Timur & Partners

Act I. An estate divided

The Ilkhanids in Anatolia and the Golden Horde in Russia were fragments of the same catastrophe: the coming apart of Genghis Khan’s empire. The estate had been divided into four uluses, one per son—Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei and Tolui. What followed happens to every will ever written: the shares stopped corresponding to the heirs. Jochi’s became the Golden Horde. Tolui’s swelled into both the Chinese Yuan dynasty, founded by Genghis’s grandson Kublai, and the Ilkhanate in Persia. Ögedei’s dissolved by the early fourteenth century into its neighbour, the Chagatai Khanate, which is the one that concerns us.

It ran from the Aral Sea and the Amu Darya to the Altai: today’s Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, northern Afghanistan as far as Kabul, southern Kazakhstan and Xinjiang. The territory fell cleanly into halves—Transoxiana in the west, with Bukhara, Samarkand and Ferghana, and Moghulistan in the east.

The Arabs called the western half Mā warāʾ an-nahr, “that which is beyond the river”. Europe called it Transoxiana, Latin for “that which is beyond the Oxus”, the Oxus being the Greek name for the Amu Darya. The same phrase in two languages, and both report the same thing: this is the country defined by being on the far side. A name given by the neighbours rather than the residents.

Act II. Timur and his associates

Transoxiana was home to the Barlas, a Mongol tribe long since turkicised. By the fourteenth century they had adopted Islam and spoke the Central Asian Turki out of which, a hundred years later and under this story’s protagonist’s descendants, the literary Chagatai language would be assembled. In 1336, in what is now the Shahrisabz district of Uzbekistan, a son was born to Taraghai of the Barlas and named Timur.

The date comes from Timurid sources, which is to say from a biography commissioned after the fact by its subject; it deserves roughly the confidence one extends to 1299 in the Ottoman case. The name is Turkic and means “iron”.

By 1361 he had assembled a war band, in the manner of Genghis before him, and attached himself to the pretender Amir Husayn, with whom he spent several years riding about the desert playing at Robin Hood and acquiring saddle sores. In about 1362 a skirmish went badly: archers took him in the right arm and the right leg, costing him two fingers and leaving him lame. Hence the nickname—Timūr-e Lang in Persian, whence the Western “Tamerlane”, and Temir Aksak in the Russian chronicles, aksak being the same word for lame in Turkic. A man named Iron and known ever after for the leg.

Rather than restore Husayn to his throne, Timur formed the view that the crown would suit him better. Here, however, a difficulty arose, because a khan—a sovereign ruler—could only be a Genghisid, a descendant of Genghis Khan, and on this point Timur’s position was weak. (Later, of course, he would invent a good deal for his biography. That came later.) Real power, meanwhile, lay with the military commander, the amir, and it was the amir’s seat Timur wanted. Having secured the clergy, he arranged the election of a compliant khan at the kurultai, detached a good many of Husayn’s men, defeated him, and was proclaimed supreme amir.

Marriage to a Genghisid princess—widowed, as it happened, by his own efforts—added güregen, “the khan’s son-in-law”, to his style. The arrangement was a small masterpiece: a Genghisid on the throne with no power, and beside him a son-in-law with all the power and no pedigree. Remember the structure. It comes up again.

At home he set about restoring what the Mongol raids had ruined in Transoxiana, and did it so thoroughly that his country remembers the period as a renaissance. Abroad, his policy was the securing of the frontiers, pursued by the only method he knew, which was raiding whichever neighbour had lately annoyed him. Five campaigns against Khwarezm, six against Moghulistan, as far as the Irtysh. When Persia declined to accept vassalage, he took Persia.

Then he turned west, and at that point everybody heard about him.

Act III. Enter the Horde

The Golden Horde was where the fun began. Mangyshlak was then governed by a kinsman—the genealogies differ on how close—of Urus Khan, who ruled the Horde’s eastern half and who had him executed for declining to join a march on Sarai. The executed man’s son Tokhtamysh, fearing for his life, fled to Timur, who extended his guest every courtesy: troops for regular and unsuccessful attempts on Urus Khan, and shelter afterwards. When Urus Khan finally died, Tokhtamysh became khan of the eastern Horde and then, having disposed of Mamai, of all of it—whereupon he betrayed his benefactor and joined his enemies.

Timur addressed the betrayal in his customary style, by raiding. In 1388 he took and destroyed Urgench, the Khwarezmian capital, on the grounds that its dynasty had sided with Tokhtamysh. Urgench simply happened to be handy. Devastating campaigns then carried him to the Irtysh and the Volga, and in 1391 he beat Tokhtamysh at the Kondurcha. This proved insufficient—Tokhtamysh rebuilt and returned—so Timur worked through Persia, the Caspian provinces, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, met Tokhtamysh coming south again, routed him at the Terek in April 1395, and gave chase. He got as far as Yelets, burned the town, and turned back.

Moscow lay another two hundred and fifty miles beyond, which was quite close enough for Vasily I, who marched his army to the Oka and had a miracle-working icon fetched from Vladimir. Remarkable coincidence: Timur elected to go home on precisely the day the icon arrived. The Timurid sources maintain that he had merely finished Tokhtamysh off and spread out in search of decent pasture, and that north of Yelets there wasn’t any—which is the truer answer and the more interesting one. A steppe army exists only as far as the grass does. Somewhere around the fifty-third parallel the grazing gives out, and with it the arithmetic of forty thousand horses. The list of commanders undone in Russia by logistics rather than by Russians is a long one; Timur has the distinction of opening it and of being the only entrant with the sense to turn round.

Yelets still keeps the day. A copy of the icon is carried in procession—the original was lost under the Soviets—and everyone is told how the Mother of God appeared to Tamerlane in a dream. That is the official name of the feast: the eighth of September, the day of the appearance of the Mother of God to Tamerlane.

After the destruction of Tokhtamysh, Timur went on to Azov and the Crimea, burned Astrakhan and New Sarai, the Horde’s capital, fixed his frontier along the Caucasus and settled nowhere. He would very much have liked to install his protégé Edigu in Tokhtamysh’s place, and could not: Edigu was a Manghit, which made him precisely as much of a non-Genghisid as Tamerlane himself. So the Horde reproduced the Samarkand arrangement exactly—a Genghisid was made khan, first Quyurchuq and then Temür Qutlugh, and the power went to the amir Edigu. Well, why not. It was a system that worked.

Tokhtamysh he forgave towards the end, received, and even promised his throne back. He failed to keep his word, having inconveniently died.

The Horde never recovered. It is usually added that Timur diverted the Silk Road southwards (plague and the general collapse of the Mongol world played their parts too) and that his victory gave the Russian princes confidence in their own strength. The confidence proved premature: in 1408 Edigu—that Edigu—came to Moscow and collected a ransom.

As for Vasily’s Lithuanian father-in-law Vytautas, four years later he took the field on Tokhtamysh’s behalf, with Lithuanians, Poles, Tatars and a contingent of Teutonic Knights, and was broken on the Vorskla by Tamerlane’s appointees. He had been angling for a royal crown of his own; the defeat ended that, ended Lithuanian expansion southward, and obliged him back into partnership with Poland. He turned west instead—and eleven years later, at Grunwald, destroyed the Teutonic Order using, it has been suggested, the feigned retreat that had destroyed him on the Vorskla. Central Europe was thus rearranged by a lesson taught on the Ukrainian steppe by two men acting on Timur’s instructions, neither of whom ever heard of Prussia.

Act IV. Meanwhile, in Anatolia

Timur had acquired a taste for travel, and in 1398 went to India, taking Delhi and a number of fortresses on the way. Warming to it, he set off westward the following year and stayed five: Aleppo and Damascus, Baghdad, Sivas. The war was mainly with the Mamluks; the Kara Koyunlu, the “black sheep”, were dealt with in passing (their white sheep neighbours will get a post of their own). Their chief Kara Yusuf fled to our Ottoman Bayezid the Thunderbolt, who declined to give him up. It is not done to surrender a guest.

That was sufficient. In 1402 Timur destroyed the Ottoman army at Ankara, took Bayezid prisoner, and dismantled his newly built empire: the western lands went to Bayezid’s sons, who immediately fell to fighting one another, and the eastern were handed back to the beys the Ottomans had dispossessed. This, incidentally, discharges the promise made at the end of the previous instalment: the exiled beys came back, and came back winners.

Kara Yusuf, as it happens, was not at Ankara—he had slipped away beforehand—and he is the only man in this story to finish it in profit, returning after Timur’s death to rebuild the Kara Koyunlu from scratch.

Timur also took a fortnight to reduce Smyrna (İzmir), which the Ottomans had by then been besieging without success for half a century. Two hundred Hospitaller knights from Rhodes were dug in there under an Aragonese, Íñigo de Alfaro. Timur offered to leave them alone in return for tribute, they refused, and the wall came down by mining on the fifteenth day.

To complete the restoration of Genghis Khan’s empire under his own management, Timur resolved at the end of his life to conquer China as well. He set out in February 1405, fell ill at Otrar and died without reaching the first Chinese outpost. The whole apparatus—the puppet khans, the son-in-law’s title, six decades of campaigning—rested on the assumption that he would eventually put the empire back together. He did not get as far as beginning. It turned cold, and he died.