Who is tamerlane

The atrocities committed in the course of these campaigns are recorded even by his own court historian. At Sabzawar, in what is now Afghanistan, Tamerlane directed a tower to be constructed out of live men heaped on top of one another and cemented together with bricks and mortar. To punish a revolt in Isfahan, he ordered a general massacre of the population, and the heads of 70, people were built up into minarets.

In an invasion of Transoxiana by Toktamish, the ruler of the Golden Horde, obliged Tamerlane to interrupt his operations in western Asia, and the repulsion of the invader, followed by expeditions into Moghulistan, was to keep him occupied for the next 4 years. It was not until that he resumed the conquest of western Asia in what is known as the Five Years' Campaign. After suppressing the Muzaffarid dynasty in Fars spring , Tamerlane entered present-day Iraq, received the submission of Baghdad, whose Jalayirid ruler, Sultan Ahmad, had fled at his approach, continued northward into eastern Turkey and the Caucasus area, defeated Toktamish in a battle on the Terek April , and advanced up the Don to capture the Russian town of Yelets, on the border between the Russian principalities and the territory of the Golden Horde.

The campaign ended, in the winter of , with the destruction of the two main centers of the Horde at Astrakhan and New Saray, and Tamerlane returned to Samarkand to prepare for his invasion of India. This, the briefest of his campaigns, lasting less than 6 months, was the occasion of Tamerlane's greatest massacre: the execution in cold blood, before the gates of Delhi, of , Hindu prisoners.

There followed immediately the so-called Seven Years' Campaign , which brought Tamerlane into conflict with the two most powerful rulers in western Asia, the Ottoman sultan of Turkey and the Mamluk sultan of Egypt. Syria, then part of Egypt's territory, was invaded in , Aleppo falling in October of that year and Damascus in March Tamerlane now turned eastward against Baghdad, which had been reoccupied by Sultan Ahmad's forces and offered stubborn resistance to Tamerlane's attack.

The sources leave us in no doubt about the injury, although there is uncertainty over exactly how it occurred. It probably happened in about , when Tamerlane was serving as a mercenary for the Khan of Sistan in Khorasan, in what is today the Dasht-i-Margo "desert of death" in south-west Afghanistan. Another source - the extremely hostile Ibn Arabshah, a Syrian chronicler from the 15th Century - says a watchful shepherd spied Tamerlane prowling about his flock of sheep, smashed his shoulder with one well-directed arrow and loosed off another into his hip for good measure.

Clavijo, the Spanish ambassador who visited Samarkand in , records how Tamerlane encountered a large party of horsemen from Sistan, who slaughtered many of his men. A Soviet archaeological team led by Mikhail Gerasimov opened Timur's exquisite tomb in Samarkand in and found that he was a "lame", well-built man of about 5ft 7in. An injury to his right leg, where the thighbone had merged with his kneecap, left it shorter than the left, hence the pronounced limp referred to in his scornful nickname.

When walking, he would have dragged his right leg, and his left shoulder was found to be unnaturally higher than the right. Further wounds were discovered to his right hand and elbow. For his 14th Century enemies, such as the Ottoman emperor and the rulers of Baghdad and Damascus, Tamerlane's lameness provided an easy opportunity to sneer - but mockery was easier than beating him in battle.

Even Arabshah, his fiercest critic, acknowledged that he was "mighty in strength and courage", a "spirited and brave" leader who "inspired awe and obedience". By , all of Persia was his. With invasions in and , Timur fought against his former protege in Russia, Toktamysh.

The Timurid army captured Moscow in While Timur was busy in the north, Persia revolted. He responded by leveling entire cities and using the citizens' skulls to build grisly towers and pyramids. Timur's army of 90, crossed the Indus River in September and set upon India. The country had fallen to pieces after the death of Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq r. Timur seized tons of treasure and 90 war elephants and took them back to Samarkand.

Timur looked west in , retaking Azerbaijan and conquering Syria. Baghdad was destroyed in and 20, of its people were slaughtered. The rulers of Europe were glad that the Ottoman Turk sultan Bayazid had been defeated, but they trembled at the idea that "Tamerlane" was at their doorstep. The rulers of Spain, France, and other powers sent congratulatory embassies to Timur, hoping to stave off an attack.

Timur had bigger goals, though. He decided in that he would conquer Ming China. The ethnic-Han Ming Dynasty had overthrown his cousins, the Yuan , in Unfortunately for him, however, the Timurid army set out in December during an unusually cold winter. Men and horses died of exposure, and the year-old Timur fell ill.

He died on February 17, at Otrar, in Kazakhstan. Timur started life as the son of a minor chieftain, much like his putative ancestor Genghis Khan. Through sheer intelligence, military skill, and force of personality, Timur was able to conquer an empire stretching from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia. Unlike Genghis Khan, however, Timur conquered not to open trade routes and protect his flanks, but to loot and pillage.

The Timurid Empire did not long survive its founder because he rarely bothered to put any governmental structure in place after he destroyed the existing order.

While Timur professed to be a good Muslim, he obviously felt no compunction about destroying the jewel-cities of Islam and slaughtering their inhabitants. Damascus, Khiva, Baghdad His intent seems to have been to make his capital at Samarkand the first city in the Islamic world. Contemporary sources say that Timur's forces killed about 19 million people during their conquests. That number is probably exaggerated, but Timur does seem to have enjoyed massacre for its own sake.

Despite a death-bed warning from the conqueror, his dozens of sons and grandsons immediately began to fight over the throne when he passed away. The most successful Timurid ruler, Timur's grandson Ulegh Beg —, ruled — , gained fame as an astronomer and scholar.

Ulegh was not a good administrator, however, and was murdered by his own son in Timur's line had better luck in India, where his great-great-grandson Babur founded the Mughal Dynasty in The Mughals ruled until when the British expelled them. Shah Jahan , the builder of the Taj Mahal , is thus also a descendant of Timur. Timur was lionized in the west for his defeat of the Ottoman Turks. Not surprisingly, the people of Turkey , Iran, and the Middle East remember him rather less favorably.

In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Timur has been made into a national folk hero. The people of Uzbek cities like Khiva, however, are skeptical; they remember that he razed their city and killed nearly every inhabitant. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.

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