In Herat, I benefited from long conversations with Maulavi Said Mohammed Omar Shahid, President of Herat University, and Maulana Khudad, President of the Council of Mullahs, and in Kabul with the historians Professor Abdul Baqi at Kabul University and Mirza Gul Yawar. Returning to Kabul in the summer of 2004, I was helped around the city by Yama and Dil Mohammed. Ratish Nanda, conservation architect with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, was a thoughtful guide to Babur’s Gardens, then undergoing an impressive and desperately needed restoration.
Khatuna Chkheidze shared her considerable expertise with me in Georgia, where the conqueror, known as ‘Temur the Evil’, is viewed with horror and loathing. She was a marvellous guide to the capital of Tbilisi, which he ravaged on half a dozen occasions. Thanks also to Tedo Japaridze, the President’s National Security Adviser, and David Katsitadze, Chair of the Eastern History Department of Tbilisi State University.
The splendid Shane Winser, Director of the Royal Geographical Society’s Expedition Advisory Centre, rode to the rescue again with her comprehensive database of Central Asian hands, including John Pilkington, who kindly introduced me to Dr Anvar Shakirov at Samarkand State University.
At HarperCollins thanks to Michael Fishwick for his rigorous editing, and to Robert Lacey, Kate Hyde, Caroline Hotblack, Rachel Nicholson and cartographer John Gilkes for their tremendous input. My agent Georgina Capel never flagged. I am grateful, as ever, for her terrific support.
I am indebted to Beatrice Forbes Manz, Associate Professor of History at Tufts University and one of the foremost Temurid scholars, both for her reading suggestions and for her insightful comments on the manuscript. Her study The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane was an essential guide to a complex subject, as was Hilda Hookham’s Tamburlaine the Conqueror. Harold Lamb’s Tamerlane the Earth Shaker, though more dated, gave a sense of the sheer fury of the Tatar conqueror in action. John Woods, Director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at Chicago University and Professor of Iranian and Central Asian History and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, provided an instructive reading list.
Roger Katz at Hatchard’s directed me to Peter Hall’s production of Tamburlaine the Great, which opened the Olivier Theatre at the National in 1976, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ground-breaking production in 1993. The RSC supplied the reviews of Antony Sher’s blood-soaked performance.
Thank you to the staff of the British Library, in particular those in the Rare Books and Music Room, my second home in recent years, and to Murad Esenov, Director of the Centre for Central Asia and Caucasus Studies and editor of the Central Asia and Caucasus Journal in Sweden.
A number of editors provided moral and financial support. My sincere thanks to Michael Prodger and Miriam Gross at the Sunday Telegraph, Mark Amory at the Spectator, Jan Dalley at the Financial Times, David Sexton at the Evening Standard and Nancy Sladek at the Literary Review for their encouragement during this project. Thanks also to Jill James, Gill Plimmer and Rahul Jacob, successive travel editors of the FT, and Cath Urquhart, travel editor of The Times, for allowing me to return to the Muslim world at a time when it was not at the top of everyone’s list of holiday destinations.
Friends and colleagues were kind enough to help me during my research. Andrew Roberts alerted me to Anthony Powell’s reference to Tamburlaine. Calum Macleod, co-author of the first-rate guidebook Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand, provided the illustration of Soviet archaeologist Mikhail Gerasimov admiring Tamerlane’s skull. Thanks to John Adamson at Peterhouse, Cambridge; Christina Lamb; Matthew Leeming; Bijan Omrani; David Stern, the FT’s Central Asia correspondent; Masoud Golsorkhi, editor of TANK magazine John Murphy; and the incomparable Tom Sutherland at the Travellers Club. The Writers in Prison section of International PEN provided a great deal of information on the abysmal human rights situation in Uzbekistan.
Writers need to eat. I pay tribute to the excessively generous hospitality of my uncle and aunt, Nick and Susan Ward, my neighbours in Norfolk who feasted me handsomely in all seasons, not least during the long winters when I laid waste to their cellar.
I would like to thank Clementine, aged nine, who has had to put up with her stepfather disappearing regularly to various countries ending in ‘stan’, and who has become a juvenile expert on Central Asia. Last of all, I must sing the praises of my wife Julia, whose life has been consumed by the Scourge of God for longer than either of us expected, and who has read and edited the manuscript more times than she would care to remember. I am thankful for her understanding about my absences, for her patience, encouragement, humour and love.
My parents have always been inspiring, devoted and loving champions. I had hoped my father would live to see this book published. That was not possible, but Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World is dedicated to my mother and to his memory.
About the Author
JUSTIN MAROZZI was born in 1970 and read History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. A former Financial Times foreign correspondent, he writes regularly for the FT, Sunday Telegraph, The Times and Spectator, where he was a contributing editor until disappearing to Central Asia to research this book. He has also written for the Economist and broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four. His first book, South from Barbary, was an account of a 1,200-mile journey by camel along the old slave routes of the Libyan Sahara. He is married and lives in Norfolk and London.
Praise
From the reviews of Tamerlane:
‘[An] impressive biography of the warrior king … thrilling if grisly reading’
MICHAEL PRODGER, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
‘A gripping tale … This is not just a biography; it is also a travel book. Mr Marozzi has traced in person much of Temur’s relentless campaign trail, and he elegiacally shows us how far Samarkand and Bukhara, once the most glorious cities in Asia, have descended’
Economist
‘Excellent … Marozzi provides a superbly rounded and vivid portrait of one of history’s most fascinating personalities’
ANDREW ROBERTS, Evening Standard
‘As well researched in libraries as with boots on the ground in some of the world’s more impenetrable places, this is a fine study of a neglected but linchpin historical figure’
Daily Mail
‘Justin Marozzi has a good story to tell and he tells it very well’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Marozzi creates a convincing portrait of a complex man living in an unsettled world … he has brought the mighty warrior in from the cold and allowed him to stalk these pages with bloody magnificence’
Sunday Times
‘Justin Marozzi’s assured biography … is a real education … he brilliantly conveys how everything goes in cycles, both in nature and in human affairs’
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE, Daily Telegraph
‘Outstanding … Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians’
JOHN ADAMSON, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
‘Robust, enthusiastic and richly detailed … full of fascinating, if often gruesome, anecdotes. Marozzi’s travels bring Tamerlane and his violent reign to life’
Literary Review
‘An engaging mixture of history, travelogue and contemporary reportage … well written and skilfully put together … Mr Marozzi is a romantic with an observant eye, and he has chosen his subject well’
JONATHAN SUMPTION, Sunday Telegraph
‘Temur’s story is indeed sensational … this book is captivating, a delightful and fortunate conjunction between the world of Temur then and that world transformed today, between history and journalism’
ALLAN MASSIE, Spectator
‘A fascinating read that’s as much travelogue as history’
Wallpaper
‘Illuminating’
Financial Times
By the Same Author
South From Barbary
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