As Tamerlane galloped across Russia, the Ottoman sultan Murad and his son ‘Thunderbolt’ Bayezid led a 30,000-strong Ottoman army into Kosovo to face 15,000 Serbs. On 15 June 1389, at the Field of Blackbirds near Pristina, the sixty-three-year-old Murad, commanding the centre amid ‘a circle of chained camels’ while his sons Thunderbolt and Yakub took the right and left, withstood a charge by Christian heavy cavalry. Twelve Serbian knights led by Prince Lazar tried to hack their way to the sultan. One of them, Miloš Obelic´, surrendered but as he prostrated himself before the victor he plunged a hidden dagger into the sultanic belly. Lazar was brought in and beheaded. His father’s body still warm, Thunderbolt, twenty-nine years old, invited his brother Yakub into the grisly sultanic tent and had him strangled – that very inverted compliment of the steppe peoples who never shed royal blood. It was the first Ottoman fratricide, the start of a gruesome institution. After marrying Prince Lazar’s daughter Olivera and defeating the king of Hungary’s crusade to stop him,* Thunderbolt believed it was time to take Constantinople. He besieged the much diminished Great City, building a castle on the Asian side, Güzelce Hisar, that still stands. With the west secure, Thunderbolt switched eastwards where he encountered a triumphant Tamerlane, ruler now of all the Golden khanates of central Asia, Persia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Georgia, to which he had added a new prize: India.
TAMERLANE TAKES DELHI; THUNDERBOLT IN A CAGE
On 17 December 1398, as Tamerlane approached the great city of Delhi, its sultan confronted him with a huge army of armoured elephants. Tamerlane’s cavalry started to panic at the smell of the pachyderms, but Tamerlane loaded his camels with hay and wood, set their loads alight and drove them towards the Indian lines. The camels, maddened by the fire, shrieking in pain, charged the elephants, which, terrified, stampeded into the Indian army. The Indian sultan – whose northern Indian kingdom had been undermined by the psychotic predations of his grandfather* – was a fellow Muslim, but Tamerlane claimed that this was a holy war because the Indian rulers were appeasing Hindu idolatry. The sultan fled, leaving tens of thousands of prisoners whom Tamerlane executed en masse. On seizing Delhi, Tamerlane spared the people but looted the city so aggressively that the Indians rebelled. At this his troops went berserk, massacring thousands. Enthroned in Delhi, Tamerlane took the salute from 120 elephants while he slaughtered Hindus and destroyed their temples.
Taking Indian artists to embellish Samarkand and elephants to fortify his army, Tamerlane returned to his capital, knowing that it was time to settle the succession. He chose as heir his eldest grandson Muhammad Shah, son of Jahangir and Khanzada: vigorous and capable, the young man had the blood of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in his veins. But Tamerlane had a family problem in the form of his youngest son Miranshah. Married to Khanzada, Jahangir’s widow, Miranshah was a chubby wife-beating alcoholic who dared to say his father was old and should let the sons rule. Khanzada went to her father-in-law, showed him her blouse bloody from Miranshah’s beatings and reported his treasonable tendencies. Tamerlane, who had wept at Jahangir’s death, now wept again. Miranshah begged for mercy with a rope around his neck and was forgiven, but he was never promoted again. Khanzada joined Tamerlane’s household.
Tamerlane could never rest for long. Thunderbolt was expanding eastwards, adopting the title sultan of Rum which Tamerlane himself claimed. ‘You are but an ant,’ Tamerlane told Thunderbolt; ‘don’t seek to fight the elephants for they’ll crush you under their feet. How can a princelet like you contend with us? But your boastful prattlings aren’t extraordinary: Turks always talk gibberish.’
‘We’ll chase you all the way to Tabriz,’ replied Thunderbolt, who formed an alliance with the Mamluks of Egypt. Tamerlane’s exhausted generals asked for a rest, warning that war against two powerful kingdoms was unwise, but the conqueror, though he was now in his sixties, overruled them. In 1401, he crushed rebellious Baghdad, where each soldier was ordered to deliver two heads to the tower builders, then he advanced towards Thunderbolt. But the Mamluk sultans threatened his flank, so he swerved into Syria.
The Mamluk sultan, a boy of fourteen, headed north accompanied by his long-suffering tutor, Ibn Khaldun, the seventy-year-old celebrity historian.* Tamerlane made short work of the boy sultan, who fled back to Cairo, leaving Ibn Khaldun to negotiate the surrender of Damascus.
