Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  Temur had manipulated and subverted traditional tribal loyalties in his rise to power. As emperor, he continued the policy. Tribal chiefs, who could already count on a degree of loyalty from their kinsmen, tended not to be appointed amirs in his army. That would have conferred too much power upon them. Wherever possible, the highest offices were awarded to his sons and grandsons, princes of the royal family. Omar Shaykh, his second son, ruled Farghana, and later the kingdom of Fars. When he was killed on the battlefield in Kurdistan, his lands were given to his son Pir Mohammed, Temur’s grandson. Another grandson, also called Pir Mohammed, son of Jahangir, later inherited the kingdom of Ghazni, modern Afghanistan. Miranshah, until his summary removal, was given the kingdom of Hulagu, covering northern Persia, Azerbaijan and Baghdad. For a time, Shahrukh was governor of Samarkand. Later, he was appointed ruler of Khorasan from his capital at Herat. But no member of the imperial family was ever allowed to become too powerful. Throughout his life, Temur took care to prevent any of the royal princes emerging as a rival to the throne. This jealous guarding of power was such that by the time of his death, his designated successor had been shorn of the personal authority and military resources required to consolidate the realm. Temur’s empire was a one-man show.

  A nomadic conqueror in the mould of Genghis, he exhibited the same scorn for the settled life of peasant farmers. His energy was remorseless, his career one of constant movement – from city to city, pasture to pasture, through deserts, over mountains, across steppes, along rivers. Time and again, his army marched thousands of miles across difficult country, inflicted bloody defeats on a series of adversaries, returned to Samarkand and, after only the briefest of rests, set out again on a new campaign. The only pause in this frenetic whirlwind came in winter, when camp was made during the harshest months of the year. This was a guiding principle, however, not a rule, and there were times when the implacable Temur ordered his shivering soldiers into action in the depths of January. There were occasions, too, when the amirs urged Temur to slow down, to give his soldiers more time to recuperate from the rigours of the latest expedition. But always the movement continued, a raging blur of mounted archers, piercing arrows and slashing swords leaving smoking ruins, piled corpses and towers of skulls – the instruments of terror – in its wake, with trains of horses and camels bearing off the most fantastic treasures of the world looted from its greatest cities. Only once in his entire career did Temur stop for a significant time in Samarkand. That time was now.

  Temur, wrote Harold Lamb, loved Samarkand ‘as an old man loves a young mistress’. In fact, it would be more accurate to say he wooed her with the ardour of a young man trying to win the love of a beautiful, older woman. The love affair began in 1366, when Temur was thirty-one and he and Husayn, his then ally, took the city by the sword from the Sarbadars. It was his first significant victory, his first notable conquest, and brought into his orbit a city whose name, like Rome and Babylon, echoed through two millennia. He always cherished this moment as the foundation of his bid to rule the world. From that moment Samarkand occupied an unchallenged position in his aesthetic universe. As Clavijo put it: ‘Samarkand indeed was the first of all the cities that he had conquered, and the one that he had since ennobled above all others, by his buildings making it the treasure house of his conquests.’

  Temur’s first move was to dress his new lover, encircling her with a girdle of fortified walls to protect her from invaders. This was out of character, insofar as it challenged the traditions established by the nomadic Genghis for whom a settled life and its associated infrastructure – towns, markets, agriculture – were anathema. The Mongol, who did not share Temur’s romantic associations with Samarkand, had swept through in 1220, arriving before the city to find massive ramparts with twelve iron gates flanked by towers. A guard of twenty elephants and tens of thousands of Turkic soldiers were unable to prevent his hordes from razing both walls and city to the ground. According to tradition, the shamanistic Genghis told the Muslims of Khorezm: ‘I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent punishment like me upon you.’ Since that dreadful storm, when the city had been ‘drowned in the ocean of destruction and consumed by the fire of perdition’, Samarkand had lain unprotected. Temur’s building works 150 years later were the first time the outer walls had been restored, an indication of the great esteem in which he held her.

  For the rest of his life, Temur hurried across the world, storming, sacking, torching, razing, seizing, all for the greater glory of his adored metropolis. He rampaged through the continent as though nothing else mattered, always returning to adorn her with his latest trophies and embellishments. Captured abroad, scientists and scholars, writers, philosophers and historians congregated in the new academies and libraries he built, adding intellectual sparkle to the city. Temur, said Arabshah, ‘gathered from all sides and collected at Samarkand the fruits of everything; and that place accordingly had in every wonderful craft and rare art someone who excelled in wonderful skill and was famous beyond his rivals in his craft’. Priests and holy men preached to their flocks in the mosques, which multiplied like mushrooms throughout the city, their lofty blue domes glimmering among the clouds, their interiors bright with gold and turquoise. Parks sprang up one by one, idyllic oases of tranquillity sprawling through the suburbs. Asia surrendered her finest musicians, artists and craftsmen to the regal vanity of Samarkand. From Persia, cultural capital of the continent, came poets and painters, miniaturists, calligraphers, musicians and architects. Syria sent her silk-weavers, glass-makers and armourers. After the fall of Delhi, India provided masons, builders and gem-cutters while Asia Minor supplied silversmiths, gunsmiths and rope-makers. This was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Among the Muslim population there were Turks, Arabs and Moors. The Christians were represented by Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Catholics, Jacobites and Nestorians, joined in lifelong servitude by the Hindus and Zoroastrians. Samarkand was a melting-pot of languages, religions and colours, an exercise in imperial splendour and an act of devotion by one man, constant in his love.

  Christopher Marlowe’s description of ‘Samarcanda’ was, for once, historically accurate. Attacked for the licence he took in his freewheeling masterpiece Tamburlaine the Great, he nonetheless brilliantly evoked the proud and wrathful emperor revelling in the great glories of his city.

  Then shall my native city Samarcanda,

  And crystal waves of fresh Jaertis’ stream,

  The pride and beauty of her princely seat,

  Be famous through the furthest continents;

  For there my palace royal shall be placed,

  Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens,

  And cast the fame of Ilion’s tower to hell;

  Through the streets, with troops of conquered kings,

  I’ll ride in golden armour like the sun;

  And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,

  Spangled with diamonds, dancing in the air,

  To note me emperor of the three-fold world.

  In the heart of this gracious city was the symbol of its strength, the heavily fortified Gok Sarai (Blue Palace), simultaneously a citadel, treasury, prison and armaments factory where the captive artisans and armourers were put to work. The great walls reverberated with the din and clattering of burly men hammering plate armour and helmets, making bows and arrows. Others blew glass for the emperor’s palaces, alongside cobblers cutting leather for army boots and sandals. The rope-makers were set to work on piles of flax and hemp – new crops which Temur had introduced to the agricultural lands outside the city expressly to supply the ropes for the mangonels and other siege engines with which he overwhelmed defiant cities and castles. Here also were the archives, the coin-filled treasury, rooms full of Asia’s plundered treasures and formal reception halls where the emperor occasionally held court.

  For all his restless roaming, Samarkand was the centre around which Temur revolved. During thirty-five
years of campaigning, the city invariably marked first the launch and – with ominous regularity for his enemies – the triumphal homecoming of his expeditions. He returned in 1381 after the sacking of Herat, and again in 1384 after taking Sistan, Zaranj and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. He was back in 1392 after routing Tokhtamish. Samarkand, the Rome of the East, looked on in wonder as its illustrious emperor trampled the universe.

  In 1396, after the latest catalogue of victories in Persia, Mesopotamia and the Kipchak steppes, Temur returned once more to Samarkand. Here he remained for two years, substituting peace for conquest while he embarked on his most sustained building projects yet. Peace maybe, but Temur threw himself into the glorification of his capital with all the furious energy of war.

  On 8 September 1404, after a journey of fifteen months and almost six thousand miles from Cadiz, the dust-encrusted Spanish ambassador Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo rode wearily into Samarkand with his modest entourage. Arriving with the European ignorance of the East that was typical of his age, he was staggered to discover the city was larger than Seville, with a population of 150,000.*

  Samarkand was approached through ‘extensive suburbs’, the awestruck envoy noted, each one contemptuously named after the great cities of the East that Temur had conquered – Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Shiraz and Sultaniya – to demonstrate that by comparison with this imperial metropolis, Pearl of the East, Garden of the Soul, they were no more than provincial backwaters. These outlying districts, densely populated, were neatly laid out with orchards, vineyards, streets and markets in open squares.

  Among these orchards outside Samarkand are found the most noble and beautiful houses, and here Temur has his many palaces and pleasure grounds. Round and about the great men of the government also here have their estates and country houses, each standing within its orchard: and so numerous are these gardens and vineyards surrounding Samarkand that a traveller who approaches the city sees only a great mountainous height of trees and the houses embowered among them remain invisible.

  Clavijo did not have to wait long for his audience with the Scourge of God. It took place in the evocatively named Baghi Dilkusha, the Garden of Heart’s Delight, one of Temur’s most fabulous parks, designed and laid out during the emperor’s two-year residence in his capital to mark his marriage in 1397 to princess Tukal-khanum, daughter of the Moghul khan, Khizr Khoja. The garden lay a little to the east of Samarkand among the famous meadows of Kani-gil. From the Turquoise Gate in the city walls a straight avenue of pines led directly to the summer palace. In his memoirs, Babur noted its many paintings celebrating Temur’s Indian campaign. With three storeys, a glittering dome and a forest of colonnades, it was a building of imperial dimensions.

  Within hours of his arrival, the Spaniard handed over to two courtiers the gifts from King Henry III of Castile. Once these formalities were over, he was led forward by new attendants holding him by the armpits. Eventually they came to another orchard, entering via a towering gate beautifully decorated in the finest blue and gold tilework. Past the imperial doorkeepers armed with maces they walked, confronted at once by six enormous elephants with miniature castles on their backs performing tricks at the behest of their keepers. The ambassador and his companions were then led forward by a succession of courtiers in order of seniority, until they were brought before Khalil Sultan, Temur’s grandson and son of Miranshah, to whom they handed over the letter from the king of Spain to the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. The audience could now begin. The scrupulously attentive ambassador left us this portrait of the most magnificent Oriental despot.

  We found Temur and he was seated under a portal, which same was before the entrance of a most beautiful palace that appeared in the background. He was sitting on the ground, but upon a raised dais before which there was a fountain that threw up a column of water into the air backwards, and in the basin of the fountain there were floating red apples. His Highness had taken his place on what appeared to be small mattresses stuffed thick and covered with embroidered silk cloth, and he was leaning on his elbow against some round cushions that were heaped up behind him. He was dressed in a cloak of plain silk without any embroidery, and he wore on his head a tall white hat on the crown of which was displayed a balas ruby, the same being further ornamented with pearls and precious stones.

  The audience passed off successfully, although Temur left the Spaniard in no doubt that he regarded himself as sovereign of the world, referring to the Spanish monarch as ‘my son your King’. Henry III, Temur acknowledged, was ‘the greatest of all the kings of the Franks who reign in that farther quarter of the earth where his people are a great and famous nation’, but that was only in small-time Europe, land of the Franks. Temur’s power and riches were on an altogether more impressive scale, hence the paternalistic condescension to a petty princeling of the West.

  Clavijo’s description of Samarkand in the early years of the fifteenth century, the zenith of Temur’s empire, is virtually unparalleled. The envoy, marvelling at the formally laid-out parks and gardens, could hardly believe what he was seeing. There were fifteen or sixteen of them, with names like Garden of Paradise, the Model of the World and Sublime Garden, all with palaces, immaculate lawns, meadows, babbling streams, lakes, orchards, bowers and flowers. There was the Garden of the Square, home to the two-storey Palace of Forty Pillars, then the Baghi Chinar or Plane Tree Garden, where Clavijo saw an extravagantly beautiful palace in the process of construction. Then there was Baghi Naw, the New Garden, lined with four towers surrounded by a high wall a mile long on each side. In the centre of the garden was an orchard and in the orchard was a palace. ‘This palace, with its large garden was much the finest of any that we had visited hitherto, and in the ornamentation of its buildings in the gold and blue tile work far the most sumptuous’. Inside were marble sculptures and floors with exquisite mosaics of ebony and ivory. According to Babur, a verse from the Koran was inscribed over the doorway in letters so large they could be read two miles away.

  Through this network of palaces and gardens Temur glided like a gilded lion, spending several days in one before moving serenely to another. A week after his arrival, Clavijo was invited to an imperial banquet in another garden planted with fruit trees and paved with paths and walkways. All around him were silk tents with coloured tapestries to provide shade. In the centre of the garden was a richly furnished palace where the Spaniard glimpsed the emperor’s sleeping chamber, an elegant tiled alcove with a silver and gilt screen in front of which a small mattress of silk worked with gold thread lay on a dais. The walls were covered with rose-coloured silk hangings ornamented with silver spangles containing emeralds, pearls and other precious stones. Silk tassels rustled in the breeze. In front of the entrance to these chambers were two tables of gold and on them seven golden flasks, two of which were set with large pearls, emeralds and turquoises with balas rubies at their lips. Next to them stood six cups of gold, similarly set with pearls and balas rubies. Clavijo took it all in, entranced.

  The Northern Garden, one of Temur’s most extravagant creations, was another of the grandiose projects conceived between 1396 and 1398. It was typical insofar as it made use of the finest materials and the most famous craftsmen from the empire. The marble for the palace was imported from Tabriz, the artists and painters from Persia, under the supervision of the celebrated Abdul Hayy, a prize from Temur’s capture of Baghdad in 1393. The images in these paintings, like those of the Registan which survive to this day, were a direct challenge to the Islamic prohibition on figurative art, symbolic perhaps of Temur’s unrivalled ascendancy, boundless self-confidence and also of his ambivalent attitude towards the faith. These frescoes, wrote Arabshah, represented ‘his assemblies and his own likeness, now smiling, now austere, and representations of his battles and sieges and his conversations with kings, amirs, lords, wise men and magnates, and Sultans offering homage to him and bringing gifts to him from every side and his hunting nets and ambushes and battles in India, Dasht [Kipchak]
and Persia, and how he gained victory and how his enemy was scattered and driven to flight; and the likeness of his sons and grandsons, amirs and soldiers, and his public feasts and the goblets of wine and cupbearers and the zither-player, of his mirth and his love meetings and the concubines of his majesty and the royal wives and many other things which happened in his realms during his life which were shown in series, all that was new and happened; and he omitted or exaggerated none of these things; and therein he intended that all who knew not his affairs, should see them as though present’.

  It was not just the outstanding beauty of these parks and palaces that so moved Clavijo. It was also their sheer scale. During his two years in and around Samarkand, Temur laid out another park, the Takhta Qaracha Gardens, an enclosure so vast, said Arabshah, that when one of the builders working on it lost his horse, the animal roamed about grazing quite happily for six months before he found it again. There were so many fruit trees planted throughout the city that one hundred pounds of fruit ‘would not sell for a grain of mustard’.

  This was a land of plenty, watered by the Zarafshan river, with fertile soil producing bumper crops of wheat and cotton. Vineyards were plentiful. The grazing was excellent for cattle and sheep. ‘The livestock is magnificent, beasts and poultry all of a fine breed,’ the envoy remarked approvingly. There were sheep with tails so fat they weighed twenty pounds. Even when Temur and his army were camping in the outlying meadows of Kani-gil and demand for meat was high, a pair of sheep still cost no more than a ducat. Wherever he looked, Clavijo saw food. Although he was teetotal – much to Temur’s displeasure – the Spaniard was something of a gourmand, and noted with wonder the range of produce. Bread was available in all parts, while rice was sold cheaply in great quantities. Everywhere there were open squares with butchers selling meat ready-cooked, roasted or in stews, with fowl, pheasants and partridges, fruit and vegetables, including the delicious Samarkand melons, grown in such abundance that many were cured and kept for a year.