There was a last macabre flourish to the fall of Smyrna. A fleet of galleys was spotted carrying reinforcements for the beleaguered knights. They did not know it, but they had arrived too late. As they neared the shore, Temur ordered the severed heads of the Smyrna garrison to be launched against their brother officers in the ships. The flame-throwing weapons were quickly adjusted to fit their new missiles. Soon the sky was thick with bloody skulls raining down on the horrified relief convoy, pounding into the wooden decks and striking down the knights as they prepared for battle. Temur’s atrocious plan had its intended effect. Appalled by the bombardment of heads, demoralised by the slaughter of their colleagues, the knights turned round and set sail for home.
The familiar call of jihad, echoing through the ranks of his warriors, had been answered. The last independent bastion of Christianity, which for years had frustrated the best efforts of the Ottomans to reduce it, lay in ruins. Two piles of skulls hacked from the bodies of the fallen knights commemorated another famous victory. The infidels had followed the army of Bayazid to a crushing defeat.
For years Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus, together with the Ottoman emperor, had regarded the cripple from Samarkand with undisguised distaste and disdain. He was not a Muslim, they sneered, he was merely a barbarian. One by one, after ignoring his warnings of the defeat he would inflict on them, they had been silenced. Temur’s claim to be the supreme Sword Arm of Islam no longer looked like an idle boast. On the contrary, it seemed a statement of the obvious.
For the insatiable Temur, one question loomed above all others: what next? Supreme in the dar al Islam, the Muslim world, he now had to look beyond its borders for future conquests.
But before this question could be answered, there was the wreckage of the Ottoman empire to attend to. Minor rulers who had been deposed by Bayazid were returned to power as vassal princes. Prince Sulayman Chelebi, having confirmed his submission to his father’s conqueror on pain of war, was granted the Ottoman territories in Europe. Another brother, Isa Chelebi, was awarded the heartland of the fragmented empire in north-west Anatolia. In this way Temur kept the Ottoman princes in check through the classic policy of divide and rule, just as he had done in the aftermath of defeating Tokhtamish of the Golden Horde. Emperor Manuel, who had been languishing penniless in the courts of Europe in self-imposed exile, was ordered back to his throne. Constantinople would fall, but Temur had bought it another fifty years.
Still, the kings of Christendom dared not relax. Dreadful rumours were spreading through their courts. The barbarian conqueror was requisitioning ships to lead his hordes onto European soil. He was marching his men around the Black Sea. He meant to convert the entire continent to Islam at the point of a sword. Even now, the vanguard of his armies had landed and was marching west. It was only a matter of days before it encircled Rome.
Such cataclysmic visions bore the hallmark of Europe’s myopia. Her poverty was her best defence against an invasion. From the Aegean to the Atlantic, there was little to tempt Temur into launching another holy war. Killing or converting the infidels was a noble aim in itself, of course, but Temur regarded such considerations with a more mercantile eye. Europe’s coffers and treasure houses were bare. No jewels, no jihad.
The aged emperor must also have known that before too long the Angel Izrail would be summoning him from earth. The seventy-two beautiful virgins who awaited him in paradise would surely not be kept waiting much longer. There was no point in squandering the precious time which remained to him on such a worthless continent as Europe.
But while he still lived, and while he could still move, there was yet time for one more campaign. He had contemplated it for years. Preparations had already been made along the farthest frontiers of his empire. His last expedition would be his most glorious. Once more he would proclaim jihad. He would challenge and overcome the only power on earth capable of opposing him. Poised on the shores of Europe, Temur led his army east. Christendom heaved a collective sigh of relief. Temur was bound for war with the Ming emperor of China.
* * *
* Modern estimates of the numbers ranged against each other at Nicopolis contrast dramatically with those of the contemporary chronicles, which claimed the Ottoman and Crusader armies both totalled about a hundred thousand.
* John, like Temur, was something of an opportunist. While assuring the Tatar of his unswerving loyalty and readiness to lend him all possible support against Bayazid, he was simultaneously negotiating terms with the Ottoman. The double-dealing did not stop there. John had also opened up a third front, maintaining secret contact with Charles VI, the French king, to whom he proposed selling his throne and the remnants of his empire in return for a regular salary and a castle in France. It was not altogether surprising, then, that as war with Bayazid approached, neither John nor the governor of Pera made any attempt to prevent the Ottoman troops in Europe returning to Asia Minor.
* Such customs were scrupulously observed, even in times of rejoicing. When a girl was born, her parents would refer to the child as ‘one who hides behind the veil’ or even ‘a mistress of the bed’.
* The Halys is today known as the Kizil Irmak, Turkey’s longest river. Flowing from the east, it swings around in a giant ‘C’ shape through central Anatolia, cuts through the Pontic mountains in the north and empties into the Black Sea. The river was immortalised in the story of Croesus, the fabulously rich last king of Lydia in the sixth century BC. At that time the river formed the boundary between his kingdom and the Persian empire of Cyrus the Great. Before he attacked, Croesus consulted the oracle at Delphi to tell him his chances of success. ‘Cross the river Halys and you shall destroy a great nation,’ came the reply. Confident of victory, Croesus invaded, only to be routed by his enemy. He had tragically misinterpreted the oracle, and it was his nation, not Persia, which was destroyed.
* Estimating the size of historical armies is notoriously difficult. Chronicles can distort, eyewitnesses can exaggerate and historians can wildly speculate. In the case of the battle of Ankara, the discrepancies between the various estimates are particularly pronounced. In his 1984 study, for example, Ian Heath estimated Temur’s army at eighty thousand at most, that of Bayazid at eighty to 120,000. This contrasts spectacularly with Johann Schiltberger’s exorbitant figures of 1.6 million for Temur and 1.4 million for the Ottomans.
* Sotomayor and Palazuelos must have greatly enjoyed their return journey in the company of these beautiful women. Indeed, Sotomayor was so captivated by a Greek woman called Maria that on arriving in Spain he declared his love, and later had a son by her. Angelina married Diego Gonzalez de Contreras, a noble Spaniard and magistrate of Segovia.
† All the evidence available indicates that Temur was an early and forceful proponent of free trade.
* Today it is the Turkish port of Izmir.
10
The Celestial Empire
1403–1404
‘God has favoured us with such extraordinary good fortune that we have conquered Asia and overthrown the greatest kings of the earth. Few sovereigns in past ages have acquired such great dominions, or attained such great authority, or had such numerous armies or such absolute command. And as these vast conquests have not been obtained without some violence, which has caused the destruction of a great number of God’s creatures, I have resolved to perform some good action which may atone for the crimes of my past life, and to accomplish that which no other power in the world can do, that is to make war on the infidels and exterminate the idolaters of China.’
Temur’s speech to his princes and amirs, 1404.
SHARAF AD-DIN ALI YAZDI, Zafarnama
China was in a state of turmoil. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan had launched his hordes against it, sacking Peking in 1215. The drawn-out assault was pressed home by his son Ogedey, who conquered ever more territories, and was finally concluded by Genghis’s grandson Kubilay, who became the undisputed Great Khan in 1264, after defeating his brother A
righ Boke for the throne. Abandoning Karakorum, traditional imperial capital of the Mongols, he moved south and took up his winter headquarters in the magnificent city of Peking (then known as Ta-tu, or Khanbaliq, City of the Khan). His fabulous summer capital of Sheng-tu later inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu in the Englishman’s opium-fuelled poem ‘Kubla Khan’.
Encompassing China and Mongolia, this new empire dwarfed and outshone the three Mongol houses of Chaghatay in Central Asia, Hulagu in Persia and Iraq, and Jochi in the Golden Horde, over each of which it exercised nominal sway. Stories of its grandeur filtered back to Europe via the high-spirited prose of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, who entered the Great Khan’s service for the best part of two decades. For years, China had been divided between north and south. With Kubilay’s conquests south of the Yangtse, the Sung dynasty was eventually defeated in 1279 and China was at last reunited. The Yuan dynasty proclaimed by Kubilay would continue until 1368. His reign was a time of prosperity as trade and communications flourished between East and West. Two hundred thousand boats a year plied the Yangtse, ferrying silk, rice, sugar, pearls and gems between the principal cities of the Middle Kingdom. Merchants looked beyond their borders to the markets of Persia and India, Java, Malaya and Ceylon. Drama, literature and painting started to thrive.
With Kubilay’s death in 1294, however, the empire embarked on a steady decline. The khan was partly to blame for this state of affairs. On acceding to the Chinese throne, he dispensed with the Mongol custom of electing leaders at a general assembly of the princes, replacing it with a simple hereditary principle, undermining at a stroke the authority of the nobles. Though he was spared any revolt, his successors were not. The Great Khans who succeeded Kubilay, already prone to idleness and dissipation, were beset by palace intrigues and attempted coups. Following the assassination of the Yuan emperor Ying-zong in 1323, China tore itself apart during a decade of civil war and bloodshed. Disease – possibly the Black Death – and a rash of natural disasters combined to devastate the increasingly fragile empire.
The last Mongol emperor, Sun Ti, was famously cruel, lustful and incompetent. Rather than attend to the desperate famines that were racking the countryside, he turned his attentions to the bedchamber, where he had his concubines perform such erotic delights as the ‘Heavenly Devil’s Dance’ for his pleasure. Taxes rose to punitive levels to fund his debauchery, and it was little surprise when a series of Chinese rebellions against Mongol rule broke out along the Yangtse and Huai river valleys, and started to gain momentum. In the 1350s, a peasant leader called Chu Yuan-chang emerged at the head of one such movement and picked off his rivals one by one. Part of his army was despatched north ‘to deliver the suffering people from the fire that would burn and the waters that would drown them’, namely the tyrannical government of the Mongols. Sweeping towards Peking, the peasant army trounced whatever resistance was offered, which was slight. There was little appetite among the people to fight for their louche, cowardly emperor Sun Ti, and those around him sensed that the Mongol domination of China was drawing to a close. The army of insurgents grew bigger daily, and by 1368 had developed into an irresistible force, seizing Peking and driving the Mongols out of northern China. Sun Ti slunk into exile.
In the same year that the capital of the empire fell, the simple peasant Chu Yuan-chang, enjoying his burgeoning power, changed his name and had himself proclaimed Emperor Tai Tsu, founding ruler of the Ming dynasty. For thirty years he ruled absolutely, if not serenely, restoring order to the turbulent empire, developing enlightened agricultural policies, and executing those who opposed his reforms. The Chinese legal and political system, uprooted by the Mongols, was brought back, albeit adapted to suit the needs of this commanding emperor. Members of the royal family were appointed to govern the richest, most strategic cities of the empire, where they built themselves palaces, assembled armies and, in time, inevitably nursed ambitions of their own.
In 1399 Tai Tsu died, leaving his sixteen-year-old grandson and heir Hui Ti struggling to retain power. Temur learnt this news shortly after his return from India, but he was then already resolved to march west, to Syria, Egypt, and war with Bayazid. Through his network of spies, diplomats and merchants he kept himself informed about the parlous state of affairs at the heart of China. The new young ruler was hard pressed by one of his dissatisfied uncles, the Prince of Peking, whose covetous eyes had fixed upon the imperial throne and whose army was the most powerful in the empire. Declaring that he was the emperor’s loyal servant, the prince led his forces south in what he called the ‘War for Pacifying the Troubles’. Under the guise of fighting the court ministers who were, he claimed, disturbers of the peace, the prince made his bid for supreme power. The war would last four years. As Peking and her territories descended into fratricide and unrest, Temur began to close in on his latest target. The Celestial Empire was ripe for attack.
China was the most fitting prize for a man who had never been defeated in battle. Well aware of his own mortality, the stooped, half-blind emperor required a suitable finale to his military career. The campaign against China justified itself on the critical questions of religion, money, honour and Mongol tradition. Untold riches awaited the ruler who could seize Peking, capital of an empire which in recent years, said the chronicles, had been persecuting Muslims by the tens of thousands and viciously suppressing all traces of Islam. Here, above all other places, there was fame and virtue to be won in slaughter and plunder. Yazdi, in a rare acknowledgement that the Sword Arm of Islam had despatched many more Muslims than infidels to their deaths, wrote of Temur’s hope that victory over China ‘might rectify what had been amiss in other wars, wherein the blood of so many of the faithful had been spilled’. The conquest of China would, moreover, mark the completion of Temur’s lifelong quest to unite under his rule the four Mongol kingdoms won by the sons of Genghis Khan. Chaghatay had been the first to recognise Temur as its sovereign, followed by the houses of Jochi and Hulagu. All that was missing was the house of Kubilay, the only Mongol empire which had not embraced Islam. Not only had the true faith failed to establish itself here, indeed been brutally suppressed, but – calumny of calumnies – the religion of the infidels had stolen in and won imperial favour. ‘It was told us that this new Emperor of China had by birth been an idolater, but lately had been converted to the Christian faith,’ reported the Spanish envoy Clavijo.
Temur’s preparations for war against his most redoubtable enemy were meticulous. As ever, his intelligence network had been set to work well in advance. The men who plied the caravan routes of Asia brought him regular reports on the deteriorating political conditions in the Celestial Kingdom. News came of Muslim merchants being expelled from China, an intolerable insult which Temur regarded as his duty to avenge. Arriving in Tashkent in 1398 with Temur’s returning envoy, the Chinese ambassador An Chi tao was detained and then sent on a tour of the Tatar’s lands, closely guarded at all times. His unexpected and forcible diversion took him as far west as Tabriz, to Shiraz, Isfahan and Herat. It lasted six years. By the time his embassy ended it had become one of the diplomatic world’s longest missions. Ambassador An returned to Peking twelve years after taking leave of his emperor.*
The calculated snub to the Ming emperor was a reflection of Temur’s growing power and confidence. Over the years his relationship with Peking had evolved from the deference suitable to a weaker monarch, to increasing defiance, and finally outright hostility. Clavijo, during his stay in Temur’s court, carefully observed the affronts suffered by another Chinese envoy – probably sent to demand Ambassador An’s release – in the process confirming that the Tatar had, until recently, acknowledged his subordinate status to the Ming ruler. ‘Now this ambassador had lately come to Temur to demand of him the tribute, said to be due to his master, and which Temur year by year had formerly paid,’ the Spaniard wrote.
Chinese archives tell a similar story. In a letter to Temur’s son Shahrukh, written in 1412 and addressed as thou
gh to a mere general rather than a head of state, the emperor Cheng Tsu urged him to accept his position as vassal ruler. Otherwise, it threatened, he would feel the consequences: ‘Your father Temur Gurgan, obeying the decree of almighty God, recognised himself the vassal of our sublime emperor. He continually sent him both gifts and ambassadors and in this way he gave peace and happiness to the people of your distant country … you must likewise consider us your sovereign with all sincerity and of your own accord, without our having to intervene to force you to it.’ The elaborate titles Temur enjoyed at home – Emperor of the Age, Conqueror of the World – were unthinkable at the court of the Ming emperor. For the emperors in Peking, the Tatar was simply Fou-ma Temur of Samarkand.*
As late as 1394, Temur was still addressing the Ming emperor with fulsome praise:
I respectfully address your Majesty, great Ming Emperor, upon whom Heaven has conferred the power to rule over China. The glory of your charity and your virtues has spread over the whole world. The splendour of your reign is bright like the heavenly mirror, and lights up the kingdoms, the adjoining as well as the far … The nations which never had submitted now acknowledge your supremacy and even the most remote kingdoms submerged in darkness have now become enlightened … Your Majesty has graciously allowed the merchants of distant countries to come to China to carry on trade. Foreign envoys have had a chance of admiring the wealth of your cities and the strength of your power, as if they suddenly went out of the dark and saw the light of Heaven … I have respectfully received the gracious letter in which your Majesty has condescended to inquire about my welfare. Owing to your solicitude there have been established post-stations to facilitate the intercourse of foreigners with China, and all the nations of distant countries are allowed to profit by this convenience. I see with deference that the heart of your Majesty resembles that vase which reflects what is happening in the world* … My heart has been opened and enlightened by your benevolence. I can return your Majesty’s kindly disposed feelings only by praying for your happiness and long life. May they last eternally like heaven and earth.
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