And yet those ponds of Bukhara are wonderfully beautiful. In the evening, after the muezzin has sounded from the minaret the call to prayer, the men of the city gather around the ponds, which are bordered by tall, silver poplars and magnificent black elms, to enjoy a period of ease and leisure. Carpets are spread, the ever burning chilim is passed from mouth to mouth, the samovar steams away, and light-footed boys hand round the shallow bowls of green tea. Here the meddahs, or story-tellers, the musicians and the dancing boys assemble to display their craft. And perhaps a conjuror or juggler comes, performing the most amazing and incredible feats of skill. An Indian snake charmer joins the throng and sets his poisonous snakes to dance, while all over reigns the peace of a Bukharan evening. No loud speech breaks the spell; items of scandal and the news of the day are exchanged in discreet whispers. So it was centuries ago in Bukhara; so it is today. There are things which not even the Soviets can alter.
The disappearance of the Bukharan hauz, and most of its open canals and sewers, brought with it another poignant loss. The storks, which for centuries had been as much a part of the city skyline as the Kalon Minaret and had fed from these open pools, had gone for good.
‘By the 1970s, the storks had left,’ said Noila. ‘I’m still so sad about it. Every morning we used to see them. You can still see one or two of their nests at the top of the mulberry trees in Lyab-i-Hauz. I used to love watching the mothers taking frogs and fish in their beaks and feeding their children. And seeing them teaching the young ones how to fly. The babies used to try to flap their wings and then they’d fall into Lyab-i-Hauz and wait there until their mothers rescued them. They were very beautiful birds. Many, many lived here because there were so many places they could feed from. You know, there’s a famous Bukharan song,’ she reminisced. ‘It’s called “The Storks are Coming Back to Bukhara”.’
She started humming the tune and then broke into song. It was a tiny, gentle voice, but it carried easily into the night. ‘I know you can still see them outside Bukhara,’ she went on, ‘but of course it’s not the same thing as having them in the city. They were part of our childhood when we grew up. Bukhara has never really been the same since they left.’
For several days I immersed myself in Bukhara and waited while it slowly revealed itself to me. It was more intimate than Samarkand, had none of that city’s flashy flamboyance, and unveiled its secrets more guardedly. Much of this had to do with the fact that it had retained its old quarter almost intact and on one site. Samarkand’s ancient monuments are spread diffusely over a far greater area. The narrow winding alleys and souks that had filtered out from the historical heart of the Registan towards the city gates are no more. Here they have been preserved.
When it was time to leave Bukhara the Holy, I did so reluctantly. The next stage of my journey, 130 miles east along the Zarafshan valley, would once again take me in Temur’s footsteps, this time as he returned to his beloved capital from the west. Samarkand had not seen her emperor for five years. Levied for a Seven-Year Campaign, the Tatar hordes had left Samarkand in October 1399, shortly after the victory in India. They returned in August 1404, weary, laden with spoil, and thinking once more of nothing but domestic delights. Temur might have been devoting many of his waking hours to the plans to invade China, but he was the emperor, chosen by God to rid the world of the unbelievers. The simple soldiers, however, the instruments of his success, were engaged in earthier considerations. War could wait. Wine and women were more immediate priorities.
Temur’s triumphal entry into Samarkand took him on the usual whirl from garden to garden and palace to palace, staying in one for several days before moving on with great pomp to the next. The crowds poured out to greet him, sharing in his grief at the loss of his heir, celebrating with him the latest victories and additions to the empire. The chronicles record his stately progress from the Garden of Heart’s Delight to the Garden of the Plane Tree, from the Model of the World to the Paradise Garden and Northern Garden. The sweeping lawns were beautifully manicured, the air was perfumed with roses, and the streams played through the palace grounds. There were audiences and receptions, riotous feasts and formal state banquets. And the games of chess continued. Nor was there any let-up in the grandiose building projects. In celebration of his latest victories, Temur gave orders for a palace to be built in a park south of the Northern Garden. Architects taken from Damascus during the last campaign were set to work. Each side of the palace was said to have measured over seven hundred metres.
‘This palace was the largest and most magnificent of any Temur had built,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘The chief ornaments of the buildings in Syria are of marble; and running streams are common in their houses. The Syrian architects are also very ingenious in mosaic work and sculpture and in contriving curious fountains and perpetual jets d’eau, and what is most remarkable is that with stones of various colours they do the same sort of work which the artificers in inlaid work do with ebony and ivory, and with equal skill and delicacy. They likewise made several fountains in the palace, the beauty of which was enhanced by an infinity of jets d’eau in various styles, in inimitable art. Afterwards the workmen of Persia and Iraq enriched the exterior of the walls with porcelain of Cachan, which gave the finishing stroke to the beauty of this palace.’
The emperor’s arrival in his capital coincided with that of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Spanish ambassador from the court of King Henry III of Castile. Leaving Cadiz in May 1403, the Spaniard and his party had endured a mammoth journey of fifteen months and six thousand miles, beset by delays. Shipwrecked in the Black Sea, they were forced to winter in Constantinople, from where they were only able to resume their journey the following spring. Hoping to receive an audience with Temur while the Tatar army was camped in the pastures of the Qarabagh, Clavijo narrowly missed him and was obliged to press on east. Such was the speed of Temur’s homeward march that the Spaniard eventually had to cross Asia in his wake.
After admiring Tabriz, where he met a large embassy from Cairo bound for Samarkand, and Sultaniya, where he was granted an audience with Temur’s debauched son Miranshah, Clavijo headed on towards Mawarannahr. At Nishapur he lost one of his party to fever, but the embassy carried on its tortuous path, crossing the Qara Qum desert and reaching the frontiers of Temur’s homeland on the southern bank of the Amu Darya at Balkh, in northern Afghanistan. Once across this heavily guarded frontier – where entry was permitted but exit was forbidden on pain of death – Clavijo took the road north, from Termez to Shakhrisabz, where he was overwhelmed by the grandeur and elegance of Temur’s Ak Sarai palace, still under construction after twenty years. From here, it was a last push of fifty miles to his final destination. At 9 o’clock on Monday, 8 September 1404, the shattered Spaniard finally arrived at a city whose magnificence he had never expected, and whose hospitality he would never forget.
The chronicles describe Temur’s return to his capital in some detail, but Clavijo’s wonderfully-observed account – impartial, unlike those of Arabshah and Yazdi – goes much further, adding texture and colour. He was writing from the unique perspective of a cultured European whose prejudices towards ‘barbarian’ Asians had suddenly been dealt a fatal blow. From his first sight of the elderly emperor he was transfixed by the lavish splendour of the court. He was led first through a great orchard, entered by a gate resplendent in blue and gold tiles. Six elephants, trophies of Delhi, guarded the entrance, each with a miniature castle on its back. Clavijo and his companions were then escorted from one attendant to the next until they reached the emperor’s grandson Khalil Sultan, who took their letter from King Henry and directed them to the Conqueror of the World. Temur was sitting on a dais in front of a beautiful palace, reclining on embroidered silk cushions and mattresses. He wore a silk cloak and a crown ornamented with a balas ruby, pearls and precious stones. Red apples floated in a fountain which threw a column of water into the air.
It is Clavijo, above all other sources, who provides the most compelling physical
portrait of Temur in his last years. All the decades in the saddle, the skin-cracking summers and the savagely cold winters, had taken their toll. ‘His Highness commanded us to arise and stand close up to him that he might the better see us, for his sight was no longer good, indeed, he was so infirm and old that his eyelids were falling over his eyes and he could barely raise them to see.’
For a sixty-nine-year-old cripple who had outlived many of his contemporaries, including several sons and grandsons, who had fought in battles throughout Asia and had travelled countless thousands of miles, this physical deterioration was hardly surprising. What was more remarkable was that despite such obvious frailties, Temur showed no signs of letting up. On the contrary, he was still pursuing his ambitions with characteristic vigour. The ruthlessness had not mellowed with age.
There were building projects to inspect, not least a new main road running through the city with arcaded shops, the mausoleum raised in honour of Mohammed Sultan and, most important, the Cathedral Mosque which Temur had commissioned to celebrate his victory in India. He intended this to be his greatest monument, a tribute to Allah and, given its unrivalled magnificence in the Islamic world, implicitly to himself. Five years after the cosmopolitan team of stonemasons, architects, labourers and master craftsmen drawn from all over his empire had begun their work, the mosque was nearing completion when he returned from the west.
‘Now at this season,’ Clavijo wrote, ‘Temur was already in weak health, he could no longer stand for long on his feet, or mount his horse, having always to be carried in a litter.’ Such physical constraints did not in the least deter the emperor from the task at hand. The chief architects and the two amirs responsible for the mosque must have trembled inwardly when he came to examine it. The first signs were ominous. Though Clavijo judged it ‘the noblest of all those we visited in the city of Samarkand’, Temur, as we have seen, did not concur. The portal was too small. His mosque was meant to eclipse every other building in the dar al Islam, never mind Samarkand. He gave orders for the façade to be demolished on the spot. The amirs who had administered the project in his absence were summarily executed.
This was a reminder, if one were needed, that Temur, however frail he had become, was the supreme power. The campaign against China would proceed as planned. A summons was despatched to all the nobles, princes, amirs and commanders who would accompany him to war against the greatest army on earth. The qurultay would be held on the plain of Kani-gil outside Samarkand. Its purpose was twofold. First, the tumultuous gathering would demonstrate to the infidels of China that they were about to be swept away by a mightier force sent by Allah. Second, the emperor would celebrate the marriages of five of his grandsons. The dynasty would live on to greater glory. This was to be a festival unlike any other Temur had ever held. And Clavijo was there to observe every minute of it.
Just as he had been shocked by the scale and opulence of Samarkand, the beauty of its monuments, the graciousness of its parks and palaces, Clavijo was now struck by the largest, most exotic gathering of humanity he had ever beheld. The account of his three-year embassy to the court of Temur runs to three hundred pages. Fifty of those, written in a tone of profound wonder, are devoted exclusively to the feast of Kani-gil, a celebration that began in the last few days of September 1404 and lasted two months. Yazdi and Arabshah both refer to the festival with their usual sycophancy and prejudice respectively on display, but once again it is to the flourishing pen of Clavijo we must turn for the most meticulous reportage of an emperor and his people at the zenith of their power. It is worth quoting from him at length.
In the plain here Temur recently had ordered tents to be pitched for his accommodation, and where his wives might come, for he had commanded the assembly of the great Horde, which until now had been encamped in the pastures beyond the orchards round and about the city. The whole of the Horde was now to come in, each clan taking up its appointed place: and now we saw them here, pitching the tents, their womenfolk accompanying them. This was done in order that all [these Chaghatays] might have their share in the festivities which were going forward for the celebration of certain royal marriages now about to be declared. From their custom as soon as the camp of his Highness thus had been pitched all these folk of the Horde exactly knew where each clan had its place. From the greatest to the humblest, each man knew his allotted position and took it up without confusion in the most orderly fashion. Thus in the course of the next three or four days we saw near twenty thousand tents pitched in regular streets to encircle the royal camp, and daily more clans came in from the outlying districts. Throughout the Horde thus encamped we saw the butchers and cooks who passed to and fro selling their roast and boiled meats, while others sold barley and fruit, and bakers with their ovens alight were kneading the dough and making bread for sale. Thus every art and craft was to be found dispersed throughout the camp, and each trade was in its appointed street of the great Horde. There were baths and bathers established in the camp who, pitching their tents had built wooden cabins adjacent to each other, each with its iron bath supplied with hot water, heated in cauldrons which they had there together with all the other furniture they required.
The Chaghatays continued to pour in, until Clavijo estimated there were fifty thousand tents pitched around the imperial enclosure on the banks of the Zarafshan river, with more in the meadows beyond. Within the various enclosures, arranged in strict hierarchy, were the emperor himself, the princes his sons and grandsons, the amirs, the sayids, descendants of the Prophet, the scholars, the shaykhs, the muftis, the qadis, the Kipchak ambassadors, the envoys from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, India and Spain, the binbashis, commanders of a thousand, the yuzbashis, leaders of a hundred, together with all the magistrates and high officials.
On 2 October the Spanish delegation was instructed to adjourn to a garden where its host, whom Clavijo referred to as the Grand Doorkeeper, was preparing a banquet. Temur had received reports that Clavijo was not drinking wine, an anomaly he was minded to rectify.
This lord informed us that Temur being perfectly well aware how it was our custom, as with all Franks [Europeans], daily to drink wine, his Highness had nonetheless noticed that we did not willingly ever do so in his presence when it was offered to us after the Tatar fashion. For that reason his Highness had arranged for us now to be brought to this garden where dinner was about to be served to us and wine provided, that thus we might eat and drink at our ease and to our fill. We found that ten sheep and a horse had been sent by order of Temur to supply the banquet with meat, also a full charge of wine and on this fare we dined sumptuously. At the conclusion of the feast they presented each of us ambassadors with a robe of gold embroidery and a shirt to match, also a hat. Furthermore, we each received a horse for riding, all these gifts being presented to us by order of the Lord Temur.
Four days later, the emperor announced a grand feast in the Royal Camp, to which he had invited all the members of the imperial family, the lords of the court and the chiefs of the clans. The ambassadors were taken to join the horde. While they observed the preparations for the banquet taking place around them, Clavijo studied the tent in which Temur was giving audiences. The first aspect of it he remarked upon was its impressive size, one hundred paces long on each of its four sides, and as high as three long lances. ‘The ceiling of the pavilion was made circular to form a dome, and the poles supporting it were twelve in number, each as thick as a man’s chest,’ in bright blue and gold and other colours. The interior of the dome was the pavilion’s ‘mark of greatest beauty’, for the canopies hanging from it formed four archways whose corners were emblazoned with pictures of eagles with folded wings. The inner walls of the pavilion were lined with beautifully woven crimson tapestries and silk embroidered with gold thread. Inside, the emperor gave audiences from a dais lined with a carpet and several fine mattresses. The outer walls were made of silk woven into bands of yellow and white. Low galleries adjoined these walls, supported by smaller poles. At each of the f
our corners stood a tall staff capped with a burnished copper ball surmounted by a crescent. Above the dome was a square-shaped turret made of silk, complete with simulated battlements and also decorated with balls and crescents. Despite its fairytale-castle style, the audience pavilion was eminently practical. A gangway led from the ground to its summit, enabling workmen to repair any damage caused by high winds. Five hundred crimson ropes held the structure securely in place. Running around the pavilion was an outer perimeter, a wall of cloth made from multi-coloured silks, ‘as high as a man on horseback may reach up to’, and patterned with battlements. An arched gateway within the wall contained double doors of canvas beneath another highly ornamented turret. The enclosure stretched three hundred paces across and contained many other tents and awnings. Clavijo found the entire effect astonishing. ‘From a distance indeed this great tent would appear to be a castle, it is so immensely broad and high,’ he marvelled.
In all there were eleven such royal enclosures, each containing a splendid array of pavilions. Wherever he wandered, whatever he saw, Clavijo was electrified. There were tents of all shapes and sizes. One was decorated with a massive figure of an eagle with outspread wings in silver gilt. Beneath it were ‘three falcons in silver gilt … very skilfully wrought, they have their wings open as though they were in flight from the eagle, their heads being turned back to look at him. The eagle is represented as though about to pounce.’ There were tents without ropes, their walls supported by slender poles, with borders made from spangles of silver inlaid with precious gems. Some were lined with red tapestries and shag velvet, others more luxuriously with furs of ermine and squirrel.
Tamerlane Page 39