Timur

According to Roemer, the people of conquered cities counted as booty: they were sold or deported to Transoxania, and many, often one in two, died on the way. Outside the gates of cities he punished, Timur raised towers of heads. At Isfahan, Hafiz-i Abru counted twenty-eight. At Baghdad (1401) only theologians and dervishes were spared. The leading men of a city, as at Herat in 1381, were usually spared.

Roemer calls the towers “direct symbols of his unbridled cruelty” and writes that the Mongols too achieved nothing that “equalled this degree of inhumanity”. Some accounts come from hostile writers such as Ibn ‘Arabshah; but Hafiz-i Abru’s count is a first-hand report. We treat overall death tolls as estimates, not counts.

Power built on fear comes apart quickly once its founder dies.

Timur was not a descendant of Chinggis Khan. A burial inscription later gave his family a common ancestry with Chinggis, but in his lifetime he made no such claim. He set up puppet Chinggisid khans in Samarqand, called himself “amir”, and, having married a Chinggisid khan’s daughter, took the title güregen, “son-in-law”. A Sunni, he brought scholars such as Taftazani and Sharif Jurjani to Samarqand, in Algar’s words “sometimes forcibly”.

Roemer writes: “This suggests that he felt his rule stood in need of legitimisation.” The sword was not enough; he also needed the name of Chinggis and the backing of religious scholars.

Even conquerors cannot rule without acceptance from people and institutions.

Timur spent decades adorning Samarqand and ringed it with villages named after the great cities of Islam. Craftsmen and scholars from conquered cities were deported there. After the Terek, the cities of the Golden Horde were so devastated that, in Roemer’s account, long-distance trade by that route was virtually paralysed; he writes that Timur had “probably” intended to ruin that country’s economy.

This is our reading: in Timur’s state, the property and even the lives of conquered townspeople belonged to the conqueror. Wealth was moved by force from the edges to the capital; only those the conqueror chose to spare were safe. That was wealth, but not ownership.

A capital made splendid by plundering others stands on others’ ruin.

After a succession struggle, Timur’s son Shahrukh took Samarqand without a fight on 13 May 1409 and made his son Ulugh Beg governor of Transoxania; he himself stayed in Herat. His wife Gowharshad built the great mosque at Mashhad (finished 1418) and endowed it in 1426; she also built a madrasa and mosque in Herat (1417–1437), with Qavam al-Din Shirazi as architect. Ulugh Beg built an observatory in Samarqand, and his astronomical tables made his name last. Shahrukh died at Ray on 13 March 1447. After two years on the throne, Ulugh Beg was defeated by his son ‘Abd al-Latif and, after a sham trial, was killed on his way to Mecca in October 1449. Gowharshad was executed on the orders of the Timurid Abu Sa‘id on 31 July 1457.

Roemer writes that at the Herat court others, especially Gowharshad, had more influence on government than Shahrukh himself. Manz is more precise: Gowharshad ranked below Shahrukh’s Chinggisid wife, Malekat Agha, but was closer to him and more active politically. The date of the observatory is not certain either: Roemer gives 825 AH, about 1420. Roemer calls Ulugh Beg a cultured prince but “not a man of action”.

A conqueror’s descendants found their lasting legacy in mosques, madrasas and an observatory, not in war.