Tamerlane

In the early 13th century Genghis Khan united Mongolia's warring tribes and created what would become history's largest land empire, whose backbone was the legendary Silk Road. His heirs ultimately ruled China, Turkestan, Persia and Russia. But by 1370 the Pax Mongolica had faded: Hung Wu forced the Mongols out of China, establishing the Ming Dynasty, and elsewhere rival princes were reducing the territory to chaos. It was at this moment that Tamerlane emerged.

Timur the Lame had relatively humble origins, though he employed Mongol princes as his puppets. From the Turkestan city of Samarkand he expanded outward in a new series of bloody conquests. First he subdued Turkestan, advancing west to the Caspian and east to the Hindu Kush. Next, in the 1380s, he overran Persia and the Caucasus. In the 1390s he reduced Russia's Khanate of the Golden Horde, then invaded India and sacked Delhi. In the 1400s he turned his attention to the rising Ottoman Empire, routing its forces at Ankara in 1402. He was preparing to attack Ming China at the time of his 1405 death.

Tamerlane was often a brilliant general, but his ruthless methods made him notorious even for the time. The total death toll of his campaigns may have been 17 million! (He marked his victorious battlefields with pyramids of enemy skulls.) In particular, his suppression of a tax revolt in the Persian city of Shiraz led to over 100,000 deaths. While the first Mongol rulers had promoted religious diversity, his realm was rigidly Islamic and the region's non-Muslim communities paid a heavy price, never quite recovering.

Tamerlane's heirs soon faced the old challenges to unity. His first effective successor, Shah Rukh, took four years to defeat his rivals, later moving his capital to Herat. (He and his heir Ulugh Begh were generous patrons of the arts and sciences.) But the Timurid Dynasty declined in the late 15th century, and was ultimately driven out of Persia by the new Safavid Dynasty. Tamerlane's most successful descendants were the Moghul Dynasty of Kabul: Babur conquered northern India in 1526 and his own heirs dominated the sub-continent for centuries.

For background reading, you can try Justin Marozzi's Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World.

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