Introduction
Tamerlane (1336-1405), Turkic ruler and conqueror, one of the greatest military campaigners in history, whose far-flung expeditions carried him from southern Russia to India, and from Central Asia to Turkey. He was born near the city of Samarqand, in what is now Uzbekistan. He was named Timur at birth; to this was later added Lang, meaning 'lame' in Persian. The name Timur Lang became, in European usage, Tamerlane (or Tamburlaine). Tamerlane was a member of the tribe of Barlas, Mongols who had accompanied 13th-century Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and his sons on conquests of Central Asia. The tribe of Barlas settled in Transoxiana (roughly corresponding to present-day Uzbekistan) after these conquests and adopted the local Turkic tongue, as well as the religion of Islam.
Rise to Power
In the 14th century Samarqand was at the center of a vast area beset by chronic warfare as the Mongol Empire broke apart. Northeast of the city was the Jagatai khanate (state ruled by a leader known as a khan), in the hands of the quarreling descendants of Jagatai, second son of Genghis Khan. To the southwest were the lands of the descendants of Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis. The Golden Horde, a powerful khanate founded by another grandson of Genghis, ruled much of Russia in the northwest. To the east, on the frontiers of China, were Mongols who had broken away from the Jagatai khanate. The quarrels of all these groups were heightened by ill feeling between the region’s main non-Mongol residents: the Turkic-speaking nomads on the one hand and the Persian-speaking farmers on the other. The nomads were treated as privileged by the Mongol rulers, while the settled population paid most of the taxes.
Tamerlane began his career as a bandit-warrior with only a few companions, who subsisted on stealing sheep from other tribes. In one sheep-stealing raid Tamerlane was wounded in the leg and shoulder. Afterward he could not bend his right knee or lift his right arm, and so he became known as 'the Lame.' Tamerlane had built up his following to several hundred men by 1361, when he declared his allegiance to Tughluq Timur, an invading Mongol who had taken over the Jagatai khanate. Tughluq Timur made him ruler of part of the region around Samarqand. Tughluq Timur soon died, and by 1370—after a power struggle between Tamerlane, Tughluq Timur’s son, and Tamerlane’s brother-in-law—Tamerlane had become the master of Transoxiana. Tamerlane then declared that he had restored the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and constructed a fictitious genealogy to link his ancestry with Genghis.
Conquests
Tamerlane ruled Samarqand as his capital, enriching the city and surrounding region with the loot of his campaigns. This helped to allay the economic cause of ill feeling between the Turkic nomads and the Persian settled people of the area. From the region’s mixed population Tamerlane organized an army of infantry, engineers, and cavalry, and over the next ten years began to expand his control over surrounding territory.
Around his personal domain at Samarqand were grouped subordinate territories. In some of them he first defeated the local ruler and then reinstalled him as a feudal vassal. Others were given to his own sons or favorite generals. Far beyond these outer territories he campaigned for a double purpose—to plunder and to prevent the rise of any rival power—but not for permanent conquest.
Tamerlane was not afraid to take his army on vast marches into far distant lands. On the move, he carefully protected his forces not only with advance guards and flank guards, but also with outer screens of scouts. One of Tamerlane’s tactical innovations was to make the infantry take the first shock of combat, holding the cavalry until the enemy was in disorder. His principle was to make his distant campaigns in different directions in different years in order to prevent the rise of any rival. In 1381 he campaigned in Iran, and in subsequent years he conducted what he called his 'three-year,' 'five-year,' and 'seven-year' invasions of that country to ensure its subservience. Extensions of these campaigns led him into Armenia and Georgia in 1392, India between 1398 and 1399, and Syria and Turkey between 1400 and 1402. In the last campaign he captured (Aleppo) and Damascus (Dimashq) and, in 1402, defeated and took prisoner Bayazid I, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, near Ankara in Anatolia. While these campaigns went on, Tokhtamish, a former ally of Tamerlane’s, won control of the Golden Horde in Russia and emerged as a powerful rival. Tokhtamish began invading Tamerlane’s territory in the mid-1380s. Tamerlane attacked Tokhtamish in 1389 and 1391 and defeated him between 1394 and 1395. In doing so, Tamerlane so greatly weakened the Golden Horde that he unwittingly helped unify and centralize Russia. By 1402 Tamerlane loosely controlled an empire stretching from India to the Mediterranean Sea.
On Tamerlane’s distant expeditions, where his purpose was only to loot and strike terror, he ordered atrocities that are still remembered. At Eşfahān (Isfahan), in Iran, which had rebelled after surrendering in 1387, he massacred 70,000 people and constructed towers of their skulls. In 1398 at Delhi, in India, he had 100,000 Hindu inhabitants slaughtered and razed the city