Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  This present life is like the rich garment with which the earth adorns itself when watered by the rain We send down from the sky. Crops, sustaining man and beast, grow luxuriantly: but, as the earth’s tenants begin to think themselves its masters, down comes Our Scourge upon it, by night or by day, laying it waste, as though it did not blossom but yesterday … Those that do good works shall have a good reward, and more besides. Neither blackness nor misery shall overcast their faces. They are the heirs of Paradise, wherein they shall abide forever. As for those that have done evil, evil shall be rewarded with evil. Misery will oppress them (they shall have none to protect them from God), as though patches of the night’s own darkness veiled their faces. They are the heirs of the Fire, wherein they shall abide forever.

  The good news coursed through the ranks. What the stars could not support, the Koran could confirm. Once again Allah had spoken. Delhi was theirs for the taking.

  On 17 December 1398, the army of Mallu and Sultan Mahmud marched through the gates of Delhi to give battle beneath a heavy sky. The Indian troops drew up with the elephants in the centre, each beast carrying its deadly contingent of men armed to the teeth. Both sides drew into the traditional formation employed by Muslim armies at this time, with left and right wings, a centre and an advanced guard.

  Temur had stationed himself on high ground overlooking the field of battle. As was customary in the final few moments before the fighting began, while the tension occasioned by the imminence of bloodshed bristled among the opposing armies, the emperor dismounted, threw himself onto the ground and beseeched Allah for His blessings. He had done all he could. The rest was in the hands of the Almighty.

  ‘So hot a battle was never seen before,’ Yazdi reported. ‘The fury of soldiers was never carried to so great excess; and so frightful a noise was never heard: for the cymbals, the common kettle-drums, the drums and trumpets, with the great brass kettle-drums which were beat on the elephants’ backs, the bells which the Indians sounded, and the cries of the soldiers, were enough to make even the earth to shake.’ Amid this terrible cacophony, the skies darkened as Temur’s archers loosed their arrows against the Indian right wing. Mallu and Sultan Mahmud responded by directing their left wing and vanguard against the Tatar right, but in a brilliant manoeuvre they were overcome at their flank and rear by Temur’s vanguard. After losing several hundred men in their first charge, they broke in rout. Temur had seized the initial advantage.

  Watching the scattered ranks of their left wing in retreat, Mallu and Sultan Mahmud gave a prearranged signal. The plain shook with thunder as the war elephants lumbered forward in tight formation, the heavily-armed men in their miniature castles poised to strike. Pounding the ground as they approached the Tatar lines, the huge armoured beasts struck fear in Temur’s men. Following orders, the archers directed their fire at the mahouts, but still the elephants advanced.

  From his vantage point, Temur saw the commotion caused by the elephants among his men. He had made preparations to deal with these exotic beasts of war. It was time to unveil them. The amirs ordered the camels bearing bundles of dried grass and wood to be driven forward. As the elephants approached, the loads were set alight and the camels rushed forward in panic. Suddenly the elephants were being charged by roaring camels on fire. Their response was instinctive. They wheeled round in terror and charged headlong into their own troops, trampling them to the ground, impaling themselves on the vicious caltrops and causing mayhem among the Indian lines. ‘The Indian troops on the left and the right fell on the ground like shadows,’ wrote Khwandamir. ‘The heads of the Indians were reduced to atoms, they were like coconuts dropped from the trees.’

  The valiant Pir Mohammed led a charge at the head of the right wing, and soon the Indians were in full retreat, cut down without mercy as they sought the safety of Delhi’s city walls. Another prince, the fifteen-year-old Khalil, distinguished himself by overcoming an elephant, together with its guards, and marching it back as a gift to his grandfather. Temur was so impressed by the young man’s bravery that he awarded him the title of Sultan. The sixteenth-century Muslim historian Ferishta wrote disparagingly of the Hindu defence of Delhi: ‘The Indians were, in a very short time, totally routed, without making one brave effort to save their country, their lives, or their property.’

  The battle was over. ‘The sun of victory and triumph rose from the east of his majesty’s banners and a whirlwind of happiness powdered the eyes of the enemy with the dust of misfortune,’ wrote Ghiyath ad-din Ali, diarist of the Indian campaign. ‘So great were the heaps of corpses that the battlefield resembled a dark mountain and rivers of blood rushed across it in mighty waves.’

  Temur’s Tatars had secured one of their greatest victories. Outdoing both Genghis and Alexander, they had marched across the most forbidding mountains of the world, crossed rivers and deserts and brought one of the richest cities in the world to its knees. Its divided rulers had failed to defend it from the northern invaders. Now its untold treasures lay before them.

  As the battlefield smouldered around him, Temur moved smoothly from the pain of war to the pleasures of peace. The day after the battle he entered Delhi in triumph. His standard was erected on the walls of the city and the sumptuous imperial pavilion unfurled and pitched. Into it filed the trembling sharifs, qadis, court officials and men of letters, confirming the formal surrender of Delhi and pleading for their lives now that Mallu and Sultan Mahmud had abandoned them to the mercy of the conqueror. Beautiful music played around the emperor as he spared them in return for a crippling ransom.

  How sweet this victory must have tasted as, one by one, the hundred or so surviving elephants were brought before Temur and made to kneel in submission and bellow their greetings to him. Once they had paid their respects to the new master of Delhi, they were sent to the far corners of his empire, to the princes of the line in Tabriz, Shiraz and Herat, to Prince Taharten at Arzinjan and Shaykh Ibrahim of Shirvan. Messengers accompanied them, spreading news of this famous victory to the farthest reaches of Asia, while in the mosques of Delhi the Friday prayers were called forth in Temur’s name.

  With these agreeable formalities over, it was time to move on to the serious business of calculating – and then removing – the treasures of the city. Temur’s officials were busy collecting money and belongings from the inhabitants of Delhi. At this stage there were no signs of trouble. The surrender of the city had passed peacefully and a ransom had been agreed. Nevertheless, an ominous trend was underway. For several days after the battle, the number of Tatar soldiers entering Delhi rose rapidly. Some were tasked with separating the inhabitants of Delhi, who had been granted an amnesty, from those taking refuge in the city, who had not. Others were engaged in assessing the ransoms to be paid by householders and property-owners. Several thousand besides, said Khwandamir, were inside the city walls to requisition sugar and corn for the troops.

  Still others had entered without official sanction. These were soldiers who came to satisfy their curiosity, satiate their sexual appetites or indulge their taste for plunder. When word came that the ladies of the imperial household wished to make a tour of the conquered city, the gates were opened and not locked up again for hours. The numbers of Tatars inside Delhi swelled again. Yazdi’s account mentions fifteen thousand soldiers entering the city at this time.

  It is impossible to identify exactly what precipitated the chain of events that now unfolded and that would be remembered with horror by Indians for centuries to come. Perhaps it was a single instance of rape or murder that ignited local passions. Maybe all that was required to unleash destruction was a disagreement between one hot-headed Tatar and a furious Indian protecting his property. Whatever the immediate cause, the carnage that ensued was momentous even by Temur’s standards. Casting scorn on the Indians’ feeble resistance, Ferishta portrays the terrors of a city given over to fire and the sword.

  The Hindus, according to custom, seeing their females disgraced, and their wealth seized
by the soldiery, shut the gates, set fire to their houses, murdered their wives and children, and rushed out on their enemies. This led to a general massacre so terrible that some streets were blocked by the heaps of the dead; and the gates being forced, the whole Mongol army stormed inside, and a scene of horror ensued easier to be imagined than described. The desperate courage of the Dehlians was at length cooled in their own blood, and throwing down their weapons, they at last submitted like sheep to the slaughter … In the city the Hindus were at least ten to one superior in number to the enemy; and had they possessed souls, it would have been impossible for the Mongols, who were scattered about in every street, house, and corner, laden with plunder, to have resisted.

  Through the streets the Tatars advanced, chasing the beleaguered Indians into Old Delhi, where they sought sanctuary in the Cathedral Mosque. With a detachment of five hundred men, two of Temur’s amirs smashed into the mosque and ‘sent to the abyss of hell the souls of these infidels, of whose heads they erected towers, and gave their bodies for food to the birds and beasts of prey. Never was such a terrible slaughter and desolation heard of.’ For three days the massacre continued. Yazdi blamed it on what he called the ‘ill conduct’ of the inhabitants. As a court historian, he was hardly likely to do otherwise. Ghiyath ad-din Ali, who wrote the original report of events at Delhi, recorded how the Tatar soldiers rampaged through the city like ‘hungry wolves falling on a flock of sheep or eagles swooping on weaker birds’.

  Whatever kindled the conflagration, Delhi, the city of gems and perfumes, was a blazing inferno reeking with the stench of slaughter. Carousing in his tent, celebrating his famous victory with a magnificent banquet in the company of the ladies of the imperial household, Temur was reportedly unaware of the bloodbath. While the amirs in the city were frantically – and unsuccessfully – trying to bring the marauding mob to heel, none of their colleagues apparently dared to disturb the emperor at play. These accounts are somewhat suspect, however, not least because Temur was not a man who lost control. It is doubtful he was not well informed about events within Delhi’s city walls. Elsewhere in the sources, much is made of the discipline of his troops, upheld on pain of death. Plunder, until official permission had been granted, was a serious crime. Knowing this, would these soldiers really have dared to cross their emperor?

  With or without his sanction, the Tatars helped themselves to the coffers of Delhi. Teeming with treasures, these shocked the soldiers by their sheer opulence. There was gold and silver without end, jewellery, pearls and precious stones, coins and rich clothing; so much, said Yazdi, that words could scarcely describe it all. Above all, there were slaves, the customary trophies of battle – ordinary citizens of Delhi, men and women alike, thrown into servitude directly upon their capture. Many of the Tatars marched out of the city with a column of 150. The poorest soldier seized at least twenty.

  For two weeks Temur remained in Delhi, accepting the surrender of local Indian princes and adding their gifts to his lengthening train of treasure. Master craftsmen and the masons of Delhi, renowned for their excellence, were thrown in chains for the return march to Samarkand. The chronicles remark on one present which particularly impressed Temur, a pair of white parrots which for years had graced the antechambers of the Indian sultans.

  Then, abruptly, the emperor gave the order to leave. One of the local princes, Khizr Khan, founder of the Sayid dynasty, who claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed, was quickly installed as Temur’s governor of what is today Punjab and Upper Sindh.* Temur was less interested in the administration of empire – history has judged this as one of his greatest failings – than the glory of conquest.

  Laden with booty, the army made laborious progress on its northward journey, sometimes as little as four miles in a day. One of Temur’s first stops was the celebrated marble mosque built by Sultan Firuz Shah on the banks of the Jumna, where the emperor gave thanks to Allah for his recent success, and which may have inspired Temur’s monumental Cathedral Mosque in Samarkand.

  This was to be no leisurely return, however. More battles awaited the Tatars, for the jihad had not ended. There were still many more infidels to be killed or converted. First the army swung round to the north-east, sacking the stronghold of Meerut before reaching the Ganges and slaughtering forty-eight boatloads of Hindus in addition to an undisclosed number of Zoroastrians. Into the foothills of Kashmir and the Himalayas Temur’s forces continued, fighting twenty or so pitched battles and plundering profitably wherever and whenever the occasion presented itself. The Muslim Shah of Kashmir submitted with promises of a vast tribute. The Hindu Raja of Jammu was captured in an ambush and hastily converted to the true faith. An expedition was sent against Lahore to punish a prince who had already submitted to Temur but had conspicuously failed to reappear as instructed. Lahore was seized and the careless prince executed.

  By March Temur had satisfied his lust for war and treasure. He said goodbye to the princes of the royal line and gave them permission to return to their provinces. In Kashmir, to the great concern of his amirs and princes, he had been stricken by a tumour on his arm. Now, as he forged north out of Kabul, he developed boils on both hands and feet, so serious an incapacity that he could no longer remain on horseback. His return journey through the lofty Hindu Kush had to be made in a litter borne by mules. During one day alone, wrote Yazdi, the route was so circuitous the royal entourage had to cross the same river forty-eight times.

  In the first days of spring, as the trees blossomed in welcome, Temur crossed the Oxus and at Termez was met by the bulk of the imperial household. Here was the Great Queen Saray Mulk-khanum, his most senior wife, closely followed by Tukal-khanum, the Lesser Queen, and Tuman-agha, his latest and most youthful wife. Here also were two of the emperor’s grandsons, Ulugh Beg and Ibrahim Sultan, joined by several of the princesses and a delegation of senior officials from Samarkand. All hurried forward to greet and congratulate the old emperor on his most recent triumph.

  The royal party pressed on towards Samarkand in high spirits, stopping for a fortnight at Shakhrisabz where Temur paid his respects at the tombs of the saints and that of his own father, Amir Taraghay. As they neared his beloved capital, thoughts turned to the triumphal entry that lay only hours away. It would be the most spectacular yet.

  One thousand miles away, Delhi lay in ruins. The extraordinary wealth amassed by generations of Indian sultans had vanished in a matter of days. Temur had sown devastation across an already damaged kingdom and northern India had suffered one of its most catastrophic invasions. Stores of grain and standing crops had been destroyed. Fields lay empty. Famine and disease were rife. Heaps of putrefying corpses poisoned air and water alike. Towers of rotting heads rose from the rubble. The skies were silent. ‘Delhi was utterly ruined and those of its people who were left, died, while for two months not a bird moved wing in the city.’

  The Scourge of God had left his terrible mark and darkened the pages of Indian history. It took more than a century for Delhi to recover.

  * * *

  * King Kanishka (78–144) was the greatest king of the Kushan dynasty that ruled over the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia. He is remembered above all as a great patron of Buddhism. A cosmopolitan and tolerant king, he presided over an era in which trade with the Roman empire and the exchange of ideas between East and West flourished. The fusion of these two worlds was best exemplified in the Gandharan school of art, in which Greco-Roman classical lines found new expression in images of the Buddha.

  * Fitzroy Maclean, the British army officer, envoy of Winston Churchill, writer, politician, spy and fearless traveller, reached Termez after a long and riotous train journey whose only refreshments consisted of untold quantities of vodka and ‘pink Soviet sausages’. In Eastern Approaches, the classic story of his adventures in Soviet Central Asia, he described his unlikely mission to cross the Oxus by boat from Termez into Afghanistan. Predictably obstructive, the Soviet authorities
advised him to return several thousand miles to Moscow overland and then fly to Kabul rather than attempt the river crossing. The unstoppable Maclean favoured the more direct approach. Finding a suitable vessel to make the journey was no easy matter. The boat he finally chose, ‘which rejoiced in the name of The Seventeenth Party Congress … was handicapped by the absence of an engine or motor of any kind’. Its captain was a singular character who informed Maclean he was learning English from a book entitled London from the Top of an Omnibus. ‘For purposes of conversation, however, his knowledge of the English language seemed to be limited to the one cryptic expression: “Very well by us” of which he was inordinately proud, and it was to repeated shouts of “Very well by us!”, heartily reciprocated by myself, that some time later I embarked on The Seventeenth Party Congress.’ The crossing completed, the crew were counted to ensure no one had fled, and without further ado ‘the remarkable craft started off stern first for the Soviet Union as if the whole capitalist world was infected with the plague’.

  * According to another epitaph: ‘In the year 937, on the 6th of the 1st Jemadi [26 December 1530], as the Emperor was in the Char Bagh [garden near Agra] which he had made, he was seized with a serious illness and bade farewell to this transitory world. Let it suffice to say that he possessed eight fundamental qualities: lofty judgement, noble ambition, the art of victory, the art of government, the art of conferring prosperity upon his people, the talent of ruling mildly, the people of God, ability to win the hearts of his soldiers, love of justice.’

  * A visit to Kabul in the summer of 2004 was a happier experience. After the departure of the Taliban in late 2001, the Afghan capital was pulling itself together again, helped by an army of NGOs and UN agencies, not to mention the 5,500 troops from thirty-three nations who made up the International Security Assistance Force. Reconstruction was the order of the day, and Babur’s Gardens were one of the many beneficiaries of the new climate of peace and development. Through a $3 million restoration programme carried out under the auspices of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the gardens were steadily being transformed. What four years earlier had been a barren slope of earth was now green, and getting greener. Five hundred trees had been planted – plane, apricot, apple, mulberry, fig, walnut, pomegranate – and another 1,500 were due to be planted in 2005, including wild cherry, which Babur is supposed to have introduced from north of Kabul, cypresses, hawthorn, roses and jasmine. ‘The idea is to restore the original character of the garden,’ Ratish Nanda, a conservation architect with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, told me. ‘Babur was always very careful looking after these gardens. Even when he was in India, he continually sent messages to his governor telling him to take care of them, reminding him to look after the plants and sending him very specific instructions.’