The immense scale of this country turns one’s thoughts to the unfathomable logistical difficulties of Temur’s expedition. How to move an army of ninety thousand with twice that number of horses a thousand miles across the roof of the world? The enormous variety of terrain the army had to cover, and the different climates it was required to endure, would have been the undoing of a lesser leader. Between Samarkand and Delhi there were freezing mountain ranges and scorched deserts, great swathes of land where supplies to provision the soldiers simply did not exist. Everything would have had to be carried by horse. How would they have managed at high altitude, stumbling among the precipices with heavy burdens on their backs as slashing rain and snow raged against them? This mountainscape has lost none of its grandeur since Temur led his army across it. It is big, bleak and raw. What the soldiers thought of it at the time we can only guess at. What we do know is that six hundred years later, with conditions vastly improved, taxi drivers cosily insulated in their heated cars still complain bitterly about the dangerous conditions and the icy passes.
South of Shakhrisabz, a dark smudge on the horizon marks the Hissar mountains. The road continues through villages and hamlets, past orchards and ploughed fields, old homesteads and abandoned plots of land. Flocks of sheep graze on the plain beneath the hills, kicking up glittering veils of dust that linger over them. Farmers fork straw into growing mounds. The occasional yurt indicates nomadic families still eking out a living in this wild landscape.
Beyond the Hissar mountains, two days’ ride from Shakhrisabz, Temur and his army rode through the famous Temur Darwaza, or Iron Gates of Derbend in the Baysun Tau mountains (literally ‘turban-wearing’, to describe their mantle of snow). These gates earned their name many centuries before Temur’s time. Travelling to Termez in 629, the Buddhist monk Xuan Zang remarked on the double set of heavy wooden doors, reinforced with iron and hung with bells, that guarded the mountain pass. By the early fifteenth century, when Clavijo traversed the pass, the doors had disappeared but the Iron Gates retained their name, in addition to their vital role as a customs and immigration post for Temur’s empire. As ever, it was the Spanish envoy who left us the most detailed description of the place at that time.
The mountain range … is very lofty and the pass that traverses it is a narrow cleft where the passage seems to have been cut through by the hand of man, with the mountain wall on either side rising vertical to an immense height. The roadway itself is quite level, passing deep down in the cleft. Here in the midst of surrounding heights stands a village, and the place is known as the Iron Gates. In the whole length of this mountain range there is no other pass to cross it, save this one, which is thus the Guard House of the Imperial city of Samarkand. It is only by this one pass that all who travel up to Samarkand from India can come: nor can those who go down from the Imperial City voyaging to India travel by any other route. The lord Temur is sole master of these Iron Gates, and the revenue is considerable to the state from the customs imposed on all merchants who come from India going to the city of Samarkand and to the regions beyond.
The Iron Gates also represented an expression of Temur’s power, for one thousand miles west of the Caspian Sea lay another Temur Darwaza, guarding the Derbend pass through which Tokhtamish had launched his raids on his rival’s territories. All the land in between the two Iron Gates, as Clavijo recorded, was controlled by one man. ‘Between these Gates of Samarkand and those Gates of Derbend indeed is a distance of at least 1,500 leagues of land and of this great territory, as you must know Temur is lord. He is master of both these Iron Gates, and the Iron Gates of Derbend yield him a very considerable yearly tribute from customs, as do those of Samarkand.’
As he passed through the Iron Gates south of Samarkand, bound for war against the sultanate of Delhi, Temur might have remembered an auspicious journey along the same road twenty-eight years before. In 1370, he rode this way en route to Balkh and a final confrontation with his rival Husayn. Now he sent his prayers towards most compassionate Allah, asking for divine protection in his latest task to defend the faith.
Today, the Iron Gates are a disappointment. A roadside sign marks the Temur Darwaza on a downward slope of the road, in what can best be described as a very minor escarpment. It would not be stretching the bounds of geographical terminology to call this a gorge – it would be breaking them completely. Clavijo’s lofty mountains are nowhere near. There is no ‘narrow cleft’ and the village itself has long disappeared. I asked the taxi driver and the other passengers what had happened to the famous pass through the towering gorge. No one could tell me.
At Derbend, the M-39 checks its south-easterly meanderings and heads south with new purpose. It bisects the pretty village of Sairob, whose main claim to fame is a pair of ancient plane trees which would have been mere four-hundred-year-old saplings when Temur’s army passed this way. One of them is eighty feet high and has a huge hollowed trunk – with a thirty-five-foot perimeter – you can easily walk into. In 1920 it was the village soviet, where the elders gathered and pontificated over the issues of the day. In 1936, after a spell as a regimental library, it became a village shop. Today it lies empty. Across the road, at the foot of a sprawl of stone cottages which line the hillside, is a spring. According to local legend, the dark grey fish which throng the waters are holy, and therefore protected. Anyone who dares to eat one will die instantly.
Past Sairob the last contours of the Hissar mountains soon splutter out, until the road is slicing south across desert plains towards the ancient city of Termez, the Amu Darya, and Afghanistan. Several miles north of Termez, Uzbekistan’s southernmost town, a sign by the road points towards the Hakim at Termezi mausoleum, its most important historical site, a complex containing a tenth-century mausoleum, a twelfth-century mosque and a fifteenth-century khanaqah (dervish hostel).
The monuments honour Abu Abdullah Mohammed ibn Hassan ibn Bashir al Hakim at Termezi, a Sufi mystic and jurist who was, mercifully, given a more concise nickname. ‘On account of his deep knowledge and cleverness the contemporaries named him Al Hakim, i.e. a wise person,’ reads a marble plaque inside the mausoleum. It goes on to praise his ‘honest labour and sacrilegious [sic] life’, a reference to his prolific literary output – four hundred or so works, including The Secrets of Holy Trips and Rare Stories about the Prophet Rasul. Educated in Balkh and already a haj at twenty-seven (a title conferred upon those Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca), Hakim at Termezi led a life of irreproachable holiness until his death in 869. The marble plaque which tells his life story was provided by Temur’s son Shahrukh in the fifteenth century.
The most striking feature of the complex is not the individual monuments – handsome enough in their own way, but bland by comparison with those of Samarkand and Bukhara – but the setting. Only yards behind the mausoleum, past flowerbeds teeming with daisies and rich red gladioli, is an electrified fence, on the inside of which stands a second fence of barbed wire. Behind these lies one of the most memorable sights in Central Asia.
Arab geographers of the Middle Ages referred to it as the Jayhun, and included it with the Tigris, Euphrates and Jaxartes (Sir Darya) as one of the four Rivers of Paradise. For much of its 1,800 miles the Oxus of antiquity, the Amu Darya of today, forms the northern border of Afghanistan. It is the longest river in the region. Tumbling down from the Pamir mountains, it is destined to end its course dribbling weakly into the sands far short of the Aral Sea it once fed. But it is not so much the geographical facts which impress, more a sense of this river’s place in the history of Central Asia, its role in tumultuous centuries long past.
It is difficult to say exactly why – the romantic setting undoubtedly plays a part – but as soon as you see this steaming band of silver for the first time you understand at once that with all its suggestions of mystery, adventure, history, empire-building and war, with all its redolence of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and the memories of the ancient cities which lined its banks and those of
its tributaries – Bukhara, Samarkand, Termez and Balkh – this is one of the great rivers of the world.
When Temur arrived in Termez, or Tirmidh as it was then known, in the spring of 1398, the city was rising from the ashes left by Genghis Khan in 1220. For centuries it had thrived at the crossroads of Asia, a prospering Silk Road emporium, with caravans streaming through en route to the markets of Khorasan and India to the south. Well before Islam arrived, Termez was a cradle of Buddhist civilisation, brought across the mountains of Afghanistan by the currents of trade and embraced by King Kanishka of the Kushan dynasty in the second century.* Xuan Zang, the Buddhist monk who passed through the Iron Gates on his way to Termez, counted more than a dozen monasteries during his visit to the city. Within the city walls, that ran for seven miles, were something like 1,100 monks. Zang reached Termez shortly before Buddhism was swept brutally off the stage by the Arab invasion in the dying years of the seventh century. Termez duly transferred its religious devotions to Islam and was integrated into the territories of Transoxiana.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, though surrounded by great mountains and almost a thousand miles from the nearest coastline, the city found unlikely fame as a port. The boats it built and exported plied the length of the Oxus. By 1333, when Ibn Battutah arrived, a century after the Mongol sacking, new Termez was ‘a large and beautiful city, abounding with trees and water’, not to mention a palace, a prison, a fine canal, and city walls with nine gates. Its markets heaved with merchants and customers seeking the city’s famous soaps and perfumes. ‘It abounds in grapes and quinces of an exquisite flavour, as well as in flesh-meats and milk,’ the Moroccan continued. ‘The inhabitants wash their heads in the bath with milk instead of fuller’s earth; the proprietor of every bath-house has large jars filled with milk, and each man as he enters takes a cupful to wash his head. It makes the hair fresh and glossy.’
Visiting Termez in 1404, Clavijo failed to remark upon the shine and bounce of local hairstyles, but still thought it a ‘great city’. ‘We were liberally entertained, all our needs being amply supplied,’ he noted approvingly.
The following centuries saw Termez alternately conquered and destroyed by rival warlords, including Temur’s son Shahrukh and his grandson Ulugh Beg. The strategic importance of its position on the Oxus marked it out as a glittering jewel to be seized by one or other ambitious empire-builder. By the nineteenth century, Termez found itself a Russian bulwark against British expansion during the Great Game, when both sides sought to maintain Afghanistan as a buffer state between their empires, using dashing multilingual spies and bribery to advance their cause. In 1937, Fitzroy Maclean’s high-spirited arrival shed some light on a forgotten Soviet outpost; but Maclean aside, the city was effectively beyond limits to foreign travellers.*
The town’s strategic appeal reasserted itself in 1979, when Soviet tanks first rolled into Afghanistan. For the next decade Termez was the command centre for the Red Army invasion. It was one of the USSR’s most inglorious military adventures, however, and in 1989 Termez watched in disbelief as soldiers straggled back across the Oxus after a humiliating retreat. Her raison d’être snatched away again, the town quietly staged her own withdrawal from the world stage and sank back into obscurity. Today all that remains of Moscow’s tragic imperial blunder are unhappy memories and rows of rusting artillery guns in front of the old fort. Termez is a poverty-stricken ghost town stranded on the sandbanks of the Oxus.
To follow Temur’s route into Afghanistan you must cross the Oxus. In 1398, this was not a problem for the Conqueror of the World. Whenever he wanted to cross a river, he ordered a bridge built. As soon as he and his army had reached the other side, the structure was immediately dismantled. The Oxus was a defining, semi-closed border for his empire, as Clavijo reported.
None may be given passage from the province of Samarkand to go into the lands to the south of the river unless he has been granted a permit and warrant. This must declare whence he has come and whither he is about to go: and such permit is necessary even though he be a free born native of Samarkand. On the other hand any persons who wish to pass the river going into the Samarkand province may do so unhindered and none need show any warrant for the passage. All the ferry-boats thus have guards stationed in them, set there by order of Temur to oversee and control the passage.
Northbound traffic was welcomed. Southbound departures were not tolerated. There were good practical (and somewhat sinister) reasons for this.
The true reason why these guards have thus been set here is that Temur … has brought to Samarkand in captivity from his wars an immense concourse of folk to people this province of his, causing them to migrate hither from all the conquered provinces. This he has done to repopulate the country of Samarkand and to ennoble the same, and the order above given is that none shall escape him to return home to the place whence they have been brought captive.
In the early twenty-first century, the southbound traveller faced similar difficulties. The so-called Bridge of Friendship linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan had been closed for two years. Tashkent was no friend of the Taliban. Fearful of Afghanistan exporting radical Islam across the Oxus, the Uzbeks had sealed their side of the bridge.
I made a plea for permission to continue my journey across the border. Beyond the Oxus Afghanistan loomed temptingly in the haze. The commander of the military base, an ethnic Uzbek with large shades, four stars on his epaulettes and an inscrutable air, arrived in a Jeep. ‘You have come to a prohibited area without permission and your visit has been recorded,’ he told me peremptorily. ‘You must leave at once.’
‘Sir, the journey I am making is in honour of the great Amir Temur, symbol of your new independent Uzbekistan. I am researching a book on this historical hero. It is essential I cross the Oxus to pay tribute to his mighty conquests.’
He removed his shades and shot me a hard look. ‘I don’t give a shit about Temur or your book. This is a restricted area. Your time at the border is over. Get out of here. Goodbye.’
Temur, of course, was confronted by no such governmental obstruction in 1398. He was the government. Swiftly crossing the Oxus, he led his army south-east past Balkh, scene of his coronation in 1370. For 150 miles they marched on until they reached Andarab, from where the Stony Girdles of the Earth rose before them in all their dreadful splendour. Here Temur left the main body of his army and took a smaller mounted fighting force thirty miles east. As snow fell around them, they crossed the Khawak pass which at 12,600 feet was the natural defence of the marauding Kafir tribes. Since, in Yazdi’s words, ‘the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of his conquests’, it was only natural that he should now turn his attention to this warlike race.
Here on the roof of the world, amid the icy peaks and passes of the Hindu Kush, the weather deteriorated rapidly. Temur’s men were hardy warriors from the desert and steppe, but of these terrible conditions they had no experience. Horses slipped and stumbled to their deaths. Casualties were high. Travelling by night to avoid losing their foothold on melting ice, the expeditionary force pressed on. In places they came upon precipices which were impassable without ropes. At one, Temur’s men had to lower the aged emperor a thousand feet on a litter. They tried the same with the horses, but only two survived, and Temur was forced to walk on foot like the humblest infantryman. The whole body of men was now unmounted. Still he would not call a halt. Whatever the difficulties, and they were mounting by the day, the mountain infidels had to be subdued before he would turn his thoughts to Delhi.
At last the small force reached the home of the Kafir tribes and stormed their mountain stronghold. The fighting was fierce and Temur lost many men, said the chronicle, a guarantee, if only the Kafirs knew it, that he would be merciless in victory. Surrender came too late for them, however, and before long the snows of the Hindu Kush were marked with spreading stains of blood and the trademark towers of skulls.
Only now would Temur rejoin his main army and resume his southerly progress.
By August they had reached Kabul, where Temur paused to attend to the business of empire. Ambassadors arrived from the Kipchak princes Idigu and Kutluk-oghlan, who had fought with Temur against Tokhtamish. They repented for their past disobedience when, contrary to their agreement to bring their armies back to Temur, they had ‘wandered in the desert like thieves without a home’, and expressed their hope that the gracious emperor would ‘forget all our sins and faults and cross out with lines of forgiveness the pages of our wrongs’. Another envoy arrived from his former adversary Khizr Khoja, the Moghul khan, pledging his allegiance.
The highlight of Temur’s stay in Kabul was the presentation by Shaykh Nur ad-din of all the wealth plundered from Persia in the Five-Year Campaign which had concluded two years previously, in 1396. ‘He brought with him an immense treasure,’ wrote Yazdi, ‘with abundance of jewels of inestimable price; likewise animals proper for the chase, and birds of prey; leopards, gold money, belts enriched with precious stones, vests woven with gold, stuffs of all colours, arms and all sorts of utensils for war, Arabian horses with saddles of gold, great camels, several carriages and riding mules, fine stirrups, the straps embroidered with gold and silver; umbrellas, canopies, pavilions, tents and curtains of scarlet and all colours.’
Tamerlane Page 26
