Timur, or Tamerlane, as he was nicknamed in the West, belongs, along with Attila and Genghis Khan, among the conquerors who most of all shook the imagination of contemporaries and left a long heavy memory in the centuries, up to the legends of his posthumous influence.
Timur’s state activity
To be fair, Timur was hardly more cruel than other rulers of his time. But he was a successful commander. Contemporaries considered him a sage and a harsh but fair sovereign. His patronage of the sciences and architecture is well known. Tamerlane made his conquests, being sincerely convinced that only his power could ensure proper order and prosperity in the world. As, indeed, all conquerors in history.
Tamerlane was born in 1336 in the family of an insignificant feudal lord of the Jagatai ulus. He had to endure a long struggle for power before he became the lord of a small state with its capital in Samarkand. Not being of Khan’s lineage, Timur was always titled Emir, although he later became related to the House of Genghis Khan. In 1371, Timur embarked on a program of extensive conquests. His dream was to restore the unity and power of the empire of Genghis Khan and his immediate descendants.
From 1371 to 1405 Timur conquered all Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern India, part of Asia Minor. There are evidences of Russian annals, that in 1395 armies of Timur have invaded the southern part of Russia and have taken the city of Yelets. However further Timur has not gone. Apparently, he had no intention to capture this poor at that time country.
Timur in 1391 and 1395-96 inflicted terrible blows to the Golden Horde, from which it could not recover. The decline and disintegration of the Golden Horde began. Thus, it is possible to tell that campaigns of Timur have accelerated process of clearing of Russian grounds from the Mongol-Tatar yoke.
Most of all wars from the very beginning of board Timur conducted with Moghulistan — the state of descendants of Genghis Khan on the grounds of modern Kirghizia, southern Kazakhstan and East Turkestan, but never managed to subdue it, except for a small western outskirts.
Timur died in 1405 while preparing another campaign, this time against China.
Anthropological type
In 1941, a Soviet archaeological expedition exhumed Timur’s remains in his famous Gur-Emir mausoleum in Samarkand. The face of the great conqueror was reconstructed by Professor Mikhail Gerasimov. Tamerlane belonged to the South Siberian (earlier it was called Turanian) race of mixed Mongoloid-European origin. Now the majority of Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Uighurs, Altaians, Khakasses and Shorians belong to this race. That is, on anthropological appearance nationality of Timur it is impossible to define.
In general, Timur lived at a time when modern nationalities of the Central Asian region have not yet formed. Therefore, the question about his nationality is to some extent speculative, even politically speculative. On the other hand, there were nationalities at the time of Tamerlane too! That is why it is interesting to get to the bottom of the matter and find out who he was or at least realized himself.
Timur is a Turkicized Mongol
Uzbeks have great reasons to consider Tamerlane as their own. Tamerlane was born near the town of Kesh, now Shakhrisabz, in the Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. It is not known what language Timur first began to speak as a child. As an adult, he spoke such regional languages as Jagatai and Persian, but he could not understand Mongolian without an interpreter. Most of the documents of his reign were written in Jagatai, the former lingua franca of then Central Asia.
The Uzbek language is to a certain extent the successor of Dzhagatai. However, in an even less modified form, Jagatai language passed into modern Uyghur. So the Uyghurs, apparently, have more reasons than the Uzbeks to consider Timur their tribesman, although Timur’s power did not include any territory inhabited by Uyghurs.
Most likely, Timur’s native language from childhood was some oral Turkic dialect, which can be considered equally close to both Uzbek and Uyghur languages.
However, it is still important with whom Timur identified himself. Among the Central Asian nobility of those times it was customary to emphasize their Mongolian origin in order to place themselves above the indigenous peoples. Timur himself, as mentioned, needed a Mongolian translator. Nevertheless, it did not prevent him from identifying himself as a Mongol (Mogul). The state of Mogulistan, which he persistently, but unsuccessfully, tried to conquer, bore in its name the ethnonym of Mongols, and Timur’s persistence clearly had national-oriented motives.
According to all sources testifying to the ethnicity of Timur, he came from the Barlas tribe. This was one of the Mongol tribes. Under Tamerlane, according to Ibn Arabshah, there were four viziers — one from each of the four Mongolian tribes: Arlat, Zhalair, Kavchin and Barlas. Tamerlane himself belonged to the latter. Curiously, Ibn Arabshah calls all of them Turks. This confirms the opinion of historians that by the second half of the 14th century the Mongols who settled in Central Asia were Turkicized.
Thus, Timur did not belong to any of the nationalities in the modern sense. To argue about whether Timur was an Uzbek or an Uighur is, in our opinion, as “productive” as to decide the question of whether Charlemagne was a German or a Frenchman.