LITMIR.BIZ

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each unit—or else. Officers were appointed to keep the count. The more squeamish soldiers bought their quota from comrades with fewer qualms. At first, the price of a head was twenty dinars, but as the massacre progressed and the supply rose to meet demand, the price plunged to half a dinar.¹⁰

       Northwest (1390–91)

      A Mongol dynasty calling itself the Golden Horde had inherited the European quarter of Chinggis Khan’s empire, west of the Ural Mountains, spanning the steppes of Russia and Ukraine. There had been a dynastic dispute in the 1370s, and for a while Timur let Toktamish, the outcast contender for leadership, sleep on his sofa until he could find a job (metaphorically speaking). Timur helped him regain the throne of the Golden Horde, but then the two Chinggisids had a falling out. Shortly after Timur withdrew from his first raid into Persia, Toktamish snuck in behind him and took Tabriz, a city Timur had been saving for later.

      Clearly Eurasia was not big enough for the two of them. Timur struck due north into the unknown wilderness of Siberia, and then turned left, sneaking up on his enemy through the vast forests of Russia. In June 1391 Timur’s army—100,000 men and women^a—came crashing down on the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kunduzcha. After a fierce fight, Toktamish fled, with Timur’s hordes in close pursuit. According to the Persian chronicler Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, “For the space of forty leagues whither they were pursued nothing could be seen but rivers of blood and the plains covered with dead bodies.”¹¹

      Although Toktamish escaped, his major cities—Sarai and Astrakhan—were taken and looted.

       Southwest (1393)

      Persia again.

       Northwest (1395)

      Toktamish again.

       Southeast (1398–99)

      In the summer of 1398 Timur set out to punish his fellow Muslim, the sultan of Delhi, for tolerating all cultures and letting Hindus walk around free, which Timur considered an affront to Islam. By December, he had crossed all of the mountains, deserts, and rivers that separated India from the rest of the world, and led his army down onto the plain of Punjab. As he pushed on through India, he accumulated thousands of Hindu prisoners to be brought home as slaves.

      Timur’s army overwhelmed the forces of the sultan under the walls of Delhi, defeating their war elephants with the flaming camel tactic described earlier. During the battle, Timur heard his prisoners cheering the Indian attacks, so he had them killed—100,000 of them, according to the chronicles. He originally planned to spare Delhi, but as his soldiers looted and raped their way across the fallen city, fights and scuffles broke out with the inhabitants. This coalesced into a full riot against the invaders, which Timur put down with typical ruthlessness. Around 50,000 citizens were massacred, and their heads were stacked up outside the four corners of the city. He then hauled off all the treasure that had accumulated in this great capital over the years, along with tens of thousands of new slaves.

       West (1400–4)

      In October 1400, Timur struck west. Having reduced Persia from great empire to mere shortcut, he swept through and attacked beyond it. He took all of the major cities in his path, and buried alive the garrison of Sivas. He destroyed Aleppo and piled up 20,000 heads. Then he pillaged, burned, and depopulated Damascus in March 1401.

      Showing uncharacteristic mercy, he resettled some defeated Turkmen soldiers in Syria. Homesick, they tried to sneak back to their native land, supporting themselves by robbery. Timur caught them near the city Damghan and piled their bloody heads out in the countryside. A Spanish diplomat to Timur’s court described passing them: “Outside Damghanat the distance of a bowshot we noticed two towers, built as tall as the height to which one might cast up a stone which were entirely constructed from men’s skulls set in clay. Besides these there were other two similar towers, but these appeared already fallen to the ground in decay.” These towers were said to emit supernatural flames in the night for years after that.¹²

      A small force sent to secure Baghdad had made no headway, so Timur returned with his full army and beseiged it for six weeks. On an unbearably hot day, when the defenders retreated to the shade, Timur struck. After the city was secured, Timur ordered every one of his warriors to bring him a severed head—some sources say two. Only clergy and scholars were spared the massacre. When it turned out that there were fewer inhabitants of Baghdad than Timur’s quota, heads were taken from the Mongols’ own camp followers, prostitutes, and personal slaves, because no one dared defy a command from Timur. The Mongols leveled every secular building and surrounded the ruins with 120 towers, assembled from 90,000 heads altogether, while Timur made a pilgrimage to a nearby shrine to pray.¹³

      The westward invasion brought Timur into conflict with the Ottoman Turks, who were busy erasing the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. The Turkish sultan, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, had crushed a string of enemies in both Europe and Asia, and all he needed to cap off his career and be proclaimed the greatest warrior in the history of Islam was to take Constantinople, seat of empire, valve of the Black Sea, and gateway to Europe that had held against Muslim invaders for centuries.

      Then, in 1402, Timur’s hordes came thundering out of the east and Bayezid had to abandon his siege of Constantinople to stop him. Bayezid marched out with a huge battle-hardened army and caught up with Timur at Ankara. It was a tough battle, and several units of Bayezid’s disgruntled conscripts switched over to Timur’s side, throwing the Ottoman position into chaos. Bayezid was defeated and captured along with his entourage. Timur had unwittingly saved Europe from the Turks for half a century.

      Many stories are told of the humiliation that the ex-sultan suffered at the hands of Timur. They say Bayezid was kept on public display in a cage, that his wife was forced to serve meals to the court naked, that Timur used him as a footstool.^b These stories are probably not true because they didn’t appear until late in history. The earliest available historians claimed that Bayezid was well treated.

      Upon reaching the far coast of Anatolia (the peninsula of Turkey), Timur laid siege to the Knights of Rhodes in the Christian city of Smyrna, which held for a few weeks and then fell to the customary massacre and pillage. When a Christian fleet later arrived to assist the knights by breaking the siege, Timur taunted them and proved that they were too late by catapulting the severed heads of the former defenders onto their ships.

       Amir Timur

      Timur had great respect for scholars and attracted many to his court. He commissioned magnificent Korans from the finest calligraphers. He was also a chess master, and the most complicated version of the game is still named after him. In Tamerlane chess, the board has nearly twice as many spaces as regular chess and more pieces, such as elephants that jump two squares diagonally and giraffes that move one diagonal and three straight.

      Like most tyrants, Timur imposed strict and swift justice in his domains, and he was not prone to weighing subtleties. When Timur returned from his war against the west and heard that the governor of Samarkand had been oppressive and greedy in his absence, Timur had the governor hanged. All of this man’s ill-gotten gains were taken into the treasury. There’s no great surprise in any of this, but Timur then hanged an influential friend of the governor’s who had tried to buy the governor’s freedom. Then Timur hanged yet another official who had interceded on behalf of the governor. After that, everyone got the message.¹⁴

      His simplistic approach to problem solving shows up again and again: “Timur now gave orders that a street should be built to pass right through Samarqand, which should have shops opened on either side of it in which every kind of merchandise should be sold, and this new street was to go from one side of the city through to the other side, traversing the heart of the township. . . . No heed was paid to the complaint of persons to whom the property here might belong, and those whose houses thus were demolished suddenly had to quit with no warning, carrying away with them their goods and chattels as best they might.”¹⁵

       Endgame

      Now seventy-one, Timur

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