Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  In any case, the Azerbaijan capital was one of the greatest cities in the world outside China. It stood at the centre of the busiest international trade routes. Merchants and caravans streamed through on the Khorasan road running east from Baghdad as far as the frontier with China. Others arrived from Cairo, Constantinople and Trebizond in the west, from Damascus, Antioch and Aleppo in Syria. Pilgrims and merchants travelled the well-trodden path from Mecca north to Baghdad and Tabriz, while from India came more itinerant traders, crossing overland from the port of Hormuz.

  The city walls measured twenty-five thousand paces (compared with nine thousand in Herat and ten thousand in Samarkand), encompassing a vast population in the region of 1.25 million, based on the two hundred thousand households recorded by Clavijo.* Travellers competed with each other for superlatives when they arrived at this booming metropolis. Marco Polo described Tabriz in around 1270 as ‘a great and noble city’ teeming with a cosmopolitan crowd of Armenians, Nestorians, Jacobites, Georgians and Persians. Writing at the turn of the fourteenth century, the Persian historian Rashid ad-din commented on the throng of ‘philosophers, astronomers, scholars, historians – of all religions, of all sects’ gathered in Tabriz. There were Indians, Kashmiris, Chinese, Uighurs, Arabs, Franks, Turks and Tibetans. The city’s prodigiously stocked markets, arranged according to the various trades and products – jewellery, musk, ambergris, silks, cottons, taffetas, unguents, lacquers from China, spices from India – were the envy of all.

  ‘I entered the town and we came to a great bazaar, one of the finest bazaars I have seen the world over,’ gasped Ibn Battutah. ‘Every trade is grouped separately in it. I passed through the jewellers’ bazaar, and my eyes were dazzled by the precious stones that I beheld. They were displayed by beautiful slaves wearing rich garments with a waist-sash of silk, who stood in front of the merchants, exhibiting the jewels to the wives of the Turks, while the women were buying them in large quantities and trying to outdo one another.’

  Tabriz was fantastically rich. ‘This city, I tell you, is the finest in the world, for trade,’ observed Friar Oderic, writing in the early fourteenth century. ‘Every article is found here in abundance. It is so marvellous that you would scarcely believe everything unless you saw it … The Christians of this place say that the revenue it pays to its emperor is greater than the revenue all of France pays to its king.’ In 1341, the treasury’s revenues from Tabriz amounted to almost nine million dinars, a staggering total for the time.

  Such prosperity was evident in the magnificence of its mosques, madrassahs, palaces and hospitals, resplendent with marble, limestone and glazed blue tiles. Clavijo, the most diligent of eyewitnesses, was taken by the sheer number and quality of the public buildings, lavishly decorated with mosaics of blue and gold. The city owed its architectural grandeur both to the prosperity generated by trade, he was told, and to a thriving culture of one-upmanship among its architectural patrons.

  All these fine buildings had been erected in days past when there had been living in Tabriz many famous and rich men who had vied each with his neighbour as to who should build the finest house, each spending willingly his wealth in what he did. Of such buildings we visited especially one, a great palace that stands surrounded by its own wall most beautifully and richly planned, and within this building were twenty thousand rooms and separate apartments.

  It was an elegantly planned city, with good roads, plenty of open spaces and many caravanserais for passing merchants. Clavijo and his entourage spent nine days there, handsomely entertained by Temur’s darugha, the governor or mayor. Like those travellers before him, the Spaniard admired the markets and luxuriated in the steaming bath-houses which he thought ‘the most splendid’ in the entire world. Fed by the river which irrigated the outlying fields, open channels of water gurgled through the streets, providing refreshment for the merchants haggling furiously in the bazaars with women draped in white sheets, their eyes hidden behind veils of horse hair: ‘In the streets and squares of this city there are many fountains, and in summer they fill them with pieces of ice, and put brass and copper jugs near them, so that the people can come and drink.’

  This, then, was the city which Tokhtamish, thundering through the alpine meadows of the Caucasus, had seized so suddenly and which now, in the spring of 1386, attracted Temur’s attention. The khan of the Golden Horde, said the dutiful Yazdi, had sacked the city with a ninety-thousand-strong army of ‘infidels of a cruel and merciless nature’. They had ‘pillaged the place and exercised all imaginable cruelties and abominations: the desolation was universal, and all the riches, treasures, and rarities which had been amassed there during a great many years were consumed in less than six days’. The Persian chronicler obligingly supplied the religious justification for Temur’s move on Tabriz. ‘The emperor having advice of this devastation was incensed at the violence and tyranny which had been exercised against the Mussulmans,’ he wrote. A crime had been committed against Islam.

  In Samarkand, where Temur had returned after seizing Sultaniya, the glacial winds of winter had given way to the pleasant zephyrs of spring. The mountains had shed their snowy coats and the Zarafshan (Gold Spreader) river was bursting its banks, watering the orchards and vineyards that lay all around the city. The streets hummed with activity. From the treasury came the din of crashing metal as swordsmiths went about their business. Hundreds of craftsmen and metalworkers, rounded up and imprisoned as Temur spun his web of empire, sweated in workshops fashioning body armour and helmets for the army. In the bazaars, saddlemakers reeking of tanned hides and oil gossiped with merchants about the forthcoming season, comparing notes on the imperious government couriers riding through on horseback with despatches and instructions. Temur, it was said, was assembling an army for a Three-Year Campaign in Persia, his most ambitious undertaking yet. The tovachis were busier than ever, gathering the forces, procuring supplies and checking that the soldiers were properly equipped. Confidence was high among these war-hardened tribesmen. Over the course of the long winter they had eaten and drunk and spent their way through much of last season’s plunder from the fall of Herat and Sultaniya. The family coffers were almost bare. It was time to leave Samarkand again to make war in distant kingdoms. These men placed great faith in their leader. They did not doubt for an instant that he would win them new treasures. He had never failed them yet. There was no reason to suppose he would now. Final preparations were made, the baggage caravans were counted and recounted and the amirs announced their readiness to the man who would conquer the world. One by one the horse-tail standards were lifted. With a roar, Temur’s army marched west again.

  The mountain tribes of Lurs, south of Sultaniya, were first to feel the Tatars’ steel. They had been ransacking the pilgrim caravans which plied the routes to and from Mecca, an outrage which demanded retaliation. After a forced march at the head of a select body of troops from the main army, Temur attacked. The tribesmen were shattered. ‘They were flung headlong from the tops of mountains,’ Yazdi reported.

  The richest prize still awaited. From Lurs, the army marched north towards Tabriz. An ill-prepared Sultan Ahmed started mustering forces to defend the city, but it was too little too late and his attempt came to nothing. With Temur’s army at the gates, once again he disappeared in ignominious flight, leaving the city to take its chances. A detachment of Temur’s men was sent after him and pursued him closely – Arabshah called him an ‘opportunist fugitive’ – but he managed to escape. Without its leader, Tabriz had little option but to surrender. Out trooped the city’s notables, the amirs and religious leaders, less magisterial now that their protector had abandoned them to the Scourge of God. In front of Temur they sued for peace and pleaded for their lives. Tabriz, since it had surrendered without a struggle, was spared. Seizing one of the greatest cities in the world had not cost Temur a single soldier.

  Instead of putting the citizens to the sword, he punished them with a huge ransom. For the rest of the summer he and his ar
my remained in Azerbaijan while local leaders arrived to pledge their loyalty to the new ruler. Skilled craftsmen, artists, mathematicians and scientists were once more despatched east, joining colleagues from captured lands to adorn Temur’s growing capital of Samarkand. Such was the importance of Tabriz within his expanding dominions that it was conferred to the rule of Mohammed Sultan, youthful son of the late Jahangir, Temur’s beloved first-born who had died a decade earlier.

  Clavijo’s portrait of Tabriz, observed eighteen years after Temur had won it, is valuable for a number of reasons. It is one of the few detailed accounts we have of it at that time, and one of the only descriptions of a city under his rule. As Harold Lamb noted in his 1928 biography of Temur, the Spaniard’s testimony undermines the arguments of those who would dismiss the conqueror as ‘an architect only of pyramids of skulls and as a barbarian destroyer’. Tabriz was clearly flourishing architecturally, economically and intellectually within his empire. The picture of a smouldering pile of ruins – far more the signature of Genghis than of Temur – could hardly be further from the truth.

  As a rule Temur made a distinction between those cities that surrendered without resistance – which were spared – and those that cost him dearly, in terms of time, effort and the lives of his soldiers – which were ravaged. But even when he unleashed his hordes, he still tended to spare the cities’ public buildings – mosques, madrassahs, schools and shrines. And even in those instances where he gave his men free rein to burn and pillage, more often than not the architects, builders and craftsmen were later ordered in to repair the damage. Teams of soldiers were left behind to restore canals, encouraging the devastated agricultural economy with a view to maximising future tax revenues. Temur’s Persian panegyrist made a point of mentioning this, of course, for it was much to Temur’s credit as a man of the holy book. ‘The Alcoran remarks that the rebuilding of places is one of the most glorious actions which princes can perform in this world, and which conduces most to the good of society,’ Yazdi wrote with typical complacency.

  Temur had no intention of turning back after these rapid gains. This was no time to exchange the challenges of campaigning for the comforts of Samarkand. After Tabriz he abruptly called a halt to the westward advance and pushed north instead. On a map this decision to march his men into the mountains of the Qarabagh, rather than continuing west along easier territory, looks odd, particularly given the inhospitable season, but it was a direct response to the gauntlet thrown down by the khan of the Golden Horde who had led his army south through the Caucasus to seize Tabriz. By incorporating this unruly region into his empire Temur intended to ensure that Tokhtamish could never repeat such mischief again. No one could be allowed to show the slightest mastery over Temur. His will was supreme.

  There was another incentive to attack, though this would have weighed less heavily with him. Georgia was an unsightly island of Christianity amid the mighty seas of Islam. Conquering it was an opportunity to win favour as a Ghazi, or warrior of the faith. King Bagrat the Great must be forced to see the error of his ways. ‘God hath recommended to Mohammed to excite the Mussulmans to make war on the enemies of their religion, because it is the most excellent of all actions,’ noted Yazdi, ever ready to please his paymaster, ‘and the Alcoran praises above all others those who risk their fortunes and lives in such a war.’

  Winter had fallen. ‘The violence of the cold was extraordinary, and the air was full of ice and frost,’ said the chronicle, but still the marches continued. Dreaming of the summer pastures of Samarkand, the soldiers struggled across freezing plains, urging their exhausted horses over ground that had been churned into a quagmire. Into the mountains they stumbled, hauling their vast quantities of equipment behind them.

  At the Georgian capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi), the Tatars encountered a vigorous defence. Both the city walls and the citadel were heavily fortified. The Georgians were also famously resilient soldiers. These were not the sort of people to surrender their city without a fight like the cowardly Sultan Ahmed of Azerbaijan. Calmly, Temur ordered the siege machines to be prepared, and the assault was launched. When the walls had been weakened he rallied his men with the terrible cry, ‘Allahu akbar, God is great,’ the signal to storm the city. With sword in hand he led the army into Tiflis, where the defiant king was captured, put into chains and brought before his new master. Later, after divisions of the Tatar army had subdued the region, razing towns and castles before them, Bagrat was given another audience with Temur in which the compelling truth of Islam was impressed upon him. The Georgian king was no less opportunist a ruler than Temur, and it did not take him long to see the wisdom of conversion. In front of his victorious opponent, he declared: ‘La ilaha illa’llah, Mohammedan rasul’ Allah, there is no god but God and Mohammed is his Prophet,’ the seven words which identify one as a Muslim. Bagrat underwrote his loyalty to Temur by presenting him with a coat of mail said to have been forged by the prophet David.

  Pleased by Bagrat’s show of devotion and repeated professions of loyalty, Temur granted him his freedom as a vassal king. It was to prove a fairly short-lived treaty. Georgia was the most rebellious region within Temur’s empire. In 1393, six years after his first triumphs here, the conqueror was campaigning again in the Caucasian mountains. By then, Bagrat had died and his son Giorgi VII had succeeded him on the throne. Like his father, he too required a show of arms to concentrate his mind. In all, Temur mounted six campaigns against Georgia. He was still fighting there as late as the autumn of 1403, a stooped old man of sixty-six.

  The fifteenth-century chronicle of T’ovma Metsobets’i, a native of the region north of Lake Van (close to the Turkish border with Armenia), described that first campaign in the most apocalyptic of terms. Like Arabshah, Metsobets’i had felt at first hand the dislocation and devastation brought by Temur’s armies, repeatedly having to flee for his life at this time. ‘A man named Tamerlane, holding the faith and precepts of the obscene Mahomet, precursor of the Antichrist, appeared in the East, in the city of Samarkand, merciless, cruel, treacherous, filled with all the evil, impurity and stratagems of the tempter Satan,’ he began. En route to Georgia, Temur and his army ‘tormented the entire multitude of believers with starvation, the sword, enslavement, and with unbearable tortures and bestial behaviour they made the most populous district of Armenia uninhabited. Many people were martyred and were worthy of the crown; they are known only to the One Who receives them, Christ our God.’ North the Tatars continued into Georgia, bloodshed attending their every advance. ‘Temur took booty, plunder, and countless captives. No one can relate the disasters and bitterness of our people. Going with numerous troops to the city of Tiflis, he took it and captured countless people; and it is believed that those killed outnumbered those left alive.’

  More troublesome news reached Temur that winter. Tokhtamish had mounted another expedition into the strategically important Darband region on the western shores of the Caspian Sea, a corridor which controlled access into Temur’s newly won lands – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan of today – from the north. The Tatars clashed with the vanguard of the invaders and a number of the soldiers of the Golden Horde were taken prisoner. Rather than killing them in cold blood, Temur set them free and sent them back to their master with a message reminding him of his obligations and the treaty between the two men. ‘How comes it that your prince, whom I regard as my son, uses me so ill as to send an army into this country, without any provocation given him?’ Temur asked. ‘For you know there is between us a certain relationship like that between father and son. And why is he the occasion of the loss of so many thousands of Mussulmans?’ It is unlikely Temur expected a conciliatory reply. The khan’s recent manoeuvres suggested that filial respect for his southern neighbour was far from his mind. On the contrary, the relationship between the two appeared to be growing ever more hostile. With each year that passed, full-scale war between the two would-be world conquerors seemed the most likely outcome.

  As the first
buds and blossoms of spring arrived in the rugged pastures of the Caucasus on the shores of the Blue Lake in 1387, Temur, his great amirs and the massed hordes who fought so furiously in his name stirred like a hibernating giant awakening from the winter sloth. Queen Saray Mulk-khanum, Temur’s chief wife, and other members of the royal household who had helped warm the emperor’s bed during these freezing months departed for Samarkand. What lay ahead did not concern them.

  During three decades, the timetable of Temur’s campaigns rarely changed. In the winter months the soldiers were stood down, returning to their families across the empire, heavily laden with the booty of the last season. As the cold months passed and the temperatures started to rise, as the frozen lakes thawed, the troops braced themselves for the emperor’s next campaign. For the best part of thirty years, spring habitually meant one thing: war.

  From Armenia the army marched west, seeping into Asia Minor like poison. Perhaps Temur already envisaged a confrontation with one of the greatest rulers in the world, Bayazid I, the Ottoman sultan on whose borders he was close to trespassing. But for now his sphere of action lay slightly to the east, in an unruly region held by feuding Turkmen tribes. Word came to Temur that they had been massacring caravans of pilgrims en route to Mecca, another pretext to raise the banner of jihad. Erzerum and Arzinjan quickly fell to him. High on a rocky peak the impregnable citadel of Van, ‘which had never been conquered by any sovereign’, represented a more difficult challenge. Yet it surrendered after just two days. The defenders of the fortress who refused to join their prince in submission were overrun after a siege of twenty days. Those who were not butchered by the sword met an even more dreadful fate, tied by the hands and feet and hurled into the abyss, a thousand steps below, to their destruction.