The Ottoman forces were no match for the all-conquering Tatars:
Believe me, you are nothing but a pismire: don’t seek to fight against the elephants because they will crush you under their feet. The dove which rises up against the eagle destroys itself. Shall a petty prince, such as you are, contend with us? But your rodomontades are not extraordinary, for a Turk never spoke with judgement. If you do not follow our counsel, you will regret it. This is the advice we give you. Behave as you think fit.
The letter reflected the geopolitical realities which were beginning to leave little room for manoeuvre on the ground. The straightforward fact of the matter was that Bayazid, having blazed through the Balkans and put the cream of European chivalry to the sword at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, was now cutting a swathe through the east. Temur’s relentless westward progress has been well documented. From Samarkand he had first conquered Herat, before continuing across Persia and into the Caucasus, subduing all before him. By the turn of the fifteenth century, then, both men’s military triumphs had reached the point where any further territorial conquest by either – to the east by Bayazid, to the west by Temur – would represent a direct encroachment on the other’s lands. That the region in which the two empires were beginning to clash was historically rebellious to the yoke of foreign powers and saw itself as independent only added to the sense that it was fair game for either side to seize it by the sword.
The Ottoman was unimpressed by the Tatar’s strong words. Temur was nothing but a ‘ravening dog’ from whom the Turks had nothing to fear: ‘For a long time we have wanted to wage war against you. God be praised, our will has now been achieved and we have decided to march against you with a formidable army. If you don’t advance to meet us, we will come and seek you out and pursue you as far as Tauris [Tabriz] and Sultaniya. Then we shall see in whose favour heaven will declare and which of us will be raised to victory and which abased by a shameful defeat.’
There were, moreover, clear signs that encroachments on each other’s empires were starting in earnest. While Temur was punishing the Georgians in the winter of 1399–1400, the Ottoman had sent his eldest son Prince Sulayman to make inroads into Armenia, a successful expedition which resulted in the defeat of Temur’s ally Prince Taharten of Arzinjan, who, under heavy pressure from the Ottomans, had been forced to surrender the city of Kamakh (in present-day eastern Turkey).
Temur was sufficiently moved by these developments to mount a lightning attack on Anatolia in the summer of 1400. He was joined by forces led by Prince Taharten, who on account of the Ottomans relieving him of both his treasure and his harem now made common cause with the Tatar. Great Queen Saray Mulk-khanum was sent to Sultaniya, the customary signal that battle was imminent. Temur set his eyes on Sivas, the base from which the Turks had made their recent incursions.
‘This city was among the finest of great cities, set in a beautiful region, remarkable for public buildings, fortifications, famous qualities and tombs of martyrs renowned above all,’ wrote Arabshah. ‘Its water is pure, its air healthy for the bodily tempers; its people modest, lovers of magnificence and pomp and devoted to means of ceremony and reverence.’ Among its other, more practical, qualities were its massive stone walls, built by the Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Kaikobad 160 years before, and a large moat. Such defences were considered necessary for a city that had developed into a thriving centre of regional trade and that was, besides, the strategic gateway to the heart of Anatolia.
In August, the siege of Sivas began. Stout walls and a moat stood between the garrison of four thousand Sipahi cavalry and Temur’s far greater force. This included eight thousand prisoners pressed into service to assist the sappers whose task it was to undermine the city’s defences. Tunnels were dug beneath the walls, propped up by wooden supports which were later set on fire to precipitate their collapse. The familiar war engines lumbered into action, hurling fire and rocks into the city. For three weeks the sappers and the battering rams went about their destructive mission until at last the walls started to crumble. Fearing disaster unless they came to terms immediately with Temur, the city elders trooped out to sue for peace and beg for mercy. Clemency was granted to the Muslim population in return for a ransom. The Armenians and any other Christians, however, were taken prisoner. As the bulk of the cavalry that had defended Sivas so manfully were Armenians, their fate was settled. Temur’s murderous ends were not to be frustrated, though on this occasion the Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes resorted to the basest trickery to achieve them. In the words of the fifteenth-century Syrian historian Ibn Taghri Birdi: ‘Seizing its armed men, three thousand individuals, he dug for them an underground vault into which he threw them and then covered them with earth. This was after he had sworn to them that he would shed the blood of none of them; and he then said: “I have kept my oath, since I have not shed the blood of any of them.”’
The Tatar, who had long aspired to recognition within the Islamic world as the greatest defender of the faith, took pains to inflict miserable deaths on the city’s Christian community. While the Sipahis were buried alive, others had their heads tied between their thighs before being thrown into the moat to drown. According to Johann Schiltberger, the Bavarian squire captured by Temur in 1402, nine thousand virgins were carried off into captivity. Those who were fortunate enough to escape the slaughter fled from Sivas in horror. As for the city itself, it was, reported Arabshah, ‘utterly destroyed and laid to waste’.
The confrontation at Sivas was a shot across the Ottomans’ bows. But Bayazid had shown himself willing and able to mount military expeditions into the Tatar’s empire, and the potential for a more decisive test of each other’s powers on the battlefield had only increased with these initial skirmishes.* At this stage, however, Temur was not minded to move to all-out battle with Bayazid. That would come in time, if Allah willed it. For now there were other priorities. Egypt must come first.
The death of Sultan Barquq in 1399 removed an obdurate and powerful adversary from the scene. But it must also have reminded Temur, if such a reminder was necessary, that it was only a matter of time before the Angel Izrail descended upon him also. These reflections can only have been impressed on him more forcefully with the news, in the same year, that the Ming emperor Chu Yuan-chang – nicknamed Tonguz Khan, the Pig Khan, by the Tatars – had died, together with Khizr Khoja, khan of the Moghuls. Temur had already outlived two of his sons, Jahangir and Omar Shaykh, and would also outlive one of his most cherished grandsons. But amid these sober thoughts would have come more positive considerations, for in the death of a rival there was opportunity, and none was better at discerning it than the Emperor of the Age. Disorder had accompanied the death of both the Ming emperor and the khan of the Moghuls, opening the way east for Temur in the future. The deaths of two of Delhi’s rulers in quick succession had condemned the sultanate to chaotic instability from which Temur had been swift to exact a bloody profit. More immediately, disorder had followed the death of Barquq, plunging Egypt into a turmoil which the Tatar felt impelled to exploit.
This, then, was an opportune moment to strike at Faraj, the newly installed boy-sultan in Cairo. While the Ottomans at this time were only beginning to emerge on the world stage, the Egyptian empire had, since the days of Sultan Saladin in the twelfth century, been the leading light within the dar al Islam, the pillar of the faith’s defence against Christian Crusaders. Saladin had recaptured Jerusalem, driven out the invaders and united the territories of Syria with those of Egypt. Under the Mamluk dynasty, which took power in the middle of the thirteenth century, Egypt’s lands stretched from the Nile to the Levant, from south-eastern Anatolia to the Hijaz.* During the reign of Sultan Baybars, who cut and thrust his way to power, the empire’s glory reached new heights. In 1260 his army put an end to the Mongols’ relentless westward advance, inflicting the first heavy defeat on them at the battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine. From routing the Mongols, Baybars turned to crushing the Crusaders, winning a number of s
avage victories over the Christian knights. After taking Antioch in 1263, he had the city’s garrison of sixteen thousand slaughtered in cold blood. One hundred thousand men, women and children were sold into slavery.
Triumphant on the battlefield, the Mamluks were no less impressive in amassing riches and turning their capital into the wonder of the Middle East. Khalil al Zahiri, a fourteenth-century Persian visitor to Cairo, reported that the city was the same size as the ten largest towns in his country put together. Leonardo Frescobaldi, a Florentine traveller, wrote in 1384 that one street in Cairo contained more people than the entire population of his home city. He went on to estimate the number of ships docking at Cairo’s Nile port of Bulaq as equivalent to three times the number of vessels at Venice, Genoa and Ancona combined. Through the cities of Cairo and Damascus Egypt lorded it over the trade routes with India. She also controlled the pilgrim route to the holy places of Mecca and Medina. Her bright Islamic lustre blazed still more brilliantly as home to the Abbasid caliph after the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1250. Now on its knees as internecine fighting ran riot around the ten-year-old Sultan Faraj, the Egyptian empire must have appeared impossible to ignore for a predator like Temur.
The Tatar was camped at Malatiyah, south-east of Sivas in eastern Anatolia, a position which neatly severed the connection between the Ottomans and the Egyptians, but which also left him exposed to both. He was aware of these dangers, because a precedent for joint action between his two opponents had already been set. In response to a request from Faraj for help in seeing off a rival to the throne, Bayazid had sent a sizeable force to assist him. Temur’s spies may also have informed him that the Ottoman’s ambassadors had appeared in Cairo shortly after the fall of Sivas, pressing for an alliance against Temur. The proposal fell on deaf ears, not least because Bayazid had seized Egyptian-held Malatiyah after Barquq’s death. For now, there was no alliance, but Temur understood that at any moment the Ottoman and Egyptian sultans could agree to join forces and put an immense army into the field against him.
Once again, prior to hostilities, he despatched a letter. It threatened dire consequences if Faraj refused to comply.
The Sultan your father committed many odious crimes against us, among them the murder of our ambassadors without cause and the imprisonment of Atilmish, one of our officers. Since your father has surrendered his life to God, the punishment of his crimes must be brought before the divine tribunal. As for you, you have got to consider your own survival and that of your subjects, so you must immediately return Atilmish to us, lest our furious soldiers fall upon the people of Egypt and Syria in a cruel slaughter, burning and pillaging their properties. If you are so stubborn as to reject this advice, you will be responsible both for spilling Muslim blood and for the total loss of your kingdom.
The message was clear, but Faraj, ‘the crooked branch of an evil stock’, and his advisers chose to ignore it. Far worse, the ambassador who brought the letter was seized by Sudun, viceroy of Damascus, and sliced in two at the waist. ‘It is not surprising that a plebeian should commit such a cowardly act,’ wrote Yazdi of the affair. ‘What then may we expect from a Circassian slave?’* Temur would not let such an action go unanswered. The order to march south was given.
One hundred and sixty miles south-west of Malatiyah lay the city of Aleppo, a thriving political, commercial, and cultural centre. Its markets, crammed with the exotic produce of India, were an important outlet on the trade routes linking the Mediterranean with Iran and eastern Anatolia. Its citadel, as one would expect, was ‘large and strong’, according to Ibn Battutah. This, the Moroccan traveller wrote, was where Ibrahim (Abraham) was said to have performed his devotions and where the tenth-century poet El Khalidi penned the following lines:
Land of my heart, extended wide,
Rich in beauty, great in pride:
Around whose head to brave the storm,
The rolling clouds a chaplet form.
Here ’tis the empyreal fires glow,
And dissipate the gloom below.
About thy breast in harmless blaze,
The lightning too forever plays;
And like the unveiling beauty’s glance,
Spreads round its charms to astonish and entrance.
A storm, with black rolling clouds, now gathered over Aleppo as Temur’s men marched south, sacking fortresses along the way. The lightning about to strike this ancient city, and the blaze that would engulf it, would be anything but harmless.
While the storm thundered overhead, rumblings of discontent broke out beneath the dark skies. Temur’s amirs began to voice their concerns to the emperor. The men were exhausted, they argued. They had had only the briefest time in which to recuperate after the gruelling marches to India and back. Since leaving Samarkand they had embarked on two arduous campaigns in Georgia, had taken both Sivas and Malatiyah, and were already being pressed into action again. They were marching through the heart of a country that belonged to an enemy rich and strong, with well-provisioned cities, towering castles and Mamluk soldiers handsomely equipped with the finest weapons. Such doubts were given short shrift by the emperor, who reminded his amirs that their fortunes and his were, as always, in the hands of God. The forced marches continued as the Syrians massed their troops for the defence of the city. They came from Antioch and Acre, Hama and Horns, from Ramallah, Canaan, Gaza, Tripoli, Baalbek and Jerusalem.
Opinion within the city was divided between those who wanted to sue for peace, including Damurdash, its governor, and those who preferred a more robust response. ‘The prince who comes before us today is exceedingly powerful,’ Damurdash warned. ‘He and his armies have performed deeds unrivalled in history. Wherever he has marched, he has conquered towns and overcome fortresses. Whoever tried to resist him, always regretted it and suffered the cruellest punishment.’ Such an adversary was surely protected by God. Far wiser not to cross him, to coin money in his name, proclaim him in Friday prayers and send priests, doctors and sharifs, loaded with priceless gifts, to sue for peace. ‘He is a prince favoured by fortune, powerful, active, glorious and ambitious,’ the governor continued. ‘His wrath burns a thousand times fiercer than fire; and if it is kindled, not even the sea will be able to quench it.’
The hawks were unimpressed, according to Arabshah: ‘Our cities are not built with mud or brick, but solid and impenetrable rock. They are filled with good garrisons equipped with plenty of food and ammunition. It would take a year just to take one of them … Our bows are from Damascus, our lances from Arabia, our shields made in Aleppo. We have on the registers of this realm sixty thousand villages. We need but one or two brave men from each village to supply us with a vast army. These Tatars have lodgings of cord and canvas, while we live in good fortresses, of hewn stone from the battlements to the very foundations.’
Damurdash’s urgent appeals for assistance from Sultan Faraj went unanswered. The Syrians would have to confront Temur’s army alone. By the end of October 1400, the Tatars were camped before Aleppo. For several days Temur sent skirmishing parties to reconnoitre the city and its surroundings. These were the same tactics he had used to tempt the Indians out from behind Delhi’s city walls – to avoid a protracted siege – and they were no less successful in Syria. The gates were opened and the army assembled in battle formation. Sudun, the viceroy of Damascus, led the right, with troops from that city reinforced with Mamluks. Damurdash took command of the left, at the head of forces from Aleppo supplemented with more Mamluks. In what was a serious tactical blunder, the unmounted soldiers of Aleppo were placed in the front lines.
On the Tatar side, the rehabilitated Miranshah and Shahrukh led the right wing. Sultan Mahmud, the puppet Chaghatay khan, commanded the left. Two of the emperor’s grandsons, Miranshah’s son Abubakr and Sultan Husayn, took charge of the vanguard of the right and left respectively. The war elephants, seized from Delhi and now Temur’s favourite military novelty, were stationed at the front of the army, resplendent in their ornately decorate
d armour. It was an army, said one historian, that ‘filled the landscape’.
To the customary cry of ‘Allahu akbar!’ the two Muslim armies rushed at each other. The fighting was furious as the Syrians threw themselves against these barbarian invaders to defend their city. The air rang with the clash of metal on metal and hummed with the flight of arrows. Urging the elephants against the Syrian left wing, which scattered in disarray, Temur stole the early initiative. Under heavy pressure from the Tatars, it eventually turned and fled to the gates of the city in full view of the rest of the army. The example of Damurdash, who made for the citadel, was the trigger for complete pandemonium. In an instant the plain was filled with Syrians charging towards the safety of the city walls, hotly pursued by the Tatars. In the mayhem soldiers were trampled to death by horses, drowned in the moat that was soon piled high with corpses, run through three or four at a time by pikes and torn to pieces by the archers. Brave women and boys who had joined the defence of their city were cut down where they stood.
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