Tamerlane (April 8, 1336–February 18, 1405) was the ferocious and terrifying founder of the Timurid empire of Central Asia, eventually ruling much of Europe and Asia. Throughout history, few names have inspired such terror as his. Tamerlane was not the conqueror’s actual name, though. More properly, he is known as Timur, from the Turkic word for “iron.”

Early Life

Timur was a member of the Turkicized Barlas tribe, a Mongol subgroup that had settled in Transoxania (now roughly corresponding to Uzbekistan) after taking part in Genghis Khan’s son Chagatai’s campaigns in that region. Timur thus grew up in what was known as the Chagatai khanate. After the death in 1357 of Transoxania’s current ruler, Amir Kazgan, Timur declared his fealty to the khan of nearby Kashgar, Tughluq Temür, who had overrun Transoxania’s chief city, Samarkand, in 1361.

Tughluq Temür appointed his son Ilyas Khoja as governor of Transoxania, with Timur as his minister. But shortly afterward Timur fled and rejoined his brother-in-law Amir Husayn, the grandson of Amir Kazgan. They defeated Ilyas Khoja (1364) and set out to conquer Transoxania, achieving firm possession of the region around 1366. About 1370 Timur turned against Husayn, besieged him in Balkh, and, after Husayn’s assassination, proclaimed himself at Samarkand sovereign of the Chagatai line of khans and restorer of the Mongol empire.

For the next 10 years Timur fought against the khans of Jatah (eastern Turkistan) and Khwārezm, finally occupying Kashgar in 1380. He gave armed support to Tokhtamysh, who was the Mongol khan of Crimea and a refugee at his court, against the Russians (who had risen against the khan of the Golden Horde, Mamai); and his troops occupied Moscow and defeated the Lithuanians near Poltava.

In 1383 Timur began his conquests in Persia with the capture of Herāt. The Persian political and economic situation was extremely precarious. The signs of recovery visible under the later Mongol rulers known as the Il-Khanid dynasty had been followed by a setback after the death of the last Il-Khanid, Abu Said (1335). The vacuum of power was filled by rival dynasties, torn by internal dissensions and unable to put up joint or effective resistance. Khorāsān and all eastern Persia fell to him in 1383–85; Fars, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Georgia all fell between 1386 and 1394. In the intervals, he was engaged with Tokhtamysh, then khan of the Golden Horde, whose forces invaded Azerbaijan in 1385 and Transoxania in 1388, defeating Timur’s generals.

In 1391 Timur pursued Tokhtamysh into the Russian steppes and defeated and dethroned him; but Tokhtamysh raised a new army and invaded the Caucasus in 1395. After his final defeat on the Kur River, Tokhtamysh gave up the struggle; Timur occupied Moscow for a year. The revolts that broke out all over Persia while Timur was away on these campaigns were repressed with ruthless vigour; whole cities were destroyed, their populations massacred, and towers built of their skulls.

In 1398 Timur invaded India on the pretext that the Muslim sultans of Delhi were showing excessive tolerance to their Hindu subjects. He crossed the Indus River on September 24 and, leaving a trail of carnage, marched on Delhi. The army of the Delhi sultan Mahmud Tughluq was destroyed at Panipat on December 17, and Delhi was reduced to a mass of ruins, from which it took more than a century to emerge. By April 1399 Timur was back in his own capital. An immense quantity of spoil was conveyed away; according to Ruy González de Clavijo, 90 captured elephants were employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a mosque at Samarkand.

Timur set out before the end of 1399 on his last great expedition, in order to punish the Mamlūk sultan of Egypt and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I for their seizures of certain of his territories. After restoring his control over Azerbaijan, he marched on Syria; Aleppo was stormed and sacked, the Mamlūk army defeated, and Damascus occupied (1401), the deportation of its artisans to Samarkand being a fatal blow to its prosperity. In 1401 Baghdad was also taken by storm, 20,000 of its citizens were massacred, and all its monuments were destroyed.

After wintering in Georgia, Timur invaded Anatolia, destroyed Bayezid’s army near Ankara (July 20, 1402), and captured Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes. Having received offers of submission from the sultan of Egypt and from John VII (then coemperor of the Byzantine Empire with Manuel II Palaeologus), Timur returned to Samarkand (1404) and prepared for an expedition to China. He set out at the end of December, fell ill at Otrar on the Syr Darya west of Chimkent, and died in February 1405. His body was embalmed, laid in an ebony coffin, and sent to Samarkand, where it was buried in the sumptuous tomb called Gūr-e Amīr. Before his death he had divided his territories among his two surviving sons and his grandsons, and, after years of internecine struggles, the lands were reunited by his youngest son, Shāh Rokh.

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  • ashinadash [she/her]English
    10•1 year ago

    The only thing I have desired in my adult life is to talk about books I like with people. How hard can that possibly be, right?

    Dante Must Die Mode. It seems like 95% of the time I’d be more productive holding people up at gunpoint and treating it like an interrogation. Sucks to suck; the precious few times I’ve been able to do it, that shit’s like a drug. Please, I beg of you, we can talk about this forever, I have headcanons and fundamental misunderstandings!

    Something that’s been rolling around my head for years now is that, in Nevada by Imogen Binnie Orange Book Bad, there’s this one bit where Maria Griffiths in her narration observes some total bullshit about genderqueer identities, which is not epic and I’m actually gonna cw for transphobia:

    Quote -

    Not to mention, if you are a total baby panda at Internet communities asking, like, How do I get hormones, Internet trans women are very nice: they will tell you. But when you ask a more complicated question, like say, how do you resolve a genderqueer identity with a female identity when it seems like acknowledging the restraints of female identity and then bursting them doesn’t make you no longer female, just empowered, and therefore is genderqueer a privileged identity that’s mostly available to female-assigned people with punk rock haircuts, in college, everybody gets all butt-hurt and you get in trouble.

    Wow, I should post literal Nevada quotes online more often. This is fun!!

    Anyway on its face this is stupid for a whole fucking mess of reasons I’m pretty sure, like Orange Book Bad itself references Gender Outlaw once or twice, (slightly dimly, fwiw) and this kind of read is noooot compatible with Bornstein’s read of gender as a class system. Ah yes, a non-cis identity is privileged and only available to one assigned gender…? Fuck off with that. It’s sort-of consistent with Binnie’s short I Met A Girl Named Bat in 2012’s The Collection as well, which uses “both genders” once, maybe just for the sake of being an asshole.

    The thing is, I have constantly wondered if I am missing something, or this is a bit or whatever, like an inside joke.This read feels kind of fucking stupid, but I don’t have any other evidence by which to prove or disprove its shittiness. You can also observe that most people would rightly not bother, and dismiss it as a dogshit take. I’m slightly biased though, if Orange Book Bad is shitty, I desire to know exactly on what level and why.

    Another factor is that someone could crawl out of the woodwork and be like “I lived next to a trans girl who said she was friends with Binnie, its actually a brilliant deliberate example of what an immovably awful person Maria is, Binnie said so” or something like that. I have low knowledge about this specific brainrot subject of books, so that’s a possibility. I only want to understand shit.