Name: Tamerlane (Amir Timur, Aksak Timur, Timur)
State: Golden Horde
Field of activity: Politics, army
Greatest Achievement: Fought for power in the Golden Horde, founded the Timurid Empire.
History remembers few names that inspired such horror as "Tamerlane". However, this was not the actual name of the conqueror of Central Asia. It is more accurate to call him Timur, from the Turkic word for "iron". Also known are his names Aksak Timur, Timur Leng (literally - Iron Lame).
Tamerlane is remembered as a vicious conqueror who razed ancient cities to the ground and destroyed entire nations. On the other hand, he is also known as a great patron of the arts, literature and architecture. One of his notable achievements is his capital in the beautiful city of Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan.
A complex person, a historical figure. The life of Tamerlane continues to interest us six centuries after his death.
Early years of Tamerlane
Timur was born in 1336, near the city of Kesh (now called Shakhrisabz), about 75 km south of Samarkand, in Maverranakhr. His father, Taragai, was the head of the Barlas clan. Barlas was a mixed Mongolian and Turkic family descended from the earlier inhabitants of Maverranakhr. Unlike their nomadic ancestors, the Barlas were farmers and merchants.
Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Arabshah in the 14th century in his biography "Tamerlane or Timur: The Great Amir" states that Tamerlane's roots go back to Genghis Khan through his mother's line; the veracity of this assertion is questionable.
Disputes about the causes of Tamerlane's lameness
The European versions of Timur's name - "Tamerlane" or "Tumberlain" - are based on the Turkic nickname Timur-i-Leng, which means "Timur lame" or "Iron Lame". Tamerlane's body was exhumed by a Soviet team led by archaeologist Mikhail Gerasimov in 1941, and they found actual evidence of two healed wounds on Tamerlane's right leg. Two fingers were missing on the right hand.
There are many versions of the reasons for Tamerlane's lameness, but we will stick to the fact that in his youth Tamerlane was the leader of a whole gang of peers and was engaged in robbery, where he was injured.
The political situation in Maverranakhr
During Tamerlane's youth, Maverranakhr was riven by conflict between the local nomadic clans and the settled Chagatai Mongol khans who ruled over it. abandoned the nomadic life of Genghis Khan and his other ancestors and supported their urban lifestyle to a large extent. Naturally, this angered its citizens.
In 1347, someone named Kazgan seized power from the ruler of the Chagatai ulus. Kazgan ruled until his death in 1358. After Kazgan's death, various warlords and religious leaders strove for power. Tughluq Timur, a Mongol commander, won in 1360.
Young Tamerlane gains and loses political influence
At this time, Timur's uncle Hadji-bek headed the Barlas clan, and he refused to submit to Tugluk Timur. Hadji-bek escaped, and the new Mongol ruler decided to install the seemingly more flexible young Tamerlane in his place.
In fact, Tamerlane had already started plotting against the legitimate khan. He entered into an alliance with the grandson of Kazgan - Emir Khusain and married his sister. The latter pursued his personal goals, wanting to make his puppet out of Tamerlane. In this case, he would not risk his head in the fight against Khan Tokhtamysh or any other Genghisid who was placed on the throne in Sarai.
Pretty soon, the Golden Horde forces overthrow Tamerlane and Emir Khusain, and they are forced to go on the run and even turn to banditry in order to survive.
In 1362 Tamerlane loses almost all of his retinue and even goes to prison in Persia for two months. The jailbreak attracted the attention of the Persian ruler, and some people recognized the prisoner as Tamerlane, in whose army they had to fight. The soldiers remembered him as a just and wise commander.
The beginning of the ascent of Tamerlane
The courage and tactical skill of Tamerlane made him a successful mercenary soldier in Persia, and he soon gained great prestige. In 1364, Tamerlane and Emir Khusain united again and defeated Ilyas Khoja, the son of Tughluk Timur. By 1366, two warlords were in control of Maverranakhr.
Tamerlane's wife died in 1370. She was the last factor that kept him from getting rid of Emir Khusain, with whom there had been more and more disagreements and treacherous actions lately. Emir Khusain was besieged and killed in the city of Balkh, and Tamerlane declared himself the ruler of the entire region. Tamerlane was not a Genghisid (general descendant of Genghis Khan), so he ruled as an emir (from the Arabic word for "prince"), and not as a khan.
Over the next decade, Timur conquered the rest of Central Asia as well.
The expansion of Tamerlane's empire
Having acquired Central Asia in his hands, Tamerlane invaded the Russian ulus in 1380. Tamerlane captured Herat (a city in modern Afghanistan) in 1383, began a campaign against Persia. By 1385 all of Persia was his.
In 1391 and 1395, Tamerlane fought against his former protégé and legitimate khan of the Golden Horde, Tokhtamysh. The Timurid army captured Moscow in 1395. While Tamerlane was busy in the north, Persia rebelled. The answer was harsh. He razed entire cities to the ground and built pyramids of rebel skulls in their place.
By 1396 Tamerlane had also conquered Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Georgia.
Tamerlane's army of 90,000 crossed the Indus River in September 1398 and set out for India. The country fell to pieces after the death of Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq (1351-1388) of the Delhi Sultanate, by which time Bengal, Kashmir and the Deccan had separate rulers.
The Turkic-Mongolian occupiers left a bloody trail on their way; Delhi's army was defeated in December and the city destroyed. Tamerlane captured tons of treasures. 90 military elephants were fully loaded and sent back to Samarkand.
Tamerlane headed west in 1399, regaining Azerbaijan and conquering Syria. Baghdad was destroyed in 1401 and 20,000 people were killed. In July 1402, Timur captured the early and conquered Egypt.
The last campaign of Tamerlane and his death
The rulers of Europe were glad that the Turkish Sultan Bayezid had been defeated, but they trembled at the thought that Tamerlane was at their doorstep. The rulers of Spain, France and other powers sent ambassadors with congratulatory letters to Tamerlane, hoping to prevent an attack.
However, Tamerlane had big plans. In 1404, he decided that he would take over Ming China. (The ethnic Han dynasty overthrew their cousins, the Yuan, in 1368).
Unfortunately for him, the Timurid army left in December, during an unusually cold winter.
Men and horses died of hypothermia, and 68-year-old Timur fell ill. He died in February 1405 in Otrar, in Kazakhstan.
Tamerlane began life as the son of a minor leader, like his supposed ancestor Genghis Khan. Through pure intellect, military prowess and strength of personality, he was able to conquer an empire stretching from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean to Mongolia.
However, unlike Genghis Khan, Timur conquered not to open trade routes and protect his borders, but to plunder and plunder. The Timurid Empire did not last long after the death of its founder because Tamerlane rarely bothered to set up any kind of government structure after he had destroyed the existing order.
While Tamerlane was a devout Muslim, he apparently had no qualms about destroying cities and slaughtering their inhabitants. Damascus, Khiva, Baghdad… these ancient capitals of the Islamic world never went unnoticed by Tamerlane. His intention seems to have been to make his capital at Samarkand the first city in the Islamic world.
Contemporary sources say that Tamerlane's troops killed about 19 million people during their conquests. This number is probably an exaggeration, but Tamerlane seems to have been very fond of slaughter.
In the absence of Tamerlane
Despite the threat of death from the conqueror, his sons and grandsons immediately began to fight for the throne when he died. The most successful ruler of the Timurids, the grandson of Tamerlane Uleg-bek, gained fame as an astronomer and scientist. However, Uleg was not a good administrator and was killed by his own son in 1449.
In India, the descendants of Tamerlane were more successful; his great-grandson Babur founded the Mughal dynasty in 1526. The Mughals ruled until 1857 when the British drove them out. (Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, is also a descendant of Tamerlane).
Reputation of Tamerlane
Tamerlane is honored in the west for his victory over the Ottoman Turks. This is confirmed by the works "Tamerlane the Great" by Christopher Marlowe and "Tamerlane" by Edgar Allen Poe.
Not surprisingly, the people of Turkey, Iran, and the Middle East remember him less favorably.
In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Tamerlane was turned into a folk hero. However, residents of Uzbek cities such as Khiva are skeptical of this historical figure; they remember that he destroyed their city and killed almost every inhabitant.
Timur (Timur-Leng - Iron Lame), the famous conqueror of the eastern lands, whose name sounded on the lips of Europeans as Tamerlane (1336 - 1405), was born in Kesh (modern Shakhrisabz, "Green City"), fifty miles south of Samarkand in Transoxiana (a region of modern Uzbekistan between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya). According to some assumptions, Timur's father Taragay was the leader of the Mongol-Turkic tribe of the Barlas (a large family in the tribe of the Mongols-Chagatays) and a descendant of a certain Karachar Noyon (a large feudal landowner in Mongolia in the Middle Ages), a powerful assistant to Chagatai, the son of Genghis Khan and a distant relative of the latter . Reliable "Memoirs" of Timur say that he led many expeditions during the unrest that followed the death of Emir Kazgan, the ruler of Mesopotamia. In 1357, after the invasion of Tughlak Timur, Khan of Kashgar (1361), and the appointment of his son Ilyas-Khodja as governor of Mesopotamia, Timur became his assistant and ruler of Kesh. But very soon he fled and joined Emir Hussein, the grandson of Kazgan, becoming his son-in-law. After many raids and adventures, they defeated the forces of Ilyas-Khoja (1364) and set off to conquer Mesopotamia. Around 1370, Timur rebelled against his ally Hussein, captured him in Balkh and announced that he was the heir of Chagatai and was going to revive the Mongol empire.
Tamerlane devoted the next ten years to the fight against the khans of Dzhent (East Turkestan) and Khorezm, and in 1380 captured Kashgar. Then he intervened in the conflict between the khans of the Golden Horde in Russia and helped Tokhtamysh to take the throne. With the help of Timur, he defeated the ruling Khan Mamai, took his place and, in order to take revenge on the Moscow prince for the defeat inflicted by him on Mamai in 1380, captured Moscow in 1382.
Timur's conquest of Persia in 1381 began with the capture of Herat. The unstable political and economic situation at that time in Persia favored the conqueror. The revival of the country, which began during the reign of the Ilkhans, again slowed down with the death of the last representative of the family, Abu Said (1335). In the absence of an heir, the throne was occupied in turn by rival dynasties. The situation was aggravated by the clash between the dynasties of the Mongol Jalayirs ruling in Baghdad and Tabriz; the Perso-Arab family of the Muzafarids ruling in Fars and Isfahan; Harid-Kurtov in Herat; local religious and tribal alliances, such as the Serbedars (who rebelled against the Mongol oppression) in Khorasan and the Afghans in Kerman, and petty princes in the border regions. All these warring principalities could not jointly and effectively resist Timur. Khorasan and all of Eastern Persia fell under his onslaught in 1382-1385; Fars, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Armenia were conquered in 1386-1387 and 1393-1394; Mesopotamia and Georgia came under his rule in 1394. Between conquests, Timur fought Tokhtamysh, now Khan of the Golden Horde, whose troops invaded Azerbaijan in 1385 and Mesopotamia in 1388, defeating Timur's forces. In 1391, Timur, pursuing Tokhtamysh, reached the southern steppes of Russia, defeated the enemy and overthrew him from the throne. In 1395, the Khan of the Horde again invaded the Caucasus, but was finally defeated on the Kura River. To top it off, Timur ravaged Astrakhan and Saray, but did not reach Moscow. The uprisings that broke out throughout Persia during this campaign demanded his immediate return. Timur crushed them with extraordinary cruelty. Entire cities were destroyed, The inhabitants were exterminated, And their heads were walled up in the walls of the towers.
In 1399, when Timur was in his sixties, he invaded India, outraged that the Sultans of Delhi were showing too much tolerance towards their subjects. On September 24, Tamerlane's troops crossed the Indus and, leaving a bloody trail behind them, entered Delhi.
Having laid the stone foundation of the mosque, at the end of the same year, Timur undertook his last great expedition, the purpose of which was to punish the Egyptian Mameluk Sultan for supporting Ahmad Jalair and the Turkish Sultan Bayazet II, who captured Eastern Anatolia. After restoring his power in Azerbaijan, Tamerlane moved to Syria. Aleppo was taken by storm and plundered, the Mameluke army was defeated, and Damascus was captured (1400). A crushing blow to the well-being of Egypt was that Timur sent all the craftsmen to Samarkand to build mosques and palaces. In 1401, Baghdad was taken by storm, twenty thousand of its inhabitants were killed, and all the monuments were destroyed. Tamerlane wintered in Georgia, and in the spring he crossed the border of Anatolia, defeated Bayazet near Ankara (July 20, 1402) and captured Smyrna, which was owned by the Rhodes knights. Bayazet died in captivity, and the story of his imprisonment in an iron cage has forever become a legend. As soon as the resistance of the Egyptian Sultan and John VII (later co-ruler of Manuel II Palaiologos) stopped. Timur returned to Samarkand and immediately began to prepare for an expedition to China. He spoke at the end of December, but in Otrar on the Syrdarya River he fell ill and died on January 19, 1405. Tamerlane's body was embalmed and sent in an ebonite coffin to Samarkand, where he was buried in a magnificent mausoleum called Gur-Emir. Before his death, Timur divided his territories between his two surviving sons and grandsons. After many years of war and enmity over the left will, the descendants of Tamerlane were united by the younger son of the khan, Shahruk.
During the life of Timur, contemporaries kept a careful chronicle of what was happening. It was supposed to serve for writing the official biography of the khan. In 1937, the works of Nizam ad-Din Shami were published in Prague. An edited version of the chronicle was prepared by Sharaf ad-Din Yazdi even earlier and in 1723 was printed in the translation of Petit de la Croix. The opposite point of view was reflected by another contemporary of Timur, Ibn Arabshah, who was extremely hostile towards the khan. His book was published in 1936 in Sanders' translation under the title "Tamerlane, or Timur, the Great Emir". The so-called "Memoirs" of Timur, published in 1830 in Stuart's translation, are considered a fake, and the circumstances of their discovery and presentation to Shah Jahan in 1637 are still being questioned.
The portraits of Timur by Persian masters have survived to this day. However, they reflected an idealized idea of him. They in no way correspond to the description of the khan by one of his contemporaries as a very tall man with a large head, blush on his cheeks and blond hair from birth.
Timur. Reconstruction based on the skull of M. Gerasimov
The Importance of Timur in World History
It is a well-known fact that almost all the great conquerors, who did not stop at trifles, but tirelessly pursued the unlimited expansion of their power, were fatalists; they felt like instruments of either a vengeful deity or a mysterious fate, carried away by an irresistible current through streams of blood, over heaps of corpses, on and on. These were: Attila, Genghis Khan, in our historical era Napoleon; such was Tamerlane, the formidable warrior, whose name was repeated throughout the West with horror and amazement for centuries, although he himself this time escaped danger. This commonality is not accidental. The conquest of half the world, in the absence of such very special circumstances as in the time of Alexander the Great, can succeed only when the forces of the peoples are already half paralyzed by the horror of the approaching enemy; and even an individual person, if he is not yet simply at the stage of animal development, is hardly capable of accepting on his only personal conscience all the disasters that a merciless war causes in the world, which for decades has been rushing from one battlefield to another. This means that where it is not a matter of a war for faith, in which much is already allowed in advance, since it primarily strives to achieve the high religious goal ad majorem Dei gloriam, only he will be at the height of the necessary insensitivity and inhumanity, whose mind is absorbed by the persistent idea about the divine mission or about his "star" and is closed to everything that does not serve his exclusive purpose. A person who has not lost any concept of moral responsibility and universal human duties will, therefore, marvel at these most terrible phenomena of all world history, just as one can marvel at a majestic thunderstorm, until the thunder strikes too dangerously close. The above consideration may, perhaps, serve to explain the special contradictions encountered in such characters, in none of them, perhaps more than in Tamerlane or, to use a more accurate form of his name, Timurlenka. It cannot be said that any of the leaders of the second Mongol-Tatar migration of peoples differed from the leaders of the first by a lesser degree of savagery and ferocity. It is known that Timur was especially fond of, after winning a battle or conquering a city, to build the highest possible pyramids, either from the heads alone, or from the whole bodies of the killed enemies; and where he found it useful or necessary, in order to make a lasting impression or set an example, he made his hordes crack down no better than Genghis Khan himself. And along with this, there are still features that, in comparison with such ferocity, seem no less strange than Napoleon's predilection for Goethe's Werther next to his rude ruthlessness. I do not deduce this from the fact that under the name of Timur rather voluminous notes have come down to us, partly military stories, partly military-political reasoning, from the content of which it is often hardly possible to conclude that in the person of their author we have before us one of the greatest monsters of all times: even if their reliability were fully proven, one must still remember that paper endures everything, and the wise legislation of Genghis Khan can be cited as an example. Also, there is no need to attach too much importance to the saying carved on Timur's ring: grow-rusti (in Persian: “right is strength”); that it was not a simple hypocrisy, was revealed, for example, in one remarkable case, during the Armenian campaign of 796 (1394). The local chronicler describes him as follows: “He camped in front of the Pakran fortress and took possession of it. He ordered to put in two separate crowds, on the one hand, three hundred Muslims, on the other, three hundred Christians. After that, they were told: we will kill the Christians, and set the Muslims free. There were also two brothers of the bishop of this city, who interfered with the crowd of infidels. But then the Mongols raised their swords, killed the Muslims and freed the Christians. Those two Christians immediately started shouting: we are the servants of Christ, we are Orthodox. The Mongols exclaimed: you lied, so we will not let you out. And they killed both brothers. This caused the bishop deep sorrow, although both of them died professing the true faith. This case is all the more noteworthy because, generally speaking, Christians could not count on Timur's gentleness; he himself was a Moslem, and although he was inclined towards Shiism, however, above all, he passionately pursued the strict implementation of the laws of the Qur'an and the extermination of the Gentiles, unless they deserved mercy for themselves, refusing any attempt to resist. True, his co-religionists usually fared a little better: “like predatory wolves on abundant herds,” the Tatar hordes attacked, now, as they had 50 years before, the inhabitants of cities and countries that aroused the displeasure of this terrible man; even a peaceful surrender did not always save from murder and robbery, especially in cases where the poor were suspected of disrespecting Allah's law. The Eastern Persian provinces got off the lightest this time, at least where they did not arouse the wrath of Timur by subsequent uprisings, simply because they were to be annexed to the immediate possessions of the new conqueror of the world; the worse he ordered to devastate Armenia, Syria and Asia Minor. In general, his invasion was the completion of the ruin of Muslim countries. When he died, in a purely political sense, everything was again the same as it was before him; nowhere did circumstances unfold otherwise than, in all likelihood, it would have happened if the momentary creation of his great kingdom had not occurred: but his pyramids of skulls could not contribute to the restoration of devastated cities and villages, and his “right” did not possess in any case the power awaken life from death; otherwise, it was, as the proverb says, that summum jus, which is the summa injuria. Indeed, Timur was only, so to speak, "the great organizer of victories"; the art with which he knew how to assemble his troops, train military leaders, defeat opponents, no matter how little we learn about him for certain, is in any case a manifestation of a mind as much bold and strong as a carefully considering mind and out of the ordinary knowledge of people. Thus, with his thirty-five campaigns, he once again spread the horror of the Mongol name from the borders of China to the Volga, from the Ganges to the gates of Constantinople and Cairo.
Origin of Timur
Timur - his name means iron - was born on Shaban 25, 736 (April 8–9, 1336), on the outskirts of the Traxoxian Kesh (now Shakhrisabz, south of Samarkand) or in one of the neighboring villages. His father, Taragai, was the leader of the Tatar tribe Barlas (or Barulas) and, as such, the chief commander of the Kesh district occupied by them, that is, he owned one of the countless small areas into which the state of Jagatai had long since disintegrated; since the death of Barak, one or another of the successors of Genghis Khan or other ambitious leaders tried to unite them into large communities, but until then without real results. The Barlas tribe is officially classified as purely Mongolian, the origin of Timur is from one of the closest trusted of Genghis Khan, and on the other hand from the daughter of his son, Jagatai. But he was by no means a Mongol; since Genghis Khan was considered a Mongol, the flatterers of his powerful successor considered it their duty to establish the closest possible connection between him in the first founder of the world domination of the Tatars, and the genealogies necessary for this purpose were compiled only later.
Timur's appearance
Already the appearance of Timur did not correspond to the Mongolian type. “He was,” says his Arab biographer, slender and large, tall, like a descendant of ancient giants, with a powerful head and forehead, dense in body and strong ... skin color is white and ruddy, without a dark shade; broad-shouldered, with strong limbs, strong fingers and long hips, proportionate build, long beard, but lacking in the right leg and arm, with eyes full of gloomy fire and a loud voice. He did not know the fear of death: already being close to 80 years old, he retained spiritually complete self-confidence, bodily - strength and elasticity. In terms of hardness and ability to resist, it was like a stone rock. He did not like ridicule and lies, was inaccessible to jokes and fun, but he always wanted to hear one truth, even if it was unpleasant to him; failure never saddened him, and success never cheered. This is an image, the inner side of which seems to be completely consistent with reality, only in external features it does not quite agree with the portrait that later images give us; nevertheless, in the main, it may have a claim to some certainty, as a transmission of a tradition based on deep impressions, where stylistic considerations did not greatly affect the author, who obviously considered admirably the elegance and symmetry of his presentation. There is no doubt the existence of a bodily defect, to which he owes his Persian nickname Timurlenka, "lame Timur" (in Turkish - Aksak Timur); this shortcoming, however, could not be a significant obstacle in his movements, since his ability to ride around horses and wield weapons was especially glorified. In those days, it could be especially useful to him.
Central Asia during Timur's youth
In the vast areas of the former kingdom of Jaghatai, everything was again the same as 150 years earlier, in the days of the disintegration of the state of the Karakitays. Where a brave leader was sought out, who knew how to gather several tribes around him for riding and battles, a new principality quickly arose, and if another, stronger one appeared behind him, it would find an equally quick end. - The rulers of Kesh were subjected to a similar fate, when, after the death of Taragai, his brother, Haji Seyfaddin, took his place. Just at that time (760=1359), in Kashgar [regions to the north and east of the Syr Darya], one of the members of the house of Jaghatai, the successor of Barak, named Tugluk-Timur, managed to proclaim himself a khan and persuade many tribes of Turkestan to recognize their dignity. . He set out with them to reconquer the remaining provinces of the kingdom [that is, Central Asia], of which the Oxus [Amu Darya] region was the most significant and still the most flourishing. The little prince of Kesha, with his weak powers, was unable to withstand the attack; but while he turned towards Khorasan, his nephew Timur went to the enemy camp and declared his submission to the dominion of Tughluq (761=1360). It is clear that he was received with joy and granted by the region of Kesh; but as soon as the khan had time to be sure of the possession of Transoxania [the region between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya], new disagreements flared up between the leaders of the tribes in his army, which led to various small wars and forced Tughluk to temporarily return to Kashgar. While he was there trying to attract new and, if possible, more reliable forces, his emirs quarreled among themselves, and Timur constantly intervened in their feuds, taking care primarily of keeping his uncle Haji Sayfeddin of Kesh at a distance, who reappeared on the horizon. Finally, they made up; but when the khan again approached (763=1362), who in the meantime had succeeded in recruiting new troops, Seyfaddin did not trust the peace and went through the Oxus to Khorasan, where he soon died thereafter.
Timur's participation in the Central Asian civil strife
With the new distribution of possessions, which Tughluq made after the soon completed conquest of Transoxania and the region between Herat and the Hindu Kush, he appointed his son Ilyas viceroy in Samarkand; at his court, Timur also gained importance, since the death of his uncle he became the undisputed ruler of Kesh; then the khan went back to Kashgar. Meanwhile, strife soon broke out between Timur and the vizier Ilyas; the former was said to have left the capital after the plot he had conceived was discovered, and fled to Husayn, one of the emirs hostile to Tughluq and his house, who retired to the steppe with a few adherents after the defeat of his party. Meanwhile, his small army was scattered by government troops, and a period full of adventure began in Timur's life. He either wandered between Oxus and Jaxarth [Amu Darya and Syr Darya], then hid in Kesh or Samarkand, once he was held captive for several months by one of the petty rulers, then he was released almost without any means, until finally he managed to once again gather around himself a few riders from Kesh and the surrounding area for new enterprises and with them to fight their way south. There, since the collapse of the kingdom of Jaghatai, Sejestan again became independent under the rule of its own prince, who was caused a lot of trouble by the neighboring mountain peoples of Gur and Afghanistan proper, of course, long freed from any foreign influence, and sometimes also by the rulers of neighboring Kerman. At Prince Sedzhestan, according to a prearranged condition, Timur met Hussein again and for some time helped him in military affairs; then they left Sejestan and, apparently reinforced by new hordes of wandering Tatars, who were many everywhere, went to the area near Balkh and Tokharistan, where they, partly peacefully, partly by strong attacks, subjugated region after region, and their troops quickly increased as they succeeded. . The army approaching them from Samarkand, despite its numerical superiority, was defeated by them on the banks of the Oxus, thanks to a successful trick; The Oks was crossed, and then the population of Transoxania, already not very satisfied with the dominion of the Kashgarians, poured in crowds to both emirs. To what extent Timur's inventive mind also did not miss any means of injuring his opponents and spreading fear and horror of his still moderate forces everywhere, is evident from one story about this time. When he, sending his detachments in all directions, also wanted to occupy Kesh again, then, in order to achieve the appearance of a significant detachment of enemies standing there, he ordered 200 horsemen to be sent to the city, each of whom had to tie a large, branchy branch to the tail of his horse. The unusual clouds of dust thus raised give the garrison the impression that an innumerable army is advancing; he hastily cleared Kesh, and Timur was again able to set up his camp in his native place.
Timur and Hussein take over Central Asia
But he did not remain idle for long. The news was received that Tugluk-Khan had died; even before the bold rebels approached, Ilyas decided to return to Kashgar to take the throne of his father there, and he was already on his way with his army. It was assumed that even if he did not immediately have time to return, he would still appear again in a short time to take the province from the rebellious emirs. Therefore, Timur and Hussein considered it best to inflict another blow on the retreating, taking advantage of the fact that just at that time, new troops flocked to them, as to the liberators of the country, from all sides; in fact, they managed to overtake the Kashgar army on the way, defeat it despite stubborn defenses and pursue Jaxartes (765=1363). Transoxania was again left to one of its emirs. One of the descendants of Jaghatai, Kabul-Shah, was elected to the khans, of course with the implied condition that he remain silent; but before things could settle down, fresh troops from Kashgar were already approaching under the personal leadership of Ilyas. The Transoxans under the command of Timur and Hussein opposed them to the east of Jaksart near Shash (Tashkent); but this time the victory after a two-day battle remained on the side of the opponents (766 = 1365), Timur himself had to retreat to Kesh, and then back through the Oxus, since Hussein did not have the courage to hold the line of the river; everything that had been achieved in the past year seemed lost. But the spirit of courage and self-confidence, which Timur apparently knew even then to inspire his subordinates, gave the inhabitants of Samarkand strength for the successful defense of the city, which Ilyas began to besiege soon after. At a decisive moment, when further defense seemed impossible, the horses of the enemies suddenly began to fall in whole masses from the plague; the enemies had to lift the siege, and its unsuccessful outcome turned out to be apparently fatal for the very dominion of Ilyas. Rumor says, at least, that after a short time one of the emirs, Kamaraddin Dughlat, treacherously deprived him of the throne in life, and it can be assumed that the resulting confusion in Kashgar made further attempts against Transoxania impossible. In any case, further traditions tell only of completely random attacks by small detachments from the border tribes, during new internecine strife, which the Transoxanean leaders still considered it necessary to bring among themselves in order to eliminate the external danger.
Assassination of Hussein by Timur
The relations between the ambitious Timur and his former accomplice Hussein soon became especially unbearable, hardly so exclusively through the fault of the latter, as Timur's panegyrists would like to assert. In the war that quickly broke out between them (767 = 1366), the native emirs, as usual, hesitated here and there, and one day Timur again had it so badly that he had only two hundred people left. He saved himself by an act of unheard-of courage. With his 243 horsemen, he approached the fortress of Nakhsheb (now Karshi in Transoxania) at night; 43 of them were to remain with the horses, with one hundred he lined up in front of one of the gates, and the last 100 were to climb over the city wall, kill the sentries who fell asleep at the gate and then let him in. The venture succeeded; before the inhabitants even knew about the proximity of the enemy, the fortress was in his power - most of the garrison, in the amount of 12,000 people, were located in the vicinity and noticed too late that they had been taken away from the very center of their position. With repeated short sorties, Timur disturbed here and there those who returned to re-occupy the city of the enemies, so that they, again exaggerating the number of his troops, finally withdrew (768 = 1366). Success, of course, again attracted a large army to him; but such changes occurred several more times before final victory smiled at him. This happened in 771 (1369), when he managed to organize a general alliance of emirs against Hussein, with whom he had once again united in 769 (1367) regarding the division of the country. Apparently, he has already set out here as a warrior of Allah; at least he made one dervish utter a divination to himself, authorizing him to this surname, the influence of which did no little to increase his party. Hussein, whose residence was in Balkh, after a lost battle did not hope to keep the city; he surrendered, but was nevertheless killed by two of his personal enemies, if not on the orders of Timur, then still with his consent. Timur became the sovereign ruler of all Transoxania and the country south to the Hindu Kush.
Unification of Central Asia by Timur
Timur at the siege of Balkh. Miniature
The position he occupied was, no doubt, rather obscure. The Turk is always ready, as we have seen in many examples, to cut off the head of his lawful sovereign if he does not like his rule; but he is extremely conservative in all religious and political respects, and it is with difficulty that he decides to recognize as the new ruler anyone who does not belong to the former family. Timur knew people too well not to take into account this mood of his people; he decided to present himself as simply an atabeg (to use the Western Turkish expression already known to us) of one of the Genghis Khanids: a sure sign that, let's say in passing, that he himself was not related to the legitimate reigning dynasty. So, the kurultai, the council of Transoxanean ancestors, convened to confirm the changes that had taken place, was supposed to elect one of the descendants of Jagatai as Khakans or Kaans, as the title of the highest Great Khan said, while Timur himself appropriated the lower title of Gur-Khan, which was worn by the former sovereigns of Kashgar and Samarkand and orders to officially call himself not Timur Khan, but only Timur Beg or Emir Timur. It's like Napoleon, who settled on the title of first consul; his successors only stopped the election of the Great Khan, but they themselves also never accepted this title, but were content with the title of beg or shah. It is true that they did not have any reason to be especially proud, since immediately after the death of Timur, the kingdom he had forcibly assembled fell apart, as before it was made up of pieces and fragments. More than once we could clearly see that among these peoples, still half nomadic, the power of the ruler was based solely on the influence that he was able to acquire with his personality. The endless toil that it cost Timur to rise from a petty chief to the top run of the whole of Transoxania during the ten-year wars, during which, almost to the moment of his final success, he often had to see himself in the position of a commander without an army; on the other hand, the complete impossibility of maintaining the unity of his combined state after his death represents such a sharp contrast to the unquestioning obedience that all his unbridled compatriots, without exception, showed him for twenty-six years, from the very recognition of him as the universal ruler, without exception, that we would think to have a riddle in front of you, if the above-mentioned main feature of the Turkish character did not give a simple and satisfactory explanation; namely: the Turks, and not the Mongols proper, played the main role with Timur in the second invasion of Asia Minor; since even if individual Mongolian tribes remained from the time of Genghis Khan in the lands of Jaghatai, the overwhelming majority of the population, excluding the Persian Tajiks, nevertheless consisted of Turks in the broadest sense of the word, and the Mongolian minority had long since disappeared from it. In essence, it certainly didn't make much of a difference; not quite as bloodthirsty and barbaric as the hordes of Genghis Khan, but also quite bloodthirsty and barbaric were the troops of Timur in all countries, which the great conqueror sent them from the minute he received power into his own hands in Transoxania, as a sad result of his great military activities was and remains the final fall of the Eastern civilization of the Middle Ages.
Not without further trouble, the new sovereign of Transoxania managed to keep in his power completely unaccustomed to subordination and obedience to the begs. More than once during the following years, it is told about arrogant emirs and noyons who refused to tolerate a boss over them, no matter how strong he was; but these were always separate and disconnected uprisings, which could be suppressed without much difficulty. In such cases, gentleness is noteworthy, in fact unusual for Timur, which he showed to people who did not want to recognize the exaltation of his comrade, who was once barely equal with them: it is clear that he cared about restoring unity, which would not be violated by feelings of revenge of individual childbirth, and only then hoped, by the strength of his personality and his external successes, the victories and booty that he brought to his own, to gradually turn any contradiction into animated devotion. He was now thirty-four; his knowledge of the people, his military ability, and his talents as a ruler had been brought to full maturity during a long time of testing, and after two decades had passed, he succeeded in achieving his goal. Namely, until 781 (1379) the entire space of the old kingdom of Jaghatai was subjugated by almost annual campaigns, at the same time the riots that often mixed with these wars were pacified, and finally, the influence of the new power was extended to the northwest. In addition to Kamaraddin of Kashgar, the pacification of the emir of the city of Khorezm, who for a long time enjoyed quite a lot of independence in his oasis lying aside, caused a lot of trouble; as soon as a peace treaty was concluded, and Timur arrived again in his capital, as usual, soon the news came that Yusuf-Bek - that was the name of the ruler of Khorezm - had rebelled again under some pretext. Finally, in 781 (1379), this stubborn man died, while his capital was again under siege; the inhabitants continued to defend for some time, until the city was taken by force, and then a thorough punishment befell it. The country came into the direct possession of Timur, while in the remote and far to the east stretching Kashgar region, the conqueror was content with the fact that after several victories in 776-777 (1375-1376) he forced Kamaraddin to flee to the Central Asian steppes and took an oath of allegiance to himself from the tribes hitherto subject to him. A significant part of them probably increased the army of Timur.
Timur's intervention in the affairs of the Golden Horde. Tokhtamysh
Already on our return from the east, we find Timur strong enough to intervene in the affairs of a much larger, although, no doubt, weakened by internal unrest state, namely Kipchak, which, since the death of Uzbek, the son of Dzhani-Bek (758=1357), was shaken by prolonged palace revolutions and broke up into several separate states, just like the kingdom of Jaghatai, with the difference that until then it had not found such a strong restorer as Timur. Around 776 (1375) the western part of Kipchak, the region of the Golden Horde proper, was in the power of one tributary of the local khan, Mamai, while in the east of the Yaik (Ural River), after numerous quarrels between various descendants of Jochi, at that time Urus Khan won. He waged war with one rival, Tylui, who resisted his plans to unite all the tribes of the eastern Kipchak; when Tului died in one battle, his son Tokhtamysh fled to Timur, who had just returned from Kashgar to Transoxania (777=1376). The Kipchak region between Khorezm and Yaksart directly touched the trans-Oxan border, and Timur, without hesitation, took the opportunity to extend his influence in this direction, supporting the applicant. Tokhtamysh, who, of course, from the very beginning had to declare himself a vassal of his patron, received a small army, with which he went down the Yaksart and took possession of the Otrar and surrounding areas; but since at the same time, until the middle of 778 (end of 1376), he repeatedly allowed himself to be beaten by the sons of Urus, Timur finally himself opposed them. Winter prevented decisive success, but in the meantime Urus died, and against his son, incapable, devoted to one sensual pleasures, Timur-Melik, prejudice soon reigned among his own subjects; therefore, Tokhtamysh, with the Transoxanean army entrusted to him for the second time, was finally able to defeat the enemy troops (end 778 = 1377) and, in the second clash, capture Timur Melik himself. He ordered to kill him and now he soon achieved his recognition in the entire eastern half of the Kipchak kingdom; from that time until 1381 (783) he completed the conquest of the kingdom of the Golden Horde in Russia, already strongly shaken by the defeat of Mamai by Grand Duke Dmitry in 1380 (782), and this completed the restoration of the state unity of all the former Kipchak possessions. By this they nominally acted under the supreme dominion of Timur; but we will soon see that Tokhtamysh was only waiting for an opportunity to refuse the service of his former patron.
Central Asia under Timur
As soon as the success of Tokhtamysh in Kipchak became a matter decided, Timur could calmly leave him to continue running his enterprise for a while, but when in 781 (1379) the last resistance of the inhabitants of Khorezm was broken and the whole north and east became subject to him, Timur could think about to act as a conqueror also to the west and south. The Persian, Arab and Turkish lands, despite all the devastation to which they had already been subjected for centuries, were still the promised land for the wandering crowd of the meager Central Asia, full of extraordinary treasures and pleasures, and once again thoroughly rob it seemed to them far from thankless work. . It is all the more clear that from the moment Timur crossed the Oxus, almost all attempts by the emirs of Transoxania and the regions directly belonging to it cease to question his dominion; his dominion over the army that he got for himself is made unlimited. In the regions of Khorezm and Kashgar, which had a long independence behind them, we, however, still meet later individual attempts to overthrow the yoke, when the great conqueror is hundreds of miles away from some ambitious leader or exiled prince; but in general, from the beginning of his first Persian campaign, Timur without the slightest difficulty enjoyed the unconditional obedience of those hundreds of thousands, to which his troops soon increased. The severity of the duties that he placed on them and on himself is unparalleled and far exceeds everything that was under Genghis Khan: he disposed of a whole multitude of large regiments, which he sent out radiantly under the leadership of various commanders; Timur usually personally led all his campaigns, if it was not a matter of very insignificant raids, and more than once made transitions from Transox / Pania directly to Asia Minor and Syria, or vice versa. For a correct assessment of his military activities, it should also not be ignored that in Western Asia he had to deal with less miserable opponents than in most cases the commanders of Genghis Khan: the Mongols and Tatars gradually ceased to be something new; the panic fear that preceded them at their first appearance could not be repeated; now battles of a different kind had to be endured, much more courageous resistance had to be overcome, and quite often the departure of a fierce conqueror was followed by an uprising of the vanquished, demanding a new war to subdue. Thus, Samarkand, which Timur made the capital of his kingdom, and Kesh, abandoned as a summer residence, were rarely honored to receive a formidable run within their walls; the great palaces and parks, which he ordered to be built and planted in accordance with the Tatar custom in both these places, as later in many other large cities of the growing state, were mostly empty: his fatherland was a military camp.
Timur at the feast. Miniature, 1628
The conquest of Afghanistan by Timur and the fight against the Serbedars (1380–1383)
Timur was not the kind of person to stop for lack of a pretext for war when, in 782 (1380), he prepared to attack the emir of Kherat, his closest neighbor to the west. Just as Genghis Khan once demanded from the Shah of Khorezm Muhammad the recognition of his dominion in the flattering form that he asked him to consider himself his son, so Timur no less politely asked Kurtid Giyasaddin, who then reigned in Herat, to visit him in order to take part in the kuriltai, at which an elected circle of emirs, i.e., inviting vassals, was going to Samarkand. Ghiyasaddin understood the purpose of the invitation, and although he did not seem to show his embarrassment, but, on the contrary, very kindly promised to come later at an opportunity, nevertheless he considered it necessary to put in order the fortifications of Herat, while he himself had to devote himself yet another task. His restless neighbors, the dangerous Serbedars of Sebzevar, again forced him to punish them for some disturbance of the order. The impudence of these interesting thugs grew worse as the years passed, so that they became burdensome to the whole neighborhood, in spite of their almost incessant quarrels among themselves. By the end of 753 (beginning of 1353) their most daring trick astonished the whole world: their then ruler, Khoja Yahya Kerraviy, cut off the head of the last Ilkhan Togay-Timur, who demanded an oath of allegiance from him a href=, in his own residence in Gurgan, where Khoja appeared, as it were, to fulfill this requirement with a retinue of 300 people; - "everyone", - the Persian historian notes at the same time, "who ever learns about this reckless courage of theirs, will gnaw the finger of amazement with the tooth of surprise." In any case, their further attempts to appropriate the region that Togay-Timur still owned - it embraced mainly Gurgan and Mazanderan - failed; one of the officers of the murdered prince, Emir Vali, proclaimed himself sovereign there and held out against the Serbedars; but, despite this, they remained a sore point of the East Persian princes, and the rulers of Herat had to constantly have a lot of trouble with them. So it is now: while Giyasaddin took Nishapur from the Serbedars, which they had long appropriated for themselves, on the other hand, Timur's son, Miran-Shah, with an army from Balkh (late 782 = early 1381) broke into the possessions of Herat. Soon his father followed him with the main army: Serakhs, where Giyasaddin's brother commanded, had to surrender, Bushenj was taken by storm, Herat itself was heavily besieged. The city was well defended; then Timur began to threaten Giyasaddin that if the city did not surrender voluntarily, he would raze it to the ground and order to kill everything living in it. The little prince, who alone could not resist such excellent strength for a long time and did not dare to count on help from the west, lost heart; instead of leading an army to the rescue, he decided to surrender. Likewise, the daring Sebzevars this time did not uphold the honor of their name: they immediately showed their readiness to greet the dangerous conqueror as humble servants; only later, when the yoke of foreign domination became painful for them, did they show their old courage in a few more indignations. In one respect, however, the great commander himself followed the example of the communist gangs: he made friends wherever he could with dervishes in order to benefit from the great influence of these wandering saints or holy vagabonds on the lower popular classes, as he already tried to do at the beginning of his career. This was also consistent with the fact that he adhered to Shiism, although the Turkish element dominated his troops: his rule that there should be only one ruler in heaven, so there should be only one ruler on earth, the dogmas of Dyuzhinnikov were more suitable than the teachings of the Sunnis, still who recognized the Egyptian caliphs of the Abbasids as the true head of Islam. – Of course, for a short time everything continued to go as smoothly as at first. The fortress of Emir Vali, Isfarain, had to be taken by storm, and only then did he decide to submit; but no sooner had the Transoxans left his country than he again showed a desire to go on the offensive himself. The Serbedars also revolted, and in Herat and the surrounding area, several brave leaders refused to obey, despite the conclusion of peace. The responsibility for the latter was placed on Ghiyasaddin, and he was sent with his son to the fortress, where they were later put to death; at the same time, the Transoxans with fire and sword in the course of 783-785 (end of 1381-1383) eliminated all resistance in these areas. One can imagine how this happened, if you know that during the second capture of Sebzevar. already partly ruined earlier, 2000 prisoners served as material for the construction of towers, and they were laid in rows between layers of stone and lime and so walled up alive. The hordes of Timur raged almost equally terribly in Sejestan, whose ruler Kutbaddin, although he surrendered, could not force his troops, who were more thirsty for battle, to lay down their arms. Another heated battle was required before these 20,000 or 30,000 men were driven back to the main city of Zerenj; for this, the irritated winner, upon entering his city, ordered to kill all the inhabitants “down to the child in the cradle” (785 = 1383). Then the conquest went further into the mountains of Afghanistan: Kabul and Kandahar were taken, the whole land was conquered up to the Punjab, and thus the border of Genghis Khan's dominion was again reached in the southeast.
Campaign to Kashgar 1383
In the meantime, it became necessary to invade the region of the former Khanate of Kashgar a second time. Between the tribes that owned it, already from the time of Tugluk-Timur, the jets came to the fore, which roamed in the east, north of the upper Jaksart, to the other side of Lake Issyk-Kul. They appear under the leadership of either Kamaraddin or Khizr Khodja, the son of Ilyas, who, no matter how many times they were expelled from their lands, always returned after a while to restore the tribes of the Kashgar kingdom against Timur. So now, the rebellious unrest between the jets caused a campaign; in 785 (1383) the Transoxanean army made its way across the whole country beyond Lake Issyk-Kul, but did not catch Kamaraddin himself anywhere. The news of this caught Timur in Samarkand, where he delayed in 786 (1384) for several months, after the happy end of the Afghan campaign, decorating his residence with looted treasures and rarities and installing various skilled artisans, whom he, according to the Tatar custom, forcibly brought from Herat and other cities to instill crafts in their homeland.
Timur's conquest of the southern coast of the Caspian (1384)
Since calm had been established in the east for the time being, he could now himself again go to Persia, where the brave and indefatigable Emir Vali again stepped out at the head of the army, despite the defeats of the previous year. From the very first appearance of Timur in Khorasan, this capable and insightful man labored in vain to unite the princes of southern and western Persia in a common alliance against the threatening conqueror: the one who had the greatest political sense, Muzaffarid Shah Shuja, considered, according to old traditions his principality, it was most prudent from the very beginning to renounce all resistance, and shortly before his death he sent precious gifts to Timur and asked for his protection for his sons and relatives, among whom he wanted to divide his provinces; the rest followed the policy of the ostrich, even more beloved in the East than even in England, and did not think about coming to the aid of the ruler of Gurgan and Mazendaran. This latter, when Timur approached him in 786 (1384), fought like a desperate one; he challenged every inch of land from the enemy, but it was impossible to resist such a strong enemy for a long time. Finally, he had to leave his capital, Asterabad; while all the horrors of Tatar ferocity broke out over the unfortunate population, Vali rushed through Damagan to Rey, from there, as they say, to the Tabaristan mountains. Accounts differ about its end; it is only true that he died shortly thereafter in the midst of the confusion that Timur's further advance to the west caused in the rest of Persia.
The state of the Jelairids in the era of Timur
First of all, Timur moved into the country between Ray himself and Tabriz, the capital of the former Ilkhans. We remember that before the peace treaty between the Lesser and Greater Hassan, Media and Azerbaijan went to the former, and the latter was content with Arab Iraq. But Little Hassan did not have long to use his finally consolidated dominion; already in 744 (1343) he was killed by his own wife, who thought that her husband's love affair with one of the emirs had come to the attention of her husband. Khulagid, in whose name Hassan ruled, made a feeble attempt to govern now on his own, but was removed by the brother of the slain man, Ashraf, who hastened to arrive from Asia Minor. The winner located his residence in Tabriz; but if Little Hassan could not be considered a person with a very ticklish conscience, then Ashraf was a downright disgusting tyrant. In the end, many of their own emirs were so thoroughly fed up with him that they called Janibek, Khan of the Golden Horde, into the country, who in 757 (1356) actually invaded Azerbaijan and killed Ashraf. With him came to an end the short reign of the Chobanids. The Kipchak princes, of course, had to immediately renounce their newly acquired property: already in 758 (1357), Dzhanibek was killed by his own son Berdibek, and the decline of the dynasty that naturally followed such violence made further enterprises against the South Caucasus impossible for a long time. This made it possible for Jalairid Uveys, the son of Greater Hassan, who also died in 757 (1356), to take possession of Azerbaijan and Media up to Ray after several intermediate changes, so that now the Ilkhans have united both Iraq and Azerbaijan under their scepter.
But the life they led in their residence in Tabriz was far from peaceful. Uveys (757–776=1356–1375) was, no doubt, a strong prince; he immediately pacified (767=1366) an accidental uprising of his governor in Baghdad, and also made his strength felt by the princes of Shirvan and the Mazenderan emir Vali, with whose possessions his own bordered under Ray. But with his death, the prosperity of the Jelairids had already ended. His next son, Hussein (776–783 = 1375–1381), no longer managed to curb the successive uprisings of his relatives and other emirs, which mixed in the most difficult way with the attacks of the Muzaffarid Shah Shuja on Baghdad and northern Media; in the end, his brother Ahmed attacked him in Tabriz, killed him and seized power, which he used with many changes and interruptions until 813 (1410). a stubborn man who never let misfortune break him, and withstood all the storms that broke out around him from the time of the invasion of Timur until the death of the terrible conqueror of the world, in order, in the end, to become a victim of his own ambition. At the same time, he was an educated person, loved poetry and music; he himself was a good poet, as well as an excellent painter and calligrapher; in short, in many respects a remarkable person: it is only a pity that he indulged in the use of opium, which at that time was more and more spread among the dervishes, as well as among the laity, as a result of which he often became completely insane - in this state he, apparently, committed the worst of his bloody deeds. This was the same Ahmed who, in the midst of various quarrels with his brothers, who also claimed the throne, let past his ears the cry for help of Emir Vali, and who now had to feel the claws of the tiger himself, at the moment when the brave emir was defeated.
Timur's war in Azerbaijan (1386)
At the end of 786 and until the autumn of 787 (1385), Timur was, however, occupied with only one concern - to destroy Vali: although he pursued him across the border, when he retired to Ray, that is, to the possessions of Ahmed, and although he easily took Even Sultania at Jelairid, whose position in this country was not strong, as soon as Vali, meanwhile, disappeared, the Tatars turned again in order to secure Tabaristan, which lay at their flank, first of all. After the cities of this country had submitted without a fight, Timur, satisfied so far with the success of this campaign, returned to Samarkand to prepare even greater forces for the next one. The fact that he did not need a pretext for a new invasion in the province of Akhmed was taken care of by Tokhtamysh, the Khan of the Golden Horde appointed by him. He began to feel his strength from the time he again subjugated the Russians under the Tatar yoke, having treacherously conquered and terribly devastated Moscow (784=1382), and for some time he was protected from any danger from this side; the more keenly did he feel the desire to evade the supreme dominion of Timur and already sent ambassadors to Tabriz to Ahmed to offer him an alliance against a common enemy. We cannot guess why Jelairid, who could hardly hide from himself the likelihood of an imminent repetition of an attack from the east, refused the ambassadors of Tokhtamysh, moreover, in a rather insulting manner; he probably had that look, and, of course, it is true that once the Kipchaks would establish themselves in his lands, they would begin to bypass him in everything no less than Timur himself; but Tokhtamysh looked askance at this matter, and during the winter of 787 (1385-1386) made a devastating raid on Azerbaijan, from which the capital itself suffered greatly. One can imagine the noble indignation that shook Timur's heart when he received the news that the Muslim-populated country was being raided and plundered by his tributary hordes, unfortunately still mostly unconverted. He immediately announced that he had to come to the aid of a fellow believer who was unable to defend his possessions on his own, and immediately in 788 (1386) he carried out this benevolent intention with the disinterestedness already familiar to us. Entering Azerbaijan at the head of his army, he captured Tabriz without any obstacles: Ahmed, as his subsequent behavior shows, considered it most prudent, if possible, to evade whenever superior forces opposed him, and save his own in case of future favorable circumstances. He was by no means lacking in courage, which, incidentally, he quite often proved in his life, although his behavior towards Timur, no doubt, resembles the well-known phrase that "for the fatherland, even life is sweet." Meanwhile, the conqueror soon saw that not all the emirs of the provinces he had just joined were thinking of making his role of patron easier for him, as the cautious Jelairid had done. Behind Azerbaijan itself, since the time of the Ilkhans, the Persian-Tatar population has already disappeared; here one had to face a new and strong element, which was to give Timur no less trouble than earlier Hulagu - with real Turks of Guz and Turkmen origin, who, for all their kinship with their more eastern brothers, had no intention of allowing them to disturb their peace .
Asia Minor in the era of Timur, the Ottomans
At that time, Asia Minor had long been completely Turkified, excluding individual coastal strips that were still in the possession of the Byzantines. More than three hundred years have passed since the Seljuks first took possession of the eastern half of the peninsula, and from the beginning of the great popular movements until the beginning of the 7th (13th) century, the flow of Turkish settlers continued to flow into the country. At that time, whole tribes, disturbed from their places by the Mongols of Genghis Khan, fled through Khorasan and Persia to Armenia and Asia Minor; they were followed by the hordes of the last shahs of Khorezm, who, after their defeats, crossed into foreign lands, both to Syria and further north, and also quite a few Turkmens were in the very hordes of the Mongol conquerors, the generals of Genghis Khan, as well as Hulagu and his successors. Until order was finally overthrown in the Seljuk state, Rum, of course, they tried to place new elements, if possible without prejudice to the permanent population, so they were sent to the Byzantine border, where they could get themselves new dwellings at the expense of the Greeks. The freshness of these popular forces, which are still entering untouched into the history of the West, explains to us how, in the midst of the decline of the Seljuk dynasty in Iconium, the spread of Turkish domination to the coast of the Aegean here hardly stops; how the emirs of individual tribes, ever multiplying and spreading, under the purely nominal supremacy of the last miserable sultans of Rum, can remain virtually independent, even in Mongol times, and how several tens of thousands of Tatar troops, at the service of the governor of Ilkhan on the right bank of the Euphrates, rarely they can do something against the western principalities and are not at all able to win a decisive victory over them. On the contrary, with the collapse of the Mongol-Persian kingdom, the long-undermined influence of its former protectors in Asia Minor also immediately disappeared. Chobanid Ashraf, who received several districts of the country at the conclusion of peace in 741 (1341), already left them in 744 (1344); we learn the same thing in the same year about Arten, who then owned the rest. In his place, the ruler of Caesarea, Sivas and Tokat is about the time of Timur Kazi Burkhanaddin, the head of one purely Turkish community, which acted here on equal rights along with the emirs of the west. Between these last - there were ten of them - for a long time the state of the Ottomans, striving for exaltation, came to the fore. My task here cannot be a secondary consideration of that remarkable development which brought the descendants of Ertogrul and Osman from an insignificant initial state to the height of world power; for this I may refer to the description of Hertzberg in one of the earlier parts of the General History. Here I must only recall that in the same year 788 (1386), when Timur, after the capture of Tabriz, was preparing to capture Armenia and Asia Minor, Osman Murad I defeated at Konya (Ikonium) his most powerful rival from among the other emirs, Ali-Bek from Karamania, and by this he made it possible for himself or his successor Bayezid I (from 791=1389) to increase the new kingdom by further moving towards Armenia, as soon as war with the Bulgarians, Serbs and other Christian states of the Balkan Peninsula would be given for this. A clash between Timur and Bayazid, moving along the same line, one from the east, the other from the west, was inevitable.
The states of Black and White rams (lambs) in the era of Timur
So far, in any case, it was still slowed down by a number of other things that delayed Timur's success in various ways. Not all Turks, who gradually settled in Armenia, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor from the time of the Seljuks, obeyed one of the eleven emirs. The entire wide strip of land east of the Kazi Burkhanaddin region and the northern possessions of the Egyptian Mamluks, on the one hand, to Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, on the other, had long been inhabited by numerous Turkish tribes, mostly Turkmen, who gradually began to take precedence over Armenian Christians and Kurdish Bedouins. An important step in this direction was marked by the arrival of two new Turkmen tribes, who came under Ilkhan Argun (683-690=1284-1291) from Turkestan through the Oxus and settled along the upper Euphrates and the Tigris, where the terrible devastations of the times of Genghis Khan and his first successors freed enough places for new residents. They were called Kara-Koyunlu and Ak-Koyunlu, which means black or white lamb people, because they had the image of this animal as a coat of arms on their banners. But we would fall into a dangerous mistake if, on the basis of the family coat of arms, we wanted to draw a conclusion about the corresponding peaceful inclinations of both tribes. On the contrary, they were lambs of the same kind as those wild English troops who, three hundred years later, by a remarkable coincidence, acquired the same name "Lambs" on the same occasion. In strength, courage and rudeness, they were true Turks of their time, who did not miss an opportunity to cause their neighbors as much anxiety as possible. At first, as reported, in the north near Erzingan and Sivas lived the Black Lambs, to the south, between Amid and Mosul, the Whites; but at the time when they begin to interfere more strongly in political circumstances, about 765 (1364), Mosul is in the power of the leader of the Blacks, Beiram Khodja, later his son, Kara Muhammad, who, although he pays from 776 (1375) tribute to the Jelairids in Baghdad, but otherwise behaves quite independently; The Whites at that time lived on both banks of the Euphrates, from Amid to Sivas, and were somewhat dependent on the ruler of this latter, Kazi Burkhanaddin, but before the advent of Timur they stand somewhat in the background compared to the Blacks. In any case, both tribes at that time owned most of Mesopotamia - the Orthokid princes of Maridin played a very insignificant role in comparison with them - and western Armenia, especially the districts of Van, Bayazid (or Aydin, as it was then called) and Erzerum. This did not rule out the possibility that other Muslim or Armenian-Christian princes had small possessions in the same areas: the Turkmen hordes were precisely scattered among the old settled inhabitants, forced to submit to the taxes imposed by them and too often to cruel treatment, but now they fell into the most distressful situation between these harsh gentlemen and Timur's advancing barbarians. If they began to defend themselves, the Tatars would cut them, if they surrendered to them, then the Turkmens would look at them as enemies: even this population, accustomed to all sorts of disasters and hardships, was rarely in such a terrible situation.
Timur's campaign in Transcaucasia (1386–1387)
Throughout the summer and autumn of 788 (1386) and the spring of 789 (1387), Timur’s troops devastated with fire and sword in all directions the valleys of the large provinces of Armenia and Georgia, fighting either against the warlike Caucasians, or against Kara Muhammad and his son Kara Yusuf, moreover, of course, they also had to suffer more than one defeat in difficult mountainous terrain. Then, of course, poor Christians had to be paid for this, the persecution of which such a pious Muslim as Timur put himself in special merit. “Tatars,” says a native chronicler, “tortured the masses of believers with all sorts of torments, hunger, the sword, imprisonment, unbearable torture and the most inhuman treatment. Thus, they turned one, once very flourishing, province of Armenia into a desert, where only silence reigned. Many people suffered martyrdom and showed themselves worthy to receive this crown. Only the retributor Christ, our God, who will crown them on the day of retribution prepared for the assembly of the righteous, can know them. Timur took away a huge booty, took numerous prisoners, so that no one was able to tell or describe all the misfortune and sorrow of our people. Then, having made his way with a significant army to Tiflis, he took possession of this latter and took many prisoners: it is calculated that the number of those killed exceeded the number of those who got out of there alive. For a moment it might have seemed that in the Tatar tormentor himself the consciousness of the horror with which he dishonored a human name was trying to rise. Our chronicler tells further: “Timur laid siege to the fortress of Van; its defenders spent forty days full of fear and killed a large number of warriors of the godless descendant of Jaghatai, but, finally, lacking bread and water, they could not withstand the siege and betrayed the fortress into the hands of enemies. Then came the order of the wild tyrant to take women and children into slavery, and to throw men indiscriminately, faithful and infidels, from the battlements of the fortification into the ditches. The soldiers immediately carried out this ferocious order; they began to mercilessly throw all the inhabitants into the abysses surrounding the city. The heaps of bodies rose so high that the last ones tossed off weren't killed instantly. This we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears from the lips of the holy and venerable archbishop, Mr. Zahei, as well as father and vartabed (i.e., deacon) Paul, who both escaped from the fortress where they were imprisoned, because one Jagatai commander, leaving the department entrusted to him, he released his prisoners to freedom, and this was an opportunity for the salvation of several. Meanwhile, the entire area around the fortress was flooded with the innocent blood of Christians, as well as foreigners. Then it happened that one reader ascended the minaret in the city of Pegri and with a loud voice began the prayer of the last day: “He has come, the day of judgment!”. The godless tyrant, whose soul did not know pity, immediately asked: "What is this cry?" Those around him answered: “The day of judgment has come; Jesus was to proclaim it; but thanks to you, it's here today. Because the voice of the one who calls is terrible, like a trumpet (1, 213) voice! “Let these lips crush!” exclaimed Timur: “if they had spoken earlier, not a single person would have been killed!” And he immediately gave the order not to overthrow anyone else into the abyss, and to release all the remaining people to freedom. But all too soon it was bound to turn out that Timur's unaccustomed order for mercy was not caused by the impulse of mercy, but only by superstition, which makes all the inhabitants of the East fear every word with a bad omen. Hardly had Timur, whose troops emerged from a difficult mountain war not without damage, turn back to the Caspian Sea, postponing the completion of his devastating activity for the future, when he already found a reason to surpass the Armenian scenes of horror on other grounds. The scene of these new bloody deeds was to be the southern Persian possessions of the Muzaffarids.
Timur's war with the Muzaffarids (1387), massacre in Isfahan
The sons and other relatives of Shah Shuja, who, after the death of this prince, which followed in 786 (1384), divided his significant possessions among themselves - they embraced Kerman, Fapc and part of Khuzistan, - as usual, the eastern sovereigns lived far from peace between themselves; a sufficient reason - if it was impossible to organize a united and strong resistance, and even against a conqueror superior in their own forces - in order to continue the policy of peace begun by the selfish but intelligent Shah Shuja. Despite this, Zein al-Abidin, the son of Shuja and the ruler of Fars, was so careless that in the summer of 789 (1387), despite Timur's invitation, he refused to appear in the latter's camp. More, of course, was not required to provoke an attack by the Tatar army; in the autumn of the said year, Timur appeared before Isfahan. The city, under the rule of one uncle, Zein al-Abidin, was surrendered without bloodshed: but one accident is said to have brought about a disaster that remains unparalleled even in this terrible time. Although the inhabitants were deigned to grant mercy for the payment of a considerable indemnity, the troops nevertheless behaved with their usual wildness, so that general despair seized the people; when at night a noise arose in one of the suburbs of the city for some reason, everyone fled and, in a sudden outbreak of indignation, attacked the weak garrison set up here by Timur and killed him. It was self-evident that such a dangerous indignation should have been followed by an exemplary punishment. It was no great difficulty for the overpowering army to immediately reconquer the city; but so that none of his people, prompted by untimely mercy, would allow any of the captured townspeople to escape, as happened in Armenia according to the above story, the detachments were ordered to present a certain number of heads for each squad, a total of 70,000. Here the Tatars themselves were fed up with murders. It is said that many tried to comply with the order by buying heads that had already been cut off by less sensitive comrades. At first, a head was worth one gold piece; when the supply increased from this, the price fell by half. In any case, Timur got his 70,000; according to his custom, he ordered towers to be built from them in various parts of the city.
I do not want to require either the reader or myself that we delve into such disgusting details more than is necessary to obtain a true impression of the horror of this terrible catastrophe; From now on, it will be enough just to follow the campaigns and conquests of the Samarkand run, and to do justice to one or another of his enemies. Between them, in courage and heroism, one of the Muzaffarids, Shah Mancyp, is ahead of all. While Timur, following the punishment of Isfahan, in the same year (789=1387) took Shiraz and other places in the region of Fars, and the rest of the members of the house of Muzaffar trembled from all over to pay their respects and prove their obedience to the terrible commander, Shah Mansur , as a true cousin of Shah Shuja, kept aloof in his possessions near Tuster, in Khuzistan, deciding to sell his dominion and life dearly. He was also little sensitive to the more subtle impulses of conscience, like any prince at this time of violence: when his uncle (in the second tribe), Zein al-Abidin, fled to him after the loss of Isfahan, he managed to lure his troops to him, planted himself into custody, and when he fled after a while, and then was again caught, without hesitation, he ordered to blind him. But whoever wanted to fight Timur could not be selective in his means; it was necessary first of all to gather such a force with which it would be possible to resist such an opponent on the battlefield; and under any circumstances, what the energetic Mansur achieved is surprising if “the war that brought Persian Iraq and Fars under the rule of Timur turned out to be not without danger for the winner and not without glory for the brave prince who achieved what that caused the scales of victory to shake."
Tokhtamysh's raids on Central Asia (1387–1389)
At first, Mansur, however, had no shortage of favorable circumstances, without which there would hardly have been an opportunity to encroach on something like this. While Timur was still busy accepting the loyalty of the rest of the Muzaffarids. unexpected news came to him that the center of his kingdom, Transoxania itself, was placed in serious danger by sudden attacks from two different sides. Tokhtamysh, who, back in the winter of 787–788 (1385–1386), was defeated during one invasion of Azerbaijan, and the still rebellious jets took advantage of Timur’s long absence from the east in order to attack in 789 (1387) in the province of Jaxarta. These latter, of course, were not defenseless; one of the sons of Timur, Omar Sheikh, remained in Samarkand with a sufficient army, and although he was defeated by Tokhtamysh at Otpar, and when he met with jets at Andijan, he only with great effort retained the battlefield, the opponents still were not able to their sorties to infiltrate close to the capital. Meanwhile, the danger that next summer the attacks would be renewed with more numerous forces was too close for the war prince himself to feel compelled to thoroughly restore order here before continuing the conquest of Persia. So, in the winter of 789-90 (1387-1388), Timur turned back to Transoxania, during the summer of 790 (1388) he devastated the province of Khorezm, the leaders of which entered into a treacherous alliance with foreigners, and prepared further vengeful campaigns for the next year, when in the middle of winter (end of 790=1388) Tokhtamysh again invaded through the upper Jaksart near Khokand. Timur hurried to meet him, defeated him, next spring (791=1389) again captured the northern regions around Otrar and drove the Kipchaks back to their steppes. Meanwhile, he became convinced that if he wanted to have any lasting calm in the northeast, then both his former tributary and the recalcitrant jets should be punished more severely. Therefore, while Miran Shah, in response to a new uprising of the Serbedars in Khorasan, surrounded and completely destroyed these brave men, Timur himself, with Omar Sheikh and other of his most capable commanders, went to the east.
Timur's campaign in Kashgar in 1390
The area of the Jets and the rest of the provinces of the Kashgar Khanate between the Tibetan border and Altai, Yaksart and the Irtysh were completely devastated by the troops sent out radiantly in all directions, all the tribes that met along the way were scattered and exterminated or driven into Mongolia and Siberia. True, Kamaraddin succeeded now, as in the following year (792 = 1390), when Timur’s generals had to repeat the enterprise for greater strength, to slip away with their closest retinue across the Irtysh: but soon after that he, apparently, died, and Khizp Khoja , whom we meet later as the khan of Kashgar and the provinces belonging to this place, after the experiments made, he considered it prudent to finally submit to the winner. The matter ended - we do not know when - with the conclusion of peace, which for a long time after the death of Timur ensured tolerable relations between the two tribes of the waters with the actual supreme power of the Samarkand sovereign.
Timur's first campaign against Tokhtamysh (1391)
It remained to put an end to Tokhtamysh. The rumor about Timur's latest successes and about new armaments immediately undertaken soon penetrated into the interior of the vast Kipchak kingdom, and when at the beginning of 793 (1391) the Transoxanean troops set out on a campaign, already in Kara Saman, still on this side of the border - north of Tashkent , the former assembly point of the army, ambassadors arrived from the Khan of the Golden Horde to start negotiations. But the time for that has already passed; countless Timur's war in Azerbaijan (1386) Timur's regiments rushed uncontrollably to the steppe. Tokhtamysh did not stay in place: he wanted to use the space as a weapon in the way of the northern peoples. The fugitives and pursuers rushed one after another, first to the northeast, far into the depths of the Kirghiz land, then again to the west through the Urals (Yaik), through the present Orenburg province to the Volga itself, in total for about three hundred German miles of travel; Finally, Tokhtamysh stopped at Kandurcha. Here he was in the center of his kingdom, he could not cross the Volga without leaving his capital Sarai unprotected. The long journey through the deserts, whose meager subsistences were for the most part exhausted by the preceding Kipchaks, did not do without sensitive losses for the Transoxans, despite the provisions they took with them in abundance; Tokhtamysh's army far outnumbered them, so that a decisive battle began for him with favorable omens. It happened on 15 Rajab 793=19 June 1391; despite all the courage with which Timur's regiments fought, Tokhtamysh still managed to break through the left flank of the enemy, commanded by Omar Sheikh, with a strong onslaught, and take a position in the rear near the center. But it was not at all the habit of the cunning conqueror to have only one bowstring for his bow. Among the Mongols and the peoples allied with them, even more than in other armies, the highly fluttering banner of the leader mattered, as a sign that guided all the movements of the other regiments; his fall usually signified the death of the leader. Timur, in whose camp there was no shortage of discontented Kipchaks, managed to bribe the standard-bearer of his enemy; this latter lowered the banner at the decisive moment, and Tokhtamysh, cut off behind enemy lines from his main forces, on the firmness of which he now could no longer count, he himself immediately set an example for flight. His hordes scattered, he himself escaped across the Volga, but his entire camp, his treasures, his harem, the wives and children of his soldiers fell into the hands of the victors, who, pursuing the fugitives, overturned entire detachments into the river. After that, they scattered throughout the eastern and middle Kipchak, killing and robbing everywhere, also devastating and devastating Sarai and all the other cities of the south up to Azov. The number of prisoners was so great that it was possible for the ruler alone to select 5,000 young people and beautiful girls, and although the officers and soldiers also received as much as they wanted, countless others had to be released, since it was impossible to drag them all along. Eleven months after the army set out from Tashkent, around the end of 793 (1391), the victorious lord "returned joy and happiness to his capital Samarkand, honoring it again with his presence."
Timur's campaign against the Golden Horde in 1391. (Map creator - Stuntelaar)
End of the fight against the Muzaffarids (1392–1393)
In general, the campaign against Tokhtamysh was perhaps Timur's most brilliant military action. In any case, the continuation of the campaign in Western Asia, so abruptly interrupted four years before, did not go so quickly, although the troops of the petty Persian princes could not stand any comparison with the troops of the Kipchaks, at least in number. But in many areas they were helped by the nature of the mountainous terrain, along which the Tatar riders could hardly move, and in courage and perseverance, neither the Turkmens nor Muzaffarid Mansur were inferior to their terrible enemy. Mansur took advantage of the respite, involuntarily given to him by Timur, in order to deprive most of his relatives of their possessions by quick campaigns, and now he dominated from Shiraz over Khuzistan, Fars and southern Media with Isfahan, when the Tatars, who during 794 (1392) years had to still to pacify uprisings in Tabaristan, approached his state in early 795 (1392–1393). So that Shah Mansur could not find shelter in the hard-to-reach mountains of upper Khuzistan, as during the first war with Muzaffarid, the side to Kurdistan and southern Iraq was occupied in advance by flying detachments, while Timur himself set out from Sultania directly through the mountains to Tuster, the main city of Khuzistan. Further, the army went first through a convenient hilly country, which gently descends to the Persian Gulf, to the entrance to the transverse valleys leading to the mountains surrounding Shiraz; after taking by storm one mountain fortress, which was considered impregnable, the road to the capital Mansur was free. As they say, Mansur deliberately allowed Timur to go so far as to wage a tireless guerrilla war with him between the mountains of the Persian mountainous country; finally, besieged by the requests of the inhabitants of Shiraz, he considered it his duty to make at least an attempt to cover the city. Thus it came one afternoon to a battle in the valley before Shiraz. But Timur again sent a bribe ahead of his riders: the chief of the emirs, Mansur, left his master in the middle of the battle with the bulk of the army, the battle could no longer be stopped. everything seemed lost. Mansur nevertheless managed to hold out until nightfall, and while the Tatars, tired of the battle, were badly guarding, he, with a small detachment of his last faithful - they say there were only 500 of them left - attacked the enemy camp in the morning twilight. In the first turmoil, he succeeded, cutting right and left around him, to produce great bloodshed and get through to Timur himself. But the strong helmet of the Tartar, invulnerable to the misfortune of the world, withstood the blow of the sword of the brave Muzaffarid; meanwhile, new crowds of enemies rushed in, and the fearless hero fell in hand-to-hand combat, and with him the last hope of the dynasty. It did not help the rest of its members in the least that they humbly submitted to the conqueror; so that it would not occur to any of them to play Mansur again, they were imprisoned and later killed.
Mamluk Egypt in the Age of Timur
From Shiraz, Timur then turned towards Baghdad, where Ahmed Ibn Uweis had lived since the loss of Tabriz, and now anxiously awaited the outcome of the war in Shiraz. His attempt to reach a peace treaty with an enemy he did not feel capable of equaling met with little encouragement from the latter; then Jelairid decided to flee with his treasures to Egypt, which now again, as in the days of Hulagu, seemed to be the life anchor of a fragile boat, which Muslim Western Asia was likened to in the midst of the storm of the Tatar invasion. In Cairo, by this time, the descendants of Keelaun had long ceased to dispose of it. During the continuous unrest and palace revolutions, under the last Bakhrits, Emir Barquq, one of the Circassian Mamluks, who now played a major role on the Nile, rose to the fore; his first attempt to deprive the power of the young sultan Khadjii after seven years of wars between the nobles of the country nevertheless led to the second accession of the eliminated, but six months later Barkuk finally seized power and reigned from 792 (1390) in Egypt, and from 794 (1392) also in Syria, whose most energetic emir, Timurbeg Mintash, was defeated and killed only by treason and after stubborn resistance. Barquq was by no means an ordinary person: brave and cunning, like all Mamluks, however, as a politician, he could not compete with his great predecessor Baibars. Although he understood that the successes of Timur himself in the west required the unification of all the forces of Egypt and Syria with the warlike Turkmens of the Black and White Lamb tribes, as well as with the then omnipotent Ottomans in Asia Minor and, finally, with Tokhtamysh, who little by little gathered strength after his defeat, he nevertheless believed that he had done enough by putting these useful allies against the Tatars in turn and not actively intervening in the war himself. As long as he lived, his intention seemed to succeed him; but when he died in 801 (1399) his heir and son Faraj (801-815=1399-1412) had to atone for his father's short-sighted selfishness by the loss of Syria, and it was only thanks to Timur's death that he finally remained untouched at least measure in Egypt.
Capture of Baghdad by Timur (1393)
However, Barquq had the insight to give a friendly welcome to Ahmed Ibn Uveys, who had fled from the Tatars, when he arrived in Cairo in 795 (1393) through Aleppo and Damascus, and to keep him a guest at his court until a favorable opportunity presented itself for reconquest of his kingdom. He didn't have to wait long for that. True, Baghdad surrendered without resistance to the approaching Timur, and during the years 795, 796 (1393, 1394) all Iraq and Mesopotamia were conquered, and the rebelliousness of the Black Lambs was punished by secondary terrible devastations in Armenia and Georgia under Kara Yusuf, the successor of the deceased in 791 (1389) Kara Muhammad.
Timur's second campaign against Tokhtamysh (1395)
But before Timur, who after the capture of Baghdad had already exchanged rude letters with Barquq, managed to oppose Syria, he was again called to the north by the attack of Tokhtamysh, who again gathered all his forces, against Shirvan, the owner of which even earlier had come under the protection of the world conqueror. Near the present Ekaterinograd, south of the Terek River, Tokhtamysh suffered a defeat in 797 (1395), even worse than at Kandurcha. he could never recover from it. Timur's gangs raged as usual, this time in their own region of the Golden Horde between the Volga, Don and Dnieper, and from there far into the depths of the Russian state [Timur reached Yelets]; then he appointed Koyridzhak Oglan, the son of Urus-Khan, who relied on a strong party in the horde, as khan there. The intended goal, to completely eliminate the ungrateful Tokhtamysh in this way, was achieved: first escaping as a runaway wanderer from the Lithuanian prince Vitovt, then wandering in the depths of inner Asia, they say he was killed seven years later.
Timur's wars with Tokhtamysh in 1392-1396. (Creator of the map - Stuntelaar)
New struggle with the Black Sheep, the reconquest of Baghdad by Ahmed Jalairid
In the winter of 798 (1395-1396), Timur, in order to prove his zeal for Islam, engaged in ruins in Christian Georgia and made another trip to the mouth of the Volga; then in the summer of that year (1396) he returned back to Samarkand to recruit new troops there for his further undertakings; in the west, he left Miranshah with part of the army to guard the conquests made. He succeeded in doing this, though not brilliantly. As soon as Timur left, the Black Lambs, led by Kara Yusuf, began to remind themselves of themselves in a very unpleasant way in Mesopotamia; Arab Bedouins also invaded from the Syrian desert, and with the help of both of them, Ahmed Ibn Uweys, already waiting in Syria, succeeded in recapturing Baghdad, in which he reigned for several years as a vassal of the Egyptian Sultan. Miranshah had to fight Kara Yusuf at Mosul and was not able to come to a decisive result, so that even the Maridin Orthokids, who before, as usual, submitted to Timur without great difficulty, considered it prudent to enter into friendship with the Turkmen and Egyptians. So about four years passed, during which Miranshah showed very little of his former abilities (as panegyrists of his surname assure, due to a fall on his head); however, the rebellion of the conquered did not take over Persia, and Timur, before returning to Iraq, could without much concern turn his attention to another country that had not yet been the object of his beneficial efforts.
India in the Age of Timur
In order to correctly understand the mode of action of the conqueror of the world Timur, one must not forget that he was mainly, and his Tatars were exclusively concerned with the capture of booty. Persia and the lands of the Caucasus were pretty much plundered during repeated wars, the future struggle against the Mamluks and Ottomans is promised to be more difficult than profitable; it is not surprising, therefore, that he, without hesitation, followed the bait, which suddenly carried him away in a completely different direction. India, which we have long lost sight of, and whose fate during the last two hundred years we can survey in a general connection only later, also has not completely escaped further Mongol invasions since the retreat of Genghis Khan. The passes of Kabul and Ghazna, those sortie gates from Afghanistan, served to pass the Jaghatai hordes into the Punjab eleven times during this interval, and the three or four Turkish dynasties, who meanwhile reigned successively in Delhi, were often at a loss how to avoid this disaster. But these attacks never had lasting success; due to the fragmentation that so quickly befell the kingdom of Jagatai, only the relatively insignificant forces of the provinces of Balkh and Ghazna always appeared here, which could not succeed in the complete conquest of a large country, although they could enjoy considerable freedom of action between the Khulagids and the khans of the east; but the Indian rulers, until the middle of the fourteenth century, had at their disposal an impressive military force. At the time mentioned it was different; the Delian sultans were more and more deprived of their influence in the outlying provinces; new independent states were formed from the former governorships of Bengal and the Deccan; and when, after the death of Firuz Shah (790=1388), his children and grandchildren, or rather nobles, who raised one or the other to the shield, squandered their strength in quarrels and frequent changes of throne, the indigenous provinces of the upper Ganges and Punjab also began to come to emergency disorder.
Timur's campaign in India, the ruin of Delhi (1398)
The news of this, which reached Timur, sounded very tempting; and so he determined, before setting off to the west, to undertake a predatory raid on a large scale across the Indus. The decision was carried out in 800 (1398). That here, in fact, the question was not about acquiring a country for a long time, is evident from the very method of its implementation. Most of the campaign coincided with the hot season, which naturally forced the Tatar army to stay as far north as possible. Multan, which had already been besieged the previous year by Pir Mohammed, Timur's grandson, and Delhi itself were the southernmost points they reached; but the districts between these two cities and the Himalayas were all the more exposed to all the horrors of war. Timur himself, or the one who on his behalf compiled a story about this campaign, tells with great composure that little by little it became painful to drag after the army numerous prisoners taken in battles with the warlike population of the Punjab; therefore, when approaching the capital, they were all together, numbering 100,000 people, killed in one day. No less terrible was the fate of Delhi itself. Already under the last Turkish sultans, this capital, which once rivaled the old Baghdad in splendor and wealth, suffered greatly as a result of the perverse orders of its rulers; despite this, it was still the first city of India in terms of population and treasures. After its sultan Mahmud and his majordomo Mello Iqbal Khan lost the battle at the gates of Delhi and with difficulty escaped to Gujarat, the inhabitants immediately surrendered; but a few skirmishes between Timur's invading regiments and the few remaining Turko-Indian soldiers or Hindus provided sufficient pretext to let plunder, murder, and fires rage everywhere with the usual barbarity. Characteristically, as Timur's narration speaks about this: “By the will of God,” says Timur, “not due to my desire or order, all three quarters of Delhi, called Siri, Jehan-Penah and Old Delhi, were plundered. The Khutbah of my dominion, which provides security and protection, was read in the city. Therefore, it was my fervent desire that no misfortune befall the local population. But it was determined by God that the city was to be devastated. Therefore, he inspired the unfaithful inhabitants with the spirit of perseverance, so that they brought upon themselves the fate that was inevitable. Lest this hideous hypocrisy seem too monstrous, we must remember that even today God is very often blamed for the heinous deeds that man commits. In any case, the day 18 December 1398 (8 Rabi 801) marks the end of Delhi as the brilliant and far-famed capital of Moslem India; under subsequent sultans, even before the last Afghan kings for a long time reduced it to the level of a virtual provincial town, it is only a shadow of itself. After Timur achieved his goal, that is, he supplied himself and his people with treasures and prisoners, he immediately set off on his return journey. The fact that after the departure of Timur, a traitor Emir from Multan, named Khizr Khan, who helped foreign robbers against his fellow tribesmen, gradually expanded his possessions and finally mastered the dominion over Delhi, gave reason to mistakenly think that Timur's dynasty for some time ruled India through Khizr and several subsequent governors. This is completely wrong: like clouds of locusts, the Tatars appeared, and just as exactly they left the country after they devastated it completely, and here bringing only death and destruction, without the slightest attempt to create anything new.
Timur's campaign in India 1398-1399. (Creator of the map - Stuntelaar)
Timur and Bayezid I of the Ottomans
As soon as he returned to Samarkand, the conqueror zealously set to work again closer to the affairs of the West. Circumstances there looked somewhat menacing. True, Sultan Barquq had just died in Egypt (801=1399), Ahmed Ibn Uweis only had difficulty holding on in Baghdad, where he was hated for his cruelty, with the help of the Black Lambs of Kara Yusuf, and one could hope to cope with this latter, as it happened often already. Around the same time, the Turkmens of the White Lamb, under the leadership of Kara Yelek (or Osman, if you call him by his Mohammedan name), deprived Burkhanaddin of Sivas of power and life, whom they pursued; earlier this might have seemed favorable to Timur: but now another enemy stepped into the same place of action, who seemed more equal to the formidable prince of war than all the previous ones. In 792–795 (1390–1393), Sultan Bayezid annexed most of the small Turkish emirates to the Ottoman state, which after the Battle of Amselfeld (791=1389) rose to the status of a power on European soil; and when Bayazid, at the request of the inhabitants of Sivas, who could not be too pleased with the conversion of the rude Turkmen, about 801 (1399) also took possession of the country as far as the Euphrates between Erzingan and Malatia, he became the immediate border neighbor of the provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia, which he claimed Timur. This was a direct challenge to Timur, who had previously taken under his protection Erzingan, which already belonged to Armenia proper. To this was added the fact that at the approach of Timur, who in 802 (1400) entered Azerbaijan with large crowds and, after one of his usual predatory raids on Georgia, was about to go to Baghdad, Ahmed Ibn Uveys and his ally Kara Yusuf fled from there to Bayazid and found a benevolent reception from him, while, on the contrary, many of the emirs of Asia Minor debunked by the latter appeared in Timur’s camp and buzzed his ears with loud complaints about the violence done to them. The tone of the diplomatic negotiations which ensued on these questions between both, almost equally powerful and, at any rate, equally haughty sovereigns, was more than clear; despite this, one could notice in Timur's behavior a slowness unusual for him in other cases. He did not hide from himself that here he faced the most serious struggle of his life. Bayazid had at his disposal the forces of all of Asia Minor and most of the Balkan Peninsula, whose Serbs formed one of the most excellent parts of the Ottoman army; Bayazid himself was hardly inferior to Timur in courage and energy, and this latter was on the extreme western border of his vast kingdom, in the midst of enslaved and oppressed peoples who could easily turn the first defeat inflicted on him by the Ottomans into final death. On the other hand, Bayazid lacked one quality, especially precious for a commander, and which Timur possessed in the highest degree: foresight, which allows everything in the world rather than contempt for the enemy. Confident in his always victorious, as he believed, army, he did not consider it necessary to make special preparations in Asia Minor to meet a powerful enemy, and remained calm in Europe in order, if possible, to complete the siege of Constantinople, which he had been busy with. some time. There he found the news that Timur at the beginning of 803 (1400) crossed the Euphrates and took Sivas by storm. Even one of the sons of Bayazid was allegedly taken prisoner at the same time and soon after that was killed; but even without this, he had enough reasons to now gather all his strength against a dangerous opponent.
Timur's campaign in Syria, the burning of Damascus (1400)
While the regiments of Bayazid were recruited in Europe and Asia. Timur decided, before moving further into Asia Minor, to secure first his left flank, which could easily be threatened by the Mamluks from Syria; also Baghdad was still in the hands of one viceroy left by Ahmed Ibn Uweis, and, as we have already seen, one could not rely on the petty Mesopotamian princes. In order to keep the latter in fear, for the time being he took advantage of the Turkmens of the White Lamb under the leadership of Kara Yelek, who, of course, was extremely revolted against Bayezid and willingly undertook to protect the fortress on the Euphrates, Malatya, easily conquered by the Tatars; Timur himself set himself the task of starting a war with Syria in the autumn of 803 (1400). She was easier for him than he could have imagined. Barquq's son, Faraj, was only fifteen years old, and his emirs had just quarreled to such an extent that the whole state threatened to be shaken by this, and Syria was almost freed from Egyptian domination. Although at this moment internal harmony was somehow restored, there were still various unrest and mutual hostility between the leaders of the troops; there was nothing to think about a common, led by one strong will, resistance to the Tatar attack. Only the Syrian emirs decided to meet the enemy at Aleppo, however, they did not jointly take a firm intention to risk the latter; thus Timur was victorious; Aleppo was terribly ruined, the rest of the cities of northern Syria were occupied without any significant difficulties, and already in the second half of 1400 (late 803) the conqueror stood in front of Damascus, where, finally, the sluggish Egyptians, accompanied by their too young Sultan. They might as well have stayed at home: while skirmishes were taking place here and there, discord between the emirs again took over; many started a plan - understandable under the circumstances - to replace the royal youth with a person capable of action, and when Farage's close associates and himself found out about this, it was all over. They managed to return safely to Cairo, leaving the Syrians to deal with the enemy as best they could. It turned out that things were bad. Although there was nothing to think of an active defense, and the city of Damascus soon voluntarily surrendered, and only the castle continued to resist for some time, however, even Timur himself hardly raged anywhere worse than here and then again in northern Syria. The purpose of this is clear: Timur wanted to give such a convincing example to the Mamluks and their subjects that they would not dare to interfere in any way with his further advance into Asia Minor.
In Damascus itself, there was no lack of religious pretexts to justify the worst treatment of the inhabitants. Timur, who here again played the role of a Shiite, outraged by the imperfections of the faithful, took particular pleasure in frightening the unfortunate intercessors of the Sunni clergy with insidious questions about the relationship between Ali and the legitimate caliphs who preceded him; then, in hypocritical indignation at the depravity of the Damascanians - who were, in any case, no worse than the rest of the Turks or even the Persians of that time - and at the godlessness of the Umayyads, who almost always lived right there, Timur ordered his Tatars to crack down here in the same way as between Christians in Georgia and Armenia. In the end, the city was "by mistake" set on fire, and for the most part burned out; in any case, it is hard to believe that there was no intent in the destruction of the Umayyad mosque. The ancient venerable church of St. John, which the Arabs only adapted to their worship, and later the Turks also spared, was still one of the first temples of Islam, despite the damage caused earlier by one fire; now she was deliberately ruined and again betrayed by the flames, from which this time she suffered much worse - a later restoration could only partially restore her to her former beauty. Despite the terms of surrender, Timur's soldiers massacred the inhabitants of the city in masses, the survivors were robbed in the most shameless way, and in a similar way the whole country was devastated to the border of Asia Minor. By such decisive measures, Timur, of course, achieved his goal completely: the Syrian and Egyptian emirs, who already found it suitable to take advantage of the weakness of the government, which had only increased as a result of the shameful flight of Sultan Faraj, for new mutual quarrels, of course, were careful not to continue to stand in the way of the conqueror of the world, and the helpless phantom sovereign himself, who soon after (808=1405) had to cede power to one of his brothers for a year, remained completely submissive until Timur's death; it can be assumed - this, of course, is not fully proven - that he even unquestioningly obeyed the demand addressed to him in 805 (1402), to mint coins with the name of Timur, so as not to cause an invasion of Egypt itself.
Second capture of Baghdad by Timur (1401)
After the Tatars restored calm in Syria in their own way, their crowds pulled back across the Euphrates to also overpower Mesopotamia and Baghdad again. This did not cost them much difficulty, since the White Lambs were a reliable support under Malatya, and the Blacks were significantly weakened by the long absence of their leader Kara Yusuf in Asia Minor. Nevertheless, it seemed necessary once again to bring order to their crowds that were in Armenia, sending a separate detachment there, while Ortokid was punished for his treason by the destruction of Maridin. Although he himself held out in his fortified castle, it was not found necessary to spend much time in taking it: Orthokid was not dangerous enough for that. Baghdad was different; although its head, Jalairid Ahmed, also did not want to give up the security of being under the protection of Bayazid, but the governor Faraj, who ruled there instead of him, had only one name in common with the Egyptian sultan; he was a brave man, and at the head of the Arab and Turkmen Bedouins whom he commanded, he did not fear the devil himself in human form. The detachment sent by Timur against the ancient city of the caliphs was not allowed in. Timur had to go there personally with the main forces, and the resistance shown also to him was so strong that he vainly besieged the city for forty days, until the old fox managed to surprise the defenders in a moment of oversight. As they say, Timur invaded the city on the most sacred day of the Muslim church year, on the great feast of sacrifice (Zul-Hidja 803 = July 22, 1401) and then only too accurately fulfilled a terrible vow, as if given by him, to slaughter people instead of ordinary sacrificial sheep. On this day, each warrior of Timur had to present not one head, as at Isfahan, but two, in order to build the favorite pyramids of skulls with the luxury corresponding to the holiday, and since it turned out to be difficult to hastily collect the entire number of heads, which stretched up to 90,000, they killed not only some of the prisoners brought with them from Syria, but many more women. The brave Faraj died with many of his men while trying to force their boats down the Tigris.
Howl/h2 title=on Timur with the Ottomans (1402)
But we have refused to give more detailed information about the horrors of this warrior; therefore, let us rather turn to the last great success, which laid the most brilliant crown on the deeds of the terrible warrior Timur already at the end of his too long life. Now he no longer left a single enemy worthy of attention either in the rear or on both flanks; although after Timur’s retreat to his winter quarters in Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Ahmed Ibn Uveys, probably hoping for Bayezid’s advancing preparations and trying to divert the enemy from him to the east, suddenly reappeared in the ruins of Baghdad and began to gather around him the scattered remnants of his former army , however, for the time being there was nothing to fear from serious difficulties from these weak raids, and preparations for a decisive blow against Bayezid could proceed in complete calm. No doubt we are told that Timur made one last attempt to reach a peace agreement with the Turks. Despite the fact that now approaching the age of seventy, he still possessed the same degree of self-confident energy, he could hardly, with a very light heart, fight the Ottoman sultan, who not without reason bore the nickname Ildirima (“lightning”). ), and whose forces, if in general and less significant than those of Timur, could be fully assembled and ready in a short time, while his own troops were scattered throughout front Asia from the Euphrates to the Indus and Jaxartes. The last wars in Syria and Mesopotamia also cost many people; besides, signs of less readiness could be seen in the emirs, who would rather be buried in pleasant peace on the plundered treasures than incessantly again be subjected to the hardships of war. In a word, Timur might wish to first replenish his army on the native soil of Transoxania and refresh it with new forces, as he had done many times already in previous years; therefore, for the first time in his life, he calmly endured the challenge that Bayezid again took possession of the long-disputed border fortress of Erzingan, while the Tatar army was occupied by Baghdad. Although he again appointed Tahert as his viceroy there, the same princeling who actually owned the city, and who with great pleasantness coped with his task of maneuvering between both powers, Timur, however, needed brilliant satisfaction, if he did not want in the eyes of the whole world to bow before Osman. That he even now began to seek him through diplomatic negotiations, bears little resemblance to his former manner; but in any case nothing came of it. Bayazid left his embassy unanswered for several months, in which, among other things, he urgently demanded the extradition of the leader of the Black Lambs, Kara Yusuf; when the return news finally arrived, negative and, moreover, rather impolite, it found the conqueror of the world already west of the Euphrates, on the way from Sivas to Caesarea, after taking by storm one Turkish border town. The army of Bayezid really stood to the right of Timur near Tokat; but he knew that she would be forced to follow him if he went to the main city, Broussa.
Battle of Angora (1402)
The armies of both sides met at Angora; but while the sultan, oblivious to some discontent that was rising in his troops, with some boastfulness went hunting in sight of the enemy and lingered there too long to take care of tactical details, Timur secured for himself the advantages of the situation and sowed the possibility of discontent in the ranks of the Turks, which he never missed doing relatively powerful enemies. In addition to the Ottoman troops themselves, the Janissaries, and reliable Serbs, Bayezid's army included soldiers from small states that he had abolished ten years earlier, and some detachments of Tatar riders who had been in Asia Minor since the first Mongol times. The latter willingly succumbed to insinuations, inviting them to go over to the side of their fellow tribesmen; the former were still devoted to their former sovereigns, who were also in the camp of enemies, and besides, they were irritated against Bayazid because of all his behavior: so the messengers of the cunning Timur found a favorable reception for their proposals. When a decisive battle began near the end of 804 (mid-1402), at a critical moment, most of the Asia Minor and all the Tatars went over to Timur: Bayazid's entire right flank was upset by this, and his defeat was decided. But while all around fled, the Sultan stood steadfastly in the center of the army with his Janissaries. He had no intention of admitting defeat; so he endured until his faithful bodyguards were completely exterminated. When, at nightfall, he finally agreed to leave the battlefield, it was too late: the fall of his horse had betrayed him into the hands of the pursuing enemies, and as the Greek emperor had once before the Seljuk Alp-Arslan, so now the Sultan of the Ottomans, under whose name it was not long before Byzantium trembled, Timur appeared as a prisoner before the Tatar run. Whether the widespread story that Timur carried him with him in an iron cage during his further march through Asia Minor was based on the truth, whether this cage was then a cage, or rather a stretcher surrounded by bars, in the end, is as indifferent as the authenticity of many anecdotes transmitted about a personal meeting and further intercourse between the conqueror and the vanquished: it is enough that Bayezid did not long endure the tearing torment of deeply struck pride. While the troops of his jailer devastated Asia Minor with fire and sword in all directions, half destroyed Brussa, the cradle of Ottoman greatness, finally took even Smyrna from the Rhodes knights of the Johannites and brutally dealt with her, while his own daughter was forced to give his hand to the grandson of Timur, the crushed sultan was apparently fading away, and before the tamer of his violent head set off on his way back to the east, Bayazid died in his imprisonment (14 Sha "ban 804 \u003d March 9, 1403).
Timur's state towards the end of his life
Middle East after the Battle of Angora
Timur, of course, could not think of extending his conquests to the Ottoman state and beyond the Bosphorus; from such a thought he should have been restrained in advance by the consciousness of the weakest side of his great kingdom: that the actual root part of it lay on the eastern border. In addition, even before the war with Bayezid, the Byzantine sovereigns of Trebizond and Constantinople entered into negotiations with the Tatars in order to get rid of the dangerous Ottoman enemy with their help and pledged to pay tribute to them; By this they, according to Eastern concepts, became Timur's vassals, for whom, without further effort, the glory of subordinating these irreconcilable enemies of Islam to his scepter was thus secured. Therefore, having again distributed Asia Minor to the emirs expelled by the Ottomans as his vassals, he left the rest of the Ottoman state, which was exclusively on European soil, to himself, which he could do with all the greater dignity that the son of Bayezid, Suleiman, who managed to escape from Angora in Rumelia, very humbly asked for peace from there. In addition, Timur, as we remember, had to eliminate one more old and restless enemy, who was behind his lines, in Baghdad. Ahmed Ibn Uveys, not without difficulty - his own son rebelled against him - kept Baghdad during the events of Asia Minor, mainly with the help of his old friend Qara Yusuf, who, when Timur approached, again appeared from the west to his Black Lambs. Later, disagreements arose between the Allies themselves; Ahmed had to flee to Syria from the Turkmen leader, and this latter played the role of sovereign in Baghdad, as long as Timur found it convenient to allow him this pleasure. It wasn't long. After the whole of Asia Minor was conquered and the conqueror of Bayezid again installed the emirs he had driven out in their principalities as his vassals, he went to Armenia and made those who showed themselves obstinate in the last dangerous time feel the weight of his hand. The orthokid from Maridin, who trembled in person with many gifts, was still graciously received, but the Georgians, who also turned out to be rebellious again, were severely punished, and Kara Yusuf was defeated at Hilla (806=1403) by an army sent to the south. Now he, too, fled to Syria, but was imprisoned in a castle in Cairo, along with his former ally Ahmed, but on the orders of Sultan Faraj, who feared the wrath of his master. Now nothing prevented Timur from returning to his homeland, after four years spent in wars in Persia and Western countries: along the way, some rebels in the Caspian lands were also destroyed, and in Muharram 807 (July 1404) victorious commander (again entered his capital Samarkand at the head of his army.
Preparations for a campaign in China and the death of Timur (1405)
But the indefatigable conqueror intended to give himself only a few months, not for rest, but for preparation for a new, gigantic undertaking. From Moscow to Delhi, from the Irtysh to the Mediterranean Sea, not a single province remained, the land of which would not have to groan under the hooves of his horses; now his eyes turned to the east. The Kashgar khanate, which since the campaign of 792 (1390) lay unquestioningly at his feet, was already directly adjacent to the border of China. The excuse to invade the Middle Empire now was easy to find. Already in 1368 (769 - 70), Genghis Khanids from the Khubilai clan, who reigned there until this year, had to give way to the founder of the national Minsk dynasty, this was sufficient reason for Timur, who kept himself until his death, as a majordomo of the descendants of the Mongol ruler of the world to present to their emirs as an undeniable necessity the reunification of this lost member to the kingdom.
The kurultai immediately convened by him approved this laudable idea with an enthusiasm that could somewhat be compared with the feelings of the French Senate towards the great Napoleon. It was immediately set about to carry it out: the seventy-year-old man, in fact, could not lose much time. Already in the fifth month after entering Samarkand, the army, with incredible speed again supplemented to 200,000 people, set out through Jaksart. But she had to stop too soon. In Otrar, still on the right bank of the river, Timur fell ill with a fever so severe that almost from the first moment one could foresee a fatal outcome.
On 17 Shaban 807 (February 18, 1405), the arrow fell, the clock stopped, and time triumphed over the most powerful and illustrious of all Muslim sovereigns who ever lived. Everything was over, and the words are really applicable here: "Everything passed as if it had never happened."
Gur-Emir - the mausoleum of Timur in Samarkand
Assessment of Timur's activities
They are applicable here at least in relation to everything that is worthy to constitute the content of the life of the ruler. Of course, in historical reflections one must not take the too lofty point of view of abstract idealism, or the too low point of view of philistinism striving to be humane: already earlier, on one occasion, we found out for ourselves that it is useless to weep over the disasters of war, if the human race is still such that without strong shocks remains sluggish and untenable in relation to their true tasks. Therefore, we will evaluate as carriers of historical necessity even terrible oppressors such as Caesar, Omar or Napoleon, whose task was to destroy the decrepit world to pieces in order to make room for new, viable formations. In any case, the similarity that the no less sharply outlined figure of Timur presents with the image of Napoleon is very remarkable. The same military genius, as organizational as well as tactical and strategic; the same combination of perseverance in the pursuit of a once accepted thought with a lightning-like onslaught at the moment of execution; the same steadfastness of inner balance in the most dangerous and difficult undertakings; the same indefatigable energy, which gave as little independence as possible to secondary bosses, personally found every important measure; the same ability to shrewdly recognize the weaknesses of the enemy, without falling into the error of too little value or despise him; the same cold-blooded inattention to the human material required for the fulfillment of great plans, the same immeasurable ambition and grandeur of plans for conquest, next to the art of using the smallest motives of human nature and with downright virtuosic hypocrisy; finally, the same combination of selfless courage with cunning treachery in the Tartar, as in his Corsican follower. Of course, there is no lack of minor differences: it is necessary to do justice to the emperor-soldier that he won almost all his battles with his genius as a commander, while the main successes of Timur, the victory over Tokhtamysh, over Muzaffarid Mansur, over the Delhi kingdom, over Bayezid, were always resolved by artfully introduced strife into a number of enemies or by bribery of contemptible traitors - but such retreats still do not violate the general impression of striking similarity.
And yet it would be unfair to Napoleon to put him on the same level with Timur. The code of laws and the government which it gave to France, even now, after eighty years, remain the only links that hold this people as restless as they are gifted in the state system, necessary, in spite of everything, for modern civilization; and no matter how severely he ordered from Spain to Russia, however, the iron broom, with which he swept the soil of Europe, nowhere carried away good seeds along with rubbish and chaff. And in Timur's actions, the most fatal thing was precisely that he never thought about creating any kind of strong order, but everywhere he tried only to destroy. If one decides to leave aside his barren and cold-blooded inhumanity, he is personally the most majestically outlined of all Mohammedan sovereigns, his life is a real epic, the directly romantic attraction of which, in a detailed description of a historian-artist, should have acted with irresistible force. All the other great Islamic caliphs and sultans - Genghis Khan was a pagan - no matter how significant their own deeds were, most of their success was due to outside forces. Muawiyah had his Ziyad, Abd al-Melik and Walid had their Hajjaj, Mansur had Barmekida, Alp-Arslan had Nizam al-mulk: Timur's only weapon, his army ready for battle, was his own creation, and not in one really important campaign they were not commanded by anyone except himself. There was one person who equaled Timur in inner strength, namely Omar; True, he only sent orders to his troops from afar, but by the strength of his personality he completely dominated each of his generals and showed all his greatness in another area, creating a state from barely organized gangs of Bedouins and disordered foreign provinces, the foundations of which served for eight centuries. framework for national development, despite all the changes, yet to a certain extent uniform and continuous. The destruction of these foundations had long been prepared by the Turks, then accelerated by the Mongols and Tatars, with the exception of only the unfinished attempt of the valiant Ghazan Khan to create a new organism. To complete this destruction forever was the sad merit of Timur, when he created chaos from all of Asia Minor, in which the forces needed to restore a new Islamic unity no longer lurked. If, in a purely political sense, his appearance is so ephemeral that after his disappearance we see how the same elements that were in operation before him are again accepted almost without change for their activity where he interrupted it, then after the After the general destruction of the last remnants of material and mental civilization left by his predecessors, none of those elements that could lead to the revival of the Islamic spirit and state could no longer powerfully develop. Thus, of the two greatest sovereigns of Islam, Omar stands at the beginning of the proper Mohammedan state life, as its creator, and at the end, as its destroyer, stands Timur, nicknamed Tamerlane.
Literature about Timur
Timur. Article in the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. Author - V. Bartold
Ghiyasaddin Ali. Diary of Timur's campaign in India. M., 1958.
Nizam ad-Din Shami. Zafar name. Materials on the history of the Kirghiz and Kirghizia. Issue I. M., 1973.
Ibn Arabshah. Miracles of the fate of the history of Timur. Tashkent., 2007.
Yazdi Sharaf al-Din Ali. Zafar name. Tashkent, 2008.
Clavijo, Ruy Gonzalez de. Diary of a journey to Samarkand to the court of Timur (1403-1406). M., 1990.
F. Nev. Description of the wars of Timur and Shah Rukh in Western Asia according to the unpublished Armenian chronicle of Thomas of Madzof. Brussels, 1859
Marlo, Christopher. Tamerlane the Great
Poe, Edgar Allan. Tamerlane
Lucien Keren. Tamerlane - Empire of the Iron Lord, 1978
Javid, Hussein. Lame Timur
N. Ostroumov. Code of Timur. Kazan, 1894
Borodin, S. Stars over Samarkand.
Seguin, A. Tamerlane
Popov, M. Tamerlan
They are not considered outright forged, but it remains doubtful how much the only surviving Persian translation of them corresponds to the original written in East Turkish, and even how much this original was personally written or dictated by Timur himself.
One connoisseur of military affairs, Jahns (Geschichte des Kriegswesens, Leipzig. 1880, pp. 708 ff.) finds the methodological nature of the instructions to the military leaders contained in Timur's notes especially remarkable, but notes quite rightly that "the strategic and tactical connection of his military exploits yet not clear enough historically to be instructive. A good example of what can happen with less care can be borrowed from Hammer-Purgstall, who undertakes to give much information about Timur's army (Gesch. d. osman. Reichs I, 309, compare 316): after reporting on the uniforms introduced in in it, he continues: "there were also two regiments completely covered with cuirasses, the oldest cuirassier regiments, which are mentioned in military history." Why the Mongolian jiba (which, by the way, can denote any kind of weapon) should correspond to our cuirass more than the shell, which has been used in the East for many centuries, not only for infantry, but also for horsemen, there is no indication of this; with the same or more right, this very phrase could be used, for example, to decorate the description of the Persian troops at Kadisiya (I, 264).
The figures here are again greatly exaggerated by historians. This is particularly evident in the following examples: in the testimony that 800,000 soldiers of Timur fought at Angora against 400,000 of Bayezid, and in the even more bold statement of the Armenian chronicler that 700,000 people participated in the capture of Damascus (Neve, Expose des guerres de Tamerlan et de Schah- Rokh, Brussels 1860, p. 72).
This is what Muslim historians say. However, one should not be silent about the fact that, according to the testimony of a Western traveler who penetrated as far as Timur's court, his behavior was far from the behavior of a zealous Muslim. Wheleer's conclusions cannot be considered undoubted, since he drew his information mainly from the Mongol history of Father Katru, the reliability of the sources of which has not been proven; the decisive opinion expressed in the said note seems to me doubtful in its reliability. Therefore, I adhered to the generally accepted story.
Khizp is the Persian-Turkish pronunciation of the Arabic name Khidr. The relationship of this prince to Kamaraddin, the murderer of his father, is unclear; after the campaign of Timur's commanders in 792 (1390), Kamaraddin is no longer mentioned, and according to Heider-Razi (Notices et extraaits XIV, Paris 1843, p. 479), Khidr, upon the death of this usurper, achieved dominance over the tribes of the former Kashgar Khanate. But according to Sherefaddin (Deguignes, Allgemeine Geschichte der Hunnen und Turken, ubers, v. Dalmert, Bd. IV, Greifswald 1771, pp. 32,35), the leader of the jets and the tribes belonging to them in 791 (1389) is already Khidr, and in 792 (1390) again Kamaraddin; this means that between these tribes there should have been a separation for some time, and some obeyed the young Khidr, and others Kamaraddin. The details are still unknown; later, Khidr Khoja is the sovereign ruler in peaceful relations with Timur (according to Khondemir, trans. Defromery, Journ. as. IV Serie, t. 19, Paris 1852, p. 282).
Of course, Berke already officially accepted Islam, which at that time also prevailed everywhere in the tribes of the Golden Horde proper. But especially to the east of the Volga, most of the so-called. the Tatars were probably pagans, as are the Chuvashs in the provinces of Orenburg and Kazan now.
Kazi is the Persian-Turkish pronunciation of the Arabic qadi "judge". His father was a judge under Arten and enjoyed great influence at the court of this latter; after his death, he, along with several other dignitaries, enthroned his young son Muhammad and then he himself died, leaving his post to Burkhanaddin. When Mohammed then died without descendants, the cunning qadi managed little by little to subjugate the rest of the nobles of the country, and in the end even took the title of sultan.
Osman is the Perso-Turkish pronunciation of the Arabic name Usman, in which the letter "c" corresponds in pronunciation to the English th. 15 Rajab according to the ordinary calendar corresponds to June 18; but since Monday is given as the day of the week, it means that the Arabic account, as it very often happens, is incorrect, and the real number is 19. However, according to one story, the battle lasted three days, which means that from here it is possible, perhaps, to explain the inaccuracy of the date.
The details of this are variously reported, and until further information must be considered highly doubtful.
We do not know anything definite about the immediate circumstances of his death. That Timur's son, then seventeen-year-old Shahrukh, cut off his head with his own hand, is a brazen invention of his courtier, Sherefaddin; also the story of Ibn Arabshah is not very plausible.
That is, prayer in mosques for the winner, which included the recognition of his new ruler by the population.
S. Thomas (The Chronicles of the Pathan Kings of Dehli, London 1871), p. 328. We are indeed told that Khizr Khan sent in 814 (1411) a deputation to Timur's son, Shahrukh, to take the oath of allegiance (see Notices et Extraits, XIV, 1, Paris 1843, p. 19b); meanwhile, this also contains little contradiction to what is said in the text, as the fact that many of the other Indian princes tried to deflect Timur's attacks from themselves by declaring themselves his vassals; this meant that the kings would have submitted if only he, for other reasons, did not want war at all costs. Timurid panegyrists, of course, always try to give purely formal expressions of politeness a deeper meaning than they really have. Abd al-Razzak's account in Notices et Extraits, op. vol. 437 et seq.
This is how Weil writes this name, at least according to the testimony of his Arabic sources. In the only original in my possession, Ibn Arabshah's Vita Timur, ed. Manger, I, 522, I find Ilyuk or Eiluk; Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches I, 293, has Kara Yuluk, which he translates as “black leech”, while in Turkish leech means not yuluk, but syulyuk. I am not able to establish exactly the form and meaning of this name.
Hertzberg decree. op. pp. 526; Eastern sources, in any case, do not give any information about this. this fact is doubtful, cf. with Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches I, 618, Weil, Geschichte des Abbasidenchalifats in Egypten II, 81, np. 4. The name Ertogrul, in any case, is only an assumption v. Hammer "a.
Although according to Weil "(Geschichte des Abbasidenchalifats in Egypten and, 97) only Persian historiographers tell about this requirement and obedience of the Sultan, both are quite plausible in the general state of affairs. Timur, who at that moment had already taken Smyrna, hardly returned to the east without achieving the formal subjugation of the Mamluks.
The 14th of Shaban corresponds to the 9th, not the 8th, as v. Hammer, op. op. p. 335. At the same time, it should be noted that the day of the week is Thursday, which comes title=Xia opposite the 13th of Shaban, corresponding in any case to the 8th of March, so that the latter may still be considered the correct number.
When writing the material, the chapter "Tamerlane" from the book "History of Islam" by August Müller was used. In many places of the material, before the dates from the Nativity of Christ, Muslim dating according to the Hijri is given.
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