Tamerlane: sword of Islam, conqueror of the world

365 Pages·2005·2.26 MB·English

by  Justin Marozzi

TAMERLANE
Sword of Islam,
Conqueror of the World
JUSTIN MAROZZI
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my mother
and to the memory of my father
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
A Note on Spelling and Terminology
1 Beginnings on the Steppe: 1336–1370
2 Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’: 1370–1379
3 ‘The Greatest and Mightiest of Kings’
4 Conquest in the West: 1379–1387
5 The Golden Horde and the Prodigal Son: 1387–1395
6 Samarkand, the ‘Pearl of the East’: 1396–1398
7 India: 1398–1399
8 ‘This Pilgrimage of Destruction’: 1399–1401
9 Bayazid the Thunderbolt: 1402
10 The Celestial Empire: 1403–1404
11 ‘How that Proud Tyrant was Broken & Borne to the House of Destruction,
where he had his Constant Seat in the Lowest Pit of Hell’: 1404–1405
12 An Empire Dies, Another is Born
Appendix A: Chronology of Temur’s Life
Appendix B: Events in Europe in the Fourteenth Century
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Note on Spelling and Terminology
A couple of years ago, Frances Wood observed in The Silk Road: ‘I think this is
the most complicated book I have ever written when it comes to spelling place
names.’ I know the feeling. Central Asia is a minefield. And it is not just place
names.
The world’s most famous Mongol conqueror is a case in point. Take your
pick from Genghis Khan, Chinghiz Khan, Chingiz Khan, or even Chinggis
Khan. The lands he bequeathed his son became the Juchid empire. Others call it
Jochid. Still others prefer Djöčid.
Scholars invariably favour the more obscure spellings, but I have tried to use
terms familiar to the general reader. Central Asian names are complicated
enough, it seems to me, without making things more difficult.
Tamerlane was in fact Temur (or Timur). The longer name by which we in
the West know him was a corruption of Temur the Lame. He was a Chaghatay
(or Čaghatay if you like your diacritic symbols), or a Turkicised Mongol, or a
Turk; but I have followed a long line of Europeans who describe him as a Tatar.
Consistency in these matters is as elusive as peace and tranquillity were to
Temur. As T.E. Lawrence so emphatically expressed it in Seven Pillars of
Wisdom after a plea for clarity from his editor: ‘There are some “scientific
systems” of transliteration, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to
need helping, but a wash-out for the world. I spell my names anyhow, to show
what rot the systems are.’ In a less brazen way I have followed his example.
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