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TIMUR

Death toll: 17 million¹

Rank: 9

Type: world conqueror

Broad dividing line: Timur vs. everyone he could get to

Time frame: ruled 1370–1405

Location: central Asia, the eye of the hurricane being Samarkand

Who usually gets the most blame: Timur; also called Tamburlaine (old version) or Tamerlane (newer version) from his insulting nickname, Timur Lenk (“the Lame”)

Another damn: Mongol invasion

The Man You Love to Hate

Throughout medieval Europe, traveling actors lived at the edge of society. They had to conform to rules of behavior and please their powerful sponsors among the nobility, so they would never dare to challenge the authorities. According to the strict guidelines of medieval drama, the bad guy always died in the end—often horribly, usually repentant. Theater was supposed to reinforce society’s norms.

Then came the Renaissance, and in the commercial center of London, successful playwrights learned that they could afford to challenge the rules. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play, Tamburlaine the Great, about an emperor of the Orient, a glorious monster, destroyer of cities, and despoiler of women. Tamburlaine strutted larger than life across the stage, and reveled in his wealth, his schemes, and his magnificent power. When the play ends, the villain is unrepentant and triumphant over all of his enemies, surrounded by worshipful followers. No one had ever seen anything like it. Audiences adored it, and it became the first theatrical hit in recorded history.

Somewhere in the audience, a young actor, beginning playwright, and friend of Marlowe’s named William Shakespeare realized that he too could probably make a living writing big, bloody dramas. That, however, is another story.² The question that concerns us is, who was this magnificent villain known to Marlowe as Tamburlaine?

First and foremost, he was the type of barbarian warlord that people told stories about. To his admirers, he was sort of a warrior trickster. As a young bandit in the central Asian wilderness, he had his soldiers build unnecessary campfires in a circle around the enemy to convince them they were outnumbered. He had his horsemen drag branches to kick up a larger dust cloud. When invading India, he strapped bundles of kindling onto camels. As the enemy elephants charged, his men chased flaming camels right into the elephants’ faces, who then panicked and stampeded back over the shocked Indian army.

Legendary villainy also swirled around him. When the Christian garrison of Sivas in Armenia asked about terms of surrender, Timur swore no blood would be shed. After they surrendered, he remained true to his word and buried them alive instead.

An Arab contemporary was reminded mostly of animal predators when describing Timur’s followers: “leopards of Turkistan, tigers of Balkhshan, hawks of Dasht and Khata, Mongol vultures, Jata eagles, vipers of Khajend,” and people in many other dangerous nations labeled as hounds, lions, hyenas, and crocodiles. It was a cosmopolitan army that grew more formidable with each conquest.³

Timur’s biography abounds with such colorful anecdotes that skeptics question everything said about him, but many of his chroniclers knew him personally as diplomats, allies, or favored scholars. Most of the stories come to us, if not firsthand, then as close to it as scholarship in the manuscript era allows. For example, if you are curious about how we know things like medieval casualty statistics, here’s a story: Once, as Timur’s army set off to pursue a fleeing enemy, each soldier placed a stone in a pile. When they returned from battle, each man took a stone off the pile. By counting the remaining stones, Timur knew exactly and immediately how many men he had lost.⁴

The most confusing aspect of Timur’s biography is that he simply attacked every which way, with no specific long-term plan other than conquest. Part of this was economic. Loot sustained armies in those days, so obviously he had to find a steady supply of rich enemies to rob. Part was geographic. Being in central Asia meant that he had enemies in all directions and no borders anchored securely against a coastline.

Land of Confusion

After Chinggis Khan died in 1227, his unified empire survived only briefly before sons, grandsons, and generals broke it down into more manageable quarters—the Yuan dynasty, the Il-Khans, the Chagatai Khanate, and the Golden Horde. For another generation or two, these four khanates cooperated as a kind of loose crime syndicate. Each quarter-empire had a frontier abutting rich foreigners who could be invaded and plundered, so theoretically they had no reason to quarrel with each other. Within a few decades, this friendly arrangement broke down as well, and the Chinggisids (the heirs of Chinggis) were at each others’ throats. Timur was born into this chaos sometime around 1336. We will meet each of these khanates in turn as Timur sets out to conquer them and re-create the empire of Chinggis Khan.

Timur’s clan of Mongols had gone native and adopted the Turkic language and Muslim religion during the previous generation. They lived in what had once been part of the unhappy land of Khwarezm, which had been so thoroughly devastated by the Mongols but had later become the inheritance of Chinggis Khan’s second son, Chagatai. By Timur’s day, rival khans were fighting each other for control.

Timur started his career as a minor bandit. As a young man, he took arrow wounds in his right hand and knee while either fighting glorious battles (his story) or stealing sheep (his enemies’ story), leaving him with a limp and a stiff arm the rest of his life.⁵ Despite these infirmities, he gathered enough followers to form an impressive army of freebooters. Eventually, his reputation as an up-and-coming warlord brought him to the attention of the alpha khan, Tughlak, who made him governor of Transoxiana.

In the years following Tughlak’s death in 1366, Timur outfought his rivals and took the throne of Samarkand. It’s all very complicated, but there were assassinations involved, as well as pitched battles and marriages. To puff up his pedigree, he claimed to be descended from Chinggis Khan and Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, but no one really believes any of that nowadays, unless it was a coincidence. (Both Chinggis Khan and Ali produced a lot of unrecorded descendants. You might be one.)

Timur scrounged up a documented relative of Chinggis Khan to sit on the throne of Samarkand, while Timur himself took the more modest title of Amir (Lord) and pulled levers from behind the curtain. No one was fooled by this arrangement, and most histories neglect to mention that Timur was not, technically, the ruler of his empire.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell Chinggis Khan and Timur apart. They seem to blend together into a generic Mongol warlord template, but there are substantial differences. Timur was a devoted Muslim, and he struck more deeply into the Middle East, against places you are more likely to have heard of: Delhi and Damascus instead of Nishapur and Bukhara.

Also unlike Chinggis Khan, Timur liked cities—well, his own cities at least. He turned his capital of Samarkand into one of the most beautiful cities of the world. Impressed by an onion dome he had seen after capturing Damascus, he had it replicated in Samarkand. From there the style spread into Russia (the Kremlin) and India (the Taj Mahal).⁶

For other cities, however, his preferred form of architecture was the tower of skulls. After consolidating his hold in Samarkand, Timur set out to decorate the world with these.

Campaigns: Southwest (1381–84)

In the generations since Chinggis Khan destroyed it in 1221, the city of Herat was reborn, becoming a wealthy and cultured stop on the Silk Road. During his earlier days as a wandering mercenary, Timur worked for the ruling dynasty of Herat, and now he tried to negotiate a marriage alliance. The current ruler agreed in principle but stalled on the details. Then Timur’s spies discovered that Herat was strengthening its defenses, a clearly provocative act. Timur stormed across three hundred miles of rough desert and mountains to surround the city. Knowing the fate that awaited an unsuccessful defense, Herat gave up without a fight and was granted mercy.⁷

With his army mobilized and having traveled so far west, Timur continued his offensive. The Persian quarter of Chinggis Khan’s empire had become the realm of the Il-Khans, but they fizzled out about the same time as the Chagatai dynasty. Exploiting this power vacuum, Timur invaded Persia with what would come to be characteristic cruelty.

At the town of Isfizar, Timur sealed 2,000 prisoners into a tower to die of starvation. The nearby town of Zaranj carried bad memories for Timur since this was where he had received his debilitating wounds, so even though the residents surrendered without a fight, Zaranj was put to the sword and torch.⁸

Southwest (1386–88)

Timur went home to rest awhile before he invaded Persia again. After taking the city of Isfahan in central Iran, he installed a garrison and was ready to grant mercy, but the people rose up and killed the garrison. Timur stormed the city again and wiped out the inhabitants, stacking up their severed heads as a warning to others who might resist him. The nearby city of Shiraz took the hint and surrendered immediately. A Muslim historian exploring Isfahan shortly afterward counted twenty-eight towers of 1,500 heads each before he stopped circling the ruins. The likely total was close to 70,000.⁹

Although we think of the past as a more brutal era than today, it’s worth noting that many of Timur’s soldiers were appalled at the order to massacre civilians and fellow Muslims; however, Timur demanded a certain number of heads from each unit—or else. Officers were appointed to keep the count. The more squeamish soldiers bought their quota from comrades with fewer qualms. At first, the price of a head was twenty dinars, but as the massacre progressed and the supply rose to meet demand, the price plunged to half a dinar.¹⁰

Northwest (1390–91)

A Mongol dynasty calling itself the Golden Horde had inherited the European quarter of Chinggis Khan’s empire, west of the Ural Mountains, spanning the steppes of Russia and Ukraine. There had been a dynastic dispute in the 1370s, and for a while Timur let Toktamish, the outcast contender for leadership, sleep on his sofa until he could find a job (metaphorically speaking). Timur helped him regain the throne of the Golden Horde, but then the two Chinggisids had a falling out. Shortly after Timur withdrew from his first raid into Persia, Toktamish snuck in behind him and took Tabriz, a city Timur had been saving for later.

Clearly Eurasia was not big enough for the two of them. Timur struck due north into the unknown wilderness of Siberia, and then turned left, sneaking up on his enemy through the vast forests of Russia. In June 1391 Timur’s army—100,000 men and women^a—came crashing down on the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kunduzcha. After a fierce fight, Toktamish fled, with Timur’s hordes in close pursuit. According to the Persian chronicler Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, “For the space of forty leagues whither they were pursued nothing could be seen but rivers of blood and the plains covered with dead bodies.”¹¹

Although Toktamish escaped, his major cities—Sarai and Astrakhan—were taken and looted.

Southwest (1393)

Persia again.

Northwest (1395)

Toktamish again.

Southeast (1398–99)

In the summer of 1398 Timur set out to punish his fellow Muslim, the sultan of Delhi, for tolerating all cultures and letting Hindus walk around free, which Timur considered an affront to Islam. By December, he had crossed all of the mountains, deserts, and rivers that separated India from the rest of the world, and led his army down onto the plain of Punjab. As he pushed on through India, he accumulated thousands of Hindu prisoners to be brought home as slaves.

Timur’s army overwhelmed the forces of the sultan under the walls of Delhi, defeating their war elephants with the flaming camel tactic described earlier. During the battle, Timur heard his prisoners cheering the Indian attacks, so he had them killed—100,000 of them, according to the chronicles. He originally planned to spare Delhi, but as his soldiers looted and raped their way across the fallen city, fights and scuffles broke out with the inhabitants. This coalesced into a full riot against the invaders, which Timur put down with typical ruthlessness. Around 50,000 citizens were massacred, and their heads were stacked up outside the four corners of the city. He then hauled off all the treasure that had accumulated in this great capital over the years, along with tens of thousands of new slaves.

West (1400–4)

In October 1400, Timur struck west. Having reduced Persia from great empire to mere shortcut, he swept through and attacked beyond it. He took all of the major cities in his path, and buried alive the garrison of Sivas. He destroyed Aleppo and piled up 20,000 heads. Then he pillaged, burned, and depopulated Damascus in March 1401.

Showing uncharacteristic mercy, he resettled some defeated Turkmen soldiers in Syria. Homesick, they tried to sneak back to their native land, supporting themselves by robbery. Timur caught them near the city Damghan and piled their bloody heads out in the countryside. A Spanish diplomat to Timur’s court described passing them: “Outside Damghanat the distance of a bowshot we noticed two towers, built as tall as the height to which one might cast up a stone which were entirely constructed from men’s skulls set in clay. Besides these there were other two similar towers, but these appeared already fallen to the ground in decay.” These towers were said to emit supernatural flames in the night for years after that.¹²

A small force sent to secure Baghdad had made no headway, so Timur returned with his full army and beseiged it for six weeks. On an unbearably hot day, when the defenders retreated to the shade, Timur struck. After the city was secured, Timur ordered every one of his warriors to bring him a severed head—some sources say two. Only clergy and scholars were spared the massacre. When it turned out that there were fewer inhabitants of Baghdad than Timur’s quota, heads were taken from the Mongols’ own camp followers, prostitutes, and personal slaves, because no one dared defy a command from Timur. The Mongols leveled every secular building and surrounded the ruins with 120 towers, assembled from 90,000 heads altogether, while Timur made a pilgrimage to a nearby shrine to pray.¹³

The westward invasion brought Timur into conflict with the Ottoman Turks, who were busy erasing the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. The Turkish sultan, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, had crushed a string of enemies in both Europe and Asia, and all he needed to cap off his career and be proclaimed the greatest warrior in the history of Islam was to take Constantinople, seat of empire, valve of the Black Sea, and gateway to Europe that had held against Muslim invaders for centuries.

Then, in 1402, Timur’s hordes came thundering out of the east and Bayezid had to abandon his siege of Constantinople to stop him. Bayezid marched out with a huge battle-hardened army and caught up with Timur at Ankara. It was a tough battle, and several units of Bayezid’s disgruntled conscripts switched over to Timur’s side, throwing the Ottoman position into chaos. Bayezid was defeated and captured along with his entourage. Timur had unwittingly saved Europe from the Turks for half a century.

Many stories are told of the humiliation that the ex-sultan suffered at the hands of Timur. They say Bayezid was kept on public display in a cage, that his wife was forced to serve meals to the court naked, that Timur used him as a footstool.^b These stories are probably not true because they didn’t appear until late in history. The earliest available historians claimed that Bayezid was well treated.

Upon reaching the far coast of Anatolia (the peninsula of Turkey), Timur laid siege to the Knights of Rhodes in the Christian city of Smyrna, which held for a few weeks and then fell to the customary massacre and pillage. When a Christian fleet later arrived to assist the knights by breaking the siege, Timur taunted them and proved that they were too late by catapulting the severed heads of the former defenders onto their ships.

Amir Timur

Timur had great respect for scholars and attracted many to his court. He commissioned magnificent Korans from the finest calligraphers. He was also a chess master, and the most complicated version of the game is still named after him. In Tamerlane chess, the board has nearly twice as many spaces as regular chess and more pieces, such as elephants that jump two squares diagonally and giraffes that move one diagonal and three straight.

Like most tyrants, Timur imposed strict and swift justice in his domains, and he was not prone to weighing subtleties. When Timur returned from his war against the west and heard that the governor of Samarkand had been oppressive and greedy in his absence, Timur had the governor hanged. All of this man’s ill-gotten gains were taken into the treasury. There’s no great surprise in any of this, but Timur then hanged an influential friend of the governor’s who had tried to buy the governor’s freedom. Then Timur hanged yet another official who had interceded on behalf of the governor. After that, everyone got the message.¹⁴

His simplistic approach to problem solving shows up again and again: “Timur now gave orders that a street should be built to pass right through Samarqand, which should have shops opened on either side of it in which every kind of merchandise should be sold, and this new street was to go from one side of the city through to the other side, traversing the heart of the township. . . . No heed was paid to the complaint of persons to whom the property here might belong, and those whose houses thus were demolished suddenly had to quit with no warning, carrying away with them their goods and chattels as best they might.”¹⁵

Endgame

Now seventy-one, Timur had crushed the two most powerful empires in Asia: Delhi and the Ottomans. He had conquered in every direction but one: eastward into China. The native Ming dynasty led by Zhu Yuanzhang had recently tossed the Mongols out of China, and Timur decided that this could not be allowed to stand. With a new army, he set out to restore the empire of Chinggis Khan, but old age caught up with him and he died in 1405 before he got his army across the border.

The significance of Timur’s conquests—however huge, bloody, and colorful—is minor and full of ironies. He was a devout Muslim who almost exclusively destroyed Muslim enemies, and it was the losers in his wars who established true legacies while Samarkand became a desert backwater under forgotten khans.¹⁶ The Ottomans regrouped and dominated the Middle East for a half millennium. The Golden Horde and its Tatar successors blocked Russian expansion into the steppe for several centuries. Timur’s most lasting impact is that one branch of his descendants forged its own destiny as the Mughals of India (see “Aurangzeb” for details).

One final story is told about Timur. It involves his own severed head. In 1941, hoping to make the definitive portrait of Timur, the Soviet scientist Mikhail Gerasimov opened his tomb and took away his skull for facial reconstruction. Locals had warned him that a curse awaited any lord who disturbed the tomb of Lord Timur. Gerasimov scoffed and proceeded with his tomb robbery. Within a couple of days, the curse came true, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The new Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan is rehabilitating Timur as a national hero. A magnificent equestrian statue of him now dominates the main square of the capital city, Tashkent, replacing the bust of Karl Marx that had been there in the late Soviet era, which had replaced the earlier statue of Stalin, which replaced the original tsarist statue of Konstantin Kaufman, Russian conqueror of Central Asia. Apparently, this plaza has never honored a likeable person.¹⁷