Tamerlane (1336 - 1405) - The Last Great Nomad Power

The Silkroad Foundation ^ | undated | Silkroad Foundation

[Hacksaw]

Tamerlane, the name was derived from the Persian Timur-i lang, "Temur the Lame" by Europeans during the 16th century. His Turkic name is Timur, which means 'iron'. In his life time, he has conquered more than anyone else except for Alexander. His armies crossed Eurasia from Delhi to Moscow, from the Tien Shan Mountains of Central Asia to the Taurus Mountains in Anatolia. From 1370 till his death 1405, Temur built a powerful empire and became the last of great nomadic leaders. Character and Personality There are abundant ancient sources written about Tamerlane. We have the primary source from Spanish Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, sent by King Henry III of Castile on a return embassy to Tamerlane. There is also a Persian biography of Tamerlane by Ali Sharaf ad-Din and the Arab biography by Ahmad ibn Arabshah; from Marlowe to Edgar Allan Poe, he continues to fascinate us as hero or viper.

Timur claimed direct descent from Jenghiz Khan through the house of Chagatai. He was born at Kesh (the Green city), about fifty miles south of Sarmarkand in 1336, a son of a lesser chief of the Barlas tribe. Sharaf ad-Din explained that he received arrow wounds in battle while stealing sheep in his twenties and left him lame in the right leg and with a stiff right arm for the rest of his life. But Tamerlane made light of these disabilities; by 1369 he had possessed himself of all the lands which had formed the heritage of Chagatai and, after being proclaimed sovereign at Balkh, made Samarkand his capital.

He was said to be tall strongly built and well proportioned, with a large head and broad forehead. His complexion was pale and ruddy, his beard long and his voice full and resonant. Arabshah describes him approaching seventy, a master politician and military strategist:

steadfast in mind and robust in body, brave and fearless, firm as rock. He did not care for jesting or lying; wit and trifling pleased him not; truth, even were it painful, delighted him.....He loved bold and valiant soldiers, by whose aid he opend the locks of terror, tore men to pieces like lions, and overturned mountains. He was fautless in strategy, constant in fortune, firm of purpose and truthful in business. In 1941, the body of Tamerlane was permitted to be exhumed by a Russian scientist, M. M. Gerasimov. The scientist found Timur, after examining his skeleton, a Mongoloid man about 5 feet 8 inches. He also confirmed Tamerlane's lameness. In his book The Face Finder, Gerasimov explains how he was able to reconstruct exact likenesses of Timur from a careful consideration of his skull.

Different sources indicate that Timur is a man with extraordinary intelligence - not only intuitive, but intellectual. Even though he did not know how to read or write, he spoke two or three languages including Persian and Turkic and liked to be read history at mealtimes. He had aesthetic appreciation in buildings and garden. It has been said that he loved art so much that he could not help stealing it! The Byzantine palace gates of the Ottoman capital of Brusa were carried off to Samarkand, where they were much admired by Clavijo. Ibn Khaldun, who met him outside Damascus in 1401 worte:

"This king Timur is one of the greatest and mightiest kings...he is hightly intelligent and very perspicacious, addicted to debate and argument about what he knows and also about what he does not know!"

Known to be a chess player, he had invented a more elaborate form of the game, now called Tamerlane Chess, with twice the number of pieces on a board of a hundred and ten squares.

Religion The question of Timur's religion beliefs has been a matter of controversy ever since he began his great conquests. His veneration of the house of the Prophet, the spurious genealogy on his tombstone taking his descent back to Ali, and the presense of Shiites in his army led some observers and scholars to call him a Shiite. However his official religious counselor was the Hanafite scholar Abd alJabbar Khwarazmi. Timur's religious practices with their admixture of Turco-Mongolian shamanistic elements belonged to the Sufi tradition. Timur avowed himself the disciple of Sayyid Baraka, the holy man of the commercial city of Tirmidh. He also constructed one of his finest buildings at the tomb of Ahmad Yaassawi, who was doing most to spread Folk Islam among the nomads.

In religion as in other aspects of his life Timur was above all an opportunist; his religion served frequently to further his aims, but almost never to curcumscribe his actions. It was in the justification of his rule and his conquests that Timur found Islam most useful.

Empire and War Machine The same as Jenghiz Khan, Timur rose from a nomad ruler; however unlike Jenghiz Khan, he was the first one based his strength on the exploitation of settled populations and inherited a system of rule which could encompass both settled and nomad populations. Those who saw Timur's army described it as a huge conglomeration of different peoples - nomad and settled, Muslims and Christians, Turks, Tajiks, Arabs, Georgians and Indians. Timur's conquests were extraordinary not only for their extent and their success, but also for their ferocity and massacres. The war machine was composed of 'tumen', military units of a 10,000 in the conquered territories. It consisted of his family, loyal tribes particularly the Barlas and Jalayir tribes, recruited soldiers from nomadic population from as far as the Moghuls, Golden Horde and Anatolia, and finally Persian- speaking sedentarists.

Timur and his army were never at rest and neither age nor increasing infirmity could halt his growing ambitions. In 1391 Timur's army fought and won in the great battle of Kanduzcha on June 18. Following his campaign in India, he acquired an elephant corps and took them back to Samarkand for building mosques and tombs. He led the attack and victory on the Ottoman army in the battle of Ankara on July 28 1402.

With great interest in trade, Timur had a grand plan to reactivate the Silk Road, the central land route, and make it the monopoly link between Europe and China. Monopolization was to be achieved by war: primarily, against the Golden Horde, the master of principal rival, the northern land route; secondarily, against the states of western Persia and the Moghuls to the east in order to place the Silk Road under unified control politically; and finally agaist India, Egypt and China.

Early in his career, he took the title or epithet 'Sahib Qiran' symbolized by three circlets forming a triangle. (See coin on the right with three rings forming Timur's symbol) It was an astrological term which meants 'Lord of the Fortunate Conjuncture'. It expressed his sense not just of balancing or juggling ruler, nomads and sedentarists, as his predecessors had done, but of integrating them into a dynamic institutional system.

China and Death The first Ming ruler, the Hung-wu emperor (1368-1398), sent embassies to former Yuan (a part of Mongol kingdom) tributaries asking that the Ming be recongnized as the new overlords. One of these reached Samarkand in 1395 and was promptly imprisoned by Tamerlane who was already planning his campaign to control the Silk Road, restore the Yuan, equal Jenghiz Khan and surpass Alexander. The second Ming ruler, Yung-lo emperor (1402-1424), anticipated an invasion from Tamerlane and sent another embassy to Samarkand. He too was imprisoned. In 1405, Yung-lo emperor launched the first of his great naval expeditions to the west under the eunuch Cheng Ho. The primary purpose of these missions was to end China's isolation in the face of an attack from Tamerlane.

Without taking the advice of his generals to remain in Samarkand until the spring, Timur and his army planned to advance northwards without delays, encamp at various points near the river Jaxartes and wait for the first sign of spring to strike towards China. They left Samarkand early in January on a day chosen by the astrologers as auspicious. Thus Tamerlane led an enormous army and departed on his last and most fantastic campaign to conquer China when he was close to seventy years old. He was too weak to walk and had to be carried in a litter. Toward the end of January, they reached Utrar. There Timur's health had suffered from the severity of the journey and he was seriously ill, On 17 or 18 February 1405, Tamerlane died. His body was carried back and buried at the Gur-i-Mir, Samarkand (See picture on the left)

Even though Tamerlane never successfully invaded Ming China, but this threat to do so had a profound impact there.

[Hacksaw]

Sunday History bump

[Hacksaw]

Bump

[PzLdr]

Tamerlane claimed relationship with Chingghis Quan through his second wife, who was a descendant of the House of Chagatai. for much of his reign, he ruled through a legitimate Chagatid Quan, and took the titles Vizier and then Emir.

Although he ruled from a fixed capital [and why was Karakorum not considered a fixed capital?], Tamerlane went to war almost every year of his rule. If he wasn't conquering new lands, or fighting new enemies, he was putting down revolts. I believe he attacked Georgia six different times. His empire was much less orderly than that of the Great Quans of Mongolia.

Finally, Tamerlane's Empire was much more ephemeral. Three of Chingghis Quan's grandsons ruled as Kha Khan after his son Ogedai [Guyuk, Mongke and Qublai]. The major components lasted much longer. Tamerlane's Empire fell apart at his death.

What are his major contributions to history? He delayed the Ottoman Turks' rise to major power when he defeated Bayazid, buying Byzantium another half century. He destroyed the reconstituted Golden Horde by defeating Toktamesh[who he placed on the throne of the White Horde, and assisted in subduing the Golden Horde], shattering it into three separate powers [The Krim Tartars, the Khanate of Kazhan, and a third Khanate]; paving the way for the rise of Muscovy, and subsequently, Russia.He inspired a play by Christopher Marlowe. And he left pyramids of skulls littering the landscapes of western Asia, and Asia Minor. What he didn't do was restore the Silk Road, restore intercontinental trade between Europe and China [which had flourished under the Mongols], establish a functioning government and a period of peace and stability in the region, or create the cross cultural fermentation that Alexander's equally short-lived empire did. He had neither vision, long range goals, nor long range plans. What he did have was an army, and a series of endless looting campaigns that harkened back to the pre - Chingghisid steppe. Tamerlane was a chess playing thug with a talent for tactics. No more. No less.

[Hacksaw]

Thanks for the reply! Intersting. I have been trying to learn more about Asian and eastern Europe history.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Hacksaw.

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[Salamander]

"paving the way for the rise of Muscovy"

...which are ducks so they don't qualify for any chicken jokes.


[honest...that's it...I promise]....;]

[sully777]

Tamerlane was a great Mongolian conqueror. "Timur placed much of his early legitimacy on his genealogical roots to the great Mongol conqueror, Chinggis or Genghis Khan. What is known is that he was descended from the Mongol invaders who initially pushed westwards after the establishment of the Mongol empire.

His father Taraghai was head of the tribe of Barlas, a nomadic Turkic-speaking tribe of Mongol origin that traced its origin to the Mongol commander Qarachar Barlas. Taraghai was the great-grandson of Qarachar Noyon and, distinguished among his fellow-clansmen as the first convert to Islam, Teragai might have assumed the high military rank which fell to him by right of inheritance; but like his father Burkul he preferred a life of retirement and study. Teragai would eventually retire to a Muslim monastery, telling his son that "the world is a beautiful vase filled with scorpions.""(Source:Wikipedia).

The Islamics wish he were related to Ali but he was pure Mongolian in geneology.

---

On a similar note, the Knights Templar in Jerusalem thought a Mongolian with a pseudo-christian root was one of their own as well:

"...Far to the east, in Mongolia, was a man named Toghrul, cheif of the Kerait clan of the Mongols. A hundred years earlier, the Keraits had been converted to Nestorian Christianity. Toghrul was nominally Chirstian and his title, Ong-Khan, was altered by Nestorian missionaries to a more comprehensible form: Khan was translated (wrongly) as priest--pretre/prester -- and Ong became the French name Jean. Vague reports of the Mongols' deeds had been filtering through to Europe and the Holy Land...bloodthirsty slaughters in the distant steepes became victories won in the name of christ; and when Toghrul was killed in 1203 by the Great Khan-Jehghiz -- the supposed christian virtues of the Ong-Khan, Prester John, were transferred to Jenghiz [not a Nestorian by any stretch of the imagination]. People in Europe and Outremer sincerely believed that help for the Holy Land [Latin States] would come not only from the West, but from the East, from Jeghiz and his family, the founders of the Golden Horde..." (The Knights Templar, Howath 211).

The Mongols would later be called the scourge of christendom fearing no god by the papacy.

[bannie]

bump!

[Dustbunny]

Interesting !!

[Lorianne]

Thanks for posting this. Very interesting

[rmlew]

Tamerlane Chess is a rather complex game.

There is a myth regarding Khan/Emir Timur's tomb. It was said that whoever desecrated the tomb would unleash a terror greater than Timur.
Soviet archeologists opened the tomb in June 1941, two days before the Nazi invasion.

Timur's empire whithered after his death, but his great-grandson Babar did go on to take northern India and set up the Mughal dynasties.

[SunkenCiv]

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