Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Justin Marozzi

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Most, if not all, of this lucrative trade was bypassing turbulent Mawarannahr. Temur’s course was set. As a prelude to invasion, he sent a letter to Husayn Sufi, leader of Khorezm, demanding the return of the Chaghatay lands. Back came a reply. Since Khorezm had been conquered by the sword, its ruler proclaimed, only by the sword could it be taken away. The predictable rebuff handed Temur the casus belli he had been looking for. His army rumbled north in 1372. After fierce fighting, the city of Kat fell. One of his first significant victories, it also bore what would become the hallmark of his military actions against recalcitrant cities. All the men of Kat were butchered, their wives and daughters thrown into slavery. The city was plundered and torched. This was the moment for Husayn to surrender, but, encouraged to prolong his resistance by one of Temur’s tribal chiefs, he opted instead for battle.^* Defeated again, he retreated to Urganch, and died soon afterwards in humiliation. Yusef Sufi, his brother, succeeded him and, recognising his enemy’s superior strength, came to terms, promising to send Husayn’s daughter Khan-zada as a wife for Temur’s first son Jahangir.^† This was a noble offer, for she was both beautiful and of royal blood, granddaughter of Uzbeg, khan of the Golden Horde to the north. She was, wrote Arabshah, a maiden ‘of the highest rank and greatest wealth, sprung of distinguished stock, of brilliant beauty, more beautiful than Shirin and more graceful than Waladah’.

      Temur returned south to Samarkand and waited. No bride arrived. More interested in war than weddings, Yusef retook Kat in defiance. A second expedition was mounted against him in 1373. This time Yusef came to terms, and southern Khorezm passed into Temur’s hands. Khan-zada was duly sent south with a caravan carrying prodigious gifts for her new family. There were untold treasures of gold and rich gems, fine silks and satins, ornate tapestries, even a golden throne. Flowers and carpets were strewn along the route to her betrothed and the air was heavy with perfume. Through the crowds of wide-eyed peasants gathered to watch this extraordinary procession the veiled princess moved silently on a white camel, her beauty hidden from impious eyes. A company of swordsmen mounted on their chargers accompanied her, the rest of her lavish retinue – camels loaded high with gifts, handmaidens in constant attendance – following in their wake. It was a magnificent sight.

      But Jahangir’s marriage did not last long. In about 1376, returning to Samarkand from another expedition against the Moghuls, Temur was greeted by a very different, more ominous, procession. A group of nobles, men like Haji Sayf ad-din Nukuz, one of his oldest and most trusted amirs, advanced slowly on horseback to meet him. Shrouded in black cloaks, their heads and faces streaked with dust, they were in mourning. Jahangir, stricken by sickness, was dead.

      ‘All the great lords of the empire, the Cheriffs and others, were clothed in black and blue garments; they wept bitterly, covered their heads with dust in token of sorrow, beat their breasts, and rent themselves according to custom,’ Yazdi reported. ‘All the inhabitants with their heads uncovered, and with sackcloth and black felt about their necks, and their eyes bedewed with tears, came out of the city, filling the air with cries and lamentations.’

      Temur was inconsolable. Jahangir, his eldest son, just twenty years old, was his great pride and heir. From his early teens he had played a leading role in his father’s political and military affairs; already his military prowess, the talent which Temur prized above all others, had marked him out as a future leader. A fearless warrior, he had even led Temur’s advance guard during one expedition against the Moghuls. In the course of his short life he had found time to father two young sons. Mohammed Sultan became the emperor’s favourite. In later life he took on Jahangir’s mantle as Temur’s heir. His were the fabulously arrayed troops who in 1402 led the Tatar army into battle against Sultan Bayazid at Ankara. Another son by a different princess, Pir Mohammed, born a month after Jahangir’s death, though less dependable, would also endear himself to his grandfather on account of his courage and valour.

      Temur sank into the blackest despair. No soft words, no expressions of sympathy, could alleviate the pain. Trusted amirs and princes were harshly dismissed. ‘Everything then became melancholy and disagreeable to him,’ wrote Yazdi, ‘and his cheeks were almost always bathed in tears; he clothed himself with mourning, and his life became uneasy to him. The whole kingdom, which used to be overjoyed at the arrival of this great emperor, was turned into a place of sorrow and weeping.’

      Jahangir’s death was a watershed from which Temur took a long time to recover. Although he would outlive many of his closest contemporaries – amirs and comrades in arms, learned men, religious and spiritual advisers, not to mention members of his own family – and gradually steeled himself against the deaths of those dearest to him, the loss of his first son affected him keenly. It marked a temporary end to his military campaigns. Samarkand no longer bristled with the hum of armies preparing for war. The tovachis, the aides-de-camp who were responsible for conscription, invariably among the busiest of Temur’s senior officers, now fell silent.

      If military affairs had receded from the immediate horizon, politics soon intruded. A shabby, unkempt refugee arrived in Temur’s court. Notwithstanding his ragged appearance, Tokhtamish was a prince of the royal house of Genghis Khan. He had fled from Urus, khan of the White Horde to the north, and murderer of Tokhtamish’s father. Now in exile, determined to avenge his father’s death and, although Temur did not yet know it, ambitious for the leadership of a reunified Golden Horde, Tokhtamish threw himself on Temur’s mercy.

       ‘If we wish to enter upon a branch of inquiry which seems utterly wanting in unity, to be as disintegrated as sand, and defying any orderly or rational treatment, we can hardly choose a better one than the history of the Asiatic nomads.’

      HENRY HOWORTH, History of the Mongols

      To understand Tokhtamish and the khanate he aspired to lead, it is necessary to return to the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. The Golden Horde, or Dasht-i-Kipchak as it was then known, had been carved out by Batu, second son of Genghis Khan’s eldest son Jochi. In accordance with the custom of the steppe, Jochi had received territories farthest from the heart of the empire in Karakorum. These ranged west from the river Irtish in Siberia ‘as far as the soil has been trodden by the hooves of Mongol horses’, according to the marvellously vague definition of the thirteenth-century Persian historian Juvayni. The uncertainty underscored the fact that the gift of these lands was theoretical, as they had yet to be fully conquered. Jochi died in 1227, however, shortly before his father. His eldest son, Orda, received western Siberia and the corridor of land sandwiched between the Amu Darya and Irtish rivers, a territory called ‘the eastern Wing of the Ulus of Jochi’, later known confusingly as both the White Horde and the Blue Horde. It fell to Batu to consolidate his hold on the lands immediately to the west – the westernmost branch of the Mongol empire, later the Golden Horde – and establish just how far those horses had travelled.

      In 1235, he was given his chance. Great Khan Ogedey appointed Batu commander of a 150,000-strong army sent to subdue the Bulgars of the Volga and the Kipchaks. The nomadic Bulgars, among the world’s most northerly Muslims, had established a prosperous state whose capital in Bulgar lay near the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers. Living in tents and breeding cattle, they also traded furs and slaves with Mawarannahr in return for weapons and manufactured goods. The Kipchaks were a powerful confederation of Turkic nomads whose steppe territory, north of the Caspian Sea, stretched west from Siberia to the Danube.

      The Bulgars were quickly crushed, their capital destroyed. Bachman, the chief of the Kipchaks, mounted stiff resistance against the Mongols but was eventually captured after a lengthy chase up and down the Volga. Like all defeated adversaries he was ordered to kneel before the victors. ‘I have been myself a king and do not fear death,’ he replied. ‘I am not a camel that should kneel.’ He was promptly cut in two.

      Batu’s СКАЧАТЬ