Timur

Timur was born on April 9, 1336 in or near the town of Kesh, later renamed Shahrisabz, south of Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan ^[1]. His family belonged to the Barlas, a Turkicized Mongol tribe that had settled in Transoxiana after the Mongol conquests of the previous century. His father, Taraghai, was a minor tribal chief of modest means, and the household followed Islam, the faith Timur would invoke throughout his career ^[2].

The region of his childhood sat within the Chagatai Khanate, the central Asian portion of the old Mongol Empire, which by the mid fourteenth century had fractured into rival camps. Settled Muslim towns along the Zarafshan valley coexisted uneasily with nomadic clans who despised urban life. Growing up between these worlds gave Timur fluency in both: he understood steppe warfare and tribal loyalty, but also the revenue, craftsmanship, and religious prestige that cities could supply ^[1].

Stories of his youth describe raiding and sheep stealing, activities common among ambitious young men of the frontier. At some point in the 1360s he took wounds to his right leg and right arm, injuries that lamed him for life. Enemies later mocked him with the Persian nickname Timur-i Lang, meaning Timur the Lame, which passed into European languages as Tamerlane ^[3]. Excavation of his tomb in 1941 by the Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov confirmed the old injuries: the skeleton showed damage to the right thigh and the fused bones of a crippled right arm ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Timur before his empire must look at the chaotic politics of Transoxiana in the 1360s. When Tughluq Temur, khan of Moghulistan, invaded the region in 1360, Timur submitted and was rewarded with authority over Kesh. He soon broke with the invaders and allied with his brother-in-law Amir Husayn, grandson of a powerful Chagatai emir. The two men spent years as fugitives and mercenaries, at one point imprisoned together in Sistan, before fighting their way back to power ^[2].

The partnership with Husayn ended as such alliances usually did. The death of Timur's wife Aljai, Husayn's sister, removed a personal bond, and the two rivals maneuvered against each other for control of the region. In 1370 Timur besieged Husayn at Balkh, took the city, and permitted his rival's killing. He then convened a gathering of chiefs that acknowledged him as sovereign of the Chagatai lands ^[1].

Because he was not descended from Genghis Khan, Timur could never lawfully claim the title of khan under Mongol custom. He solved the problem with careful theater. He installed puppet khans of genuine Genghisid descent, ruled in their names, and styled himself amir, or commander. By marrying Saray Mulk Khanum, a princess of the line of Genghis Khan and Husayn's widow, he gained the honored title Gurkani, meaning royal son-in-law ^[3]. The arrangement fooled no one and satisfied everyone: real power sat with Timur, while the forms of steppe legitimacy remained intact.

Any honest account of Timur achievements must hold conquest and cruelty in the same frame. From 1370 to 1405 he campaigned almost without pause. He first subdued Khwarazm and Moghulistan, securing his home base, then turned against Persia. Herat fell in 1383, and over the following decade his armies overran the lands of the Kartids, Muzaffarids, and Jalayirids, bringing Iran and much of Iraq under his rule ^[1]. Cities that resisted faced calculated horror: at Isfahan in 1387, after the population killed his tax collectors, his troops built towers from the skulls of the slaughtered, a practice contemporaries recorded at several of his sieges ^[3].

His most persistent enemy was Tokhtamysh, khan of the Golden Horde, a former protege who turned on him. Timur defeated him in great battles at the Kondurcha River in 1391 and on the Terek in 1395, then sacked the Horde's capital at Sarai. The destruction of the Horde's trading cities shifted the caravan routes of Eurasia southward through his own territories, an economic consequence that outlasted the fighting ^[2].

In 1398 he invaded northern India on the pretext that the Delhi Sultanate showed too much tolerance to its Hindu subjects. He crushed the army of Sultan Mahmud Tughluq outside Delhi in December 1398 and gave the city over to a sack so severe that contemporaries said it took generations to recover. Chroniclers report the massacre of tens of thousands of captives before the battle ^[5]. Turning west, he took Aleppo and Damascus from the Mamluks in 1400 and 1401, destroyed Baghdad in 1401, and in 1402 met the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at Ankara. The Ottoman army broke, and Bayezid died in captivity months later. The defeat delayed Ottoman expansion for a decade and, in the judgment of many historians, gave Constantinople an unintended reprieve of half a century ^[1].

Destruction abroad financed creation at home. Timur made Samarkand his capital and poured into it the plunder, artisans, and scholars of every conquered land. Craftsmen from Damascus, Delhi, Shiraz, and Baghdad were deported to Transoxiana to build and decorate his monuments. The colossal Bibi-Khanym Mosque, begun after the Indian campaign, was intended to be the grandest mosque in the Islamic world, and his own future mausoleum, the Gur-i Amir, set patterns of ribbed turquoise domes and glazed tilework that shaped Islamic architecture for centuries ^[6].

He cultivated an image as a defender of Islam and a patron of learning, keeping historians, theologians, and poets at his court even while sacking Muslim cities. The scholar Ibn Khaldun, who negotiated with him outside the walls of Damascus in 1401, left a firsthand account describing a ruler of sharp intelligence who questioned him closely about the geography and history of North Africa ^[5]. The Castilian envoy Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, who reached Samarkand in 1404, described gardens, silk pavilions, and feasts of astonishing scale, a picture of imperial splendor recorded by an outsider with no reason to flatter ^[7].

Timur also had his reign documented on his own terms. Court historians such as Nizam al-Din Shami and later Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi composed Persian chronicles, each titled Zafarnama, the Book of Victory, that presented his wars as the ordained triumphs of a just ruler ^[2]. These works, along with the hostile biography by the Syrian writer Ibn Arabshah, who had been carried off from Damascus as a boy, form the core sources from which every modern Timur biography is built.

Timur married numerous wives and consorts, as steppe custom and dynastic politics required. The most senior was Saray Mulk Khanum, the Genghisid princess whose lineage anchored his legitimacy; tradition associates her name with one of Samarkand's great madrasas and with the Bibi-Khanym Mosque itself ^[6]. He fathered many children, though several sons died before him. Jahangir, his favored heir, died young in 1376, and Umar Shaykh fell in battle in 1394, losses that unsettled the succession he tried to arrange ^[2].

Contemporary descriptions and the 1941 forensic examination agree on his physical presence: a tall, broad-chested man, lame in the right leg, with a strong right arm rendered stiff by old wounds. Gerasimov's reconstruction of his face from the skull, showing prominent cheekbones and a thin beard, remains one of the most famous exercises in forensic facial reconstruction ^[4]. He was reportedly a skilled chess player who enjoyed debating scholars, and though he never learned to read, he had histories read aloud to him and possessed a detailed command of the past of the lands he attacked ^[5].

His household was itinerant for most of his life. Even as emperor he preferred encampments of ornate tents outside Samarkand to permanent residence within it, wintering on the move and returning to the capital between campaigns. Clavijo noted that the aging conqueror, nearly seventy and unable to walk without help, was still planning new wars from these camps in the autumn of 1404 ^[7].

By 1404 Timur controlled, directly or through vassals, the lands from the Euphrates to the Syr Darya and from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus. One great Mongol successor realm remained beyond his reach: China, where the Ming dynasty had expelled the house of Kublai in 1368. Timur had earlier sent tribute missions to the Ming court, exchanges the Chinese recorded as submission, and he came to regard the relationship as an insult to be repaid. Late in 1404 he mustered a large army and marched east in winter, intending to invade China through the Tian Shan passes ^[1].

The campaign ended almost before it began. Halting at Otrar on the Syr Darya river in January 1405, he fell ill during a season of exceptional cold. Fever overtook him, and he died there on February 19, 1405, at the age of sixty-eight ^[1]. His body was carried back to Samarkand and buried in the Gur-i Amir, beneath a slab of dark green jade said to be the largest of its kind.

The succession he left behind unraveled quickly. His designated heir, his grandson Pir Muhammad, could not hold the emirs, and after years of fighting Timur's youngest son Shahrukh emerged as ruler of a reduced but stable realm centered on Herat, while Shahrukh's son Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand and built his famous observatory there ^[2]. The empire of the conqueror thus passed to a generation of builders and astronomers, an irony that has struck historians ever since.

Basic Timur facts convey the scale of his impact: thirty-five years of warfare, an empire spanning western, central, and southern Asia, and a death toll that some modern estimates place in the millions, though precise figures are unknowable from medieval sources ^[3]. Cities such as Baghdad, Delhi, and Sarai suffered blows from which some never fully recovered, and the destruction of irrigation works in parts of Persia and Mesopotamia had effects lasting far beyond his lifetime. Historians continue to debate whether he was a planner of empire or a raider on an imperial scale, since he rarely built durable administration in the lands he devastated ^[2].

His cultural afterlife proved as large as his conquests. The Timurid Renaissance under his descendants made Herat and Samarkand centers of miniature painting, astronomy, and Persian letters. His great-great-great-grandson Babur conquered northern India in 1526 and founded the Mughal dynasty, whose emperors proudly called themselves the house of Timur; through them, Timurid architectural taste flowed into monuments such as Humayun's tomb and the Taj Mahal ^[6]. In Europe his defeat of Bayezid made him briefly a celebrity, and Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, first staged in the late 1580s, fixed him in the Western imagination as the archetype of boundless ambition ^[8].

In modern Uzbekistan, Timur has been elevated to national hero. After independence in 1991 his statues replaced those of Marx and Lenin in Tashkent and Samarkand, and 1996 was declared the year of Amir Temur in honor of his 660th anniversary ^[3]. A persistent legend surrounds the opening of his tomb: Soviet scientists exhumed his remains on June 21, 1941, one day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the coincidence spawned the tale of a conqueror's curse. The remains were reburied with Islamic rites in 1942 ^[4]. Nearly seven centuries after his death, the lame amir of Kesh remains both a warning and a monument.