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1 Beginnings on the Steppe 1336–1370

‘Tamerlane, the “Lord of the Conjunctions”, was the greatest Asiatic conqueror known in history. The son of a petty chieftain, he was not only the bravest of the brave, but also profoundly sagacious, generous, experienced, and persevering; and the combination of these qualities made him an unsurpassed leader of men and a very god of war adored by all ranks … The object of Tamerlane was glory, and, as in the case of all conquerors ancient or modern, his career was attended by terrible bloodshed. He sometimes ordered massacres by way of retribution or from policy, but there were few that had their origin in pure savagery.’

LIEUT. COL. P.M. SYKES, A History of Persia

At around 10 o’clock on the morning of 28 July 1402, from a patch of raised ground high above the valley, the elderly emperor surveyed his army. It was a vast body of men, spreading over the Chibukabad plain, north-east of Ankara, like a dark and terrible stain. Through the glinting sunlight the ordered lines of mounted archers stretched before him until they were lost in the shimmering blaze, each man waiting for the signal to join battle. There were two hundred thousand professional soldiers drawn from the farthest reaches of his empire, from Armenia to Afghanistan, Samarkand to Siberia. Their confidence was high, their discipline forged in the fire of many battles. They had never known defeat.

For the past thirty years these men and their sons and fathers had thundered through Asia. Through deserts, steppes and mountains the storm had raged, unleashing desolation on a fearful scale. One by one, the great cities of the East had fallen. Antioch and Aleppo, Balkh and Baghdad, Damascus and Delhi, Herat, Kabul, Shiraz and Isfahan had been left in flaming ruins. All had crumpled before the irresistible Tatar hordes. They had killed, raped, plundered and burnt their way through the continent, marking each triumph with their dreadful trophies. On every battlefield they left soaring towers and bloody pyramids built from the skulls of their decapitated victims, deadly warnings to anyone who dared oppose them.

Now, as the soldiers stared up at the distant silhouette of a man on horseback, framed against the heavens, they steeled themselves for another victory. Truly their emperor had earned his magnificent titles. Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction (of the Planets, a reference to the auspicious position of the stars at his birth); Conqueror of the World; Emperor of the Age; Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes. But one name suited him above all others: Temur, Scourge of God.

On his vantage point beneath the smouldering midsummer sky, the emperor felt no disquiet. Moments away from the most important battle of his life, he felt nothing but the unshakeable faith in his destiny that had served him so well. Dismounting from his stallion, he knelt to offer up his customary prayers to the creator of the universe, humbly prostrating himself on the scorched earth, dedicating his victories to Allah and asking Him to continue bestowing divine favour on His servant. Then, with all the saddle-stiffness of his sixty-six years he rose to his feet and looked out over the field of battle, where the future of his dynasty lay with his beloved sons and grandsons.

The left wing was commanded by his son Prince Shahrukh and grandson Khalil Sultan. Its advance guard was under another grandson, Sultan Husayn. Temur’s third son Prince Miranshah led the right wing, his own son Abubakr at the head of the vanguard. But it was the main body of the army, a glittering kaleidoscope of men under the command of his grandson and heir Prince Mohammed Sultan, on which the emperor’s clouded eyes may have lingered longest. From the midst of these men rose Temur’s crimson standard, a horse-tail surmounted by a golden crescent. Newly arrived from the imperial capital of Samarkand, unlike their battle-weary brothers in arms, these troops were splendidly attired, each detachment resplendent in its own colour. There were soldiers carrying crimson ensigns with crimson shields and saddles. Others were clad from head to toe in yellow, violet or white, with matching lances, quivers, cuirasses and clubs. In front of them stood a line of thirty exquisitely equipped purveyors of destruction, war elephants seized after the sacking of Delhi in 1398. On their backs, guarded behind wooden castles, stood bodies of archers and flame-throwers.

The Tatar army was, wrote the fifteenth-century Syrian chronicler Ibn Arabshah, a devastating sight. ‘Wild beasts seemed collected and scattered over the earth and stars dispersed, when his army flowed hither and thither, and mountains to walk, when it moved, and tombs to be overturned, when it marched, and the earth seemed shaken by violent movement.’

Staring at them across the sweltering plain were the ranks of Temur’s mightiest enemy. The Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I, the self-styled Sword Arm of Islam, had put a similar number of troops into the field. There were twenty thousand Serbian cavalry in full armour, mounted Sipahis, irregular cavalry and infantry from the provinces of Asia Minor. Bayazid himself commanded the centre at the head of five thousand Janissaries – the makings of a regular infantry – supported by three of his sons, the princes Musa, Isa and Mustapha. The right wing was led by the sultan’s Christian brother-in-law, Lazarovic of Serbia, the left by another of his sons, Prince Sulayman Chelebi. These men, victors of the last Crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, where they had snuffed out the flame of European chivalry, were thirsty, exhausted and dispirited after a series of forced marches. Even before battle commenced their morale had been shattered by Temur’s brilliant tactical manoeuvrings. Only a week earlier they had occupied the higher ground on which their adversary’s army now stood. Feigning flight, the Tatar had outmanoeuvred them, diverted and poisoned their water supply, doubled back, plundered their undefended camp and taken their position.

All was still on both sides. A ripple stirred through Temur’s lines of cavalry as the horses sensed a charge. Then, slicing through the silence, came the heavy rumble of the great kettle-drums, joined by cymbals and trumpets, the signal for battle. Now the valley echoed to the thundering of horses’ hooves, the swoosh of arrows and the clash of metal upon metal. From the first blows struck the fighting was ferocious. Charging across the plain came the formidable Serbian cavalry, bright globules of armour amid the choking wreaths of dust stirred up by their mounts. Under pressure, the Tatar left flank retreated, defending itself with volley after volley of arrows and flames of naphtha. On the right wing Abubakr’s forces, advancing against Prince Chelebi’s left wing under cover of a cloud of arrows, fought like lions and finally broke through their enemy’s ranks. Bayazid’s Tatar cavalry chose this moment to switch sides, turning suddenly against Chelebi’s Macedonians and Turks from the rear. It was a decisive moment which broke the Ottoman attack. Temur, a master of cunning, had engineered the defection of the Tatars in the months before the battle by playing on their sense of tribal loyalty and holding out the prospect of richer plunder. Seeing both the disarray of his own forces who were being overwhelmed by the Tatars, and the confusion of the Ottoman right wing, in desperate retreat from the mounted cavalry of Temur’s grandson Sultan Husayn, Chelebi judged the battle lost and fled the field with the remainder of his men.

Temur watched history unfurl itself before him on the valley floor. He was interrupted by the rushing blur of a gorgeously armoured man on horseback. Throwing himself off his mount, Temur’s favourite grandson Mohammed Sultan went down on one knee and begged his grandfather for permission to enter the battle. It was the right time to press home the advantage, he insisted. The emperor listened gravely to the young’s man arguments and nodded his agreement with pride. Mohammed Sultan was a fearsome warrior and a worthy heir.

The elite Samarkand division, together with a body of the emperor’s guards, charged the Serbian cavalry, who, observing with horror Chelebi’s departure from the field, buckled under the attack and followed him in retreat towards Brusa. It was a bitter blow for Bayazid, whose infantry were now the only forces left intact. Worse was to follow. The Tatar centre now moved forward to settle the affair with eighty regiments and the dreaded elephants. They held the ground. The Ottoman infantry was routed; anyone left standing was slaughtered on the spot or captured.

Sultan Bayazid, the man whose name struck fear in the hearts of Europe’s kings and princes, stood on the brink of catastrophe. Most of his army had fled. Only the Janissaries and his reserves held on. Still he would not surrender, and the fighting continued furiously until nightfall, Bayazid’s forces defending their sultan valiantly.

‘Yet they were like a man who sweeps away dust with a comb or drains the sea with a sieve or weighs mountains with a scruple,’ wrote Arabshah. ‘And out of the clouds of thick dust they poured out upon those mountains and the fields filled with those lions continuous storms of bloody darts and showers of black arrows and the tracker of Destiny and hunter of Fate set dogs upon cattle and they ceased not to be overthrown and overthrow and to be smitten by the sentence of the sharp arrow with effective decree, until they became like hedgehogs, and the zeal of battle lasted between those hordes from sunrise to evening, when the hosts of iron gained the victory and there was read against the men of Rum the chapter of “Victory”.^* Then their arms being exhausted and the front line and reserves alike decimated, even the most distant of the enemy advanced upon them at will and strangers crushed them with swords and spears and filled pools with their blood and marshes with their limbs and Ibn Othman [Bayazid] was taken and bound with fetters like a bird in a cage.’

The battle of Ankara, and the career of Sultan Bayazid, had ended. Temur had achieved his most outstanding victory. ‘From the Irtish and Volga to the Persian Gulf and from the Ganges to Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in the hands of Timour,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘His armies were invincible, his ambition was boundless, and his zeal might aspire to conquer and convert the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already trembled at his name.’ Now he stood at the gates of Europe; its feeble, divided and penurious kings – Henry IV of England, Charles VI of France, Henry III of Castile – trembled indeed at the ease with which this unknown warlord had trounced their most feared enemy, rushing off sycophantic letters of congratulation and professions of goodwill to ‘the most victorious and serene Prince Themur’ in the hope of forestalling invasion. All feared his advance.

In the Tatar camp there were no such fears. Temur’s men, from the highest amirs to the most lowly soldier, wondered what the emperor would do next. Perhaps he would lead the hordes farther west into Christendom to mete out more destruction against the infidel and store up greater credit with the beneficent Allah. Perhaps he would look east to another, more powerful infidel, the Ming emperor of China. Such decisions could wait.

For now it was enough for the emperor and his forces to luxuriate in their greatest triumph. Soldiers sifted through the carnage on the blood-soaked battlefield, hacking heads from corpses to build the customary towers of skulls. Ottoman weapons were collected, horses rounded up and anything else of use stripped from the dead. Other, more agreeable, pursuits awaited. There was feasting to be had, dancing girls to admire and, most delicious of all, Bayazid’s harem to despoil.

Who was this exotic Oriental warlord who had annihilated one of the world’s most powerful sovereigns and now stared so ominously across the Bosporus? To answer that question, to understand how in 1402 Temur literally catapulted into European consciousness, first by routing Bayazid, then by launching the severed heads of the Knights Hospitallers of Smyrna^* as missiles against their terrified brethren, we must travel back six momentous decades and 1,800 miles to the east, to a small town in southern Uzbekistan called Kesh.

It was near here on 9 April 1336, according to the chronicles, that a boy was born to Taraghay, a minor noble of the Barlas clan.^† These were Tatars, a Turkic people of Mongol origin, descendants of Genghis Khan’s hordes who had stormed through Asia in the thirteenth century.^*‘The birthplace of this deceiver was a village of a lord named Ilgar in the territory of Kesh – may Allah remove him from the garden of Paradise!’ wrote Arabshah. The child was given the name Temur, meaning iron, which later gave rise to the Persian version, Temur-i-lang, Temur the Lame, after a crippling injury suffered in his youth. From there it was only a slight corruption to Tamburlaine and Tamerlane, the names by which he is more generally known in the West.^†

According to legend, the omens at his birth were inauspicious. ‘It is … said that when he came forth from his mother’s womb his palms were found to be filled with blood; and this was understood to mean that blood would be shed by his hand,’ wrote Arabshah. (It is worth explaining at the outset the ill-will Arabshah bore towards Temur.^* As a boy of eight or nine, the Syrian had been captured by the Tatar forces who sacked Damascus in 1401. Carried off to Samarkand as a prisoner with his mother and brothers, he learnt Persian, Turkish and Mongolian, studying under distinguished scholars and travelling widely. Later, in a curious twist of fate, he became confidential secretary to the Ottoman Sultan Mohammed I, son of Bayazid, the man whose dazzling military career had been extinguished by Temur. He returned to Damascus in 1421, but never forgot the terrible scenes of rape and pillage enacted by Temur’s hordes. They culminated in the razing of the great Umayyad Mosque, ‘matchless and unequalled’ throughout the lands of Islam, according to the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah.^†)

Shakhrisabz lay in the heart of what was known in Arabic as Mawarannahr, ‘What is Beyond the River’. On a modern atlas Mawarannahr extends across the cotton basket of the former Soviet Union, encompassing the independent Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, running into north-west Xinjiang in China. The territory was also known as Transoxiana, whose centre was a three-hundred-mile-wide corridor of land sandwiched between the two greatest rivers of Central Asia, the Amu Darya and Sir Darya. Better known by their more evocative classical names, the Oxus and the Jaxartes, these were two of the four medieval rivers of paradise, slivers of fertility rushing through an otherwise barren landscape. At 1,800 miles, the Amu Darya is the region’s longest, sweeping west in a gentle arc from the Pamir mountains before checking north-west towards the southern tip of the Aral Sea. The Sir Darya, 1,400 miles long, flows west from the snow-covered Tien Shan mountains before it, too, diverts north-west, almost watering the rapidly shrinking Aral Sea on its northern shores.

On the banks of these hallowed waterways and their tributaries rose the noble cities of antiquity, whose names echoed with the distant memories of Alexander the Great and the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan:^* Bukhara, Samarkand, Tirmidh (Termez), Balkh, Urganch and Khiva. Beyond the rivers the deadly sands of the desert erupted, fizzing across the landscape on hot, dry winds. West of the Amu Darya stretched the spirit-shattering wilderness of the Qara Qum (Black Sands) desert. East of the Sir Darya, the equally inhospitable Hunger Steppe unfurled, a vast, unforgiving flatness melting into the horizon. Even between the two rivers, the pockets of civilisation were under siege from the timeless forces of nature as the lush farming land gave way to the burning Qizik Qum (Red Sands) desert of the north. In the summer, the heat was stupefying and the skins of those who toiled in the fields blistered and turned to leather. In winter, snows gusted down without mercy on a lifeless land and the men, women and children who had made their home here, nomads and settled alike, retreated behind lined gers (felt tents) and mudbrick walls, wrapping themselves tightly in furs and woollen blankets against winds strong enough to blow a man out of his saddle. Only in spring, when the rivers tumbled down from the mountain heights, when blossoms burst forth in the orchards and the markets heaved with apples, mulberries, pears, peaches, plums and pomegranates, melons, apricots, quinces and figs, when mutton and horsemeat hissed and crackled over open fires and huge bumpers of wine were downed in tribal banquets, did the country at last rejoice in plenty.

The Mongol conquests, which historians like to say ‘turned the world upside down’, began in 1206. Having subdued and unified the warlike tribes of Mongolia under his command, a Mongol leader called Temuchin, somewhere in his late thirties, was crowned Genghis Khan – Oceanic Khan or Ruler of the Universe – on the banks of the Onon river. The seat of his empire was Karakorum. Though the tribes subsumed under his command were many, henceforth they were known simply as the Mongols. Once created, this vast fighting force, which probably numbered at least a hundred thousand, needed to be kept occupied. If it was not, the likelihood was that it would quickly fracture into the traditional pattern of feuding tribal factions, undermining its new master’s authority. Genghis looked south across his borders and decided to strike the Chin empire of northern China.

His army, noted for its exceptional horsemanship and superb archery, swept across Asia like a tsunami, flattening every enemy it encountered. In 1209, the Turkic Uyghurs in what is today Xinjiang offered their submission. Two years later, the Mongols invaded the northern Chinese empire and Peking, its capital, was taken in 1215. The Qara-Khitay, nomads who controlled lands from their base in the Altaic steppes of northern China, surrendered three years later, so that by 1218 the frontiers of Genghis’s nascent empire rubbed against those of Sultan Mohammed, the Muslim Khorezmshah who ruled over most of Persia and Mawarannahr with his capital in Samarkand. It is debatable whether Genghis was looking to fight this formidable ruler at this time, but after a caravan of 450 Muslim merchants from his territories was butchered in cold blood in Mohammed’s border city of Otrar on suspicion of being spies, and after reparations were refused, war was the only course open to him.

In 1219 the Mongols swarmed into Central Asia. Otrar was put under siege and captured. Genghis’s sons Ogedey and Chaghatay seized its governor and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat. It was the first sign of the terrifyingly vicious campaign to come. Mohammed fled in terror, closely pursued to an island on the Caspian Sea where he soon died. The prosperous city of Bukhara fell, followed quickly by Samarkand, whose defensive force of 110,000 troops and twenty war elephants proved no match for the Mongols. The Islamic state felt the full force of Genghis’s fury. This was a man who revelled in war and bloodshed, who believed, as he told his generals, that ‘Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as nightshirts and supports, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of the breasts.’

Cities were razed and depopulated, prisoners slain or ordered to march as a shield before the army, in full battle formation. Even cats and dogs were killed. Marching through Azerbaijan, the invaders sacked the Christian kingdom of Georgia in 1221, flattening the capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi). Through the Caucasus and the Crimea and along the Volga they advanced, routing Bulgars, Turks and Russian princes as they hugged the northern shores of the Caspian Sea. Another siege was mounted against Urganch, homeland of the shahs. After seven months of resistance, the city was stormed. Artisans, women and children were gathered to one side and enslaved. The remaining men were put to the sword. Each of Genghis’s soldiers was ordered to execute twenty-four prisoners.

North of the Oxus the Mongols fell upon the ancient city of Termez, where legend has it that a woman begged to be spared the massacre, telling her captors she had swallowed a pearl. Her stomach was ripped open and the gem removed, prompting Genghis to order his men to disembowel every single corpse. Balkh, the fabled former capital of the Bactrian empire, collapsed before the Mongol onslaught, followed by the city of Merv, where the forces of Tuli, another of the warlord’s sons, reportedly slew seven hundred thousand.^* Herat, Nishapur and Bamiyan likewise folded. In the dying months of 1221, Jalal ad-din, who had led the resistance to the Mongols after the ignominious flight of his father Mohammed, was defeated at the battle of the Indus, which marked the end of the campaign. In 1223, Genghis returned east. He died four years later, ruler of an empire which spanned an entire continent from China to the gates of Europe.

Though none of his successors was possessed of such savage genius, the Mongol conquests Genghis initiated were vigorously expanded by his sons and grandsons. The territories he had won were distributed according to custom. Tuli, the youngest son, received his father’s seat in Mongolia. Jochi, the eldest, received lands farthest away from Karakorum, west of the Irtish river in what later became the regions of the Golden Horde, the Russian khanate which is discussed in Chapter 2. Ogedey, the third son and future Great Khan, or royal leader above all his brothers, was given the ulus (domain) of western Mongolia. Genghis’s second son Chaghatay received Central Asia as his inheritance. It became known as the Chaghatay ulus, the western half of which formed the Mawarannahr in which Temur grew up.

By 1234, Ogedey’s conquest of the Chin empire was complete. The 1240s and 1250s saw Mongol rule spreading west across southern Russia into eastern Europe under the leadership of Genghis’s fearsome grandson Batu, founder of the Golden Horde. At the same time, another grandson, Hulagu, was conquering his own territories by the sword, establishing an empire which included Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the west, Baghdad and the Fertile Crescent in the south, and ranged as far east as Khorasan, eastern Persia. Founder of the Ilkhanid dynasty of Persia, Hulagu was helped in his conquests by Mongol troops belonging to his brother Great Khan Mönke, together with detachments from both Batu and Chaghatay. United, the khanates proved invincible.

History suggests it is easier to carve out an empire than preserve it, and the fate of Genghis’s successors proved no exception to the rule. With the death of Great Khan Mönke in 1259, the great age of Mongol conquest ground to a close. In 1260, the Mongol army was defeated at the battle of Ain Jalut by the Egyptian army under Baybars, who became the first Mamluk sultan later that year. Africa closed her doors forever to the pagan invaders from the east. The Sung empire of southern China fell to Genghis’s famous grandson Kubilay in 1279, but by that time the Mongol empire had been torn apart by infighting for two decades. Instead of uniting to extend their dominions in the west, the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanid dynasty had embarked in 1262 on a long series of wars over the pasturages of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. At the same time in the east, the house of Tuli was disintegrating as Kubilay and his brother Arigh Boke fought a four-year civil war for the imperial throne. As the thirteenth century drew to a close, the Chaghatay ulus found itself at war with the three other Genghisid dynasties. The empires which the Ruler of the Universe had bequeathed to his sons were at each other’s throats.

Genghis had been dead for more than a hundred years by the time of Temur’s birth, but the legacy of the Mongol conquests still hung over this land of desert, steppe and mountain. Many of the practicalities of daily life had undergone little transformation, and nomadism remained dominant in most of the regions Genghis had conquered. As John Joseph Saunders wrote in his classic account of the period, The History of the Mongol Conquests (1971), ‘Nomadic empires rose and fell with astonishing swiftness, but the essential features of the steppes remained unchanged for ages, and the description by Herodotus of the Scythians of the fifth century before Christ will apply, with trifling variations, to the Mongols of the thirteenth century after Christ, 1,700 years later.’

For centuries the Mongols had driven their flocks and herds across the endless, treeless steppe, roaming from pasture to pasture in migrations whose timing was dictated by the seasons. Sheep and horses satisfied virtually all their needs. From sheep came the skins to fashion clothes, wool to make the gers they lived in, mutton and cheese to eat, milk to drink. Horses provided mounts for hunting and battle, as well as the powerfully intoxicating fermented mare’s milk, or kumis. Though their ways of life were utterly different, though both sides regarded each other with suspicion, born largely from the predatory instincts of the wandering horsemen, the nomads and the settled populations of the towns and cities of Central Asia came together from time to time to trade.

Among the most prized products for the nomads were the metals with which to forge weapons. Tea, silks and spices were luxuries. Such trade predated Genghis by many centuries. Central Asia had existed as a crossroads between East and West ever since the Silk Road – 3,700 miles from China to the Mediterranean ports of Antioch and Alexandria via Samarkand – came into being around the beginning of the first century BC. By the time of the Mongols, there were at least another three major trade routes linking East to West. First there was the sea route from south China to the Persian Gulf. Another artery began in the lower Volga, clung closely to the Sir Darya and then headed east to western China. Finally, there was the northern route which from the Volga-Kama region cut through southern Siberia up to Lake Baikal, where it diverted south to Karakorum and Peking. Eastbound along these routes came furs and falcons, wool, gold, silver and precious stones. Westward went the porcelain, silks and herbs of China.