Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  It took the secretaries of the diwan three days just to record all these treasures – ‘the fingers of the book-keepers grew weary with the writing’ – and two days for Temur to see them pass before him in review. As a morale-booster for the troops, of course, this magnificent ceremony was difficult to outdo. Those soldiers who had been dreading the battles that lay ahead now turned their thoughts to the pleasures of plunder. Up to this point everything had gone according to plan, just as the emperor had assured them. The defeat of the wild Kafir tribes, warriors who had refused to bow before Alexander, had been sudden and complete. There was no reason to expect the battles which awaited them to be any less successful. They had crossed the roof of the world. The worst of their journey was over.

  Twenty-first-century Kabul is a ruined city, its historical monuments prised apart, bombed, shot at, plundered, smashed, swept away by centuries of conflict. The past has been forcibly erased by the present. It is a city of derelict palaces, destroyed factories, devastated parks and gardens, hollowed houses, broken mud walls, torn-up roads and shattered lives. Here are the familiar victims of conflict, the veiled widows, beggars young and old, amputees, unemployed men, victims of landmines, sick, malnourished children, proud, poverty-stricken fathers, the flotsam and jetsam cast up by the retreating tides of war. It is a modern-day reincarnation of a city visited in fury by Temur.

  After the debacle at Termez, I had entered Afghanistan via Pakistan. Without much hope of success I picked my way through the subdued corridors of Kabul University’s damaged cubist sixties buildings to Professor Abdul Baqi, Afghanistan’s only specialist on Temur, an elderly man with a blunt nose, full lips and obligatory white beard.

  When I asked him what Temurid secrets the city could offer, he smiled sadly. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much in Kabul,’ he said. The ancient Balar Hissar fortress was a military base closed to visitors. What little Temur had built in the city had long since disappeared.

  My disappointment was obvious. A long silence followed.

  ‘You know, there is one thing you should see while you’re here,’ the professor eventually added. ‘Go to Babur’s Gardens. They were designed by Temur’s most famous descendant. You’ll find his tomb there.’

  Laid out in the middle of the sixteenth century, Babur’s Gardens occupy a large rectangular sweep of ground on the western slopes of Mount Sher-i-Darwaza. One of the grandest horticultural projects the city had ever seen, the gardens were a striking reminder of Temur’s magnificent cultural legacy. Today they offer a valuable glimpse into how a city like Kabul would have looked in its full Temurid bloom. The natural adornments were of a grace and sophistication no longer found, an aesthetic triumph built on a scale which blended monumentality with harmony.

  From the moment he conquered it in 1504 and made it the first seat of his empire, Babur loved Kabul with a passion, so much so that he asked to be buried in these gardens. Much of his memoirs, a fascinating window into the late Temurid world, is devoted to describing the city. The climate was perfect. ‘If the world has another so pleasant, it is not known. Even in the heats, one cannot sleep at night without a fur coat.’ Then there were the ‘heady’ local wines, ‘famous for their strength’. Like his world-conquering great-great-great-grandfather, Babur was a prodigious drinker of some renown, writing light-heartedly about one evening when he downed so much wine he could barely stay on his horse. ‘Very drunk I must have been, for, when they told me next day that we had galloped loose-rein into camp carrying torches, I could not recall it in the very least.’

  When he was not quaffing the fine local wines, Babur was something of a naturalist. He counted thirty-two varieties of wild tulips on the mountainsides and admired the fecundity of the fields and orchards, which produced ‘grape, pomegranate, apricot, apple, quince, pear, peach, plum, almond and walnut’ in abundance. Oranges, lemons, rhubarb, melons and sugarcane also grew plentifully, and apiaries produced honey. There was no shortage of firewood. Throughout the city and among the valleys of the outlying villages, beneath snow-capped mountains, birds filled the air with their song. There were nightingales, herons, mallards, blackbirds, thrushes, doves, magpies and, most stately of all, cranes, the birds of heaven, ‘great birds, in large flocks, and countless numbers’. In the rushing waters of the Kabul river and its tributaries, fishermen took to the banks and ‘many are netted and many are taken on wattles fixed in the water’. The city, Babur wrote in a passage which would have interested his ancestor, was ‘an excellent trading centre. Down to Kabul every year come 7, 8, or ten thousand horses and up to it, from Hindustan, come every year caravans of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand heads-of-houses, bringing slaves, white cloth, sugar-candy, refined and common sugars, and aromatic roots. Many a trader is not content with a profit of thirty or forty on ten. In Kabul can be had the products of Khorasan, Rum, Iraq and China, while it is Hindustan’s own market.’

  New parks, palaces and mosques sprang up during Babur’s reign as he sought to beautify the city, just as Temur had done in his own capital. Trees were planted on a rise he named the Four Gardens in memory of the Samarkand he had left behind. One of them, known as the Great Garden, had been seized by Temur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg. Babur bought it from its then owner and described it in some detail in his memoirs. A river descended from the mountain,

  with gardens green, gay and lovely on either bank. Its water is quite pure and so cold that it need never be iced to drink … Around this enclosure large plane trees spread their shade, making pleasant sitting places beneath, and through it runs a perennial stream, large enough to turn a mill wheel. I ordered its winding course to be made straight … Lower down there is a fountain called the Revered Three Friends, with oak trees growing on hillocks at either side … On the way down from this fountain towards the plain many places are covered with the flowering Arghwan [Judas] tree, which grows nowhere else in the country … If, the world over, there is a place to match this when the Arghwans are in full bloom, their yellow mingling with red, I do not know it.

  As late as 1977, Nancy Hatch Dupree, an expert on the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, wrote admiringly of Babur’s Gardens:

  On entering, the first structure to meet the eye is the charming summer pavilion built by the Amir Abdur Rahman (1880–1901). It is shaded by magnificent plane trees so beloved by the Moghuls [Mughals]. From the graceful pillared veranda one looks down upon terraced gardens dotted with fountains. Inside, the ceilings are beautifully painted in the style of the late nineteenth century …

  Two decades of fighting had changed the place beyond all recognition. Dupree’s description was of another world. Babur’s Gardens were no more than a giant slope of wasteland overlooking a visibly shattered city. Mortars had ripped into the park and craters had replaced flowerbeds. The neat lawns which once stretched down towards the city had disappeared altogether. Fountains had been smashed and removed. The once magnificent plane trees were charred trunks, hacked down and burnt as precious firewood.

  My guide in the gardens was Shukur, an Afghan in his early thirties. He had fled to Pakistan after both his parents were killed in a rocket attack on Kabul sixteen years earlier. He used to visit the gardens regularly with his family, he told me, but had not returned to the capital since his parents’ death. Seeing the extent of the damage to Babur’s beloved gardens was a powerful shock. As we surveyed the desolation around us he grew tearful. ‘There used to be lots of plane trees here,’ he said, pointing to another charred trunk. ‘There were flowerbeds filled with flowers, everywhere there were bushes. Many families came here for picnics in the afternoons and weekends. It was a very beautiful place. It’s all gone now. Fighting has killed everything.’

  We continued up the barren slope to Babur’s tomb, next to a badly damaged marble mosque built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1646. Next to it was an empty swimming pool with a broken diving board. In the nineties, the ‘charming’ summer pavilion remarked upon by Nancy Dupree succumbed to the ravages of w
ar.

  The tomb itself consists of a simple slab of marble on a raised platform grazed by random bullets. Above it are these words:

  Only this mosque of beauty, this temple of nobility, constructed for the prayer of saints and the epiphany of cherubs, was fit to stand in so venerable a sanctuary as this highway of archangels, this theatre of heaven, this light-garden of the God-forgiven angel king whose rest is the garden of heaven, Zahiruddin Mohammed Babur the Conqueror.*

  Babur had chosen his burial place with care. It gave the finest views over the city. Warfare had disfigured this picture, and many of the buildings which rose into the skyline were skeletal ruins, beyond repair. Far beneath us on the plain loomed the stark outline of rocket-savaged Habibiya high school, a building which had been hit so many times it looked like a concrete colander. In the distance beyond was the war-torn outline of Darulaman Palace, built for King Amanullah Khan in 1923. Yet for all this, Kabul managed to retain its natural beauty. Beneath a shameless blue sky a veil of haze drifted upwards from the amphitheatre of mountains which girdle the city. Fighting had raged here in recent times, but the flourishing pockets of green suggested that the parks and gardens had weathered the onslaught. Just as it had done since Kabul was founded at least 2,500 years ago, the Kabul river meandered dreamily through the city.

  Babur had asked that nothing should cover his grave, so that rain could fall and sun could shine on him. For a long time after his Afghan wife Bibi Mubarika (Blessed Lady) Yusufzai brought his body back from Agra to Kabul, his instructions were honoured. But in the reign of King Nadir Shah (1929–33), a marble stone was installed over the grave, together with a pavilion to protect it from the elements. Ironically, the recent fighting had helped fulfil the last wish of Babur. Gunfire had removed much of the roof, which now contained more rectangles of sky than tiles. It was an oddly inappropriate monument to a man of such genius, but at least it had survived.

  ‘The people who did this had no respect for our history,’ Shukur said softly. ‘They were not good men. Looting and destroying, that was what interested them. That was all they knew.’

  Listening to these wistful recollections, the stories of plunder six centuries after the rampages of Temur’s hordes, I recalled Ibn Battutah’s description of Kabul. He had passed through in 1332 in the course of his epic peregrinations across the world. Then, as now, destruction was the order of the day. Kabul, he wrote, was ‘once a large city; but it is now, for the most part, in ruins’.*

  With the inspection of his fabulous treasures at an end in Kabul, Temur ordered the army to continue south in three divisions. Sultan Mahmud Khan, the puppet Chaghatay ruler whom Temur had installed in 1388 after the death of his father Suyurghatmish, took the left wing towards Delhi. Sulayman Shah led the vanguard to clear the way through hostile territory. Temur himself ranged south to meet his grandson Pir Mohammed, who was occupied with the siege of the holy city of Multan, in what is today the Pakistani province of Punjab.

  By September the emperor reached the Indus, at the very spot, said Yazdi, where Jalal ad-din, king of Khorezm, swam across in flight from the wrathful Genghis. Another bridge was constructed and within two days the army had crossed the great river. But more obstacles lay ahead: first the Jhelum and shortly afterwards the Chenab and Ravi rivers. Fearfully Temur’s amirs had warned of the difficulties of overcoming these natural defences which guarded the approach to Delhi. None proved a significant obstacle, however. The army pressed on.

  In October Temur stopped at the Sutlej river for his rendezvous with Pir Mohammed. Multan, the City of Saints, had mounted a vigorous defence before it fell to the Tatar invaders. After a siege lasting six months, conditions inside the city were intolerable. ‘The inhabitants were in such great want of victuals, that they were constrained to eat unclean things, and even dead bodies,’ wrote Yazdi. Outside the city walls, the situation of Pir Mohammed’s men had been scarcely better. Racked by disease, the great majority of his horses had perished, prompting a rebellion by the recently conquered local rulers. Only when news of Temur’s imminent arrival reached the rebels did they think better of their rising and withdraw in rapid flight. Pir Mohammed was congratulated by his grandfather for subduing the enemy. His reward was thirty thousand fresh horses and the command of the right wing.

  Closing in on Delhi, Temur swept through the Punjab, driving all before him. He took particular care to take revenge on those who had risen up against his grandson. One by one whole towns and villages emptied in terror as the conqueror approached, put them to the sword and burnt them to the ground. At Bhatnir, refugees from Dipalpur and Pakpattan crowded beneath the city walls as Temur’s army bore down on them. Their efforts to flee were in vain. Those who escaped the massacre were beaten and carried off as prisoners. The slaughter was so intense the city stank with rotting corpses, the court chronicle reported.

  By December, Temur was poised to strike. Everything on the path to Delhi had fallen to him. It only remained to seize the greatest prize. At Loni, north of the city, he set up camp and surveyed the terrain from raised ground above the Jumna river. ‘A great city, where men skilled in various arts are gathered; a home of merchants, a mine of gems and perfumes’, Delhi lay invitingly before his army. Though she had been perilously weakened by internal division, within her walls was an army of ten thousand horse, between twenty and forty thousand infantry, and 120 elephants equipped for war.

  The first skirmish came when Temur’s reconnaissance party of seven hundred cavalry was attacked by the forces of Mallu Khan, who was then ruling Delhi through Sultan Mahmud Khan. The Tatars held off the Indians and returned safely to camp, but there were important consequences. First, Temur had managed to tempt Mallu into battle, albeit little more than a scuffle. This augured well. After the interminable siege of Multan, Temur was minded to take Delhi as quickly as possible. He did not want to be forced to sit and wait for the city to surrender from starvation. Far better to lure Mallu into a pitched battle and settle the issue without delay. Second, the rush of troops against the Tatars had been met with roars of approval from the hundred thousand Hindus taken prisoner en route to Delhi. Such was the fervour of their reaction, born out of hopes of liberation, that Temur, fearing a rebellion in his rearguard, gave orders for each and every one to be killed on the spot. The command was to be obeyed on pain of death. Even the holy men travelling with Temur’s army were required to act as executioners, and many were their tears as they sent innocent men and women to their deaths in cold blood. ‘The history of mankind cannot furnish another example of so horrid an act of deliberate cruelty,’ wrote the nineteenth-century historian Sir Malcolm Price, ‘yet the being who perpetrated it has been exalted by historians and poets into a demi-god; and several, not contented with ascribing to him that valour, policy, and martial skill, which he undoubtedly possessed, have extolled him for his numberless virtues; and, above all, for his justice and clemency.’

  Perhaps this unexpected butchering of captives added to the sense of foreboding within Temur’s ranks. Certainly there was real fear among his men. Of greatest concern were the mighty Indian elephants, of which they had heard dark stories in Samarkand and had now seen for themselves in the opening skirmish. Covered in heavy armour-plate, carrying flame-throwers, archers and crossbowmen in protected turrets on their backs, and armed with tusk-mounted scimitars that were rumoured to be poisoned, they made a terrifying sight. Arrows and sabres were no use against them.

  ‘The rows of mighty elephants, clad in complete steel, emptied the brains of the chieftains of their ardour,’ wrote the sixteenth-century historian Khwandamir. ‘Since they had never seen a battle with elephants, and on the subject of their dreadful aspect, and the power of their deeds, they had heard exaggerated accounts of these strange animals, hence they entertained great fears and regarded the overcoming of the elephants as an impossibility; and the misgivings of the noble and the great on this account had been raised to such a pitch, that at the time of appointing the position of
the officers, when his majesty the Sahib-Qiran [Temur] asked the distinguished persons and accomplished scholars of exalted rank, which place they liked … [they] answered that their place was to be with the ladies.’ It was yet another test of Temur’s leadership and tactical acumen. The amirs, officers and men needed to be reassured. A strategy for combating the elephants had to be devised.

  Temur ordered his soldiers to dig deep trenches, reinforced with ramparts, to protect their positions. Next, he had men fashion caltrops, three-pronged iron stakes, which were then strewn across the elephants’ path. Buffaloes were tied together at the neck and feet by leather thongs and lined up in front of the trenches. Camels were also roped together with wood and dried grass on their backs. The archers were told to concentrate their fire on the exposed mahouts who controlled the elephants.

  With the preparations complete, attention turned to the court astrologers. Prior to joining battle, it was customary for them to pronounce their satisfaction that the planets were in an auspicious position. This time, whether through lingering fears of the elephants or other less worldly concerns, they expressed unease about the timing of Temur’s plans. To no avail. For once, the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction declared himself in no wise interested in the conjunction of the planets or the state of the heavens. The cowering astrologers were scolded. Temur would not wait for their verdict, favourable or otherwise.

  Publicly, he called for his Koran to be brought before him. With marvellous convenience it was opened at a passage proclaiming the annihilation of a people by the perseverance of its powerful enemy. According to Ghiyath ad-din Ali, author of an original Persian diary of the Indian campaign, Temur read from the chapter of Yunis (Jonah):