Such effusive flattery would only have been enhanced by the accompanying gift of two hundred horses.†
By the dawn of the fifteenth century, Temur was at last ready to turn from weasel words to war. At this time a Chinese embassy from Peking arrived at his court to demand tribute, which Temur had neglected to pay for seven years, despite occupying lands along his eastern borders in Moghulistan that were traditionally held in fief to the Chinese emperor. The envoy, whose stay in Samarkand coincided with Clavijo’s diplomatic mission, reminded the Tatar emperor that no tribute had been received. He was humiliatingly rebuffed, as the startled Spaniard reported: ‘The answer of his Highness to these ambassadors was that this was most true, and that he was about to pay what was due: but that he would not burden them, the ambassadors, to take it back to China on their return, for he himself Temur would bring it. This of course was all said in scorn and to spite them, for his Highness had no intention to pay that tribute.’ On another occasion, noticing that the envoy from Peking was occupying a seat above those of the Spaniards, Temur gave orders for their positions to be reversed. The Chinese ambassador, he proclaimed to his hushed audience, ‘was the envoy of a robber and a bad man, the enemy of Temur’. Then he gave a clear sign that the days of diplomacy and tribute were over. War was in the offing. ‘If only God were willing, he Temur would before long see to it that never again would any Chinaman dare come with such an embassy as this man had brought.’
The reasons for the dramatic shift in Temur’s relations with Peking are not difficult to fathom. For years he had been biding his time. Highly pragmatic in his choice of opponents, he would not move until his armies were sufficiently large and powerful to challenge the greatest ruler in the East. Nor would he undertake such a long and testing campaign until his main rivals on the world stage had been destroyed. To the north, the Golden Horde had been crushed. To the south, Delhi had been utterly ravaged. To the west, the Ottoman and Mamluk empires had folded before the Tatar onslaught. To the east, China alone remained outside his orbit, the last affront to the man who aspired to rule the world. The road east was now open to his armies.
Temur knew China’s capital was a treasure house without parallel in the world. In 1404, his envoy returned from Peking to Samarkand with Ambassador An. The official reported that the Chinese capital was twenty times larger than Tabriz. If that was true, wrote Clavijo, then ‘it must indeed be the greatest city in all the world’. Temur was also told, though this was less welcome news, that the Ming armies were as numerous as the sands of the desert:
The man further reported that the Emperor of China was lord of so many warriors that when his host went forth to wage war beyond the limits of his Empire, without counting those who marched with him he could leave four hundred thousand horsemen behind to guard his realm together with numerous regiments of footguards. As that man further reported, it was the order current in China that no nobleman should be allowed to appear publicly on horseback unless he kept in his service at his call at least a thousand horsemen and yet of the like of such nobles the number to be met with was very large. Many were the other wonderful facts that were further related of the capital and country of China.
This was the kingdom Temur resolved to conquer. It was a question of destiny, the final decisive play in a brilliant game of chess. The opening gambit had been made six years earlier. Fortresses had been built, agricultural land reclaimed along his eastern marches, all in preparation for this, his ultimate campaign. For years he had roved outside Mawarannahr, ranging his armies against his opponents like the most consummate grandmaster, toppling kingdoms and enlarging his empire with every move he made. For the most part he had directed his furious energy against the west. Now, at his command and under his immutable will, his ranks of Tatar pawns advanced ever farther east.
Allahdad, one of Temur’s most trusted amirs, was sent east and instructed to prepare a detailed survey of the land the Tatars would have to cross to reach the Chinese capital. His formidable assignment was to ‘make a map of those regions and describe their condition in his reply, that he might explain to Temur the situation of those realms and show the nature of the way through them and the paths and explain to him the nature of their cities and their villages, valleys and mountains, castles and forts, the nearer parts and the remote, the deserts and hills, wastes and deserts, landmarks and towers, waters and rivers, tribes and families, passes and broad roads, places marked and those without signs of the way, dwelling places and houses for travellers, its empty places and its people, weaving the path of a diffuse style and avoiding abridgement and omission and explaining the distances between all the stages and the manner of the journey between all the dwelling places’.
The northern route to China was considered the only practical choice. This was the route Ambassador An had taken on his journey from Peking. To the north of the icy Tien Shan Celestial Mountains it traversed Semirechye, the Land of the Seven Rivers – which flowed into Lake Balkash – east of Mawarannahr. This route crossed steppe with decent grazing for the horses, the single most important consideration in the complex web of Temur’s military logistics.
Allahdad had been involved in plans for this campaign from an early stage. In the winter of 1401–02, while Temur wintered in the pastures of the Qarabagh, he was on his way to the eastern marches with orders to develop agricultural land to feed the armies and build bases from which to launch the attack. One fort was to be built ten days’ march from Ashpara, east of the Sir Darya river. Another was constructed still closer to China, next to Lake Issykul. These preparations were in addition to those Temur had begun as early as 1396, when he had spent two years in Samarkand beautifying his capital and planning for war in the east. It is clear that this was no casual undertaking. Temur had appointed his grandson and heir Mohammed Sultan, at the head of forty thousand troops and a number of the most prominent amirs, to supervise the construction of fortresses and to reclaim and irrigate the agricultural land that had been abandoned in those regions. Unruly tribes had been assimilated into the Tatar armies or eliminated.
Allahdad completed his mission successfully. He used ‘many leaves of glistening papyrus’ to make the map, carefully folded into a neat rectangle. All of the details required by Temur were included, and nothing was omitted. According to Arabshah, he finished it in good time, too. The emperor received it while he was still marching through Asia Minor with his army, on his way back to Samarkand.
As war approached, activity along the eastern marches intensified. With the building work complete, the priority was to grow sufficient crops and rear enough animals to feed the great army that swept through kingdoms like locusts. Every farmer and villager from Samarkand to Ashpara was ordered to ‘cease business and trade and in word and deed give themselves to tilling the soil and farming’. If need be, men and women should forgo the five daily prayers required by Islam in favour of working the land. Sometimes Allah had to take second place. A sense of urgency gripped the empire. In the heaving bazaars and alleys of Samarkand, in the many-domed mosques and madrassahs, the manicured parks and palaces, the talk was all of this latest expedition. Like a loyal mistress the city missed Temur during his campaigns, but always waited patiently and expectantly for his triumphal return. All knew that war with China represented his most awesome challenge yet. Many feared that their masterful emperor had finally overextended himself. For all his previous victories, a single defeat at the hands of the most powerful army on earth now threatened the entire empire. The stakes had never been higher.
The spring of 1403 brought two surprises and one tragedy for the elderly emperor. Temur and his army were still crossing Asia Minor towards Samarkand and China when he received news that Sultan Bayazid, his most famous captive, had died while travelling under escort with the imperial baggage caravan. Temur’s personal doctor had been unable to save him. The sources differ on how the fallen Ottoman met his end. Gout, asthma, apoplexy, a broken heart, even suicide have all been cited as the cause
of death. While there is no reason to believe that the news would have brought much satisfaction to a ruler who was himself approaching his seventieth birthday, there is something of the crocodile about the tears Yazdi has him shedding: ‘Temur was so extremely affected that he bewailed the misfortune of that great prince with tears. He began to reflect how providence often baffles human projects for he had resolved … to raise the dejected spirit of Bayazid by re-establishing him on the throne with greater power and magnificence than he had enjoyed before.’
Such plans, were they real or imagined, had been dashed. But there was far worse news to follow. A messenger galloped into the imperial camp at Aq Shahr with a desperate report. Mohammed Sultan lay desperately sick. He had never fully recovered from the wounds received at Ankara. Without betraying any emotion, Temur gave orders for Bayazid’s body to be sent to Brusa ‘with all the pomp and magnificence’ due to a great king. He presented the Ottoman’s son Musa Chelebi with a royal vest, a fine belt, a sword, a quiver inlaid with precious stones, thirty horses and a quantity of gold. Only with that business finished did he hurry to the young prince’s camp. By the time he arrived, having been delayed by a rebel Turkmen tribe, his grandson’s condition had worsened. Unable even to speak, he lay on his bed with a deathly pallor across his face. For three days he was carried in a litter, but it was too late. Four days after the death of Bayazid, the youthful Mohammed Sultan, a lion on the battlefield and the emperor’s great hope for the future, passed away.
Temur was inconsolable. He had always loved this prince especially. There was a heartbreaking symmetry to his premature death, for he was the oldest son of the emperor’s first-born, Jahangir, who had died at the age of twenty more than a quarter of a century earlier. This young man Temur had favoured above all his other sons and grandsons, confidently making him his heir in recognition of his qualities of leadership, courage, intelligence and military acumen. Even Arabshah, a sworn critic of Temur, acknowledged the fine character of the prince. He was, said the Syrian, ‘a refuge for excellent men and haven for the learned; the signs of felicity appeared in the lines of his brow and the glad news of nobility shone from his features’.
The whole army went into mourning. Its march home and onwards to war had become a great funeral cortège. Everyone wore black. Mohammed Sultan’s mother and Jahangir’s widow, the beautiful Khan-zada, was summoned to meet the army at Avnik in Armenia. Before she reached the town, the prince’s three young sons arrived at Erzerum, a sight so moving to the emperor that the tears poured down his face again. Then there was the mother’s grief to behold. Khan-zada had already lost her husband. Now she had lost her first child. When news reached her of Mohammed Sultan’s death, she collapsed on the spot. Later, when she came to, she pulled her hair out, ripped her clothes and tore her cheeks until they bled. She had never expected her treasured son to fall so young, she wailed. He had been destined to become a great emperor. Now her tears ran like blood, for his death had pierced her like a ‘fatal dagger’.
Death, as the old emperor knew, was stalking him more closely than ever. Men who had shared his victories over the years had started to fall. In recent months, seasoned comrades on the battlefield had been gathered up. Sayf ad-din Nukuz, Temur’s long-serving amir, had died shortly before the decisive encounter with Bayazid. The puppet khan, Sultan Mahmud, a fearless soldier who had captured the escaping Ottoman sultan, had been stricken after the battle. He was not replaced.
Temur ordered Mohammed Sultan’s funeral banquet to be held in Avnik. The lords of Asia came with their condolences, praising Allah for dignifying the world with such a manly prince and warrior. Priests recited from the Koran in a sombre monotone. Mohammed Sultan’s kettle-drum gave its final peal of thunder. All of a sudden, the ladies of the court and the princes, the vassal kings and amirs, the soldiers and the servants, one and all let forth a terrible cry of mourning. Then the drum was smashed to pieces, in honour of Mongol custom. Never would it be sounded in tribute to another prince.
From Avnik, the prince’s coffin was taken to Sultaniya, thence to Samarkand where Temur had ordered the population to observe public mourning. ‘At his approach the people of Samarkand went out and they had covered themselves to meet him with black garments and in black walked noble and humble, base and illustrious, as though the face of the world were covered with a fog of deepest night.’
Temur had demonstrated over the years an almost instinctive inability to pass the Christian kingdom of Georgia without invading it. Though the death of Mohammed Sultan still weighed heavily on him, though his soldiers were battle-weary and his mind was turning towards the forthcoming campaign against China, he was unable even at this moment, in the heat of August, to resist the temptation. Another punitive expedition was ordered against King Giorgi VII, who had failed to present himself at the emperor’s court. This was Temur’s sixth, and last, campaign against the mountain kingdom.
It was harvest time and the Tatars plundered the fields of grain. Then they marched into the higher passes where the fighting was hardest. The chronicles made much of the siege of Kurtin, a famously fortified stronghold which the inhabitants considered impregnable. With cisterns full of water, ‘cellars furnished with delicious wines’ and plentiful supplies of pigs and sheep, the defenders were confident they would see off the Tatars. But one night, while the engineers were building siege engines and battering rams, a soldier slipped through a narrow opening in the rockface and found a way up to the fortress above. Fifty more joined him during the night. At dawn, the cry of ‘Allahu akbar’ resounded from the heights, the Tatar drums thundered, the trumpets sounded and the attack began. The gate was smashed by stones hurled from one of the siege machines, and the garrison was overrun. The governor and his soldiers were beheaded, the troops who had risked their lives in the assault handsomely rewarded. Temur gave them robes, swords, belts of honour, horses, mules, tents, umbrellas, villages and gardens in their home countries, and, of course, scores of young women.
The campaign continued into the autumn of 1403. Temur advanced into the centre of the country, ‘where he plundered seven hundred towns and villages, laying waste the cultivated lands, ruining the monasteries of the Christians and razing their churches to the very foundations’. The zeal with which he was all of a sudden pursuing the infidels, after decades butchering countless Muslims, was an indication, perhaps, that he knew he did not have long to live. From Smyrna, he had hastened to Georgia; from there he was bound for China.
Through a number of distinguished Georgian prisoners taken in the early exchanges, Temur conducted negotiations for King Giorgi’s surrender. Given the expedition that awaited him, he was not prepared to delay long in this region. Eventually, though the king still refused to appear in Temur’s court, he sent envoys carrying a thousand gold coins struck in the emperor’s name, a thousand horses, vessels of gold, silver and crystal, many cloths and a fabulously large balas ruby. Temur pronounced himself satisfied with this show of submission and the army continued east. More churches and monasteries were burnt to the ground around the capital of Tiflis, and then the Tatar hordes were gone. Georgia had been devastated again. Its fields lay bare, its coffers empty. Whole towns and villages had disappeared in the carnage. Rotting corpses were piled in the roads. Minarets of skulls, the tallest structures standing, rose from the quagmire. Winter was fast approaching and icy winds tore through the valleys. Temur’s Tatar hordes had raped and killed and torched and plundered until there was no more to be taken. Silence hung over the stricken kingdom. The only blessing, though none knew it, was that the Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes would never return.
Temur wintered for the last time in the high pastures of the Qarabagh. Here, his remorseless energy showed no signs of subsiding. He threw himself back into the business of empire, rebuilding the derelict town of Baylaqan and granting sons and grandsons territories. The crown of Hulagu, once ruled by the disgraced Miranshah, was divided between Abubakr, the prince’s eldest son, who took B
aghdad and Iraq, and Omar, his second son, who was given the northern regions, including Tabriz and Sultaniya. Abubakr was ordered to rebuild Baghdad.* Dynastic considerations were beginning to crowd in on him. The aged emperor was plotting a smooth succession after his death. His grandson Pir Mohammed was given the city of Shiraz. The young man’s brother Rustam assumed control of Isfahan, while another of his brothers, Iskander, took Hamadan. Prince Khalil Sultan received lands between the Caucasus and Trebizond on the northern coast of Asia Minor.
After the recent deaths of Bayazid and Mohammed Sultan, Amir Sayf ad-din Nukuz and Sultan Mahmud, Temur hardly needed any more reminders of his own mortality. But in the spring of 1404, as the great body of the Tatar army moved out of the pastures after a last spectacular hunt, he suffered another personal loss. Shaykh Baraka, his spiritual mentor, the man who had accompanied him on his campaigns for years, who had roused him and his troops to a magnificent procession of victories, came west to express his sorrow at the death of Temur’s heir. The Tatar’s joy at this unexpected reunion was all too brief. This was the last time they would meet. Baraka followed Bayazid and Mohammed Sultan to his grave soon afterwards.
The march home continued, and the administration of empire with it. Travelling with his mobile court, Temur handed out judgements, listened to petitions and grievances, received tribute from vassal rulers or their envoys, and executed officials who had abused their positions. Such affairs of state mattered little to the rank-and-file soldiers. Their thoughts and daydreams were centred on getting back to Mawarannahr. Each step took them nearer home.
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