Ibn Arabshah - Tarih-i Timurlenk - 1860

Цитата:
Timur (1336-1405), also Timur Lenk, hence Tamerlane, was a Turco-Mongol conqueror who created in Samarkand a city which even in ruins reveals a love of delicate beauty that is difficult to reconcile with the known nature of its creator. Claiming to be a distant relative of Genghis Khan through the female line, Timur was not a Mongol himself, but from the Turkic Barlas tribe in Transoxania, now Uzbekistan. His name means ‘iron’ in Turkish—like Genghis's original name, Temujin. The pejorative suffix ‘Lenk’ means ‘the lame’ in Persian—which he was as the result of an arrow wound—but Asian historians call him Amur Timur Gurigan—Lord Timur the Splendid.

Timur's trajectory began with a three-year struggle to achieve dominance in Transoxania at the end of which in 1370 he proclaimed himself not merely emir of Samarkand but khan of the Chagatai and inheritor of Genghis's Mongol empire. For the next decade he made this grandiose claim a reality, alternately defeating rival khanates or assisting them against outsiders, notably the Russians and the Lithuanians who had rebelled against the Golden Horde. Between 1383 and 1399 he conquered the Caucasus, Persia, and Iraq, having to turn back twice to deal with the khan of the Golden Horde who invaded first the Caucasus and then Transoxania. While he was thus engaged, the Persians rose in revolt and it was during his repression of this starting in about 1396 that he levelled towns, destroyed irrigation systems, and built his trademark pyramids of skulls. For an encore he invaded India in 1398 on the pretext that the Muslim sultan of Delhi was being too tolerant of his Hindu subjects. Burning and massacring as he went, he defeated the sultan at Panipat and then sacked Delhi so comprehensively that it took a century to recover.

Between 1399 and 1403 he laid waste Azerbaijan (a sequel to the Golden Horde invasion) then rode west to defeat the Mamelukes and sack Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad, shipping their artisans to Samarkand and killing everyone else. He then turned his baleful attention on the Ottoman Turks, destroying their army near Ankara in 1402 and in passing taking Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes. The sultan of Egypt and the Byzantine emperor made submission and he received ambassadors from as far away as England. Timur returned to Samarkand in 1403 and immediately set about preparing an invasion of China, on which he had embarked when he fell ill and died. His body was embalmed and such was the awe surrounding his name that it lay unmolested in his beautiful mausoleum in Samarkand until Soviet archaeologists opened it in 1941, shortly before the Germans invaded Russia.

The differences between Timur's style and Genghis's are instructive. Genghis trusted his generals to execute the plans he had sketched on the broadest of canvases, communicating with his widely dispersed armies using his system of ‘arrow’ messengers. Timur exercised much more rigid control, concentrating his armies and leading them in person. This may simply have been a difference in style, or it may have been that Genghis had better lieutenants such as Subedei and Jebe, or both. None of Timur's generals were first-rate commanders in their own right. He was even more meticulous in planning and preparation than Genghis, personally drawing up the requirements for equipment for each soldier and writing detailed regulations for setting up camps. But once a campaign had started he could be impetuous; in 1388 he rode into Baghdad with a small band of followers and personally pursued the sultan out of the kingdom. In 1400 Timur met the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun outside Damascus in one of the most fascinating encounters in military history. Timur asked him to write a detailed description of Egypt and territories to the west ‘in such a manner that when the conqueror read it, it would be as if he were seeing the region’. The historian prudently completed the assignment in a few days, but North Africa was to be spared a visit by a man who would very likely have made the ecological damage done by drought and goat pale by comparison.

Additional to his attention to logistics and intelligence requirements, Timur was also a master of the oriental philosophy of war that emphasizes treachery and sowing dissension among your adversaries. If he made an alliance, it was to make the ally drop his guard, and if he sent an emissary to an enemy camp it was to distribute money and promises (seldom kept) so that the enemy general would be betrayed by his own lieutenants. He was the complete master of every aspect of war in the Mongol style and led from the front in countless battles. A single exquisite city is not much to put in the balance against the fact that he crushed the fragile edifice of civilization everywhere else.

Bibliography

* Bellamy, Christopher, ‘Swift Flight of the Parthian: Great Captains of Asia’, Military Review (July 1987).
* Gale, Gen Sir Richard, Kings at Arms: The Use and Abuse of Power in the Great Kingdoms of the East (London, 1971).
* Lamb, Harold, Tamerlane the Earth Shaker (London, 1929)

Christopher Bellamy/Hugh Bicheno

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