Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  Base villain, vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,

  Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground

  That bears the honour of my royal weight,

  Stoop, villain, stoop! Stoop, for so he bids

  That may command thee piecemeal to be torn,

  Or scattered like the lofty cedar trees

  Struck with the voice of thundering Jupiter …

  Now clear the triple region of the air,

  And let the majesty of heaven behold

  Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.

  Zabina, meanwhile, has been treated to her own degradation, becoming the slave of Zenocrate’s handmaiden. Bajazeth objects, warning Tamburlaine that such ambitious pride will be his ruin. He is immediately returned to his cage. Accompanied by his Persian lords and followers, Tamburlaine taunts his adversary repeatedly, trying unsuccessfully to feed him morsels of meat from the point of his sword. The proud Ottoman flings the food away, but later confesses to his wife that he is fading away. The humiliation at Tamburlaine’s hands eventually proves too much for the Turk. With no end in sight to his ‘obscure infernal servitude’, he chooses the only honourable alternative and takes his life, Marlowe providing the immortal stage direction, ‘He brains himself against the cage.’ Discovering her late husband’s grisly remains, his widow Zabina is devastated. There is nothing else for it. Chasing her husband’s shadows into the afterlife, ‘She runs against the cage and brains herself.’

  History was rather less dramatic. The debate over whether Bayazid was thrown into a cage, a hugely degrading punishment for one of the world’s most powerful sovereigns, can be traced back to Arabshah, whose acid hostility to Temur we have already observed. The Syrian chronicler claimed that ‘Ibn Othman [Bayazid] was taken and bound with fetters like a bird in a cage … Ibn Othman he ordered to be brought to him every day, and received him with kind and cheerful speech and marks of pity, then derided and mocked him.’ Arabshah also had Bayazid attending Temur’s victory banquet, where he was further humiliated.

  Ibn Othman saw that the cupbearers were his consorts and that all of them were his wives and concubines; then the world seemed black to him and he thought the likeness of the agonies of death sweet and his breast was torn and his heart burned, his distress increased, his liver was crushed, groans came from the bottom of his heart and his sighs were redoubled, his wound broke out again and his sore was newly inflamed and the butcher of calamity scattered salt on the wound of his affliction.

  Yazdi, by contrast, offers a version much more favourable to Temur, as we have come to expect from the court panegyrist. The victorious emperor delivers a brief lecture to the effect that Bayazid has committed a great deal of injustice towards Temur, and is therefore the author of his own downfall. Temur claims never to have wanted the war, ‘because I knew that your troops were always at war with the infidels. I have used all possible ways of mildness; and my intention was, if you had harkened to my counsels, and consented to a peace, to have given you powerful succours, both of money and troops, to carry on the war for religion with greater vigour, and to exterminate the enemies of Mohammed.’ Nevertheless, he goes on, ‘to return thanks to God for my good fortune in this battle, I will neither treat you nor your friends ill; and you may rest satisfied as to that point’. Bayazid, Yazdi assures the reader, was treated with the utmost respect as a ‘great emperor’. Indeed, such was the esteem in which Temur held him that when, in March 1403, he learnt of Bayazid’s death in captivity, Temur was reportedly moved to tears by the news. He had, said Yazdi, been planning to restore the sultan to his throne.

  Yazdi’s account is characteristically fulsome. There is as little reason to regard his as the definitive version of events as there is to trust that of the hostile Arabshah. That there was a great deal of bad blood between Temur and Bayazid is beyond question. But that held equally for many of Temur’s other adversaries, and none had been treated so contemptuously in defeat. Humiliating his vanquished opponents had never been his style. Instead, by far his most common practice was to reinstall them as vassal kings, which is precisely what he did in the case of Bayazid’s sons. The Ottoman prince Sulayman Chelebi, who received his father’s European lands and a capital at Adrianople, explicitly acknowledged Temur’s honourable behaviour towards Bayazid in a letter to the Tatar. The clearest suggestion, however, that Arabshah’s story of the Ottoman sultan being confined behind bars was fanciful, is the Turkic word ‘kafes’ in the chronicles, which can mean either litter or cage. It is thus quite possible, likely even, that Bayazid was brought to Temur in a litter after the battle, a conventional mode of transport for the sultan.

  There are other reasons to doubt Arabshah’s version. Clavijo makes no mention of a cage; nor, critically, does Schiltberger, who had been taken captive at Nicopolis in 1396 and after the battle of Ankara became one of Temur’s slaves. The last word on the subject must go to John Buchan Telfer, the translator of the Bavarian’s narrative. ‘The fable of the iron cage is scarcely worth recalling to mind,’ he argued, ‘but had there been a shadow of truth in it, Schiltberger would not have failed to notice the circumstance of the powerful monarch he had served so long being thus ignominiously treated.’

  In the carnage of Ankara, Nicopolis had become a distant memory. The days of Bayazid’s glory were over. Caged or not, the Thunderbolt had struck for the last time.

  While messengers fanned out across Temur’s empire carrying news of his famous victory, the emperor made plans to exploit it to the full. With the most serious fighting over, Bayazid’s lands stretched invitingly before him like an unlocked palace. To his west lay Brusa, seat of the Ottoman empire and flourishing centre of the caravan trade through Asia Minor. Mohammed Sultan was given the enviable task of riding out to seize its treasures, although Prince Sulayman Chelebi, after narrowly beating him to the city from Ankara, had removed many of its greatest prizes. Among those which remained were the richly decorated bronze gates, inlaid with representations of St Peter and St Paul and finished with enamel, gold and azure. These were later presented to the Great Empress Saray Mulk-khanum on Temur’s return to Samarkand. When everything else of value had been taken, the city was torched.

  As the Tatar hordes sped west after their fugitives, the Sea of Marmara, gateway to Europe, became choked with fleeing Turks. Reneging on their earlier agreement with Temur, the Genoese and Venetian merchants who controlled the eastern shores of the sea struck lucrative deals with the desperate Ottomans, ferrying them across the water to safety on the European mainland. It was not all plain sailing for the Turks, however. Some of the less scrupulous Christians, according to one chronicle, killed their Muslim passengers and threw them overboard in revenge for the punishing sieges Bayazid had inflicted on Constantinople.

  Undefended, the provinces of Asia Minor meekly offered up their prizes to the invaders. The hordes thundered to the outer reaches of Bayazid’s fractured empire. Silver coins, precious stones, pearls, vessels and furniture of gold and silver were despatched directly to the emperor. Everything else worth seizing was loaded onto the long trains of camels and horses and returned east. One by one, towns and cities fell to Temur’s rapacious men. It was, said Arabshah, an orgy of cruelty.

  They shaved heads, amputated necks, crushed arms, cut off shoul-derblades, burnt livers, scorched faces, gouged out eyes, split open bellies, blinded the sight, made tongues mute, blocked the hearing, crushed noses to the earth and brought low the lofty noses, lacerated mouths, shattered chests, crushed backs, pounded the ribs, split navels, melted hearts, severed sinews, shed blood, injured private parts, did violence to souls, destroyed men, poured out bodies like molten images, destroyed lives, and not a third or fourth part of the subjects of Rum escaped the havoc which they dealt, but most of them were either strangled or struck down or hurled headlong or destroyed by goring or devoured by wild beasts.

  As news of this apocalypse filtered across the Aegean, Europe started to tremble at the prospect of Temur’s westward
advance. Bayazid had folded before this terrible force. Christendom now lay prostrate before the Lame Conqueror. Its armies were no match for these rough men of the steppes, steeled by years of victory. If the emperor’s famous crimson standard, the swinging horse-tail beneath a shining golden crescent, were to appear on the European mainland, the days of Christendom were surely over.

  Among the court observers of Temur’s emphatic victory over Bayazid were two distinguished Spanish knights. Payo de Sotomayor and Hernan Sanchez de Palazuelos had been sent by their farsighted King Henry III of Castile to bring him news from the Levant. The Spanish king, who despatched embassies far and wide, to the princes of Christendom as well as the Moors, asked them to report on the customs, the armies and the intentions of the rulers in that region. After a long and arduous journey, the knights had been received gracefully by Temur at his camp outside Ankara. While their Tatar hosts showered them with every comfort and courtesy, they watched events unfold on the battlefield with a mixture of admiration and dread. That Temur the Lame was a powerful Asian monarch they had fully expected. But for him to overcome the army of Bayazid, the scourge of the last Crusade, was beyond comprehension. Armed with the typical European prejudices of their time, they regarded Asia – if they considered the continent at all – with condescension, as the home of rude savages. It was inconceivable that Asia should produce a mighty Muslim warrior capable of routing Europe’s greatest enemy.

  In time the two Spaniards were dismissed and, together with Temur’s return envoy, Mohammed al Qazi, sent home with fabulous presents of jewels and women for King Henry. (It was in response to this embassy that Clavijo embarked on his diplomatic mission, intending to reach Temur in his winter pastures in Georgia, but forced through delay to press east to Samarkand.) Among the Christian women whom Temur had rescued from Bayazid’s harem was Angelina, daughter of Count John of Hungary, a famous beauty of her age, celebrated by the poets.*

  In the weeks that followed the battle of Ankara, European monarchs grew increasingly uneasy as news of Temur’s victory reverberated throughout the heart of Christendom. Their reactions were highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the conqueror of Bayazid had done them an enormous service by eliminating their most powerful adversary at a stroke. On the other, they wondered fearfully whether this mysterious Oriental despot, who had surged forth unannounced from unknown Asia, would now continue west across the Aegean.

  Letters were despatched from Temur’s camp. Archbishop John of Sultaniya departed to the court of the French king Charles VI with imperial missives boasting of the conqueror’s triumph and stressing the need for unhindered commerce between the two continents.† In England, King Henry IV received similar correspondence. For a continent riven by division and ruled by impecunious princes, there was little question of opposing Temur. Nicopolis, from which their diminished armies and dwindling coffers were still recovering, was too painful a memory. Instead, Christendom turned to frantic diplomacy, the only option left to it. A stream of sycophantic messages coursed east.

  From his newly seized throne in England, Henry, anxious to be recognised by such an important potentate, sent earnest congratulations to a warlord he had never met. From Charles VI of France came fulsome praise to ‘the most victorious and serene Prince Themur’, along with thanks for the Tatar’s enlightened treatment of Christian merchants travelling in his lands. Bearing priceless jewels and gold florins, ambassadors arrived from Manuel II, the Byzantine emperor who had appealed for help from Temur against the Ottomans, reaffirming his submission and offering tribute in return for future protection from the Turks. The Regent of Constantinople added his voice to the chorus of Temur’s newest admirers, joined by the ever pragmatic Venetians. The Genoese colony at Pera, demonstrating the merchant’s time-honoured understanding of the shifting balance of power, rushed to profess its allegiance and Temur’s pennant was immediately hoisted over the Bosporus.

  Old foes suddenly saw the error of their ways. In answer to Temur’s command, Sultan Faraj of Egypt and Syria quickly offered his submission. Temur’s ambassador Atilmish was returned to his master, accompanied by gold and silver, precious jewels and horses in gorgeous livery. As was customary for defeated opponents, the conqueror’s titles were announced in the Friday prayers and coins were struck in his name. Faraj conveyed the news that he had imprisoned two of Temur’s longest-standing and most troublesome adversaries, Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad and Qara Yusuf, prince of the Black Sheep Turkmen tribes. As for what he should do with the two men, Faraj declared he was at Temur’s service.

  Temur had always understood the symbolic importance of history and tradition. They formed a powerful part of the way he presented himself to his people and to his enemies. Much of his attachment to history was self-serving. Aware of his own place in the long line of world conquerors, determined to leave future generations with an official record of his achievements, he had his military campaigns scrupulously recorded and exalted.

  That he also possessed a powerful intellectual interest in history seems beyond dispute. It was evidenced by his love of debate – to which the hostile Arabshah referred – by his assembly of illustrious scholars to grace his court and, in a single instance, by the great notice he showed Ibn Khaldun, the Arab historian, in the remarkable series of audiences he granted him during a month camped outside the city walls of Damascus in 1401.

  Traditions he regarded with a measure of expedience. As long as they legitimated his authority, they were observed. But they could also be manipulated. His raising of the banner of Islam, in particular, marked a clear departure from the shamanism of the Mongols, but the invocation of jihad also gave religious authority to his conquests and conferred upon him a definite prestige.

  From 1370, when he first rose to power as the ruler of Chaghatay, Temur had taken care to install a puppet khan, in recognition of the Mongol laws by which only a blood descendant of Genghis Khan was entitled to rule. Though all knew who wielded the power, Temur himself assumed the junior title of Amir. By doing so, he was showing his respect, however disingenuously, for the customs of the steppe.

  The yasa, the customary laws, would have been recognisable to Genghis’s Mongols almost two hundred years earlier. Temur cultivated this hinterland of convention in order to legitimise what was in effect a profoundly revolutionary enterprise, subsuming the tribal practices and hierarchies of the ulus into an overarching political system based on the empire-building of one man and his armies. On the battlefield, the formation of his soldiers – with left and right wings, a centre and vanguard – would likewise have been familiar to the Mongols of the thirteenth century.

  His marriage in 1370 to Husayn’s widow Saray Mulk-khanum further reinforced his authority as ruler, since she was both daughter of the last Chaghatay khan of Mawarannahr and a princess of the Genghis line. The marriage allowed him to style himself Temur Gurgan, son-in-law of the Great Khan, a title which he took care to use in ceremonial functions as well as in the Friday prayers and even on the coins minted in his name.

  With the defeat of Bayazid and the surrender of Faraj, the Islamic world’s two greatest empires had fallen to him. Alone and unchallenged, Temur now stood at its helm. Given his statesmanlike awareness of the power of tradition and the resonating force of religion, it was only natural that he should cast his eyes on a small stronghold halfway down the Aegean coast. Smyrna was the last Christian oasis in Rum, a symbolic affront to the new master of Asia Minor.* Equally compelling as an incentive to destroy it was the fact that both the Ottoman Sultan Murad and his son Bayazid had tried and failed. The Thunderbolt, indeed, had spent seven fruitless years attempting to wrest it from the Knights of the Hospital of St John, a military religious order founded in Jerusalem in the eleventh century. The temptation for Temur to succeed where others had so conspicuously failed was overwhelming.

  Any hopes of clemency the knights might have harboured vanished with their refusal to surrender. Although they had not reckoned on having to defend themselves ag
ainst the irresistible Temur, their confidence was understandable. Their position, high on a rocky outcrop extending into the sea, looked unassailable. To take it would require a two-pronged attack by land and water, a task that appeared beyond the bounds of siege technology. But such difficulties would only have appealed to Temur’s imagination and cunning.

  His amirs ordered the men to build platforms, supported by sunken columns, across the sea, effectively cutting off the citadel from the shore. Siege engines then rumbled across towards the bottom of the walls, while scaling ladders were put into position. Hour after hour the Tatars loosed volleys of Greek-fire into the heart of Smyrna, observing with satisfaction the black curls of smoke which started to rise into the sky from the stricken city. Great mounds of timber were set alight by the walls, but the heavy rains of December prevented their collapse. For a fortnight the two sides faced each other down, the besieged defending manfully against the swarming Tatars. Eventually the unrelenting pressure began to tell. Breaches started appearing in the walls, and Temur’s men rushed through, an irresistible deluge flattening everything before it. The Knights Hospitallers had mounted a courageous resistance, but now they were overrun by superior numbers intent on slaughter and destruction. Once more Temur presided over a mass execution as the souls of the stubborn infidels were despatched.