Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  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.

  2

  Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’

  1370–1379

  ‘Our quivering lances shaking in the air

  And bullets like Jove’s dreadful thunderbolts

  Enrolled in flames and fiery smouldering mists

  Shall threat the gods more than Cyclopian wars;

  And with our sun-bright armour, as we march,

  We’ll chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyes

  That stand and muse at our admired arms.’

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,

  Tamburlaine the Great

  While a ten-year-old Temur was learning the martial skills that would make him such an accomplished warrior, three thousand miles to the west one man bestrode the battlefields of Europe. For any child with a taste for romantic knights and heroic endeavours, his is a stirring story, his royal tomb an arresting sight.

  Edward the Black Prince lies in Canterbury Cathedral close to the top of Pilgrims’ Steps, their stones worn smooth by centuries of feet and bended knees. Boys and girls cling on to the protective bars which surround him, peering through for a better look at the recumbent figure of the prince in full armour. As a schoolboy in Canterbury, I used to do the same, hurrying through the echoing nave before assembly to snatch a few minutes in front of his tomb. How could this slim, neat little man have been such a champion of war six centuries earlier, I wondered, picturing the charge of knights on horseback, the volleys of arrows scything through the sky and the flashing sword-strokes that could hack a man to pieces. His head rests on a fabulous helmet, surmounted by a roaring lion, his hands clasped together on his chest in prayer, sword by his side. He gazes
into the heavens, past his knightly achievements, his gauntlets and scabbard, the surcoat and shield emblazoned with the golden lions and fleurs de lys of England.

  The Black Prince is perhaps the most glamorous symbol of the European age of chivalry. His career dazzled as brightly as the bejewelled swords which won him such fame and glory in France. In 1346, at the age of sixteen, he led the right wing of his father King Edward III’s army to a brilliant victory at the battle of Crécy, where he won his spurs in style. A decade later, he routed the French again at Poitiers, capturing King John II and taking him back to England as his prisoner. He won England new lands in France as prince of Aquitaine, returned Pedro the Cruel, the deposed King of Castile, to his throne, and suppressed rebellions with brutal efficiency. Wherever he went his exploits resonated with the martial thunder of the Middle Ages.

  However impressive it may be to schoolboys with their colouring books, castle sets and computer games, the warfare of the fourteenth century spelt only misery and poverty for most of Europe. Historians have long referred to this period as ‘the calamitous century’, in which famine, war and disease cut swathes through the population. The evangelising glories of the Crusades were already a memory. Christendom had lost its possessions in the Holy Land by the close of the thirteenth century and Outremer, the cherished land overseas, had ceased to exist.

  Life was a trial for poor peasants and rich rulers alike, as hereditary monarchies struggled to maintain their royal lines and fend off rival dynasties. For most of the century, England and France, the two great powers of the continent, were locked in conflict, consumed by the Hundred Years’ War which emptied their coffers and depleted their chivalry. Both were perilously divided into feuding fiefdoms, their kings undermined by the machinations of the nobles. In France the struggle for the disputed throne allowed the dukes of Orléans, Bourbon, Brittany and Anjou, together with the counts of Foix and Armagnac, to wield power like princely states. The duchy of Burgundy grew steadily from a royal province into a dynasty and a prosperous empire with its own ambitions. For much of this period the French kings were toothless tigers, harried on all sides by disloyal nobles, wandering mercenaries and revolting peasants.