Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  I know my soul is about to leave my body and I am to be taken to the throne of God who gives life, and takes it away. I beg you shed no tears at my death. Rather than tearing your clothes and running around like madmen, pray to God to have mercy on me. Say Allahu akbar, God is great, and recite the Fatiha to comfort my soul.* Since God enabled me to give laws to Iran and Turan so that throughout those kingdoms the great do not oppress the poor, I hope he will forgive my sins, which are without number … I declare Pir Mohammed, son of Jahangir, my sole heir and lawful successor to my throne. He must possess the throne of Samarkand with absolute sovereignty and independence so that he can administer the business of empire, the army, and all the countries and cities under his jurisdiction. I command you all to obey him and sacrifice your lives to maintain his authority so that the world will not fall into disorder and that the fruits of my labours over so many years are not lost. If you remain united, no one will dare oppose you, nor offer the slightest challenge in executing my last wishes.

  He ordered his amirs, lords and army commanders to come before him and swear to observe these instructions. The amirs Shaykh Nur ad-din and Shah Malik pledged their eternal obedience, and were unable to hold back the tears. They offered to write to Khalil Sultan, summoning him to Otrar so he could hear his grandfather’s dying wishes in person. But Temur, barely able to move or talk, shook his head. There was no time for that. ‘This is the last audience you will have of me. I have no other desire than to see Prince Shahrukh, but that is impossible. God will not have it.’ On hearing these words, the princes and ladies of the court, standing silently in the emperor’s antechamber, started sobbing. Temur turned to them for the last time. He looked weak and broken, but his eyes burned with their customary fire.

  Remember to do everything I have told you to keep peace and public order. Always keep yourselves informed about the affairs of your subjects. Be valiant and keep your sword in your hand with courage that like me you may enjoy a long reign and a vast empire. I have purged Iran and Turan of their enemies and disturbers of the peace and I have brought them justice and prosperity. If you follow my last wishes and make justice the guide of all your actions, the empire will long remain in your hands. But if discord and disunity creep in, ill fortune awaits you. Enemies will start wars which will be difficult to end and irreparable damage will befall the state and religion.

  After these words, the fever worsened. Outside the emperor’s chamber imams were reciting from the Koran. A priest stood at the bottom of his bed reading verses affirming the unity of God. At about 8 o’clock Temur, mindful of the Prophet’s promise that he whose last words were ‘La ilaha illa’llah, there is no god but God’ would enter heaven, declared his faith aloud. Then, said Yazdi, ‘he gave his soul to the angel Izrail, who called him in these words: “O hopeful spirit, return to your Lord with resignation. We belong to God and to God must we return.”’*

  For a moment there was silence inside the bedchamber. Outside, all that could be heard was the wind tearing at the palace walls in that cold, black night deep in the Asian steppe. Candles threw a veil of gold over Temur’s pale features. Then the princes and the ladies, the amirs and the great lords of the court, the doctors and the attendants, all gave in to their grief and wept profusely. The emperor, centre of their universe, was dead.

  * * *

  * The fatiha is the opening sura of the Koran:

  In the Name of God,

  The Compassionate,

  The Merciful.

  Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe,

  The Compassionate, the Merciful,

  Sovereign of the Day of Judgement!

  You alone we worship, and to You alone

  we turn for help.

  Guide us to the straight path,

  The path of those whom You have favoured,

  Not of those who have incurred Your wrath,

  Nor of those who have gone astray.

  * Arabshah, of course, recorded Temur’s last hours rather differently. Even at the end, he could not restrain his violent dislike for the man who had sacked and destroyed his native city, Damascus. The chapter in which Temur dies is headed: ‘How that Proud Tyrant was Broken and Borne to the House of Destruction, Where he had his Constant Seat in the Lowest Pit of Hell’. The prose is as apocalyptic and unforgiving as ever: ‘His heart was crushed and neither his wealth nor his children availed him anything and he began to vomit blood and bite his hands with grief and penitence … And the butler of death gave him to drink a bitter cup and soon he believed that which he had resolutely denied, but his faith did not help him, after he had seen damnation; and he begged for assistance but none was found; and it was said to him: “Depart, O impure soul, who were in an impure body, depart vile, wicked sinner and delight in boiling water, fetid blood and the company of sinners.” But if one saw him, he coughed like a camel which is strangled, his colour was almost quenched and his cheeks foamed like a camel dragged backwards with the rein; and if one saw the angels that tormented him, they showed the joy with which they threaten the wicked, to lay waste their homes and utterly destroy the whole memory of them … Then they brought garments of hair from Hell and drew forth his soul like a spit from a soaked fleece and he was carried to the cursing and punishment of God, remaining in torment and God’s infernal damnation.’

  12

  An Empire Dies, Another is Born

  ‘Our hearts are torn with grief, for the most powerful of emperors, the soul of the world, is dead; and already ignorant youths whom he raised from the lowest state to the highest honours have become traitors to him. Forgetting the obligations they owe him, they have disobeyed his orders and violated their oaths. How can we dissemble our grief at so terrible a misfortune? An emperor who has made the kings of the earth to serve at his gate, and has indeed earned the name of conqueror, no sooner leaves us than his will is set aside. Slaves have become the enemies of their benefactor. Where is their faith? If rocks had hearts they would mourn. Why are not stones rained down from Heaven to punish these ungrateful wretches? As for us, God willing, we shall not forget our master’s wishes; we shall carry out his will, and obey the young princes his grandchildren.’

  Temur’s amirs, speaking after his death.

  HAROLD LAMB, Tamerlane the Earth Shaker

  ‘It is a common observation that the grandeur of princes is known by the monuments which remain of them after their death.’

  SHARAF AD-DIN ALI YAZDI, Zafarnama

  Temur’s blood had hardly cooled when the internecine fighting he had so eloquently warned against on his deathbed exploded. Rarely had the fortunes of an empire depended so entirely on one man being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pir Mohammed, the designated heir, was far away to the south in his territories of northern India. The ambitious Khalil Sultan, however, was wintering with his army in Tashkent, from where it was a march of just 160 miles south-west to Samarkand, seat of the empire. The scramble for power began.

  Temur’s grandson Sultan Husayn was the first to make his bid. After a lightning attempt to take the throne failed, he took refuge with Shahrukh, who swiftly executed him. Hurrying back to the capital from Otrar, the loyal amirs Shah Malik and Shaykh Nur ad-din, intending to safeguard the succession for Pir Mohammed, found themselves barred at the gates. The governor of Samarkand, already co-opted by Khalil Sultan, the young pretender to the throne, refused them entry. In the short term, the simple facts of geography proved conclusive. Khalil Sultan, nearest to the capital when his grandfather died, seized power. In 1406, the rightful heir gathered his forces and marched north at the head of an army to give battle. He was roundly defeated by Khalil Sultan. A year later, Pir Mohammed was murdered in a coup led by his most trusted amir.

  Khalil Sultan’s reign was brief. He had risen to power with the support of an army drawn largely from the populations outside Mawarannahr. These men did not have a direct interest in what was essentially one family’s fight for power, nor were they instinctively bound to their co
mmander. Like many of the tribes and peoples Temur had won to his cause during his lifetime, they had to be bought. Over the years such loyalty had been purchased by distributing the prizes of the battlefield, the plundered palaces and the looted treasuries of Asia among the soldiers who had given him his victories. The death of Temur fundamentally altered that equation. Immersed in the vicissitudes of his domestic position, Khalil Sultan was unable to venture beyond his borders to continue the conquests on which his grandfather’s empire had depended. For four years he emptied the coffers of Samarkand for his followers, encouraged by the ambitious woman he had married. Shadi Mulk had enjoyed a meteoric rise. Rescued from the harem, she had become first a princess and now, the summit of her dreams, empress. Under her influence, the amirs fell from favour one by one until Khalil Sultan relied exclusively on his beautiful wife for advice on affairs of state. ‘This was the height of folly and madness,’ Arabshah sneered, ‘for how could he be happy, who suffers his wife to rule him?’

  By 1409, there was little left to give away. Khalil Sultan’s followers, disappointed with the end of his largesse, melted away to where their prospects were more auspicious. Khalil Sultan took himself and his depleted forces to his uncle, Shahrukh, who welcomed his nephew with open arms, only to poison him. Shadi Mulk, said Arabshah, was devastated. ‘Taking a dagger, she plunged it into her throat and leant upon it with such force that it pierced her head and she burnt with her fire all that beheld her, then both were buried in one tomb.’

  Shahrukh, having put down a series of bubbling rebellions in his province of Khorasan, swept in and took power. He transferred his capital to Herat, leaving Samarkand in the hands of his gifted son, Ulugh Beg. The next forty years were the golden age of Temurid civilisation. The heart of the empire remained intact, and after decades of war began to luxuriate in the benefits of peace. Shahrukh and his wife Gawhar Shad were prolific patrons of the arts and literature, presiding over an era in which Temurid culture soared to its apogee. In Samarkand, the astronomer king immersed himself in mathematics, medicine and music. A lover of poetry like his father, he was also a devoted student of history, geography, philosophy and theology. But he was noted above all for the observatory he constructed and the astronomical tables he devised, still in use at the time England appointed its first Astronomer-Royal in the seventeenth century. Magnificent monuments continued to rise, their minarets climbing to the heavens. The Registan assumed greater grandeur with the construction of a new madrassah which celebrated the constellations and paid tribute to the achievements of the astronomer king. As a chronicler put it: ‘From the time of Adam until this day, no age, period, cycle or moment can be indicated in which people enjoyed such peace and tranquillity.’

  These were the last flourishes of the vast empire Temur had wrested from nothing. By the middle of the fifteenth century, both Shahrukh and Ulugh Beg were dead. After thirty-eight years of supremely enlightened government, the astronomer king was murdered by his own son. Within a century of the emperor’s death, the Temurid empire had ceased to exist. Temur’s prophetic warning against family divisions had gone unheeded. The greatest gifts it bequeathed – the blue-domed mosques and madrassahs, the dazzling minarets, the exquisite parks and palaces – lay scattered across Asia like funerary monuments to a lost civilisation. Only in the Mughal empire, founded across the roof of the world in India by Babur, Temur’s great-great-great-grandson and most illustrious descendant, did echoes of its splendour survive.

  On a late autumn evening, my last in Central Asia, I bade farewell to Temur. With its 120-foot blue-ribbed dome visible across the city, flashing in the falling sun like the brightest beacon, flanked by two slender minarets, the Gur Amir mausoleum is the finest in Samarkand and the most inspired piece of Temurid architecture the world ever saw. Built by the emperor to honour his cherished grandson Mohammed Sultan, it is the final resting place of the Conqueror of the World, a ‘magnificent sepulchre’ according to that tireless sycophant Yazdi. ‘The cincture of the dome was of marble set off with gold and azure. Within it was dug a vault in which to lay the prince’s body, and a charming garden was made around it on the ruins of some houses.’ Although Temur had made plans to be buried in Shakhrisabz, his family home and the first seat of his power, Khalil Sultan interred him here, embalmed with camphor, musk and rosewater. It was one of the wayward prince’s inaugural acts on taking control of the city.

  ‘Then first he gave heed to the burying of his grandfather and performing his obsequies and placing him in the tomb,’ recorded Arabshah.

  Therefore he had him laid in a coffin of ebony, which the chief men bore on their heads. Kings followed his body and soldiers with faces cast down, clad in black, and with them many Amirs and ministers, and they buried him in the same place in which they had buried Mohammed Sultan, his grandson, near the place called Ruh-Abad, which is well known, where he lay on supports in an open vault; and he paid him due funeral rites, ordering readings of the Koran from beginning to end and in portions and prayer and giving of alms, food and sweetmeats, and set a dome over the tomb and discharged his debt to him and scattered over his tomb his garments of silk and hung from the walls his weapons and equipment, which were all adorned with gems and gold and embroidered and decked with so much art that even the meanest of them equalled the income of a country and one grain from the heap of those gems was beyond price. He also hung star-candles of gold and silver in the sky of the ceilings and spread over the couch of the tomb a coverlet of silk and embroidery up to its sides and borders. Of the candles one was of gold, weighing four thousand sesquidrachms, which make according to the weights of Samarkand one pound, and ten according to those of Damascus.

  Then he appointed for his tomb readers of the Koran and servants and placed at the college janitors and managers, to whom he generously assigned pay for each day, year and month. A little later he transferred his body to a coffin of steel made by a man of Shiraz, a most skilled master of his art, and buried him in the well-known tomb, where vows are made to him and petitions offered and prayers said. And when kings pass it, they prostrate themselves to show honour and often dismount from their beasts to honour him and do reverence.

  Children scampered about outside the mausoleum. The distant sounds of family life and the aromatic smell of plov filtered through the dusk, borne on a light breeze that played around the ankles. Across the car park, sitting on a throne and staring towards the Registan, was the monumental statue of Temur where newlywed couples celebrate their marriages every weekend. Through the monumental entrance portal, a blaze of blue with an inset arch tapering into an ornate stalactite muqarnas, the courtyard was completely empty. Beyond another, less imposing, portal, the fluted dome rose skyward. Built on an octagonal plan by a celebrated architect from Isfahan – ‘This is the work of the weak slave of God, Mohammed ibn Mahmoud Isfahani,’ reads an inscription – the mausoleum is a triumph of scale, style and simplicity, a noble building which celebrates the life of a prince, the sway of a dynasty and the omnipotence of God. Beneath the textured surface of the dome, shining with tiles of navy blue, turquoise, yellow and green, runs the inscription, in huge Kufic script ten feet high, ‘God is Immortal’. Moved by the scale of the cupola, a poet had declared: ‘Should the sky disappear, the dome will replace it.’

  I pressed on towards the heart of the mausoleum, momentarily blinded by the cool, dark interior as I stepped out of the glare. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I picked my way along the vaulted eastern gallery – added by Ulugh Beg in the 1420s – which led to a cavernous square chamber, each side thirty feet long, directly beneath the dome. The interior decoration was astoundingly rich, faded in places, restored to bolder colours in others. Hexagonal tiles of onyx lined the lower section of the walls, a serene dado topped with a shallow marble cornice. Above the onyx, Koranic inscriptions encircled the chamber, traced in gold and carved from jasper. Each of the four walls was inset with a tall bay, whose upper reaches seemed to cascade down in papier-mâché stalacti
tes painted gold and blue. Beyond these vaults, at neck-craning height, amber light streamed in from marble lattice windows, illuminating the golden furnace of the inner dome above, resplendent amid geometric panels of iridescent stars.

  The crowning glory of the mausoleum looked down onto seven cenotaphs gathered in the centre of the chamber behind an ornate marble rail. These are the tombs of the leading lights of the Temurid dynasty: Mohammed Sultan, the valiant prince in whose honour the mausoleum had been built; Ulugh Beg, the polymath astronomer king; his father Shahrukh, the wise patron of the arts; Miranshah, the emperor’s most troublesome son. Raised on a marble plinth in the centre of the cenotaphs lies Temur’s tomb, a slab of the darkest jade, black to the eye and six feet long, once the largest piece of the stone in the world. Cracked in the middle, intricately engraved on the top and sides, it was brought to Samarkand by Ulugh Beg in 1425 to adorn the tomb of his grandfather. The damage is supposed to have occurred in 1740, when the Persian invader Nadir Shah attempted to carry off the treasure without success. More modestly engraved than the tombs surrounding it, the slab of jade lies next to another sepulchre, belonging to Shaykh Sayid Baraka. The emperor’s instructions to be buried at the feet of his spiritual and religious mentor were honoured to the letter.

  Even in death Temur has managed to intertwine the two conflicting strands of his identity. Etched across the jade is a long inscription detailing – and mythologising – his genealogy. Several generations beyond his father, Taraghay Barlas, he establishes the fictitious connection with Genghis Khan. On and on the list of names continues until it reaches his last paternal ancestor. ‘And no father was known to this glorious man but his mother was Alanquva,’ it reads. ‘It is said that her character was righteous and chaste, and that she was not an adulteress. She conceived him through a light which came into her from the upper part of a door and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man. And it said that it was one of the sons of the Commander of the Faithful, Ali son of Abu Talib.’ This is a masterpiece of propaganda. In an instant Temur has become the descendant of both Genghis Khan and the Caliph Ali, uniting the traditions of the Mongols with the heritage of Islam.