Colorful and readable biography of the famous 14th century Central Asian marauder. In the same style as Lamb's bio of Hannibal: it gives you a really good feel for a romantic and intriguing era not well known to moderns.
Notes:
* "Tamerlane" as misnomer: his name is actually Timur, and he was called Timur-i-laing, which means Timur the limper/the one who limps. This was corrupted in English to Tamerlane.
* Timur operated across a tremendous region of the world that is much more accustomed to instability than we are, peopled by cultures who accept death with far more equanimity than modern soy-culture: "It was the hour and the place appointed for Hussayn and no man may escape his fate."
* Tamerlane defeats his rivals and unifies the Tatars in 1369, 140 years after the death of Genghis Khan. His empire rose (and fell) rapidly, at its peak stretching from Turkey all the way to northern India, surrounding much of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Red Sea.
* Tales of near-sociopathic daring:
+ One soldier in an outlandish plumed outfit convinces an entire group of enemy soldiers to surrender and give up captives and weapons: he fools them by pointing out Timur among his group, saying the great Timur would never be out fighting without a gigantic army. They had a grand total of thirteen men.
+ The story of Khitai Bahatur and Shaikh Ali mocking each other for cowardice: Khitai immediately goes into battle, alone, to prove Shaikh Ali wrong; Ali, not wanting to be outdone immediately joins him and they get surrounded... "thou art mad, go back!" the other said "nay, thou go back." These are the kinds of dudes that Tamerlane had to unite.
* "He who breaks his word shall lose his life." A romantic sense of justice, it gives the reader a mournful feeling of lost frontier justice, like the old Wild West, except with more gravitas and a deeper history. Something we've lost in our modern era...
* Timur's first son dies in infancy of an illness.
* Rewinding about a century to look at the era of Kubilai Khan and the various other divided empires of Genghis Khan's descendants.
* "What God has done is well done." A vibe of acceptance, non-attachment, fatalism.
* The Il-Khan (sub) empire, stretching from Jerusalem to India: as late as 1305 ambassadors from Edward I of England as wells as from the Greek emperor of Constantinople journeyed to retain the "goodwill" of this Mongol lord.
* Timur by 1375 at ousted another one of Genghis Khan's descendants' territory, talking the lands around Samarkand. Modern Samarkand is a city in Uzbekistan, east of the Caspian Sea, it used to be a major link on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean.
* "The gentleman [Timur] was driving the barbarian into the desert."
* What remained of the Mongol Empire was the "Golden Horde"; the territory of Juchi, eldest son of Genghis Khan. Nomadic peoples from the steps, whole cities moving around. They controlling Russia from a distance, forcing them to pay tribute, they engaged with the Venetians and Genoese who had established trading posts throughout their territory.
* Russia defeated the Golden Horde in a battle led by Dimitri, prince of Moscow, this opened up a chance later for Timur to conquer both... "We who have taken up the sword have suffered more than our fathers who bent the neck of submission."
* One of the Golden Horde, Toktamish, fled and asked Timur for asylum. Timur ultimately equipped him to fight other members of the Golden Horde. Toktamish starts to get aggressive and ultimately attacks Timur himself, forgetting his gratitude.
* Timur attacks where he was least expected, right in Toktamish's own territory, resolving the conflict in one great battle and predicting that he would be scared off by such aggressive daring. "It is better to be at the right place with ten men than absent with ten thousand."
* Tremendous long-distance maneuvers of Timur's army: 1800 miles covered in some 18 weeks to achieve a total victory over the Golden Horde.
* Quotes like this are a good reminder that civilization hangs by a thread: "Wine was carried in then to the victors in golden bowls, honey mead, date wine and spirits. And the bowls were brought by the hands of captive women, hundreds chosen for their bright faces and fine figures. As was customary, their garments had been taken from them, their dark hair loosened upon their shoulders. And they were made to sing the love songs of their people before the Tatar lords took them off and violated them." Worth remembering that not much has changed in humanity's fundamental nature. In fact one of the most dangerous lies of modernity is to think otherwise.
* On Timur's fatalism/acceptance:
+ "Peace and war are alike to me." Timur.
+ "He was not depressed by misfortune, and prosperity did not stir in him any exaltation" (The chronicler known as "the Arab" describing Timur).
+ On the death of his second son, Omar Shaikh: "God gave, and God has taken away."
* See the system of post roads and way stations created throughout all of his territory by Timur, both for travel and for rapid information flow.
* "A wise enemy is less harmful than a foolish friend." Timur
Warrior Ag Boga, who played a huge role in helping Timur to victory over the Persians, and who Timur rewarded tremendously, saying regarding his new-found riches: "God be my witness, yesterday I had no more than one horse and how can all this be mine now?"
* An alliance forms against Timur: after taking Baghdad and sending envoys to the sultan of Egypt, Bayazid, the sultan of the Turks, allies with the sultan of Egypt (the Mameluks) and the Syrian Arabs against Timur.
* A Micheneresque description of Samarkand from the imagination of the author.
* In an era while Europe was living in the mud, and the Crusades were long over, these Eurasian conquerors formed the most competent and most established empires of the world. Western Europeans were seen as uncivilized savages; to these Asiatics, Constantinople was the reigning city of Europe at this time.
* Timor conquers the army of India and takes Delhi and Northern India. (!)
* Then Timur travels a thousand miles back east to reconquer and restabilize the region of the Caucasus, the Turks under Bayazid, as well as Egypt/the Mamluks around 1400, Timur rampages through Damascus, Aleppo, Palestine; he conquers and nearly levels Baghdad.
* The "last crusade": Sigismund and the French set out to "free" Constantinople from Turkish incursions, he was annihilated by the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396.
* The Venetians and the Genovese were involved in this event as well; they were trying to battle each other for access to trade with Asia, and Constantinople was at risk from Turkish incursion still, when--unexpectedly--the Timur and his Tatar army appeared in Eastern Turkey. All the Turks were called to arms and Bayazid suspended his siege of Constantinople. In 1402, Timur outmaneuvers Bayazid in his own territory, traps the Turks (who were already low on food and water and exhausted from marching in a big circle trying to find Timur), while the Tatars, rested and ready, destroyed the Turks, capturing Bayazid, who died shortly after. Timur basically annihilated the Turkish army, leaving the Europeans astonished, "Where the Turks had been Lords for a century, a Tatar conqueror had appeared, out of the depths of the east." Timur "made no effort to enter Europe" after this tremendous surprise victory.
* Timur next decides to go to Cathay (that era's term for "China"), but dies en route in 1405 in the city of Otrar. "Do not rend your garments and run to and fro like madmen because I have left you. That will breed disorder."
* His army quickly broke up into parts; a succession problem develops in Samarkand; everything quickly fell apart into civil war. The core of the empire was won over by Shah Rukh, who kept much of it intact, he and his son Ulugh Beg, with defense sufficient to maintain a core mini-empire but with little conquering and expansion, presided over an era of arts, poetry and splendor. They are known today as the Timurids, thought of as enlightened monarchs.
* Contact from Europe was broken at this point, and not until the middle of the 19th century did the Russian army advance as far as Samarkand, where archaeologists rushed into seek out many of the things Timur carried back from the Byzantine library after destroying Bayazid. However, much of the beautiful (and once-thought indestructible) parts of the city had been reduced to ruins from years of earthquake and harsh weather.
* Grandsons of Timur later went from Samarkand into India, founding the Moghul dynasty.
* This book really reminds a reader of the poem Ozymandias ("'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains...") Within a couple of generations hardly anything remains of Timur's "works."
* Persia became a great power to centuries later, the Turks managed to recapture Constantinople in 1453.
* These guys were performing total war centuries before the European powers "discovered" it, using weapons technology (naphtha, liquid or "Greek" fire, siege engines, etc.) more advanced than anything in Europe... and it showed in the results whenever Europeans came into contact with any of these armies: "A decided superiority in fire... an inflexible discipline, and lifelong familiarity with battle tactics combined with the genius of their leaders gave the Mongols and Tatars such advantage over the motley and ill-led armies of 13th and 14th century Europe that the record of their encounters is one of almost continuous disaster for Europe."
* Europeans in that day and for centuries thereafter barely comprehended Timur, barely grasped him at all, seeing him as a legendary, romantic figure. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play called "Tamburlaine the Great" in 1586 with absolutely zero authentic detail. Not until the 18th century was more accurate knowledge available about Timor thanks to the French translation of Sherif ad-Din's long chronicle.
* The book closes with a set of short chapter notes with good explanations of the technical/cultural meaning of the words "Mongol," "Tatar," "Turk," etc., as well as the various misnomers/misspellings commonly used in place of these words. This really helps the reader keep these various peoples straight.
Vocab:
appanage: a gift of land, an official position, or money given to the younger children of kings and princes to provide for their maintenance.
ogival: having the form of an arch
mangonel: a military device for throwing stones and other missiles.
To Read:
E.G. Browne: Persian Literature Under Tartar Dominion
Edward Creasy: The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo: The Chronicles of Clavijo
Stanley Lane-Poole: Turkey
Edward Creasy: The History of the Ottoman Turks
E.H. Parker: A Thousand Years of the Tartars