"After Tamerlane had overcome Bayezid and returned to his own country, he went to war with the king-sultan, who is the chief king among Infidels. He took with him 12 hundred thousand men, went into his territory, and lay siege to a city called Hallapp, which contains 4 hundred thousand houses. Then the lord and governor of the city took with him 80 thousand men, and went out and fought with Tamerlane, but he could not overcome him, and fled again into the city, and many people were killed in his flight. He continued to defend himself, but Tamerlane took a suburb on the fourth day, and the people he found in it he threw into the moat of the city, put timbre and mire upon them, and filled the moat in four places. The moat was 12 fathom deep, and cut in the solid rock. Then he stormed the city, and took it by assault and captured the governor, and fully occupied the city… ."
Last episode we had a look at Schiltberger’s time among the Ottomans, and a tumultuous time it was, as he first sought escape, then rode with his long-time captors, if we can still call them that, on a series of military expeditions that culminated in the Battle of Angora. Bayezid’s sons are going to be struggling to put the pieces back together after that disaster, and, as you might guess from the fact that the Ottoman Empire would live to see World War 1, at least one of them would find some success in doing so. However, we’re not going to be following that today. We’ll continue with Schiltberger as he tells of his new circumstances, and of Timur the Conqueror.
As I mentioned last episode, some of the events in this one actually occurred before Timur defeated Bayezid and before Schiltberger’s time with him, but I’m telling the story in this order partly because it’s the order Schiltberger told it in and also because it lets us bundle all the Timur material neatly together. Some items to clarify immediately: the Tamerlane referred to a moment ago in that Schiltberger quote, is, in fact, Timur. “Tamerlane,” perhaps the name you’re more familiar with, is an anglicization of the Farsi, Temur-i lang, meaning Timur the Lame, the “lame” part being the unfortunate result of an early-life sheep raid that had earned Timur an arrow in the leg. Further clarification, this king-sultan Schiltberger mentions is the Mamluk sultan of Egypt who we met last episode, Nasir ad-din Faraj, and, finally, the “Hallap” which Timur was besieging was in fact a city you’ve probably heard quite a bit about in recent years. Timur was besieging Aleppo.
Schiltberger’s description of this event, though he clearly wasn’t there himself, gives us a picture of the kind of brutality that Timur is well known for. Remember him bloodlessly, oh so bloodlessly, burying the defenders of Sivas alive? Here we see him filling a 12 fathom moat with people, at four places. 12 fathoms, if you’re not sure what that equates to, is apparently 72 feet, or about 22 metres, and I haven’t found a good source for how deep this moat really was, and if this is even remotely accurate, but that’s a lot of space to have to fill with human bodies.
It should be noted, for fairness, or at least completeness, that Timur perhaps did feel provoked into action. He had sent an envoy to the Mamluk Sultan, but the governor of Damascus had ordered this ambassador taken and then cut in half at the the waist. Maybe Timur needed no excuse to engage in warfare - he rarely did - and maybe shared faith would never have deterred him from invading Syria - it wouldn’t deter his attack on the Otttomans - but this killing of an ambassador was a clear end to any possibility of peace.
In the fall of 1400 Timur moved south, putting the Ottomans aside for a few years and taking one fortress after another until he reached Aleppo. Following battle before the city, in which a feigned flight, a classic Mongol tactic, led first to envelopment of the defenders and then a successful siege, Timur’s army gained the city. Schiltberger describes what follows very briefly: they “pillaged it.” Other sources, however, paint a picture of widespread violence, days of massacre, burning, and looting culminating in Timur’s grisly trademark: looming pyramids of heads.
This might be as good a time as any to rewind a little and establish who Timur was. If you’re not familiar with him, you might be wondering who exactly we’re talking about, this shadowy figure appearing out of the void to crush the Ottomans and sweep across Syria. Something of an answer to that question will become clear in the telling, but for now we should establish the basics before looking at Schiltberger’s depiction of Timur’s deeds.
The Conqueror was by this point already well established as an enormously powerful figure. For roughly 30 years, his armies had been on the move, from Baghdad to Moscow to Delhi, building what we now call the Timurid Empire, the Turco-Mongol power that spread across Central Asia in the late 14th century. Timur was born near Samarkand, in present day Uzbekistan, at a place called Shahrisabz, the green city. You’ll often see April 9th, 1336, listed as the exact date of birth, but this may simply have been an invention of the chroniclers. That aside, it’s hard to be more precise than some time in the 30s.
The area he was raised within had been part of the Mongol Khanate, specifically, the Chagatai Khanate where Genghis Khan’s second son Chagatai had ruled, and the tribe he was part of, the Barlas, marked its descent from within Genghis’ confederation. Their religion was Islam, their language Turkic, and, in keeping with their Mongol history, they were nomads, or at least semi-nomadic, reliant on the horse in all things, and in battle and hunting on the composite bow, crafted of wood, horn, and sinew. His armies were modelled on the old Mongol decimal system, divisible in neat units of tens and hundreds, and with subsumed peoples scattered throughout.
He was ever active. In him there seems to have existed a constant thirst for fresh conquest which might have been driven equally by a drive to embody Genghis and a need to retain the loyalty of his great horde. Recognizing that an army which regularly had opportunities for plunder was a happy army, a well payed and a unified one, he was constantly campaigning, pressing for fresh conquests even when his advisors cautioned him against pushing on. In his military campaigns, Timur would, for the most part, not break new ground. His advance was that of a tide coming back in, retracing the steps of the earlier Mongol conquests or actually coming at the expense of fellow heirs to Genghis’s legacy, as in the case of his ongoing conflict with the Golden Horde.
The narrative value of that legacy was not at all lost to Timur, who sought to connect himself to the great khan, for example through marriage to a dead rival’s widow, the daughter of the region’s last Chagitai Khan, allowing Timur to trace a line right back to Genghis. This he did, referring to himself as son in law to the Great Khan, and later establishing a puppet Chagitati Khan as supreme ruler.
Even as he sought to evoke the memory of a proud Mongol past, he looked, if often in a highly selective way, to the laws of Islam and declared himself “the sword of Islam.” Timur recognized as his teacher Imam Sayid Baraka, a man he held in such high esteem that he wanted to be buried next to him, facing him, so that, as one chronicle has it “... at the day of judgement, when every one should lift up their hands to heaven to implore assistance of some intercessor, he might lay hold on the robe of this child of the prophet Muhammed.” On Timur’s banner, the horse’s tail, a powerful Mongol symbol, flew alongside the crescent. This mixture, of Genghis and Muhammad, carried forward through aggressively militant expansion and atrocity, had proved a potent one, and from early opportunism in seizing local power, Timur had swept outwards with little in the way of setbacks or defeats. By the time he enters our story, he’s at his peak, an old man certainly, but one wielding immense power and still doing so in the field, not from the safety of his palace. As Schiltberger tells us, after Aleppo fell, Damascus was not far behind.
Schiltberger pauses briefly over the wonders of Damascus, turning, as he sometimes does, to a kind of travel writer for a moment, selling us on the sights to be seen. The temple, he says, is grand enough to require 40 external gates, and within are hung 12 thousand lamps, many being silver and gold, of which 9 thousand are lit daily, save on Friday when all of them are lit. That established, Schiltberger tells us of the Mamluk Sultan coming out to intervene on Damascus’ behalf, sending 12 thousand men to its defence and with 30 thousand moving to meet Timur. Nasir ad-din Faraj will not oppose Timur in battle however, instead retreating back towards his own capital in the face of the conqueror’s advance, leaving poisoned water and grasslands behind him to blunt pursuit. Timur, rather than lose further men in such a chase, turns back to Damascus.
Schiltberger has this to say of what happens there:
Then he turned against Damascus and besieged it for 3 months, but could not take it. During those 3 months they fought every day, and when the 12 thousand men saw that they had no assistance from their lord, they asked Timur to be allowed to pass. He consented, and they left the city at night and returned to their lord. Then Timur stormed the city and took it by assault. And now, soon after he had taken the city, came to him a [ kind of bishop ] and fell at his feet, and begged for mercy for himself and his priests. Timur ordered that he should go with his priests into the temple; so the priests took their wives, their children, and many others, into the temple for protection, until there were 30 thousand young and old. Now Timur gave orders that when the temple was full, the people inside 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 fire. Then he ordered that each one of his soldiers should bring him the head of a man. This was done, and it took 3 days; then with these heads were constructed three towers, and the city was pillaged.
The famed traveller Ibn Battuta had visited Damascus in 1326, around 75 years earlier. He had said of it then that it “surpassed all other cities in beauty, and no description, however full, c[ould] do justice to its charms.” Of its ill-fated Umayyad Mosque, he said it was “the most magnificent mosque in the world, the finest in construction and noblest in beauty, grace and perfection; it was matchless and unequalled.” As a man who had seen a great many great cities, he had some basis for comparison.
The details of the taking of Damascus, unsurprisingly vary significantly in the telling. Accounts other than Schiltberger’s actually place the Mamluk Sultan’s army within sight of the city walls, a sight which inspires the defenders to stream forth to establish positions outside the walls and offer battle, thinking the winds turning in their favour. Imagine their bitter surprise to find one morning that by the rising sun, Nasir’s army was no longer visible. It had melted away in the night, and was bound for Cairo to face down a rival’s bid for power.
Another detail which Schiltberger’s telling omits is of a negotiated surrender on the part of the city. This was apparently followed by a spirited assault on Timur’s soldiers made by a group of hold-outs in the citadel. Perhaps this was what provoked Timur’s orders that the city was to be destroyed, its people slaughtered, and its treasures and other material goods plundered. There is some argument as to whether or not Timur did in fact order the burning of the Umayyad Mosque; some even say he wished to save it from the fires that had spread. There is little disagreement over the aftermath, the ruinous violence that was done to the city and its people.
The 15th century Egyptian historian Ibn Taghribirdi wrote of 19 days of killing and rape. performed on a mass scale, after which survivors were bound and taken away, leaving children under the age of 5. The city was then torched. He concludes, “Timur, may god curse him, departed from Damascus having been there 80 days. The whole city had been 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. Of the other mosques of the city, its palaces, caravanserais, and baths, nothing remained but wasted ruins and empty traces; only a vast number of children were left there who died, or were destined to die, of hunger.” It’s not an image I like to linger over, but we should recognize that Timur does not merely seem a brutal figure across the great distance of time and culture. He is a brutal figure, and, as we’ll see, is said to be responsible for a number of atrocities of this sort.
These horrors aside, there is another episode to the story of Timur in Damascus which I’d like to touch on. Timur was not the only giant of his era present there. Damascus was a thriving centre, and doubtless housed many prominent figures of the time, but there was also a guest then in the city, a man born in Tunis but widely travelled, a lifelong intriguer and player of politics, a qadi, or judge, familiar with power, but also a philosopher of history of startling originality, a famed historian in fact, widely respected long after his death: in Damascus at the time was Ibn Khaldun.
Ibn Khaldun spent 35 days about Timur’s camp, often in conversation with him, and in a letter written shortly thereafter, he spoke of the him in terms that were somewhat surprising given his position as a qadi appointed Timur’s enemy, the Mamluk Sultan in Cairo. He wrote:
This king Timur is one of the greatest and mightiest of kings. Some attribute to him knowledge, others consider him a Shi‘ite because they note his preference for the members of the family of the Prophet; still others attribute to him the employment of magic and sorcery, but in all this there is nothing but rumour. It is simply that he is highly intelligent, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also about what he does not know. He is between sixty and seventy years old. His right knee is lame from an arrow which struck him while raiding in his youth, 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. He is one who is favoured by God—the power is God’s, and He grants it to whom He chooses of his creatures.”
Unfortunately for us, Ibn Khaldun, with his 35 days of familiarity, his knowledge and theories of history, and his general worldliness, was really in a better place to provide observations on Timur than our friend Schiltberger was. It would be more than a year after the taking of Damascus that Schiltberger himself would fall under Timur’s control, and even then, what must his life have been like? Unlike his time with the Ottomans, there will be no indications of any agency whatsoever, no “and I was also there and went with them.” Not for a while at least. Perhaps this was because his freedoms were severely limited; maybe he lived in chains for a period, or in a similar situation, simply unable to really go anywhere once dragged back to Samarkand after the battle of Angora. And yet, Schiltberger does eventually say of Timur that he “rode after him,” meaning he followed him, among his retinue or army. Possibly then, he simply did not want to speak of taking part in actions on Timur’s behalf of partaking in the slaughter that implied, and who could blame him for that?
Whatever the case may be, we have, in the meantime, Schiltberger the reporter, giving his account of further episodes he was certainly not present for. There are two of those items I think I should cover here, events which Schiltberger must have learned of one way or another after being captured from the Ottomans. In the first case, he had not yet even left Bavaria and could not have imagined the life ahead.
It was 1387, and Timur was besieging Isfahan, a city south of Tehran described by ibn Battuta as “one of the largest and fairest of cities,” boasting “apricots of unequalled quality with sweet almonds in their kernels, quinces whose sweetness and size cannot be paralleled, splendid grapes, and wonderful melons.”
Timur actually seems to have come to the city willing to enjoy a peaceful takeover, and he had every reason to think things might come off that way. He had, in recent years, received a letter from the region’s ruler, Shah Shuja Muzaffar of the Muzaffar dynasty, a Persian family that had come to the forefront as the Mongol Ilkhanate had collapsed. The Shah wrote in his letter, quote “... I have tasted all the pleasures I could reasonably expect during the fifty three years I have stayed upon the earth . . . In brief, I die as I have lived, and I have abandoned all the vanities of the world. . . Although it is not at all necessary to commend to you my loved son Zayn al Abidin - God grant him a long life under the shadow of your protection - I leave him to the care of God and your Majesty.” As he departed the earth, Shah Shuja was turning over his domain, his sons’ domain really, to Timur. Even as he left his cities to his sons and nephews he’d signed their futures away, and now Timur was knocking on the gates of Isfahan and making known his intention of cashing that cheque.
Initially, Shah Shuja’s nephew, Shah Mansur, seemed ready to fulfill his uncle’s commitments without violence, and Isfahan’s people gave themselves, and their city, up to Timur and agreed to accept his rule. He, in turn, left 3-6000 men and departed, but when the people knew he was clear of the city and, in other tellings, had an inkling of the ruinous taxation they could expect, they revolted. Schiltberger relates that the people waited until they knew Timur was out of the region, and that they then slaughtered 6000 of Timur’s people. Though the number was likely lower, the risk may have been higher, for other sources tell us that Timur and his army were actually encamped before the city at night when the drumming of an anonymous blacksmith roused the city’s people to violent revolt. By morning at the latest, Timur would have perceived the betrayal, and he would not have been happy.
Indeed, Timur was so unhappy at the turn of events that he ordered the city’s population killed, 70 thousand of them, and he accomplished this in traditional Mongol fashion. Every group of soldiers was responsible for a certain number of Isfahani heads, to be presented for inspection to the officers. It is reported that some of Timur’s men were a little squeamish about proceeding with the mass slaughter and that this drove a healthy market in gently used heads. Such qualms do not seem to have lingered long though, as the killing accelerated, and, as would become typical in stories of cities taken by Timur, great pyramids of skulls formed outside the city. The historian Hafiz-i-Abru is said to have walked round Isfahan after the slaughter and counted 28 towers of 1500 hundred heads each, but I have to imagine he didn’t actually count them; this was a very rough guess, a kind of jelly beans in the jar for crueler times, and I question how accurate such an estimate could possibly be.
But none of this is yet really the horrible part. Schiltberger reports, in an odd complication, that Timur doesn’t just wake up and sack the city. Instead, he tells its rebellious people that he can forgive their transgression, and he will do so, but he’s going to need their archers first. He has something he needs to do, and simple task really, and archers are needed, so the hopeful city sends him 12 thousand of theirs. And he takes them and he cuts off all their thumbs, and he releases them back into the city. He then enters the effectively archerless Isfihan and commences the slaughter. But the horrible part is still to come. For me at least, it comes when Schiltberger tells of the children of Isfahan. Those under 7, and there 7000 of them, are placed on the plain outside the city, and, unlike Bayezid, Timur will not listen to his councillors’ pleas on their behalf, does not allow himself to be moved to mercy. Instead he orders them trampled by horse and he actually makes the first passes himself when his people are initially reluctant to do so. Then he sets fire to the city, and he leaves.
The other event that Schiltberger reports on, which brings us forward again to March, 1398, is Timur’s invasion of Northern India. Schiltberger, working in nicely balanced figures, tells us that Timur made preparations for four months, for he was set on a destination that was four months distant from his capital, and that he eventually went forth with an army of 400 thousand. Let’s hear his description of the expedition:
When the time came … he crossed a desert of 20 days’ journey; there, is a great want of water, and then he got to a mountain which it took him 8 days, before he came out of it. On this mountain there is a path, where camels and horses must be bound to planks and lowered. Then he came to a valley where it is so dark, that people cannot see each other by the light of day, and it is of half a day’s journey. Then he came to a high mountainous country, in which he travelled for three days and three nights, and then got to a beautiful plain, where lies the capital of the country.
It’s an evocative description, but it doesn’t quite communicate how dramatic a venture this was. Know first, that this is a 1,500 km road trip, about 1,000 miles, but that this number does not take into account the varied and difficult terrain involved, terrain that could easily turn it into a 2,000 km endeavour. There are rivers, deserts, and the Hindu Kush mountain range with its stunning 25,000 foot peaks; no easy task for 400k or even, as it more likely was, 90k people to accomplish, and with perhaps twice that many horses along as well. The whole thing would have been a tremendous feat of logistics and survival: here building a bridge over the Oxus so that they might cross; there turning aside with a fraction of his army to deal with the Katir.
The Katir were a tribal group inhabiting this mountain region, and Hilda Hookham describes their near legendary status well: they were “fire-worshippers… they were said to be huge as giants, speaking in an unknown language, clad in black, with hearts as dark as their clothes; others were said to go quite naked.” They were said to have resisted Alexander the Great when he’d gone East, and now Timur was not going to leave them at his back as he proceeded towards Delhi. But to dislodge them was not going to be easy. He and this section of his army were operating at over 12,000 feet in treacherous, icy, conditions. At points, his men would need to lower him, supposedly 1,000 feet, on a litter. They’d try the same with horses, but it wasn’t feasible; the horses didn’t survive. So they went on unmounted, Timur included, until they reached the Katir stronghold. The resistance was fierce, but that only guaranteed the result, towers of skulls, and Timur went on, rejoining the main body of his troops and getting closer to Delhi.
They would stop at Kabul in August, receiving ambassadors, promises of loyalty, and treasure, and then they’d move on, reaching the Indus in September, there again building a bridge for the purpose and crossing the river in two days. By October, they reached Multan, in present day Pakistan, where Timur’s grandson Pir Mohammed had, with the army’s vanguard, been besieging the city. Both besiegers and besieged were in dreadful shape, beaten down by disease and starvation, even said to be reduced to eating human corpses inside the walls, but the coming of Timur and his fresh men and horses broke the deadlock, prompting surrender. The full army moved on, levelling villages that may have been complicit in resisting Pir Mohammed. There are stories here of massacres, and of mass imprisonments, the countryside starting to empty out before him as he destroyed what could not be plundered.
By December, the trek is nearly over. Delhi is waiting, described by Arabshah as “a great city, where men skilled in various arts are gathered; a home of merchants, a mine of gems and perfumes. Too great to besiege.” And even if it’s been weakened by internal division, it’s still waiting with a Sultan Mahmud who was not inclined to surrender and had 10 thousand horse, 20-40 thousand infantry, and, most terrifyingly, 120 war elephants to support him.
The first encounter is but a small battle, advance units against a cavalry sortie from the city, but it seems to have triggered two things. One: Timur, not wanting to get bogged down in a sustained siege, found that he could in fact draw the city’s defenders out into open battle. Two: the prisoners taken thus far on the campaign cheered uproariously as they saw those defenders riding out, and this apparently made Timur extremely nervous. So overcome with apprehension was he, that he ordered all of the prisoners killed immediately, purportedly as many as 50 to 100 thousand of them. Supposedly, Timur objected to the inclusion of these numbers in the court chronicles, comparing himself to a chef, and arguing that his work ought to be judged by the meal produced, and not by the gore on his hands as he prepared it. But either way, he now needn’t worry about uprisings from within his encampment and he could focus entirely on the task before him.
And before him were those war elephants. People often argue that elephants in war are nowhere near as effective as you might think, but I suspect that’s not something you internalize when you’re across the field from them. These were 120, 400 in Schiltberger’s telling, living, breathing, war machines, giants wrapped in armour, boasting squads of archers, greek fire, protective turrets, and, though it at first sounds unnecessary, tusk mounted scimitars that were, though it sounds spectacularly unnecessary, said to be poisoned. Your first sight of these monsters could, I’m sure, easily make you forget you were there along with a nigh-invincible 90,000 man army, an army that had itself spread terror across a huge stretch of the world. Timur needed an answer to this problem, and the one he would arrive at was cruel, clever, and effective.
It was the 17th of December when Sultan Mahmud’s army came out to offer combat. Timur’s astrologers had not offered him positives signs, but his reading of the Quran for that day spoke of better things, an omnipotent figure destroying a people, and so the day was approved. From the chronicler Yazdi, we read:
“So hot a battle was never seen before. The fury of soldiers was never carried to so great excess; and so frightful a noise was never heard: for the cymbals, the common kettle-drums, the drums and trumpets, with the great brass kettle-drums which were beat on the elephants’ backs, the bells which the Indians sounded, and the cries of the soldiers, were enough to make even the earth to shake.”
Initial maneuverings went Timur’s way, and his enemy’s left flank was in disarrayed retreat when the elephants were signalled forward.
On Timur’s side, trenches had been dug and reinforced, buffaloes lashed together as living walls before them, caltrops fashioned and placed, and something else was made ready too. As Schiltberger tells us, one of Timur’s councillors had stepped forward and offered some advice, advice that was put into practice and executed:
...Suleyman advised, that camels should be taken and wood fastened on them, and when the elephants advanced, the wood should be ignited, and the camels driven up against the elephants; thus would they be subdued by the fire and the cries of the camels, because the elephants are afraid of fire. Then Timur took 20 thousand camels and prepared them as above described, and the Sultan came with his elephants in front. Timur went to meet him, and drove the camels up against the elephants, the wood on them being on fire. The camels cried out, and when the elephants saw the fire and heard the great cries, they took to flight, so that none could hold them.
When the elephants broke, running in fearful panic from Timur’s burning camels, they inflicted terrible damage on their own side. It needed only one last push, a charge from Pir Mohammed on Timur’s right, to send the soldiers of Delhi running for the shelter of their walls. The day, the field, and the city were all Timur’s.
In Schiltberger’s telling that was about the end of it. The brilliant and repulsive burning of 20 thousand camels had brought about his victory and all that was left was for his opposite number to pledge allegiance, military support when it was asked for, many precious stones, and 2 zentner of the gold of India, roughly 200 pounds. Timur then returned to his own country and took with him 100 war elephants, elephants which, as we know, he’d be putting to use soon at Angora.
But there was a bit more to his army’s taking of Delhi than this. It was not nearly so neat and tidy as an agreement made after the battle and both sides going their peaceful ways. There was the triumphal entry into the city first, with Timur accepting the submission of its most noteworthy people and viewing with approval a parade of the elephants, themselves made to kneel before him to the accompaniment of celebratory music and commemorative poetry. Then there was the business of the city’s ransom, collected from each citizen according to their rank and wealth. There were a lot of Timur’s soldiers within the city now, accomplishing their various tasks, and more streamed in, for over the next week the city gates were left open out of respect. Soon there were said to be 15 thousand of Timur’s fighters inside the walls, and the result starts to seem inevitable, building towards an ugly end.
It’s hard to pick out a first act here, a kicking off of violence, an initial disagreement, but there are reports that the terrible ransoms being demanded and the abuses of the soldiers caused people to rise up, either in violence against the soldiers or against themselves as they torched their own houses and flung themselves in. Timur’s emirs are said to have tried to contain matters by shutting the gates, but his men forced them open again, letting those outside pour in to take part in the extremely bloody sacking of Delhi and the construction of the usual towers of skulls.
There is disagreement over exactly to what degree these events were beyond Timur’s foresight or control. He was, as Hookham points out, not in the habit of leaving sources of wealth behind after a conquest, and he was much more inclined to satisfy his own troops than he was to any acts of mercy. Whether or not he was, as reported, enjoying a banquet at the time, it seems unlikely that would have objected to what happened.
There were other battles, other sieges and slaughters, on this campaign, but we’re going to leave Timur and his men to stagger home under the weight of obscene wealth. We’ll wait for them in Samarkand, the city Schiltberger was bound for after the Battle of Angora. We have little in the way of clues as to his life there, but we know quite a bit of about his new home.
One source for this knowledge is a Castillian ambassador by the name of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo of Madrid who left us a wonderful travel narrative titled “Life and Acts of the Great Tamerlane, with a description of the lands of his empire and lordship.” Among those present at the Battle of Angora had been a pair of knights sent by Henry the third of Castile, who sent his embassies widely. They had been well treated by Timur, and, soon after, Henry had received an envoy with gifts and greetings from Timur. On the 21st of May, 1403, he responded in kind by sending a party which departed from near Cadiz in Southwestern Spain. With Clavijo along, they hoped to reach Timur before he left Anatolia, but in this they would be unsuccessful. Unanticipated adventure awaited.
There’d be mishaps at sea, split sails, lost rudders, and shipwreck. There’d be an unplanned winter near Constantinople. There’d be continually disappointed hopes of catching up to Timur at the next stop. They’d deal with hard roads, bandits, tolls, and death, and Clavijo would record the features of interest as he passed, architecture, embassies, marketplaces, and foods; Clavijo comments extensively on the topic of food. At last they were brought to Samarkand on September the 8th, 1404, at the end of a 15 month, and almost 6,000 mile, journey. “How is my son, the king? Is he in good health?” Timur apparently asked them when they finally arrived, not the only time he referred to their king this way.
The Samarkand they found, the one Schiltberger would have found, was truly a grand place.
If I have given the impression that Timur was given to willy-nilly fits of slaughter and delighted in indiscriminate taking of heads, then I’ve been somewhat misleading. Timur did indeed discriminate when taking heads. He valued highly the heads and bodies of all kinds of artisans and craftsmen, and, as a result, had gathered from across the great stretch of his conquests, the best his time had to offer. As Clavijo reports, “From Damascus he brought weavers of silk, and men who made bows, glass, and earthenware, so that, of those articles, Samarkand produces the best in the world. From Turkey, he brought archers, masons, and silversmiths. He also brought men skilled in making engines of war….”
The outskirts of the city were named after the great cities he had conquered, Baghdad, Damascus, Shiraz, and so on, establishing Samarkand itself as the truly great city, the seat of an emperor. The city was filled with formal gardens, exquisitely laid out, and with names like Garden of Paradise, the Model of the World, the Sublime Garden. Each was large enough to accommodate streams, lakes, orchards, and palaces. As an example, the Northern Garden featured a palace made of Tabriz marble; its frescoes, painted by Persian artists overseen by a master taken from Baghdad, depicted the conqueror’s many victories, many kings, lords, and sultans offering tribute, many feasts and banquets, and the many realms that were his. Another garden was reported by Arabshah to be so large that when one of the builders lost his horse in the enclosure it was 6 months before the wandering animal was found again.
Samarkand’s natural setting was ideal. Aided by the Zarafshan river, the land produced enormous amounts of fruit, wheat, and cotton. There were vineyards in abundance and space enough for plentiful livestock. Clavijo was apparently quite impressed by the food situation, being not immune to the temptations of the belly, and he commented approvingly on everything from the plumpness of the animals to the reasonable prices of meat, fruit, and grains. He also noted the contents of the markets: furs from Russia; silks and gems from China; spices from India; and cloth, glass and metal from Syria and Anatolia. Samarkand benefited heavily from the trade caravans that passed through it, and also of course from the staggering wealth which decades of war had drained from the surrounding world and brought to the city.
Clavijo and his party spent about 3 months in and around Samarkand, 3 months in which they observed Timur flitting from garden to garden, pavilion to pavilion, and palace to palace: one night enjoying a banquet here and the next a feast at a new location: roast horse and sheep, rice, and wine, tremendous amounts of wine whether one was so inclined or not, tarts made with flour, sugar, and herbs, and a drink of sugared cream. On Wednesday the 8th of October we read that the ambassadors chose not to eat, when given the option, and returned to their lodgings, a sure sign that Clavijo had been indulging heavily.
Timur received one embassy after another, conducting the day-to-day business of empire: he ordered a variety of amusements be performed; he ordered hangings and punishments; and he played chess, chess to which he had apparently added both spaces and pieces to increase its complexity.
But Timur would not be content to while away his last years in the splendour of the imperial capital. His eyes, Schiltberger tells us, had turned to China, the domain of the Yong-le Emperor, Zhu-Di of the Ming Dynasty. Timur’s pivot towards China shows up in Clavijo’s narrative too. When the Spanish ambassadors are first seated near Timur, they are initially placed beneath the Chinese embassy, but Timur intervenes, conveying to the Chinese representative that “those who were ambassadors from the King of Spain, his son and friend, should sit above him; and that he who was the ambassador of a thief and a bad man, his enemy, should sit below them.”
This “thief and bad man,” the Chinese emperor, had sent word to Timur that his land was only his as the Chinese emperor allowed, that Zhu-Di required payment every year, and that it had been 7 years, 5 according to Schiltberger, since such payment had been offered. In both narratives Timur agrees that this is true, but informs Zhu-Di’s representatives that he will not pay, that he will not be subject to him, and, in Schiltberger, he continues to say that he will be paying the Chinese ruler a visit.
Clavijo’s visit was actually cut short because, he was told, Timur was sick to the point of death, but a week later Timur and his armies were on the march to China. This was not a spur of the moment decision, a sudden fit of irritation. Timur had been putting the pieces into place for quite some time.
In late 1401, one his emirs, a man named Allahdad, had been dispatched to lay the groundwork for invasion. He was to map the route and make preparations for the movement of a large army. To this end much had been done. Allahdad had chosen a path and developed agricultural land to support an army of horse and men; he’d raised crops and built forts at key points and provided Timur with a map, even as the conqueror was still in Anatolia. East of Samarkand, all were put to work, preparing the soil to feed an invasion; the region was put on a footing of total war. Despite all this, the challenge was still great, perhaps too great for a ruler who was now likely 70 years old, perhaps older.
Schiltberger tells us that 1 million, 8 hundred thousand men went east with Timur, but even if we accept the lower estimates of 200 thousand, it’s still an enormous army, and an equally enormous logistical puzzle. They had 4,000 kilometres and a winter to go. And it was going to be too much.
Who knows what might have happened, had Timur been a younger man on that journey, but even for the young and fit this was a punishing adventure. Perhaps better to say, who knows what might have happened had he left at a different time of the year. Maybe the two questions are not so different actually. Timur had been planning and preparing this for years, but maybe he knew his time was short and this was what hurried his departure that winter when he might easily have waited for spring. As it was, Arabshah has the following to say:
“The wind blew on the breath of man, it quenched his spirit and froze him on his horse and also the camels, until it destroyed all softer constitutions… Therefore, many perished in his army, noble and base alike, and the winter destroyed great and small amongst them… Yet Timur cared not for the dying and grieved not for those that had perished.”
It was January, and they were about 250 miles from Samarkand. Scouts sent ahead reported the roads covered with snow to the depth of two spears. No matter what was tried, they couldn’t keep Timur himself warm and well, and his diet couldn’t have helped. At times he gave up on solids, pressing on with wine and spirits. He became sick in his stomach and bowels, and some said it a result of his drinking, but he would not alter his habits and his sickness did not lessen, understandably in a 70 year old man who ate poorly, drank heavily, exerted himself, and exposed his body to the harsh winter.
In Schiltberger’s telling he turns back now, forced to by the loss of men, horses, and cattle. In other tellings it is his health that stops him. In Arabshah we see him stricken, “cough[ing] like a camel that is strangled, his colour was nigh quenched and his cheeks foamed like a camel dragged backwards with the rein; and if one saw the angels that tormented him, they showed the joy with which they threaten the wicked, to lay waste their houses and utterly destroy the whole memory of them… .” He continues “The hand of Death gave him a cup to drink … then they brought garments of hair from hell and drew forth his soul like a spit from a soaked fleece and he was carried to the cursing and punishment of God, remaining in torment and God’s infernal punishment.”
In Schiltberger, Timur’s death is an almost comedic affair. He says: “It is to be noted, that three causes made Timur fret, so that he became ill, and died of that same illness.” The first cause was that one his vassals had gotten greedy and disappeared with a sizeable tribute payment. The second was that another of his vassals had had an affair with his youngest wife, and upon learning of this, Timur had that wife beheaded. Thirdly, when he ordered a pursuit of this vassal, the commander of that pursuit sent warning on, so that the vassal escaped. As Schiltberger reports, “it fretted him so much that he had killed his wife, and that the vassal had escaped, that he died, and was buried in the country with great magnificence.”
What should we make of Schiltberger’s version of events? Presumably, this was the story he heard, but what was the purpose of a narrative that removed Timur’s death from the icy campaign against China? Perhaps it was an issue of local politics, difficult to reconstruct, or perhaps it was a case of finding the great conqueror’s weakness, not on the trail of conquest, but domestically, with a woman. Stories of deaths or defeats so often find ways to make themselves acceptable, to not jar too much the ears of the listener.
And Schiltberger? He would be just fine. As he’d lived through other changes, he would live through this one. We’ll end this episode with Schiltberger’s telling of his circumstances:
You should know that Timur left two sons. The eldest was named Shahrukh, who had a son to whom Timur gave his capital and the country that belonged to it, and to each of his two sons, Shahrukh and Miran Shah, he gave a kingdom in Persia, and other large territories that belonged to them. After the death of Timur, I came to his son named Shahrukh, who had a kingdom, the capital of which is called Herat. Here I remained with Miran Shah, the son of Timur.