Timur (1336–1405) was born in the immediate aftermath of the schism within the Chaghatay khanate that erupted during the reign of Tarmasharin. He grew up near Samarqand, where the settled population was dominated by nomadic and semi-nomadic Turko–Mongol tribes. Timur himself could claim descent from the Mongols through his mother and from Turks through his father. During the 1360s, he developed a series of alliances with local chieftains and became a powerful actor in the affairs of Transoxiana.
In about 1370, Timur seized control of Samarqand and declared his intention of restoring the glory of the Mongol empire. He spent the next decade securing control of the frontiers of Transoxiana. True to the classic model, victories begat victories, for the vanquished armies became the reservoir for new recruits into his own army, and his forces grew exponentially. Unlike the armies of light cavalry characteristic of the Chinggisid conquests, however, Timur’s armies gradually became a composite force. One element that made him such a formidable opponent was that he realized the advantages of combining the mobility of light cavalry with the shock force of heavy calvary. He also utilized infantry when it served his purposes, and he gradually adopted the new technologies of rockets and siege artillery.
In 1381, Timur began the conquests that made his place in history. His own explanations for the campaigns are not recorded, and historians have had to speculate on his motivations. To some observers, the needless bloodshed and physical destruction of the campaigns suggest that they were simple plundering operations, carried out to keep his volatile troops satisfied with booty. Other historians have speculated that the campaigns were begun in order to create a great commercial network that would allow Samarqand to recapture its glory, and that the accompanying violence was a technique to intimidate the local populations to submit to his authority.
Whatever Timur’s motives may have been, by 1385 he had captured Herat, Khorasan, and all of eastern Iran, and during the course of the next year he conquered Esfahan and Hamadan, thus destroying the petty dynasties that had emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the Il-khanid regime. Over the next nine years, he conquered Iraq and the Caucasus. During the 1390s, he led two punitive expeditions against Toqtamish of the Horde. Toqtamish, self-confident after having seized power over the Horde in 1377, dared to encroach upon Timur’s territory in Transoxiana. Timur retaliated and punished him in battle, but Toqtamish foolishly challenged Timur again in Azerbaijan. This time, Timur systematically destroyed all the commercial cities in the Horde from the Black Sea to the Aral Sea. Although Timur was not able to capture Toqtamish, the latter’s reputation was destroyed, and the destruction of the cities of the steppes caused irreparable harm to the economy of the Tatars.
During Timur’s campaign against Toqtamish, revolts broke out all over Iran against his occupation. He brutally suppressed the revolts. Whole cities were destroyed, their inhabitants massacred, and towers were built of their skulls. After reestablishing control of Iran, Timur invaded the Delhi Sultanate in 1398. The Indian army, exhausted by the decade of civil war that followed the death of Firuz, was crushed. The killing and wanton destruction that characterized the Delhi campaign may be unsurpassed in history. The chroniclers report that Timur ordered the execution of tens of thousands of Hindu captives before and after the battle for Delhi. Thousands of them are said to have been skinned alive. The sack of Delhi went on for several days before the city was set afire and left in smoldering ruins. Members of the Tughluq dynasty continued to claim sovereignty in Delhi until 1413, but the city remained devastated. Over the course of the next century, Delhi slowly established itself as a regional power, but it would take over a century for it to eclipse its rival Hindu and Muslim states again.
Timur returned to Samarqand in 1399 with a vast amount of wealth with which to enhance the only city that he appears ever to have appreciated. He also brought back a herd of Indian war elephants, a novel weapon that he wanted to add to his arsenal. As usual, he spent only a few days inside the walls before retiring to his rural pavilion. Before the end of the year, he set out on a campaign to the west, and he again secured control over Azerbaijan. While there, he received emissaries from Turkish chieftains in Anatolia who were under his protection and learned that Bayezit had invaded their territories. Bayezit’s action was an affront to Timur’s honor and resulted in a tense confrontation between two of the most powerful men in the world. Neither one had a clear picture of the other’s power, and both were reluctant to force the issue without more intelligence. Timur send a diplomatically worded dispatch to Bayezit, warning him to keep his distance from areas under Timur’s authority. Bayezit replied not only arrogantly, but insultingly. Timur then attacked and destroyed the Ottoman outpost of Sivas, which had been under the command of one of Bayezit’s sons.
Assuming that he had taught Bayezit his lesson, Timur then turned to the Mamlukes and attacked the city of Aleppo in 1400. The Circassian Mamlukes, reeling from the effects of recurring bouts with the plague, of famines caused by inadequate floods of the Nile, and of a worsening balance of trade with Europe, were in no position to contest the mighty Timur. Aleppo was sacked, and in 1401, Timur moved on to Damascus. There, the young Mamluke sultan had assembled his army, but when he heard of a rebellion in Cairo, he returned to his capital in haste. The abandoned army, confused and leaderless, straggled back to Cairo in disarray. The inhabitants of Damascus, now defenseless, agreed to pay Timur a heavy ransom not to be attacked. Once inside the walls, however, Timur increased the ransom demand tenfold. When the citizens protested, he ordered the city to be sacked, and the inhabitants were massacred. He spared the city’s artisans, whom he sent to Samarqand.
By the fall of 1401, Timur was no longer concerned by a potential threat from the Mamlukes, and he headed toward the Caucasus for the winter. Learning of a rebellion in Baghdad, he ordered the city destroyed. Leveled for the second time in little more than a century, it would require more than four centuries for the city to become even a regional town again. Once in the Caucasus, Timur received news of Bayezit’s continuing challenge to his claims in eastern Anatolia, and he resolved to decide the issue the following season. In July 1402, the two armies met at modern Ankara. Timur used his Indian war elephants to launch the attack. Once the battle had been joined, Bayezit’s Turkish allies abandoned him, leaving him to fight Timur with his Balkan Christian vassals. He was defeated and captured, and died in captivity eight months later. Timur’s army pursued the remnants of the Ottoman army all the way to the Dardanelles, where the Ottoman survivors were ferried across (for a price) by Genoese and Venetians.
Bayezit’s sons began fighting each other for control of the Ottoman holdings, and they almost caused the destruction of everything that their ancestors had achieved. For the next nine years, their civil war allowed most of the local leaders in Anatolia and in the Balkans to regain their political independence, and both areas lapsed into near anarchy. To contemporaries, it appeared that the Ottomans were finished.
In the Presence of Timur
Anyone trapped within a city besieged by Timur would be consumed by anxiety of the worst kind. Such a fate befell one of the era’s greatest scholars, Ibn Khaldun, when Timur besieged Damascus. The scholar’s experience with Timur soon became “up close and personal” when the conqueror announced that he desired to see him. Timur received ibn Khaldun graciously, and then informed him that he wanted him to write a detailed description of the Maghrib. Ibn Khaldun spent the next five weeks in Timur’s camp writing his report, and he left a record of his experiences during that time. Foregoing an opportunity to portray Timur as a monster, he reveals a human side to Timur as well as his own obsequiousness in the presence of absolute power.
[After asking for the report on the Maghrib] he gave a signal to his servants to bring from his tent some of the kind of food which they call “rishta” and which they were most expert in preparing. Some dishes of it were brought in, and he made a sign that they should be set before me. I arose, took them, and drank, a
nd liked it, and this impressed him favorably. [Then] I composed in my mind some words to say to him which, by exalting him and his government, would flatter him….
The news was brought to him that the gate of the city had been opened and that the judges had gone out to fulfill their [promise of] surrender, for which, so they thought, he had generously granted them amnesty. Then he was carried away from before us, because of the trouble with his knee, and was placed upon his horse; grasping the reins, he sat upright in his saddle while the bands played around him until the air shook with them; he rode toward Damascus….
When the time for Timur’s journey approached and he decided to leave Damascus, I entered to him one day. After we had completed the customary greetings, he turned to me and said, “You have a mule here?”
I answered, ‘Yes.”
He said, “Is it a good one?”
I answered, ‘Yes.”
He said, “Will you sell it? I would buy it from you.”
I replied, “May Allah aid you—one like me does not sell to one like you; but I would offer it to you in homage, and also others like it if I had them.”
He said, “I meant only that I would requite you for it with generosity.”
I replied, “Is there any generosity left beyond that which you have already shown me? You have heaped favors upon me, accorded me a place in your council among your intimate followers, and shown me kindness and generosity—which I hope Allah will repay to you in like measure.”
He was silent; so was I. The mule was brought to him while I was with him at his council, and I did not see it again….
Then on another day I entered to him and he asked me: “Are you going to travel to Cairo?”
I answered, “May Allah aid you—indeed, my desire is only [to serve] you, for you have granted me refuge and protection. If the journey to Cairo would be in your service, surely; otherwise I have no desire for it.”
He said, “No, but you will return to your family and to your people.”
SOURCE: Anthology of Islamic Literature From the Rise of Islam to Modern Times, with an introduction and commentaries by James Kritzeck. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1964, pp. 281–284.
Timur now began to prepare for the climax of his career: a campaign against the Ming dynasty in China. He set out from Samarqand in December 1404, but fell seriously ill as he approached the Syr Darya River. He died in February 1405. Contrary to Muslim practice, his body was embalmed and sent to Samarqand, where it was buried in the impressive tomb that he had constructed for that purpose, the Gur-e Amir. At his death, his sons and grandsons fought over the succession and lost all the territories that Timur had conquered, except for Transoxiana and western Afghanistan.
Timur’s legacy would boast of impressive cultural achievements in Samarqand and Herat over the next century. Timur himself adorned Samarqand with beautiful architecture, gardens, and the equivalent of a national library, where books were copied, illustrated, bound, and stored. Elsewhere, however, the result of Timur’s career was sheer destruction. The area from Delhi to Damascus had been laid waste, and combined with the effects of the plague in Syria and Iraq, the populations of a huge area experienced suffering and despair beyond comprehension.
Some historians have pointed out that Chinggis Khan and his Mongol successors usually employed cruelty as a means to gain submission. Timur, like Alexander the Great, seems to have simply enjoyed watching rivers of blood flow. What makes Timur’s cruelty more difficult to explain is that all of his opponents were Muslim regimes. If he had been a pagan like his Mongol ancestors, his barbarity might be dismissed as a symptom of his hostility to an alien culture. Timur, however, like many of his fellow Turks and Mongols in Central Asia, easily combined residual shamanism with a commitment to Islam. In the name of Islam, he systematically destroyed the Jacobite church in northern Syria and western Anatolia, as well as the Nestorian church in Central Asia. He also claimed to be serving the cause of Islam in invading the Delhi Sultanate, which of course was ruled by Muslims. But his motives for the utter destruction of large numbers of Muslims across a wide swath of territory remain obscure.
Conclusion
The fifteenth century dawned on an eastern Muslim landscape utterly transformed from its contours of the early thirteenth century. From Syria and the Russian steppes in the west to India in the east, the whole order had been reworked several times in a century and a half. Muslim regimes, Mongol regimes, civil war, the plague, and Timur Lang had transformed the political and social order the way a tornado scrambles anything in its path. The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century inflicted catastrophic damage upon Iraq and Khorasan. They had also inadvertently boosted the fortunes of the nascent Mamluke, Ottoman, and Delhi regimes by causing tens of thousands of intellectuals, craftsmen, and artists to flee to those havens. In the fourteenth century, the plague and Timur’s campaigns laid waste once again to Iran and Iraq, but also threatened the very existence of the Mamluke, Ottoman, and Delhi states and societies. By the time of Timur’s death in 1405, Delhi had been reduced to the status of a local pretender, and Ottoman power appeared to be destroyed. The Circassian Mamlukes had been humiliated by their failure to defend Damascus, and recurring waves of the plague kept them weaker than their Qipchaq predecessors.
The Mongol conquests, it should be remembered, were only the latest wave of violence and suffering to afflict the Muslim world. On the other hand, they were so destructive that they caused mass migrations of peasants, nomads, craftsmen, intellectuals, and merchants to areas not under the immediate threat of Mongol attack. One important consequence was that the ethnic composition of many parts of the Muslim world would be changed for centuries to come. Moreover, regions which up to that time had been peripheral to mainstream developments in the Dar al-Islam now became thriving centers of commerce and culture due to the influx of refugees from the Mongol advance.
The period 1260–1405 represents a major watershed in Muslim history. It witnessed a degree of destruction and suffering that can hardly be imagined, and yet the thoroughness of the changes that took place created the conditions for new societies to assert themselves. A comparable period in western European history would be that of the Frankish conquests and the Norsemen’s raids, or from the sixth through the late tenth centuries. The cumulative effect of this period was that, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the political structures of the central and eastern sections of the Dar al-Islam had been so shaken that a contemporary outside observer could be forgiven for wondering if Islamic civilization had a future. As it turned out, that civilization was about to rise, phoenixlike, and become the most dominant force in the world for several centuries.
FURTHER READING
The Mongol Khanates
Adshead, S.A.M.Central Asia in World History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Kwanten, Luc. Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 500–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Vernadsky, George. The Mongols and Russia. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1953.
New Centers of Islamic Culture
Ahmed, Aziz. Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Ayalon, David. Islam and the Abode of War. London: Variorum, 1994.
——. Outsiders in the Lands of Islam: Mamluks, Mongols and Eunuchs. London: Variorum Reprints, 1988.
Cahen, Claude. The Formation of Turkey. Translated and edited by P. M. Holt. Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2001.
Canfield, Robert L., ed. Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Ikram, S.M. Muslim Civilization in India. Edited by Ainslie T. Embree. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1964.
Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. New York and Washington: Prae
ger Publishers, 1973.
Kafadar, Cemal. Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. Berkeley, California: The University of California Press, 1995.
Irwin, R.The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1382). Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
McCarthy, Justin. The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923. London and New York: Longman, 1997.
Scourges
Adshead, S.A.M.Central Asia in World History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Dols, Michael. The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Manz, Beatrice Forbes. The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
CHAPTER 11
Unity and Diversity in Islamic Traditions
In 1325, a young Moroccan named Ibn Battuta embarked upon the hajj. Others from his hometown who had traveled to Mecca before him had usually been away for two to three years. Thus, he knew that he would be gone for an extended period, but it is doubtful that he had any idea at the time just how long it would be before he saw home again. In fact, after he had completed the rituals of the pilgrimage, he decided to travel the extent of the Muslim world. He sailed along the coast of East Africa, ventured into the realm of the Horde in southern Russia, lived for seven years in India, and may even have sailed through the straits of Southeast Asia on his way to China. He did not return home until 1349. His return trip was fraught with numerous perils, for he had to make his way through the collapsing states of the mid-fourteenth century as well as avoid becoming a victim of the plague, which was ravaging much of the world at the time.
A History of the Muslim World to 1405 Page 49