Matrakçı Nasuh’s Tabriz - Wikimedia
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As Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and his colleagues travelled east toward Timur, it was not just the story of their passage that went in the text. There was history. Very recent history. There was, for any unfamiliar readers, a report as to who this Timur was and what he had done. Which was quite a bit.
The focus here is the coming together of Timur and his Ottoman adversary, Sultan Beyazid. We see their worlds first overlap around Erzincan, where the travellers were last episode. We see that region’s lord caught between them and jockeying within the confines of a Venn diagram’s central space. Beyazid was demanding tribute from him, but he turned to Timur for support. Over this space they held in common, over this land and its lord, which each believed to be theirs, the two powerful figures clashed.
In the text, we get the incredible arrogance of Beyazid. European sources are often pretty invested in that idea. He knew of no Timur nor any reason why he should listen to such a man, for who in this world could now present him with a challenge? Who could possibly oppose the Ottoman sultan? He defied Timur and made rash promises about what he would do to Timur and those he cared about. As for Timur, he leapt into action.
The text gives us a fleeting depiction of devastation at Sivas and Damascus, shows us the Emperor in Constantinople and the Genoans in Pera making clear on whose side they sat, offering assistance to Timur, the enemy of their very much more immediate enemy, a real flicker of light on the horizon, whatever else they may have thought of him.
We also get a little on the immediate lead-up to the fateful encounter, Timur’s success in out-maneuvering his foe to bring Bayezid and an exhausted Ottoman army to battle at Ankara. We read that Timur threw his enemy into disorder, that they fought, and that he took Beyazid prisoner.
We also get an aside on proper nomenclature, not new information but really interesting I think to see in an early 15th century European source. Timur Bek, the text tells us, is, quote, “the proper name of that lord, and not Tamerlane, as we call him; for Timur Bek is as much as to say, in his language, the same as the lord of iron; because Bek means lord, and Timur is iron. Tamerlane, on the contrary, is an insulting name; and means lame, because he became lame on the left side.”
Whatever name you know him by, and here it will again be Timur, our Castilian friends were well on their way to finding him.
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Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers. And this is that part of the podcast where I tell you that you can sign up to the podcast patreon at patreon.com/humancircus for an amount of your choosing, that for this cost of as much as a highly reasonable take-out side per month or as little as a sauce you can listen to episodes early, without advertising, and with a little extra on the end, as well as keeping this podcast and its host afloat and well away from the November storms of the Black Sea.
This episode, I want to send out my thanks and appreciation to David and to Joe. Thank you both very much!
And now, back to the story.
When last we spoke, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and the others were braving those November waters and finding them to be, after all, a bit too much. They were wintering in Pera, across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, and then trying again in the spring. Finding more success this time, they sailed the southern coast of the Black Sea and took to the mountains beyond, where they contended with its harsh environment and equally harsh economic conditions. Increasingly, they were finding traces of Timur as they went, traces that will be ever more evident, that will quite outgrow the term traces.
This episode, we enter Iran from the northwest and leave by the northeast, and we enjoy meat, melons, wine, and horrifying heat as we go. That Constantinople episode was very much about objects, but this is truly about the travel, the trek.
We rejoin our ambassador and his colleagues as they camp on a plain, sharing it with hundreds of tents belonging to Chagataids, a word, the text tells us, for those in Timur’s host of noble lineage. And it was an interesting word. A word evoking the great Mongol Empire of the 13th century and most especially the son of Genghis himself, Chagatai Khan. Obviously, this was no accident.
Samarkand, Timur’s Samarkand, sat solidly within the western Chagatai Ulus or Khanate, and like other rulers of the region had and would he had consciously tied himself into the legacy. He had plugged in via marriage and via puppet figureheads that made him part of that tradition and summoned up that great past. Not that our travellers were in what had been Chagatai’s territory quite yet. They were in Armenia, just leaving Armenia and heading east, south-east, toward Tabriz, if anything firmly in Ilkhanid territory, not there was by this point such a thing.
It was Thursday June the 4th, 1404, and they had been travelling for more than a year.
At Khoy, on the edges of Armenia, they saw the city set upon a stream-strewn plain, surrounded by orchards, grain fields, and the city’s own brick walls. They saw an ambassador from what they termed the Sultan of Babylon travelling with a 20 horse and 15 camel caravan with gifts for Timur. He had among those gifts 6 rare birds and what sounded very much like a giraffe, which Clavijo found worth describing in detail, from its longer fore-legs and horse-like body down to its hooves, its buffalo-esque hind-quarters, and of course its neck, its neck long enough to eat from the top of a high wall or, more usefully, the upper branches of a tree, which it did extensively. It was, he writes, “a wonderful sight” for any who had never seen such an animal, which, of his Castilian contemporaries, would have been many..
Moving east, they were leaving the snow-capped mountains behind them and finding an ever more abundant number of fruits. They passed a tall hill said to have been purchased by Genoans who wanted to build a castle there, but the ruler who’d sold them the hill, once he had the money, had changed his mind. “It [is] not the custom for merchants to build castles in his country,” he informed them, and if they wanted to raise a castle on that hill, then they would have to just take the hill out of his territory. To this they tried to respond, but he cut off their heads. It sounds harsh, but then maybe it was a particularly unpleasant response. I should note that I’ve not seen this story elsewhere, which is not to say it’s not out there.
On Wednesday the 11th, they reached Tabriz, sizeable and rich, with its well-ordered streets and lanes, its large buildings, skillfully ornamented mosques, and fountains that in the summer were filled with chunks of ice. The ambassador picks out merchants who dealt in cloths, scents, and pigments among their goods, and among the people women who went about entirely covered up with black netting before their eyes, though he doesn’t appear to have come to grips with why they did this. So they wouldn’t be recognized, he said, though maybe that’s the translation letting him down a little. As for food, there were many marketplaces selling ample amounts of fruit and well dressed meat, cooked in a variety of ways. Clavijo would increasingly be taking note of such matters.
He mentions the villages they passed through, how they’d rest on carpets in the shade, how they hid from the now unbearable heat of the day, almost as unbearable as the insects which were numerous enough, he says, to kill both people and animals. They dined on bread, cream, or other dishes that the locals would bring out to them.
He also mentions a new and promising indication that they were actually getting closer to reaching Timur. As they rested by some buildings, set there for the use of merchants and other travellers, a messenger arrived from Timur’s son with directions that they should hurry to where he was encamped. Then, that night, as they rode after waiting for the temperature to cool, they met another messenger. Timur’s son was in Soltaniyeh, and they should hurry there.
On the 22nd of June, they reached that city. Their assessment was that it was not so large as Tabriz but that in trade it thrived, and this seems to have been despite the climate. They said that this was a place where the heat of the sun would actually kill foreign merchants, that it would burn their backs, penetrate their hearts, and, were they to escape, forever alter their appearance, all of which you’d think would be real detriments to attracting business, but clearly such was not the case.
The city had many inns for the use of merchants and played host to their caravans of camels that that passed through in great quantities, particularly in the summer months, bringing from India spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and mace, and from Gilan, by the Caspian Sea, its silks, bound for Syria and elsewhere. It attracted merchants from many locations, among them Genoa, at least some of whom must have survived to carry on this commerce.
From Shiraz came silks and cottons, and from Khorasan woven cloths of many colours. From China came ships with spices, pearls, and rubies, not to Soltaniyeh itself, not a coastal city, but to Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The ships, as Marco Polo among others, had also reported, were not joined by iron but with cords and pegs, and it was said that the seas they sailed were too full of magnetic lodestones that would have otherwise torn them apart. In Hormuz, the pearls these ships had carried were cut and then brought to Soltaniyeh and Tabriz where they were set on rings and other jewelry.
Clavijo wrote of these things, and he wrote of that son of Timur who they had come to see, Miran Mirza in the text, Mirza Jalal-ud-din Miran Shah Beg, or just Miran Shah, if you’re looking him up later. Miran Shah had enjoyed a somewhat troubled career as Timur’s representative, and Clavijo told us a little about that too.
The picture we get is that of someone really settling into debauchery, the powerful man’s useless son. He had been to Tabriz and ordered many houses, mosques, and fine buildings destroyed, and then he had gone to Soltaniyeh and done the same there. He had emptied the treasury and divided it among his followers. He had torn down what sounds like the mausoleum of some well respected lord. And his justification? That he was the son of the greatest man in the world, so by what deed could he himself be remembered by? His conclusion, it was said, was that if he could not be remembered for what he did, for what he constructed and achieved, then let them say at least that if he had built nothing, he had destroyed the grandest works in the world.
And Timur was not pleased with what this son was up to. When he received word of it, he was on the verge of having him killed, but he was counselled otherwise. He satisfied himself with reining in Miran Shah’s powers and responsibilities and kicking off further family drama by trying to hand them over to first one and then another of the troubled man’s sons. Clearly, Miran Shah was not viewed favourably for succession.
That’s the story in Clavijo’s telling at least, but there’s a little more to it than that. There may be quite a bit more. There’s the suggestion that Miran Shah’s entire personality was drastically altered by head injuries suffered in a 1397 hunting accident, when he’d fallen from his horse while out riding in the autumn near Tabriz. His behaviour apparently became ever more erratic and unpredictable after that, escalating into emptied treasuries, military disasters, and his wife taking her complaints to her father in law, Timur, in Samarkand. Timur would then send investigators to sort out the matter, and they found the source of the corruption not with Timur’s son but with four of his companions, musicians all, naturally, and promptly had them killed.
So there’s that narrative, but then it’s one which emerges in histories that would be written under familial rivals, accounts that may have been part of a piece of character assassination concealing quite a different story.
Miran Shah was ambitious. He was not Timur’s first choice for succession, but when that son died, Miran Shah took the opportunity to marry the dead man’s wife. When another son died, he became the eldest survivor. When he splashed the money around, it might have been less haphazard than would later be depicted, may have been more a case of purchasing good will and influence than mindless indulgence. By the mid-90s he had ceased to include Timur’s name when issuing decrees, and Timur may well have felt his own say over succession slipping away. He may have intervened to curb his son’s ambitions.
Among all these maybes, there is one interesting source that seems to sway matters toward this second possibility, that of a Miran Shah of power and ambitions rather than pointless destruction and consumption, and that is Ahmad ibn ‘Arabshah, a writer living in Samarkand through the period in question. He actually quoted a letter that Miran Shah had written to Timur, and we can question the exactitude of his quotation. Was he looking at this letter as he wrote? How long since he’d seen it? Had he, in fact, seen it at all? Did it exist? There are questions, but that doesn’t mean that it was a fabrication or that ibn ‘Arabshah did not capture the spirit of a letter that he had really seen or heard the contents of.
According to ibn ‘Arabshah, Miran Shah had, in writing, called upon his father to step away. Timur accomplished great things already. He had founded an empire, and now he could leave it to his children to attend to the winnings. Miran Shah flattered his father as to his achievements, but he also put him in his place a little. What Timur had done was not so very great when compared to the doings of the mighty caliphs and sultans of the past, when compared to the prophets, when compared to Muhammed. If Timur would not restrain himself, then Miran Shah promised that, quote, “I will meet you and restrain you and prevent you from your zeal for laying waste, that I may teach you to walk aright.”
They were strong words, and they didn’t sound like those of a man who had been diverted by a traumatic accident and then sunk into a life without aspirations beyond destruction and personal enjoyment.
As for the impression Clavijo and the others had of Miran Shah, it was brief. They were welcomed in a palace by a man about 40, large, corpulent, and gouty, and that was about it. It’s hard to say what all the hurry had been. They stayed for three days in his city, and then they left. After this short break, we will also leave.
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Over the early summer, Clavijo and the others traveled southwest across what is now northwest Iran, fresh horses supplied to them as they went. Early July, the 6th, brought them to Tehran, large and unwalled, delightful, and well supplied with everything, but also, they were told, an unhealthy place in which fevers were prevalent. There was eating to be done, of course, a great deal of meat, and a horse roasted with its head still on. There were gifts, a robe and a hat for Clavijo, and then they were gone.
They saw ruins outside the city, those of Rayy, an ancient city that had been through much but seems not to have survived the Mongols. “This was once the largest city in all that land,” the text said, “though it is now inhabited.” By some accounts it was a 1220 massacre that had emptied the city, by others more limited executions after which it had been abandoned in favour of Tehran and Varamin.
On the 10th of July, they encountered horsemen who brought them to a nearby camp and to the local notable, a knight of Timur’s, the text tells us. There, they met the ambassador from Cairo, the one with the giraffe - the two parties seem to have been pretty much keeping pace with one another - and together, they met with that host, were received and dined with him before his tent, and later, at their own tents, were brought sheep, bread, and flour. Over the coming days, they would feast with him on roast horse and boiled tripe, and would be provided with horses and camels for the next leg of the journey, along with gifts of robes and for Clavijo himself a horse, though the ambassador felt that the saddle and bridle that came with it were a little underwhelming.
By the 12th of July, it was time to leave, but there was sickness in the Castilian party. Gomez de Salazar was ill and so was the theologian, with Clavijo himself not entirely well and others also under the weather. The sick, they were told, would have to remain there and return to Tehran. They would not be up to the way ahead, and that meant seven of the travellers would need to stay, including two of Clavijo’s men, and one each who were with Salazar and the theologian. That snippet of information is about as much as we see of the makeup of the embassy as a whole actually, and it’s also a fleeting reminder of how it might have felt to be abandoned, to sick and so far from home, waiting in hope that the party would pick you up on the way back. Two of the seven wouldn’t live to see Clavijo arrive for the return trip.
On the 14th, those who’d been healthy enough to do so, stopped at a castle and learned that Timur had been there just 12 days earlier. For a month he had laid siege there for the way its lord, once well-loved in his eyes, had wronged him and earned his outrage. He had been there but was now gone, was off up the road to Samarkand and they should meet him there.
The next nights were spent out in the open air with no villages to be found. There were nights like that, though not so many as one might expect. They passed through mountains with little water, only a great oppressive heat, and on the 17th, they stopped by a large city and two deserted castles where a “hot, fierce wind” blew that put them in mind of hell. Perhaps of the same opinion, one of their ger falcons escaped, the gift for Timur getting loose and taking flight. A bad omen some might think, and that was without looking to the towers of skulls.
There were two of them standing there, outside of town, two others that had fallen, four of the grisly monuments that Timur was often said to have often constructed. The towers were made of mud and the heads of men, and piled high enough that one could scarcely strike the top with a thrown rock. The pillars were remnants of a conquered people who had returned from forced resettlement and made themselves a problem. Then twice conquered, they had been set there in plaster. People of the nearby town said they often saw lights glimmering from the tower tops at night, and it was understandable, for the concentrated reminder of a rumoured 60,000 slaughtered dead could put such thoughts in one’s head.
It was hot enough now that the embassy’s hours of travel were limited to the night, and its members were in rough shape. Having recently been warned that their sickly colleagues could never survive this journey, they were now finding that to be no exaggeration.
On the 20th, they reached a city and were welcomed there by a quote/unquote “great knight” who came to their quarters to dine with them. They were, however, too sick to join him, so he left them with meat and fruit, but not for long. He was not patient for very long. He invited them later that same night to come to his palace, to receive the ceremonial robes of a great lord. Again, they sent word that they were too sick to go to him. Surely, he would understand and accept their excuse. But he persisted. They must come, or at least someone must. So the theologian did.
He was perhaps the one of them in the best shape to do so, but still, you can picture him pale and sweating, sick and away from home, but still forced to put in a shift, as one sometimes is. Picture him presented with robes, sitting in for a full feast, and then kneeling in reverence three times, all the while not at all well enough to be there. He had done what was necessary.
The niceties out of the way, the embassy was given horses and permission to proceed. Indeed, quite beyond permission they were directed to hasten by day and night to follow and find Timur. They wanted to rest, but that was not an option. Their host told them it would be worth his life not to do as his ruler willed. Soft pillows were placed on their saddles, in recognition of their weakness, but he ushered them out of his city nonetheless. They were described now as more dead than alive, maybe milking the situation for dramatic value, maybe not. Either way, they could only carry on without a break, departing on the same day they had arrived. They travelled all night and rested by a deserted village.
Their travel now made use of the system set up within Timur’s lands, and it will sound familiar to any who have come across similar, Mongol efficiencies. There were well stocked post houses at which one or two hundred mounts might be kept, and travellers could swap their horses there as they tired. Between such facilities, a rider on business was able to exchange their exhausted horse for those they encountered, and if they were bound for Timur himself, they could lay claim to absolutely anyone’s, including those of the ruler’s own sons. Despite these measures, the bodies of horses that had been ridden to death were a not infrequent sight, for such were the expectations of speed placed on their riders. As Clavijo wrote, Timur “was better pleased with him who travel[led] a day and a night for fifty leagues, and kill[ed] two horses, than with him who [did] the distance in three days.” And the ways were measured and marked with small pillars, so there was no excuse for not knowing one’s rate of progress. Like earlier travellers in Mongol lands, Clavijo and the others were amazed at the speed and distance of movement that this system produced.
However, they were also forced to participate in it and, as best they could, to yield to its expectations, even as ill as they were. There was no time to recover and recuperate, and even by night, the heat of the wind they found to be remarkable. They’d reach a settlement, would dine and receive fresh horses, and then travel through the night with little to no water to be found. At one stretch of sandy desert, where there were neither people nor refreshment for leagues around, the party was on the verge of death. A boy slightly less exhausted than the rest had to be sent forward to the river to fetch wetted shirts and, one would also hope, some better vessels for holding drinking water.
Even before they’d reach that point, Gomez de Salazar is described as nearly dying, and at a village shortly before Nishapur they at last had to leave him, for he could not go on. Would not go on much further.
On the plain before that city, they passed among the hundreds of black tents and were met by one of Timur’s men who had come to escort them the rest of the way. When he heard of Salazar’s plight, he had him sent for and carried into Nishapur on a litter. Doctors were called upon to care for him, but, as Clavijo would report, “it pleased God that [he] should end his days at this place.”
As for the rest of the party, they enjoyed fine lodgings, meat, and fruits, among them some especially fantastic melons, and they were given wine, a great deal of wine.
Guided by Timur’s man, a military leader of some sort, the path ahead was an efficient one. A message reached the embassy, inviting them to Herat where they were promised great honours and whatever else they could need by no less than Timur’s son Shah Rukh, but not even this was sufficient to pull them from their path. Timur was not one who liked waiting, and only their excuses travelled to Shah Rukh in Herat.
As had been the case on other stretches of the journey, provisions were well laid on for them as they went, fodder for the horses along with meat, milk, rice, cream, and melons for their riders, as much as three times as much as they would have wanted. And there was a good reason for this. Much as Clavijo had in the past reported the wonderful nature of the beatings which were distributed when villagers failed to please Timur’s ambassador, here the program was similar, if perhaps even more intense.
When they arrived in a town, Timur’s people would seize the first man they saw in the street and punctuate the beatings with repeated questions as to who was in charge. No surprise then that Clavijo and the others also reported villagers fleeing at the sight of them and merchants shutting up shop with startled exclamations that ambassadors had arrived and brought misery upon the day.
It was, by the way, not always meat and delicious melons for these people. You really get a sense of the burden passing ambassadors or indeed any other Timurid business could place on them, with mentions that they were forced to provide to others what they would have very much liked to have for themselves. When they lacked for the nicer things, Clavijo noted, it was sour milk put in boiling water to make a cheese as sharp as vinegar with little flour cakes cooked in the same pot.
As August went on and they moved northeast through northeastern Iran and present day Turkmenistan, it was meat and wine, nights spent sometimes in buildings set aside for the use of merchants and other travellers, sometimes the tents of their hosts. The road took them through sandy deserts that drifted in the wind, obscuring the way forward and causing them at times to lose their way. When they came to cities, they were welcomed and given meat, wine, and robes, robe upon robe, so that I imagine some of their baggage animals needing to be set aside for carrying those alone.
On August 21st, they came to a border of sorts. They reached the banks of the Oxus or Amu Darya river, forceful and muddy, and in April and the months after increasingly high from mountain thaw, a river through which the text associates Timur with an earlier conqueror in Alexander the Great. Timur had crossed it going from Samarkand on his conquests, using a pontoon bridge that he had destroyed behind him. He had built another bridge on his return, not much before Clavijo, and it was this one they now crossed, avoiding the boats and tolls that travellers would otherwise face.
On the other side was Termez, a large city of many people, streams, goods, and gardens, but beyond this, the travellers could say little more. They were exhausted, but fortunately for them, the end was in sight.
With the river crossing and their arrival in Termez, they had entered present-day Uzbekistan, if only barely, and Samarkand, and its ruler could only be so far away now, about 350km according to Google maps. Given that Castile was some 6,000 behind them, as the crow flies and much further in distance travelled, that put them very much on the home stretch, about a year and a third after leaving.
And that’s where we’ll leave them to pick things up next time.
I won’t have anything else out before the end of year, so I’ll wish you all well now. If you celebrate Christmas, then Merry Christmas, and whether or not you do, happy new year, and happy winter holidays. I hope you’re getting a holiday of some kind from things, that you and those close to you are well, and that you’re looking after yourselves.
Thank you very much for listening to the podcast this year. It’s been a weird one, obviously, but however, this year has affected you, I wish you better, merrier times ahead.
I’ve continued to enjoy making this podcast and telling these stories, and I’m glad there are so many people out there who are enjoying listening to them. As long as there are people willing to listen, and maybe even if there aren’t, I’ll keep telling them. There’s no shortage of stories to be told in this medieval world that we’re exploring together.
If you are listening on the Patreon feed, and if you’re not you could be, then keep listening for a little something extra on the game of chess, a topic with a much stronger connection to today’s episode than you might think. If not, I’ll talk to you soon.