen of the steppe prevailed, ruling against both settlement in the towns and the use of their cattle to tend agricultural land. Instead, the hordes would roam across the steppe and the mountains, grazing their hardy mounts on the pastures in accordance with the ancient ways. Mubarak was summarily dethroned. For the next fifty years, the pagan aristocrats held the ground. But the seeds of change planted by Mubarak continued to take root even after his ousting. The soil was fertile. The Mongol warlords who had accompanied Mubarak to Mawarannahr, who included the Barlas clan, Temur’s tribe, had by the opening of the fourteenth century converted to Islam and been Turkicised. The qurultay of 1269, however clear its conclusions, had not proved decisive. The old divisions between East and West, paganism and Islam, pastoralism and a more settled existence, remained, tearing at the fabric of the sprawling Chaghatay ulus. In time, such pressures told. By the 1330s, the internecine disputes, simmering for several generations, finally boiled over until the fault-line cleft the ulus in two. To the west, Mawarannahr. To the east, ruled by a separate branch of the Chaghatay family, Moghulistan – land of the Moghuls – a mountainous territory extending south from Lake Issykul in Kyrgyzstan to the Tarim basin. Though this hostile split occurred at around the time of Temur’s birth, its consequences occupied him throughout his career. In fact, with only a few intervals, the Moghuls were his lifelong enemy. In the early fourteenth century, Mawarannahr enjoyed a brief period of prosperity under Kebek Khan (ruled 1318–26). Echoing the sedentary style of his predecessor Mubarak, he shifted his seat to the fertile Qashka Darya valley and introduced a range of administrative reforms, including his own coinage and, for the first time, a well-ordered tax system. Such behaviour did little to endear him to the nomadic elements within Mawarannahr, who chafed against this imposition of authority. His construction of a palace at Qarshi, in the heart of the Qashka Darya valley, only added to their sense of grievance, but Kebek did not back down. The strains between the rival sedentary and nomadic populations resurfaced aggressively during the reign of his weaker successor, his brother Tarmashirin. The conflict which had ripped Chaghatay asunder now threatened to engulf Mawarannahr. Still hankering for a return to the old way of life, the nomad aristocracy urged Tarmashirin to honour the policies agreed at the qurultay of 1269. To no avail. Rather than compromise, the new khan chose instead to convert to Islam. This provocative act, coming at a time of profound instability, sealed his fate. Like Mubarak before him, he was stripped of power. Tarmashirin’s overthrow by the nomadic clans was an important landmark. It marked the end of real power for the Chaghatay khans of Mawarannahr. From this time they became no more than puppet rulers, installed in office as a nod to the customs of Genghis by the nomadic warlords who replaced them as the true source of power and authority. The battle for the soul of Mawarannahr, for the supremacy of a way of life made famous by the Mongol conqueror, had at last been decided. The settled nobility in the towns and villages had been confronted and overcome. Henceforth, power would reside among the men of the saddle, the bearded warriors whose strength and stamina was legendary. In 1347, Amir Qazaghan overthrew the Chaghatay khan and seized the reins of power. For a decade he led his warriors into neighbouring territories, plundering and sacking with repeated success. Then, in 1358, on the orders of the khan of Moghulistan, he was assassinated, plunging Mawarannahr into turmoil. The collapse of central control was devastating. The vacuum left by Qazaghan was quickly filled by ambitious local warlords and religious leaders. Mawarannahr was riven by petty rivalries and division. Tughluk Temur, the Moghul khan, prepared to invade. It was into this maelstrom of feuding fiefdoms, high among the shadows cast by the roof of the world, that Temur was born. A brick kern in the roadside village of Khoja Ilgar, eight miles to the south of the historic Uzbek city of Shakhrisabz, the Green City, marks the birthplace of the Scourge of God. As memorials go, it is an unprepossessing sight, a pile of bricks on a concrete base topped by an inscribed plaque, more like a poorly built barbecue than a monument to one of the world’s greatest conquerors. A traveller might expect this to be an important tourism site in Uzbekistan, a young country which has, since independence in 1991, resurrected Temur from the dustbin of Soviet historiography and championed him as its new nationalist figurehead, invincible hero of the Motherland. But this being the heartland of a nation still shaking off the ideological dust of communism and singularly uncomfortable with the new ethos of capitalism, there are no signs of commercialism here. No car park teeming with tour buses. No shops selling Temur T-shirts, key-rings or pens. The site, instead, is exquisitely rural, as it was when the Spanish ambassador Clavijo arrived in Kesh, as Shakhrisabz was then known, on 28 August 1404. The ‘great city … stands in the plain, and on all sides the land is well irrigated by streams and water channels, while round and about the city there are orchards with many homesteads’, he observed. ‘Beyond stretches the level country where there are many villages and well-peopled hamlets lying among meadows and waterlands; indeed it is all a sight most beautiful in this the summer season of the year. On these lands five crops yearly of corn are grown, vines also, and there is much cotton cultivated for the irrigation is abundant. Melon yards here abound with fruit-bearing trees.’ This is an appropriate place from which to start on the trail of Temur, to stop and listen for distant echoes of the world conqueror borne across six centuries on the autumnal zephyrs. Already, there are unexpected hints of continuity bridging the historical divide. A small vineyard suggests that though this is a Muslim country, the pleasures of the grape are still observed here, taking one back to Temur’s lavish, bacchanalian feasts. Here in the alternately serene and savage Qashka Darya valley, next to a brick kern and an amiable peasant boy fretting over pilfered melons, it is possible to imagine Temur’s early years. This was the rugged terrain in which he grew up, learning the skills of the steppe without which his dreams of world domination would amount to nothing. A local proverb would have been in his mind from an early age: ‘Only a hand that can grasp a sword may hold a sceptre.’ Self-advancement in this brutal world was inconceivable without excelling in the martial arts. Surrounded by the snow-capped Zarafshan mountains, he would have galloped wildly across these winter-frozen steppes, accompanied by his band of ruffian friends, sharpening his skills on horseback, imagining great battle charges, lightning raids on an enemy camp, heroic victories and headlong flight. In this fertile valley and among the broad meadows which eased into the lower reaches of the mountains, he would have learnt how to hunt bears and stags. Half a century later, these skills saved his army from certain starvation during one of his most difficult campaigns against the Golden Horde, travelling across what is today a thick slice of Kazakhstan and the southern belly of Russia. Toughened by the bone-chilling grip of winter and the skin-cracking heat of summer, the young Temur would have learnt to fight like a man in this valley, over the steppes and among the mountains, skirmishing on increasingly daring night-time missions to steal sheep from unwary herdsmen, gathering around him an entourage of like-minded brigands, steadily developing a reputation for courage and leadership which brought him to the attention of the tribal elders. The sources are generally quiet on Temur’s childhood. We can only imagine the vicissitudes of life on the steppes in the early fourteenth century, a world governed by tribal traditions and family relationships, the unending rhythm of the seasons and a fierce struggle to survive amid the unpredictable flux of constantly shifting alliances. Temur himself did little to illuminate the darkness surrounding his early years, taking care only to exaggerate his humble origins, thereby emphasising the glory of his later achievements. Perhaps, as has been suggested, there were signs that the young Temur was destined to be a leader of men. ‘At twelve years of age, I fancied that I perceived in myself all the signs of greatness and wisdom, and whoever came to visit me, I received with great hauteur and dignity,’ he is supposed to have said. (#ulink_5cf2379e-f3b4-56a6-9147-baa682000194) Arabshah provides us with another fascinating, though probably overblown, glimpse of Temur as a young man emerging as an inspirational leader among his contemporaries. Again, the value of the description arises from the hostility of the writer, a man less willing than most to acknowledge Temur’s qualities. As a youth he grew up brave, great-hearted, active, strong, urbane, and won the friendship of the Viziers’ sons of his own age and entered into company with his contemporaries among the young Amirs to such a degree, that when one night they had gathered in a lonely place and were enjoying familiarity and hilarity among themselves, having removed the curtains of secrecy and spread the carpet for cheerful intercourse, he said to them, ‘My grandmother, who was skilled in augury and divination, saw in sleep a vision, which she expounded as foreshadowing to her one among her sons and grandsons who would conquer territories and bring men into subjection and be Lord of the Stars and master of the Kings of the age. And I am that man and now the fit time is at hand and has come near. Pledge yourselves therefore to be my back, arms, flank and hands and never to desert me.’ Whatever the harbingers of greatness, however tough his childhood, Temur vaulted out of obscurity, and into the official histories, in 1360 with a move which exemplified his flair for timing. It was characteristically astute and audacious. Taking advantage of the chaos into which Mawarannahr had fallen after Amir Qazaghan’s assassination in 1358, the Moghul khan invaded from the east with a view to reuniting the fractured Chaghatay ulus under his rule. Haji Beg, chief of the Barlas clan that ruled the Qashka Darya valley where Temur lived, decided to flee rather than fight. The youthful Temur accompanied his leader as far as the Oxus, where he asked to be allowed to return home. He himself, with a body of men, would prevent the invading Moghuls from seizing more land, he assured his chief. To judge by what happened next, it is unlikely he ever had such an intention. Contrary to what he had told Haji Beg, he did not lift a sword against the Moghul invaders. Recognising their superior force, he did something infinitely more pragmatic, offering his services to the Moghul khan instead. It was a supremely audacious volte-face, but his offer was accepted. Henceforth, he would be the Moghul khan’s vassal ruler. At the age of twenty-four, Temur had successfully claimed leadership of the entire Barlas tribe. To capitalise on his newfound position, he contracted an alliance with Amir Husayn, the grandson of Qazaghan who had emerged as regional strongman and aristocratic ruler of Balkh, northern Afghanistan. Husayn was leader of the Qara’unas tribe. Secretly the two men were pledged to rid Mawarannahr of the Moghuls. Their relationship was cemented with the marriage of Temur to Husayn’s sister, Aljai Turkhan-agha. In any event, Temur’s submission to the Moghul khan did not last long, for after a bloody purge of local leaders the khan appointed his son Ilyas Khoja governor of Mawarannahr. Temur was not content to be second in command (perhaps Husayn never understood this important distinction). His response was immediate. He and Husayn turned outlaw and went underground. For the next few years the two partners became highwaymen, bandits and mercenaries, roaming across high Asia with greedy intent. Sometimes they were fortunate and the plunder was rich. More often than not, life was difficult as they found themselves constantly on the move to avoid detection by the vengeful Moghul khan. At one time, said the chronicles, Temur’s entire entourage was reduced to his wife and one follower. He reached his nadir in 1362, when he and his wife were imprisoned for two months in a vermin-infested cowshed. These were ignoble beginnings for the man who one day would hold sway from Moscow to the Mediterranean, from Delhi to Damascus. At some point during this period, probably in 1363, Temur received the injury which left him lame in both right limbs, an affliction which gave rise among his enemies to the scornful nickname Temur the Lame. Most likely he was injured while serving as a mercenary in the pay of the khan of Sistan in Khorasan, in the midst of what is today known as the Dasht-i-Margo (Desert of Death) in south-west Afghanistan. Differing explanations abound. Arabshah, generally the most malicious of the sources, says Temur was a sheep-stealer who stole one sheep too many. Spying the thief prowling about his flock, a particularly watchful shepherd smashed his shoulder with a well-directed arrow, loosing off another into Temur’s hip for good measure. ‘So mutilation was added to his poverty and a blemish to his wickedness and fury.’ Clavijo, whom we have less reason to doubt as an impartial witness, records how Temur was caught in an ambush: At this time Timur had with him a following of some five hundred horsemen only; seeing which the men of Sistan came together in force to fight him, and one night that he was engaged carrying off a flock of sheep they all fell on him suddenly and slew a great number of his men. Him too they knocked off his horse, wounding him in the right leg, of which wound he has remained lame all his life (whence his name of Temur the Lame); further he received a wound in his right hand, so that he has lost the little finger and the next finger to it. (#ulink_10040931-bade-5775-8d2a-46f5b77e76a2) He was left for dead, the Spaniard recounted, but managed to crawl to the safety of some welcoming nomads. Tales grew of his brilliantly inventive tactics in battle during this time, as he struggled both for personal glory and an end to the Moghul occupation of Mawarannahr. Yazdi’s Zafarnama (Book of Victory), whose honeyed paean is the perfect counterbalance to Arabshah’s bitter polemic, repeatedly stresses Temur’s military acumen. (#ulink_8792a983-ecc8-51c4-b534-54f6e6af6627) In one encounter with his enemy, the Persian wrote, Temur had his soldiers light hundreds of campfires on the hills around the far larger forces of his enemy to convince them they were surrounded. When his adversaries fled, he ordered his men to fasten leafy branches to the side of their saddles to stir up clouds of dust as they gave chase, thereby giving the impression of a huge army on the move. The ruse worked superbly. The Moghuls fled, Mawarannahr was liberated and Shakhrisabz was his. ‘Thus fortune, which was always favourable to Temur, caused him to triumph over an army by fire, and to conquer a city by dust.’ To this day, the jewel of Shakhrisabz, the monument whose size and beauty so startled Clavijo in 1404, is the Ak Sarai or White Palace. It was, Yazdi reported, ‘built so exquisitely fine and beautiful, that no other could compare with it’. Nowhere else is Temur’s comment, ‘Let he who doubts our power look upon our buildings,’ so emphatically confirmed. With twin entrance towers rising two hundred feet from the ground, flanking a grand portal arch 130 feet high, this was his greatest palace. Masons and thousands of other craftsmen had been toiling on its construction for twenty years by the time Clavijo arrived, and the building continued daily. From the fabulous entrance several archways, encased in brickwork and blue patterned tiles, gave onto a series of small waiting chambers for those granted an audience with Temur. Beyond these galleries another gateway led to a courtyard a hundred yards wide, bordered by stately two-tiered arcades and paved with white marble flagstones, at the centre of which stood an ornate water tank. Through the next archway lay the heart of the palace, the domed reception hall where ambassadors craned their necks to admire the magnificence of the craftsmanship and swallowed nervously before they met the Terror of the World. ‘The walls are panelled with gold and blue tiles, and the ceiling is entirely of gold work,’ noted the incredulous Clavijo. It is clear from his breathless narrative that the Spanish envoy was not expecting anything like this untold splendour. Nor at this time would any other European, for whom the Orient was a dark, barbaric world. ‘From this room we were taken up into the galleries, and in these likewise everywhere the walls were of gilt tiles,’ Clavijo continued. We saw indeed here so many apartments and separate chambers, all of which were adorned in tile work of blue and gold with many other colours … Next they showed us the various apartments where Temur was wont to be and to occupy when he came here with his wives; all of which were very sumptuously adorned as to floors and walls and ceilings … we visited a great banqueting hall which Temur was having built wherein to feast with the princesses, and this was gorgeously adorned, being very spacious, while beyond the same they were laying out a great orchard in which wereplanted many and diverse fruit trees, with others to give shade. These stood round water basins beside which there were laid out fine lawns of turf. This orchard was of such an extent that a very great company might conveniently assemble here, and in the summer heat enjoy the cool air beside that water in the shade of these trees. These were the opulent gardens of an emperor maintaining a self-consciously Mongol court in the tradition of Genghis Khan. Shakhrisabz, the Green City, was entering its golden age. In 1379, said Yazdi, ‘The emperor, charmed with the beauties of this city, the purity of the air in its plains, the deliciousness of its gardens, and the goodness of the waters, made it his ordinary residence in summer and declared it the second seat of his empire.’ Ak Sarai palace, more than any other built by Temur, was designed to impress, to demonstrate, in the words of the Kufic inscription on the eastern tower, that ‘the Sultan is the shadow of Allah [on earth]’. Legend describes how Temur, infuriated by the curtailed inscription ‘the Sultan is a shadow’ on the western tower, flung the craftsman responsible from the top of the palace. Other inscriptions paid elaborate tribute to the Tatar’s shining qualities. ‘Oh Benefactor of the People, long may you rule like Sulayman. May you be like Nuh in longevity! May this palace bring felicity [to its tenant]. The Heavens are astonished at its beauty,’ read one. ‘The Sultan binds his enemies with [the chains of] his good deeds,’ thundered another. ‘Whosoever turns to him gains satisfaction. The fame of his good deeds, like a sweet odour, is ubiquitous. His goodness is evident. His face is clear and his motion agreeable.’ How tiny visitors would have felt as they passed through the portal. What a way to put one’s visitors in their place, to make them aware, if any doubts remained, that they were in the company of one of the greatest leaders on earth. The portal towers one sees today have been trimmed down to 120 feet by a combination of war, greed and the passage of time. Yet, even at less than 60 per cent of their original height, they rise majestically, dominating their immediate surroundings in an architectural creation that marries strength with finesse, elegance with simplicity. Towards the top of the towers, above the turquoise and navy-blue Kufic inscriptions of ‘Allah’ and ‘Mohammed’ – which to the untrained eye appear only as pretty geometric patterns – the devastating curve of the arch begins. No sooner has it begun its sweep across the heavens than it is instantly cut off by a chasm of sky. Each tower stands in dramatic isolation. The scale is overwhelming. But what must it have looked like in its full fantastically decadent glory, when the gold-encrusted roof reached to the stars, when Temur’s various wives – Clavijo counted eight during his stay – sashayed through the banqueting hall in their rustling silk dresses to take their places reclining among sumptuous cushions and brocades in a garden of pristine lawns and fruit trees, amid the streams and fountains? Here among the luxurious tents and awnings, lined with silk in summer and fur in winter, illuminated at night by the soft flicker of lamps, the song of their voices would have floated up towards the stars. The restorers have been at work here, and new tiles have replaced those which have not survived, but the essentially ruined state of the palace has been maintained. Temur’s most lavish monument is now little more than two foreshortened towers, sunk in the earth like the tusks of a giant beast brought to ground. But it is this very ruination that adds to the grandeur of the impression, a reminder that the original building was of a size and splendour beyond our imagination. Or, as an unusually flummoxed Clavijo put it, as workmen milled around him, still busy after all those years working on the palace, ‘such indeed was the richness and beauty of the adornment displayed in all these palaces that it would be impossible for us to describe’. It is still possible, sweating and panting in the streaming heat, to climb to the top for a vantage point over Shakhrisabz. (How much harder it would have been in Temur’s time, when the towers stood at their full height.) Farther afield to the south, the monumental blue dome of the Kok Gumbaz Mosque, built by Temur’s grandson Ulugh Beg in 1435–36, interrupts the leafy skyline. Another, smaller blue dome, a junior member of the family, sits next to it. Corrugated-iron roofs, pockets of blinding light, sizzle in the sun. Birds wheel and soar overhead on the thermals. Directly in front of the Ak Sarai palace, halfway down Victory Park, stands a statue of Temur. He stares into time with a far-off gaze, a symbol of strength and authority, protector of Shakhrisabz. He wears a simple crown. A large belt with a circular embossed buckle is fastened across a calf-length tunic trimmed with paisley patterns. A curved sword is fastened to his left side. A flowing gown hangs from his shoulders. The solid boots emphasise the sense of permanence and power. Nowadays, dwarfed by the statue and monumental plinth, regularly-spaced processions of bridal parties make their way towards it, laying flowers at Temur’s feet and having themselves photographed beneath the Father of the State. The end of each ceremony is marked by the popping of a bottle of Uzbek champagne. No sooner does one party depart than another arrives. It is a pleasant picture: young couples standing respectfully in front of the giant figure of Temur, framed by the ruined towers of his palace in the background. The women seem joyful, however nervous their smiles. But the men without fail look deadly serious, scowling into the cameras as though they would rather be somewhere else. Late on a sun-spattered October afternoon, several hundred yards away from Temur along the sprawling Ipak Yuli street which cleaves Shakhrisabz in two, a throng of elderly men adjourn to a local chaikhana (tea-house), where they sit languidly on cushions on a raised topchan (wooden platform), away from their wives and families. All wear the traditional chapan gown, some striped in bright purples and indigos, others black and faded. Some wear them as capes, with the distinctive long sleeves hanging down empty almost to their knees. Others have rolled up the sleeves. White, grey or black turbans or the more elaborate embroidered doppes perch on their heads like decorative nests. Most have beards, long manes of silver that they stroke from time to time, as unhurried as the passing of the seasons. Clustered together around glasses of kok chai (green tea), these men in their ancient costumes are remnants from another era, guardians of history, surrounded on all sides by a younger generation – clad in shell-suits, baseball caps and trainers – which has no time for the sartorial traditions of old. The tea-house is a fitting place for the elders to make their stand, for this is where the past – and the trail of Temur – begins in Shakhrisabz. Ipak Yuli street is a historical feast which begins with the delicate appetiser of the fourteenth-century Malik Azhdar Khanaqah, originally a refuge for wandering Sufi dervishes, later one of the town’s Friday mosques, and in Soviet times a simple museum. The procession of dishes continues with the fifteenth-century baths nearby, now under restoration. Next comes the Koba Madrassah (religious college), formerly a seat of learning teeming with rows of boys learning the Koran. Sometime in the last few years it careered into capitalism and evolved into a courtyard crammed with market stalls selling fake designer jeans, cheap shoes and trainers. Farther down the principal street, thrusting into the skyline with the arrogance of beauty, is the Dorut Tilovat, Seat of Respect and Consideration, whose centrepiece is the most extravagant dish of all, the Kok Gumbaz Mosque visible from the Ak Sarai palace, built by Ulugh Beg, Temur’s grandson, the astronomer king. This was the first place to which Clavijo was taken on his arrival in Shakhrisabz, when the mosque was still unfinished. ‘Here daily by the special order of Temur the meat of twenty sheep is cooked and distributed in alms, this being done in memory of his father and of his son who lie here in those chapels,’ he noted. Plied with vast quantities of meat and fruit, the Spaniard heard how Temur’s cherished son Jahangir had been buried there, together with the emperor’s father Taraghay. Temur himself was going to be laid to rest beneath this dome, Clavijo was told. The restorers have been at work here too, and the portal is ablaze with glimmering blue tiles. Local legend says Temur’s father and his spiritual Sufi adviser Shaykh Shams ad-din Kulya are buried beneath ancient onyx carvings in one of the surviving mausolea from the Barlas funeral grounds. Nearby is a small domed chamber which houses four tombstones belonging to Ulugh Beg’s kinsmen. A hollow has been worn into the Kok Tash (blue stone) from centuries of parents pouring water onto it for sick children or relatives to drink. The stone contains medicinal salts. After this tombstone calm, the main market is an explosion of activity. Farmers have come to town with their wives and children to sell their produce. They squat in the dust over wooden crates and metal buckets crammed with tomatoes, onions and apples. Peasant women in cheap patterned dresses and bright headscarves dust off their produce and arrange it in neat piles. Shaven-headed boys stand by makeshift trolleys, ready to cart off loads for anyone who requires a porter. Large awnings have been erected to shade mountains of melons the size of cannonballs. This, at least, has not changed, for Clavijo remarked on exactly the same phenomenon. ‘The water melons there are as large as a horse’s head … the very best and biggest that may be found in the whole world,’ he wrote. Some are being loaded onto the back of a lorry, thrown carefully by a man on the ground to a boy in the vehicle. Wrinkled women hold forth behind a stone counter selling soft cheese, scooping their products into pretty pyramids and vying with each other to attract customers. Long counters are given over to sweets, nuts and piles of pasta, biscuits and exotic spices. Sacks of semechka sunflower seeds lie open, delved into at will by passing strangers. Men, women and children pick up handfuls, expertly bite down the middle of the seed, spit out the outer covering and chew the tiny kernels as though they are the choicest delicacies rather than the poor man’s snack. Fruit and vegetables lie on the ground and on counters, wherever there is space. Here, as in Temur’s time, there are peaches, pears and pomegranates, plums, apricots, apples, grapes and figs, potatoes, peppers and onions. Some stalls specialise in plastic bags of pre-cut carrots for use in plov, an oily dish of rice, meat and vegetables. Butchers with huge cleavers chop away at cuts of meat that would be consigned to the rubbish bin in wealthier countries. Carcasses hang from hooks, dripping pools of blood into the dust. It is a place of perpetual motion. People come and go on foot, on bicycles, on trolleys, carts, donkeys and horses. Those who wish to escape the sun have adjourned to a small eatery, whose front is covered several layers deep in bicycles. Under the gallery men chew on shashlik kebabs or plates of manty, mutton and onion dumplings topped with smetana sour cream. Some of them congregate like soldiers around a cauldron of plov, steaming away on a fire. Life is hard in Shakhrisabz, as it is throughout Uzbekistan. The lustre that the town enjoyed in Temur’s time, six centuries ago, has virtually disappeared. The once luminous jewel of an ever-expanding empire has become a crumbling ruin in a forgotten former Soviet backwater mired in corruption and poverty. The glory of Shakhrisabz has long gone. Only the ruins, and the gleaming statue of Temur, suggest it ever existed. In 1365, on the banks of the Amu Darya, Temur stood a very long way indeed from glory. His ally Amir Husayn had just deserted him on the battlefield in his first serious reversal. A growing sense of resentment and rivalry was starting to emerge between the two men. It came to life at the fateful battle of the Mire. Ilyas Khoja, the former governor of Mawarannahr, had invaded again. His army was close to Tashkent when he encountered the forces of Temur and Husayn. Battle was joined as the heavens opened. Amidst thunder and lightning the rain poured down, turning the ground into an illuminated quagmire which swamped man and beast alike. Pressing hard against the Moghuls, Temur seized the upper hand and signalled for Husayn, nominally his commander, to bring forward his men and finish off the enemy. Yet Husayn held back. The Moghul forces rushed to take advantage of this fatal mistake and swarmed through, cutting men down on all sides. Ten thousand were killed. Temur and Husayn fled south across the Amu Darya. It was an ignominious ending. It was also instructive. For a man like Temur with ambitions far beyond this small theatre of war, it sowed the seeds of doubt into his alliance with Husayn. How reliable was a man who refused to fight alongside his partner in battle when the fighting was at its most critical? In Temur’s mind, he had been betrayed. It is unlikely, in any case, that either Temur or Husayn considered this a permanent alliance. That, after all, was the way of the steppes. Alliances were regularly made and just as promptly broken. In the short term, however, the partnership continued. A year after the battle of the Mire, Temur and Husayn celebrated success with their brutal overthrow of the independent Sarbadar leadership of Samarkand and installed themselves as the new rulers. (#ulink_65ef1bd4-1762-5b40-a8a7-5e3c3f4430a8) Officially, as before, Husayn, the nomad aristocrat, grandson of Amir Qazaghan, was the senior man. But already Temur was winning a personal following. His amirs and soldiers, encouraged by his generosity in distributing plundered treasures, loved him. Husayn, by contrast, was mean-minded. To recoup the heavy losses he had incurred in the ill-fated battle of the Mire, he raised a punitive head tax on Temur’s amirs and followers. It was so exorbitant, said the chronicles, that it was completely beyond their means. Temur was reduced to offering his horses, and went so far as to give Husayn the gold and silver necklaces, earrings and bracelets belonging to his wife Aljai, Husayn’s sister. Husayn recognised the family jewels as he tallied up the levies, but was only too happy to pocket them. His avarice did not escape notice. Temur’s star, however, was on the rise. The alliance between the two aspiring warlords had been sealed with the marriage of Temur to Aljai. Her death at this time, which represented the final severance of family ties, now looked like a harbinger of destiny. From 1366 to 1370, the two men duly opted in and out of temporary alliances, now uniting against Moghul invaders, now resolved each to exterminate the other. With every year that passed one thing became increasingly clear: the vast lands of Mawarannahr were not big enough to encompass their rival ambitions. Temur used these years profitably. He consolidated his popularity with his tribesmen and cast a shrewd eye over those other sections of society whose support he would need if he were to govern alone: the Muslim clergy; the nomad aristocracy of the steppe; merchants; agricultural workers; the settled populations of towns and villages, hurt by endless conflict. Husayn, on the other hand, progressively alienated his subjects with onerous and capricious taxes. His fateful decision to rebuild and fortify the citadel of Balkh was a provocative gesture to the nomad aristocracy who opposed settlement and saw in its broad walls and defences the rise of Husayn’s power and the decline of their own. Temur continued to win more and more followers to his cause. The Moghuls had been successfully repelled. Now he set his sights on removing the last obstacle to supreme power in southern Mawarannahr. Eventually, the time arrived. At the head of his forces, Temur rode south in 1370, crossing the Amu Darya at Termez (with covetous eyes he would march this way again in 1398, taking his armies across the roof of the world to war with India). Here he met Imam Sayid Baraka of Andkhoi, ‘one of the most illustrious lords of the house of the prophet’, according to Yazdi, a Muslim sage from Mecca or Medina who was in search of equally illustrious patronage. Having earlier been rebuffed by Husayn, Baraka turned instead to Temur, who proved more receptive to the older man’s advances. The white-bearded cleric could not have harmed his chances by foretelling a magnificent future for Temur and handing him a standard and a kettle-drum, traditional emblems of royalty. ‘This great Sharif resolved to spend all his days with a prince whose greatness he had foretold,’ wrote Yazdi, ‘and Temur ordered that after his death they should be both laid in the same tomb, and that his face should be turned sideways, that at the day of judgement, when every one should lift up their hands to heaven to implore assistance of some intercessor, he might lay hold on the robe of this child of the prophet Mahomet.’ (On his death, Temur was laid to rest in a tomb at the feet of his spiritual guide, a position of unprecedented modesty for the mightiest of monarchs. (#ulink_f9980ad4-87ab-59e7-9a7f-f7b56fc256c9) ) Assured of Allah’s protection, Temur pressed on south, where his army surrounded Husayn’s capital of Balkh. Fighting raged between the followers of the two protagonists. Eventually, the city walls were forced and Temur’s marauding troops cut loose. Isolated inside his citadel, Husayn watched his enemy advance until at last he appreciated the imminence of his own ruin. Throwing himself on Temur’s mercy, he promised to leave Mawarannahr for the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca if his former brother in arms spared his life. But it was too late for contrition. Husayn’s death, when it came, bordered on the farcical. Doubting Temur’s promises of quarter, he first hid inside a minaret until he was discovered by a soldier who had climbed the tower in an effort to find his lost horse. The officer encountered a trembling Husayn, who tried to bribe him with pearls. The soldier reported his discovery but Husayn escaped again, this time hiding in a hut. Happened upon by watchful soldiers once more, he was finally handed over to his arch-rival. Pontius Pilate-like, Temur refused to condone his killing – he had given his word that Husayn’s life be spared – but did nothing to stop Kay-Khusrau, one of his chiefs who had a blood feud with the ruler of Balkh, from carrying out the deed. The reckoning had come. Temur was triumphant. His greatest rival had been eliminated. Balkh was robbed of its treasures and razed to the ground, prefiguring the rapine, slaughter and destruction that awaited the rest of Asia. Not least among Temur’s victory spoils was Husayn’s widow, Saray Mulk-khanum. Daughter of Qazan, the last Chaghatay khan of Mawarannahr, she was also a princess of the Genghis line. It was customary for a victorious leader to help himself to the harem of his defeated opponent. Temur wasted little time in availing himself of the privilege. Taking Saray Mulk-khanum as his wife bolstered his legitimacy (the three other wives he inherited were a pleasant bonus). Henceforth, and for the rest of his life, he styled himself Temur Gurgan – son-in-law – of the Great Khan, on the coins which bore his name, in the Friday prayers and in all ceremonial functions. Temur was as avid a collector of wives as he was of treasures and trophies from his many campaigns. Although little is known about how many he had, and when he married them, from time to time they surface in the chronicles and then just as abruptly sink back into the depths of obscurity. We know that Saray Mulk-khanum was his chief wife, the Great Queen, a position she owed to her distinguished blood. Others followed. In 1375 he married Dilshad-agha, daughter of the Moghul amir Qamar ad-din, only to see her die prematurely eight years later. In 1378 he married the twelve-year-old Tuman-agha, daughter of a Chaghatay noble. Temur’s voracious appetite for wives and concubines did not lessen noticeably during his lifetime. In 1397, towards the end of his life, he married Tukal-khanum, daughter of the Moghul khan Khizr Khoja, who became the Lesser Queen. By this time, according to the hostile Arabshah, the ageing emperor ‘was wont to deflower virgins’. In terms of numbers of wives, Clavijo’s account is probably the most accurate. He counted eight in 1404, including Jawhar-agha, the youthful Queen of Hearts whom Temur had just married well into his seventieth year. An unknown number of others had predeceased him. In the wake of Husayn’s defeat and execution, and in deference to the traditions of Genghis, by which only a man of royal blood could aspire to supreme command, Temur installed a puppet Chaghatay khan, Suyurghatmish, as nominal ruler. This was no more than a formality. All knew that power lay with Temur alone. ‘Under his sway were ruler and subject alike,’ Arabshah recorded, ‘and the Khan was in his bondage, like a centipede in mud, and he was like the Khalifs at this time in the regard of the Sultans.’ The realities of the power-sharing arrangement were underlined in a dramatic ceremony of enthronement. With the blessing of the qurultay of Balkh, Temur crowned himself imperial ruler of Chaghatay on 9 April 1370. (#ulink_1cb12854-e79b-555d-b81f-35b78ed3b5fe) Majestic in his new crown of gold, surrounded by royal princes, his lords and amirs, together with the puppet khan, the new monarch sat solemnly as one by one his subjects humbly advanced, then threw themselves on the ground in front of him before rising to sprinkle precious jewels over his head, according to tradition. Thus began the litany of names he enjoyed until his death. At the age of thirty-four he was the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, Emperor of the Age, Conqueror of the World. His greatness, said Yazdi, was written in the stars: When God designs a thing, he disposes the causes, that whatever he hath resolved on may come to pass: thus he destined the empire of Asia to Temur and his posterity because he foresaw the mildness of his government, which would be the means of making his people happy … And as sovereignty, according to Mahomet, is the shadow of God, who is one, it cannot be divided, no more than there could have been two moons in the same heaven; so, to fulfil this truth,God destroys those who oppose him whom providence would fix upon the throne. Had they been consulted, the countless millions who lost their lives over the course of the next four decades – buried alive, cemented into walls, massacred on the battlefield, sliced in two at the waist, trampled to death by horses, beheaded, hanged – would surely have differed on the subject of the emperor’s mildness. But they were beneath notice. No one, be he innocent civilian or the most fearsome adversary, was allowed to stand in the way of his destiny. The world would tremble soon enough. Temur’s rampage was only just beginning. (#ulink_6fd2c9b3-e5e2-51c6-a19f-2ad0f8bac030) A reference to Book 48 of the Koran, Al Fath (Victory): ‘We have given you a glorious victory, so that God may forgive you your past and future sins, and perfect His goodness to you; that He may guide you to a straight path and bestow on you His mighty help … God has promised you rich booty, and has given you this with all promptness. He has stayed your enemies’ hands, so that He may make your victory a sign to true believers and guide you along a straight path.’ (#ulink_1c893a4b-6d08-5340-988f-0716df891fd3) Founded in the eleventh century as the Knights of the Hospital of St John at Jerusalem, the military religious order in Smyrna was, by 1402, the last Christian stronghold in Asia Minor. (#ulink_27663f74-98b0-5e8a-8df1-e81551633a06) Academics tend to dispute Temur’s actual birthday. Beatrice Forbes Manz, for example, author of a scholarly study of Temur, says this date was ‘clearly invented. He was probably at least five years older than the date suggests.’ (#ulink_27663f74-98b0-5e8a-8df1-e81551633a06) The Tatars were originally a powerful horde which held sway in north-east Mongolia as early as the fifth century. As with many of the other ethnic groups drawn from the melting-pot of Central Asia, a region which for thousands of years has been a crossroads for great movements of populations, the term is neither exact nor exclusive. The word itself may have originated from the name of an early chieftain, Tatur. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan’s westward rampages with his Mongols brought about a cross-fertilisation of cultures and peoples throughout the continent. Despite the fact that he had already virtually eliminated the Tatars as a tribe, these Turkicised Mongols became known as Tatars. Europeans, however, used the term indiscriminately for all nomadic peoples and, because they regarded these rough barbarians with fear and loathing, spelt it Tartar, from Tartarus, the darkest hell of Greek mythology. Today, the words Mongol and Tatar are often used interchangeably. (#ulink_27663f74-98b0-5e8a-8df1-e81551633a06) ‘To speak of him as Tamerlane is indeed a matter of insult, being a name inimical to him,’ noted Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, the Spanish envoy sent to Temur’s court by Henry III of Castile in 1402. Such diplomatic niceties are still scrupulously observed among Uzbeks, as the author discovered 598 years later during an interview with Tashkent’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. ‘We are very proud of Amir Temur. We do not call him Tamerlane,’ he told me with only the lightest and most diplomatic of reproaches. (#ulink_f640c4db-3498-54ad-aeeb-346630770568) The chapter headings of Arabshah’s Life of Temur the Great Amir make this animosity abundantly clear: ‘This Bastard Begins to Lay Waste Azerbaijan and the Kingdoms of Irak’; ‘How that Proud Tyrant was Broken & Borne to the House of Destruction, where he had his Constant Seat in the Lowest Pit of Hell’. Elsewhere, Temur is described variously as ‘Satan’, ‘demon’, ‘viper’, ‘villain’, ‘despot’, ‘deceiver’ and ‘wicked fool’. Any praise for Temur from this quarter is therefore not to be taken lightly. (#ulink_f640c4db-3498-54ad-aeeb-346630770568) Ibn Battutah earned the soubriquet ‘Traveller of Islam’ after a twenty-nine-year, seventy-five-thousand-mile odyssey around the world. He journeyed indefatigably by camel, mule and horse, on junks, dhows and rafts, from the Volga to Tanzania, from China to Morocco. Variously a judge, ambassador and hermit, he was also pre-eminently a travel writer, the stories of his epic wanderings recounted in the monumental The Precious Gift of Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel. (#ulink_42e2bd88-cae4-53c3-878d-e9c5b93d9bfa) The title of Khan was the most popular designation for a sovereign in medieval Asia. Initially it referred to kings and princes, but it was debased over the centuries to include local rulers and even chiefs. (#ulink_7e3cc636-c008-584d-b242-dffa5548e38d) This figure, like many from the medieval chronicles, should be treated with a degree of caution. Scholars consider the population estimates and reports of the numbers killed in battles to be routinely inflated in these sources. (#ulink_1b52459f-a940-544b-9002-b8fcb4055808) The most controversial of sources relating to Temur’s life are the supposedly autobiographical Mulfuzat (Memoirs) and Tuzukat (Institutes). These date back to their alleged discovery in the early seventeenth century by a scholar called Abu Talib al Husayni, who presented them in Persian translation to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1637. Both the Memoirs and the Institutes were generally accepted as legitimate historical documents until the late nineteenth century. Major Charles Stewart, who translated them for the London edition of 1830, claimed ‘the noble simplicity of diction’ and ‘the plain and unadorned egotism’ that ran through them proved their authenticity. Subsequent generations of scholars have been less impressed. Why, if these documents came from Temur, did neither of the contemporaneous writers Nizam ad-din Shami and Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi make any reference to them? Why was the original manuscript – from which al Husayni’s translation was made – never retrieved? Finally, how could such an important chronicle, which Temur purportedly wrote for posterity, have remained a secret for 232 years? Until such doubts can satisfactorily be removed, and the Memoirs and Institutes definitively authenticated, they are best regarded as specious. It should be noted, however, that the state-controlled academia in Uzbekistan – which since the 1990s has been required to support the official Temur revival – considers both to be beyond reproach. (#ulink_0eebf0dc-a332-52fd-98b4-5a929f01c85a) On 22 June 1941, Temur’s tomb was opened by the Soviet archaeologist Professor Mikhail Gerasimov, who confirmed the injuries to both right limbs. Those who believe in spirits of the dead exercising power beyond the grave made much of the exhumation. Uzbeks had argued vehemently against it, predicting catastrophe if the emperor’s tomb was disturbed. Hours after Gerasimov prised it open, the world learnt of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Shortly after Temur’s skeleton and that of Ulugh Beg, his grandson, were reinterred with full Muslim burial rites in 1942, the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad. (#ulink_8a76d164-f30d-5b25-b0eb-189724f15d6e) The measured voice of Gibbon put the two writers admirably into perspective. On Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi: ‘His geography and chronology are wonderfully accurate; and he may be trusted for public facts, though he servilely praises the virtue and fortune of the hero.’ On Ibn Arabshah: ‘This Syrian author is ever a malicious, and often an ignorant enemy: the very titles of his chapters are injurious; as how the wicked, as how the impious, as how the viper etc.’ (#ulink_743fc99e-a5e6-5968-b9f7-ee3149ad2848) The Sarbadars had established an independent state in Khorasan in the 1330s. They took their name from the word for a gibbet or ‘gallows-bird’. Rather than accept the rule of the hated Mongols in Mawarannahr, they were prepared to go to the gallows resisting them. One of their most notable victories came in Samarkand, where they successfully overcame the siege of Ilyas Khoja’s forces. Hovering like vultures around the weakened city, Temur and Husayn moved quickly to exploit this favourable development and seized power. (#ulink_89e091be-0b69-5449-988f-9b839ef9afa2) Though his tomb was later removed to the Gur Amir mausoleum of Samarkand, where he was interred next to Temur, a shrine to Imam Sayid Baraka remains to this day in Andkhoi, a small town in the remote north-west corner of Afghanistan, several miles from the border with Turkmenistan. A humble building with a whitewashed fa?ade and brown mudbrick domes, it is one of the few historical monuments to have escaped the destruction caused by more than two decades of war. (#ulink_c76e59ac-f8d1-570c-a358-fc58b27f4f45) In selecting Balkh as the place of his enthronement, Temur was emphatically demonstrating his new supremacy in a famous seat of power which had attracted both Alexander the Great and Genghis before him. Balkh, known by eighth- and ninth-century Arabs as the Mother of Cities, is a place of great antiquity. Zoroaster was preaching fire-worship here sometime around 600 BC. Its position north of the Hindu Kush mountains and south of the Amu Darya made it a strategically important toehold in Afghanistan, and from 329 to 327 BC it served as Alexander’s military base. In the first centuries after Christ, when Buddhism was thriving in Afghanistan under the Kushan dynasty, numerous pilgrims flocked to its many temples. By the seventh century its architectural renown was such that the Chinese traveller Xuan Zang could claim it boasted three of the most outstanding monuments in the world. The invasion of the Arabs, bringing Islam in their wake, lent further lustre to Balkh as mosques and madrassahs sprang up in abundance. By the ninth century there were forty Friday mosques within the city walls and Islamic culture was flourishing. Balkh also became an important centre of Persian poetry. Many consider Maulana Jalaluddin Balkhi, the thirteenth-century mystic known to Western readers as Rumi, to be the greatest Sufi poet ever. A moment of happiness, you and I sitting on the verandah, apparently two, but one in soul, you and I. We feel the flowing water of life here, you and I, with the garden’s beauty and the birds singing. The stars will be watching us, and we will show them what it is to be a thin crescent moon. You and I unselfed, will be together, indifferent to idle speculation, you and I. The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar as we laugh together, you and I. In one form upon this earth, and in another form in a timeless sweet land. It was, predictably, the dark storm of Genghis Khan that swept away forever these days of glory and romantic poetry. In 1220, at the head of ten thousand soldiers, the Mongol warlord rode into Balkh and ravaged it completely. In 1333, more than a century later, Ibn Battutah found Balkh ‘an utter ruin and uninhabited, but anyone seeing it would think it inhabited on account of the solidity of its construction. The accursed Tinkiz destroyed this city and demolished about a third of its mosques on account of a treasure which he was told lay under one of its columns. He pulled down a third of them and found nothing and left the rest as it was.’ By the eighteenth century, Balkh had recovered sufficiently to become the seat of the governors-general of Afghan Turkestan. In 1866, however, after catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and malaria, the city was abandoned in favour of nearby Mazar-i-Sharif to the east. Today it is a quiet backwater, but the echoes of Temur, fainter with each passing century, still remain. The blue-ribbed dome which sits atop the shrine of the fifteenth-century theologian Khwaja Abu Parsa, with its corkscrew pillars and stalactite corbels, recalls the imposing magnificence of late Temurid architecture. The badly damaged monument looks down on the tomb of Rabia Balkhi, the first woman of her time to write poetry in Persian. She died when her brother slashed her wrists, furious to discover she had been sleeping with a slave lover. Her last poem, it is said, was written in her own blood as she lay dying. Since 1964, when her tomb was discovered, young lovers, especially girls, have come to pray at her tomb for guidance in their own tangled affairs of the heart. 2 Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’ 1370–1379 (#ulink_eb6c1cb3-778a-545d-8fb4-0289caa9cae8) ‘Our quivering lances shaking in the airAnd bullets like Jove’s dreadful thunderboltsEnrolled in flames and fiery smouldering mistsShall threat the gods more than Cyclopian wars;And with our sun-bright armour, as we march,We’ll chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyesThat stand and muse at our admired arms.’ CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Tamburlaine the Great While a ten-year-old Temur was learning the martial skills that would make him such an accomplished warrior, three thousand miles to the west one man bestrode the battlefields of Europe. For any child with a taste for romantic knights and heroic endeavours, his is a stirring story, his royal tomb an arresting sight. Edward the Black Prince lies in Canterbury Cathedral close to the top of Pilgrims’ Steps, their stones worn smooth by centuries of feet and bended knees. Boys and girls cling on to the protective bars which surround him, peering through for a better look at the recumbent figure of the prince in full armour. As a schoolboy in Canterbury, I used to do the same, hurrying through the echoing nave before assembly to snatch a few minutes in front of his tomb. How could this slim, neat little man have been such a champion of war six centuries earlier, I wondered, picturing the charge of knights on horseback, the volleys of arrows scything through the sky and the flashing sword-strokes that could hack a man to pieces. His head rests on a fabulous helmet, surmounted by a roaring lion, his hands clasped together on his chest in prayer, sword by his side. He gazes into the heavens, past his knightly achievements, his gauntlets and scabbard, the surcoat and shield emblazoned with the golden lions and fleurs de lys of England. The Black Prince is perhaps the most glamorous symbol of the European age of chivalry. His career dazzled as brightly as the bejewelled swords which won him such fame and glory in France. In 1346, at the age of sixteen, he led the right wing of his father King Edward III’s army to a brilliant victory at the battle of Cr?cy, where he won his spurs in style. A decade later, he routed the French again at Poitiers, capturing King John II and taking him back to England as his prisoner. He won England new lands in France as prince of Aquitaine, returned Pedro the Cruel, the deposed King of Castile, to his throne, and suppressed rebellions with brutal efficiency. Wherever he went his exploits resonated with the martial thunder of the Middle Ages. However impressive it may be to schoolboys with their colouring books, castle sets and computer games, the warfare of the fourteenth century spelt only misery and poverty for most of Europe. Historians have long referred to this period as ‘the calamitous century’, in which famine, war and disease cut swathes through the population. The evangelising glories of the Crusades were already a memory. Christendom had lost its possessions in the Holy Land by the close of the thirteenth century and Outremer, the cherished land overseas, had ceased to exist. Life was a trial for poor peasants and rich rulers alike, as hereditary monarchies struggled to maintain their royal lines and fend off rival dynasties. For most of the century, England and France, the two great powers of the continent, were locked in conflict, consumed by the Hundred Years’ War which emptied their coffers and depleted their chivalry. Both were perilously divided into feuding fiefdoms, their kings undermined by the machinations of the nobles. In France the struggle for the disputed throne allowed the dukes of Orl?ans, Bourbon, Brittany and Anjou, together with the counts of Foix and Armagnac, to wield power like princely states. The duchy of Burgundy grew steadily from a royal province into a dynasty and a prosperous empire with its own ambitions. For much of this period the French kings were toothless tigers, harried on all sides by disloyal nobles, wandering mercenaries and revolting peasants. Across the Channel, England faced her own difficulties. Edward III’s illustrious fifty-year reign, an exercise in military adventurism and repudiation of papal authority, came to an end with his death in 1377, a year after his son and heir the Black Prince had died. The premature demise of the knight who had twice humiliated the French meant that the throne passed to the king’s nine-year-old grandson, Richard II, who was poorly placed to continue Edward’s expansionist forays. War had impoverished the country, which was in no mood to countenance another huge demand on its resources. The deeply unpopular poll tax led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The century ended inauspiciously with the youthful king’s removal from the throne in 1399 and his murder a year later. It was all the usurper Henry IV could do to keep his kingdom together, beset by the rebellions of the Scots and the Welsh, supported, as ever, by the French. Nor was the fighting restricted to these northern kingdoms. Europe was awash with petty wars, in thrall to the vogue for military and dynastic adventure. In the quieter periods between the major campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War, ‘free companies’ or bands of mercenaries roamed the continent, torching towns and extorting the countryside, spreading misery and destruction wherever they rode. ‘Without war you cannot live and do not know how to,’ Sir John Chandos, the Black Prince’s lieutenant, reprimanded a group of their captains. Southern France, Italy and Germany teemed with these perennial soldiers who refused to go home. Italy herself was riven by conflict, spurred on by the famous condottieri, soldiers of fortune like Sir John Hawkwood, captain-general of Florence, and, later, Francesco Sforza, ruler of Milan. The protracted hostilities between Guelphs and Ghibellines degenerated into wider, equally ruinous, factionalism. Ruled by despots, the great cities scrambled to enlarge their dominions. Naples and Florence tore themselves apart, the trading city of Genoa sank into decline. To add to these economic woes, the once mighty banks of Bardi and Peruzzi collapsed in the 1340s, bankrupted by the defaulting English king, Edward III. The situation was hardly better in Spain and Portugal where, despite the reconquest of most of Muslim al-Andalus the previous century, disunity and disorder ruled. Aragon was prey to repeated civil wars in which the nobles competed for the crown while, to the west, the death of Alfonso XI of Castile in 1349 – carried off by the plague – triggered another European fight for the succession, this time between Pedro II and his bastard brother Henry, Count of Trastamara. Two more decades of war followed. And then, of course, there were the horrors of the Black Death, which spread west along the trade routes from Asia and coursed through Europe like poison. By 1347 it had reached Constantinople, Rhodes, Cyprus and Sicily, moving onwards into Venice, Genoa and Marseilles. A year later it infected Tuscany, central Italy and England. By mid-century it was ravaging Scandinavia, penetrating as far north as Iceland and Greenland. One-third of the population of Europe was wiped out by a disease so terrifyingly ghastly many felt it was a heaven-sent punishment for the sins of the world. ‘I do not know where to begin describing its relentless cruelty; almost everyone who witnessed it seemed stupefied by grief,’ wrote the Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, who buried five of his children with his own hands. ‘They died almost immediately; they would swell up under the armpits and in the groin and drop dead while talking. Fathers abandoned their children, wives left their husbands, brothers forsook each other.’ Dogs dragged hastily-buried corpses into the streets and gorged on them before collapsing themselves. ‘Nobody wept for the dead, since each was awaiting death; and so many died that everyone thought that the end of the world had come.’ The Black Death killed an estimated twenty-five million people, precipitating an agricultural crisis due to the severe shortage of labour to farm the land. The accompanying breakdown of law and order only added to the havoc left in its wake. While war, plague and famine sapped Europe internally, external threats were also beginning to mount. Christendom’s eastern frontier was under pressure as the weakening Byzantine empire faced attack from the Ottomans. One by one it started to lose its possessions, first in Asia Minor with the fall of Brusa and Nicaea, later and more ominously with Adrianople, Gallipoli and Thessalonica. In 1389, a Christian army under the Serbian king Lazarus was crushed at Kosovo by a Turkish army led by Sultan Murad I. By 1394, Constantinople itself was under siege. Two years later, Christendom roused itself from its sickbed for a final assault on the Muslim foe and put its last Crusader army into the field at Nicopolis, on the banks of the Danube. It was cut to pieces. Europe shuddered to consider what the resurgent infidel planned next. Islam was on the march. If matters on the European mainland were unpromising, hopes of heavenly salvation seemed equally fraught. Though the Church began the fourteenth century confidently, with Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming in his Unam Sanctam bull of 1302 that ‘the spiritual power excels in dignity and nobility any form whatsoever of earthly power’, it steadily lost much of its authority during this period. Besieged by the dangers of warring Italy, the papacy withdrew shortly afterwards to Avignon on the banks of the Rh?ne, from where a succession of French popes plotted wars in the papal states and pacification in Europe, the necessary prelude to taking up the fight against the Muslims of the East. They were remembered, and resented, more for the staggering size and ostentation of the papal palace, and the punitive taxes which went to pay for it, than for their commitment to the defence of the faith or the spiritual nourishment of their flock. Then, in 1378, disaster struck as the Church split over the election of the irascible Italian Pope Urban VI. Another Frenchman, Clement VII, was elected to replace him, precipitating the Great Schism. For the next four decades, one pope presided in Rome while another, the anti-pope, held sway in Avignon. The prestige of the papacy sunk further. The Europe of Temur’s time, then, in Muslim eyes at least, was little more than a barbarian backwater. Church and state were divided and weak. The age of imperial adventure had expired, not to be revived until the later fifteenth century. Edward the Black Prince might have cut a dashing figure on the battlefields of Europe, but the Islamic world scarcely registered this sorry land of the infidel. The real treasures of conquest were not to be found in what the Koran referred to as the dar al-harb (the abode of war), home of the unbelievers. They lay in the East. As Bernard Lewis wrote: ‘For the medieval Muslim from Andalusia to Persia, Christian Europe was still an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief, from which the sunlit world of Islam had little to fear and less to learn.’ Europeans were no more impressed by the Oriental heathens. Temur’s whirlwind conquests went largely unnoticed in the West until, in 1587, a fire-and-brimstone Tamburlaine sprang onto the Elizabethan stage like a thunderbolt from the heavens. Temur’s neglect at the hands of Western historians, which continues to this day, allowed Marlowe’s bloodthirsty Tamburlaine to provide the enduring popular image of a magnificent, God-defying Oriental despot, fearless in conquest, unforgiving in triumph, yet simultaneously capable of scaling the poetic heights with his beautiful lover Zenocrate. It is one of history’s small ironies that a man who took such care to ensure his place in posterity by having his civil and military record meticulously chronicled should find his posthumous reputation in the hands of an Elizabethan playwright with a taste for the sensational. Brilliant in battle, unvanquished on the world stage, Temur’s efforts to secure the recognition he so richly deserved came to nothing. ‘These cares were ineffectual for the preservation of his fame, and these precious memorials in the Mogul or Persian language were concealed from the world or, at least, from the knowledge of Europe,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘The nations which he vanquished exercised a base and impotent revenge; and ignorance has long repeated the tale of calumny which had disfigured the birth and character, the person, and even the name, of Tamerlane. Yet his real merit would be enhanced rather than debased by the elevation of a peasant to the throne of Asia.’ Passed over by historians, Temur has fared little better on the stage. Though Marlowe’s play is more than four hundred years old, productions have been remarkable for their extreme rarity. Tamburlaine the Great went through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without a single recorded performance. One problem is the play’s length: it is really two full-length plays, rather than one. Another is the potentially monotonous series of conquests and slaughter, which continue, as they did historically, until Tamburlaine’s death. C.S. Lewis famously described the play as ‘a hideous moral Spoonerism: Giant the Jack Killer’. Suffice it to say that the plot is not as complicated as it could be. As a result of these and other difficulties, the first professional production of modern times came in London as late as 1951, when Tyrone Guthrie directed Donald Wolfit in the lead role with the Old Vic company. A quarter of a century later, Peter Hall chose the play to open the Olivier Theatre at the National, with Albert Finney in the lead role. Hall judged Tamburlaine variously as a ‘Boy’s Own Paper story’, ‘an immoral Morality play’, ‘the first atheist play’ and ‘the first existential play’. ‘One thing I know very strongly about Tamburlaine now,’ he wrote in 1976. ‘It reeks of the theatre as the circus reeks of sawdust and horse shit.’ Yet theatre-goers still had to wait until 1993 for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first production of the play, directed by Terry Hands in Stratford. It was worth the wait. Audiences were captivated by Antony Sher’s snarling barbarism in the lead role, an explosive and athletic performance which rejoiced in the tyranny and bounding majesty of what one reviewer called ‘the megalomaniac’s megalomaniac’. While the sultan Bajazeth and his Turks strut awkwardly across the stage on golden stilts, Tamburlaine swings in Tarzan-like, kicking Bajazeth to the ground. In victory he glorifies in sneering sadism, rubbing his fingers in Bajazeth’s sweaty hair, licking them and offering them to Zenocrate to smell. Bathed in blood, he mocks the famished, caged sultan and encourages his henchmen to urinate on scraps of reeking bread with which they taunt him. Then, with a leering grin, he cuts off one of the sultaness’s fingers. Marlowe’s virgins of Damascus, yet more victims for the ‘scourge of God’, become flaxen-haired children sweetly proffering posies. If the 1993 production proved anything, it was that with an actor of Sher’s stature, together with careful editing – in this case Tamburlaine was whittled down to three hours – opulent costumes and imaginative special effects, Marlowe’s most sensational play could be big box office. There was another, more enduring, lesson to be taken from Tamburlaine, a critic noted: ‘As events in the Middle East and elsewhere continue to show, we ignore him and his descendants at our peril.’ Had Temur lived long enough to see Tamburlaine the Great, he might conceivably have been gratified by his dramatic depiction (though he would certainly have objected to the use of his derisive nickname). Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is one of the most intensely realised warrior heroes of the stage. Shakespeare’s Henry V and Coriolanus seem poorer creatures by comparison. For Tamburlaine rises beyond the mortal sphere. As the Persian lord Theridamas remarks on first seeing this ‘Scythian shepherd’ early in Act I: His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods, His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth … Tamburlaine, the audience rapidly discovers, is interested only in omnipotence: I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about, And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere, Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome. After routing his Arabian and Egyptian enemy at the close of Part I, he explains his victory to the Soldan of Egypt, who is mourning the loss of his throne. The god of war has resigned to Tamburlaine, the defeated Egyptian is told, and will soon make him ‘general of the world’. Even Jove suddenly looks ‘pale and wan’, fearing Tamburlaine is about to dethrone him. Not content with comparing himself favourably to the gods, he throws down the gauntlet to the Prophet Mohammed, burning the Koran and daring him out of the heavens: Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power, Come down thyself and work a miracle. Thou art not worthy to be worshipped That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ Wherein the sum of thy religion rests. For Elizabethan audiences this was shocking stuff, blasphemy in the eyes of the authorities and an affront to properly Christian sensibilities. Gossip was already afoot concerning Marlowe’s supposed atheism, heresy and dissolute life, dangerous charges at a time when the authorities were rounding up those suspected of libel, sedition or even ‘unsafe’ opinions. Contemporary critics rounded on the play as a glorification of impiety. In his prefix to the largely forgotten Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), Robert Greene condemned Marlowe for ‘daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan’. On 12 May 1593, the popular playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested and tortured. He wrote a letter, almost certainly under duress, condemning Marlowe’s ‘monstrous opinions’ and his tendencies to ‘jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men’. A shady character called Richard Baines, another informer, wrote of Marlowe’s ‘damnable judgement of religion and scorn of God’s word’, including wild allegations that the playwright professed ‘That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest,’ ‘That if there be any god or good religion, then it is in the papists,’ ‘That all Protestants are hypocritical asses’ and that Christ and John the Baptist were sodomites. Such testimonies had the desired effect. On 18 May, the Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. He was stabbed to death in the notorious Deptford tavern brawl less than two weeks later. Tamburlaine the Great provided plenty of ammunition to Elizabethan critics, as it does to this day. Joseph Hall, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, accused Marlowe of gross populism and pandering to the rabble – ‘He ravishes the gazing Scaffolders’ – in Virgidemiarum (1597). Ben Jonson joined the chorus of disapproval: in Discoveries, posthumously published in 1640, he argued that there was nothing in plays like Tamburlaine except ‘scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers’. Wonderfully unconcerned by such high-minded criticism, audiences thrilled to what quickly became a phenomenally popular play. To this day, on those rare occasions when it is staged, they still do, alternately shocked and seduced, appalled and entranced, by the brutal machinations of this exotic tyrant. Whatever the Elizabethan authorities thought about Marlowe’s atheism, Tamburlaine was otherwise thoroughly in keeping with the zeitgeist of the era. It posed questions about colonisation and kingship, rebellion and religion, all the vicissitudes of power. This was a time of vigorous English expansion and growing self-confidence, the birth of a military and mercantile nation with dreams of empire and the ambition to project its might across the globe. Marlowe’s numerous references to hemispheres, meridian lines and poles, to continents known and unknown, perfectly reflected an age of exploration and commercial endeavour across the seas, personified by Sir Francis Drake, the man who circumnavigated the world in 1577–80 and calmly finished his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe before routing the Spanish Armada in 1588. Just as Tamburlaine thunders across the world from conquest to conquest, so England, led by her heroic queen, was steadily emerging as a great power on the world stage. In Elizabeth’s famous speech to the English troops at Tilbury on the eve of their engagement with the Armada, there are unmistakable shades of Tamburlaine (written only a year previously): ‘… [I] think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.’ Little surprise that for all the authorities’ disapproval, the play enjoyed such a remarkable success in its own time. It was so well known that in 1629, more than forty years after its first performance, prisoners pulling carts of sewage through London’s streets were taunted with one of the celebrated lines from the play – ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,’ the very words which Tamburlaine jeers at Bajazeth’s two sons, whom he has harnessed to his chariot. Different eras have naturally judged Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – as well as the real-life conqueror – through different prisms. Nineteenth-century military historians, not least the British, tended to lionise the Tatar for his prodigious military skills, and wrote admiringly of his successful campaigns while downplaying his cold-blooded massacres. In the twentieth century, his career was viewed less enthusiastically. John Joseph Saunders wrote in 1971 that ‘Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism.’ In 1996, the historian Leo de Hartog judged Temur a parochial sadist. Not surprisingly, different cultures have also reached radically different verdicts. Within the dar al Islam, the Muslim world, Temur is a household name, usually revered as a great conqueror and propagator of the faith. In Christian Georgia, which he ravaged half a dozen times, he is spoken of with dread and remains the country’s greatest anti-hero. In the Soviet empire, he was removed from the history books, the authorities fearful of the nationalism he might inspire among the subject populations of Central Asia. When he was mentioned, it was only as a savage barbarian and despot. In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, as we shall see, Temur has been rehabilitated and championed as the father of a new nation. In the West he languishes in the depths of obscurity. Likewise in the theatre, the play that could disgust Elizabethan literary critics was equally able to confirm the prejudices of their late-nineteenth-century successors. Arthur Houston, professor of political economy at Trinity College, Dublin, excused the excesses of Tamburlaine on the grounds that ‘The principal characters are Eastern barbarians, proverbially prone to the extremes of passion, and addicted to the use of hyperbolical expressions. Marlowe in my opinion has been rather under-rated.’ Swinburne admired Marlowe’s poetic gifts, but George Bernard Shaw considered him ‘a fool’ who catered to a ‘Philistine and ignorant’ public. In our own time, Edward Said accused Marlowe’s ‘Oriental stage’ of preparing the ground for Christendom’s jaundiced view of Islam as the ‘Other’. More than four centuries after it was first brought to stage, Tamburlaine remains as capable as ever of generating storms and controversies. The play can be understood as a paean to empire, an ode to atheism, a celebration of commerce, exploration, social mobility and individualism, a mockery of royalty and hereditary authority, and a defiance of foreign power – for Tamburlaine read Elizabeth, for Bajazeth’s Turkey read Catholic Spain – yet these various layers of interpretation are not what most impress. Tamburlaine the Great is as much about sheer performance as it is about principles. Should there be any doubt, Tamburlaine’s voice, a blast of sound and fury, seizes the attention at the beginning of the first act, and from that moment never lets go. The set-pieces are engrossing. Marlowe had immersed himself in the most recent scholarship, using sources such as Pietro Perondini’s Life of Temur (1553) and George Whetstone’s English Mirror (1586), and was familiar with the conqueror’s career. Although sometimes on uncertain ground historically, his dramatisations of some of its highlights are powerfully drawn. They have become the stuff of legend. Drama and history coalesce in the confrontation between Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, ‘emperor of the Turks’. A landmark in the conqueror’s career, it becomes a pivotal encounter in the play. Long before the two sworn adversaries even enter the battlefield, Marlowe gives the Ottoman great billing to intensify the scale of the looming encounter. Before battle is joined they meet in person, accompanied by their courtly entourages, and trade insults like boxers before a championship fight. Bajazeth calls Tamburlaine a ‘Scythian slave’, and swears by the holy Koran that he will make him ‘a chaste and lustless eunuch’ fit only for tending his harem. The Tatar shrugs off the threat, telling the Turk that ‘Thy fall shall make me famous throughout the world!’ Which indeed it did. Battle is brief and devastating. Tamburlaine trounces Bajazeth and imprisons him in a cage, taunting him and his wife to distraction and suicide. Marlowe uses the rout of Bajazeth to emphasise the immutability of fate. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of Tamburlaine’s inexorable rise to glory. This is a man of magnificence, cruelty, military genius, overarching pride and sensuality, whose sense of his own power knows no bounds. He finds his peer group not on earth but in the heavens. After defeating Bajazeth, he styles himself ‘arch-monarch’ of the earth, ‘the Scourge of God and terror of the world’. The play echoes to the crash and thunder of arms. It has, as one critic put it, an ‘astounding martial swagger’. But Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is as much a poet as a warrior (testament, though the playwright might not have known it, to Temur’s artistic and intellectual interests). If adversaries on the battlefield provoke his fiery wrath, it is his beloved lover Zenocrate who inspires his passion, unleashed in a sparkling stream of poetry which lifts the play into a higher sphere. Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee, That in thy passion for thy country’s love, And fear to see thy kingly father’s harm, With hair dishevelled wipest thy watery cheeks; And like to Flora in her morning’s pride, Shaking her silver tresses in the air, Rainest on the earth resolved pearl in showers, And sprinklest sapphires on thy shining face, Where Beauty, mother to the Muses, sits, And comments volumes with her ivory pen, Taking instructions from thy flowing eyes, Eyes, when that Ebena steps to heaven, In silence of thy solemn evening’s walk, Making the mantle of the richest night, The moon, the planets, and the meteors, light. Later, she falls sick, and Tamburlaine is consumed by the darkest grief. The bloodstained emperor is the poet-lover once more. Black is the beauty of the brightest day; The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire, That danced with glory on the silver waves, Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams, And all with faintness and for foul disgrace, He binds his temples with a frowning cloud, Ready to darken earth with endless night. Zenocrate, that gave him light and life, Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory bowers, And tempered every soul with lively heat, Now by the malice of the angry skies, Whose jealousy admits no second mate, Draws in the comfort of her latest breath, All dazzled with the hellish mists of death. But nothing can save her. Lying in her bed of state, surrounded by kings and doctors, her three sons and her husband, she dies. A distraught Tamburlaine rails against ‘amorous Jove’ for snatching her away from him, accusing the god of wanting to make Zenocrate his ‘stately queen of heaven’. The martial imagery and force of language return in his distraught response, but for once they are born of desperation and tragic futility. The play closes with Tamburlaine’s death. Even here, at the end of his life, there is no regret or repentance, no sense that he is being defeated by a greater force. Instead, he calls for a map and points to this and that battlefield around the world, reliving his great victories in front of his sons. There is time to crown his heir Amyras, and then nature achieves what none of Tamburlaine’s earthly foes could manage. At the final moment, in the throes of death, his arrogance does not desert him: Farewell, my boys! My dearest friends, farewell! My body feels, my soul doth weep to see Your sweet desires deprived my company, For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die. As a dramatist, Marlowe is guilty of all the usual sins: exaggeration, historical infelicities, geographical inaccuracies, sensationalism. Yet his Tamburlaine is a triumph of imaginative genius. Nowhere else has the Tatar been so brilliantly conceived, so passionately realised. The grandeur of the poetry, the sweeping cadences of the line, the constantly unfolding military drama, all keep the audience rapt. It is little wonder that Marlowe, rather than the historians, holds the key to the popular image of Tamburlaine, with the full flash and fury of his God-defying protagonist. In the play, as in life, the ‘Scythian shepherd’ transcends all earthly limitations, embarks on a crushing career of conquest, and destroys everything in sight. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine rises even higher than his historical counterpart as a figure of boundless power. His is an irresistible, unworldly force that lifts him above his fellow mortals towards the heavens. He tramples over our moral universe, butchering innocent virgins, slaughtering wholesale, all the while consciously setting himself up as a rival to the gods whom he despises for their weakness. As his contemporaries recognise only too well, this is a man That treadeth Fortune underneath his feet, And makes the mighty god of arms his slave. However great his ambition, however broad the stage on which he sought to make his mark, it is doubtful that the real Temur entertained such elevated comparisons in 1370. The titles he had gained, though magnificent, were deceptive. Master of a small swathe of Central Asia, beset on all sides by hostile forces, Temur was neither Emperor of the Age nor Conqueror of the World. It would take several decades of constant campaigning before he could make such exalted claims. Mindful of Mongol tradition, which he never tired of using to bolster his position, Temur’s priority on acceding to the throne was the reunification of the fractured Chaghatay empire. Demonstrating the astute opportunism which would sustain him through numerous challenges over the course of his career, he sought to place himself in the line of rulers harking back to Genghis Khan. His marriage to Saray Mulk-khanum had already eased him, albeit somewhat tenuously, into that position. Now he intended to capitalise on that auspicious beginning by restoring the diminished empire to its former glory. These lands, bequeathed to Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatay, had disintegrated in the vortex of conflict. To the north-west, the fertile region of Khorezm, formerly within the Chaghatay ulus, now lay independent under the Qungirat Sufi dynasty. To the east, Moghulistan, once also an integral part of the ulus, was now a direct enemy whose continued depredations against its western neighbour, Mawarannahr, Temur was resolved to end. For the next decade he led campaigns against both, now attacking the Moghuls in the east, now taking his armies north into Khorezm. There were expeditions farther afield, too, but for now the priority was to expand and consolidate his base. Today, constant warfare may seem a futile waste of resources, but in Temur’s time it was the most effective way of retaining the loyalty of the nomadic tribes, uniting them under the banner of plunder and booty. There were regular challenges to his authority, however, from tribal leaders who resented the loss of power occasioned by his rapid rise. Such moves were frustrated by Temur’s clever consolidation of his armies. He and Husayn had amassed powerful forces during their alliance, and on Husayn’s assassination they were transferred to his command. He therefore presided over an impressive body of fighting men, including the Qara’unas armies, the largest in Chaghatay. Further support came from the settled populations, for whom war was anathema, stability and prosperity a cherished dream. They understood, as feuding tribal leaders would not, that only a strong ruler could impose the peace that would allow them to flourish. Temur led his first expedition against his eastern neighbours in 1370, the year of his enthronement. His adversary was the Moghul leader Qamar ad-din, who had succeeded the assassinated Ilyas Khoja. This first campaign was indecisive, though sufficiently successful for Temur’s forces to return laden with plunder. Qamar ad-din would remain an irritant for years to come. Though there were more noteworthy campaigns against the Moghuls – the next came in 1375 – their chief evaded capture. Legend tells of an incident during one of these expeditions through the Tien Shan mountains, high above Lake Issykul in what is today Kyrgyzstan. Pursuing Moghul archers over the San-Tash pass, each one of Temur’s soldiers was ordered to pick up a stone and place it on a pile. Once they had routed their enemy they returned, each soldier collecting a stone and taking it back with him to enable Temur to calculate his army’s losses. By the time his men had left the mountains, a towering cairn still remained, so heavy were the casualties. In the late 1370s, more expeditions took Temur’s men into Moghulistan, and by 1383, when another heavy defeat was inflicted on the Moghuls, Qamar ad-din was in his dotage, militarily speaking. He was ousted by Khizr Khoja, son of the former Moghul khan Tughluk Temur, in 1389, although that was still not the last of him. The following year, taking advantage of Khizr Khoja’s flight from Temur’s armies, he tried to seize power again, only to be chased back once more. The last we hear of him, possibly apocryphally, is sometime around 1393 when, unable to keep up with his retreating army, he was left in a forest by his officers with several concubines and enough food for several days. He was never seen again. Temur’s eastern question was resolved more or less permanently shortly afterwards, when Khizr Khoja came to terms with his more powerful neighbour and was recognised as Moghul khan. The relationship between the two was settled in 1397, when the Moghul khan gave his sister Tukal-khanum to be Temur’s wife. In tribute to her royal blood she became his second queen and was known as Kichik Khanum, the Lesser Lady. As Temur’s power and riches grew with each season of military campaigns, the size of his household and the number of his wives and concubines swelled in proportion. During these years, Temur was also actively engaged in bringing his northern neighbour Khorezm to heel. Ostensibly the reason for conflict here was the restoration of the Chaghatay empire as it had been left to Genghis Khan’s second son. There was another equally, if not more, compelling reason to pick a fight. Khorezm straddled the caravan routes linking China to the Mediterranean, and therefore enjoyed great prosperity. Bringing the region back into the Chaghatay orbit would restore huge revenues, which in turn would fund further expansion. If Temur could annex the region, securing his borders to the north, he would be free for the first time to lead his armies beyond the borders of the Chaghatay ulus. This strategy of keeping his armies constantly employed and consistently rewarded was one which Temur pursued for the rest of his life. It was specifically intended to minimise tribal opposition to his leadership. For as long as the traditional political culture of the ulus, with its pattern of shifting alliances and intermittent conflict, remained intact, Temur was vulnerable. His task was to weld a fractious confederation of tribes, governed by time-honoured traditions of hierarchy and authority, into an army loyal to his person. A strong centralised leadership weakened the tribal leaders’ positions. Unless they were recompensed for this loss, Temur could not count on their continued support. Only by leading the tribes out of the ulus to victories abroad could he end, or at least minimise, internal ulus politics, and retain their loyalty. Thus, as the American historian Beatrice Forbes Manz put it: ‘For the business of politics he now substituted that of conquest.’ This was Temur’s highly effective, long-term approach. From a more immediate perspective, Khorezm was a prize worth seizing. Kat and Urganch, its two capitals, were great cities. The latter mightily impressed the world traveller Ibn Battutah, who reported that its markets were so teeming with merchants and buyers that during one foray into the town he was unable to move, such was the jam of humanity passing this way and that. ‘The city abounds in luxury and excellent plenty, and its beauties make a fine show,’ wrote Arabshah. Khorezm was a land rich in natural produce. Foodstuffs, particularly cereals and fruits, grew in abundance. Melons and pomegranates were a local delicacy, as was game, in the form of roasted pigeon, fowl and crane. Drawing on the water from the Amu Darya delta, large crops of cotton were harvested in the fields. Flocks of sheep grazed on the plains, herds of cattle on the Aral marshlands. The markets were well stocked with costly animal skins, noted the tenth-century Arab geographer Mukaddasi, some from the Bulgar country of the Volga to the north-west. There was marten, sable, fox, two species of beaver, squirrel, ermine, stoat, weasel, hare, and goatskins. Grapes, currants, sesame and honey were also to be found in profusion, in addition to the gorgeous carpets, cotton and silk brocades, and cloaks destined for export. There was no shortage of military supplies. Armies could be readily equipped with swords, cuirasses and bows. The bark of white poplar, a local speciality, was highly prized as a covering for shields. Hunters came to market to choose from hundreds of handsome falcons. In addition to these products and activities, Mukaddasi discovered a thriving slave trade in Khorezm. Turkish boys and girls were either bought or stolen from the steppe nomads, converted to Islam, and later despatched to Muslim countries where they frequently rose to high positions. Most, if not all, of this lucrative trade was bypassing turbulent Mawarannahr. Temur’s course was set. As a prelude to invasion, he sent a letter to Husayn Sufi, leader of Khorezm, demanding the return of the Chaghatay lands. Back came a reply. Since Khorezm had been conquered by the sword, its ruler proclaimed, only by the sword could it be taken away. The predictable rebuff handed Temur the casus belli he had been looking for. His army rumbled north in 1372. After fierce fighting, the city of Kat fell. One of his first significant victories, it also bore what would become the hallmark of his military actions against recalcitrant cities. All the men of Kat were butchered, their wives and daughters thrown into slavery. The city was plundered and torched. This was the moment for Husayn to surrender, but, encouraged to prolong his resistance by one of Temur’s tribal chiefs, he opted instead for battle. (#ulink_73aca7b3-bba1-5180-b706-f0e23cc469a5) Defeated again, he retreated to Urganch, and died soon afterwards in humiliation. Yusef Sufi, his brother, succeeded him and, recognising his enemy’s superior strength, came to terms, promising to send Husayn’s daughter Khan-zada as a wife for Temur’s first son Jahangir. (#ulink_8d6dce98-5f03-56e7-a4b5-0915832c2856) This was a noble offer, for she was both beautiful and of royal blood, granddaughter of Uzbeg, khan of the Golden Horde to the north. She was, wrote Arabshah, a maiden ‘of the highest rank and greatest wealth, sprung of distinguished stock, of brilliant beauty, more beautiful than Shirin and more graceful than Waladah’. Temur returned south to Samarkand and waited. No bride arrived. More interested in war than weddings, Yusef retook Kat in defiance. A second expedition was mounted against him in 1373. This time Yusef came to terms, and southern Khorezm passed into Temur’s hands. Khan-zada was duly sent south with a caravan carrying prodigious gifts for her new family. There were untold treasures of gold and rich gems, fine silks and satins, ornate tapestries, even a golden throne. Flowers and carpets were strewn along the route to her betrothed and the air was heavy with perfume. Through the crowds of wide-eyed peasants gathered to watch this extraordinary procession the veiled princess moved silently on a white camel, her beauty hidden from impious eyes. A company of swordsmen mounted on their chargers accompanied her, the rest of her lavish retinue – camels loaded high with gifts, handmaidens in constant attendance – following in their wake. It was a magnificent sight. But Jahangir’s marriage did not last long. In about 1376, returning to Samarkand from another expedition against the Moghuls, Temur was greeted by a very different, more ominous, procession. A group of nobles, men like Haji Sayf ad-din Nukuz, one of his oldest and most trusted amirs, advanced slowly on horseback to meet him. Shrouded in black cloaks, their heads and faces streaked with dust, they were in mourning. Jahangir, stricken by sickness, was dead. ‘All the great lords of the empire, the Cheriffs and others, were clothed in black and blue garments; they wept bitterly, covered their heads with dust in token of sorrow, beat their breasts, and rent themselves according to custom,’ Yazdi reported. ‘All the inhabitants with their heads uncovered, and with sackcloth and black felt about their necks, and their eyes bedewed with tears, came out of the city, filling the air with cries and lamentations.’ Temur was inconsolable. Jahangir, his eldest son, just twenty years old, was his great pride and heir. From his early teens he had played a leading role in his father’s political and military affairs; already his military prowess, the talent which Temur prized above all others, had marked him out as a future leader. A fearless warrior, he had even led Temur’s advance guard during one expedition against the Moghuls. In the course of his short life he had found time to father two young sons. Mohammed Sultan became the emperor’s favourite. In later life he took on Jahangir’s mantle as Temur’s heir. His were the fabulously arrayed troops who in 1402 led the Tatar army into battle against Sultan Bayazid at Ankara. Another son by a different princess, Pir Mohammed, born a month after Jahangir’s death, though less dependable, would also endear himself to his grandfather on account of his courage and valour. Temur sank into the blackest despair. No soft words, no expressions of sympathy, could alleviate the pain. Trusted amirs and princes were harshly dismissed. ‘Everything then became melancholy and disagreeable to him,’ wrote Yazdi, ‘and his cheeks were almost always bathed in tears; he clothed himself with mourning, and his life became uneasy to him. The whole kingdom, which used to be overjoyed at the arrival of this great emperor, was turned into a place of sorrow and weeping.’ Jahangir’s death was a watershed from which Temur took a long time to recover. Although he would outlive many of his closest contemporaries – amirs and comrades in arms, learned men, religious and spiritual advisers, not to mention members of his own family – and gradually steeled himself against the deaths of those dearest to him, the loss of his first son affected him keenly. It marked a temporary end to his military campaigns. Samarkand no longer bristled with the hum of armies preparing for war. The tovachis, the aides-de-camp who were responsible for conscription, invariably among the busiest of Temur’s senior officers, now fell silent. If military affairs had receded from the immediate horizon, politics soon intruded. A shabby, unkempt refugee arrived in Temur’s court. Notwithstanding his ragged appearance, Tokhtamish was a prince of the royal house of Genghis Khan. He had fled from Urus, khan of the White Horde to the north, and murderer of Tokhtamish’s father. Now in exile, determined to avenge his father’s death and, although Temur did not yet know it, ambitious for the leadership of a reunified Golden Horde, Tokhtamish threw himself on Temur’s mercy. ‘If we wish to enter upon a branch of inquiry which seems utterly wanting in unity, to be as disintegrated as sand, and defying any orderly or rational treatment, we can hardly choose a better one than the history of the Asiatic nomads.’ HENRY HOWORTH, History of the Mongols To understand Tokhtamish and the khanate he aspired to lead, it is necessary to return to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. The Golden Horde, or Dasht-i-Kipchak as it was then known, had been carved out by Batu, second son of Genghis Khan’s eldest son Jochi. In accordance with the custom of the steppe, Jochi had received territories farthest from the heart of the empire in Karakorum. These ranged west from the river Irtish in Siberia ‘as far as the soil has been trodden by the hooves of Mongol horses’, according to the marvellously vague definition of the thirteenth-century Persian historian Juvayni. The uncertainty underscored the fact that the gift of these lands was theoretical, as they had yet to be fully conquered. Jochi died in 1227, however, shortly before his father. His eldest son, Orda, received western Siberia and the corridor of land sandwiched between the Amu Darya and Irtish rivers, a territory called ‘the eastern Wing of the Ulus of Jochi’, later known confusingly as both the White Horde and the Blue Horde. It fell to Batu to consolidate his hold on the lands immediately to the west – the westernmost branch of the Mongol empire, later the Golden Horde – and establish just how far those horses had travelled. In 1235, he was given his chance. Great Khan Ogedey appointed Batu commander of a 150,000-strong army sent to subdue the Bulgars of the Volga and the Kipchaks. The nomadic Bulgars, among the world’s most northerly Muslims, had established a prosperous state whose capital in Bulgar lay near the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Living in tents and breeding cattle, they also traded furs and slaves with Mawarannahr in return for weapons and manufactured goods. The Kipchaks were a powerful confederation of Turkic nomads whose steppe territory, north of the Caspian Sea, stretched west from Siberia to the Danube. The Bulgars were quickly crushed, their capital destroyed. Bachman, the chief of the Kipchaks, mounted stiff resistance against the Mongols but was eventually captured after a lengthy chase up and down the Volga. Like all defeated adversaries he was ordered to kneel before the victors. ‘I have been myself a king and do not fear death,’ he replied. ‘I am not a camel that should kneel.’ He was promptly cut in two. Batu’s forces reached the river Ural in 1237, crossed into Russia and laid waste to every city from Moscow to Kiev, taking advantage of the hopelessly weak and divided Russian princes. The cities of Ryazan and Kolomna in the western reaches were so thoroughly sacked, wrote an anonymous chronicler, that ‘no eye remained open to weep for the dead’. Other towns simply disappeared from the map altogether. Kiev fell shortly before Christmas 1240, its Byzantine churches torched to the ground, the saintly bones they harboured burnt in contempt. Plundering and massacring as they advanced to the gates of Europe, the Mongol army marched into Poland in 1241. In a region utterly unknown to them, thousands of miles from home in the depth of winter, they overcame the Polish feudal chivalry – like the Russians, enfeebled by divisions – through the superb military acumen of Subedey, Genghis’s veteran commander. Krakow fell on Palm Sunday. In a subsequent battle outside what was later known as Walstadt, the Mongols collected nine sacks containing the ears of the defeated Germans and Poles. Silesia was similarly devastated before Batu’s hordes turned their attention to the kingdom of Hungary, which fell after catastrophic casualties in the region of sixty-five thousand at the battle of Mohi. Contemplating the Mongols’ onward advance into the heart of Europe, Emperor Frederick II despatched a letter to the kings of Christendom appealing for contributions to a common army. His request met with a deafening silence. Pope Gregory IX published his own appeal in August 1241, but died shortly afterwards. The continent lay vulnerable before the Mongols. By 1242 Batu’s army was camped outside the walls of Neustadt, south of Vienna, and Christendom stood on the brink of disaster. There were further forays into Croatia and Albania. It is said that the Mongols’ depredations in Hungary prompted Queen Blanche of France to ask her son Louis IX what action should be taken against them. ‘If these people, whom we call Tartars, should come upon us, either we will thrust them back into Tartarus, whence they came, or else they will send us all to heaven,’ he predicted. Fortunately for the kingdoms of Europe, it was not to be. In an extraordinary piece of good luck, the continent was saved by news of Ogedey’s death the previous December. The Mongol army had already been riven by disputes between Batu and rival Mongol princes, harbinger of a more lasting and damaging split between the houses of Jochi and Tuli on the one hand and those of Ogedey and Chaghatay on the other. A struggle for the succession in Karakorum now appeared likely, a consideration which would have weighed heavily with Batu, who wanted to ensure that the candidate most favourable to his interests ascended to the throne. He therefore decided to return to participate in the qurultay to appoint the new Great Khan, in the event a matter which took several years to resolve. His horde turned eastwards and Europe survived. Had Ogedey lived longer, the Mongol empire would almost certainly have reached the shores of the Atlantic. ‘At a distance of more than seven centuries,’ wrote John Joseph Saunders, ‘the historian is still struck with wonder at this extraordinary campaign. Whether one considers the geographical scope of the fighting, which embraced the greater part of eastern Europe, the planning and coordination of movement of so many army corps, the clockwork precision whereby the enemy was surrounded, defeated and pursued, the brilliant manner in which problems of supply were solved, or the skill with which Asian armies were handled in an unfamiliar European terrain, one cannot fail to admit that the Mongol leaders were masters of the art of war such as the world scarcely saw before or has seen since.’ Following the end of the European invasion, and in anticipation of further Mongol divisions, Batu’s priority was to establish his own kingdom or ulus. From 1242 to 1254 he built his capital, Old Saray, on the east bank of the Akhtuba, a tributary of the Volga, sixty-five miles north-west of Astrakhan. After his triumphs in Russia and Europe, his ulus – which had originally consisted of a relatively modest slice of land north of the Caspian – extended to include the vast swathe of territory slanting south-west from Nizhniy Novgorod and Voronezh in Russia to Kiev in Ukraine and the river Prut on the borders of Romania. In the east his horde encompassed Khorezm and the famous city of Urganch. With Saray as their centre these lands were what became known – though only from the sixteenth century – as the Golden Horde. The khanate took its name from Batu’s fabulously embroidered silk tents pitched on the banks of the Volga to receive the defeated Russian princes who were summoned thither to pay him homage. Yellow or gold was, besides, the mark of imperial power. Genghis’s descendants were known as the Golden Family, and the Great Khan traditionally held sway from the Golden Ordu, his seat of power. Though the borders Batu established remained essentially the same until Temur’s interventions in the late fourteenth century, after his death in 1255 or 1256 his brother Berke mounted the throne of the Golden Horde and raised another city, New Saray, also on the banks of the Akhtuba, east of Volgograd. New Saray became the capital of the khanate under Uzbeg, whose reign from 1313 to 1341 represented the height of the Golden Horde’s power and glory. At this time it started to eclipse the Chaghatay ulus as the principal caravan route linking Asia with Europe. The Genoese and Venetians, those indomitably commercial European pioneers, were allowed to establish colonies in Kaffa and at Tana at the mouth of the river Don. New Saray grew rich on trade in child slaves, silks and spices, salt and corn, wine and cheese. In 1339, the Franciscan envoy brought Uzbeg a superb warhorse as a gift from the Avignon papacy, in recognition of the khan’s protection of the Christian communities. In the early 1330s, Ibn Battutah discovered an extraordinarily cosmopolitan city of Mongols, Kipchaks, Circassians, Russians and Greeks, each community living in its own quarter. New Saray was, he considered, counting its thirteen cathedrals and numerous mosques, ‘one of the finest cities, of boundless size, situated in a plain, choked with the throng of its inhabitants and possessing good bazaars and broad streets’. Such had been its prodigious growth within a few years that it took the methodical Moroccan traveller half a day to cross from one side of the city to the other. Uzbeg’s son Janibeg ruled until 1357, his reign fatally undermined by the ravages of the Black Death, which killed an estimated eighty-five thousand in the Crimea alone. From this time the Golden Horde embarked upon a steady decline. Batu’s royal line came to an end in 1359, paving the way for two decades of civil wars and the simultaneous rise of the hitherto subject Russian princes. From 1360 to 1380, fourteen khans came and went, usually amid scenes of terrible violence. After 1368, when the Mongols were finally expelled from China, the greater Mongol empire was rudderless and unable to resolve the internal disputes of the Golden Horde. By the time of Tokhtamish’s arrival in Samarkand, the Horde had fragmented. Khorezm, formerly part of it, latterly independent, had been brought into Temur’s orbit. In the absence of central authority, local leaders rose to the fore. One of the most powerful was Mamay in the Crimea. Another was Urus, khan of the White Horde, whose lands bordered Moghulistan. He, like his rivals, aspired to lead a reunified Golden Horde restored to its former might. The leadership of this region was a vital consideration for Temur, for since the conquest of Khorezm it bordered his empire immediately to the north. Fomenting continued unrest in the White Horde by supporting Tokhtamish, a domestic rival to Urus, made eminent sense. It would distract Urus from his larger designs of consolidating the Golden Horde, which threatened Temur’s embryonic empire to the south. No expenses were spared, therefore, when the dishevelled Tokhtamish presented himself in Samarkand. Temur greeted him as his son and threw a sumptuous banquet to welcome him. He gave him gold, precious jewels, new weapons and armour, magnificent belts, cloths, furniture, horses, camels, tents and pavilions, kettle-drums and slaves. To help establish him, he was given lands on Temur’s northern borders and an army to further his designs. Twice Tokhtamish attacked Urus and twice he was repelled. Each time, Temur made good his losses and re-equipped him without complaint. When an ambassador arrived from Urus demanding the surrender of the fugitive, Temur’s response was swift: he joined battle alongside Tokhtamish. After stalemate in the frozen steppes, Temur and Tokhtamish were at last victorious. Urus died, his louche and incompetent successor was overthrown soon afterwards, and in 1378 Tokhtamish was installed as khan with Temur’s support. From that time he dedicated himself to bringing the entire Golden Horde under his control. No sooner had Temur resolved this northern question – for now – than news reached him that a former adversary had mounted a rebellion. In Khorezm, Yusef Sufi, no doubt ruing his decision to become Temur’s vassal, had elected to regain his independence. Reneging on formal agreements, though he himself practised it unswervingly throughout his campaigns, was anathema to Temur when encountered in an enemy. It demanded punitive retaliation. The city of Urganch was surrounded. Arabshah described it as a ravished maiden: ‘To the beautiful virgin he sent in a suitor and besieged her and reduced her to the utmost distress, tightening the garments of the throat at the neck of her approaches, so that his nails were almost fixed in her lappets.’ As the siege engines and mangonels massed around the city walls and set about their destructive work, a desperate Yusef sent a message to Temur: ‘Why should the world face ruin and destruction because of two men? Why should so many faithful Muslims perish because of our quarrel? Better that we two should find ourselves face to face in open field to prove our valour.’ A time and a place for the duel were suggested. It was an ill-considered approach to a man who, though lame in his right side, had always thrived on combat. Temur accepted the challenge. Methodically, piece by piece, he donned his duelling armour. The circular embossed shield was secured on his left arm. From his left hip hung his long, curved sword. Only after he had mounted his charger did he put on his black and gold helmet. Fearing disaster, his amirs crowded round, pleading with him not to undertake such a rash mission. There was no need for such a display of personal bravery, they pleaded with him. It was their duty to fight on the battlefield. The emperor’s job was to command from the throne. The old amir Sayf ad-din Nukuz rushed forward, grabbed the horse’s reins and remonstrated with his leader. Temur would not countenance any opposition. He made as if to strike his aged retainer and then broke free. Taking a last look at his assembled amirs, he roused his horse with a cry, spurred it forward and galloped off towards the moated city of Urganch, leaving his panic-stricken followers coughing in the dust. In front of the city walls, under the incredulous stare of scores of archers, any one of whom could have killed him with a single well-placed arrow, Temur announced himself. He had come to accept Yusef Sufi’s challenge. He was met with silence. Yusef had never expected Temur to pick up the gauntlet thrown down in the heat of the siege, yet here he was, alone and unprotected. It was a gesture of outstanding bravery and blind recklessness. Humiliated in front of his own men, Yusef cowered in his inner rooms. He had no intention of going out to meet Temur in a duel to the death. The Tatar looked up with contempt at the massed ranks of archers on the ramparts. ‘He who breaks his word shall lose his life,’ he shouted, and with that he was gone. Passing back through the lines of siege engines across the empty plain, he returned to a tumultuous reception from his men. Yusef, if he ever heard his enemy’s last words, must have been haunted by them. Within three months he had fallen sick and died. The outlying provinces were plundered and ravaged by Temur’s hordes who moved across the plains like devouring locusts. Urganch, the city of plenty, now belonged to Temur. The sacking of Urganch in 1379, though cataclysmic for Khorezm, did not bring to an end the history of Temur’s involvement with the city. His empire was one of conquest followed, often years later, by reconquest. A formal empire like that of Rome was neither his model nor his ambition. Trade, and the peace and stability needed to promote it, always weighed heavily in his calculations, but they were of secondary importance to the overwhelming principle of conquest. Conquest required armies, armies required soldiers. And soldiers had to be paid and rewarded for their efforts. A map of his campaigns remains the most eloquent statement of Temur’s boundless ambition, his relentless drive, his limitless energy. Lines stretch greedily across Asia, through natural obstacles, across deserts, past powerful enemies, as far west as the gates of Europe on the Turkish coast, as far east as deepest Siberia, from the outskirts of Moscow in the north, across the roof of the world to Delhi in the south. Looking at this map and studying the dates of these campaigns – back-to-back for thirty-five years with only a single hiatus of two years during which Temur remained in Samarkand – it is difficult to counter the argument that keeping his armies on the move, plundering and sacking as they went, was his overriding raison d’?tre. Had the leaders of Urganch understood this, they might well have cast aside any delusions of independence and opted for a more peaceful existence under the yoke of Temur’s empire. But memories must have been very short in the city, for in 1388, only a decade after the last failed revolt, the Sufi dynasty of Khorezm, spurred on by the troublemaking Tokhtamish, now established as khan of the Golden Horde, decided to rebel. Once more Temur returned to the city, and once more the results were catastrophic for its citizens. If he was cruel in conquest, when revisiting a city he was merciless. Urganch was razed. For ten days he led his men in savagery and slaughter. By the end of it the city which had been ‘a place of meeting for the learned, a home for men of culture and poets, a resort of the refined and great’, had disappeared. Urganch consisted only of a single mosque. As a mark of his wrath, Temur had barley sown over the ground where once the city had stood. It was his most feared calling card, a reminder that should he wish to do so he could erase an entire city from the face of the earth. The once fertile kingdom of Khorezm, a prosperous centre of trade and agriculture and a distinguished seat of Arabic learning, is now a neglected corner of the former Soviet empire, a fatally dry and dusty desert province struggling to survive. The aridity of the region, the root of its poverty and disease, finds its echoes in the story of Urganch’s last ill-fated tussle with Temur. For in tearing it apart wall by wall and house by house, Temur spared nothing. The sprawling irrigation system, which watered vast numbers of fields and underpinned all agricultural activity, was ripped up and destroyed. Urganch was left to the desert. Over the years that followed, it gradually recovered, but it never regained its former splendour. In time it was displaced by the neighbouring city of Khiva as the capital of Khorezm. Today, Urgench, as it is now known, is a grey, open-air Soviet museum, a city of straight lines and stony faces. Its people have been doomed to live in a region condemned to permanent drought, but in their poverty they have nowhere else to go. Lenin, pioneer of the Soviet experiment that helped turn the province into this poisonous dustbowl, has disappeared, but other monuments, such as that honouring the Martyrs of the Revolution, remain in concrete defiance. Clues to understanding Khorezm’s decline are clustered around the city. Cotton motifs decorate the buildings, the soulless apartment blocks, even the streetlights, paying tribute to the region’s main source of income and the architect of its environmental collapse. Under constant pressure since the 1960s, when the Soviet Union earmarked Central Asia as its cotton basin, the two rivers which flowed so freely in Temur’s time and fed the Aral Sea have now been bled dry by this most thirsty of crops. Neither the Amu Darya nor the Sir Darya even reaches the sea any longer. What Temur began in those moments of fury, the Soviets unwittingly accelerated. Where the Tatar obliterated the irrigation network, the Soviets expanded it with a vengeance. The ecological disaster they unleashed is widely regarded as the world’s worst. The environmental problem is so acute that Urgench, which until recently saw snow in winter and rain in spring, now has neither. Instead, it is warm and dry all year round. Elsewhere in the region summers have become hotter and winters colder. Clouds which once skimmed over the Aral Sea, collecting water which fed the region as rain, now pick up salt instead. In the space of a generation, the area of the Aral Sea has been halved, the volume of its waters cut by three-quarters. Each year the water level drops by a further three feet, releasing new swathes of contaminated land to the winds scouring its surface. The herbicides and defoliants used to improve cotton yields leach into the evaporating sea until they are left as chemical crusts, disintegrating into dust and then scattered across the region by the gusting north-east winds and recurrent sandstorms. Driven away or simply destroyed, the number of species of mammals in the region has fallen from seventy to thirty, the number of bird species from 319 to 168. The salt content of the Aral Sea has trebled over thirty years, killing all twenty-four species of its fish – including carp, perch, sturgeon and salmon – and dealing a death blow to the city of Muynak, once its largest port, now the graveyard of Soviet hubris. Rusting hulls of fishing boats lie discarded on their sides, a hundred miles from the sea’s retreating shores. These vessels are all that remain of the once mighty Aral fleet which in 1921, responding to an appeal from Lenin to help the starving Volga region, caught twenty-one thousand tonnes of fish and sent them north to relieve the famine. In the 1970s and eighties, the annual catch was forty thousand tonnes and more. Now, apart from the negligible quantities of fish with carcinogenic tissue surviving in the scattered salt-water ponds, the sea is empty. Muynak is a desperate place. The sea has fled under man’s assault, uncovering his legacy of contamination to the winds, leaving the town beached on the sand-flats like a tragic shipwreck, a port without a sea. Health problems abound. Tuberculosis and anaemia are common. Diets are poor. Meat is almost impossible to find and any vegetables grown locally contain traces of harmful chemicals. The water is polluted. Even the air the people breathe is frequently contaminated, as winds whip up chemical dust and pass it into their lungs. ‘Fish are our prosperity’, reads a sign in front of the tatty municipal building, flanked by painted hoardings on which smiling sailors with bulging muscles unload their catch into the arms of buxom factory workers. On the top floor is the office of the mayor, a corpulent and corrupt man who takes more interest in dubious construction projects and the beautification of his mansion than in the hunger, disease and economic misery of his townspeople. Even in that most autocratic of empires under Temur, corrupt behaviour by an official was, if uncovered, unlikely to have gone unpunished. Had he served Temur in local government, the present-day mayor of Muynak would probably have been a marked man. In 1404, returning to Samarkand after five years’ campaigning in western Asia, Temur learnt that Dina, the city’s governor, had been ruling capriciously during his absence. ‘His Highness since his return had come to know that this man had betrayed his trust, using his office to misgovern and oppress the people,’ Clavijo related. ‘He therefore now commanded this Dina the Chief Mayor to be brought before him, and after judgement forthwith he was taken out and without delay hanged.’ The punishment did not end there. The money the mayor had appropriated from the subjects of Samarkand was returned to the imperial treasury. An influential friend who had tried to buy Dina’s pardon was also hanged. Another official, a favourite of Temur who had likewise tried to intercede on the mayor’s behalf, was arrested and tortured until he had revealed the whereabouts of his entire fortune. No sooner had he done so than he was dragged off to join the governor of Samarkand on the gallows, where he was hanged upside down until dead. ‘This act of high justice condemning so great a personage to death, made all men to tremble, and notably he had been one in whom his Highness had reposed much confidence.’ The only employer left in Muynak is the fish-canning factory, but its days are numbered. Back in 1941, when it was founded, the sea was only five hundred yards away, and fishermen deposited their catch at the gates. Now the few fish being processed come from small salt-water lakes in the region, a token, state-directed effort to keep the factory afloat. It hasn’t worked. Like the hotel, the canning plant is facing imminent bankruptcy. Salaries haven’t been paid for a year. Only a small fraction of the 1,200 workers who packed fish in happier days remain. Most of these look beaten down by the dreadful conditions. Inside, it resembles a dark, damp dungeon. Unlit corridors penetrate deep into the heart of the building. It is freezing, the sort of cold that hurts your head, shoots through your clothes and passes directly into your bones. The walls are filthy. Just visible beneath the grime, occasional Soviet-era slogans praising the workers overlook teams of men and women hunched over medieval machines. The whole place stinks of an evil combination of putrefying fish and rusting equipment. At the back of the factory, a group of men with makeshift trolleys congregate in front of a counter full of watermelons, the sort which in Temur’s time had so impressed Ibn Battutah (‘the very best and biggest’ in the world, he thought). It looks like a greengrocer with limited stock – one sort of fruit and no vegetables – but the reality is more depressing. This fish-canning factory in Central Asia’s most advanced country has run out of money. It pays its workers in melons. (#ulink_6e365e4e-ed73-5c24-84c6-7ee1f65d9c43) The chief whispering in Husayn’s ear was none other than Kay-Khusrau Khuttalani, the same man to whom Temur had handed over Amir Husayn for execution in 1370, to satisfy an outstanding blood feud. Kay-Khusrau paid for his subsequent desertion to the Sufis of Khorezm. When captured, he was handed over by Temur to Amir Husayn’s family, who executed him in turn. This was typical of Temur’s acuity in tribal dealings. In both cases he kept his own hands clean. (#ulink_6e365e4e-ed73-5c24-84c6-7ee1f65d9c43) The obscurity surrounding the names and numbers of Temur’s wives clears up slightly when it comes to his sons. Temur’s first-born, Jahangir, was born in around 1356 when Temur would have been twenty. His mother’s name, according to the sixteenth-century historian Khwandamir, was Narmish-agha. Omar Shaykh followed, with Miranshah, the third son, born in 1366. Shahrukh, the youngest, was born in 1377. 3 ‘The Greatest and Mightiest of Kings’ (#ulink_e7f1af9c-98a6-51a1-b2d1-fa225548e052) ‘The character of Temur has been differently appraised by those who are dazzled by his military achievements on the one hand and those who are disgusted by his cruelty and utter disregard of human life on the other.’ EDWARD G. BROWNE, A Literary History of Persia If we are to understand Temur’s unparalleled life, his numerous campaigns and victories, the motivation which impelled him halfway across the world to seek them and the brilliant tactical acumen which left him undefeated on his deathbed, if we are to appreciate his love of magnificence, bravery and beauty, his intolerance of laziness, cowardice and corruption, his lifelong respect for learned men and religious scholars, the cunning and cruelty which proved fatal to millions, the generosity and forgiveness which came to the rescue of so many others – in short, if we are to make sense of perhaps the greatest self-made man who ever lived, then there is no better place to begin than with his contemporaries. The most flattering profile of Temur is provided by the Persian court historian of the early fifteenth century, Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi. Zafarnama, the Book of Victory, is a veritable panegyric, peppered with passages singing the emperor’s praises, so much so that the reader is inclined to skim through the sycophancy and dismiss Yazdi as a hopelessly servile commentator. But what is interesting about the Persian’s ingratiating chronicle is the fact that both he and Ibn Arabshah, Temur’s inveterate critic, single out several attributes in common. ‘Courage raised him to be the supreme Emperor of Tartary, and subjected all Asia to him, from the frontiers of China to those of Greece,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘He governed the state himself, without availing himself of a minister; he succeeded in all his enterprises. To everyone he was generous and courteous, except to those who did not obey him – he punished them with the utmost rigour. He loved justice, and no one who played the tyrant in his dominion went unpunished; he esteemed learning and learned men. He laboured constantly to aid the fine arts. He was utterly courageous in planning, and carrying out a plan. To those who served him, he was kind.’ (#ulink_69f72309-b597-5a23-be19-f423c4888360) Arabshah, surprisingly, provided the most valuable portrait of the conqueror. As we have seen, the Syrian was anything but a dispassionate observer, having witnessed at first hand the devastation wrought on his native Damascus by the Tatar hordes in 1401. Appalled by the torture and slaughter of the city’s inhabitants, it is little wonder that he succumbed to the temptations of invective in his life of Temur. The recurrent references to his subject as a bastard, viper, demon, despot, treacherous impostor, wicked fool, owl of ill omen and the like do little for Arabshah’s credibility as an objective biographer. Yet Arabshah is a critical character witness precisely because of this profound enmity. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the final chapter of his book, the very heading of which pulls the reader up short. It is entitled ‘Of the Wonderful Gifts of Temur and his Nature and Character’. Unlike the preceding chapters, which rarely exceed five pages, and are frequently only one, this runs to thirty-five pages. Its opening passage leaves us with a picture of the conqueror at the end of his life, and is worth quoting from at length. It begins with a physical description: Temur was tall and lofty of stature as though he belonged to the remnants of the Amalekites, big in brow and head, mighty in strength and courage, wonderful in nature, white in colour, mixed with red, but not dark, stout of limb, with broad shoulders, thick fingers, long legs, perfect build, long beard, dry hands, lame on the right side, with eyes like candles, without brilliance; powerful in voice; he did not fear death; and though he was near his [seventieth] year yet he was firm in mind, strong and robust in body, brave and fearless, like a hard rock. The Soviet archaeological team which opened Temur’s tomb in 1941 found that he was a well-built man of about five feet seven inches, ‘tall and lofty of stature’ for that time. His lameness was likewise established. An injury to his right leg, where the thighbone had merged with his kneecap, left it shorter than the left, hence the pronounced limp referred to in his pejorative nickname. When walking he dragged his right leg, and his left shoulder was found to be unnaturally higher than the right. Further wounds were discovered to his right hand and elbow. The red colour Arabshah mentions in Temur’s colouring may well be a reference to his moustache and beard, traces of which were found still attached to the skull. ‘He did not care for jesting or lying,’ Arabshah continues. ‘Wit and trifling pleased him not; truth, even if it were painful, delighted him; he was not sad in adversity nor joyful in prosperity … He did not allow in his company any obscene talk or talk of bloodshed or captivity, rapine, plunder and violation of the harem. He was spirited and brave and inspired awe and obedience. He loved bold and valiant soldiers, by whose aid he opened the locks of terror, tore men to pieces like lions, and through them and their battles overturned mountains …’ It is as though the dignity and grandeur of Temur’s character, suppressed by the Syrian for nine-tenths of the book, is finally too much for him to contain. After the long summaries, and vituperative denunciations, of Temur’s campaigns, it is time for Arabshah to deliver his verdict on Temur the man. And suddenly, the language has changed. The conqueror is ‘wonderful in nature’, his fearlessness is mentioned twice within a few sentences, rather like Yazdi’s emphasis of his courage. He is the object of his soldiers’ awe. The man who Arabshah has been telling us for three hundred pages revels in wanton cruelty and spilling blood does not, it transpires, tolerate any talk of bloodshed, rape or plunder in his presence. As Arabshah continues, you sense that after all these pages filled with hatred he finds himself, despite his intentions, re-evaluating his subject in a vastly more favourable light. It is a marvellous and highly revealing moment. Temur, he goes on, was: A debater, who by one look and glance comprehended the matter aright, trained, watchful for the slightest sign; he was not deceived by intricate fallacy nor did hidden flattery pass him; he discerned keenly between truth and fiction, and caught the sincere counsellor and the pretender by the skill of his cunning, like a hawk trained for the chase, so that for his thoughts he was judged a shining star. No longer the coarse viper, Temur is the consummate diplomat and politician, masterful in the business of empire, attuned to deceit and subterfuge, a ‘shining star’ in the intellectual firmament. In his first chapter, Arabshah poured scorn on Temur’s lineage. He was born, said the Syrian, into ‘a mixed horde, lacking either reason or religion’. Brought up in the nomadic traditions of the steppe, the Tatar spoke both Turkic and Persian fluently, but was illiterate. By the end of his book, Arabshah has arrived at a rather different judgement on Temur’s intelligence and his respect for learning. Temur loved learned men, and admitted to his inner reception nobles of the family of Mahomed; he gave the highest honour to the learned and doctors and preferred them to all others and received each of them according to his rank and granted them honour and respect; he used towards them familiarity and an abatement of his majesty; in his arguments with them he mingled moderation with splendour, clemency with rigour and covered his severity with kindness. Temur’s harshest critic, the man who had seen his great city reduced to ashes, its men and women raped and butchered, is at pains to stress that the Tatar was no mindless, uncouth, heathen tyrant. Temur liked to gather the most illustrious minds about him. Few could expect mercy when he torched a city, but scholars, poets, men of letters, Muslim clerics, shaykhs, dervishes and divines, artists and architects, miniaturists, masons and skilled craftsmen of all descriptions were invariably spared. If soldiers were his first love as an emperor, Temur’s admiration for holy men and men of letters came a close second. Under his rule Samarkand attracted – voluntarily and otherwise – Asia’s most distinguished minds, and this at a time when high culture in that continent shone more brightly than in benighted Europe. From Baghdad came Nizam ad-din Shami, author of the original Zafarnama, the inspiration for Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi’s later work of the same name. Persian scholars thronged to the conqueror’s court. There was Sa’d ad-din Mas’ud at Taftazani, one of the celebrated polymaths of his era, a theologian, grammarian, lawyer and exegetical teacher. He was joined by Ali ibn Mohammed as Sayyid ash Sharif al Jurjanj, the mystic and logician, and Abu Tahrir ibn Yaqub ash Shirazi al Firuzabadi, the renowned lexicographer. Lutfallah Nishapuri, the poet laureate and panegyrist of Temur’s son Miranshah, was highly regarded by Temur. Another poet, Ahmed Kermani, author of the Temurnama (Book of Temur), was on intimate terms with the emperor, while eminent scholars like Djezeri, compiler of one of the most respected Arabic dictionaries, were frequently granted high office. There were many foundations and endowments for colleges and mosques, schools and hospitals. And at the centre of this extended academic and cultural web sat Temur, distributing patronage like a spider spinning its web. In 1401 there occurred one of the most fascinating meetings of minds of the age when the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun was presented to the Tatar during the siege of Damascus. After staying in Temur’s camp for a month, he left with a profound respect for ‘one of the greatest and mightiest of kings’, not to mention a commission to write a history of North Africa. Temur impressed him with his knowledge of the history of the Tatars, Arabs and Persians: ‘He is highly intelligent and very perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also about what he does not know.’ Arabshah also took note of Temur’s interest in history: ‘He was constant in reading annals and histories of the prophets of blessed memory and the exploits of kings,’ he wrote. The emperor even established a new position of Story-Reader in his court. Practical disciplines such as mathematics, astronomy and medicine were particularly favoured. Prefiguring Yazdi’s uncritical comments, Arabshah goes on to express his admiration for Temur’s persistence and determination: ‘When he had ordered anything or given a sign that it should be done, he never recalled it or turned thence the reins of his purpose, that he might not be found in inconstancy and weakness of plan or deed.’ Yazdi puts it rather more flatteringly: ‘As Temur’s ambition was boundless, and the least of his designs surpassed the greatest actions in the world, he never abandoned any one of his enterprises till he had completely finished it.’ Famously brilliant at manoeuvring his armies to victory on the battlefield, Temur was no less skilful at marshalling his forces on the chessboard, where his cool calculation, audacity and control undid the grand masters of his day. Even here he was exceptional, observed Arabshah. ‘He was constant in the game of chess, that with it he might sharpen his intellect; but his mind was too lofty to play at the lesser game of chess and therefore he played only the greater game, in which the chess board is of ten squares by eleven, that is increased by two camels, two giraffes, two sentinels, two mantelets [war engines], a vazir and other pieces.’ (#ulink_5eb9452f-fdd5-5c87-ad24-b75decf05157) The longer Arabshah dwells on Temur’s character, the more highly he seems to extol his virtues, until, towards the end, he observes simply: ‘He was called the unconquered lord of the seven climes and ruler by land and sea and conqueror of Kings and Sultans.’ But there is a last sting in the tail. Summoning back his deep-seated resentment, he damns the Tatar on one important account: ‘He clung to the laws of Jenghizkhan … on whom be the curse of Allah,’ he rasps. ‘Temur must be accounted an infidel and those also who prefer the laws of Jenghizkhan to the faith of Islam.’ Arabshah was right to recognise the tension between the two motivating principles behind Temur’s life of conquest. What he failed to appreciate was that Temur’s political and religious ideology was a shrewdly calculated amalgam of the yasa, or customary laws, of Genghis Khan on the one hand and Islam on the other. Temur drew freely from both Islam and the laws of Genghis to justify his actions, be they military conquest or domestic political arrangements. He was, above all else, an opportunist. At his coronation in 1370 he installed a puppet Chaghatay khan as his nominal superior, in deference to the traditions requiring the khan to be of royal blood. Thereafter a khan presided over Temur’s expanding empire: first Prince Suyurghatmish and, from 1388, his son Sultan Mahmud. For all Temur’s pomp and power, and even at the height of his majesty, he never styled himself a khan. He was instead Temur the Great Emir, or Temur Gurgan, son-in-law of the Great Khan through his marriage to Saray Mulk-khanum, and it was in these names and that of the Chaghatay khan that coins were minted and Samarkand’s authority acknowledged in the khutba (Friday prayers) throughout his lands. But no one, certainly not Arabshah, doubted where the real source of power lay. Temur was no infidel. Islam governed his military career in the same way that Christianity provided the ideological propulsion for the Crusaders during their bloody sojourns in the Holy Lands. The Crescent always surmounted Temur’s royal standard, and it was under the banner of Islam that his conquests were prosecuted. That Islam and wholesale slaughter were incompatible bedfellows was beside the point. The same could be said of the Christian faith and the Crusaders. Just as he borrowed from the traditions of Genghis, so Temur dipped freely into the laws of Islam, picking up and retaining those aspects of the faith he found useful, disregarding those which were inconvenient. He had no time, for instance, for the Prophet’s recommendation of a maximum of four wives for a man. More important, despite a lifetime’s wanderings, he never found time to honour one of the five pillars of Islam, the pilgrimage to Mecca, a badge of honour for dutiful Muslims who can afford the journey. He did not shave his head, nor did he wear a turban or the robes prescribed by the faith. Temur’s interpretation of jihad, (#ulink_91b28637-8336-573b-ad7a-009f43bcf4f8) or holy war, cast further doubt on his credentials as a good Muslim. In his eyes it justified the use of force and savagery against virtually anyone. It was one thing to launch a holy war against the infidels of Christian Georgia, as Temur did several times (on one campaign he even forced King Bagrat to convert to Islam). It was quite another to put fellow Muslims to the sword. As high-born leaders, lowly soldiers, desperate women and innocent children all discovered to their cost, professing the faith of Islam was no guarantee of safety from Temur’s armies. Muslim Asia, after all, was their stamping ground. They swept through its heartland – across what are today Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and India – raining down death on the sons and daughters of the Koran. Who could count the nameless millions of Muslims who perished at their hands? These were the people who suffered his worst atrocities. Two thousand were piled on top of one another and cemented alive into towers of clay and bricks in the city of Isfizar in 1383. In Isfahan, holy city of Persia, seventy thousand were slaughtered in 1387; the sacking of Baghdad in 1401 left ninety thousand dead, their heads cemented into 120 towers. Damascus and Aleppo witnessed unimaginable horrors. And yet this was a man who aspired to the title of Ghazi, Warrior of the Faith. Christians, Jews and Hindus – the infidels who should have felt the full force of the sword of Islam – escaped lightly by comparison. Only occasionally, as though to make up for his massacres of brother Muslims, did Temur unleash his wrath on them. In 1398, shortly before joining battle against the (Muslim) sultan of Delhi, he gave orders for a hundred thousand mostly Hindu prisoners to be killed. Two years later, he had four thousand Armenians buried alive in Sivas, this time sparing its Muslim population. There was an arbitrariness to Temur’s atrocities that belied his claims of holy war. Sometimes, as in Afghanistan and parts of Persia, he explained his rampages as an attack on the Sunni creed of Islam. (#ulink_a9fdf17f-43de-5278-9aac-6718aa38a4bc) In Mazandaran, also in Persia, by contrast, cities were razed to punish Shi’a dervishes. Then again, Temur could just as easily pose as protector of the Shi’a tradition. In Damascus, Arabshah’s fellow citizens were put to the sword ostensibly on account of their hostility to the Shi’a. In 1396, Temur looked south for his next conquest. ‘The sultans of Delhi have been slack in their defence of the Faith,’ he told his amirs before leading his troops across the towering Hindu Kush mountains to sack that city. In 1404, he rallied his troops for his last campaign. Once more the banner of holy war was raised, this time against the infidel Ming emperor. Temur’s observation of the Muslim faith was based on pragmatism rather than principle. Although he came from a conventional Sunni tradition, his Sufi credentials were bolstered through his patronage of the Naqshbandi order, centred in Bukhara, and his cultivation of the Sufi shaykhs of Mawarannahr and Khorasan, who enjoyed a prominent position in his court, none more so than Shaykh Baraka of Andkhoi. (#litres_trial_promo) Temur also buried family members in handsome tombs next to the shrines of distinguished Sufis. But if the hints of his Sufist sympathies were strong, signs of support for the Shi’a were hardly lacking either. The most striking is to be found on his tombstone in the Gur Amir mausoleum in Samarkand, where an elaborate and largely invented family tree traces him back to Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet. In another nod to Shi’ite tradition, Temur displayed special attention to the descendants of the Prophet throughout his life. It is just as difficult for modern scholars to pin him down on his religious allegiances as it was for his contemporaries. Temur was a chameleon. Whatever worked or furthered his cause in any way was good. This was a cynical interpretation, certainly, but what his message of jihad lacked in intellectual coherence and consistency, it made up for in the sheer projection of force. It was, quite simply, the creed of conquest. It was in the public displays that Islam shone brightest. The five daily prayers were a regular feature of life at Temur’s court. Wherever he campaigned, with him went the imams and the royal mosque, a sumptuously appointed pavilion made of the finest silk. From it came the ululating cadences of the muaddin, calling forth the faithful to prayer. One of Temur’s most practised routines was to prostrate himself on the ground and offer up prayers to the Almighty prior to joining battle. This was done in full view of his princes, amirs and soldiers, and served as a reminder that God was on his side, a message reinforced by the dutiful religious leaders who always accompanied the armies on their campaigns. Pre-eminent among these was Shaykh Sayid Baraka, whom Temur had met in Termez during the early years of rivalry with Husayn. In 1391, as Temur’s army stared across the Kunduzcha river at the ranks of Tokhtamish’s soldiers, Baraka picked up some dirt and flung it at the enemy. ‘Your faces shall be blackened through the shame of your defeat,’ he roared. ‘Go where you please,’ he continued, turning to Temur. ‘You shall be victorious.’ Once again the emperor’s mounted archers rode to triumph. It was a straightforward, symbiotic relationship. The priestly entourage owed its position to Temur, and in return for this generous patronage assured him – and the soldiers – of the Almighty’s support for whatever military campaign His servant on earth might propose. Sycophantic clerics, if called on, would justify any action. As Hilda Hookham put it in her 1962 biography: ‘With the blessing of the shaykhs, Temur could lead his hordes against all the kingdoms of the seven climes, destroying infidels because they were not Muslims and Muslims because they were not faithful.’ Obsequious court writers like Yazdi, in the service of one of Temur’s grandsons, later fulfilled the same purpose. ‘We have a tradition of Mahomet,’ he observed, ‘wherein he assures us that he was the child of the sword, and that the most happy moments which he passed with God were when he had the sword in his hand; and he adds, that paradise itself is under the protection of the sword: which demonstrates that kings are not peaceable possessors of the throne, but when they are victorious; and that subjects cannot enjoy quiet in their families, but by the protection of the sword of their prince.’ Yet the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction was just as likely to consult astrologers as holy men for the opportune moment to strike. Their duty was to determine the disposition of the planets. In practice this meant delivering the verdict the emperor wanted to hear. His response to their deductions was governed, as ever, by expediency. If the astrologers failed to reach the desired conclusion, they were ignored. When, at the gates of Delhi, they decided the omens were unfavourable for attack, Temur simply reverted to Islam. ‘Neither fortune nor affliction depends on the stars,’ he replied with severity. ‘I confide myself to the care of the Almighty, who has never yet abandoned me. What does it matter if the planets are in this or that relationship?’ As the astrologers retreated in shame, he promptly took out his copy of the Koran and opened it, conveniently, at a passage which indicated that victory was assured. It was. Temur saw no contradiction between bloodshed and Islam. The transition from slaughter on the battlefield one day and quiet reflection in a mosque or shrine the next posed no moral difficulties for him. Days after ravaging Delhi so utterly it took the city a century to recover, he strode calmly into the beautiful mosque on the river Jumna to give thanks for his victory. In Baghdad, as his soldiers put the finishing touches to the 120 towers of skulls, while the Tigris ran red with blood and the air was putrid from rotting corpses, Temur was visiting the tomb of the venerated eighth-century imam Abu Hanifa, chief of one of the four orthodox sects of Islam, ‘to implore the intercession of this saint’. In his understanding that appearances were everything, and with his instinct for choreographed expressions of piety, Temur demonstrated a profoundly modern approach to the politics of his day. Wine was another subject on which Temur revealed his ambivalence towards religion and his preference for Mongol custom. Strictly prohibited by Islam, it was generally not permitted in his court. But there were numerous exceptions when it flowed freely: at the lavish Tatar banquets held to celebrate a victory in battle; during a family wedding; or on the conclusion of Ramadan. The Spanish ambassador Clavijo was one witness among many to bacchanalian orgies which owed more to the heathen traditions of Genghis Khan and the Mongols than the strictures of Islam. A beautiful cup-bearer was assigned to each man at the feast, the Spaniard noted. Her duty was to ensure that the guest’s golden goblet was kept full at all times. Refusing a toast, in which the entire contents of the vessel had to be downed, was considered a serious breach of etiquette and a sign of discourtesy towards the emperor. Teetotallers generally discovered a sudden affection for the grape on such occasions. Feasts invariably ended in a drunken blur. Those warriors who could still stand would grab a companion for the night and stagger back to their tents. There was nothing Islamic about that. Moments like these betrayed Temur’s genius for the popular gesture. Sometimes these were designed to underline his position as an Islamic leader, such as zakat (the giving of alms), the observation of Ramadan or the prohibition on eating pork. At other moments it was the laws of Genghis he chose to honour, reassuring his followers that the traditions of the steppe were supreme. He was highly intelligent, ambitious, manipulative, cynical and exploitative. The question whether he was a good Muslim or whether he abided by Mongol customs misses the point. Temur was interested in either code insofar as it supported his designs of conquest. What is important to appreciate is the skill with which he managed to use now one, now the other, to his advantage. And this in turn testifies to his outstanding capacity for leadership. Nowhere were these talents so much in evidence as with his armies. The foundation of his empire, the men by whom kingdoms were won or lost, Temur’s mounted archers were governed by a combination of iron discipline and lavish reward. They knew they could be cut in half, hanged, run through with a sword or otherwise executed for cowardice, treachery or unlicensed plunder. They also understood that unswerving loyalty to Temur on and off the battlefield was the most likely path to riches. Temur’s generosity, referred to throughout the sources, was one of the causes of his victory over Husayn during their struggle for supremacy in Mawarannahr in the late 1360s. Where Husayn was greedy and loath to share the spoils of battle with his soldiers, Temur was generous to the point of self-impoverishment. While the amir of Balkh was happy to see Temur pay a punitive head tax with jewellery belonging to his wife, Husayn’s own sister, Temur regarded as a priority the reward of his supporters. This was not out of any sentimental regard for their prosperity and comfort. It was merely the most effective method of retaining their allegiance in a political system notorious for shifting, opportunistic alliances. The chronicles are full of tales of plunder, with soldiers staggering home under the weight of ransacked goods at the head of vast caravans of enslaved prisoners. Temur’s reputation for largesse served his military ambitions admirably. It also won him defections from his enemies. At times, such as the battle of Ankara in 1402, these defections were instrumental to his victories. In 1391, after his first defeat of Tokhtamish, he distributed priceless gifts to his soldiers in thanks for their courage on the battlefield. Yazdi related how: He distributed robes of honour, and belts adorned with precious stones, to the princes, Emirs, Cheriffs, and all the lords and officers of his army: he also honoured with his favours the generals and captains of his troops, as a recompense for their fatigue, and in joy of his victories. But the pleasure which the great warriors received, when Temur applauded their actions, was inexpressibly great; in this charming retreat he sent them in cups of gold the most delicious wines by the hands of the most beautiful women in the world. Both discipline and reward came to depend upon the emperor himself rather than the tribal leaders at the lower level. Temur deliberately appointed men from the ranks of his personal followers, including family members, to positions of high command. This was done to undermine the traditional system of armies being led by tribal chiefs, the main source of potential opposition to him – or, in extremis, outright rebellion. It resulted in the formation of a new military class directly loyal to his person, free from the political constraints of the tribe. These men enjoyed hereditary positions, which meant that in time, through their sons and grandsons, as well as his own, the numbers of Temur’s personal followers steadily increased. As his power grew and the size of his armies swelled from captured forces and fresh conscription, the authority of this new elite went from strength to strength, while the influence of the tribal leaders waned in parallel. The organisation of Temur’s armies would have been recognised at once by Genghis Khan, for it followed the structure of the Mongols’. There was a left wing, a right wing, the centre and the advance guard. The smallest unit of men was ten soldiers, an onlik, led by an onbashi. Ten of these groups formed the yuzlik, under the next rank of yuzbashi, officers denoted by the kettle-drums slung across the saddles of their outriders. After this came the binlik, a body of a thousand troops under the command of a binbashi. The most senior rank beneath Temur was the amir who presided over ten thousand men, a tuman, whose insignia was the tuk, a long lance with a horse’s tail fastened at its tip. Temur always heaped rewards on those who had shown particular valour on the battlefield. Acts of outstanding bravery were commemorated in the official court chronicles. Promotion depended above all on one’s military conduct. An onbashi would be made a yuzbashi after performing some heroic action, while the commander of a hundred became the commander of a thousand. The most senior officers were granted the ultimate title of tarkhan, a position harking back to the days of Genghis Khan. This conferred on them a number of important privileges, among which the most valuable was the permanent exemption from taxes. Unlike any other soldier in Temur’s armies, the tarkhan was entitled to keep everything he plundered. Everyone else had to make over a share of his spoils to the emperor. The tarkhan was also immune from criminal prosecution. Only after he had committed the same crime nine times was he answerable to justice. Perhaps the ultimate prize was his access to Temur at all times. It was the responsibility of the aides-de-camp, the tovachis, to ensure that the soldiers were properly equipped. Once conscripted, each man had to report for service with a bow, a quiver containing thirty arrows, a shield and enough grain to feed a horse for a year. For every two cavalrymen a spare horse was required, and each onlik, the body of ten soldiers, had to bring a tent, two spades, a pickaxe, rope, hide, an awl, an axe, a saw and one hundred needles. The Tatar foot-soldier carried a bow, an axe, a dagger, a sabre and a small round shield, wooden with an iron rim, hung at the hip. In winter he wore black sheepskins, coloured kaftans in summer, over either tight or baggy trousers and boots. On his head he sported a tall hat made of fur, felt or sheepskin. There was a comprehensive range of secondary weapons, including maces and varieties of swords, knives and shields. The richer soldiers had helmets, single-edged sabres and coats of mail for themselves and their horses. The Tatar composite bow, the main arm on which Temur’s armies depended, was a formidable weapon, considerably longer than the Persian, Turk or Indian versions. (#litres_trial_promo) It fired a heavier arrow with a shorter range. Temur’s soldiers made much use of another destructive technology. Greek-fire, invented in the seventh century, was a gelatinous incendiary mixture, fired at one’s enemy through bronze tubes. Its original composition is unknown, a closely guarded secret handed down from one Byzantine emperor to another, but it is thought to have been made from a combination of flammable materials such as sulphur, naphtha, quicklime and pitch in a petroleum base. Since it ignited spontaneously and could not be extinguished by water, it was a profoundly effective weapon, sowing panic among those who faced it. In battle, the principal tactics and techniques employed by Temur were horse-archery, envelopment of his enemy where possible, and, a particular favourite, used with enormous success, feigned flight. At Aleppo, for example, his men staged a deliberate retreat, leading the Syrians right behind their lines, where they were fallen upon and utterly routed. The Tatars, wrote an observer at the outset of the fourteenth century, ‘are for the most part victorious over their enemies; yet they are not afraid to turn their backs in a fight if it is to their advantage … Their manner of fighting is very dangerous, so that in one Tatar battle or skirmish there are more slain or wounded than in any great conflict between other nations, which results from their archery, for they shoot strongly and surely, being indeed so skilful in the art of shooting that they commonly pierce all kinds of armour, and if they happen to be routed they flee in troops and bands so well ordered that it is very dangerous to follow or pursue them, because they shoot arrows backwards in their flight, often wounding both men and horses that pursue them.’ Men predominated in the lines, but war was by no means their exclusive preserve, as Arabshah noted. There were also in his army many women who mingled in the m?l?e of battle and in fierce conflicts and strove with men and fought with brave warriors and overcame mighty heroes in combat with the thrust of the spear, the blow of the sword and shooting of arrows; when one of them was heavy with child and birth pangs seized her, while they were on the march, she turned from the way and withdrawing apart and descending from her beast, gave birth to the child and wrapping it in bandages, soon mounted her beast and taking the child with her, followed her company; and there were in his army men born on the march and grown to full age who married and begot children and yet never had a fixed home. A leader of impressive intellect and infinite cunning, Temur placed a premium on good, timely intelligence, the lifeblood of his many campaigns. A vast network of spies fanned out from Samarkand across his lands and into the kingdoms and empires of those he sought to conquer. Well represented among them were the Islamic orders, itinerant monks, dervishes, shaykhs and Sufis. ‘He was of rare temper and depth so deep that in the sea of his plans the bottom could not be touched, nor could one reach the high peak of his government by a smooth or rough path,’ wrote Arabshah. ‘He had placed through his realm his informers and in other kingdoms had appointed his spies; and these were amirs like Atilmish, one of his allies, or learned fakirs, like Masaud Kahajani, his chief minister, or traders seeking a living by some craft, ill-minded wrestlers, criminal athletes, labourers, craftsmen, soothsayers, physicians, wandering hermits, chatterers, strolling vagabonds, sailors, wanderers by land, elegant drunkards, witty singers, aged procuresses and crafty old women.’ These men, women and children brought back news from across Asia, from the prices and availability of various commodities to the state of an enemy kingdom, the names of its military leaders and nobles and the mapping of its lands and cities. ‘One skilful plan can perform the service of a hundred thousand warriors,’ Temur was reported to have said. To aid the flow of information, Temur, like the Mongols, used a system of posting stations known as yams. Up to two hundred horses were kept at each regularly staged post and stable, the costs met by the local population. Clavijo, who witnessed their operations at first hand while on his way to the emperor’s court, left a typically detailed description of how zealously the envoys and couriers went about their work on behalf of the emperor. Such was the importance accorded government business that if any envoy riding a tiring mount came upon other riders with fresher horses, these were required on pain of death to dismount and hand over their animals to the messenger and his entourage. No one was spared this inconvenience: the Spaniard was told that on one occasion Temur’s eldest son and his attendants were forced to surrender their horses to envoys en route to Samarkand. The information and intelligence contained in his envoys’ despatches was highly valued and jealously guarded by Temur. They were under strict orders to ride full tilt around the clock. ‘Temur indeed sets much store that those he sends and those who come to him should ride post day and night,’ Clavijo recorded. ‘So doing they may easily cover fifty leagues in the twenty-four hours, though by thus riding they will kill two horses. But this may be, rather than to take three days over that journey: for he deems speed to be much to his service.’ This was no exaggeration. Such hard riding inevitably took its toll, the unsightly evidence plain for all to see: ‘By the roadside many were the dead horses we saw during our journey, which had thus been ridden to death and the carcass abandoned: the number indeed a marvel to note.’ It is hardly surprising, given the range of his military triumphs, the part of the world from which he came, and the conscious emulation, when it suited him, of the traditions inspired by his illustrious predecessor, that Temur should find himself compared with Genghis Khan. History’s verdict has been divided, with the rival camps occupying the ground staked out for them by the original protagonists, Arabshah on the one hand and Yazdi on the other. In a recent history of Russia and the Mongols, Leo de Hartog found Temur both cruder and crueller than Genghis. Temur was as merciless as the Mongol world conqueror had been, but his subtle methods were often characterised by sadism, which had never been present in Genghis Khan. In the field of religion there were also great differences between the two. A parochial Muslim, Temur had little understanding of other faiths, while the shamanistic Genghis Khan was particularly tolerant towards other religions. In fact, it is not at all clear that Temur was as merciless as Genghis. There are numerous stories of acts of clemency on his part. Cities which surrendered quickly, such as Herat, Urganch and Baghdad, tended to be treated far more leniently than those whose resistance occasioned casualties among Temur’s soldiers and required an all-out assault. Those which opted to rise against him, however, could expect little quarter. As for the destruction which followed his every campaign, Temur was much more likely than Genghis to spare both men and monuments; and even when he did not he frequently had the same cities his men had razed to the ground rebuilt in the interests of trade and agriculture. That Temur was cruel is beyond question. But to accuse him of sadism is to indulge in unfounded speculation which owes more to the prejudices of the twenty-first century than the values of the fourteenth, when human life was held far cheaper than it is today. Temur was no exemplar of cruelty. When the Mamluk sultan Baybars took Antioch in 1263, for example, he had the sixteen-thousand-strong garrison slaughtered and the hundred thousand inhabitants sold into slavery. The massacres Temur committed were neither for his amusement nor pleasure. They were carried out to strike terror into his opponents’ hearts, to rid his newly conquered territories of opponents, and to minimise the risks of rebellion. The charge of religious intolerance is likewise wide of the mark. Temur used Islam primarily as an instrument conferring prestige and legitimacy on his actions. The charge of parochialism is one that not even his detractors, least of all Arabshah, would have recognised. Temur’s was the politics of the expedient. In an age when the Crescent and the Cross faced each other across the Aegean and the Mediterranean like the standards of hostile armies, it was Temur, and not the Ottoman sultan, who made friendly overtures towards the Christian princes of Europe. In Temur’s thinking the practicalities of trade between Europe and Asia could outweigh the traditional, deeply held religious antagonism between Christendom and the lands of Islam. He was a man of vision, his intellectual horizons as broad as the steppes across which he led his armies to victory. Arminius Vambery, the nineteenth-century Hungarian traveller and philologist, was better able to put Temur in historical perspective. He dismissed comparisons with Genghis. ‘Those who would rank Temur side by side with a Chinghiz, as a mere savage, wilful tyrant, are doubly in error,’ he wrote. ‘He was pre-eminently an Asiatic soldier who used his victories after the fashion of his time and country.’ Genghis had delegated civil and military command. After his early conquests, he directed his sweeping campaigns from his headquarters in Karakorum. Temur, a more reckless commander, had no interest in holding back from the fray. Samarkand, though the imperial capital, came to know him as an absentee emperor, forever appearing with untold riches plundered from the great cities of Asia, celebrating his victories at famously sumptuous banquets that could last several months, before disappearing again on campaigns of up to five years. Unlike Genghis, Temur was rarely absent from the battlefield, where he frequently threw himself into the action at great personal danger. Sir John Malcolm, the nineteenth-century soldier, statesman and historian, provided one of the best appreciations of Temur’s military charisma: ‘Such a leader as Temur must have been idolized by his soldiers … he was careless of the opinion of other classes in the community. His object was fame as a conqueror; and a noble city was laid in ashes, or the inhabitants of a province massacred, on a cold calculation that the dreadful impression would facilitate the purposes of his ambition.’ But whatever their respective styles on the battlefield, perhaps the most striking difference was evident off it. By today’s standards, Temur was a nomadic conqueror. He was constantly on the move. Hardly had he finished one campaign than his armies were assembled for another. Genghis and his Mongol hordes would, however, probably have viewed Temur’s career with disdain, for in Samarkand the Tatar had built a permanent capital, a concession to the way of life of the despised settled population, and a violation of the nomadic tradition cherished by the warriors of the steppe. Temur’s beloved city, the Pearl of the East, betrayed his love of opulence. The splendid mosques and madrassahs, the parks and the palaces, each of them a wonder of the world, revealed an appreciation of artistic excellence and architectural beauty that was entirely foreign to Genghis. Both men unleashed havoc across half the known world, put millions to the sword and razed to the earth cities standing in their path. But only Temur saw fit to rebuild, for he was a creator as much as a destroyer. This marked him out as a different breed of conqueror altogether. Much of his life was spent honouring the ancient traditions established by his Mongol predecessor, but by the time he died Temur was his own emperor, in thrall to no other man. Samarkand was the greatest expression of this individuality. It was a tribute to his undefeated military career and a monument to his imperial vanity. Over four decades the city soaked up Temur’s offerings like an avaricious mistress. There was gold, silver, precious stones, marble, exotic beasts, fabulous cloths, silks, tapestries, slaves and spices; yet still she was not satisfied. Each time he returned with more, she sent him back out into battle. Her glorification required ever increasing spoils from countless victories. Only constant campaigning could deliver them. By the end of the 1370s, Temur’s emerging empire took in the treasures and territories of Khorezm and Mawarannahr. Now, with Samarkand whispering in his ear, his eyes roved westward for more. (#ulink_b4b5cae0-0990-5acc-909f-5dae69656d51) Yazdi is by no means alone in providing such a glowing profile. Subsequent writers have also been mesmerised by Temur’s blaze of conquests. Military historians, above all, have been overwhelmed. Writing in 1915, Sir Percy Sykes echoed Yazdi’s conclusions in remarkably similar language, calling him ‘the greatest Asiatic conqueror known in history’, ‘the bravest of the brave’, ‘an unsurpassed leader of men and a very god of war adored by all ranks’. (#ulink_d63db9b6-9258-5a1d-90b6-4cc42b4930ec) To this day this most demanding of games is known as Tamerlane chess. (#ulink_ae1c8273-d9ca-531d-962d-a9665431afa6) The word is used here in the sense of the lesser jihad, meaning holy war, rather than the greater jihad, by which the Prophet Mohammed exhorted his followers to fight a personal struggle against vice, passion and ignorance, to improve themselves as human beings and demonstrate their commitment to Islam. (#ulink_de86443c-41af-597d-a5f1-e883603255ce) Sunni Islam, the most widely followed, orthodox sect of Islam, stressed the original dynasty of the caliphs, while the Shi’a faction, which broke off in 661, supported the rival dynasty of caliphs begun by Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet. Sunni and Shi’a Islam are united only by three core doctrines: the oneness of God, and belief in both the revelations of the Prophet and resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/justin-marozzi/tamerlane-sword-of-islam-conqueror-of-the-world/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.