Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  This procession of victories marked the western limits of Temur’s Three-Year Campaign. As abruptly as he had pushed north from Sultaniya, he now swept south across Azerbaijan, riding back into Persia at the head of his army of mounted archers. Such unexpected changes of direction, employed regularly during his campaigns, consistently wrong-footed his enemies. Temur was a brilliant military tactician. Unaware of his approach, oblivious to the threat, sultans, kings and princes suddenly found their cities, castles and armies under attack without warning. The element of surprise achieved formidable success.

  This time Temur had another target in sight. Glittering on the desert plain like a brooch of emerald and sapphire, its cool waters and lush orchards equally inviting, lay Isfahan. It was, reported Ibn Battutah, ‘one of the largest and fairest of cities’, a place of plenty and splendour. Its architecture was graceful, its markets thick with merchants, famed for hundreds of miles. Watered by the Zayandeh river, it was a fertile oasis surrounded by limitless horizons of sand and salt. ‘It is rich in fruits, among its products being apricots of unequalled quality with sweet almonds in their kernels, quinces whose sweetness and size cannot be paralleled, splendid grapes, and wonderful melons,’ wrote the Moroccan traveller. ‘Its people are good-looking, with clear white skins tinged with red, exceedingly brave, generous, and always trying to outdo one another in procuring luxurious viands.’ Arabshah agreed. Isfahan was ‘a great city, full of excellent men and teeming with nobles’.

  Although an early proponent of blitzkrieg, Temur liked to justify his military actions before they began. A pretext was needed before he could lay claim to Isfahan. He did not have to cast about for one for long. Prior to leaving Samarkand on this Three-Year Campaign, he had received a highly unusual letter from Shah Shuja Muzaffar, the ruler of the Persian province of Fars, with whom he had previously contracted an alliance. After a decadent life indulging heavily in wine and women, the patron of the poet Hafiz was now on his deathbed, from where he entrusted the protection of his remaining family to Temur.

  ‘Great men are aware that the world is the theatre of inconstancy,’ Shah Shuja’s letter began:

  Men of learning are never given to trifles – nor transitory pleasures and beauties – because they know the passing of all things … As to the treaty between us, deigning never to break it, I look upon the gaining of the Imperial Friendship as a great conquest, and my chief wish – dare I say it – is to have in my hand this treaty with you at the Day of Judgement, so that you should not reproach me with breaking my word … Now I am called before the tribunal of the Sovereign Master of the Universe, and I thank the Divine Majesty that I have done nothing for which my conscience can reproach me – notwithstanding the faults and sins which are inseparable from life and the depraved nature of man – and I have tasted all the pleasures I could reasonably expect during the fifty-three years I have stayed upon the earth … In brief, I die as I have lived, and I have abandoned all the vanities of the world. And I pray God to give his blessing to this monarch [Temur] as wise as Solomon and as great as Alexander. Although it is not at all necessary to commend to you my loved son Zayn al Abidin – God grant him a long life under the shadow of your protection – I leave him to the care of God and your Majesty. How could I doubt that you will keep this treaty? I also beg of you to say the final prayer for your devoted friend, who is happy in departing out of this life in friendship with you, that through the prayers of a Prince so great and fortunate, God may be merciful to me and raise me up among the saints. This is what we pray your Majesty to carry out, as our last will, for which you will be answerable in the next world.

  The Muzaffarid prince gave Shiraz, capital of Fars province, to his son and heir Zayn al Abidin. The old man’s nephew Shah Yahya received Yazd, his brother Sultan Ahmed inheriting Kirman. Isfahan was bequeathed to his valiant nephew Shah Mansur. The letter and Shah Shuja’s will gave Temur just the opportunity he was waiting for. Testing the loyalty of his new vassal, he summoned Zayn al Abidin to swear loyalty to him at his travelling court. The prince failed to present himself.

  Suddenly the Tatar hordes were lined up in full battle formation before the walls of Isfahan. It was a terrifying sight for its governor and citizens, who knew Temur’s reputation only too well. A false move and the city would be turned to ashes. Rushing out to pre-empt certain slaughter, the governor and his officials offered their surrender. Temur accepted, on condition the city pay a typically heavy ransom. Once this had been agreed, he rode into Isfahan with a magnificently arrayed entourage to inspect his latest acquisition.

  Tension gripped the city. No one knew what Temur would do next. Gossip, rumour and wild speculation coursed through the bazaars. Some said Isfahan was going to be spared, and that Temur would soon be on his way after seizing the ransom. Others, mindful of previous outrages, expected the city to be torched, and retreated into their cellars, determined not to move until the conqueror and his army had left.

  A new governor was appointed, and then, as suddenly as he had arrived, Temur wheeled around, spurred his horse and galloped back to his camp outside the city, well pleased with the day’s events. Night fell and the cloak of darkness descended on Isfahan. An uneasy peace bristled in the streets. Tatar officers guarded the gates to the city, reinforced within the walls by a garrison of soldiers. No one else was allowed entry. Camped outside after several months on the march, seventy thousand hungry and exhausted soldiers thought longingly of plunder, picturing the sexual and gastronomic pleasures that surely awaited them, and wondered what the morning would bring.

  Some time in the night, according to Yazdi, Isfahan awoke to the noise of a blacksmith beating his drum and urging his fellow citizens to fall upon the Tatar soldiers stationed inside the walls. Gripped by fear and moved by hatred, they rose up against their new conquerors and the garrison of three thousand was slain. In a matter of minutes the massacre was complete. Toasting their success, the hot-blooded rebels swore that Isfahan would remain free. But the celebrations did not last long. The first flush of victory quickly receded, replaced by the chilling realisation that Temur would certainly avenge these killings, carried out in defiance of a treaty agreed with the city elders. No quarter could be expected from him now. With this recognition that they had signed their own death warrants rather than liberated Isfahan, the mood of the warriors changed and their limbs started to tremble. And then another silence, heavy with dread, hung over the roofs of the city.

  At dawn, wrote Arabshah,

  Temur perceived that evil crime; and Satan puffed up his nostrils and he forthwith moved his camp and drew the sword of his wrath and took arrows from the quiver of his tyranny and advanced to the city, roaring, overthrowing, like a dog or lion or leopard; and when he came in sight of the city, he ordered bloodshed and sacrilege, slaughter and plunder, devastation, burning of crops, women’s breasts to be cut off, infants to be destroyed, bodies dismembered, honour to be insulted, dependants to be betrayed and abandoned, the carpet of pity to be folded up and the blanket of revenge to be unfolded … then he loosened the reins of the cutting sword in the fields of their necks and made their graves in the bellies of wolves and hyenas and the crop of birds; and the whirlwinds of destruction did not cease sweeping them from the trees of existence, until they counted the number of dead, who were six times more than the people of Nineveh.

  Temur ordered the killing of every man, woman and child. Seventy thousand lost their lives in the bloodbath. Each division of the army, from the detachments of ten and one hundred to the tumans of ten thousand, was ordered to bring back a certain number of heads, and the tovachis were appointed to count them. At first, Yazdi observed, there was great reluctance among the soldiers to murder fellow Muslims in cold blood. Many bought heads from more willing executioners. Heads changed hands for twenty dinars apiece until the soldiers lost their scruples and the torrent of slaughter raged unabated through the city; the price plunged to half a dinar. Those who had escaped the initial slaughter, hidi
ng in their houses, crept out at night and fled through the snow. They were hunted down the following morning and butchered where they stood.

  No mercy was shown Isfahan’s children. Schiltberger, the Bavarian squire captured and taken prisoner by Temur’s army at the battle of Ankara in 1402, described what happened after the slaughter inside the city walls.

  Then he ordered the women and children to be taken to a plain outside the city, and ordered the children under seven years of age to be placed apart, and ordered his people to ride over these same children. When his counsellors and the mothers of the children saw this, they fell at his feet, and begged that he would not kill them. He would not listen, and ordered that they should be ridden over; but none would be the first to do so. He got angry and rode himself [amongst them] and said: ‘Now I should like to see who will not ride after me?’ Then they were obliged to ride over the children, and they were all trampled upon. There were seven thousand.

  The familiar totems of Temur’s wrath sprang up around the city like an unholy halo of death. The historian Hafiz-i-Abru walked halfway round Isfahan shortly after the bloodshed and counted twenty-eight towers of fifteen hundred heads each.

  In the final weeks of 1387, Temur was celebrating the peaceful surrender of Shiraz, two hundred miles to the south. There was reason to be content. Like Herat, Tabriz and Isfahan, the city had emptied its coffers to him, this time for a crippling ransom of ten million silver dinars. In the mosques, Temur’s name was read in the khutba – the sermon in Friday prayers – as the new sovereign. The rival princes of the Muzaffarid dynasty were now vassal kings. Victory letters were despatched to Samarkand commemorating, in florid prose, the sweep of his triumphs. The lion’s share of the empire carved out by Hulagu now owed its allegiance to the upstart sheep-stealer-turned-emperor from Samarkand.

  It was in Shiraz, according to a popular story, that the poet Hafiz, the brightest star in the literary firmament, was summoned before Temur to explain himself. He had written a verse which had come to the Tatar’s attention and displeased him mightily.

  If that unkindly Shiraz Turk would take my heart within her hand, I’d give Bukhara for the mole upon her cheek, or Samarkand.

  Temur’s voice, though calm, was full of menace. ‘I have subdued with this sword the greater part of the earth. I have depopulated a vast number of cities and provinces in order to increase the glory and wealth of Samarkand and Bukhara, the ordinary places of my residence and the seat of my empire; yet you, an insignificant individual, have pretended to give away both Samarkand and Bukhara as the price of a little black mole setting off the features of a pretty face.’

  It was a dreadful moment for Hafiz. His life hung in the balance. A careless answer would cost him his head. ‘Alas! O Prince,’ he replied, ‘it is this prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you see me.’

  Far from offending Temur, the poet’s reply amused him. Instead of ordering his immediate execution, he presented him with extravagant presents and asked him to stay in the imperial court.

  These weeks of courtly pleasures were suddenly interrupted. From Samarkand, eleven hundred miles away, came desperate news. Mawarannahr was under attack. The heart of the newly won empire was besieged. Prince Omar Shaykh, Temur’s eldest surviving son, had only narrowly escaped death on the battlefield. Enemy forces had surrounded Bukhara. Some were marauding in the Qashka Darya valley, where Temur had been born. Soldiers were laying waste to towns and villages. The palace at Qarshi, one of the defining symbols of the Chaghatay empire, had been razed to the ground. Worse still, the Jats, Temur’s long-standing adversaries in Moghulistan, had wasted no time in joining the rebellion, accompanied by the Sufi shah of Khorezm.

  It was a bitter blow. By the mid-1380s, Temur ruled, or rather had conquered, lands stretching west from Samarkand as far as Georgia and the fringes of the Ottoman empire. Although much of these territories would require periodic reconquest, it was Temur, and no other man, who could justifiably claim to be emperor over them. But while he had been winning these new lands with the sword a thousand miles away in the west, a hostile army, taking advantage of his absence from the seat of empire, had struck decisively in the east. His adversary had mounted a lightning raid where it was least expected, using precisely the sort of tactics which Temur himself had employed with such success. The brilliantly executed manoeuvrings had completely wrong-footed the master of warfare. Now, after years of peace and plenty, Samarkand, his beloved capital, was under threat. It was the most serious challenge he had ever faced. Failure to confront and overcome it would spell the humiliating end to his career of conquest.

  But what made the news even harder for Temur to stomach was the identity of his enemy. The grating irony was that it was the very man whose incursions had prompted him to campaign in the Caucasus to shore up his western defences. Here was an adversary of an altogether different nature, of far greater mettle, than those Temur had faced and defeated before, an audacious warrior in his own mould. The one-time protégé had unleashed his sword against his former mentor. The son had turned against his adopted father. Tokhtamish, khan of the Golden Horde, wanted war.

  * * *

  * Today, Khorasan refers only to the north-eastern province of Iran, but in medieval times it covered a far larger territory. For Arab geographers it encompassed everything from Dasht-i-Kavir, the central desert of Iran, to the borders of China in the east, and to those of India in the south. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, it had shrunk to the equivalent of Iranian Khorasan, southern Turkmenistan, and northern and north-western Afghanistan.

  * To give an idea of the size of European towns in the fourteenth century, in Italy only four – Milan, Venice, Naples and Florence – could boast populations of over fifty thousand. Paris had in the region of eighty thousand inhabitants. Cologne, the largest city in Germany, had a population approaching forty thousand, almost identical to that of London.

  * Despite these precautions, the people of Herat rebelled against Temur only two years later. This time the conqueror sent his son Miranshah to quash the uprising, a task he completed with brutal efficiency. The members of the Kart royal family were executed and towers piled high with the skulls of the dead. The city never rebelled again. In 1389 Miranshah killed Pir Mohammed, the last survivor of the dynasty. According to one story, he cut off the prince’s head in the middle of a high-spirited banquet, an act he later blamed on the vast quantities of wine he had consumed.

  * Byron’s languid peregrinations through Asia in 1933–34 left him with a profound appreciation of the Temurids’ artistic and architectural achievements. Queen Gawhar Shad, wife of Shahrukh, particularly intrigued him. ‘I feel some curiosity about Gohar Shad,’ he confessed, ‘not on account of her piety in endowing religious foundations, but as a woman of artistic instinct. Either she had that instinct, or she knew how to employ people who had it. This shows character. And besides this, she was rich. Taste, character, and riches mean power, and powerful women, apart from charmers, are not common in Mohammadan history.’

  * Under Taliban rule, the Masjid-i-Jami, Herat’s Friday mosque, one of the greatest buildings in the Islamic world and among Afghanistan’s most important historical monuments, was closed to all non-Muslims. Mosque officials enforced this ban zealously, out of fear, they said, of beatings by the dreaded religious police.

  * Like his predecessor Hafiz, Jami did not hide his light under a bushel. He claimed never to have met anyone who could best him in an argument, one reason presumably why he refused to acknowledge the obligations of a pupil to any teacher. He described himself as a great poet, a great scholar and a great mystic, a master of all literary genres and subjects: lyrical and romantic poetry, exegesis of the Koran, analysis of the divine mission of the Prophet Mohammed, Arabic grammar, rhyme, prosody and music. In his own words: ‘My verses have achieved so much fame in the whole world that a minstrel begins singing with my verses. If the caravan of my verses reach Fars, souls of Sa’di an
d Hafiz welcome it. If they reach India, Khusraw and Hasan come out to receive it. Sometimes the Emperor of Constantinople Rum sends his greetings to me while at other times, Cheepal sends messages to me from Hind.’

  * Robert Byron, as ever, had his own counter-intuitive views on this celebrated saint. ‘Khoja Abdullah Ansari died in the year 1088 at the age of eighty-four, because some boys threw stones at him while he was at penance. One sympathises with those boys: even among saints he was a prodigious bore. He spoke in the cradle; he began to preach at fourteen; during his life he held intercourse with a thousand sheikhs, learnt a hundred thousand verses by heart (some say 1,200,000) and composed as many more. He doted on cats.’

  * Born in the late fifteenth century, Bihzad first entered the service of Ali Sher Nawai, the statesman, poet, father of the Chaghatay language, generous patron of the arts and friend of Sultan Husayn Mirza, before graduating to royal appointments. Though little is known about him, he worked in Herat, ushering in a new style of Persian miniature painting which was characterised by firm lines, strong colours, unprecedented detail and exquisite delicacy. His work is now regarded as marking the high point of the Islamic miniaturist’s craft and a major influence on Persian painting. Writing around 1523, the historian Khwandamir left this glowing profile of his contemporary: ‘He sets before us marvellous forms and rarities of art; his draughtsmanship, which is like the brush of Mani, has caused the memorials of all the painters of the world to be obliterated, and his fingers, endowed with miraculous qualities, have wiped out the pictures of all the artists among the sons of Adam. A hair of his brush, through its mastery, has given life to the lifeless form … At the present time, too, this marvel of the age, whose belief is pure, is regarded with benevolence by the kings of the world and is encompassed with the boundless consideration of the rulers of Islam.’ Bihzad’s magnificent illustrations can be seen in Yazdi’s Zafarnama. They include fascinating pictures such as ‘Temur granting audience on the occasion of his accession’, ‘The Building of the Great Mosque in Samarkand’, ‘Destruction of the remnant of the Kipchak army’, and ‘The Assault on the fortress of the Knights of St John at Smyrna’. After the capture of Herat by the Safavids in 1510, Bihzad moved to Tabriz, and possibly Bukhara.