A Minor Noble in a Broken World
Timur was born in 1336 near Kesh, south of Samarkand, into a Turkicised clan of modest standing within the Chagatai domains, a region where Mongol authority had fragmented into feuding warlords. He was Muslim, spoke Turkic, and could not claim descent from Genghis Khan, which under steppe convention barred him from the title of khan. He solved the problem by ruling through puppet khans of Genghisid blood and taking for himself only the title of amir, while marrying a princess of the line to style himself royal son-in-law.
Injuries to his right leg and arm, sustained in his twenties in circumstances the sources dispute, left him lame; Persian speakers called him Timur-i Lang, the lame, which European writers turned into Tamerlane. Soviet-era examination of his remains in 1941 confirmed the disabilities. By 1370 he had eliminated his rivals, including his own brother-in-law and former ally Amir Husayn, and made himself master of Transoxiana. He was thirty-four, and he would spend the remaining thirty-five years of his life at war.
Campaigns Without Consolidation
His armies moved from Persia to the Caucasus, from Delhi to Anatolia. He destroyed the Golden Horde under Toqtamish, a former protege, in campaigns that wrecked the trading cities of the lower Volga and helped shift Eurasian commerce away from the northern steppe routes. In 1398 he sacked Delhi, and the accounts of the slaughter and the enslavement that followed are appalling even by the standards of the period. In 1400 he took Aleppo and Damascus, and in 1402 he captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid at Ankara, delaying the Ottoman advance into Europe by a generation.
He rarely occupied what he took. The pattern was conquest, extraction, and departure, with governors installed who often rebelled and had to be reconquered. Cities that resisted were made examples of: the chronicles describe minarets built of skulls at Isfahan and elsewhere, and while the numbers reported are unreliable, the practice is attested in his own official histories, which present it as policy rather than excess. He justified the wars as jihad even when the victims were Muslims, a contradiction contemporaries noticed.
Samarkand and the Inheritance
What the plunder built was extraordinary. Artisans, tilemakers, weavers, armourers and architects were deported from Persia, Syria, Anatolia and India to Samarkand, and the city became one of the most spectacular in the world: the Bibi Khanum mosque, the Gur-i Amir tomb, the Shah-i Zinda necropolis, gardens laid out across the plain. The Timurid style that grew from it, with its ribbed domes and tiled facades, shaped later architecture from Iran to Mughal India, where his descendant Babur founded a dynasty that claimed him as ancestor.
He died in February 1405 at Otrar, in midwinter, marching east to invade Ming China at the age of sixty-eight. The empire divided among his sons and grandsons and shrank quickly, but the Timurid courts became centres of astronomy, painting and poetry: his grandson Ulugh Beg built an observatory at Samarkand and compiled a star catalogue that remained the most accurate in the world until the telescope. The tension between the culture Timur endowed and the means he used to endow it has never resolved.
