The self-made heir of Genghis
Timur was born in 1336 near Samarkand into the Turkicised Mongol world of the Chagatai khanate — not of Genghisid royal blood, a defect he managed all his life by ruling through puppet khans and marrying Genghisid princesses to style himself “son-in-law.” Arrow wounds taken in his bandit youth lamed his right side; the Persian Timur-i Lang, Timur the Lame, became Europe’s “Tamerlane.” A Soviet exhumation in 1941 confirmed the injuries exactly.
From 1370, master of Samarkand, he spent thirty-five years in nearly continuous campaign: Persia, the Caucasus, the Golden Horde’s steppe (whose destruction as a power he accomplished), and northern India — where in 1398 he shattered the Delhi Sultanate’s army and gave Delhi a sack from which contemporaries said it took a century to recover. In 1402 at Ankara he destroyed the Ottoman army and captured Sultan Bayezid I — the story of the sultan caged is embellishment-encrusted, his captivity and death in it are fact — incidentally granting besieged Constantinople a fifty-year reprieve. Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad received his signature monuments: towers of skulls, counted by chroniclers in the tens of thousands. Estimates of his campaigns’ total dead run into the many millions; he regarded himself, sincerely, as an instrument of God.
Samarkand and the Timurid light
The paradox: the destroyer was a builder. Artisans were spared from massacred cities and marched to Samarkand, which he made one of the world’s most beautiful cities — the Bibi-Khanym mosque, the Registan’s beginnings, gardens ringing the walls. Under his descendants the Timurid Renaissance flowered in Samarkand and Herat: the astronomer-king Ulugh Beg’s observatory, miniature painting’s golden age, Navoi’s poetry — and, five generations on, a Timurid prince named Babur, expelled from Central Asia, conquered India and founded the Mughal Empire: Timur’s line ruling Delhi, the city he had gutted.
He died in February 1405 at Otrar, aged 68, leading an army to conquer Ming China — the last great steppe conqueror, stopped only by winter and death.
The tomb
His jade-covered tomb, the Gur-e-Amir, carries warnings against disturbance. Soviet archaeologists opened it on 19-21 June 1941; within days Germany invaded the USSR, and the coincidence hardened into the “curse of Timur” legend — completed by the detail, also true, that he was reburied with Islamic rites in late 1942, shortly before the tide turned at Stalingrad. Uzbekistan has since made him the national founding figure: the conqueror’s statue stands where Marx’s used to.