by Will Durant
“In 769,” (1367) reads his dubious autobiography, “I entered my thirty-third year; and being of restless disposition, I was much inclined to invade some of the neighboring countries.”20 Resting at Samarkand during the winters, he marched forth almost every spring in a new campaign. He taught the towns and tribes of Transoxiana to accept his rule docilely; he conquered Khurasan and Sistan, and subdued the rich cities of Herat and Kabul; he discouraged resistance and revolt by savage punishments. When the city of Sabzawar surrendered after a costly siege, he took 2,000 captives, “piled them alive one upon another, compacted them with bricks and clay, and erected them into a minaret, so that men, being apprised of the majesty of his wrath, might not be seduced by the demon of arrogance”; so the matter is reported by a contemporary panegyrist.21 The town of Zirih missed the point and resisted; the heads of its citizens made more minarets. Timur overran Azerbaijan, took Luristan and Tabriz, and sent their artists to Samarkand. In 1387 Isfahan yielded, and accepted a Tatar garrison, but when Timur had gone the population rose and slew the garrison. He returned with his army, stormed the city, and ordered each of his troops to bring him the head of a Persian. Seventy thousand Isfahan heads, we are told, were set on the walls, or were made into towers to adorn the streets.22 Appeased, Timur reduced the taxes that the city had been paying to its governor. The remaining towns of Persia paid ransom quietly.
At Shiraz in 1387, says a tradition too pretty to be trusted, Timur summoned to his presence the town’s most famous citizen, and angrily quoted to him the lines which had offered all Bokhara and Samarkand for the mole on a lady’s cheek. “With the blows of my lustrous sword,” Timur is said to have complained, “I have subjugated most of the habitable globe... to embellish Samarkand and Bokhara, the seats of my government; and you, miserable wretch, would sell them both for the black mole of a Turk of Shiraz!” Hafiz, we are assured, bowed low and said: “Alas, O Prince, it is this prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you find me.” Timur so relished the reply that he spared the poet and gave him a handsome gift. It is regrettable that no early biographer of Timur mentions this charming incident.23
While Timur was in south Persia word was brought to him that Tuqatmish, Khan of the Golden Horde, had taken advantage of his absence to invade Transoxiana, and even to sack that picturesque Bokhara which Hafiz had valued at half a mole. Timur marched a thousand miles north (consider the commissary problems involved in such a march), and drove Tuqatmish back to the Volga. Turning south and west, he raided Iraq, Georgia, and Armenia, slaughtering en route the heretical Sayyids, whom he branded as “misguided communists.”24 He took Baghdad (1393) at the request of its inhabitants, who could no longer put up with the cruelty of their Sultan Ahmed ibn Uways. Finding the old capital in decay, he bade his aides rebuild it; meanwhile he added some choice wives to his harem, and a celebrated musician to his court. Ahmed found asylum in Brusa with the Ottoman Sultan Bajazet I; Timur demanded Ahmed’s extradition; Bajazet replied that this would violate Turkish canons of hospitality.
Timur would have advanced at once upon Brusa, but Tuqatmish had again invaded Transoxiana. The angry Tatar swept across south Russia, and, while Tuqatmish hid in the wilderness, he sacked the Golden Horde’s cities of Sarai and Astrakhan. Unresisted, Timur marched his army westward from the Volga to the Don, and perhaps planned to add all Russia to his realm. Russians of all provinces prayed feverishly, and the Virgin of Vladimir was borne to Moscow between lines of kneeling suppliants who cried out, “Mother of God, save Russia!” The poverty of the steppes helped to save it. Finding little to plunder, Timur turned back at the Don, and led his weary and hungry soldiers back to Samarkand (1395–96).
In India, said all reports, there was wealth enough to buy a hundred Russias. Proclaiming that Moslem rulers in north India were too tolerant of Hindu idolatry, and that all Hindus must be converted to Mohammedanism, Timur, aged sixty-three, set out for India at the head of 92,000 men (1398). Near Delhi he met the army of its Sultan Mahmud, defeated him, slaughtered 100,000 (?) prisoners, pillaged the capital, and brought back to Samarkand all that his troops and beasts could carry of the fabled riches of India.
In 1399, still remembering Ahmed and Bajazet, he marched forth again. He crossed Persia to Azerbaijan, deposed his wastrel son as governor there, hanged the poets and ministers who had seduced the youth into revelry, and redevastated Georgia. Entering Asia Minor, he besieged Sivas, resented its long resistance, and, when it fell, had 4,000 Christian soldiers buried alive—or were such stories war propaganda? Wishing to protect his flank while attacking the Ottomans, he sent an envoy to Egypt proposing a nonaggression pact. The Sultan al-Malik imprisoned the envoy and hired an assassin to kill Timur. The plot failed. After reducing Aleppo, Hims, Baalbek, and Damascus, the Tatar moved on to Baghdad, which had expelled his appointees. He took it at great cost, and ordered each of his 20,000 soldiers to bring him a head. It was done—or so we are told: rich and poor, male and female, old and young, paid this head tax, and their skulls were piled in ghastly pyramids before the city’s gates (1401). Moslem mosques, monasoteries, and nunneries were spared; everything else was sacked and destroyed, so thoroughly that the once brilliant capital recovered only in our time, by the grace of oil.
Feeling now reasonably sure on left and right, Timur sent Bajazet a final invitation to submit. The Turk, made too confident by his triumph at Nicopolis (1396), retorted that he would annihilate the Tatar army, and would make Timur’s chief wife his slave.25 The two ablest generals of the age joined battle at Ankara (1402). Timur’s strategy compelled the Turks to fight when exhausted by a long march. They were routed. Bajazet was taken prisoner, Constantinople rejoiced, Christendom was for half a century saved by the Tatars from the Turks. Timur continued Europeward to Brusa, burned it, and carried away its Byzantine library and silver gates. He marched to the Mediterranean, captured Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes, butchered the inhabitants, and rested at Ephesus. Christendom trembled again. The Genoese, who still held Chios, Phocaea, and Mitylene, sent in their submission and tribute. The Sultan of Egypt released the Tatar envoy, and entered the distinguished company of Timur’s vassals. The conqueror returned to Samarkand as the most powerful monarch of his time, ruling from Central Asia to the Nile, from the Bosporus to India. Henry IV of England sent him felicitations, France sent him a bishop with gifts, Henry III of Castile dispatched to him a famous embassy under Ruy González de Clavijo.
It is to Clavijo’s detailed memoirs that we owe most of our knowledge of Timur’s court. He left Cádiz on May 22, 1403, traveled via Constantinople, Trebizond, Erzerum, Tabriz, Tehran (here first mentioned by a European), Nishapur, and Mashhad, and reached Samarkand on August 31, 1404. He had with some reason expected to find there only a horde of hideous butchers. He was astonished at the size and prosperity of Timur’s capital, the splendor of the mosques and palaces, the excellent manners of the upper class, the wealth and luxury of the court, the concourse of artists and poets celebrating Timur. The city itself, then over 2,000 years old, had some 150,000 inhabitants, and “most noble and beautiful houses,” and many palaces “embowered among trees”; altogether, and not including the extensive suburbs, Clavijo reckoned Samarkand to be “rather larger than Seville.” Water was piped into the houses from a river that ran by the city, and irrigation canals greened the hinterland. There the air was fragrant with orchards and vineyards; sheep grazed, cattle ranged, lush crops grew. In the town were factories that made artillery, armor, bows, arrows, glass, porcelain, tiles, and textiles of unsurpassed brilliance, including the kirimze or red dye that gave its name to crimson. Working in shops or fields, dwelling in houses of brick or clay or wood, or taking their ease urbanely on the riverside promenade, were Tatars, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Iraoi, Afghans, Georgians, Greeks, Armenians Catholics, Nestorians, Hindus, all freely practicing their rites and preaching their contradictory creeds. The principal streets were bordered with trees, shops, mosques, academies, libraries, and an ob
servatory; a great avenue ran in a straight line from one end of the city to the other, and the main section of this thoroughfare was covered with glass.26
Clavijo was received by the Tatar emperor on September 8. He passed through a spacious park “wherein were pitched many tents of silk,” and pavilions hung with silk embroideries. The tent was the usual abode of the Tatar; Timur himself, in this park, had a tent 300 feet in circumference. But there were palaces there too, with floors of marble or tile, and sturdy furniture inset with precious stones or sometimes altogether made of silver or gold. Clavijo found the monarch seated cross-legged on silken cushions “under the portal of a most beautiful palace,” facing a fountain that threw up a column of water which fell into a basin wherein apples bobbed incessantly. Timur was dressed in a cloak of silk, and wore a high, wide hat studded with rubies and pearls. He had once been tall, vigorous, and alert; now, aged sixty-eight, he was bent, weak, ailing, almost blind; he could barely raise his eyelids to see the ambassador.
He had acquired as much culture as a man of action could bear; he read history, collected art and artists, befriended poets and scholars, and could on occasion assume elegant manners. His vanity equaled his ability, which no one exceeded in that time. Contradicting Caesar, he reckoned cruelty a necessary part of strategy; yet, if we may believe his victims, he seems to have been often guilty of cruelty as mere revenge. Even in civil government he conferred death lavishly—as to a mayor who had oppressed a city, or a butcher who had charged too much for meat.27 He excused his harshness as needed in ruling a people not yet reconciled to law, and he justified his massacres as means of forcing disorderly tribes into the order and security of a united and powerful state. But, like all conquerors, he loved power for its own sake, and spoils for the grandeur they could finance.
In 1405 he set out to conquer Mongolia and China, dreaming of a halfworld state that would wed the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His army was 200,000 strong; but at Otrar, on the northern border of his realm, he died. His last orders were that his troops should march on without him; and for a while his white horse, saddled and riderless, paced the host. But his soldiers well knew that his mind and will had been half their might; soon they turned back, mourning and relieved, to their homes. His children built for him at Samarkand the majestic Gur-i-Mir, or Mausoleum of the Emir, a tower crowned with a massive bulbous dome, and faced with bricks enameled in lovely turquoise blue.
His empire crumbled with his brain. The western provinces almost at once fell away, and his progeny had to content themselves with the Middle East. The wisest of this Timurid line was Shah Rukh, who allowed his son Ulug to govern Transoxiana from Samarkand, while he himself ruled Khurasan from Herat. Under these descendants of Timur the two capitals became rival centers of a Tatar prosperity and culture equal to any in Europe at the time (1405–49). Shah Rukh was a competent general who loved peace, favored letters and art, and founded a famous library at Herat. “Herat,” wrote a Timurid prince, “is the garden of the world.”28 Ulug Beg cherished scientists, and raised at Samarkand the greatest observatory of the age. He was, says a florid Moslem biographer,
learned, just, masterful, and energetic, and attained to a high degree in astronomy, while in rhetoric he could split hairs. In his reign the status of men of learning reached its zenith.... In geometry he expounded subtleties, and on questions of cosmography he elucidated Ptolemy’s Almagest... Until now no monarch like him has ever sat on a throne. He recorded observations of the stars with the co-operation of the foremost scientists.... . He constructed in Samarkand a college the like of which, in beauty, rank, and worth, is not to be found in the seven climes.29
This paragon of patronage was murdered in 1449 by his bastard son; but the high culture of the Timurid dynasty continued under the sultans Abu Sa’id and Husein ibn-Baiqaia at Herat till the end of the fifteenth century. In 1501 the Uzbeg Mongols captured Samarkand and Bokhara; in 151c Shah Ismail, of the new Safavid dynasty, took Herat. Babur, last of the Timurid rulers, fled to India, and founded there a Mogul (Mongol) dynasty which made Moslem Delhi as brilliant a capital as Medicean Rome.
IV. THE MAMLUKS: 1340-1517
While Islam in Asia suffered repeated invasions and revolutions, Egypt was exploited with relative stability by the Mamluk sultans (1250–1517). The Black Death destroyed Egyptian prosperity for a time, but through such vicissitudes the Mamluks continued to reconcile competent administration and artistic interests with embezzlement and atrocity. In 1381, however, with Sultan Malik al-Nasir Barquq, the Burji Mamluks began a dynasty of luxury, intrigue, violence, and social decay. They debased the coinage even beyond the custom of governments, taxed the necessaries of life, abused the state monopoly of sugar and pepper, and laid such heavy dues at Alexandria on European trade with India that Occidental merchants were provoked into finding a route to India around Africa. Within a generation after Vasco da Gama’s voyage (1498) Egypt lost much of its once rich share of the commerce between East and West; and this economic disaster reduced the country to such destitution that it offered only feeble resistance when Selim I ended the Mamluk rule and made Egypt a province of the Ottoman Empire.
Cairo remained from 1258 to 1453 the richest, fairest, and most populous city in Islam. Ibn-Batuta described it glowingly in 1326; and Ibn-Khaldun, visiting it in 1383, called it “the metropolis of the universe, the garden of the world, the ant heap of the human species, the throne of royalty; a city adorned with palaces and châteaux, convents, monasteries, and colleges, and illumined by the stars of erudition; a paradise so bounteously watered by the Nile that the earth seems here to offer its fruits to men as gifts and salutations” 30—to which the toilsome fellaheen might have demurred.
The Egyptian mosques of this age reflected the severity of the government rather than the colors of the sky. Here were no “ivans” or portals of glazed brick and tinted tile as in Islamic Asia, but massive stone walls that made the mosque a fortress rather than a house of prayer. The mosque (1356–63) of Sultan Hassan was the wonder of its age, and is still the stateliest monument of Mamluk art. The historian al-Maqrizi thought that “it surpassed all other mosques ever built,” 31 but he was a Cairene patriot. An uncertain tradition tells how the Sultan collected renowned architects from many lands, asked them to name the tallest edifice on earth, and bade them erect a loftier one. They named the palace of Khosru I at Ctesiphon, whose surviving arch rises 105 feet from the ground. Stealing stones from crumbling pyramids, their workmen built the walls of the new mosque up to 100 feet, added a cornice for thirteen feet more, and raised at one corner a minaret to 280 feet. The gloomy towering mass impresses, but hardly pleases, the Western eye; the Cairotes, however, were so proud of it that they invented or borrowed a legend in which the Sultan cut off the right hand of the architect lest he should ever design an equal masterpiece—as if an architect designed with his hand. More attractive, despite their function, were the funerary mosques that the Mamluk sultans built outside Cairo’s walls to embalm their bones. Sultan Barquq al-Zahir, who began life as a Circassian slave, ended in mute glory in the most splendid of these tombs.
The greatest builder among the Burji Mamluks was Qa’it Bey. Though harassed by war with the Turks, he managed to finance costly edifices in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem; restored in Cairo the Citadel of Saladin and the university mosque of el-Azhar; built a hotel famous for its arabesques of stone; raised within the capital a mosque with ornate ornament; and crowned his demise with a memorial mosque, in granite and marble, whose superb decoration, lofty balconied minaret, and geometrically carved dome make it one of the lesser victories of Moslem art.
All the minor arts flourished under the Mamluks. Carvers in ivory, bone, and wood made a thousand handsome products, from pen boxes to pulpits, conceived with taste and executed with unremitting industry and skill; witness the pulpit from Qa’it Bey’s extramural mosque, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Gold and silver inlay reached its peak during these bloody dynasties. And Egyptian po
ttery, which had invented a thousand novelties in its immemorial millenniums, now gave the world enameled glass: mosque lamps, beakers, vases. painted with figures or formal ornament in colored enamel, sometimes enhanced with gold. In these and numberless other ways the Moslem artists, giving beauty a lasting form, atoned for the barbarities of their kings.
V. THE OTTOMANS: 1288-1517
History begins after origins have disappeared. No one knows where the “Turks” arose; some have guessed that they were a Finno-Ugric tribe of the Huns, and that their name meant a helmet, which is durko in one Turkish dialect. They formed their languages from Mongolian and Chinese, and later imported Persian or Arabic words; these “Turkish” dialects are the sole means of classifying their speakers as Turks. One such clan took its name from its leader Seljuq; it grew from victory to victory, until its multiplied descendants, in the thirteenth century, ruled Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Asia Minor. A kindred clan under Ortoghrul fled in that century from Khurasan to avoid drowning in the Mongol inundation. It found military employment with the Seljuq emir of Konya (Iconium) in Asia Minor, and received a tract of land to pasture its herds.
When Ortoghrul died (1288?) his son Othman or Osman, then thirty years old, was chosen to succeed him; from him the Ottomans or Osmanlis received their name. They did not, before the nineteenth century, call themselves Turks; they applied that name to semi-barbarous peoples in Turkestan and Khurasan. In 1290, seeing that the Seljuqs were too weak to prevent him, Othman made himself the independent emir of a little state in northwestern Asia Minor; and in 1299 he advanced his headquarters westward to Yeni-Sheir. He was not a great general, but he was patiently persistent; his army was small, but it was composed of men more at home on horse than on foot, and willing to risk a weary life or limb for land, gold, women, or power. Between them and the Sea of Marmora lay drowsy Byzantine cities ill governed and poorly defended. Othman laid siege to one such town, Brusa; failing at first, he returned again and again to the attempt; finally it surrendered to his son Orkhan, while Othman himself lay dying at Yeni-Sheir (1326).
