[JasonC]

Tamerlane was basically just a butcher who fought smaller forces with huge ones and destroyed everything in his path, like a swarm of locusts. He trapsed across his own domains on missions of conquest, and left nothing but deserts and disunity. He was not a successful commander, he just killed a lot of people to no purpose. Note, this is not true of the earlier Mongol leaders, some of whom had real military accomplishments. But largely due to the weakness of their enemies and the native superiority of steppe nomad warfare at that time - whenever they got their act together politically. Not things any of them invented, incidentally.

[swilhelm73]

What of Tamerlane's defeat of the Ottoman Turks? The Turks had been a force before Tamerlane, and were notably a force after. But they only barely survived Tamerlane.

[swolf]

Chengis Khan pretty much invented modern warfare, and he and his luitenants invented getting around. Subudai needed only for Khan Oktai to live another two years and he'd have been the first military commander in the history of the planet to have stood on both the Atlantic and Pacific shores of Eurasia. Those guys were moving entires armies 100 - 200 miles per DAY and were getting messages from Beijing to Moscow in a week.