Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  Khaldun gave a valuable profile of the Tatar emperor, confirming his powerful intellect and passion for wide-ranging scholarly debate. ‘This king Temur is one of the greatest and mightiest of kings,’ he began. ‘Some attribute to him knowledge, others attribute to him heresy because they note his preference for the “members of the House” [of Ali, i.e. the Shi’ites]. Still others attribute to him the employment of magic and sorcery, but in all this there is nothing. It is simply that he is highly intelligent and very perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also about what he does not know.’

  He went on to describe Temur’s injury. ‘His right knee is lame from an arrow which struck him while raiding in his boyhood, as he told me. Therefore he dragged it when he went on short walks, but when he would go long distances men carried him with their hands.’ Like Clavijo, Khaldun saw for himself the pain this injury could cause Temur. After one audience with the historian, the aged conqueror ‘was carried away from before us because of the trouble with his knee’. But although he was in his sixty-fourth year, Temur was evidently neither too old nor too infirm to ride on horseback, for Khaldun noticed how ‘he sat upright in his saddle’.

  After a month observing Temur at close quarters, Khaldun came to a simple conclusion: ‘He is one who is favoured by Allah. The power is Allah’s, and he grants it to whom he chooses.’

  If Temur enjoyed divine protection, Damascus now found itself completely bereft. Although initial signs suggested the surrender would be honoured – Tatar amirs were put on guard at the city gates to prevent their soldiers entering, and any troops caught plundering were publicly crucified in the silk bazaar – history suggested the city would pay a high price for the resistance it had staged. Nor did these intimations of disaster take into account the possibility that the Syrians themselves might not honour the surrender negotiated with Temur. Ominously for the people of Damascus, this apparently remote possibility now became reality. The governor of the fortress, fired with zeal against the Tatar invaders, ordered his garrison to resist. Temur’s soldiers, preparing for victory celebrations, suddenly found themselves under attack. One thousand were killed, said Ibn Taghri Birdi, their heads severed and taken back to the citadel.

  When Temur learnt of this strike, he ordered the fortress to be taken immediately. Sappers set to work and the walls were undermined. Wooden towers were built from which the soldiers trained their fire on the garrison, loosing volleys of arrows and hurling Greek-fire at the besieged. Still the governor refused to capitulate. Next the catapults rumbled forward, unleashing rocks, boulders and fireballs into the fortress. Day after day the punishing barrage continued. Weakened by the sappers, pounded by the war engines, the walls started to crumble, but were quickly, if patchily, repaired by the stubborn defenders. Only after twenty-nine days withstanding this hourly onslaught did the governor finally bow to the inevitable and yield to Temur. But by now the Tatar was well beyond forgiveness and mercy. He ordered the governor to be beheaded. The citadel gave up its treasures, opening its gates to reveal a surviving garrison of just forty Mamluk slaves.

  Negotiations between Temur and the city elders of Damascus were delicately poised. The advantage, as both sides fully understood, lay entirely with the Tatar. Whatever he demanded must be given, for in his hands alone lay the power to spare this great city or reduce it to ashes. A ransom of one million dinars was agreed, only for Temur to turn around to the cringing officials once it had been collected and demand ten million. No sooner was this sum harried and beaten out of the city’s beleaguered population than Temur claimed that only a third of the total had been paid. Now he laid claim to the fortune of the entire city. The negotiations began to look like a pretext for wholesale rape and pillage. The skies darkened again. The furious storm that had engulfed Aleppo was about to break over Damascus.

  An order ran out through the ranks. Hungry soldiers, exhausted by months of campaigning, lean from the gruelling forced marches, looked at each other in delight and cheered to the heavens. Damascus was to be put to the sword. It was a bitter, seismic shock for the young Arabshah, one from which he never recovered. ‘Those evil unbelievers suddenly fell upon men, torturing, smiting and laying waste, as stars fall from the sky, and excited and swollen they slaughtered and smote and raged against Muslims and their allies, as ravening wolves rage against teeming flocks of sheep.’

  The tempest of destruction overran the city. The people of Damascus, wrote Ibn Taghri Birdi, ‘were subjected to all sorts of torture; they were bastinadoed, crushed in presses, scorched in flames, and suspended head down; their nostrils were stopped with rags full of fine dust which they inhaled each time they took a breath so that they almost died. When near to death, a man would be given a respite to recover, then the tortures of all kinds would be repeated.’ In their remorseless hunger for booty, the Tatars introduced new cruelties previously unheard of in Damascus.

  For example, they would take a man and tie a rope around his head and twist it until it would sink into his flesh; they would put a rope around a man’s shoulders, and twist it with a stick until they were torn from their sockets; they would bind another victim’s thumbs behind him, then throw him on his back, pour powdered ashes in his nostrils to make him little by little confess what he possessed; when he had given up all, he would still not be believed, but the torture would be repeated until he died; and then his body would be further mutilated in the thought that he might be feigning death. And some would tie their victim by his thumbs to the roof of the house, kindle a fire under him and keep him thus a long time; if by chance he fell in the flames, he would be dragged out and thrown on the ground till he revived, then he would thus be suspended a second time …

  So great was the quantity of treasure seized from Damascus, claimed Yazdi, that the combined caravans of horses, mules and camels were unable to carry it all. Articles of gold and silver, together with precious belts from Egypt, Cyprus and Russia had to be jettisoned to make room for more valuable trophies.

  Arabshah, who was understandably at his most jaundiced when recounting the sacking of his native city, claimed that Temur captured a ninety-year-old Syrian officer who had led the resistance in the citadel. The emperor would not execute him, he told the old man, since that would not avenge the loss of the brave Tatar soldiers at his hands. ‘I will torture you despite your age and add affliction to your affliction and weakness to your weakness,’ Temur is supposed to have jeered. A heavy chain was fastened to the man’s knees, and he was thrown into captivity.

  As the flames spread through the streets of Damascus, the dome of the Umayyad Mosque towered over the city through the smoke. Whipped up by the wind, the fire roared towards it, sucking up timber houses, palaces, mosques, bath-houses, felling everything in its way. ‘It continued to burn until it reached the Great Mosque,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun. ‘The flames mounted to its roof, melting the lead in it, and the ceiling and walls collapsed.’ One of the wonders of the world, a sparkling eighth-century monument to the Muslim faith, had been desecrated by an army of Muslims under the command of a man who actively sought recognition as the Warrior of Islam. ‘This was an absolutely dastardly and abominable deed,’ Khaldun continued, ‘but the changes in affairs are in the hands of Allah – he does with his creatures as he wishes, and decides in his kingdom as he wills.’*

  What might strike the modern Western reader as complacency or an unnatural fatalism on Khaldun’s part is no more than the submission to Allah traditionally required by Islam, a tenet of faith which continues to this day. But there was another reason, perhaps, for his calm and measured tone. Although Damascus was a pile of blackened, smoking ruins, its citizens butchered to the last man, he at least was safe and well.

  ‘The whole city had burned, the roofs of the Umayyad Mosque had fallen in because of the fire, its gates were gone, and the marble cracked – nothing was left standing but the walls,’ Ibn Taghri Birdi recorded sadly. ‘Of the other mosques of the city, its palaces, car
avanserais, and baths, nothing remained but wasted ruins and empty traces; only a vast number of young children was left there, who died, or were destined to die, of hunger.’*

  While Cairo trembled at the prospect of sharing an equally apocalyptic fate, while Miranshah and Shahrukh laid waste to Antioch and the surrounding region, the conqueror lay stricken with boils and a damaged back. Illnesses and infections were beginning to attack him in his autumn years.

  Dreading Temur’s continued progress south and west, preparing for imminent flight, the people of Cairo met the reports of his northward marches with undisguised joy. Sultan Faraj meanwhile assured the Tatar that the envoy Atilmish would be restored to his master. But Temur, once he had recovered from his latest affliction, had other concerns. Returning to the business of empire, he summoned his favourite grandson and heir Mohammed Sultan from Samarkand, appointing him ruler of the Hulagid dominions, formerly governed by the young man’s debauched uncle Miranshah. In the clearest sign that he had no intention of returning home, whatever his ailments, he ordered Mohammed Sultan to bring fresh troops, and gave separate instructions for the imperial family to join him. There was no question of stopping now. The only issue was where to turn his restless energies next. The campaign would continue. The troops had been levied for a Seven-Year Campaign.

  Temur now turned north towards the Caucasus, where he intended to winter among the congenial pastures of the Qarabagh. Hardly had he departed than reports arrived bringing discouraging news. The twenty thousand troops he had sent to retake Baghdad, five hundred miles to the east, had so far failed to make an impression. Rather than countenance this setback, Temur resolved, in typical fashion, to remedy it in person.

  Baghdad, long known as Dar as Salam (the House of Peace), had been home to Temur’s old adversary Sultan Ahmed, as well as the Turkmen chief Qara Yusuf of the Black Sheep tribe, to whom he had given sanctuary. In Temur’s hard-headed calculations, the city was worth the abrupt detour. ‘This city is more famous than can be described and the aroma of its excellence and merits more fragrant than can be shown,’ wrote Arabshah. Ibn Battutah admired it as ‘one of the largest of cities’, steeped in Islamic history, home to the graves of Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Ahmed ibn Hanbal, two of the founders of the four principal schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam.

  By the time Ibn Battutah visited Baghdad in 1327, it had lost its status as glorious capital of the Islamic world, home of the caliphs, which it had enjoyed since 756. Descending on the city from the west with his Mongol hordes in 1258, Hulagu sacked and virtually destroyed it with a ferocity that would have pleased his grandfather Genghis Khan. For forty days fires consumed the city, burning down the Mosque of the Caliph, the shrine of the Shi’a imam Musa al Kazim and the tombs of the caliphs at Rusafah, together with most of the streets and houses.

  Half a century after Hulagu had stormed through, Baghdad remained a barely twitching corpse. A long succession of invaders – Persian, Turk, Mongol – had shattered its very fabric. Around 1300, an anonymous author underlined the extent of the destruction in an update of the famous Geographical Dictionary compiled by Yakut in about 1226:

  Hence nothing now remains of western Baghdad but some few isolated quarters, of which the best inhabited is Karkh; while in eastern Baghdad, all having long ago gone to ruin in the Shammasiyah Quarter and the Mukharrim, they did build a wall round such of the city as remained, this same lying along the bank of the Tigris. Thus matters continued until the Tatars under Hulagu came, when the major part of this remnant also was laid in ruin, and its inhabitants were all put to death, hardly one surviving to recall the excellence of the past. And then there came in people from the countryside, who settled in Baghdad, seeing that its own citizens had all perished; so the city is indeed other than it was, its population in our time being wholly changed from its former state – but Allah, be He exalted, ordaineth all.

  After the sacking of Hulagu, though Baghdad continued to enjoy considerable prestige as one of the great Islamic cities, in reality it was barely more than a provincial town living on its past as capital of Arabian Iraq. Ibn Battutah found the city still on its knees, but stirring.

  The western part of Baghdad was the earliest to be built, but it is now for the most part in ruins. In spite of that there remain in it still thirteen quarters, each like a city in itself and possessing two or three baths. The hospital is a vast ruined edifice, of which only vestiges remain. The eastern part has an abundance of bazaars, the largest of which is called the Tuesday bazaar.

  Besides the markets, Ibn Battutah saw the three great mosques of the former home of the Abbasid caliphs still standing – the eighth-century mosques of Mansur and Rusafah, and the eleventh-century Mosque of the Sultan. He admired Baghdad’s two bridges, ‘on which the people promenade night and day, both men and women. The town has eleven cathedral mosques, eight on the right bank and three on the left, together with very many other mosques and madrassahs, only the latter are all in ruins.’

  To judge from his account, Battutah took more interest in the city’s baths than in what remained of its historical treasures: ‘The baths at Baghdad are numerous and excellently constructed, most of them being painted with pitch, which has the appearance of black marble.’ The Moroccan was much taken by their sophistication, remarking approvingly on the ‘large number of private bathrooms, every one of which has also a wash-basin in the corner, with two taps supplying hot and cold water’. What most fascinated him was the practice of giving each bather three towels, one to wear around his waist on entering the baths, one for when he left, and another with which to dry himself. ‘In no town other than Baghdad have I seen all this elaborate arrangement,’ he applauded.

  Whatever the destruction it had suffered in recent times, Baghdad remained a city of prodigious size on Temur’s arrival. Ibn Battutah’s contemporary, the geographer Hamd Allah Mustawfi al Qazwini, described its walls, divided east and west across the river Tigris, as two sweeping semi-circles of eighteen thousand and twelve thousand paces respectively.

  Aleppo and Damascus had folded before Temur’s onslaught. It was unacceptable for Baghdad to defy the inevitable. Striking out from Syria, the Tatar hordes reached their latest target after a succession of forced marches. The order was given to surround the city, and the soldiers struck camp on both sides of the Tigris. Though Baghdad was more than six miles in circumference, said Yazdi, the huge army encircled it with ease. A bridge of boats was built over the Tigris and archers stationed downriver to prevent the inhabitants escaping. Upriver, Miranshah and Shahrukh guarded the approaches to the city.

  For the people of Baghdad it was the worst possible time to find themselves under siege. It was an extraordinarily fierce summer. The heat was so intense, said the chronicler, that birds fell dead in mid-flight and armoured soldiers ‘melted like wax’. Looking out at Temur’s numberless army encamped around their city, ‘the astonished inhabitants no longer looked upon their city as the house of peace, but as the palace of hell and discord’. Panic-stricken, the defenders struggled to repair the mined walls as they tumbled about them. Temur’s princes and amirs pleaded with him to order an all-out assault, a request he refused, Yazdi explained (rather improbably), on the grounds that the inhabitants would soon come to their senses and that it would be a shame to lay waste to this fine city.

  Six weeks into the siege, on a day so hot that the defenders propped their helmets up on sticks behind the ramparts, abandoned their positions and returned home, the emperor ordered his men to storm Baghdad. The valiant Shaykh Nur ad-din was first up a scaling ladder, mounting Temur’s famous horse-tail standard, crowned with a half moon, on the walls. Many of the inhabitants threw themselves into the Tigris in desperation, only to be cut down by the waiting archers. The governor and his daughter tried to escape in a boat but it was shot at and overturned. They drowned in the foaming Tigris.

  Baghdad belonged to Temur again. To mark his retaking of the city which had caused him such trouble, he issued o
ne of his most vengeful orders, born of his rage at losing so many men. The city could expect no mercy. Each soldier must fetch him a Baghdad head. Arabshah, who said the figure was two heads per man, described what happened next.

  They brought them singly and in crowds and made the river Tigris flow with the torrent of their blood throwing their corpses on to the plains, and collected their heads and built towers of them … Some, when they could not have Baghdadis, cut the heads off Syrians who were with them and other prisoners; others, when heads of men were wanting, cut off the heads of ladies of the marriage-bed.

  Only the religious leaders and scholars of the city were granted quarter. They were given new robes of honour, fresh mounts and safe conduct out of Baghdad.

  Next came the order that every house must be razed. Mosques, colleges and hospitals alone were to be spared, said Yazdi, though after events in Damascus, including the destruction of the Umayyad Mosque, this seems distinctly doubtful. Markets, caravanserais, monasteries, palaces and bath-houses went up in smoke. ‘Thus, says the Alcoran, “The houses of the impious are overthrown by the order of God.”’

  With the Tigris red with blood and the air putrid with rotting corpses, Temur sailed serenely upriver to the tomb of Imam Abu Hanifa in eastern Baghdad – a graceful shrine topped with a white cupola – ‘to implore the intercession of this saint’.* As he prayed, his soldiers were putting the finishing touches to the 120 towers of skulls they had erected around the flattened city. What Arabshah termed the ‘pilgrimage of destruction’ was almost at an end. Antioch and Acre, Baalbek and Beirut, Hama and Homs, all lay in ruins. Damascus had been torn apart and gutted. In Aleppo, twenty thousand heads had been severed. In Baghdad the atrocities had reached new heights. This time the vultures had ninety thousand to feed on.