Timur,
the Iron LimperFOR THE WHOLE PAPER, COMPLETE WITH GRAPHICS, FOLLOW THIS LINK...
Asia has long been the birthplace of would-be conquerors of the world. One of the greatest of these was a man who commanded both fear and awe in Asia and Europe during the fourteenth century: Tamerlane. This name, by which he was known in Europe, is actually a corruption of his name in Persian, Timur-i-Leng, meaning "Timur the Lame." The word Timur is Turkic for "iron": it was an appropriate name for the man who, in his lifetime, rose from being a prince in a small Turko-Mongol tribe to become the ruler of an expanding empire that stretched from Delhi to Anatolia. His life was, in the words of one modern scholar, "one long story of war, butchery and brutality unsurpassed until the present century."
Timur was born in Kesh, also known as Shahr-i-Sabz, "The Green City" (located about fifty miles south of Samarkand) in 1336. He was the son of a chief in the Barlas tribe, one of the many Mongol tribes which had made up the hordes of Chingiz Khan (1162 -1227) and which had been subsequently Turkicised as a result of the strong Turkic element in the Mongol armies. Upon the death of the great Khan in 1227, his massive empire was divided up amongst his sons, each of whom received an allotment of territory, called an ulus. The Khan's second son, Chagatay (d.1242), received the territories then known as Transoxiana ("The Land Across the Oxus") and Moghulistan (present-day Semirechye and Sinkiang). Along with other Turko-Mongol tribes, the Barlas settled in Transoxiana, between the two major rivers in the region: the Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Jaxartes (Syr Darya).
By the time of Timur, Mongol power in the Chagatay ulus was severely weakened. The Chingisids only ruled the area in name. Minor chieftains exerted varying degrees of control over different parts of Transoxiana. Despite having been wounded in his right leg and arm during his mid-twenties, an event which left him lame for the rest of his life, Timur was able to move into this power vacuum and slowly build up for himself an army of loyal followers. Together with his brother-in-law, Amir Husayn, he headed up the defense of the area against the Chingisids, who repeatedly attacked from their power base in the northern steppe area of Semirechiye in an effort to regain control of Transoxiana. As a result of both shrewd military strategy and subsequently turning against and defeating Husayn, he became the sole ruler of Transoxiana in 1369, establishing his capital at Samarkand, an event recorded by Marlowe in his famous work, Tamburlaine the Great:
Then shall my native city, Samarcanda...
Be famous through the furthiest continents,
For there my palace-royal shall be placed,
Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens,
And cast the fame of Ilion's tower to hell.
From his new royal capital, the lame conqueror set out to subjugate the rest of the world. The first areas to be added to his domain, during the 1380's, were the regions of Khwarezm (modern-day Turkmenistan), Khorasan (northern Afghanistan), and Persia, all lands which had formerly been part of the Mongol Empire. Although he never expanded his empire proper further north than Tiflis (Tbilisi) in the Caucasus, his campaigns into the Russian steppe resulted in the defeat of his arch-rival, Toktamish, khan of the Golden Horde, in 1395 and severely weakened Mongol power in that region. At one time, Timur was almost at the gates of Moscow, but he never besieged the city.
One of the main motives behind Timur's empire-building efforts was the desire to control the lucrative trade routes which linked East and West. His capture of Delhi in 1398 and subsequent proclamation as Emperor of Hindustan furthered this goal, as did his defeat of the Mamlukes in Syria in 1400, and his destruction of Baghdad the following year. His western campaign continued with the invasion of Anatolia in 1402, which resulted in the defeat of the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid I, at the Battle of Ankara that same year. The European monarchs were genuinely relieved that Timur had so effectively crippled the Turks who were continually threatening their domains. However, they were also aware that this new Asian conqueror could also pose a threat to them. Therefore, they were eager to establish diplomatic contact with the great "Tamburlaine."
One of these envoys, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo (d. 1412), was sent as an ambassador of the King of Castile. It is from his memoirs, along with those of various Muslim biographers, such as the Persian Ali Sharaf ad-Din and the Arab Ahmad ibn Arabshah, that we have been able to reconstruct the story of Timur's life. Clavijo was present in Samarkand for the victory celebrations after the defeat of the Ottomans, as the conqueror prepared for what was to be his greatest exploit yet, the conquest of China. Around the time when Timur was beginning his rise to power, in 1368, the Mongol Yuan dynasty had been overthrown and the Ming dynasty had been established. Timur was eager to show the Ming emperor, who looked on him as a vassal and had demanded tribute from him, who the true master of Asia was. However, this goal was never to be realized. In 1405, at the outset of his last and greatest campaign, the Iron Limper died in Otrar on the Jaxartes River, 250 miles north of Samarkand.
The empire that Timur had built could not be kept together by his descendents, none of whom shared the same iron will that he had possesed. As had happened with Chingiz Khan's empire, factions soon developed, and vassals on the periphery of the Timurid domains quickly seized their chance to assert their independence. Shortly after Timur's death, little was left of the former empire except for Transoxiana and Afghanistan. However, although the size of the Timurid empire was drastically reduced, his successors went on to usher in the Muslim equivalent of the European Renaissance, centered in the cities of Samarkand and Herat.
Two of the Amir's four sons had died before their father: Jahangir (1355-1375) and Umar Shaykh (1355-1394). His second son, Miran Shah (1366-1408), passed away shortly after his father, leaving only the youngest, Shah Rukh (1377-1447) as an heir. In fact, Timur had appointed his grandson, Pir Muhammad to succeed him, but he also died shortly after his grandfather, in 1406. In 1409, Shah Rukh seized power, making Herat his capital. His eldest son, Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) was appointed governor of Samarkand, while his second son, Baysunghur (1399-1433) served as his wazir in the capital. None of these rulers had inherited Timur's passion for conquest, but they did share his interest in building and played a major role as patrons of the arts and sciences. A chronicler of the time wrote that "From the time of Adam until this day no age, period, cycle or moment can be indicated in which people enjoyed such peace and tranquility." Under their patronage, music, calligraphy, Persian miniature painting, literature, and various scientific pursuits flourished.
Ulugh Beg, who ruled over the empire during the two years between his father's death and his own, was one of the greatest astronomers that the world has ever seen. He built a magnificent observatory in Samarkand and the calculations that he made with it gained him fame in Europe as an eminent scholar. Unfortunately, he was murdered in 1449 by his son Abdul Latif, who was alarmed at the secular pursuits of his father. A year after the murder, Abdul Latif also died. In 1452, Abu Sa'id (1424-1469), a grandson of Miran Shah, brought the Timurid domains, still consisting of Transoxiana, Afghanistan and northern Persia, under his control. He was followed by Sultan Husayn Bayqara (1438-1506), a grandson of Umar Shaykh, who began his rule of nearly four decades in 1468. "It was under his beneficient direction that Herat achieved the zenith of its glory as a centre of art, literature and scholarship." It was at Husayn's court that the poet Mir Ali Shir Nava'i, who popularized Chagatay, the classical Turkic language, as a literary medium, rose to prominence, along with the miniature painter Bihzad and the poet Jami. However, at the same time, the ruler also continued the pursuit of pleasure which had been a mark of most of the Timurid dynasty and which had resulted in more than a few of Timur's descendants dying from too much alcohol or other forms of debauchery.
Timurid power in Central Asia came to an end with the advent of another Turkic tribe from the north: the Uzbeks. These former nomads who had converted to Islam while members of the Golden Horde had become disaffected with a life of riding and raiding and were intent on settling in Transoxiana and adopting a sedentary way of life on the the trade routes that ran through Central Asia. In 1500, under their leader, Muhammad Shaibani Khan (1451-1510), they captured Samarkand from Zahiruddin Babur (1483-1530), a great-great-great-grandson of Timur and the ruler of Ferghana, who had himself captured Samarkand in 1497. Babur recaptured Samarkand in 1501, only to lose it to Shaibani again in 1505. Herat fell to the Uzbeks shortly after, in 1507. Babur made one more attempt to regain Samarkand in 1511, but he was unsuccessful and was forced by the Uzbeks to flee south in the following year. However, his career as a ruler was not over, as he subsequently went on to found the Moghul dynasty, which ruled India until the British took over the country in the early nineteenth century. The Shaibanid Uzbeks established an empire in Transoxiana which lasted until the end of the sixteenth century.
Samarkand, Timur's royal city, celebrated its 2500th anniversary in 1970. It is an ancient site, located on the Zarafshan River, in modern-day Uzbekistan, whose exotic reputation has prompted stanzas from poets as diverse as Milton, Keats, Oscar Wilde, and the Persian Hafiz. Although Firdausi, another great Persian poet, speaks of its foundation in the mythical past, the Soviets maintained that it was founded in 530 B.C. We know little of its history prior to the fourth century B.C., but we do know that Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) passed through the city, then called Maracanda, in 328 B.C. in the process of subduing Central Asia. The city rose to become a major staging post on the Silk Route from China to the West. In the mid-seventh century A.D., Sa-mo-kien, as the Chinese called it, was visited by the Buddhist monk Hsuan-tsang (602-649 A.D.), whose memoirs give us a good idea of what life was like in the area prior to the advent of Islam. At this time, the residents of the city were mostly Zoroastrians, although Buddhism was known and Nestorian Christianity had also been introduced into the area. In fact, the Nestorian patriarch had raised it to the rank of metropolitan see, possibly as early as the beginning of the fifth century and certainly by the early seventh century.
Without a doubt, the most significant invasion of the area came in the late seventh century, when the armies of the Arab caliph invaded, bringing the religion of Islam to Mawarannahr ("The Land Beyond the River"), as the Arabs called the area. The Arab general, Qutayba ibn Muslim, launched a jihad (holy war) against Transoxiana from Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan, south of the Oxus) in 705: Bukhara finally fell in 709, to be followed by Khiva in 711. In that same year, the armies of Islam succeeded in capturing Samarkand. The city soon developed into a major centre of Islamic scholarship under the Arabs. Among other things, Samarkand was the first place where the Arabs experimented with making paper, a skill they learnt from the Chinese after defeating them at the Battle of Talas (751). The power of the caliph was subsequently replaced by a succession of dynasties: the Samanids (875), the Qarakhanids (999), the Seljuks (1073), the Qarakhitai (1141), and the Khwarezmians (1210). During this time, Samarkand was no mean city: it has been estimated that its population in the tenth century was over half a million.
The next major event in the life of Samarkand occurred in 1221: the armies of Chingiz Khan captured the city from Shah Sultan Muhammad, the Turkic ruler of the Khwarezmian empire, who had made it his capital. In return for the Shah's resistance to the great Khan, the city was sacked and looted, its soldiers killed and its artisans carried off into slavery. However, although Samarkand was largely abandoned, its history was not over yet. We have accounts of the city by various travellers through the area, including Marco Polo (1254-1324), who, although he did not actually visit Samarkand, passed through the area in 1272-73, and the Moor Abu Abdullah ibn Battuta (1304-1377), who, in 1333, described it as "one of the largest and most perfectly beautiful cities in the world."
It was under Timur, the Mongols' "successor," that Samarkand went on to become one of the most glorious capitals in the then-known world. The city was given a new location, south of its previous site on the mound of Afrasiyab, which had been largely destroyed by the Mongols. Under the Amir, as Timur was known, it had become a thriving city which netted half the commerce of Asia: in its markets could be found leather, linen, spices, silk, precious stones, melons, grapes, and a host of other goods. It was also a city of great architectural monuments, skilled artisans and scholars. Even though Timur's successor, Shah Rukh, moved the Timurid capital to Herat, Samarkand continued to prosper under Ulugh Beg. As Timurid power in Transoxiana faltered after the deaths of Shah Rukh and Ulugh Beg, the city ceased to be as important as it had been. In 1447, it was sacked by the Uzbeks, who were to return half a century later to set up yet another Turkic dynasty in the area.
After the demise of Timurid rule in Central Asia, Samarkand came under a succession of Persian, Turkic, and even Chinese rulers. The city was eventually captured by the Russians in 1868 as this new power from the north expanded into Turkestan ("Land of the Turks"), as the area was known at that time. It is today a major city in the Republic of Uzbekistan, one of five Central Asian republics which emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Timur was not only a great conqueror; he was also a great builder. Whenever he laid waste to a city that stood in the path of his army, he would bring back the artisans to build his royal city of Samarkand. There were sculptors, stone-masons and stucco-workers from Azerbaijan, Isfahan and Delhi; Mosaic-workers from Shiraz; weavers, glass-blowers and potters from Damascus - in such numbers that"'the city was not big enough to hold them." During the few brief times when he was not off on a military campaign, he was busy overseeing his building projects. Perhaps the main thing that strikes one about Timur's monuments is the sheer grandeur of them. They are statements about the man who made the earth shake in his day, as is evidenced by an Arab proverb quoted on one of his buildings: "If you want to know about us, examine our buildings."
Although Timur concentrated his architectural efforts on Samarkand, he also erected buildings in other cities, such as Shahr-i-Sabz, where he constructed a magnificent Aq Saray (White Palace), and Turkestan, where he erected a mosque and mausoleum in honor of Hoja Ahmed Yasavi (d. 1166), a famous poet and Sufi sheikh. The first of these structures was almost entirely destroyed by the Uzbeks in the sixteenth century, but the ruins still remain. The second has been preserved in quite good condition and apparently still functions as a "holy place" to which devout Muslims make periodic pilgrimages.
However, probably the most impressive architecture that remains from this period can be found in Samarkand. Timur filled his capital with both secular and religious monuments, as well as a plethora of gardens, which featured stone walls and floors with elaborate patterns and palaces outfitted with gold, silk and carpets. Most of these structures have not survived to the present. Such is the case with his magnificent four-story palace, which Babur describes in his memoirs. However, a number of significant buildings have survived and can still be seen today.
There are also still extant examples of buildings erected by subsequent Timurid rulers. As noted above, although they did not share his passion for territorial expansion, they did inherit his love of fine architecture. Interestingly enough, one of the principle Timurid builders was Gawhar Shad, Shah Rukh's wife, who was responsible for a magnificent mosque at Meshed (built between 1405 and 1418) and a mosque-madrasah-mausoleum complex in Herat (1417-1437). Unfortunately, these structures are mostly in ruins today, largely as a result of war and earthquakes over the last two centuries. As can be imagined, the transition of the Timurid capital to Herat also moved the architectural focus from Samarkand to that city. However, the Timurids still continued to build in their founder's capital, especially Ulugh Beg, who was governor of the city under his father, Shah Rukh.
The preponderence of elaborate decoration on Timurid monuments, much of it involving various pottery techniques, especially glazed tilework, reflects the advances made in this artform during this period. There are three major structures still standing in Samarkand which Timur himself was responsible for building: the Gur-i Amir, the Bibi Khanum mosque, and the Shah-i Zindeh mausoleum complex (although this had been originally begun in pre-Timurid times, Timur was responsible for most of its present form). In addition, there are two important examples of Timurid architecture from the period after Timur: the madrasah and observatory of Ulugh Beg.
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