Timur

• 1. Introduction

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  Timur was undefeated in battle. Across roughly thirty-five years of campaigns, no enemy ever beat him in the field, yet the man who never lost was lame in one leg and missing two fingers on his right hand. He called himself the "Sword of Islam," and at the height of his power he claimed control over the shattered remnants of three Mongol successor states at once. His armies, multi-ethnic and much feared, laid waste to parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Scholars estimate his campaigns killed millions of people. He was born in the 1320s in Transoxiana, into the Turkicized Mongol confederation of the Barlas, and by 1370 he had seized the western Chagatai Khanate. From there came a chain of victories over the Golden Horde, the Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottomans, and the Delhi Sultanate. How did a minor noble's son with a crippled body become the most powerful ruler in the Muslim world? Why did a man who massacred whole cities also keep company with poets and scholars? And what was he chasing when he died in the snow, marching toward China?

• 2. Iron And A Limp

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  His name, Temur, means "iron" in Chagatai, his mother tongue, and it is likely cognate with Genghis Khan's birth name, Temujin, a loan from a Common Turkic word for blacksmith. He was born near the city of Kesh, now Shahrisabz in Uzbekistan, some 80 kilometers south of Samarkand. His father, Taraghai, was described as a minor noble of the Barlas, though the historian Manz argues Timur may have understated his father's standing to make his own rise look more remarkable. Around 1363, the injuries came that would define how the world remembered him. By one account he tried to steal a sheep from a shepherd and was struck by two arrows, one in his right leg and one in his right hand, where he lost two fingers. Both wounds disabled him for life. The Persian name that followed him, Temur-i Lang, meaning "Timur the Lame," is the root of Tamerlane, the name the West still uses. Later dynastic histories claimed he was born on the 8th of April 1336, but most sources from his own lifetime point to the late 1320s. Several scholars suspect the 1336 date was chosen to link him to Abu Sa'id Bahadur Khan, the last ruler of the Ilkhanate, who died that year.

• 3. A General In Another's Name

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  By about 1360, Timur had emerged as a military leader whose troops were mostly Turkic tribesmen of the region. He allied himself with Amir Qazaghan and rode into Khorasan at the head of a thousand horsemen, his second expedition. When Tughlugh Timur of Kashgar invaded, Timur was sent to negotiate and instead joined the invader, who rewarded him with Transoxiana. His own father died around this time, and he became chief of the Barlas. His brother-in-law Amir Husayn began as a fellow fugitive and ended as his rival. In Balkh, Timur drew followers among merchants, tribesmen, clergy, aristocrats, and farmers by sharing his belongings, while Husayn alienated the same people with heavy taxes spent on elaborate buildings. Around 1370, Husayn surrendered and was later assassinated, and Timur was formally proclaimed sovereign at Balkh. Mongol tradition barred him from the title of khan, because he was not a descendant of Genghis Khan. So he ruled through a puppet, the Chaghatayid khan Suyurghatmish, and took for himself the title of Amir, meaning general. He married Husayn's widow, Saray Mulk Khanum, a descendant of Genghis Khan, and through her claimed the title gүregen, royal son-in-law to the Chinggisid line.

• 4. Lord Of Conjunction

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  Sahib Qiran, "Lord of Conjunction," became Timur's most famous title, and it was rooted in astrology. It referred to the meeting of Saturn and Jupiter, the two superior planets, held to be an auspicious sign and the mark of a new era. According to A. Azfar Moin, the title was messianic, hinting that Timur might be the awaited messiah who would open a final age before the end of time. The title was not invented for him. It had earlier marked Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the paternal uncle of Muhammad, and was claimed by the Mamluk sultan Baybars and by rulers of the Ilkhanate. Barred from the caliphate, which was reserved for the Quraysh, the tribe of Muhammad, Timur built instead an image of himself as a supernatural power ordained by God. His motto was the Persian phrase rasti rusti, meaning "truth is safety." His religious self-presentation shifted with circumstance. He held Ali and the Ahl al-Bayt in high regard and was noted for a pro-Shia stance, yet he also punished Shias for desecrating the memory of the Companions of the Prophet, and at times attacked Sunnis on religious grounds. In the last years of his life he styled himself a ghazi, a warrior of Islam.

• 5. The Persian Campaigns

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  In 1383 Timur began the long conquest of Persia, though he already ruled much of Khorasan by 1381. He opened with Herat, capital of the Kartid dynasty, and when the city refused to surrender he reduced it to rubble and massacred most of its citizens. It stayed in ruins until Shah Rukh ordered its rebuilding around 1415. Tehran surrendered and was treated mercifully, a pattern Timur often followed with cities that yielded. When Khorasan revolted, he destroyed Isfizar and had prisoners cemented into the walls alive. Isfahan immediately surrendered in 1387 and was spared, until its people killed the tax collectors and some of his soldiers. He then ordered a massacre with a death toll reckoned between 100,000 and 200,000, and an eyewitness counted more than 28 towers built of about 1,500 heads each. His massacres were selective, sparing the artistic and educated. In 1393 Shiraz fell after surrendering, and the Muzaffarids became vassals before being annexed. That same year he caught Baghdad by surprise, marching there in only eight days from Shiraz. Sultan Ahmad Jalayir fled, and the city would change hands again before Timur's wars were done.

• 6. War On The Steppe

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  Tokhtamysh had once been a refugee in Timur's own court before becoming ruler of the eastern Kipchak and the Golden Horde. After his rise he quarreled with his patron over Khwarizm and Azerbaijan, and in 1385 he invaded Azerbaijan, starting the Tokhtamysh-Timur war. In the first phase, Timur led an army of over 100,000 men more than 700 miles north into the steppe, then rode about 1,000 miles west on a front more than 10 miles wide. The army pushed so far north that summer days grew very long, and his Muslim soldiers complained about keeping a full schedule of prayers. At the Battle of the Kondurcha River in 1391, Tokhtamysh's army was boxed against the east bank of the Volga in the Orenburg region and destroyed. The second phase came through the Caucasus, ending in 1395 at the Battle of the Terek River. Timur's army destroyed Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde, and Astrakhan, disrupting the Silk Road that ran through Horde territory. Tokhtamysh never recovered his power and was killed about a decade later near present-day Tyumen. The Golden Horde broke apart into smaller khanates within the next half-century, which let Moscow gather the Russian lands and emerge as the dominant Russian state.

• 7. Camels Against Elephants

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  On the 30th of September 1398, Timur crossed the Indus River with a force of 90,000, drawn by the collapse of the Tughlaq dynasty that had ruled the Delhi Sultanate since 1320. He sacked Tulamba and massacred its inhabitants, sent his grandson Pir Muhammad to take Multan after a six-month siege, and broke a force of 2,000 under Malik Jasrat at the Sutlej. The Jat peasantry harried his march, looting caravans and vanishing into the forests, and he had thousands of them killed. Before the battle for Delhi on the 17th of December 1398, he slaughtered some 100,000 captives, fearing they might revolt. The defenders fielded war elephants armored in chain mail, their tusks smeared with poison, and his Tatar troops were afraid of them. Timur ordered a trench dug, loaded his camels with wood and hay, set the loads alight, and prodded the burning animals with iron sticks so they charged the elephants. The panicked elephants turned and stampeded back into their own lines. Delhi was then one of the richest cities in the world. It was sacked and its people enslaved, and after three days of uprising the city reeked of the dead, who were left as food for the birds. Delhi would not recover for almost a century.

• 8. The Ant And The Elephant

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  Years of insulting letters passed between Timur and Bayezid I, the Ottoman sultan. In one, Timur wrote: "Believe me, you are but pismire ant: don't seek to fight the elephants for they'll crush you under their feet." At the Battle of Ankara on the 20th of July 1402, Timur defeated and captured Bayezid, who died in captivity and left the Ottomans to a twelve-year interregnum. Timur said his motive was restoring Seljuq authority, seeing the Seljuks as the rightful rulers of Anatolia because Mongol conquerors had granted them rule. In December 1402 he besieged and took Smyrna, a stronghold of the Christian Knights Hospitaller, and carried out a mass beheading there. To Europe he was a contradiction. Charles VI of France and Henry IV of England praised him as a man who saved Christianity from the Turks, while others called him a barbaric threat to European culture. Henry III of Castile sent a famous embassy led by Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to Samarkand in 1403 to 1406, and Timur said he regarded the king of Castile "as his very own son." A letter from Timur to Charles VI, written in Persian and dated the 30th of July 1402, survives in the French archives, suggesting that the king send traders to Asia.

  Timur preferred to fight in spring, yet he died in winter, on an uncharacteristic campaign. In December 1404 he set out against Ming China and detained a Ming envoy. He had detained earlier envoys too, since 1394, when the Hongwu Emperor's ambassadors addressed him as a subject. He fell ill while camped on the far side of the Syr Daria and died at Farab on the 17th or the 18th of February 1405, before reaching the Chinese border. The geographer Clements Markham recorded that his body was embalmed with musk and rose water, wrapped in linen, laid in an ebony coffin, and sent to Samarkand. His tomb, the Gur-e-Amir, still stands there. In 1941 his body was exhumed and examined by Soviet anthropologists, who found he stood 5 feet 8 inches, tall for his era, broad-chested, with red hair and beard. The examination confirmed his lameness and a withered right arm, his right thighbone knitted to his kneecap so he would have walked with a pronounced limp. A tale grew that his tomb warned, "Whomsoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I." Three days after the exhumation began, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He was reburied with full Islamic ritual in November 1942, just before the Battle of Stalingrad.

  Timur had forty-three wives and concubines, many of them women he married as he conquered their fathers' or husbands' lands. He twice named an heir and twice outlived the choice. His son Jahangir died of illness in 1376, and his grandson Muhammad Sultan died of battle wounds in 1403. Only on his deathbed did he name Pir Muhammad, who could not hold the loyalty of his relatives, and a bitter civil war broke out among Timur's descendants. Not until 1409 did his youngest son, Shah Rukh, take the throne. The bloodline reached far. His grandson Ulugh Beg, the astronomer and mathematician, ruled Central Asia from 1411 to 1449, and his great-great-great-grandson Babur, born in 1483, founded the Mughal Empire. His legacy split along the lines of who suffered and who flourished. Central Asia blossomed, while Baghdad, Damascus, Delhi, and other cities were sacked and their people massacred, and he is honored in Muslim Central Asia yet vilified in much of Persia, Iraq, India, and Arabia. He nearly exterminated the Church of the East, once a major branch of Christianity, afterward confined largely to the area now called the Assyrian Triangle. In Uzbekistan he is called the "Founder of the Uzbek nation," and his monument in Tashkent stands where a statue of Karl Marx once stood.