Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  Across the Channel, England faced her own difficulties. Edward III’s illustrious fifty-year reign, an exercise in military adventurism and repudiation of papal authority, came to an end with his death in 1377, a year after his son and heir the Black Prince had died. The premature demise of the knight who had twice humiliated the French meant that the throne passed to the king’s nine-year-old grandson, Richard II, who was poorly placed to continue Edward’s expansionist forays. War had impoverished the country, which was in no mood to countenance another huge demand on its resources. The deeply unpopular poll tax led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The century ended inauspiciously with the youthful king’s removal from the throne in 1399 and his murder a year later. It was all the usurper Henry IV could do to keep his kingdom together, beset by the rebellions of the Scots and the Welsh, supported, as ever, by the French.

  Nor was the fighting restricted to these northern kingdoms. Europe was awash with petty wars, in thrall to the vogue for military and dynastic adventure. In the quieter periods between the major campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War, ‘free companies’ or bands of mercenaries roamed the continent, torching towns and extorting the countryside, spreading misery and destruction wherever they rode. ‘Without war you cannot live and do not know how to,’ Sir John Chandos, the Black Prince’s lieutenant, reprimanded a group of their captains. Southern France, Italy and Germany teemed with these perennial soldiers who refused to go home. Italy herself was riven by conflict, spurred on by the famous condottieri, soldiers of fortune like Sir John Hawkwood, captain-general of Florence, and, later, Francesco Sforza, ruler of Milan. The protracted hostilities between Guelphs and Ghibellines degenerated into wider, equally ruinous, factionalism. Ruled by despots, the great cities scrambled to enlarge their dominions. Naples and Florence tore themselves apart, the trading city of Genoa sank into decline. To add to these economic woes, the once mighty banks of Bardi and Peruzzi collapsed in the 1340s, bankrupted by the defaulting English king, Edward III.

  The situation was hardly better in Spain and Portugal where, despite the reconquest of most of Muslim al-Andalus the previous century, disunity and disorder ruled. Aragon was prey to repeated civil wars in which the nobles competed for the crown while, to the west, the death of Alfonso XI of Castile in 1349 – carried off by the plague – triggered another European fight for the succession, this time between Pedro II and his bastard brother Henry, Count of Trastamara. Two more decades of war followed.

  And then, of course, there were the horrors of the Black Death, which spread west along the trade routes from Asia and coursed through Europe like poison. By 1347 it had reached Constantinople, Rhodes, Cyprus and Sicily, moving onwards into Venice, Genoa and Marseilles. A year later it infected Tuscany, central Italy and England. By mid-century it was ravaging Scandinavia, penetrating as far north as Iceland and Greenland. One-third of the population of Europe was wiped out by a disease so terrifyingly ghastly many felt it was a heaven-sent punishment for the sins of the world.

  ‘I do not know where to begin describing its relentless cruelty; almost everyone who witnessed it seemed stupefied by grief,’ wrote the Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, who buried five of his children with his own hands. ‘They died almost immediately; they would swell up under the armpits and in the groin and drop dead while talking. Fathers abandoned their children, wives left their husbands, brothers forsook each other.’ Dogs dragged hastily-buried corpses into the streets and gorged on them before collapsing themselves. ‘Nobody wept for the dead, since each was awaiting death; and so many died that everyone thought that the end of the world had come.’ The Black Death killed an estimated twenty-five million people, precipitating an agricultural crisis due to the severe shortage of labour to farm the land. The accompanying breakdown of law and order only added to the havoc left in its wake.

  While war, plague and famine sapped Europe internally, external threats were also beginning to mount. Christendom’s eastern frontier was under pressure as the weakening Byzantine empire faced attack from the Ottomans. One by one it started to lose its possessions, first in Asia Minor with the fall of Brusa and Nicaea, later and more ominously with Adrianople, Gallipoli and Thessalonica. In 1389, a Christian army under the Serbian king Lazarus was crushed at Kosovo by a Turkish army led by Sultan Murad I. By 1394, Constantinople itself was under siege. Two years later, Christendom roused itself from its sickbed for a final assault on the Muslim foe and put its last Crusader army into the field at Nicopolis, on the banks of the Danube. It was cut to pieces. Europe shuddered to consider what the resurgent infidel planned next. Islam was on the march.

  If matters on the European mainland were unpromising, hopes of heavenly salvation seemed equally fraught. Though the Church began the fourteenth century confidently, with Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming in his Unam Sanctam bull of 1302 that ‘the spiritual power excels in dignity and nobility any form whatsoever of earthly power’, it steadily lost much of its authority during this period. Besieged by the dangers of warring Italy, the papacy withdrew shortly afterwards to Avignon on the banks of the Rhône, from where a succession of French popes plotted wars in the papal states and pacification in Europe, the necessary prelude to taking up the fight against the Muslims of the East. They were remembered, and resented, more for the staggering size and ostentation of the papal palace, and the punitive taxes which went to pay for it, than for their commitment to the defence of the faith or the spiritual nourishment of their flock. Then, in 1378, disaster struck as the Church split over the election of the irascible Italian Pope Urban VI. Another Frenchman, Clement VII, was elected to replace him, precipitating the Great Schism. For the next four decades, one pope presided in Rome while another, the anti-pope, held sway in Avignon. The prestige of the papacy sunk further.

  The Europe of Temur’s time, then, in Muslim eyes at least, was little more than a barbarian backwater. Church and state were divided and weak. The age of imperial adventure had expired, not to be revived until the later fifteenth century. Edward the Black Prince might have cut a dashing figure on the battlefields of Europe, but the Islamic world scarcely registered this sorry land of the infidel. The real treasures of conquest were not to be found in what the Koran referred to as the dar al-harb (the abode of war), home of the unbelievers. They lay in the East. As Bernard Lewis wrote: ‘For the medieval Muslim from Andalusia to Persia, Christian Europe was still an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief, from which the sunlit world of Islam had little to fear and less to learn.’

  Europeans were no more impressed by the Oriental heathens. Temur’s whirlwind conquests went largely unnoticed in the West until, in 1587, a fire-and-brimstone Tamburlaine sprang onto the Elizabethan stage like a thunderbolt from the heavens.

  Temur’s neglect at the hands of Western historians, which continues to this day, allowed Marlowe’s bloodthirsty Tamburlaine to provide the enduring popular image of a magnificent, God-defying Oriental despot, fearless in conquest, unforgiving in triumph, yet simultaneously capable of scaling the poetic heights with his beautiful lover Zenocrate. It is one of history’s small ironies that a man who took such care to ensure his place in posterity by having his civil and military record meticulously chronicled should find his posthumous reputation in the hands of an Elizabethan playwright with a taste for the sensational.

  Brilliant in battle, unvanquished on the world stage, Temur’s efforts to secure the recognition he so richly deserved came to nothing. ‘These cares were ineffectual for the preservation of his fame, and these precious memorials in the Mogul or Persian language were concealed from the world or, at least, from the knowledge of Europe,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘The nations which he vanquished exercised a base and impotent revenge; and ignorance has long repeated the tale of calumny which had disfigured the birth and character, the person, and even the name, of Tamerlane. Yet his real merit would be enhanced rather than debased by the elevation of a peasant to the throne of Asia.’

  Passed over by histo
rians, Temur has fared little better on the stage. Though Marlowe’s play is more than four hundred years old, productions have been remarkable for their extreme rarity. Tamburlaine the Great went through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without a single recorded performance. One problem is the play’s length: it is really two full-length plays, rather than one. Another is the potentially monotonous series of conquests and slaughter, which continue, as they did historically, until Tamburlaine’s death. C.S. Lewis famously described the play as ‘a hideous moral Spoonerism: Giant the Jack Killer’. Suffice it to say that the plot is not as complicated as it could be. As a result of these and other difficulties, the first professional production of modern times came in London as late as 1951, when Tyrone Guthrie directed Donald Wolfit in the lead role with the Old Vic company. A quarter of a century later, Peter Hall chose the play to open the Olivier Theatre at the National, with Albert Finney in the lead role. Hall judged Tamburlaine variously as a ‘Boy’s Own Paper story’, ‘an immoral Morality play’, ‘the first atheist play’ and ‘the first existential play’. ‘One thing I know very strongly about Tamburlaine now,’ he wrote in 1976. ‘It reeks of the theatre as the circus reeks of sawdust and horse shit.’ Yet theatre-goers still had to wait until 1993 for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first production of the play, directed by Terry Hands in Stratford. It was worth the wait.

  Audiences were captivated by Antony Sher’s snarling barbarism in the lead role, an explosive and athletic performance which rejoiced in the tyranny and bounding majesty of what one reviewer called ‘the megalomaniac’s megalomaniac’. While the sultan Bajazeth and his Turks strut awkwardly across the stage on golden stilts, Tamburlaine swings in Tarzan-like, kicking Bajazeth to the ground. In victory he glorifies in sneering sadism, rubbing his fingers in Bajazeth’s sweaty hair, licking them and offering them to Zenocrate to smell. Bathed in blood, he mocks the famished, caged sultan and encourages his henchmen to urinate on scraps of reeking bread with which they taunt him. Then, with a leering grin, he cuts off one of the sultaness’s fingers. Marlowe’s virgins of Damascus, yet more victims for the ‘scourge of God’, become flaxen-haired children sweetly proffering posies. If the 1993 production proved anything, it was that with an actor of Sher’s stature, together with careful editing – in this case Tamburlaine was whittled down to three hours – opulent costumes and imaginative special effects, Marlowe’s most sensational play could be big box office. There was another, more enduring, lesson to be taken from Tamburlaine, a critic noted: ‘As events in the Middle East and elsewhere continue to show, we ignore him and his descendants at our peril.’

  Had Temur lived long enough to see Tamburlaine the Great, he might conceivably have been gratified by his dramatic depiction (though he would certainly have objected to the use of his derisive nickname). Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is one of the most intensely realised warrior heroes of the stage. Shakespeare’s Henry V and Coriolanus seem poorer creatures by comparison.

  For Tamburlaine rises beyond the mortal sphere. As the Persian lord Theridamas remarks on first seeing this ‘Scythian shepherd’ early in Act I:

  His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods,

  His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth …

  Tamburlaine, the audience rapidly discovers, is interested only in omnipotence:

  I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,

  And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about,

  And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere,

  Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

  After routing his Arabian and Egyptian enemy at the close of Part I, he explains his victory to the Soldan of Egypt, who is mourning the loss of his throne. The god of war has resigned to Tamburlaine, the defeated Egyptian is told, and will soon make him ‘general of the world’. Even Jove suddenly looks ‘pale and wan’, fearing Tamburlaine is about to dethrone him. Not content with comparing himself favourably to the gods, he throws down the gauntlet to the Prophet Mohammed, burning the Koran and daring him out of the heavens:

  Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,

  Come down thyself and work a miracle.

  Thou art not worthy to be worshipped

  That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ

  Wherein the sum of thy religion rests.

  For Elizabethan audiences this was shocking stuff, blasphemy in the eyes of the authorities and an affront to properly Christian sensibilities. Gossip was already afoot concerning Marlowe’s supposed atheism, heresy and dissolute life, dangerous charges at a time when the authorities were rounding up those suspected of libel, sedition or even ‘unsafe’ opinions. Contemporary critics rounded on the play as a glorification of impiety. In his prefix to the largely forgotten Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), Robert Greene condemned Marlowe for ‘daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan’.

  On 12 May 1593, the popular playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested and tortured. He wrote a letter, almost certainly under duress, condemning Marlowe’s ‘monstrous opinions’ and his tendencies to ‘jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men’. A shady character called Richard Baines, another informer, wrote of Marlowe’s ‘damnable judgement of religion and scorn of God’s word’, including wild allegations that the playwright professed ‘That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest,’ ‘That if there be any god or good religion, then it is in the papists,’ ‘That all Protestants are hypocritical asses’ and that Christ and John the Baptist were sodomites. Such testimonies had the desired effect. On 18 May, the Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. He was stabbed to death in the notorious Deptford tavern brawl less than two weeks later.

  Tamburlaine the Great provided plenty of ammunition to Elizabethan critics, as it does to this day. Joseph Hall, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, accused Marlowe of gross populism and pandering to the rabble – ‘He ravishes the gazing Scaffolders’ – in Virgidemiarum (1597). Ben Jonson joined the chorus of disapproval: in Discoveries, posthumously published in 1640, he argued that there was nothing in plays like Tamburlaine except ‘scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers’. Wonderfully unconcerned by such high-minded criticism, audiences thrilled to what quickly became a phenomenally popular play. To this day, on those rare occasions when it is staged, they still do, alternately shocked and seduced, appalled and entranced, by the brutal machinations of this exotic tyrant.

  Whatever the Elizabethan authorities thought about Marlowe’s atheism, Tamburlaine was otherwise thoroughly in keeping with the zeitgeist of the era. It posed questions about colonisation and kingship, rebellion and religion, all the vicissitudes of power. This was a time of vigorous English expansion and growing self-confidence, the birth of a military and mercantile nation with dreams of empire and the ambition to project its might across the globe. Marlowe’s numerous references to hemispheres, meridian lines and poles, to continents known and unknown, perfectly reflected an age of exploration and commercial endeavour across the seas, personified by Sir Francis Drake, the man who circumnavigated the world in 1577–80 and calmly finished his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe before routing the Spanish Armada in 1588. Just as Tamburlaine thunders across the world from conquest to conquest, so England, led by her heroic queen, was steadily emerging as a great power on the world stage. In Elizabeth’s famous speech to the English troops at Tilbury on the eve of their engagement with the Armada, there are unmistakable shades of Tamburlaine (written only a year previously): ‘… [I] think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.’

  Little surprise that for all the authorities’ disapproval, the play
enjoyed such a remarkable success in its own time. It was so well known that in 1629, more than forty years after its first performance, prisoners pulling carts of sewage through London’s streets were taunted with one of the celebrated lines from the play – ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,’ the very words which Tamburlaine jeers at Bajazeth’s two sons, whom he has harnessed to his chariot.

  Different eras have naturally judged Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – as well as the real-life conqueror – through different prisms. Nineteenth-century military historians, not least the British, tended to lionise the Tatar for his prodigious military skills, and wrote admiringly of his successful campaigns while downplaying his cold-blooded massacres. In the twentieth century, his career was viewed less enthusiastically. John Joseph Saunders wrote in 1971 that ‘Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism.’ In 1996, the historian Leo de Hartog judged Temur a parochial sadist.

  Not surprisingly, different cultures have also reached radically different verdicts. Within the dar al Islam, the Muslim world, Temur is a household name, usually revered as a great conqueror and propagator of the faith. In Christian Georgia, which he ravaged half a dozen times, he is spoken of with dread and remains the country’s greatest anti-hero. In the Soviet empire, he was removed from the history books, the authorities fearful of the nationalism he might inspire among the subject populations of Central Asia. When he was mentioned, it was only as a savage barbarian and despot. In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, as we shall see, Temur has been rehabilitated and championed as the father of a new nation. In the West he languishes in the depths of obscurity.