I asked Maulavi Said whether, given this great legacy, he considered Temur a hero. He looked horrified. ‘No! Definitely not. He was a killer and an invader, a bloody man and a barbarian. He did nothing for culture here. It was his son Shahrukh who made up for all his father’s destruction by supporting the arts. Temur’s family was civilised but he was just a thug.’
His elderly companion shook his head but said nothing. We moved on to Gazargah, the fifteenth-century shrine complex built by Shahrukh several miles east of the city. Past the mulberries and rose bushes beggars young and old swarmed around the ornate portal created by the Persian architect Quram ad-din Sherazi, towering so high it was visible from Herat. Some had made this place their home, and shuffled about in ragged cloaks and blankets. Inside were hundreds of headstones. The most ancient, smooth with age but with many of their beautiful inscriptions intact, leaned precariously in the ground like twisted teeth. Elderly men with unkempt beards, little changed in dress or appearance from the times of Temur, sat cross-legged and quiet, whispering thanks for any alms given by visitors. A few yards behind them stood a fifteen-foot marble pillar from the mid-fifteenth century, finely carved, a model of the highly skilled craftsmanship which Temur so actively supported. Nearby was another exceptional monument, the nineteenth-century tomb of Amir Dost Mohammed. We paused by the shrine of Khoja Abdullah Ansari, eleventh-century Sufi poet, philosopher and patron saint of the city,* set in the shade of an old ilex tree and the once gleaming blue iwan, an arched niche within an eighty-foot wall surmounted by a domed turret at either end. Patches of blue glaze survived at the lower level of the iwan, but most of the decorative tiles had fallen like winter leaves, leaving a dull beige façade.
While we walked slowly among these funerary monuments Maulana Khudad resumed our conversation where we had left off. He disagreed with his colleague’s damning verdict on Temur. ‘From my point of view he was certainly a hero. Generally, those who called him a barbarian came from the West. Temur was spreading Islam and they didn’t like it so they denigrated him.’
He cast a mischievous glance towards his old friend and continued. ‘Though at first he wreaked havoc in Herat, he also brought great benefits and honoured Islamic scholars like Mohammed Said Sharif Gurgani, Maulana Saad ad-din Taftazani and Maulana Razi. His children and grandchildren – men like Shahrukh, Sultan Baysunqur, Ulugh Beg and Abu Said – served Islam greatly. In Temur’s time there were 350 madrassahs just in Herat. One of them, the Mirza Madrassah, had forty thousand students, many of them foreign. Four thousand graduated every year. The whole thing was supported by Temur. And it wasn’t just Islam which benefited. He had great creative vision. For example, he built twelve huge irrigation canals around Herat which changed agriculture here forever. And just think of the great artist Bihzad, who worked at the court of Sultan Husayn Mirza.* And of course, then there was the emperor Babur, who founded the Mughal empire in India. None of this would have happened without Temur.’ He shot a defiant glare at his friend again. ‘This was not an ordinary man. He was a man of war, yes, but of culture, too. We will always remember him for these fine buildings. My friend is not right. For Herat, Temur was the greatest hero the city ever knew.’
With Herat conquered and the winter snows thawing amid the first hints of spring, Temur resumed his heroic ambitions in the west. ‘Asia trembled from China even to the borders of Greece,’ wrote Yazdi, and well it might. In 1382, the Tatar armies rumbled north-west towards Mazandaran, the province immediately south of the Caspian Sea. Protected both by the Elburz mountains, with summits of up to seventeen thousand feet, covered with thick forest, and by treacly swamps, it was inauspicious terrain for an invader, but after stiff resistance Amir Wali, the local ruler, was defeated and forced to offer his submission. Four years later, Mazandaran rebelled. Temur was well positioned to deal with the challenge, having recently begun the first of his three major campaigns in Persia. He wrote a letter to Amir Wali demanding his surrender. Alone among his chiefs, Amir Wali refused to comply, despatching pleas for assistance to Shah Shuja Muzaffar, who ruled Fars in the south, and Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad and Azerbaijan. No help arrived. Amir Wali was forced to join battle without his allies, conscious that defeat spelled certain death.
‘When the armies were in sight of each other and blows of javelins, swords and spears were being dealt indiscriminately, Shah Wali withstood some time his adverse fortune; then he turned his back after deciding upon withdrawal and flight,’ wrote Arabshah. He was subsequently captured and lost his head, literally. It was brought to Temur’s throne in a gesture which paid tribute to the yasa of Genghis Khan.
Mazandaran’s fall in 1382 was followed a year later by an act of calculated brutality by Temur. Once again it was inflicted on a city which had rebelled, and once again the price was calamity. Isfizar, a city south of Herat, fell, and two thousand inhabitants were taken prisoner. Rather than execute them on the spot, Temur chose instead to make an example – if any were needed – of the consequences of rebellion. A tower was constructed, though this time the prisoners who went into it were not dead. ‘There were near two thousand slaves taken who were piled alive one upon the other with mortar and bricks, so that these miserable wretches might serve as a monument to deter others from revolting,’ wrote the unsympathetic Yazdi.
Invigorated by this dreadful act, Temur led an army of one hundred thousand into Sistan, the south-western province of Afghanistan. Zaranj, its prosperous capital, mounted a valiant defence. Such was the ferocity of the fighting that Temur felt impelled to throw himself into the heart of the battle, at great personal risk. When his horse was shot from beneath him, he vowed revenge. Sistan already held painful memories, for this, most probably, was where he had received the wounds that left him lame in both right limbs, either while fighting as a hired sword in the service of the local khan or – the more prosaic version – when caught in the act of stealing sheep. Whatever his feelings, Zaranj felt his fury, and the capital of a fertile province known as the Garden of Asia and the Granary of the East was pitilessly razed. Arabshah wrote that the residents of Zaranj sued for peace, which Temur granted on condition they surrender all their weapons. ‘And as soon as they had given this guarantee, he drew the sword against them and billeted upon them all the armies of death. Then he laid the city waste, leaving in it not a tree or a wall and destroyed it utterly, no mark or trace of it remaining.’ Men, women and children perished in the slaughter, echoed Yazdi, ‘from persons of a hundred years old, to infants in the cradle’. Windmills, agricultural lands and, worst of all, dykes and irrigation canals, were destroyed. In time, the desert moved to reclaim what it had lost, the sands swept in, and the once green province gave way to the Dasht-i-Margo (Desert of Death), the Dasht-i-Jehanum (Desert of Hell) and the Sar-o-Tar (Place of Desolation and Emptiness). To this day the region remains poverty-stricken and deserted.
From Zaranj, Temur swung east to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, which fell to him in 1384, its governor thrown in irons and hanged. No sooner had he seized Kandahar than he abruptly doubled back on himself, marched west halfway across Persia and, after the feeble flight of its ruler Sultan Ahmed, accepted the surrender of Sultaniya in the same year.
This was a development of enormous significance. Sultaniya was an important commercial centre, a ‘great city’, as Clavijo reported on his arrival on 26 June 1404, twenty years after it had passed into Temur’s dominions. Founded in about 1285 by Arghun, the sixth Ilkhanid ruler of Persia, who was attracted by its abundant pastures and used it as his summer capital, Sultaniya became the seat of empire under his son Mohammed Oljeytu Khudabanda in 1313. The city was expanded aggressively, the outer walls increasing from twelve thousand paces in circumference to thirty thousand. At its heart stood a powerful square citadel with heavy fortifications, built of cut stone with walls broad enough for several horsemen to ride abreast on their ramparts. Sixteen towers looked down onto an encircling moat beyond the outer walls, decorated with turquoise tiles,
Arabic inscriptions and pictures of horsemen fighting heads of lions.
Oljeytu intended Sultaniya to become a fully functioning capital, no mere royal camp. He duly embarked on a terrific building spree, ordering his courtiers to design graceful palaces and gardens. The vizier Rashid ad-din built an entire quarter of a thousand houses. Another, Taj ad-din Ali Shah, built a lavish, ten-thousand-dinar palace called Paradise, its doors, walls and floors studded with pearls, gold, rubies, turquoise, emeralds and amber. A city of monuments made from baked brick, stone and wood sprang up on the desert plain, luxuriously decorated with bronze doors, inlaid window grilles, marble revetments and mosaic faience.
The most famous architectural creation, however, was Oljeytu’s monumental octagonal tomb, 120 feet in diameter, which alone today recalls Sultaniya’s illustrious past. The tomb complex, which incorporated a mosque, madrassah, hospital and khanaqah (a hostel for travelling dervishes), was one of the grandest pious endowments of its time. Octagonal in plan – a reference to the eight gates of Paradise – the rectangular burial chamber projected from the southern iwan. Within the portals, courtyards of white marble dazzled the eyes, which were drawn inexorably towards the giant shadow-making dome and the eight minarets which guarded it at each of the corners of the upper terrace. Beneath the dome stood two storeys of eight-bay arcades. A third opened onto the exterior. Inside, four bays were especially elaborately decorated in geometric patterns of brick and delicate strips of glazed and unglazed terracotta. A dado of hexagonal glazed tiles divided the chamber into two. Above it, the entire interior, including that of the dome, was covered in plaster, painted with decorative patterns and inscriptions. It was a truly imperial creation.
‘The total of those who worked on the foundations was ten thousand men,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Mamluk biographer al Yusufi. ‘Five thousand moved dirt, and five thousand cut and dressed stone. There were five thousand wagons to move rock and other materials, for which there were ten thousand donkeys. They made a thousand kilns for brick, and a thousand kilns for lime. Five thousand camels transported wood, and two thousand persons were assigned to cut wood from the mountains and other places. Three thousand smiths were employed to work sheets of metal, windows, nails and the like. There were five hundred carpenters, and five thousand men laid marble. Supervisors were appointed over them to urge them on in the work.’
Trade, meanwhile, flourished. Although its population was less than that of Tabriz, capital of Azerbaijan to the north-west, Sultaniya was ‘a more important centre of exchange for merchants and goods’, said Clavijo. According to the Ilkhanid chronicler Abul Qasim al Kashani, the city had more than ten thousand shops filled with bales of Chinese brocade, small boxes, cups, ewers and a host of other materials. In June, July and August each year, weary camel caravans trudged in from the deserts laden down with spices – cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, manna and mace – from India and Afghanistan, cotton and taffeta from Shiraz and silks from the southern shores of the Caspian.*‘The city then is in a state of great commotion, and immense are the customs dues that accrue to the Treasury.’ Merchants from Persia, Genoa and Venice gathered to buy the cloth; large quantities were also exported to Syria, Turkey and the Crimea. Sultaniya was also a centre of the trade in pearls and precious stones. From China came pearls, mother of pearl and rubies, shipped to the port of Hormuz in southern Persia. Here they were expertly drilled and strung and exported ‘to all parts of the western world’. Many were loaded onto camels for the sixty-day caravan journey to Sultaniya where they were bought by merchants ‘from Christian lands’ and from Turkey, Syria, and Baghdad.
Such was the city’s size and strategic importance, straddling a major east – west trade route, that Pope John XXII set up an archbishopric at Sultaniya in 1318. Archbishops were appointed until 1425. By the time Clavijo arrived, shortly before Temur’s death, Sultaniya had passed its apogee. The outer defensive walls had gone, he reported. The city was losing its importance. In the seventeenth century, the Persian ruler Shah Abbas moved his capital to Isfahan and Sultaniya’s decline accelerated. Today, the metropolis is long gone, whittled down over the centuries to the point where Oljeytu’s tomb looks down upon nothing more than an insignificant mud-brick village in northern Iran.
For Temur, the importance of seizing Sultaniya was by no means exclusively commercial. Of far greater consequence was what its capture represented. It is easy now to overlook the milestones in his military career. Sometimes the victories seem to merge into a remorseless blur of savagery and slaughter. But though it seems to have been largely neglected by the court chroniclers and historians in subsequent centuries, the taking of Sultaniya represented a definite landmark both in the scope of Temur’s ambitions and in his ability to fulfil them. His successes until this point, though impressive, were essentially domestic achievements. Herat represented the first foray abroad, militarily decisive but still tentative in purely geographical terms, rather as though Temur were testing the waters before he plunged in deeper. The temperature evidently suited him, because that challenge had been overcome with contemptuous ease.
Herat ushered in a new era of conquest. Henceforth, for practically the rest of Temur’s life, spring would herald a new campaigning season. Winter was a time for hibernation and planning the next target for his armies. His first campaign was instructive. First Kandahar crumpled and then, in one fell swoop, he had led his men across the Persian deserts to seize the prize of Sultaniya, a thousand miles west of Samarkand, without so much as a battle. As an entrance onto the international stage it was a move of astonishing audacity, a trumpet blast to the world and an announcement, in the most dramatic terms, of Temur’s empire-building intentions. In fact, with a more or less united confederation of tribes under his single command, all hungry for reward, it was imperative for him to lead them beyond their borders – beyond Mawarannahr and the Chaghatay ulus – to new triumphs abroad. This, indeed, was the only way to retain their allegiance and service. Steppe tribesmen traditionally would remain loyal to a leader only for so long as he proved victorious on the battlefield. Temur understood this acutely. Any analysis of his career necessarily dwells on the observation that essentially it was one long campaign, punctuated with only the briefest of interludes. Quite simply, he needed to keep his armies on the move.
These initial manoeuvres, from the fall of Herat to the bloodless defeat of Sultaniya, also demonstrated his capacity to surprise, a key weapon in his armoury and one that he would employ throughout his campaigns. They also revealed his willingness to use terror to project and increase his power through Asia. The razing of Zaranj and the extermination of its population were inspired by what Temur saw as the need to acquire a reputation for complete ruthlessness, as a man who, if challenged, would unleash every instrument of cruelty and destruction at his command. It was in his interests for this reputation to filter across the continent. Equally, the events at Zaranj were intended to show other would-be opponents the futility of resistance to this unstoppable force. The skulls severed from the corpses of his defeated opponents – soldiers and civilians, men, women and children alike – should be understood in this context of terror. Far better, both for Temur and the cities and dynasties which blocked his expansion, that they surrender quickly and be spared. Defiance would only meet with the swiftest and most terrible retribution. Little wonder that Sultan Ahmed had no stomach for the fight as Temur marched into his lands. The loss of Sultaniya was a great blow. Once assimilated into Temur’s emerging empire, it steadily assumed a greater political role to match its commercial preeminence. By the time Clavijo passed through, it had taken its place as the capital of Persia.
If Temur had learnt any lessons from his seizure of Herat and Sultaniya, it was this: that issuing unexpected ultimatums, reinforced by the rapid manoeuvring of his armies across great distances and the threat of massive, terrifying force in the style of Genghis Khan, was a potent strategy. As Arabshah put it: ‘He ran to the ends of the earth, as Satan runs from t
he son of Adam and crept through countries as poison creeps through bodies.’
Tempted by Tabriz after seizing Sultaniya, Temur returned instead to winter in Samarkand, to rest his soldiers and allow them to enjoy the fruits of their endeavours. In his absence came disturbing news. Tokhtamish Khan, his one-time protégé, had thrust south from the Golden Horde of Russia and sacked Tabriz himself. From Temur’s perspective, this was an unacceptable development. His earlier acts of friendship had been thrown back in his face. Had Tokhtamish already forgotten how Temur had clothed him so richly when he had arrived destitute in the Tatar’s court in 1376? How Temur had financed repeated military campaigns to win him his kingdom in the north, even fighting alongside him until he was installed as khan of the Golden Horde? Such ingratitude so soon augured badly. The sweeping steppes of Asia, its wide deserts and snow-capped mountains were beginning to look too small to encompass the rival ambitions of the two warrior princes.
In taking Tabriz, the khan of the Golden Horde had issued a direct challenge to the Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes. It was not in Temur’s character to let it go unanswered. Had the city been of little consequence, it is probable he would have acted no differently. The point was that Tokhtamish had announced his ambitions overtly. Failure to respond decisively would have represented, in Temur’s mind at least, an admission of weakness and an invitation to further attacks.
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