He marched through the world like samum — a fiery desert wind, scorching everything in his path. His name was Timur (Iron), but history remembers him as Tamerlane — Timur the Lame. His limp became his symbol: a lame wolf that would gnaw on anyone who dared to question his strength. His empire stretched from Delhi to Smyrna, from the Volga to the Persian Gulf, but it was built not on wisdom, but on bones. And when he died, the empire crumbled like a clay jug broken by a horse’s hoof.
Blood and sand
1336 “- Look at the stars, Timur,” the mother said, cradling the infant in her arms, ”You are born under their light. You will become great like Genghis Khan.” She did not know that her son would destroy all of Genghis Khan’s legacy and equal the Great Grandfather in cruelty. Timur was born in the village of Khoja-Ilgar, near Samarkand, in the family of a poor chief of the Barlas tribe. Humiliation and evil — that’s what fed Tamerlane’s soul.
Humiliation and eternal hunger — that’s what fed Tamerlan’s soul.
At 12 he fought for a piece of bread, at 16 he killed his first man. “Jackals survive. Lions rule,” said Timur. A leg wound at age 25 was a turning point. The limp, the taunts of his enemies — nurtured rage. “They laugh? Let them. I’ll make them weep,” he told a friend, Haji-Berdy. The latter would later betray him, and Timur would sew him into a sack of hungry cats.
Timur started out with a dozen horsemen. But even then, in the dust of small steppe squabbles, Timur understood: strength is not in the number of sabers, but in the ability to make them shine as one. His path to an army capable of shaking the continent began not on the battlefield, but in a web of alliances and betrayals, where every step smelled of blood and honey of power.
In the 1360s, Maverannahr (the Arabic name for the future Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) was squirming like a wounded beast under the blows of Mongol khans and local clans. The Chagatai ulus created by Genghis Khan’s son, which included Maverannahr, was falling apart.
Timur, then still just the leader of a band of mercenaries, sold his sword to one and another. “War is trade,” he used to say to his patron, Emir Hussein, ”I am a good merchant. They were united by their hatred of the Mongols and their thirst for power. Together they took Samarkand from the Sarbadar tribe, but the spoils divided them.
The Chagatai ulus, created by Genghis Khan’s son Chagatai, was falling apart.
Hussein wanted gold, Timur wanted loyalty. “You are building a house on sand,” Timur warned when Hussein took some of the army’s share for himself. The response was laughter. A year later, Timur laid siege to his capital of Balkh. Hussein’s hungry soldiers opened the gates, betraying their lord. — ‘You lost because you are greedy and short-sighted,’ Timur told him as he watched his former ally suffocate in a noose. The body was thrown into the ditch, Timur became emir of Maverannahr. The year is 1370.
Fire and wind
Timur’s army was born out of fire. He didn’t recruit warriors, he melted them down. The tribes of the Barlas, the Jalairos, the Argyns — all those who yesterday had slaughtered each other over a well, Timur shackled them with iron discipline. “You are not dogs now,” he shouted to the tribal noyons, ”you are my pack of wolves! And in a pack only the leader howls!” Apostates were crushed with stones, but Tamerlane also gave the sweetness of generosity.
After the capture of Urgench in 1379, soldiers were given so much silver that horses stumbled under the weight of sacks. His guard of kultags (lightning), wore Damascus steel armor and rode on horses selected like Persian brides. Every warrior knew: to betray Tamerlane was to condemn the entire family to death.
His genius was in the details. Timur adopted from the Mongols “tumens” — mounted divisions of 10,000 horsemen, capable of splitting into thousands and hundreds, and reassemble like mercury. Spies — lashkarbazi penetrated the cities before the first shots were fired, dispelling rumors: “Timur is merciful to those who surrendered, but will devour the children of those who resist. By the time he marched on Khorezm in 1386, his army numbered 200,000 soldiers. More than the population of many kingdoms.
But his main weapon was himself. At the Battle of Kandahar (1383), wounded in the shoulder, Timur plucked an arrow and led the attack, shouting: — Look! Blood is water, victory is wine! Warriors who saw him sleeping in the saddle and eating the same gruel idolized him. “He is not a man,” they whispered in the tumens, ”he is a genie, born of samum, the wind of the deserts, which burns out the lungs of the weak …”
When Tokhtamysh, Khan of the Golden Horde, asked him, “How did you gather such warriors?”, Timur pointed to the steppe, where soldiers were burying the fallen: “They follow me, because I lead them from darkness to light. — What light? — The one I have lit.
A throne of bones
His army knew no pity, and neither did he. In 1381, Tamerlane took Khorasan. “Surrender and save your lives!” — shouted a parliamentarian at the gates. The city refused. Three days later, what was left of Khorasan were pyramids of skulls. But the Iron Hammer, was not a blind destroyer. Samarkand, the capital of Tamerlane’s empire, became the pearl of the East. Architects, poets, scientists, all served him. “I break cities to build new ones,” Timur told the vizier.
His brutality cut his losses. Invading India, Timur ordered tens of thousands of captives to be slaughtered. — Why — asked his grandson, Pir-Muhammad. — So that others would surrender. Fear runs faster than cavalry,” replied the grandfather. At the Battle of Delhi, Tamerlane let elephants loose on the battlefield by tying burning straw towers to their backs. “Sometimes you have to burn your own to burn other people’s,” he said as he watched his burning elephants trample Indian regiments and squeal in pain.
In the 1380s, Tamerlane’s army, hardened in a hundred battles, has become a machine that devours kingdoms. It is ready to fall on the West, where the lands of the last empire of the great Mongols, the Golden Horde, are spread…