Atrocitology - Matthew White

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Great, about an emperor of the Orient, a glorious monster, destroyer of cities, and despoiler of women. Tamburlaine strutted larger than life across the stage, and reveled in his wealth, his schemes, and his magnificent power. When the play ends, the villain is unrepentant and triumphant over all of his enemies, surrounded by worshipful followers. No one had ever seen anything like it. Audiences adored it, and it became the first theatrical hit in recorded history.

      Somewhere in the audience, a young actor, beginning playwright, and friend of Marlowe’s named William Shakespeare realized that he too could probably make a living writing big, bloody dramas. That, however, is another story.2 The question that concerns us is, who was this magnificent villain known to Marlowe as Tamburlaine?

      First and foremost, he was the type of barbarian warlord that people told stories about. To his admirers, he was sort of a warrior trickster. As a young bandit in the central Asian wilderness, he had his soldiers build unnecessary campfires in a circle around the enemy to convince them they were outnumbered. He had his horsemen drag branches to kick up a larger dust cloud. When invading India, he strapped bundles of kindling onto camels. As the enemy elephants charged, his men chased flaming camels right into the elephants’ faces, who then panicked and stampeded back over the shocked Indian army.

      Legendary villainy also swirled around him. When the Christian garrison of Sivas in Armenia asked about terms of surrender, Timur swore no blood would be shed. After they surrendered, he remained true to his word and buried them alive instead.

      An Arab contemporary was reminded mostly of animal predators when describing Timur’s followers: “leopards of Turkistan, tigers of Balkhshan, hawks of Dasht and Khata, Mongol vultures, Jata eagles, vipers of Khajend,” and people in many other dangerous nations labeled as hounds, lions, hyenas, and crocodiles. It was a cosmopolitan army that grew more formidable with each conquest.3

      Timur’s biography abounds with such colorful anecdotes that skeptics question everything said about him, but many of his chroniclers knew him personally as diplomats, allies, or favored scholars. Most of the stories come to us, if not firsthand, then as close to it as scholarship in the manuscript era allows. For example, if you are curious about how we know things like medieval casualty statistics, here’s a story: Once, as Timur’s army set off to pursue a fleeing enemy, each soldier placed a stone in a pile. When they returned from battle, each man took a stone off the pile. By counting the remaining stones, Timur knew exactly and immediately how many men he had lost.4

      The most confusing aspect of Timur’s biography is that he simply attacked every which way, with no specific long-term plan other than conquest. Part of this was economic. Loot sustained armies in those days, so obviously he had to find a steady supply of rich enemies to rob. Part was geographic. Being in central Asia meant that he had enemies in all directions and no borders anchored securely against a coastline.

       Land of Confusion

      After Chinggis Khan died in 1227, his unified empire survived only briefly before sons, grandsons, and generals broke it down into more manageable quarters—the Yuan dynasty, the Il-Khans, the Chagatai Khanate, and the Golden Horde. For another generation or two, these four khanates cooperated as a kind of loose crime syndicate. Each quarter-empire had a frontier abutting rich foreigners who could be invaded and plundered, so theoretically they had no reason to quarrel with each other. Within a few decades, this friendly arrangement broke down as well, and the Chinggisids (the heirs of Chinggis) were at each others’ throats. Timur was born into this chaos sometime around 1336. We will meet each of these khanates in turn as Timur sets out to conquer them and re-create the empire of Chinggis Khan.

      Timur’s clan of Mongols had gone native and adopted the Turkic language and Muslim religion during the previous generation. They lived in what had once been part of the unhappy land of Khwarezm, which had been so thoroughly devastated by the Mongols but had later become the inheritance of Chinggis Khan’s second son, Chagatai. By Timur’s day, rival khans were fighting each other for control.

      Timur started his career as a minor bandit. As a young man, he took arrow wounds in his right hand and knee while either fighting glorious battles (his story) or stealing sheep (his enemies’ story), leaving him with a limp and a stiff arm the rest of his life.5 Despite these infirmities, he gathered enough followers to form an impressive army of freebooters. Eventually, his reputation as an up-and-coming warlord brought him to the attention of the alpha khan, Tughlak, who made him governor of Transoxiana.

      In the years following Tughlak’s death in 1366, Timur outfought his rivals and took the throne of Samarkand. It’s all very complicated, but there were assassinations involved, as well as pitched battles and marriages. To puff up his pedigree, he claimed to be descended from Chinggis Khan and Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali, but no one really believes any of that nowadays, unless it was a coincidence. (Both Chinggis Khan and Ali produced a lot of unrecorded descendants. You might be one.)

      Timur scrounged up a documented relative of Chinggis Khan to sit on the throne of Samarkand, while Timur himself took the more modest title of Amir (Lord) and pulled levers from behind the curtain. No one was fooled by this arrangement, and most histories neglect to mention that Timur was not, technically, the ruler of his empire.

      Sometimes it can be difficult to tell Chinggis Khan and Timur apart. They seem to blend together into a generic Mongol warlord template, but there are substantial differences. Timur was a devoted Muslim, and he struck more deeply into the Middle East, against places you are more likely to have heard of: Delhi and Damascus instead of Nishapur and Bukhara.

      Also unlike Chinggis Khan, Timur liked cities—well, his own cities at least. He turned his capital of Samarkand into one of the most beautiful cities of the world. Impressed by an onion dome he had seen after capturing Damascus, he had it replicated in Samarkand. From there the style spread into Russia (the Kremlin) and India (the Taj Mahal).6

      For other cities, however, his preferred form of architecture was the tower of skulls. After consolidating his hold in Samarkand, Timur set out to decorate the world with these.

       Campaigns: Southwest (1381–84)

      In the generations since Chinggis Khan destroyed it in 1221, the city of Herat was reborn, becoming a wealthy and cultured stop on the Silk Road. During his earlier days as a wandering mercenary, Timur worked for the ruling dynasty of Herat, and now he tried to negotiate a marriage alliance. The current ruler agreed in principle but stalled on the details. Then Timur’s spies discovered that Herat was strengthening its defenses, a clearly provocative act. Timur stormed across three hundred miles of rough desert and mountains to surround the city. Knowing the fate that awaited an unsuccessful defense, Herat gave up without a fight and was granted mercy.7

      With his army mobilized and having traveled so far west, Timur continued his offensive. The Persian quarter of Chinggis Khan’s empire had become the realm of the Il-Khans, but they fizzled out about the same time as the Chagatai dynasty. Exploiting this power vacuum, Timur invaded Persia with what would come to be characteristic cruelty.

      At the town of Isfizar, Timur sealed 2,000 prisoners into a tower to die of starvation. The nearby town of Zaranj carried bad memories for Timur since this was where he had received his debilitating wounds, so even though the residents surrendered without a fight, Zaranj was put to the sword and torch.8

       Southwest (1386–88)

      Timur went home to rest awhile before he invaded Persia again. After taking the city of Isfahan in central Iran, he installed a garrison and was ready to grant mercy, but the people rose up and killed the garrison. Timur stormed the city again and wiped out the inhabitants, stacking up their severed heads as a warning to others who might resist him. The nearby city of Shiraz took the hint and surrendered immediately. A Muslim historian exploring Isfahan shortly afterward counted twenty-eight towers of 1,500 heads each before he stopped circling the ruins. The likely total was close to 70,000.9

      Although we think of the past as a more brutal era than today, it’s worth noting that many of Timur’s soldiers were appalled at the order to massacre civilians and fellow

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