The Tatars: Horsemen of the Steppe
The Tatars first appear in records as a nomadic people of Central Asia, kin and neighbors of the Mongols, who rode with them when they invaded Europe. A Chinese writer of the thirteenth century described them much as Jordanes had described the Huns a thousand years earlier. They were short, and strangers found them ugly. They could not write but were skilled in war, shot their arrows accurately at full gallop and multiplied by diligent polygamy. On the move or on campaign they carried their bedding, food, wives, children, camels, horses, sheep and dogs. Between wars they herded animals, lived on the milk and meat of their flocks and dressed in their wool and hides.
In times of plenty they ate to excess, but in need they bore hunger, thirst, cold and heat, in the writer's words, "better than any other people". Their weapons were bow and arrow, sometimes with oil-lit arrowheads, and the catapults and siege machines of the medieval age. In the hands of a man who dreamed of empire while nursing at his mother's breast, such a people made an excellent tool.
A Raider from Kesh
When Genghis Khan died in 1227 he had divided his vast realm among four sons. Chagatai received the region of Samarkand and its surroundings, and his name was later applied to all Mongol and Tatar tribes under his rule. Timur, whose name means "iron", was the son of the chief of a tribe living in Kesh, in Transoxiana. According to Clavijo, this "scourge from heaven" showed cruelty and injustice from childhood, and with a gang of thieves his own age he stole cattle and sheep from his neighbors' herds.
In one such raid two fingers of his right hand were cut off, and in another a wound to his heel left him permanently lame. For this reason his enemies called him Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane. He had little time for study but knew some poetry and literature and had a sense of the difference between rising and declining art. When he was sixteen his father handed him leadership of the tribe and withdrew to a monastery, since to that old man the world was a golden vase full of snakes and scorpions. As the story goes, his father advised him to defend the faith and uphold its rites, and Timur took the advice so seriously that he even built towers out of the skulls of men.
The Rise to Samarkand
In 1361 the Khan of Mongolia appointed Ilyas Khoja governor of Transoxiana and named Timur one of his advisers. But the headstrong young man was not yet ready for politics. He quarreled with the council so sharply that he had to flee Samarkand and take to the desert. There he gathered young fighters and joined the band of his brother-in-law Amir Hussein, who was also a rebel. For some time the two wandered the wilds, escaping from one hiding place to another. This life of hardship and danger toughened body and spirit alike, until luck finally turned and they were assigned to put down a rebellion in Sistan.
Their success there gave them courage. They challenged Ilyas Khoja, killed him, took Samarkand and jointly governed the Chagatai tribes (1365). Five years later Timur took part in a secret plot to kill Hussein and so took sole control. In his doubtful memoirs he says that in 1367, at thirty-three, restless by nature, he dreamed of conquering one of the neighboring countries.
He spent winters in Samarkand and marched out almost every spring. Over time he brought all the cities and tribes of Transoxiana under his rule, conquered Khorasan and Sistan and took the rich cities of Herat and Kabul. He answered every revolt with brutal punishment. When Sabzevar surrendered after a long and costly siege, he took 2,000 prisoners. A court panegyrist of the time wrote that he used them to raise a tall tower as a lesson to those who might be tempted by pride. The city did not learn the lesson and resisted again, and as a result more towers of skulls were raised. The details of these events are omitted here.
Iran Under Timur
Timur then invaded Azerbaijan, took Tabriz and Luristan and sent the region's artists to Samarkand. In 1387 Isfahan surrendered and admitted a Tatar garrison. After Timur left, the townspeople rose and killed all the Tatars. Timur returned, took the city in a lightning assault and ordered each of his men to bring him a head. They say 70,000 heads were piled on the walls or used to crown towers that lined the city's streets. His anger then cooled, and he reduced the taxes he had imposed. The other cities of Iran paid their tribute quietly.
Also in 1387 Timur went to Shiraz. There is a story about his meeting with Hafez there that is so charming it seems invented. Timur summoned Shiraz's notables and, angrily addressing Hafez, recited lines from the ghazal that offers Samarkand and Bukhara for a Turkish beauty's mole. He scolded him, saying that he had conquered much of the inhabited world with his sword to adorn those two capitals, and yet this wretched poet gave away both for the sake of a mole on a Shirazi Turk's cheek. Hafez bowed deeply and answered that it was exactly this kind of extravagance that had brought him to the poverty Timur now saw. It is said that Timur was so pleased that he excused the poet and gave him a handsome gift. It is a pity that none of Timur's contemporary biographers mention this delightful episode.
Tokhtamysh and the Road to Baghdad
While Timur was in southern Iran, he heard that Tokhtamysh, ruler of the Golden Horde, had taken advantage of his absence to overrun Transoxiana and had even plundered Bukhara, the beautiful city Hafez had priced at half a mole. Timur set off at once and covered about three hundred leagues northward, which, one should remember, was a great logistical problem in an age of difficult supply. He met Tokhtamysh and pushed him back to the banks of the Volga. Then he turned south and west again and invaded Georgia, Armenia and Iraq.
In 1393, at the request of the people of Baghdad, who were weary of the oppression of their ruler, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, Timur took that city. He rebuilt the old capital, which was falling into ruin, and added a few chosen wives and a famous musician to his court. Sultan Ahmad fled to Bursa in Turkey and took refuge with Sultan Bayezid I. Timur demanded his return, and the Ottoman sultan replied that this would completely violate the Turks' tradition of hospitality.
The Edge of Russia
Timur was preparing to march on Bursa when once again word reached him that Tokhtamysh had invaded Transoxiana. The angry Tatar crossed southern Russia swiftly. While Tokhtamysh was a fugitive in the steppes, Timur sacked Sarai and Astrakhan, the main centers of the Golden Horde. Meeting no resistance, he turned west and advanced from the Volga to the Don, perhaps intending to add Russia to his realm.
The Russians of every province turned to God in anguish and made the Virgin of the Church of Vladimir in Moscow their intercessor, crying together: "Mother of God, save Russia!" What saved Russia instead was the barrenness of the steppe. Timur found nothing to plunder along the way, and he turned his hungry, exhausted army back from the Don and returned to Samarkand (1395–1396).
Toward India
Reports from India said that the country's wealth was so great it could buy a hundred Russias. Timur declared that the Muslim rulers of northern India had been far too tolerant of Hindu idolatry. At sixty-three, as the book puts it, he set off with 92,000 troops to bring the Hindus to Islam (1398). Near Delhi he met the army of Mahmud Shah Tughluq, ruler of Delhi, and defeated it. The book says he killed 100,000 prisoners (with a question mark in the source), plundered the capital and took to Samarkand as much of India's legendary riches and jewels as his soldiers and pack animals could carry.