Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  In 1404, as the mosque neared completion, the workers were surprised by the arrival of Temur, fresh from his triumphant Five-Year Campaign. The emperor was so unimpressed by the size of the portal that he ordered it torn down at once and new foundations dug. Clavijo reported that the portal was too low, Arabshah that it was dwarfed by the rival façade of the Saray Mulk-khanum Madrassah directly opposite. Whatever the reason, Temur was incandescent with rage. The two amirs responsible for its construction were sentenced to death. Temur reserved the most gruesome pre-gallows punishment for Mohammed Jalad, according to Arabshah.

  Merely casting an eye upon it [the mosque], he pronounced against Mohammed Jalad sentence of death and forthwith they drew him on his face and bound his feet and ceased not dragging him and drawing him over the ground on his face, until in this manner they had torn him to pieces; and Temur took for himself all his servants, children and property Now he had diverse reasons for that deed, of which this was the chief; the queen, the chief wife of Temur, ordered to be built a college and the architects and geometers judging by unanimous consent that it should be built opposite that mosque, raised its columns high and elevated its structure and lifted its stories and walls above that mosque, wherefore it became stronger than it and stood higher, but since Temur was by nature like a leopard and the temper of a lion, no head was raised above him but he brought it low and no back grew stronger than his but he broke it and he was thus in all things which concerned or touched him. Therefore when he saw the great height of that college and that it bore itself more proudly than the slighter structure of his own, his breast was bitter with anger and he blazed forth and dealt as he did with that superintendent, who did not find the fortune which he had hoped.

  Temur now took personal charge of the construction. Although in poor health and unable either to stand for long or to mount his horse, he had himself carried to the site every day in a litter. His obsession with the work astonished Clavijo.

  He would stay there the best part of the day urging on the work. He would arrange for much meat to be cooked and brought, and then he would order them to throw portions of the same down to the workmen in the foundations, as though one should cast bones to dogs in a pit, and a wonder to all he with his own hands did this. Thus he urged on their labour: and at times would have coins thrown down to the masons when especially they worked to his satisfaction.

  With Temur on site, the building continued night and day. The result was breathtaking. The carved stone and marble, glazed mosaics and bright blue and gold frescoes, together with the hangings and silk carpets, lent the mosque an incomparable refinement. Its scale was unique, contained within a site spanning 350 feet by five hundred feet. The portal reached over a hundred feet, outdone only by the 150-foot minarets which lanced the skyline and looked down on a great courtyard bordered by a gallery of four hundred cupolas supported by four hundred marble columns. Kufic inscriptions from the Koran traced their way around the base of the majestic dome, so large they could reputedly be read from miles away. ‘The dome would have been unique but for the sky being its copy; the arch would have been singular but for the Milky Way matching it,’ the court historian simpered.

  The quality and variety of ornament were extraordinary. Large surfaces were covered with glazed brick-ends in hazarbaf technique, crammed with square Kufic designs paying tribute to Allah and his Prophet. In places these paeans to the Almighty were traced across neat arched panels parallel to the ground. In others they cascaded diagonally down the façades in staccato zigzags beneath a frieze of jagged crenellations. All of the mosque’s visible faces were covered in this profusion of colour. The entrance portal and sanctuary iwan had panels of mosaic faience, with insets of polished brick and stone matrices and majolica tiles. A spiral moulding of light blue tiles drew the eye towards the sky, while carved stone anchored the colossal structure to the earth.

  Inscriptions on the entrance portal honoured Temur, relating how work began in 1399 and was completed in 1403–04. ‘The great sultan, pillar of the state and the religion, Amir Temur Gurgan ibn Taraghay ibn Burgul ibn Aylangir ibn Ichil ibn al-Amir Karachar Noyan, may God preserve his reign, was helped (by heavenly favour) to complete this jami [Friday mosque] in the year 806 [1403–04],’ read an inscription in carved stone over the main entrance.

  By removing the minarets from the top of the massive iwans and placing them at the sides like the salients of a fortress gate, Temur was confidently departing from the Ilkhanid style, giving his Cathedral Mosque an unmistakable religious-military aesthetic on a grand scale. What better testament could there be to the man who regarded himself as the Sword of Islam? There were other important architectural innovations. The novel combination of lateral iwans with domed units, moving away from the traditional court mosque with its four iwans, reappeared in the Masjid-i-Shah of Isfahan and was later exported to the mosques of Mughal India.

  But however magnificent Temur’s Cathedral Mosque, it had been built too quickly. The emperor’s personal intervention, not least his execution of the two amirs in charge of the project, had doubtless caused a frenzy among the workers and foremen. Perhaps they cut corners in their efforts to finish the building and escape the emperor’s ire. Perhaps the foundations were too shallow to support such a mighty edifice. The exact reasons are not known, but no sooner had the mosque been completed than it started falling down. It was not long before worshippers, their devout reflections shattered by tumbling masonry, decided to take their prayers elsewhere. Its shell remained, however, and by the nineteenth century the mosque was doubling as a cotton market and stables for Tsarist officers. Bukharan amirs had already plundered it of anything valuable, not least the famous gates of seven metals, which were melted into coins. In 1897 an earthquake hit Samarkand, and the mosque was dealt a lethal blow.

  Today, the main body of the mosque remains closed to visitors, its interior dark and dilapidated. Peering through a grille into the gloom, I could make out a cavernous, largely derelict space in which only the most faded, smudged traces of painted plaster and gilt papier-mâché remained. Yet still the monument stands proudly erect, remarkable evidence of Temur’s princely vision. Restored with more sensitivity than the shiny monuments of the Registan, its twin portal towers taper elegantly towards the heavens. The detail on the façade, as fine as anything in Samarkand, has been retraced in subdued blues and beiges.

  From the top of the towers, after paying the requisite bribes, I stared over a burnished Samarkand in the warm streaming wind, past the mosque’s immense dome, the azure sheen pockmarked with terracotta where the missing tiles should have been. In the courtyard in front of the portal was a massive lectern of Mongolian marble, given by the astronomer king Ulugh Beg. In former times this had housed the Othman Koran, but when the Russians seized the holy book and carried it off to St Petersburg in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was removed from the crumbling mosque for its own safety and left to fend off the elements in the open air. Far below my vantage point I made out a heavily-built matron and her daughter. The younger woman was crawling around beneath the lectern, getting up, shaking herself down and then disappearing beneath it again. Legend has it that a barren woman who crawls underneath it three times will be blessed with children.

  Looking down on the ruined glory of the mosque, I wondered whether its sorry fate had harmed Temur’s status and reputation abroad, contributing to the ignorance which generally greets his name in the Western world. Perhaps if it had survived more completely it would have stood as an unparalleled tribute to the greatest conqueror of the Islamic world, reminding all who saw it that though he was a blood-soaked tyrant, he was also a man of vision and culture, a more complex and fascinating figure than either Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. The monumentality of his architecture, the rationality of its proportions, the quality of the materials used and the craftsmen employed, all were still visible in what remained of this fabulous complex. Yazdi’s comments admiring the otherworldly dimensions of
the mosque came back to me as I gazed across the city of turquoise domes:

  How marvellously high is the building whose upper rooms are Paradise To estimate its loftiness must confound the greatest minds.

  For once, the panegyrist was barely exaggerating.

  If the Bibi Khanum Mosque was Temur’s most extravagant religious building in Samarkand, the mausolea of Shah-i-Zinda (the Living King) was his holiest. The site itself, which lay beyond the city walls in the north-east of the capital over the ancient settlement of Afrosiab, predated Temur by several centuries, but under the conqueror’s lavish patronage it developed into an important centre for pilgrims, an integral part of his attempt to make Samarkand the Mecca of Central Asia.

  Mausolea had existed here from at least the twelfth century, but Genghis’s hordes erased them from the face of the earth, with one prominent exception. The solitary survivor of the Mongol invasion and the centrepiece of the complex was the tomb of Kussam ibn Abbas, cousin of the Prophet Mohammed, who is supposed to have arrived in the province of Sogdiana – which included Samarkand and Bukhara – in 676. Brimming with missionary fervour, Kussam was on a mission to convert the Zoroastrian fire-worshippers to Islam. The local population did not take kindly to this foreign preacher, however, and Kussam was promptly beheaded. Notwithstanding his decapitation, the story goes, he managed to pick up his head and jump down a well, where he has remained ever since, ready to resume his reign when the time comes. The Arabs venerated him as a great martyr, and the cult of the Living King was born. Over the centuries, the tomb continued to attract the faithful. ‘The inhabitants of Samarkand come out to visit it every Sunday and Thursday night,’ wrote Ibn Battutah in 1333. ‘The Tatars also come to visit it, pay vows to it and bring cows, sheep, dirhams and dinars; all this is used for the benefit of the hospital and the blessed tomb.’

  Temur sought to increase the popularity and prestige of the Shah-i-Zinda by converting it into a royal burial ground. Valiant amirs were also allowed to be buried here, and during the latter half of the fourteenth century the complex developed into one of the prize jewels in Samarkand’s architectural crown. Two of Temur’s sisters were buried there, together with other relatives and amirs who had loyally served him. It was a feast of fine craftsmanship, masonry, calligraphy and art, a street of the dead awash with all hues of blue majolica tiles. Blue domes glowed like beacons in the white light, while all around them plainer domes of terracotta baked slowly in the sun.

  For most of the twentieth century, in a cruel twist of history perpetrated by the Soviets, Shah-i-Zinda languished as an anti-Islamic museum. Now freed from the shackles of communism it is enjoying its latest renaissance as one of Samarkand’s most impressive attractions. One afternoon, Farkhad and I took a taxi to the necropolis. Our driver, a retired army officer, was completely unmoved by the government’s rehabilitation of Temur: ‘You know, in the army now they teach soldiers about Temur, how he was a great warrior, how he won his many battles and how the new army of Uzbekistan fights in his spirit. All this talk of Temur is rubbish. It’s all very well mentioning him all the time, but what does any of it mean? The comparisons aren’t even accurate. Temur treated his soldiers well. The pensions we get aren’t enough to live on. This government can’t even feed its own people.’

  We filed through Ulugh Beg’s elaborate portal and domed entrance halls and stepped into the complex, confronted at once by the familiar blue cupolas which top the Qazi Zadeh Rumi mausoleum, the largest on the site and thought by some to hold the body of Temur’s wetnurse. Down a narrow street shaded on both sides by tall monuments stand two of the finest tombs. The first, the mausoleum of Shadi Mulk-agha, built in 1372, housed a niece of Temur – ‘This is a garden in which lies buried a Treasury of good fortune, And this is a tomb in which a precious pearl has been lost’ reads the inscription framing the door – who had been joined later by the emperor’s eldest sister Turkanagha. Apart from the Rukhabad mausoleum in the centre of town – one of the few monuments in Samarkand that dates to Temur’s time – this was the first dome of plain brickwork I had seen, its restrained simplicity forming a counterpoint both to the turquoise sky above and the intricate panels of carved and glazed terracotta and majolica on the portal below. It is justly considered one of the most brilliant examples of early Temurid ceramic revetments, with its entire façade and interior, including the dome, sheathed in tiles in a variety of highly refined techniques.

  Inside the shaded tomb, the exuberance of the decoration shows no signs of restraint. Large rectangular panels containing medallions against a background of hexagrams stretch across the walls, framed by borders of knotted Kufic to give the impression of a particularly fine carpet. The interior angles are filled with tumbling muqarnas or stalactite ornament. Above them, in the crown of the dome a magnificent star shines forth, its eight points running down into lines which divide the heavens into eight panels, each with a teardrop medallion containing a sun and six planets in red, green and bright yellow.

  Directly opposite is the tomb of Shirin Bika-agha, another of the emperor’s sisters, erected a decade later, traced with mosaic faience in spiralling floral patterns of blues, yellows, white and green, vying for attention with scrolling vegetal decorations and the ornate ochre calligraphy running across the mosaics. Inside, beneath a double dome, a sixteen-sided drum tapers into an octagonal zone illuminated by shafts of sunlight stealing in through plaster-grille windows of coloured glass to reveal golden murals and a dado of green hexagons and flying cranes, the birds of heaven.

  Towards the end of the street lies the Tuman-agha Mosque and mausoleum complex, named after one of Temur’s favourite young wives, a twelve-year-old whom he married when he was in his early forties. The Paradise Garden was also designed in her honour. Tuman-agha had the complex erected in 1405, the year of her husband’s death, shortly before she was forced to marry Temur’s amir Shaykh Nur ad-din by Temur’s grandson, Khalil Sultan. The unfortunate woman was widowed again when her second husband was killed by Shahrukh’s armies in 1411.

  At the foot of a portal twinkling with colourful faience is a carved door and above it the sombre inscription: ‘The tomb is a door which everyone must enter.’ On the portals of the mosque is the more encouraging reminder: ‘The prophet of God, peace be upon him, said, “Hurry with prayer before burial, And hurry with repentance before death.”’ Within the mausoleum, Temur’s bride sleeps beneath a dome of eternal night, a blue sky with scattered stars of gold watching over an idyllic country landscape of trees and flowers.

  At the end of the street, past the tomb of Kutlug-agha, yet another of the emperor’s wives, is the object of this pilgrimage, the deliciously cool Kussam ibn Abbas Mosque, supreme in the skyline with a trio of grand cupolas. The centre of the edifice, the ziaratkhona (pilgrimage room), rebuilt in 1334, two years before Temur’s birth, is ablaze with bright tiles. An elegant dado of light blue hexagons encircles the chamber, trimmed by mosaic faience in blue, green and white.

  The holy heart of Shah-i-Zinda appears in a small chamber visible through a wooden lattice frame. There lies the grand four-storey tomb of Kussam ibn Abbas, its several tiers loaded with ornamented majolica and crammed with Koranic inscriptions: ‘Those who were killed on the way of Allah are not to be considered dead,’ reads one. ‘Indeed they are very much alive.’

  At the bottom of Samarkand’s University Boulevard, a cool avenue of tall plane trees leading into Registan Street, is a monumental statue in bronze of an enthroned king. His line of sight stretches down towards the Registan. Even sitting down, Temur is an intimidating fifteen feet tall. His beard is trimmed short beneath a highly ornamented crown. His arms are crossed over one another and his right hand rests on the hilt of a curved sword held against his left side. A flowing cloak with a bold border covers his broad shoulders and simply-decorated tunic, reaching down to his ankles. Large boots poke out from beneath it. The statue lords it over the boulevard, exactly as the sculptor intended.

  This is S
amarkand’s tribute to Temur, its version of the stirring statue of the emperor on horseback in Tashkent. A dappled light filtered down through the trees and played across the pavement. Down a side street a group of boys were fishing in a pool beside a restaurant. Others were splashing about and swimming in a fountain, the water catching the bright sunlight on their backs. Clusters of students walked and cycled past. Zhigulis and slightly larger Volga saloons, the stock Russian cars which dominate the roads of Uzbekistan, rushed by in varying states of repair. A gentle breeze took the sting out of the growing heat.

  Two taxis were parked on the side of the road beneath the statue. A petite woman stepped out delicately, taking care not to disturb her wedding dress. Dwarfed by its expanding frills and ruffles, she looked as though she had come off worst in a fracas with a large white meringue. Next to her the groom shuffled awkwardly in an ill-fitting dark suit and adjusted his tie. Once the couple had composed themselves they looked up to the statue of Temur, several steps above road level, and started a slow, deliberate walk towards it. Behind them, their mothers, wearing the traditional Uzbek tie-dyed ikat silk dresses, fussed about with the bride and groom’s clothes, smoothing down the wedding gown and brushing off stray dandruff from the groom’s shoulders, as the growing ranks of the family joined them from other taxis.

  The bride and groom led the way up the steps with regal formality. At the foot of the statue the woman laid a bunch of flowers on the marble dais. Then a professional photographer with a Soviet-era camera closed in on the couple and snapped them in front of, and beneath, the austere king staring down towards the centre of his capital with the familiar far-off gaze. More shots were taken of the bride and groom with the rest of the family, and with that the second part of the ceremony was over and the group made their way off. The couple had already been to the register office to get married, and had come to the statue simply to pay their respects to Temur and to seek his blessings.