The World полностью

Only the Golden Family of Genghis could rule as khan, so while he crowned himself amir of Transoxiana, making Samarkand his capital, Tamerlane set up a puppet khan and married a khan’s widow, Saray Mulk Khanum. She was around thirty years old, ‘surpassingly beautiful’ and directly descended from Genghis, allowing Tamerlane to adopt the title gürkan – imperial son-in-law. Constantly at war expanding his territories, he was an emperor in all but name. He had forty-three favoured concubines, but Saray alone was his adviser, serving as his regent in Samarkand when he was away fighting, the chief of his wives. Only four of his many sons made it to adulthood, and his favourite was Jahangir, whom he married to a Golden heiress, Khanzada, granddaughter of Janibeg Khan of the Golden Horde. When Tamerlane had marched against her father in 1374, the latter sent his beautiful daughter out to meet the conqueror at the head of a procession of gifts. Tamerlane made peace immediately and married Khanzada to Jahangir, only for his son to die of illness two years later. The steely Tamerlane was heartbroken, burying the youth in a splendid tomb (still standing) in his home town of Kesh where he planned to be buried himself. ‘Everything then became melancholy to him, his cheeks were almost always bathed in tears.’ As he promoted his sons and family to command the growing empire, he paid special attention to Jahangir’s widow Khanzada and their sons.

Tamerlane was the child of the ferocity of the steppe and of the refinement of urban Persian culture, projecting himself as both connoisseur and butcher. Adoring Persian poetry, the conqueror welcomed the Persian poet Hafiz, a wise, playful chronicler of love, sex, wine and mysticism, who had written a famous ghazal – a poem of love and longing – for a girl:

If that beauty of Shiraz would take my heart in hand,

For the black mole on her cheek

I would give the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

Now Tamerlane teased him: ‘By my sword, I’ve conquered the greater part of the world to beautify Samarkand and Bukhara – and you’d exchange them for a girl from Shiraz?’

‘O Sovereign of the world,’ replied Hafiz, ‘it is by such generosity that I have been reduced, as you see, to my present state of poverty.’ Tamerlane laughed and rewarded him. Hafiz’s real view of politicians and paladins was:

Darius, Alexander, their great hullabaloo

Can be summed up simply in a line or two.

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Tamerlane’s coalition of Mongols, Turks, Persians and Uzbeks, was held together by constant victory and the delivery of endless plunder to distract and reward his voracious amirs. But the only way to sustain his power was by interminable war, fuelled by ambition so colossal that it exhausted even his paladins, who – like those of Alexander – begged him to rest and let them enjoy their prizes. Embarking on twenty years of inexorable fighting, sacking cities from Bursa and Baghdad to Damascus and Delhi, often having to retake rebellious Khorasan, Tamerlane claimed all the lands of the Golden and Seljuk dynasties, using terror on a Mongol scale, gleefully stacking towers of heads to advertise his ferocity. At Sebzewar in Iran he piled 2,000 living prisoners on top of one another and had them plastered into living towers. At Isfahan, his towers contained by his own boast 70,000 heads. No one knows the numbers of his victims, but one estimate claims he killed 17 million – 5 per cent of the world population.

In the early 1380s, he welcomed as an ally an ambitious Golden khan named Toqtamish. Russian princes led by Dmitri Donskoi of Moscow had just defeated the Horde, but two years later Khan Toqtamish restored Golden power, burning Moscow, and slaughtered half the Muscovites.^* Then Toqtamish challenged Tamerlane himself.

Starting in 1385, in a campaign that lasted for ten years, he gradually defeated Toqtamish in a series of battles – one of which he ‘regarded as his greatest victory’ – sweeping northwards across Russia towards Moscow: headless, handless, footless skeletons tell of his passing. In Crimea, he enslaved Genoese and Venetians at Kaffa and Tana.