Timur feasting near Samarkand - Wiki
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Today, we’re off to meet Timur. Off to see Timur the conqueror. Amir Timur the emperor, the founder of the Timurid dynasty, called by biographer Beatrice Forbes Manz, “the last of the great nomad conquerors.”
Over the last decades since seizing power, Timur had looked ever outwards. As Manz writes, he had “moved like a whirlwind through Eurasia,” “criss-cross[ing it] from Delhi to Moscow, from the T’ien Shan Mountains of Central Asia to the Taurus Mountains in Anatolia, conquering and reconquering, razing some cities, sparing others. His activity was relentless and unending.”
But as our travellers reached him, he was, for all of that, uncharacteristically at rest, his perpetual campaign for the moment on pause. He was relaxing, soaking in the joys of victory at his centre of power in Samarkand, setting aright that which had fallen into disorder during his long absence, and he was celebrating.
There were celebrations of his triumphs in war, over Beyazid and others, and of weddings in the family. There were, as we’ll see, feasts. Great feasts. Feasts in abundance. Feasts in what really starts to look like over-abundance, an exhausting campaign of dining and drinking to match the intensity of his military ones. Feasts enough to make you wonder if it wasn’t actually healthier for Timur and those around him on the road, marching to one bloody conflict after another, than it was to eat and drink at home.
That, in that mode, was how our travellers were going to find Timur, how they were going to settle into a few months alongside Timur, and Timur, it must be said, was going to show himself to be a very hospitable host.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the first Human Circus episode of the year 2021, may it be a better one. Anyways, I’m glad to be back. I took a couple of weeks away from things over the holiday. And I’m glad you’re back and still listening. Thank you, as always, for doing so. And if you’re on the Patreon, then an extra-special thank you to you. It really does help me out.
This time, I want to send out my particular thanks to new patron Alex. Thank you so much for your support.
And now, let’s get back to the story, the story of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo.
When last we spoke, Clavijo and his comrades in the Castilian embassy had traversed present-day northern Iran. They crossed the river Oxus, or Amu Darya, and entered Uzbekistan, and they did so at a pace quite beyond what they’d have been comfortable with. Even in ill health and exhausted by travel, they were pushed along by Timur’s expectations and by the systems of travel and communications installed in his realm. Several of them sickened and were left behind. Gomez de Salazar died.
But they were close. They were long past the point where they’d hoped and expected to find Timur, but now Samarkand was a mere 350 km away. The end was in sight for their journey, and the end is in sight for ours.
This time, we’ll reach Samarkand. We’ll settle in there, and we’ll feast. There will also be non-food related material, but this episode is largely concerned with good times, at least for most of those present. Timur had been away for years - an empire didn’t conquer itself - and now he was back. There would be eating and executions, and there would be soaking up the adulation of his own people as well as that of visitors from near and very, very far.
We pick up the story as our travellers make ready to leave Termez on the last stretch of their journey and as they distribute gifts to those of Timur’s men who had helped them, Florentine robes and a horse, for it was by the performance of such exchanges, the proper and expected giving of gifts, that one was measured. This gift giving was an incredibly important practice, something that to the unfamiliar traveller could look very much like greed, as it had to earlier western European travellers among the Mongols.
Like those earlier travellers, Clavijo was struck by the people he now travelled among, the people of Timur.
He said they suffered hardship - whether cold or heat, hunger or thirst - better than any other people in the world, that they showed great valour, and that they were expertly skilled with both horse and bow. To war, they took their families, their children, and their flocks, and you get a sense that Clavijo and the others were somewhat thrown by the way these nomadic or semi-nomadic populations were not tied to any particular urban area but were, all the same, highly numerous, seeming to the travellers to appear in numbers from nowhere, on this plain or that, near water or pasture. He seems also to have been thrown by that countryside itself, hot and flat, and blasted by fiery winds, something I mentioned last episode and something he mentions repeatedly.
On the 22nd of August, a Friday, the ambassadors dined in the city and then left, travelling across a well-peopled plain. That Sunday, they dined near some large buildings where Timur would stay when he passed through that way, eating meat and fruit, wine and melons, the melons being large, plentiful, and very good. On Monday, they ate at the base of a high hill, at a building ornamented with fine brickwork of many colours. There was a lot more eating in this phase of the trip than there had been in some of the earlier ones.
Up that hill, through the pass and into the ravine, a traveller would come to the “Gates of Iron,” or at least a “Gates of Iron,” for the Gates of Derbent, across the Caspian, carried the same name, indeed are perhaps more commonly associated with it. Up that way the travellers went, spending that night and the next atop the range of hills. There, one of the men attached to Alfonzo Paez, an attendant who had been sick, “departed this life.”
By the end of August, they were in “the verdant city,” the ancient city of Kesh, now known as Shahrisabz, with its green and cheerful walls and terraces. It was a city of grand edifices then, including the mosque at which Timur’s father and his eldest son were interred, a great and grand structure complete with ponds and courtyards. Beautifully decorated in blue and gold but not yet finished, the chapel being prepared for Timur himself as yet not done. Timur had been there just a month before the travellers and been dissatisfied with the progress. Finding a doorway too low, he had commanded that it be raised.
It was a city of grand edifices then, and, as you’ll see if you search for images of it now, it still is. Its palaces were however, like the mosque, unfinished, had been unfinished for 20 years and were still under construction. But they were still very striking.
The travellers entered through long, tunnelled entrances and towering gateways, past arched recesses on either side where attendants would sit. They stood in wide courtyards of white stone with pools of water at their centre. Everywhere around them were gold and blue glazed tiles of different patterns and images of suns and lions, the arms, our guide noted, of the previous lord of Samarkand.
There were delightful gardens, with flowing water and trees for fruit and shade. There were rooms so rich, Clavijo said, “that it would be impossible to describe it, without gazing and walking over everything, with slow steps.”
They were still keeping a fast pace. The travellers were into Kesh on Thursday and out on Friday, and as August became September, within a day’s journey of Samarkand, they waited. The waiting was part of the established order of diplomatic business, like the exchanging of gifts.
In this case, Timur was occupied, they were told, with ambassadors from Tokhtamysh, the eastern Golden Horde khan with whom he had clashed repeatedly during the ‘90s, but there was also an expectation of waiting at least 5 or 6 days before being called for. After pushing themselves to the brink of death to get there, in some cases that crucial little extra past that brink, the Castilian party was at least now able to rest, and they did so in luxurious garden surroundings.
Running for a league around them was an earthen wall. Within it were fruit trees of all kinds save lime and citron and many streams of water that ran between them. There were avenues of taller, shading trees, punctuated by raised platforms, and there was a hill, accessible on two sides by bridges that led to flights of stairs leading up. At its flattened top, sat a palace and an inner garden, itself surrounded by its own earthen wall, with deer, pheasants, vineyards, and rows of beautiful trees.
In these extremely pleasant surroundings, Clavijo and the others recuperated. Along with that ambassador from Egypt - who was still keeping pace with them - they waited. They waited in tents set up on the grass near a stream, and they ate. They ate well, on sheep, dressed and cooked, along with roasted horse, a variety of rice dishes, and fruit. The travellers dined, rested, and on the 8th of September, they departed for Samarkand, travelling over a plain and past gardens, houses, and markets at which many things were sold.
They came to yet another well gardened palace where they dismounted and were met, and what a mix of relief and disbelief it must have been to at least be reaching their goal. They were called upon to present their gifts there and then, for it was not they who would carry them in to Timur but certain of his men appointed to do just that.
At the entrance to the garden - there were going to be quite a few gardens now - they passed through a high gate. They met mace-wielding guards and six elephants carrying wooden castles, men, and banners. Timur’s ambassador to Castile who had travelled with them was there, drawing laughter for his Castilian style apparel.
Clavijo and the others were brought to an older man before whom they bowed, the son of a sister to Timur. They were brought before three small boys, grandsons of Timur to whom they also bowed and offered the letter from their king. Then, held under the arms by his men, they were brought before Timur himself.
The conqueror wore a silk robe and, on his head, a large white hat set with a central ruby that was surrounded by pearls and gems. He sat cross-legged on an embroidered carpet with pillows around him. Behind him was a doorway to the palace and in front a fountain full of red apples.
Three times, the travellers bowed, one knee on the ground, arms crossed before their breast, bending forward. They were ordered then to rise and to come forward, for their host wished to see them. His eyesight was not what it once had been. He was nearly 70.
“How is my son, the king?” Timur asked them. “Is he in good health?”
He listened to their answer, and he spoke again, to the ambassadors and to his audience, a mix of his own family members, regional royalty of various sorts, and the sons of Tokhtamysh, the khan he’d had business with while the Castillians waited.
“Behold! Here are the ambassadors sent by my son, the king of Spain, who is the greatest king of the Franks, and lives at the end of the world. These Franks are truly a great people, and I will give my benediction to the king of Spain, my son. It would have sufficed if he had sent you to me with the letter, and without the presents, so well satisfied am I to hear of his health and prosperous state.”
So he said, or something like it, according to his Castilian visitors and as recorded, transmitted, and translated down to us. I do find his repeated reference to Enrique as his son amusing, seemingly striking a note of affection, though also a firm reminder as to their relative status. There were going to be other reminders of exactly where everyone stood.
The event moved on to a room where Timur sat, and the ambassadors were placed to his right, placed, at least at first, below the envoy of the Yongle emperor of Ming China, but not for long. Timur, either reacting to what he saw in the moment or carrying out a piece of prearranged political theatre, called out for their places to be reversed. Then, just so there was no confusion as to why this was being done, someone came forward to address the Chinese ambassador.
The envoy was told that those who had come from Castile did so as representatives of a son and a friend and as such should sit above him. He, on the other hand, was there on the behalf of “a thief and a bad man,” so he should sit below, and so it would be throughout the time the two embassies shared in Samarkand. Though they were to be seated in a place of greater prestige, there’s no doubt that Timur’s business with this “bad man” would have been foremost in his mind and was of much greater importance to him than Clavijo and his companions. But more on that later.
Meat was called for then, and so heavy were the pieces, they were dragged in on sheets of leather for the carvers to go to work. Into basins of silver, gold, pottery, and porcelain, went cuts of horse haunch, loin, and tripe. In went the haunch and head of sheep. In went a soup, salt, and sauce, and flatbreads were folded up and set atop like lids. Timur’s people set out these meats, and then they set out more, more food than could be managed, including meatballs, melons, and grapes, along with gold and silver jugs of sugar and cream. Then they brought still more, for them to take back to their lodgings as a not-so-little takeaway for after. To not have taken the food would have been a terrible affront, one which the Castilians would manage not to commit.
They were going to successfully avoid insulting their host, and maybe that was going to be good enough where measurements of diplomatic success were concerned. They’d offered no offence, and their presents were received, according to this translation, with “much complacency.” Sometimes, simply “not bad” was entirely good enough, and this was looking very much like one of those situations.
The Castilians were shown that night to their lodgings, where they settled in among the gardens, and we’re going to settle into the Clavijo embassy’s stay in Samarkand, its abundant feasting. But first, a quick break.
…
In the days that followed the Castilians’ arrival, their host flitted about to one amply gardened palace after another. He’d gone from the one where he’d received them to a second that he’d recently had constructed. Then, on the 15th of September, he was off to yet another, every bit as beautiful, as lofty and handsome, in its garden setting, its blue and gold tile-work, its trees for fruit and shade, its many-coloured silk tents with red awnings, its central house, richly ornamented with silks and silver, pearls and gems, its avenues and wooden terraces along which a visitor might walk. A visitor like Clavijo, but not Clavijo. He and the others were not there to enjoy those surroundings, though they had been invited.
They had been summoned by Timur to a great feast, but their interpreter had not been present, had not been there where he should be, and when he should be. And the Castilians had lingered at their lodgings, waiting for him to come. They had lingered long enough to miss the entire feast, and Timur was extremely disappointed by the whole thing.
Not with them, his honoured guests, he was at pains to mention. They had done the wrong thing - they should in the future hurry straight away to the feast without waiting for any functionaries - but that didn’t mean he was angry at them. That anger was very much reserved for the interpreter himself. With him, Timur was absolutely incensed, so much so that he called for the man to have a hole bored through his nose, a rope to be strung through it, and for him to be dragged through the army by that rope, quite probably to his death.
Fortunately for this most unfortunate interpreter, someone else spoke up for him and asked for mercy, gaining it before he could be dragged off. And that mercy seems to have been fair. Because you shouldn’t be mutilated and possibly slain for being late for work, obviously, but also because it’s not as if this was Clavijo’s one chance to engage in a little imperial feasting at the side of the great man. There were going to be opportunities in absolute abundance. Timur was recently returned from years of campaigning, and this was the season of feasting
That very night, when the party was too late to take part in person, they still were given a feast to go in the form of five sheep and two large jars of wine, and on the 22nd, Timur was at another palace, and there was another feast, at a place where the surrounding walls were high and towered, and the house by its pool of water was the richest they’d yet seen. As for the food, there was roasted horse and sheep with rice, and there was wine, an endless cascade of wine, sent first in a jug to the ambassador’s lodgings so they might show up in a jovial mood, then poured by attendants on their knees who filled a guest’s cup, filled it again, and then accused the drinkers of insulting their lord if they did not drink quickly or enthusiastically enough. Calls rang out for all assembled to drink by their love of Timur, or to his head, and all were required to drain their cups immediately.
As the evening wound down, silver coins were brought forth in basins and scattered over the guests. Clavijo and the others were clad afresh in robes and bowed three times before their host before retiring. They should come and dine with him again, he said. They should come again, the very next day.
That was when the next feast would be, at yet another pleasant location, this one by a plain where Timur’s army encamped in well-ordered fashion, each person knowing where their tent should be located, where the butchers’, bakers’, fruit-sellers’, and bathing tents would be, and settling themselves without confusion or noise. Even with such organization, the dust of their combined movements was enough that the multitude who feasted that day on the now familiar mix of sheep, horse, and wine, all appeared to be wearing the same coloured clothes from being covered with it.
After that, it was into Samarkand itself, into grand but still unfinished buildings at its edges which Timur had ordered built in honour of his mother in law. And there was more feasting, as there ever was, this time highlighted by the appearance of a party of Christian ambassadors from the borders of China. Like a party of wandering blacksmiths, they seemed to Clavijo, in hats he felt would have been too small to cram their heads into and clothing entirely of rough skins, some with the fur on the outside, some against the skin within. They clearly cut pretty striking - I think he would say, outlandish - figures for our Clavijo, as they brought their gifts of sable, martin, fox, and falcon up to Timur, the envoys from near China making their hopes and wishes known while those from Spain, Egypt, and who knows where else looked on.
And the Castilian representatives didn’t need to do much more than look. They didn’t trip over their own feet, and that seems to have been the bar for success they were shooting for. It’s something of an absurd prospect given the grotesque time and effort they’d spent in getting there, but they seem not to have been pursuing any particularly pressing agenda. They were not begging after economic opportunities or attempting to engineer unlikely alliances.
Were they interested in this central Asian power that had almost casually sent the Ottoman threat into decline? Of course they were, but now that they’d encountered that power in person, they appear to have had no larger diplomatic goal. Maybe there was something crucial in their letter of greeting, alluded to but not explored in the text, but they do not appear to have been seriously lobbying Timur for anything in particular, or at least nothing that emerges here, and nor would anything much be asked of them. What could a ruler of this stature want from the distant Spanish king? Timur was hardly bent on any Mediterranean adventures. Indeed, his interests lay in entirely the other direction.
Timur was quite content for these visitors from afar to dine and drink with him, to be used in the theatre of his rather more critical dealings with the Yongle emperor’s representatives, and generally to be gestured to as trinkets on his shelf of exotic playthings, examples, as supplicants from a distant king, of his own magnetic might and influence. Finally - and we should not lose sight of this one in the distance at which we’re viewing this character or think him somehow above such things as a monumentally powerful man - Timur enjoyed showing off. On that occasion when he’d been so angered by the interpreter's lateness, it was, supposedly, at least in part because he had so wanted to display the site, the magnificent buildings of that magnificent garden palace, to his guests, and on another occasion his first wife ordered that they be shown her tents. What was it to pour the fruits of transcontinental conquest into your capital if you couldn’t also have it admired by your guests.
So the Castilians weren’t necessarily under much pressure, save to tick the basic boxes of decorum, tricky enough at times in an unfamiliar place. They were free, for example, to watch Timur play chess or to feast. Free, but not entirely carefree.
On the 2nd of October one of Timur’s men came by with his lord’s acknowledgement that though they drank wine in his presence, he realized that they could not entirely do so at their ease, as they would among themselves. He sent 10 sheep, a horse, and wine for all, that they might do so. It was very considerate of him, and it was a brief reprieve from the rigours of imperial feasting.
On the 6th, they feasted on the plains where his horde was encamped, in a huge pavilion that so amazed our guide, that I think he devoted as much space to describing it, its setting, structure, operation, and ornamentation, as anything else on his entire trip. It was large enough to look, from a distance, like a castle, he said, “and possessed more beauty than it was possible to describe.”
On the 7th, there was another feast, this one, after the usual sheep and horse, featuring “sweetmeats, sugar, raisins, and almonds” on silk covered silver stands. They were presented as gifts to Timur, and as he had on other such occasions, he shared them out, giving two to the ambassadors.
And on the 8th, there was, as you might have guessed, another great feast, or at least, one was planned. High winds kept the outdoor event from going ahead, but Timur ordered that any who desired it should be fed. Clavijo and friends, likely taking the opportunity to rest their stomachs, did not follow up on this offer.
On the 9th, regularly scheduled feasting resumed, this time at an event held by a woman married to one of Timur’s sons, the occasion, a marriage of one of her relatives. There was roasted meat, of course, torn at noisily and torn from one another’s hands as if in a game. There was rice, prepared in many ways, and tarts made from flour, sugar, and herbs. There was sugared cream, and there was wine, vast quantities of wine, so that men fell down merrily, and there was a lot of friendly pressure on Clavijo whose status as a non-drinker, amazingly, still at this point, maintained, provoked quite a bit of curiosity verging on disbelief among their hosts, with Timur’s first wife, Saray Mulk Khanum, in particular pressing him to drink. Clavijo, undistracted by any drinking of his own, devoted a fair bit of space and attention to describing the royal women as they sat, jugglers performing before them, and received cup after golden cup of wine, brought to them by attendants who never turned their backs, kneeled often, and with napkins in hand, never touched the cups themselves.
And I don’t know if this was a mistake in the recording of the dates, but there appears to have been another event held on that very same Thursday, October the 9th, this time ordered by Timur himself and more of a full on festival than a feast.
Everyone was there, the, in Clavijo’s translated terminology, knights and ladies of Timur’s court in all their splendour. There was meat, fruit, and wine, and Timur laid on a kind of double edged set of entertainments. He called all the tradespeople of Samarkand to assemble and for each to put on their own amusements, to bring their goods to the marriage festival, but also to put on games, shows, and masquerades. Women dressed as spirits or animals pursued one another and skinners and butchers were costumed as foxes and lions. There was juggling, tumbling, and wrestling. And then there was the less gentle side to the day, for, as Timur declared, “he knew how to be merciful and kind to some, and how to be severe to others.”
In the time in which the ambassadors had been his guests, he had shown generosity and consideration, but the man renowned for piling towers of heads like those our travellers had passed on the way in, was not limited in his moral palette to that alone. We’ve maybe caught him at a good moment and in a good light, feeling, for the moment in a celebratory mood, jovial, with still fresh victories to savour, family weddings to enjoy, and in a period of peace before what came next, but, he was more than capable of showing cruelty when he felt it called for, has really since become somewhat infamous for doing so when it perhaps wasn’t called for.
At this festival, gallows were set near the merchants’ stalls, and they were soon put to use. A chief magistrate who had governed Samarkand while his ruler had been away was found to have been neglectful of his duties and for his injustice was hanged. Another man, who had spoken up for the magistrate and offered up his own money in asking for him to be pardoned, had been bled for all the coins he had and was then also hanged, as was a man who had been left in charge of 3,000 horses but was now unable to produce them. He promised he could produce twice as many if only they’d give him time, but Timur would not.
I suppose that when a ruler left on one of these extended campaigns, it could start to feel like he was never coming back, like there were opportunities to take and powerful positions to occupy and abuse in his absence, and some of these killings may well have been carried out, as much as anything, as demonstrations that Timur had indeed returned to his rightful place and that they should not forget it.
There were also smaller matters to put right, issues of fair pricing and the like. There were traders in meat or crafters of shoes who had been found to have charged too much and in the interests of justice and consumer protection had been fined or, in some cases it seems, possibly put to death. It’s not clear here if it’s just an informative aside or specific to what went on there at the festival, but there is a mention here that hanging was reserved for the rich and powerful while beheading was appropriate for the rest. No word on whether any of “the rest” were included among those greedy shoe and meat merchants, those accused merchants who maybe had indeed been taking advantage of their customers while their lord was away, maybe had just made up the numbers in a spectacle set to communicate that order had now returned.
Clavijo and the other ambassadors watched it all. The feasting and the drinking. The weddings. The little show put on to put the Yongle Emperor’s envoy in his place. The amusements, both amusing and deadly. They may not have been pursuing an ambitious agenda of their own, but they were going to be there to watch one play out to its conclusion. And next episode, we’ll get into that.
If you are listening on the Patreon feed then please do keep listening for a little story set, or at least beginning, in this same part of the world. If not, then thank you for listening. I’ll be back soon, and I’ll talk to you then.