Читать книгу Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World - Justin Marozzi - Страница 6

‘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”.^* 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^* 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.^† These were Tatars, a Turkic people of Mongol origin, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had stormed through Asia in the thirteenth century.^*‘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.^†

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.^* 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.^†)

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:^* 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.^* 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 Mönke, 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 Mönke 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.^*

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. ^*

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.^* 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 were planted 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.^* 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.^* )

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.^* 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.

^* 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.’

^* 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.

^† 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.’

^* 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.

^† ‘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.

^* 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.

^† 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.

^* 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.

^* 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.

^* 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.

^* 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.

^* 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.’

^* 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.

^* 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 façade 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.

^* 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.