History does not record the emotions of Temur’s soldiers as they marched north from Baghdad to seek their winter quarters in the plains of the Qarabagh. Relief and joy, we can be sure, mingled with grief and exhaustion. There were numerous injured among them, their lives in the gift of the Almighty. Not all would live to see another campaigning season. Among the fit and well, many had grown rich from looting, their horses and camels staggering beneath loads of plunder. Some had been promoted for their heroic actions on the battlefield. Others simply longed for home.
Once more, Temur’s Tatar hordes had given him the victories he had ordered. As he rode towards the Caucasus, the emperor must have cast a proud eye over this unflinching army. ‘Soldiers, whether associates or adversaries, I hold in esteem,’ he is supposed to have said. ‘Those who sell their permanent happiness to perishable honour and throw themselves into the field of slaughter and battle, and hazard their lives in the hour of danger.’
For now, these men looked forward to nothing but rest. Banquets, drinking bouts, the pleasures of the flesh, all these awaited the weary soldiers in the rolling pastures of the Qarabagh. But the implacable Temur had other thoughts on his mind. As ever, the brilliant chess-playing warrior was one move ahead. War against his mightiest adversary had been brewing for some time. The first skirmishes had already been fought. Though his soldiers did not realise it, the hour of danger was close at hand.
* * *
* These bacchanalian revelries had taken their toll on the prince’s health and physique, according to Clavijo, who met Miranshah and was entertained by him in Sultaniya, en route to Samarkand. The Spaniard described him as ‘a man of advanced age, being about forty years old, big and fat, and he suffers much from the gout’.
* Even the invariably hostile Ibn Arabshah acknowledged Mohammed Sultan’s qualities. He was, said the Syrian, ‘a manifest prodigy in his noble nature and vigour. And when Temur saw in his nature signs of singular good fortune and that in the excellence of his talents he surpassed the rest of his sons and grandsons, he disregarded all of them and turned his mind to this one and appointed him his heir.’
* There are fascinating records of the correspondence, in rhyming couplets, between Temur and Barquq in the aftermath of the Mamluk sultan’s murder of the Tatar ambassadors. In one, Temur threatens annihilation of the Egyptian if his rival chooses war over peace:
‘Our forces are numerous, and our valour is vigorous; Our horses forward dash, our lances deeply gash, our spearheads like lightning flash, and our sabres like thunders crash. Our hearts are as the mountains strong, like sands in number our armies’ throng, and we among the heroes and Himyar’s kings belong. Our kingdom none can assail, our subjects from harm shall never ail, by our might our rule shall ever prevail. To him who makes peace with us will safety ensue, but he who makes war on us will repent and rue, and he who doth avow of us what he doth not know of us – he is a fool.’
Barquq’s reply, casting scorn on Temur’s confused style and rhetoric, was equally direct:
‘For you were the fires of hell created, kindled that your skins be incinerated … For our horses are Barcan, our arrows Arabian, our swords are from Yaman, and our armour Egyptian. The blows of our hands are hard to contest, we are renowned in all of the East and all of the West. If we kill you, how good will be the gain! And if you kill one of us, only a moment between him and Paradise will remain …’
* As the noose slipped around his neck, his last words were a punning verse whose elegance suffers somewhat in translation:
‘’Tis the end of the matter and the last round, O heretic!
Whether thou goest or not, the choice is no longer in thy hand!
If they lead thee, like Mansur, to the foot of the gibbet [pa-yi-dar]
Stand firm [pay-dar] like a man, for the world is not enduring [pay-dar]!
(Mansur was a tenth-century mystic executed in Baghdad for making comments implying he was God.)
* The historian Herbert Gibbons saw the fall of Sivas as a landmark, arguing that in his earlier days the Ottoman would have met such a setback with a swift political, diplomatic or military response. This time there was only inertia: ‘He had become a voluptuary, debauched mentally and physically. His pride and self-confidence had increased in inverse ratio to his ability to make good his arrogant assumptions.’
* The Mamluks (from the Arabic word for ‘owned’) were originally Turkic slaves brought to Egypt as boys and given extensive military training which, if they performed well, culminated in their freedom and subsequent service as senior administrators and bodyguards to the caliphs and sultans. The thinking behind the creation of this new military elite was that since the Egyptian state was in effect its parent, the Mamluks would always remain loyal to the throne. In fact these foreign imports, initially of Kipchak Turk origin, later Circassian, proved so successful that they seized power and ruled Egypt as a new dynasty from 1250 until 1517, when they were conquered by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I. They continued to rule locally as Ottoman viceroys but were fatally weakened by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. The remaining Mamluks were massacred by Mohammed Ali in 1811.
* A disparaging reference to Faraj’s origins. His father, Barquq, was the first Circassian Mamluk sultan.
* This apocalyptic picture of an empty ghost city was not altogether accurate, for we know from the chronicles that before he departed Temur took time to indulge his passion for theological debate and summoned the city’s qadis before him. He fired a series of questions at them, the wrong answers to which, as they knew, could lose them their heads. Why had they chosen the wrong path, he asked, by following the Sunni creed of Islam, not the Shi’a? This question completely threw the religious scholars, for they thought Temur himself was a Sunni Muslim. As Arabshah put it, ‘The Muslims were in perplexity and their heads were being cut off.’ There followed a more deliberately provocative question. Which was the martyr of Islam destined for paradise, the soldier who gave his life in defence of Aleppo or he who died while fighting for Temur? A deathly silence fell upon the qadis. Then a Hanafite scholar, Muhib ad-din Mohammed, stood up. ‘The prophet of God (God bless him and grant him peace!) was asked this question and he answered: “He who fights that the word of God be supreme is a martyr.”’ Temur was pleased with the answer, so much so that he was moved to spare those who had survived the violence, prompting the same Ibn Taghri Birdi who earlier had detailed the piles of stinking corpses to venture the observation that Temur’s behaviour towards the people of Aleppo was ‘comparatively mild’.
* It is worth quoting Arnold Toynbee’s verdict on Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual achievements: ‘He is indeed the one outstanding personality in the history of a civilisation whose social life on the whole was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. In his chosen field of intellectual activity he appears to have been inspired by no predecessors, and to have found no kindred souls among his contemporaries, and to have kindled no answering spark of inspiration in any successors; and yet, in the Prolegomena (Muqaddimat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place. It was his single brief “acquiescence” from a life of practical activity that gave Ibn Khaldun his opportunity to cast his creative thought into literary shape.’
* Among these early reports of the sacking of Damascus, opinion was divided as to whether Temur ordered the destruction of the Umayyad Mosque. Schiltberger, the Bavarian whose accounts are littered with inconsistencies, claimed that a bishop, pleading for his life and those of his priests, was told to take them and their families to the mosque for protection. They numbered thirty thousand, he said. ‘Now Temur gave orders that when the temple was full, the people should be shut up in it. This was done. Then wood was placed around the temple, and he ordered it to be ignited, and they all perished in the temple. Then he ordered that each one of his [soldiers] should bring to him the head o
f a man. This was done, and it took three days; then with these heads were constructed three towers, and the city was pillaged.’ The court histories, however, report that Temur did all he could to prevent the conflagration in the mosque.
* In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, the fall of Damascus is similarly grisly. Under siege, the governor of the city stalls for time before surrendering. While he delays, the flags flying in Tamburlaine’s camp change from white to red to black, spelling disaster.
The first day when he pitcheth down his tents,
White is their hue, and on his silver crest,
A snowy feather spangled white he bears,
To signify the mildness of his mind,
That, satiate with spoil, refuseth blood:
But when Aurora mounts the second time,
As red as scarlet is his furniture;
Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood,
Not sparing any that can manage arms:
But if these threats move not submission,
Black are his colours, black pavilion;
His spear, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes,
And jetty feathers menace death and hell;
Without respect of sex, degree, or age,
He razeth all his foes with fire and sword.
In a frantic attempt to save Damascus, the governor sends four virgins to Tamburlaine to plead for mercy ‘with knees and hearts submissive’. The attempt is in vain. The virgins are butchered on the spot, their ‘slaughtered carcasses’ hoisted up onto the city walls, ‘A sight as baneful to their souls, I think,/As are Thessalian drugs or mithridate,’ Tamburlaine observes. ‘But go, my lords,’ he continues, ‘put the rest to the sword.’ Damascus dissolves in flames.
* By the tenth century there were four schools of Islamic law based on the Koran, the hadith and the interpretations of the ulema (clergy). Abu Hanifa (699–767) founded the Hanifite system of jurisprudence which sought new ways of applying the tenets of Islamic law to everyday life. In practice, this interpretation of Muslim law is tolerant of differences within Muslim communities, and gives judges great discretion when neither the Koran nor the Sunna (traditions of the Prophet) are applicable.
9
Bayazid the Thunderbolt
1402
‘To fight is our habit, to join in combat our aim, to struggle for the faith our task. The law of waging war for the cause of Allah Almighty is our rule … Our soldiers spend their lives and wealth for Allah, that they may gain Paradise.’
LETTER FROM SULTAN BAYAZID I TO TEMUR, 1402
‘… Tush, Turks are full of such brags
And menace more than they can well perform.
He meet me in the field and fetch thee hence?
Alas, poor Turk! His fortune is too weak
T’encounter with the strength of Tamburlaine.’
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Tamburlaine the Great
During the recent months of campaigning, while his armies were putting Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad to the sword and the flame, Temur had not neglected the arts of diplomacy. Ambassadors and couriers had been shuttling along the trade routes of Asia to further the conqueror’s interests and damage those of the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I. They had travelled to Manuel II, the enfeebled Byzantine emperor who, under pressure from the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, had fled to Trebizond in northern Turkey where he confirmed his submission to Temur. The Tatar demanded that twenty war galleys be made available to him in advance of his next battle. Similar demands had been brought to Christian Constantinople, temporarily under the command of Manuel’s nephew, Regent John, as well as to the Genoese at Pera on the Bosporus. Representing Catholic Europe, John of Sultaniya, who had been appointed Archbishop of the East and Ethiopia by Pope Boniface IX in 1398, arrived in the Tatar court with messages of goodwill from King Charles VI of France. For all his aspirations to become Islam’s greatest defender, to earn the title of Ghazi, Warrior of the Faith, Temur’s opportunistic instincts allowed him to do business with the infidel with a clear conscience.
By far the most important correspondence, however, was that between Bayazid and Temur. The themes had remained constant since their first diplomatic exchange, but the tone of the letters had become increasingly confrontational. Temur pressed his demands that Bayazid surrender to him his two long-standing adversaries, Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad and the rebellious Turkmen chief Qara Yusuf, both of whom had for years eluded him.
‘Since we have been informed that your master wages war against the infidels of Europe, we have always held back from marching into his country with our army, unwilling to destroy a Muslim country which would only delight the infidels,’ he told the Ottoman envoys. ‘But there is nothing more disagreeable to us than to hear that he grants protection to Qara Yusuf Turcoman, the greatest robber and villain on earth, who pillages merchants, murders travellers and commits a thousand other crimes. What is most dangerous is that the wretch lives in the middle of a Muslim country where he is like a wolf among sheep.’ Bayazid must either try Qara Yusuf and execute him, send him to Temur bound in chains, or expel him from his lands. In addition, he must return the castle of Kamakh on the western Euphrates to its previous master, Temur’s ally Taharten.
But the all-conquering Ottoman, the man who had brought Christian Europe to its knees, was in no mood to compromise. To understand why, we must travel back six years to the disturbed courts of Christendom.
By the closing decade of the fourteenth century, Christian Europe had identified the Ottoman sultan as its greatest danger. At the gates of the continent, Byzantium was breathing her last, strangled by the Turkish forces who encircled her. In 1399 her emperor Manuel II had abandoned her, sailing west with a force of Genoese who had tried, and failed, to raise the Ottoman siege. Constantinople was entrusted to his nephew John. The Christian empire seemed poised to collapse under the sword of Islam. Still worse, from the European monarchs’ perspective, their mainland had been breached and Christian territories taken, first Serbia at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, then Bulgaria in 1393. Bayazid, who had earned the nickname Yilderim (Thunderbolt, or Lightning) on account of the speed with which he moved between his western and eastern fronts, was even now encroaching on Hungary. The push west had to be halted before the Crescent was raised above the entire continent.
Racked by the plague, drained by the Hundred Years’ War, and divided by the Great Schism with one pope in Rome and another in Avignon, Europe was in a perilously weak position from which to defend herself against the burgeoning power of Bayazid. Nevertheless, in recognition of the parlous position in which Christendom found itself, Popes Boniface IX of Rome and Benedict XIII of Avignon joined in calling for a Crusade against the Ottoman.
A Franco-German army was raised under the leadership of Count John of Nevers, son of the Duke of Burgundy. As they marched east, the Crusaders were joined by another force of Germans and a smaller detachment from England. At Buda, their ranks were swelled with King Sigismund of Hungary’s army of about ten thousand. By the time more knights had arrived from Wallachia, Poland, Bohemia, Italy and Spain, the Crusaders numbered around sixteen thousand, one of the largest armies Christendom had ever put into the field.
At Nicopolis on the Danube, they met an Ottoman army of similar size.* Bayazid had abandoned the siege of Constantinople and marched north on learning of their approach. Before the battle began, Sigismund, who was familiar with the Ottoman style of fighting, urged the French to hold back while his light troops charged the enemy lines, at which point the heavy European cavalry would attack. He also did not want his allies to advance too quickly from what was a sound defensive position. But the French and Burgundian Crusaders, hungry for the honour of leading the first charge, appalled by what they took as a slight to their fighting skills, and implacably opposed to entering battle behind men they regarded as peasants, refused to listen. The Count d’Eu grabbed a banner of the Holy Virgin and shouted to his men: ‘Forward in the name of G
od and St George, today you shall see me a valorous knight.’ Thus it was that on the morning of 25 September 1396, bursting with confidence and Christian valour, to rousing cries of ‘For God and St Denis,’ the knights of Europe galloped forward under billowing pennants.
For a while it seemed their impetuousness had succeeded, for the Crusaders, having crossed a ravine and climbed the hill towards their enemy, drove back and cut down the irregular Turkish infantry and light cavalry that faced them. Eventually they broke through the enemy positions, protected by a forest of sharpened wooden stakes, and were on the point of celebrating when disaster suddenly loomed. Sigismund’s advice had been sound. Now, exhausted from their exertions, sweating beneath their heavy armour, the Christians discovered with horror Bayazid’s huge force of heavy cavalry awaiting them over the hill. The knights were on foot, having dismounted before the stakes guarding the Ottoman positions. Worse, the main force of Hungarians was too far behind them to lend immediate support.
Such tactical ineptitude, which divided the Crusading army into two weaker forces, was an unexpected gift to Bayazid. The order was given to charge. The Sipahi cavalry let out a terrible cry, horses’ hoofs thundered across the ground, and the disorganised, disoriented French knights were hacked to pieces. ‘The sound of trumpets rose to the sky,’ wrote the Turkish poet Yusfi Meddah. ‘Over their heads the clashing of swords. The blows seemed to rain down unsparingly. Fine warriors, in their hands maces, make a rending clashing noise as they fight. Arrows fall like rain and warriors seek to scatter arrows, the cowards seek to escape, leaving behind their quivers.’ Six times the banner of the Virgin was knocked to the ground, and six times it was raised again. But the pressure from the Ottomans was too great. When Admiral de Vienne, rallying his Crusaders beneath the banner, was cut down and killed, the French knights surrendered. The Hungarians followed soon after. In desperate retreat, Sigismund managed to find his way back to the Danube, where he boarded a boat and sailed away to safety. ‘We lost the battle by the pride and vanity of those French,’ he famously said. ‘If they had believed my advice, we had enough men to fight our enemies.’
Tamerlane Page 33
