‘God has favoured us with such extraordinary good fortune that we have conquered Asia and overthrown the greatest kings of the earth. Few sovereigns in past ages have acquired such great dominions, or attained such great authority, or had such numerous armies or such absolute command. And as these vast conquests have not been obtained without some violence, which has caused the destruction of a great number of God’s creatures, I have resolved to perform some good action which may atone for the crimes of my past life, and to accomplish that which no other power in the world can do, that is to make war on the infidels and exterminate the idolaters of China.’
Temur’s speech to his princes and amirs, 1404.
SHARAF AD-DIN ALI YAZDI, Zafarnama
China was in a state of turmoil. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan had launched his hordes against it, sacking Peking in 1215. The drawn-out assault was pressed home by his son Ogedey, who conquered ever more territories, and was finally concluded by Genghis’s grandson Kubilay, who became the undisputed Great Khan in 1264, after defeating his brother Arigh Boke for the throne. Abandoning Karakorum, traditional imperial capital of the Mongols, he moved south and took up his winter headquarters in the magnificent city of Peking (then known as Ta-tu, or Khanbaliq, City of the Khan). His fabulous summer capital of Sheng-tu later inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu in the Englishman’s opium-fuelled poem ‘Kubla Khan’.
Encompassing China and Mongolia, this new empire dwarfed and outshone the three Mongol houses of Chaghatay in Central Asia, Hulagu in Persia and Iraq, and Jochi in the Golden Horde, over each of which it exercised nominal sway. Stories of its grandeur filtered back to Europe via the high-spirited prose of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, who entered the Great Khan’s service for the best part of two decades. For years, China had been divided between north and south. With Kubilay’s conquests south of the Yangtse, the Sung dynasty was eventually defeated in 1279 and China was at last reunited. The Yuan dynasty proclaimed by Kubilay would continue until 1368. His reign was a time of prosperity as trade and communications flourished between East and West. Two hundred thousand boats a year plied the Yangtse, ferrying silk, rice, sugar, pearls and gems between the principal cities of the Middle Kingdom. Merchants looked beyond their borders to the markets of Persia and India, Java, Malaya and Ceylon. Drama, literature and painting started to thrive.
With Kubilay’s death in 1294, however, the empire embarked on a steady decline. The khan was partly to blame for this state of affairs. On acceding to the Chinese throne, he dispensed with the Mongol custom of electing leaders at a general assembly of the princes, replacing it with a simple hereditary principle, undermining at a stroke the authority of the nobles. Though he was spared any revolt, his successors were not. The Great Khans who succeeded Kubilay, already prone to idleness and dissipation, were beset by palace intrigues and attempted coups. Following the assassination of the Yuan emperor Ying-zong in 1323, China tore itself apart during a decade of civil war and bloodshed. Disease – possibly the Black Death – and a rash of natural disasters combined to devastate the increasingly fragile empire.
The last Mongol emperor, Sun Ti, was famously cruel, lustful and incompetent. Rather than attend to the desperate famines that were racking the countryside, he turned his attentions to the bedchamber, where he had his concubines perform such erotic delights as the ‘Heavenly Devil’s Dance’ for his pleasure. Taxes rose to punitive levels to fund his debauchery, and it was little surprise when a series of Chinese rebellions against Mongol rule broke out along the Yangtse and Huai river valleys, and started to gain momentum. In the 1350s, a peasant leader called Chu Yuan-chang emerged at the head of one such movement and picked off his rivals one by one. Part of his army was despatched north ‘to deliver the suffering people from the fire that would burn and the waters that would drown them’, namely the tyrannical government of the Mongols. Sweeping towards Peking, the peasant army trounced whatever resistance was offered, which was slight. There was little appetite among the people to fight for their louche, cowardly emperor Sun Ti, and those around him sensed that the Mongol domination of China was drawing to a close. The army of insurgents grew bigger daily, and by 1368 had developed into an irresistible force, seizing Peking and driving the Mongols out of northern China. Sun Ti slunk into exile.
In the same year that the capital of the empire fell, the simple peasant Chu Yuan-chang, enjoying his burgeoning power, changed his name and had himself proclaimed Emperor Tai Tsu, founding ruler of the Ming dynasty. For thirty years he ruled absolutely, if not serenely, restoring order to the turbulent empire, developing enlightened agricultural policies, and executing those who opposed his reforms. The Chinese legal and political system, uprooted by the Mongols, was brought back, albeit adapted to suit the needs of this commanding emperor. Members of the royal family were appointed to govern the richest, most strategic cities of the empire, where they built themselves palaces, assembled armies and, in time, inevitably nursed ambitions of their own.
In 1399 Tai Tsu died, leaving his sixteen-year-old grandson and heir Hui Ti struggling to retain power. Temur learnt this news shortly after his return from India, but he was then already resolved to march west, to Syria, Egypt, and war with Bayazid. Through his network of spies, diplomats and merchants he kept himself informed about the parlous state of affairs at the heart of China. The new young ruler was hard pressed by one of his dissatisfied uncles, the Prince of Peking, whose covetous eyes had fixed upon the imperial throne and whose army was the most powerful in the empire. Declaring that he was the emperor’s loyal servant, the prince led his forces south in what he called the ‘War for Pacifying the Troubles’. Under the guise of fighting the court ministers who were, he claimed, disturbers of the peace, the prince made his bid for supreme power. The war would last four years. As Peking and her territories descended into fratricide and unrest, Temur began to close in on his latest target. The Celestial Empire was ripe for attack.
China was the most fitting prize for a man who had never been defeated in battle. Well aware of his own mortality, the stooped, half-blind emperor required a suitable finale to his military career. The campaign against China justified itself on the critical questions of religion, money, honour and Mongol tradition. Untold riches awaited the ruler who could seize Peking, capital of an empire which in recent years, said the chronicles, had been persecuting Muslims by the tens of thousands and viciously suppressing all traces of Islam. Here, above all other places, there was fame and virtue to be won in slaughter and plunder. Yazdi, in a rare acknowledgement that the Sword Arm of Islam had despatched many more Muslims than infidels to their deaths, wrote of Temur’s hope that victory over China ‘might rectify what had been amiss in other wars, wherein the blood of so many of the faithful had been spilled’. The conquest of China would, moreover, mark the completion of Temur’s lifelong quest to unite under his rule the four Mongol kingdoms won by the sons of Genghis Khan. Chaghatay had been the first to recognise Temur as its sovereign, followed by the houses of Jochi and Hulagu. All that was missing was the house of Kubilay, the only Mongol empire which had not embraced Islam. Not only had the true faith failed to establish itself here, indeed been brutally suppressed, but – calumny of calumnies – the religion of the infidels had stolen in and won imperial favour. ‘It was told us that this new Emperor of China had by birth been an idolater, but lately had been converted to the Christian faith,’ reported the Spanish envoy Clavijo.
Temur’s preparations for war against his most redoubtable enemy were meticulous. As ever, his intelligence network had been set to work well in advance. The men who plied the caravan routes of Asia brought him regular reports on the deteriorating political conditions in the Celestial Kingdom. News came of Muslim merchants being expelled from China, an intolerable insult which Temur regarded as his duty to avenge. Arriving in Tashkent in 1398 with Temur’s returning envoy, the Chinese ambassador An Chi tao was detained and then sent on a tour of the Tatar’s lands, closely guarded at all times. His unexpected and forcible diversion took him as far west as Tabriz, to Shiraz, Isfahan and Herat. It lasted six years. By the time his embassy ended it had become one of the diplomatic world’s longest missions. Ambassador An returned to Peking twelve years after taking leave of his emperor.*
The calculated snub to the Ming emperor was a reflection of Temur’s growing power and confidence. Over the years his relationship with Peking had evolved from the deference suitable to a weaker monarch, to increasing defiance, and finally outright hostility. Clavijo, during his stay in Temur’s court, carefully observed the affronts suffered by another Chinese envoy – probably sent to demand Ambassador An’s release – in the process confirming that the Tatar had, until recently, acknowledged his subordinate status to the Ming ruler. ‘Now this ambassador had lately come to Temur to demand of him the tribute, said to be due to his master, and which Temur year by year had formerly paid,’ the Spaniard wrote.
Chinese archives tell a similar story. In a letter to Temur’s son Shahrukh, written in 1412 and addressed as though to a mere general rather than a head of state, the emperor Cheng Tsu urged him to accept his position as vassal ruler. Otherwise, it threatened, he would feel the consequences: ‘Your father Temur Gurgan, obeying the decree of almighty God, recognised himself the vassal of our sublime emperor. He continually sent him both gifts and ambassadors and in this way he gave peace and happiness to the people of your distant country … you must likewise consider us your sovereign with all sincerity and of your own accord, without our having to intervene to force you to it.’ The elaborate titles Temur enjoyed at home – Emperor of the Age, Conqueror of the World – were unthinkable at the court of the Ming emperor. For the emperors in Peking, the Tatar was simply Fou-ma Temur of Samarkand.*
As late as 1394, Temur was still addressing the Ming emperor with fulsome praise:
I respectfully address your Majesty, great Ming Emperor, upon whom Heaven has conferred the power to rule over China. The glory of your charity and your virtues has spread over the whole world. The splendour of your reign is bright like the heavenly mirror, and lights up the kingdoms, the adjoining as well as the far … The nations which never had submitted now acknowledge your supremacy and even the most remote kingdoms submerged in darkness have now become enlightened … Your Majesty has graciously allowed the merchants of distant countries to come to China to carry on trade. Foreign envoys have had a chance of admiring the wealth of your cities and the strength of your power, as if they suddenly went out of the dark and saw the light of Heaven … I have respectfully received the gracious letter in which your Majesty has condescended to inquire about my welfare. Owing to your solicitude there have been established post-stations to facilitate the intercourse of foreigners with China, and all the nations of distant countries are allowed to profit by this convenience. I see with deference that the heart of your Majesty resembles that vase which reflects what is happening in the world* … My heart has been opened and enlightened by your benevolence. I can return your Majesty’s kindly disposed feelings only by praying for your happiness and long life. May they last eternally like heaven and earth.
Such effusive flattery would only have been enhanced by the accompanying gift of two hundred horses.†
By the dawn of the fifteenth century, Temur was at last ready to turn from weasel words to war. At this time a Chinese embassy from Peking arrived at his court to demand tribute, which Temur had neglected to pay for seven years, despite occupying lands along his eastern borders in Moghulistan that were traditionally held in fief to the Chinese emperor. The envoy, whose stay in Samarkand coincided with Clavijo’s diplomatic mission, reminded the Tatar emperor that no tribute had been received. He was humiliatingly rebuffed, as the startled Spaniard reported: ‘The answer of his Highness to these ambassadors was that this was most true, and that he was about to pay what was due: but that he would not burden them, the ambassadors, to take it back to China on their return, for he himself Temur would bring it. This of course was all said in scorn and to spite them, for his Highness had no intention to pay that tribute.’ On another occasion, noticing that the envoy from Peking was occupying a seat above those of the Spaniards, Temur gave orders for their positions to be reversed. The Chinese ambassador, he proclaimed to his hushed audience, ‘was the envoy of a robber and a bad man, the enemy of Temur’. Then he gave a clear sign that the days of diplomacy and tribute were over. War was in the offing. ‘If only God were willing, he Temur would before long see to it that never again would any Chinaman dare come with such an embassy as this man had brought.’
The reasons for the dramatic shift in Temur’s relations with Peking are not difficult to fathom. For years he had been biding his time. Highly pragmatic in his choice of opponents, he would not move until his armies were sufficiently large and powerful to challenge the greatest ruler in the East. Nor would he undertake such a long and testing campaign until his main rivals on the world stage had been destroyed. To the north, the Golden Horde had been crushed. To the south, Delhi had been utterly ravaged. To the west, the Ottoman and Mamluk empires had folded before the Tatar onslaught. To the east, China alone remained outside his orbit, the last affront to the man who aspired to rule the world. The road east was now open to his armies.
Temur knew China’s capital was a treasure house without parallel in the world. In 1404, his envoy returned from Peking to Samarkand with Ambassador An. The official reported that the Chinese capital was twenty times larger than Tabriz. If that was true, wrote Clavijo, then ‘it must indeed be the greatest city in all the world’. Temur was also told, though this was less welcome news, that the Ming armies were as numerous as the sands of the desert:
The man further reported that the Emperor of China was lord of so many warriors that when his host went forth to wage war beyond the limits of his Empire, without counting those who marched with him he could leave four hundred thousand horsemen behind to guard his realm together with numerous regiments of footguards. As that man further reported, it was the order current in China that no nobleman should be allowed to appear publicly on horseback unless he kept in his service at his call at least a thousand horsemen and yet of the like of such nobles the number to be met with was very large. Many were the other wonderful facts that were further related of the capital and country of China.
This was the kingdom Temur resolved to conquer. It was a question of destiny, the final decisive play in a brilliant game of chess. The opening gambit had been made six years earlier. Fortresses had been built, agricultural land reclaimed along his eastern marches, all in preparation for this, his ultimate campaign. For years he had roved outside Mawarannahr, ranging his armies against his opponents like the most consummate grandmaster, toppling kingdoms and enlarging his empire with every move he made. For the most part he had directed his furious energy against the west. Now, at his command and under his immutable will, his ranks of Tatar pawns advanced ever farther east.
Allahdad, one of Temur’s most trusted amirs, was sent east and instructed to prepare a detailed survey of the land the Tatars would have to cross to reach the Chinese capital. His formidable assignment was to ‘make a map of those regions and describe their condition in his reply, that he might explain to Temur the situation of those realms and show the nature of the way through them and the paths and explain to him the nature of their cities and their villages, valleys and mountains, castles and forts, the nearer parts and the remote, the deserts and hills, wastes and deserts, landmarks and towers, waters and rivers, tribes and families, passes and broad roads, places marked and those without signs of the way, dwelling places and houses for travellers, its empty places and its people, weaving the path of a diffuse style and avoiding abridgement and omission and explaining the distances between all the stages and the manner of the journey between all the dwelling places’.
The northern route to China was considered the only practical choice. This was the route Ambassador An had taken on his journey from Peking. To the north of the icy Tien Shan Celestial Mountains it traversed Semirechye, the Land of the Seven Rivers – which flowed into Lake Balkash – east of Mawarannahr. This route crossed steppe with decent grazing for the horses, the single most important consideration in the complex web of Temur’s military logistics.
Allahdad had been involved in plans for this campaign from an early stage. In the winter of 1401–02, while Temur wintered in the pastures of the Qarabagh, he was on his way to the eastern marches with orders to develop agricultural land to feed the armies and build bases from which to launch the attack. One fort was to be built ten days’ march from Ashpara, east of the Sir Darya river. Another was constructed still closer to China, next to Lake Issykul. These preparations were in addition to those Temur had begun as early as 1396, when he had spent two years in Samarkand beautifying his capital and planning for war in the east. It is clear that this was no casual undertaking. Temur had appointed his grandson and heir Mohammed Sultan, at the head of forty thousand troops and a number of the most prominent amirs, to supervise the construction of fortresses and to reclaim and irrigate the agricultural land that had been abandoned in those regions. Unruly tribes had been assimilated into the Tatar armies or eliminated.
Allahdad completed his mission successfully. He used ‘many leaves of glistening papyrus’ to make the map, carefully folded into a neat rectangle. All of the details required by Temur were included, and nothing was omitted. According to Arabshah, he finished it in good time, too. The emperor received it while he was still marching through Asia Minor with his army, on his way back to Samarkand.
As war approached, activity along the eastern marches intensified. With the building work complete, the priority was to grow sufficient crops and rear enough animals to feed the great army that swept through kingdoms like locusts. Every farmer and villager from Samarkand to Ashpara was ordered to ‘cease business and trade and in word and deed give themselves to tilling the soil and farming’. If need be, men and women should forgo the five daily prayers required by Islam in favour of working the land. Sometimes Allah had to take second place. A sense of urgency gripped the empire. In the heaving bazaars and alleys of Samarkand, in the many-domed mosques and madrassahs, the manicured parks and palaces, the talk was all of this latest expedition. Like a loyal mistress the city missed Temur during his campaigns, but always waited patiently and expectantly for his triumphal return. All knew that war with China represented his most awesome challenge yet. Many feared that their masterful emperor had finally overextended himself. For all his previous victories, a single defeat at the hands of the most powerful army on earth now threatened the entire empire. The stakes had never been higher.
The spring of 1403 brought two surprises and one tragedy for the elderly emperor. Temur and his army were still crossing Asia Minor towards Samarkand and China when he received news that Sultan Bayazid, his most famous captive, had died while travelling under escort with the imperial baggage caravan. Temur’s personal doctor had been unable to save him. The sources differ on how the fallen Ottoman met his end. Gout, asthma, apoplexy, a broken heart, even suicide have all been cited as the cause of death. While there is no reason to believe that the news would have brought much satisfaction to a ruler who was himself approaching his seventieth birthday, there is something of the crocodile about the tears Yazdi has him shedding: ‘Temur was so extremely affected that he bewailed the misfortune of that great prince with tears. He began to reflect how providence often baffles human projects for he had resolved … to raise the dejected spirit of Bayazid by re-establishing him on the throne with greater power and magnificence than he had enjoyed before.’
Such plans, were they real or imagined, had been dashed. But there was far worse news to follow. A messenger galloped into the imperial camp at Aq Shahr with a desperate report. Mohammed Sultan lay desperately sick. He had never fully recovered from the wounds received at Ankara. Without betraying any emotion, Temur gave orders for Bayazid’s body to be sent to Brusa ‘with all the pomp and magnificence’ due to a great king. He presented the Ottoman’s son Musa Chelebi with a royal vest, a fine belt, a sword, a quiver inlaid with precious stones, thirty horses and a quantity of gold. Only with that business finished did he hurry to the young prince’s camp. By the time he arrived, having been delayed by a rebel Turkmen tribe, his grandson’s condition had worsened. Unable even to speak, he lay on his bed with a deathly pallor across his face. For three days he was carried in a litter, but it was too late. Four days after the death of Bayazid, the youthful Mohammed Sultan, a lion on the battlefield and the emperor’s great hope for the future, passed away.
Temur was inconsolable. He had always loved this prince especially. There was a heartbreaking symmetry to his premature death, for he was the oldest son of the emperor’s first-born, Jahangir, who had died at the age of twenty more than a quarter of a century earlier. This young man Temur had favoured above all his other sons and grandsons, confidently making him his heir in recognition of his qualities of leadership, courage, intelligence and military acumen. Even Arabshah, a sworn critic of Temur, acknowledged the fine character of the prince. He was, said the Syrian, ‘a refuge for excellent men and haven for the learned; the signs of felicity appeared in the lines of his brow and the glad news of nobility shone from his features’.
The whole army went into mourning. Its march home and onwards to war had become a great funeral cortège. Everyone wore black. Mohammed Sultan’s mother and Jahangir’s widow, the beautiful Khan-zada, was summoned to meet the army at Avnik in Armenia. Before she reached the town, the prince’s three young sons arrived at Erzerum, a sight so moving to the emperor that the tears poured down his face again. Then there was the mother’s grief to behold. Khan-zada had already lost her husband. Now she had lost her first child. When news reached her of Mohammed Sultan’s death, she collapsed on the spot. Later, when she came to, she pulled her hair out, ripped her clothes and tore her cheeks until they bled. She had never expected her treasured son to fall so young, she wailed. He had been destined to become a great emperor. Now her tears ran like blood, for his death had pierced her like a ‘fatal dagger’.
Death, as the old emperor knew, was stalking him more closely than ever. Men who had shared his victories over the years had started to fall. In recent months, seasoned comrades on the battlefield had been gathered up. Sayf ad-din Nukuz, Temur’s long-serving amir, had died shortly before the decisive encounter with Bayazid. The puppet khan, Sultan Mahmud, a fearless soldier who had captured the escaping Ottoman sultan, had been stricken after the battle. He was not replaced.
Temur ordered Mohammed Sultan’s funeral banquet to be held in Avnik. The lords of Asia came with their condolences, praising Allah for dignifying the world with such a manly prince and warrior. Priests recited from the Koran in a sombre monotone. Mohammed Sultan’s kettle-drum gave its final peal of thunder. All of a sudden, the ladies of the court and the princes, the vassal kings and amirs, the soldiers and the servants, one and all let forth a terrible cry of mourning. Then the drum was smashed to pieces, in honour of Mongol custom. Never would it be sounded in tribute to another prince.
From Avnik, the prince’s coffin was taken to Sultaniya, thence to Samarkand where Temur had ordered the population to observe public mourning. ‘At his approach the people of Samarkand went out and they had covered themselves to meet him with black garments and in black walked noble and humble, base and illustrious, as though the face of the world were covered with a fog of deepest night.’
Temur had demonstrated over the years an almost instinctive inability to pass the Christian kingdom of Georgia without invading it. Though the death of Mohammed Sultan still weighed heavily on him, though his soldiers were battle-weary and his mind was turning towards the forthcoming campaign against China, he was unable even at this moment, in the heat of August, to resist the temptation. Another punitive expedition was ordered against King Giorgi VII, who had failed to present himself at the emperor’s court. This was Temur’s sixth, and last, campaign against the mountain kingdom.
It was harvest time and the Tatars plundered the fields of grain. Then they marched into the higher passes where the fighting was hardest. The chronicles made much of the siege of Kurtin, a famously fortified stronghold which the inhabitants considered impregnable. With cisterns full of water, ‘cellars furnished with delicious wines’ and plentiful supplies of pigs and sheep, the defenders were confident they would see off the Tatars. But one night, while the engineers were building siege engines and battering rams, a soldier slipped through a narrow opening in the rockface and found a way up to the fortress above. Fifty more joined him during the night. At dawn, the cry of ‘Allahu akbar’ resounded from the heights, the Tatar drums thundered, the trumpets sounded and the attack began. The gate was smashed by stones hurled from one of the siege machines, and the garrison was overrun. The governor and his soldiers were beheaded, the troops who had risked their lives in the assault handsomely rewarded. Temur gave them robes, swords, belts of honour, horses, mules, tents, umbrellas, villages and gardens in their home countries, and, of course, scores of young women.
The campaign continued into the autumn of 1403. Temur advanced into the centre of the country, ‘where he plundered seven hundred towns and villages, laying waste the cultivated lands, ruining the monasteries of the Christians and razing their churches to the very foundations’. The zeal with which he was all of a sudden pursuing the infidels, after decades butchering countless Muslims, was an indication, perhaps, that he knew he did not have long to live. From Smyrna, he had hastened to Georgia; from there he was bound for China.
Through a number of distinguished Georgian prisoners taken in the early exchanges, Temur conducted negotiations for King Giorgi’s surrender. Given the expedition that awaited him, he was not prepared to delay long in this region. Eventually, though the king still refused to appear in Temur’s court, he sent envoys carrying a thousand gold coins struck in the emperor’s name, a thousand horses, vessels of gold, silver and crystal, many cloths and a fabulously large balas ruby. Temur pronounced himself satisfied with this show of submission and the army continued east. More churches and monasteries were burnt to the ground around the capital of Tiflis, and then the Tatar hordes were gone. Georgia had been devastated again. Its fields lay bare, its coffers empty. Whole towns and villages had disappeared in the carnage. Rotting corpses were piled in the roads. Minarets of skulls, the tallest structures standing, rose from the quagmire. Winter was fast approaching and icy winds tore through the valleys. Temur’s Tatar hordes had raped and killed and torched and plundered until there was no more to be taken. Silence hung over the stricken kingdom. The only blessing, though none knew it, was that the Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes would never return.
Temur wintered for the last time in the high pastures of the Qarabagh. Here, his remorseless energy showed no signs of subsiding. He threw himself back into the business of empire, rebuilding the derelict town of Baylaqan and granting sons and grandsons territories. The crown of Hulagu, once ruled by the disgraced Miranshah, was divided between Abubakr, the prince’s eldest son, who took Baghdad and Iraq, and Omar, his second son, who was given the northern regions, including Tabriz and Sultaniya. Abubakr was ordered to rebuild Baghdad.* Dynastic considerations were beginning to crowd in on him. The aged emperor was plotting a smooth succession after his death. His grandson Pir Mohammed was given the city of Shiraz. The young man’s brother Rustam assumed control of Isfahan, while another of his brothers, Iskander, took Hamadan. Prince Khalil Sultan received lands between the Caucasus and Trebizond on the northern coast of Asia Minor.
After the recent deaths of Bayazid and Mohammed Sultan, Amir Sayf ad-din Nukuz and Sultan Mahmud, Temur hardly needed any more reminders of his own mortality. But in the spring of 1404, as the great body of the Tatar army moved out of the pastures after a last spectacular hunt, he suffered another personal loss. Shaykh Baraka, his spiritual mentor, the man who had accompanied him on his campaigns for years, who had roused him and his troops to a magnificent procession of victories, came west to express his sorrow at the death of Temur’s heir. The Tatar’s joy at this unexpected reunion was all too brief. This was the last time they would meet. Baraka followed Bayazid and Mohammed Sultan to his grave soon afterwards.
The march home continued, and the administration of empire with it. Travelling with his mobile court, Temur handed out judgements, listened to petitions and grievances, received tribute from vassal rulers or their envoys, and executed officials who had abused their positions. Such affairs of state mattered little to the rank-and-file soldiers. Their thoughts and daydreams were centred on getting back to Mawarannahr. Each step took them nearer home.
Nine hundred miles east of the Qarabagh, a great landmark soared up from the desert fastness like a homage to the heavens. The veterans of Temur’s campaigns pointed it out excitedly to their younger colleagues, who had never set eyes on such a prodigious monument, and scarcely believed it could be a minaret. The reason for the older men’s pleasure was simple. The tower meant that their marathon five-year journey was over. They had reached Mawarannahr safely. This was Bukhara the Noble, Dome of Islam, second city of the empire.
The Kalon Minaret which so cheered Temur’s soldiers in 1404 still presides spectacularly over Bukhara today. Looming 150 feet into the sky, it is visible from most parts of this labyrinthine city of secrets.
On a cool, clear, autumnal evening, my first in Bukhara, I sat in a chaikhana in Lyab-i-Hauz Square, soul and centre of the old town, contemplating the twin pleasures of a steaming bowl of green tea and the reflected glory of the seventeenth-century Nadir Divanbegi khanaqah, a mosque and hostel providing accommodation for travelling holy men. I was planning a visit to the Kalon Minaret, but had been waylaid by the charms of the prettiest town square in Central Asia. Here, at last, was serenity. The hauz, built in 1620 as the city’s largest reservoir, was a square pool of green water beneath a dimming sky. Bevelled steps ran down from street level to its surface. Mulberry trees lined the square, the most gnarled and crooked among them dating from 1477. On the top of the tallest was a derelict storks’ nest.
It was a still night beneath the stars, a perfect time for exploration. I took myself away from the murmurs of the Lyab-i-Hauz into the dark streets of the old town. Men played cards in pools of light in their doorways. Figures hove into view in tiny alleys then were swallowed up instantly by the night. Children raced through the streets. Above them bats circled around the flickering lights of a disused fountain, paper-thin wings fluttering madly. The domed carpet markets were closed, and footsteps echoed in their chambers. Here and there loomed grand portals flanked with corner towers. There were mosques and madrassahs, some illuminated, others, more remotely located, hidden in darkness. But the most striking monument was the largest minaret I had ever seen, a huge golden tower that pierced the night, one of Bukhara’s most fabulous symbols. Drawn inexorably towards it, I threaded through the streets, past the Magok-i-Attari Mosque, into the cap-makers’ bazaar, around the Bazar-i-Kord Mosque, alongside the Amir Alim Khan Madrassah, until there it stood: Bukhara’s greatest survivor.
Built in 1127, the Kalon Minaret had escaped even the razing wrath of Genghis Khan when a mere stripling of a hundred. The warlord of the steppes was so overawed by this triumph of verticality that he ordered his men to spare it as they scythed their way through the city. (The rest of Bukhara was not so fortunate. By the time Genghis’s hordes had finished their murderous mission, it was said: ‘From the reflection of the sun the plain seemed to be a tray filled with blood.’) A minaret unlike any other, it has servedmuaddin, merchant and the military alike for the best part of a thousand years. This was the tower craved by shattered camel caravans traversing the Qara Qum desert, the first trace of civilisation for travellers tormented by thirst and racked with hunger. Burning beacons at its summit guided the stragglers through raging sandstorms. The minaret was also a watchtower. From a window in the ornate rotunda gallery soldiers scanned the horizon for enemy armies approaching Bukhara. And for the dispensers of Bukhara-style justice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Kalon Minaret was also the ‘Tower of Death’, where the most violent criminals stumbled up its 105 steps prior to their destruction. The ceremonies were carefully choreographed, designed to inculcate fear, revulsion and macabre fascination in the crowds that gathered to watch. The offender’s crime was read out from the top of the minaret. A hush fell over the spectators. Then, after a dreadful pause, tied up inside a sack, he was pushed, screaming in blind panic, to his death.
For all its practical uses, the Kalon Minaret is an exquisite feat of architecture. From its octagonal base, thirty feet in diameter, it tapers smoothly into the heavens through ten bands of carved brick and delicate majolica tilework. At the summit, above its sixteen windows, there is more fine detail as the bricks flare outwards slightly before retreating to form a horizontal roof crowned by a rocket-like protuberance that marks the lines of an older extension.
Though the minaret avoided the levelling traditionally inflicted on conquered cities by Genghis and his Mongols, the Kalon Mosque from which it sprang did not. Such was its size and splendour that the warlord falsely believed he had ridden into the sultan’s palace. On discovering that this was Bukhara’s most magnificent mosque, he contemptuously ordered his men to use the Koran-holders as mangers for his horses. Here, in the house of God, Genghis gave his men carte blanche to destroy the city, and within minutes the mosque was in flames. It burnt to the ground.
‘Of course, they used to call Bukhara the “Dome of Islam” or “Heart of Islam” even before Temur. This was the city that produced great religious scholars like Bakhauddin Nakhshbandi – his name means “The Decoration of Religion” – and Imam al Bukhari. Their books are still studied in Bukhara, so I think we can still say Bukhara is the “Dome of Islam”.’
I had returned to the Kalon Mosque the following morning to meet its imam, Abdul Gafur Razzaq, the most important religious figure in Bukhara. He resembled a middle-aged sloth, with a goatee beard and heavy eyelids, and was so relaxed he seemed to move in slow motion, when he moved at all. On my arrival, an eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly and a young assistant rushed off at once to prepare tea. His master remained, languidly reclining on cushions.
Imam al Bukhari was one of the greatest sages of Islam, the ninth-century author of Sahih al Bukhari, regarded by Muslims worldwide as the most authentic book after the Koran, a comprehensive collection of hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. Famed for his superhuman memory, as a child he could recite two thousand hadith. He collected and examined more than six hundred thousand in the course of his researches, selecting only 7,275 of them as sahih, or genuine. These he authenticated with full genealogies of those who had communicated them, harking back to the Prophet himself.
Together with al Bukhari, Khazreti Mohammed Bakhauddin Nakhshbandi was one of the city’s most illustrious sons, a contemporary of Temur and the greatest Sufi leader of Central Asia. Among his followers he emphasised contemplation, self-purification, peace, tolerance and moral excellence, as well as a withdrawal from authority. The complex of school, mosque, khanaqah and Nakhshbandi’s grave, ten minutes outside Bukhara, was recently restored with Turkish aid. It was reopened in 1993 to commemorate the 675th anniversary of his birth in a ceremony that marked the renaissance of Islam in Central Asia. Visitors today will find pilgrims from across the Muslim world circling the holy man’s heavy black tombstone, pausing occasionally to bestow reverent kisses upon it. Some exchange a few words with a priest shaded by an awning beneath a plane tree – said to have sprouted from Nakhshbandi’s staff – and hand him a few banknotes in exchange for a prayer. Others tie rags and wishes in the tree. Elsewhere in the complex, pilgrims cook offerings in thanks for the fulfilment of their wishes.
Temur’s Dome of Islam had come under attack in the first half of the twentieth century. The imam had been brought up by his grandparents during the Soviet era, when religious instruction was prohibited. Secretly they had found him teachers who had worked in the madrassahs before the Soviets’ arrival, and it was under their tutelage that he had started to study the Koran and Arabic calligraphy. When he was eighteen, he won a place in the prestigious sixteenth-century Mir-i-Arab Madrassah in Bukhara, a blue-domed masterpiece directly opposite the Kalon Mosque: ‘Temur would never have believed what happened here in those times. During the Soviet period the madrassah didn’t accept any student from Bukhara because the city’s communist leaders wanted to show what good communists they were. They told their bosses that no one in the city wanted to study religion because they were so progressive. I was only admitted because of my knowledge of calligraphy.’
He had studied at the madrassah for seven years, including a two-year secondment to the Imam al Bukhari Madrassah in Tashkent. After two years in the army, he returned to the world of Islam as a teacher in the Mir-i-Arab Madrassah. At the age of fifty, after a distinguished career, he had reached the top of his profession. ‘We only had three mosques and one madrassah that took eighty students during the Soviet time. Now we have one hundred mosques just in the Bukhara region, and eleven madrassahs nationwide.’
It would have pleased Temur to find that, in keeping with Bukhara’s religious heritage, Sufism was at the forefront of this religious revival. ‘This is what we try to introduce to the people. It’s mystic teaching, helping people to perfect themselves and get closer to Allah. Sufis are against fighting and for development. You probably already know how much Temur respected Sufi scholars. He brought many of them to Samarkand and constructed mausoleums for them when they died. Sufism developed a great deal under him.’
Bukhara, Uzbekistan and Central Asia are re-engaging with Islam. But what is most fascinating is that Bukhara is reacquainting itself with its long-standing Sufic tradition, perhaps the first serious revival since Temur’s dedicated sponsorship six centuries earlier.
How far it had to go was revealed by an exploration of the Kalon Mosque. Designed to accommodate up to twelve thousand of the faithful at Friday prayers, it encompassed a vast open-air quadrangle bordered by a colonnaded, multi-domed arcade. It was the second-biggest mosque in Central Asia, built in 795 in what had been, for a brief period at least, more auspicious times for Islam. The mosque one sees today, immense in scope and peerless in ambition, dates from the early sixteenth century.
The enormous area of worship is superfluous these days. A small area at the back of the arcade, an inconsequential fraction of the mosque, is all that has been set aside for prayers. Its size contrasts tellingly with the vast western portal and mihrab niche that facesMecca beneath the glittering blue bubble of the Kok Gumbaz (Blue Dome). ‘Immortality belongs to God’, reads a white Kufic inscription around it.
Today, the minaret of the Kalon Mosque, like those throughout Bukhara, lies strangely silent. The haunting sounds of the adhan, the call to prayer, are nowhere to be heard. Once more, Islam is under watch from the authorities, fearful of an upsurge in fundamentalism. Like his colleagues in the rest of the city, the imam was appointed by the state and his sermons are monitored.
What a decline from Islam’s golden era in Bukhara, from the ninth century, when it emerged as a bastion of the faith, until the nineteenth, when depravity and fanaticism started to take over. But then, state religion had been manipulated before. Temur’s subservient priests upheld his authority and gave their blessing to his numerous campaigns against Muslims and infidels alike. And in any case, such a reversal of fortunes was nothing new. The Dome of Islam did not thrive uninterrupted from the ninth century.
Bukhara took over a century to recover from the devastation wrought by Genghis in 1219. When Ibn Battutah passed through in 1366, he reported: ‘All but a few of its mosques, academies and bazaars are lying in ruins.’ The wandering man of letters was unimpressed. ‘I found no one in it who knew any thing of science.’ The city had to wait for Temur to regain its glory.
Noila, director of the department for the protection of mosques and monuments in Bukhara, was a courteous lady of about fifty with a scholarly, lined face. We were sitting together one evening over a glass of green tea in Lyab-i-Hauz, overlooking the square from the first-floor veranda of a small chaikhana.
‘People say Amir Temur had no connection with Bukhara, but that’s just not true,’ she began.
Around a long table next to us, a large family, including several army officers, was celebrating some happy event with the help of endless rounds of beer and vodka. I loved returning to this small square, the Kaaba of Bukhara, around which swirled an absorbing cross-section of Bukharzis night and day. It had a life of its own and an eclectic population of old men, shrieking boys, romantically inclined couples, ducks, geese, a persistent kingfisher and a prowling cat. In the festering heat of midday, it reflected the lethargy of the city. The elderly backgammon players were nowhere to be seen, the boys diving from the mulberry trees vanished, and the ducks kept a low profile in the shadows. Even the diehard shashlik cook retreated altogether. And then, as evening approached and the temperature cooled, the underground vitality that simmered beneath the surface bubbled up once more. Fountains burst forth on cue, ducks and geese celebrated raucously, fairy lights winked in the trees, lovers returned from the shadows for a candlelit dinner alongside the pool, the shashlik cook sharpened his knife and was soon lost to sight beneath the wreaths of smoke from the coals, boys hurled themselves into the water and once again the square echoed to the sound of slamming dominoes and games of backgammon. Lyab-i-Hauz, like the rest of Bukhara, had a rhythm all of its own.
‘To begin with,’ Noila continued, ‘Temur’s mother, the daughter of a sadr [senior religious official], came from Bukhara, so he spent a lot of time here during his childhood. He always respected the city very much, and the main reason for this was its Islamic heritage. In fact, it became the second city of his empire. While Samarkand was his secular capital, Bukhara was his religious centre. You must remember that in those times no leader could carry out his political, military and economic policies without the support of the religious establishment. Temur also restored a lot of important monuments like the mausoleums of Shaykh Sayf ad-din Bukharzi and Chasma Ayub. He also restored the Bakhauddin Nakhshbandi shrine. The man who looked after Temur’s library, Mahmoud Khoja Bukharoi, was also from the city. Temur came here several times during fighting. Bukhara and the surrounding area were always very important to him, particularly when he was collecting forces in the Zarafshan and Qashka Darya valleys to drive off the Moghul invaders.’
In fact, Temur returned periodically to the pastures around Bukhara during his many campaigns. He wintered here with his troops in 1381, after taking Herat. It was fine hunting territory. Two of Genghis’s sons, Chaghatay and Ogedey, used to send their father fifty camel-loads of swans a week while they were here. In 1389, having defeated Khizr Khoja, the khan of Moghulistan, Temur rested his court and troops in Bukhara, celebrating his victory with a grand hunt around the lakes and streams at the foot of the Zarafshan.
In 1392, Temur was back in Bukhara, this time after falling ill at the outset of his Five-Year Campaign in Persia. ‘He was so sick he called all his family from Samarkand, expecting to die. But a doctor from Bukhara, using Avicenna’s methods,* managed to save him, and after one month he was well enough to continue with his campaign,’ Noila told me. ‘Bukhara always supported Temur in his conquests, not like Khorezm and some other places.’
It is fair to say, however, that Bukhara played only a distant second fiddle to Samarkand. Unquestionably, Bukharzis were proud of their rich heritage, but any discussion about Temur brought back memories of how he had slighted their great city by comparison with the munificence he bestowed on his imperial capital.
I asked Noila how the government was managing the restoration of the city. Although Bukhara seemed to have escaped the Disneyfication of Samarkand, many of its historical buildings were crumbling away through neglect.
‘We have 462 mosques and other ancient monuments in the Bukhara region, so of course it’s a problem,’ she answered. ‘But the government and private sponsors are spending lots of money on this. You’ve got to remember the Soviets destroyed much of Bukhara. In the 1920s, there was a map of the city listing a thousand mosques and monuments. This included 360 mosques, 280 madrassahs, eighty-four caravanserais, eighteen hammams, and 118 hauzes, so you can see what they destroyed. Lenin gave an order to the soldiers to burn Islam in the fire. Bukhara was the fire of Islam, so how could they do it? They burnt books, killed imams and forbade people from praying. They burnt down many mosques and madrassahs, too, and turned others into offices, clubs and storage space. They destroyed the Ark [Bukhara’s ancient fortress] and smashed a part of the Kalon Minaret. A Russian engineer ordered the hauzes to be filled in because they had become a health risk, spreading malaria and tapeworm. Mirzoi Sharif Madrassah was turned into a prison. Before the revolution, everyone had written in the Arabic alphabet. Now they introduced the Cyrillic alphabet, so most of us can’t even read our old books any more. Bukhara was a major trade centre on the Silk Road. No more. The Bolsheviks put an end to that. Big businessmen suddenly became enemies of the state. Educated people were thrown into prison, and an uneducated, illiterate man was made mayor of Bukhara under the control of the Russians. This is what happened to our city.
‘Until recently, we weren’t even allowed to talk about what happened in those early Soviet days. We couldn’t even explain to tourists what had happened to some of the monuments. For example, when we showed visitors around the Ark and they asked why it was in such bad condition, we had to say it was wear and tear. We weren’t allowed to say the Soviets bombed much of the building to pieces in 1920. In the museums we had all these pictures showing the terrible executions under the Amir of Bukhara – throat-cuttings, hangings, beatings, live burials. It was all designed to show how primitive life had been here in Islamic times before the Soviets came to our rescue and civilised us.* You need to understand all this. It’s the background behind restoring Amir Temur to the Uzbeks. Some people have said there is a tendency in Uzbekistan to exaggerate Temur’s greatness and so on. Perhaps that’s true, but we’re a young nation, getting up from our knees. We need a new figurehead. Before we had Lenin; he wasn’t even one of our people. If there is exaggeration, I think it’s entirely forgivable.’
One of the things she had said about the monuments was astounding. There had been 118 hauzes before the Russian arrival. What had happened to them? I had seen one or two empty pits in the ground, desolate ruins with broken steps. And, of course there was the Lyab-i-Hauz. But that still left well over a hundred unaccounted for. Gustav Krist, the improbable Austrian carpet-seller and traveller, must have underestimated the destructive power of the Soviets. In 1937 he wrote:
And yet those ponds of Bukhara are wonderfully beautiful. In the evening, after the muezzin has sounded from the minaret the call to prayer, the men of the city gather around the ponds, which are bordered by tall, silver poplars and magnificent black elms, to enjoy a period of ease and leisure. Carpets are spread, the ever burningchilim is passed from mouth to mouth, the samovar steams away, and light-footed boys hand round the shallow bowls of green tea. Here the meddahs, or story-tellers, the musicians and the dancing boys assemble to display their craft. And perhaps a conjuror or juggler comes, performing the most amazing and incredible feats of skill. An Indian snake charmer joins the throng and sets his poisonous snakes to dance, while all over reigns the peace of a Bukharan evening. No loud speech breaks the spell; items of scandal and the news of the day are exchanged in discreet whispers. So it was centuries ago in Bukhara; so it is today. There are things which not even the Soviets can alter.
The disappearance of the Bukharan hauz, and most of its open canals and sewers, brought with it another poignant loss. The storks, which for centuries had been as much a part of the city skyline as the Kalon Minaret and had fed from these open pools, had gone for good.
‘By the 1970s, the storks had left,’ said Noila. ‘I’m still so sad about it. Every morning we used to see them. You can still see one or two of their nests at the top of the mulberry trees in Lyab-i-Hauz. I used to love watching the mothers taking frogs and fish in their beaks and feeding their children. And seeing them teaching the young ones how to fly. The babies used to try to flap their wings and then they’d fall into Lyab-i-Hauz and wait there until their mothers rescued them. They were very beautiful birds. Many, many lived here because there were so many places they could feed from. You know, there’s a famous Bukharan song,’ she reminisced. ‘It’s called “The Storks are Coming Back to Bukhara”.’
She started humming the tune and then broke into song. It was a tiny, gentle voice, but it carried easily into the night. ‘I know you can still see them outside Bukhara,’ she went on, ‘but of course it’s not the same thing as having them in the city. They were part of our childhood when we grew up. Bukhara has never really been the same since they left.’
For several days I immersed myself in Bukhara and waited while it slowly revealed itself to me. It was more intimate than Samarkand, had none of that city’s flashy flamboyance, and unveiled its secrets more guardedly. Much of this had to do with the fact that it had retained its old quarter almost intact and on one site. Samarkand’s ancient monuments are spread diffusely over a far greater area. The narrow winding alleys and souks that had filtered out from the historical heart of the Registan towards the city gates are no more. Here they have been preserved.
When it was time to leave Bukhara the Holy, I did so reluctantly. The next stage of my journey, 130 miles east along the Zarafshan valley, would once again take me in Temur’s footsteps, this time as he returned to his beloved capital from the west. Samarkand had not seen her emperor for five years. Levied for a Seven-Year Campaign, the Tatar hordes had left Samarkand in October 1399, shortly after the victory in India. They returned in August 1404, weary, laden with spoil, and thinking once more of nothing but domestic delights. Temur might have been devoting many of his waking hours to the plans to invade China, but he was the emperor, chosen by God to rid the world of the unbelievers. The simple soldiers, however, the instruments of his success, were engaged in earthier considerations. War could wait. Wine and women were more immediate priorities.
Temur’s triumphal entry into Samarkand took him on the usual whirl from garden to garden and palace to palace, staying in one for several days before moving on with great pomp to the next. The crowds poured out to greet him, sharing in his grief at the loss of his heir, celebrating with him the latest victories and additions to the empire. The chronicles record his stately progress from the Garden of Heart’s Delight to the Garden of the Plane Tree, from the Model of the World to the Paradise Garden and Northern Garden. The sweeping lawns were beautifully manicured, the air was perfumed with roses, and the streams played through the palace grounds. There were audiences and receptions, riotous feasts and formal state banquets. And the games of chess continued. Nor was there any let-up in the grandiose building projects. In celebration of his latest victories, Temur gave orders for a palace to be built in a park south of the Northern Garden. Architects taken from Damascus during the last campaign were set to work. Each side of the palace was said to have measured over seven hundred metres.
‘This palace was the largest and most magnificent of any Temur had built,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘The chief ornaments of the buildings in Syria are of marble; and running streams are common in their houses. The Syrian architects are also very ingenious in mosaic work and sculpture and in contriving curious fountains and perpetual jets d’eau, and what is most remarkable is that with stones of various colours they do the same sort of work which the artificers in inlaid work do with ebony and ivory, and with equal skill and delicacy. They likewise made several fountains in the palace, the beauty of which was enhanced by an infinity of jets d’eau in various styles, in inimitable art. Afterwards the workmen of Persia and Iraq enriched the exterior of the walls with porcelain of Cachan, which gave the finishing stroke to the beauty of this palace.’
The emperor’s arrival in his capital coincided with that of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Spanish ambassador from the court of King Henry III of Castile. Leaving Cadiz in May 1403, the Spaniard and his party had endured a mammoth journey of fifteen months and six thousand miles, beset by delays. Shipwrecked in the Black Sea, they were forced to winter in Constantinople, from where they were only able to resume their journey the following spring. Hoping to receive an audience with Temur while the Tatar army was camped in the pastures of the Qarabagh, Clavijo narrowly missed him and was obliged to press on east. Such was the speed of Temur’s homeward march that the Spaniard eventually had to cross Asia in his wake.
After admiring Tabriz, where he met a large embassy from Cairo bound for Samarkand, and Sultaniya, where he was granted an audience with Temur’s debauched son Miranshah, Clavijo headed on towards Mawarannahr. At Nishapur he lost one of his party to fever, but the embassy carried on its tortuous path, crossing the Qara Qum desert and reaching the frontiers of Temur’s homeland on the southern bank of the Amu Darya at Balkh, in northern Afghanistan. Once across this heavily guarded frontier – where entry was permitted but exit was forbidden on pain of death – Clavijo took the road north, from Termez to Shakhrisabz, where he was overwhelmed by the grandeur and elegance of Temur’s Ak Sarai palace, still under construction after twenty years. From here, it was a last push of fifty miles to his final destination. At 9 o’clock on Monday, 8 September 1404, the shattered Spaniard finally arrived at a city whose magnificence he had never expected, and whose hospitality he would never forget.
The chronicles describe Temur’s return to his capital in some detail, but Clavijo’s wonderfully-observed account – impartial, unlike those of Arabshah and Yazdi – goes much further, adding texture and colour. He was writing from the unique perspective of a cultured European whose prejudices towards ‘barbarian’ Asians had suddenly been dealt a fatal blow. From his first sight of the elderly emperor he was transfixed by the lavish splendour of the court. He was led first through a great orchard, entered by a gate resplendent in blue and gold tiles. Six elephants, trophies of Delhi, guarded the entrance, each with a miniature castle on its back. Clavijo and his companions were then escorted from one attendant to the next until they reached the emperor’s grandson Khalil Sultan, who took their letter from King Henry and directed them to the Conqueror of the World. Temur was sitting on a dais in front of a beautiful palace, reclining on embroidered silk cushions and mattresses. He wore a silk cloak and a crown ornamented with a balas ruby, pearls and precious stones. Red apples floated in a fountain which threw a column of water into the air.
It is Clavijo, above all other sources, who provides the most compelling physical portrait of Temur in his last years. All the decades in the saddle, the skin-cracking summers and the savagely cold winters, had taken their toll. ‘His Highness commanded us to arise and stand close up to him that he might the better see us, for his sight was no longer good, indeed, he was so infirm and old that his eyelids were falling over his eyes and he could barely raise them to see.’
For a sixty-nine-year-old cripple who had outlived many of his contemporaries, including several sons and grandsons, who had fought in battles throughout Asia and had travelled countless thousands of miles, this physical deterioration was hardly surprising. What was more remarkable was that despite such obvious frailties, Temur showed no signs of letting up. On the contrary, he was still pursuing his ambitions with characteristic vigour. The ruthlessness had not mellowed with age.
There were building projects to inspect, not least a new main road running through the city with arcaded shops, the mausoleum raised in honour of Mohammed Sultan and, most important, the Cathedral Mosque which Temur had commissioned to celebrate his victory in India. He intended this to be his greatest monument, a tribute to Allah and, given its unrivalled magnificence in the Islamic world, implicitly to himself. Five years after the cosmopolitan team of stonemasons, architects, labourers and master craftsmen drawn from all over his empire had begun their work, the mosque was nearing completion when he returned from the west.
‘Now at this season,’ Clavijo wrote, ‘Temur was already in weak health, he could no longer stand for long on his feet, or mount his horse, having always to be carried in a litter.’ Such physical constraints did not in the least deter the emperor from the task at hand. The chief architects and the two amirs responsible for the mosque must have trembled inwardly when he came to examine it. The first signs were ominous. Though Clavijo judged it ‘the noblest of all those we visited in the city of Samarkand’, Temur, as we have seen, did not concur. The portal was too small. His mosque was meant to eclipse every other building in the dar al Islam, never mind Samarkand. He gave orders for the façade to be demolished on the spot. The amirs who had administered the project in his absence were summarily executed.
This was a reminder, if one were needed, that Temur, however frail he had become, was the supreme power. The campaign against China would proceed as planned. A summons was despatched to all the nobles, princes, amirs and commanders who would accompany him to war against the greatest army on earth. The qurultay would be held on the plain of Kani-gil outside Samarkand. Its purpose was twofold. First, the tumultuous gathering would demonstrate to the infidels of China that they were about to be swept away by a mightier force sent by Allah. Second, the emperor would celebrate the marriages of five of his grandsons. The dynasty would live on to greater glory. This was to be a festival unlike any other Temur had ever held. And Clavijo was there to observe every minute of it.
Just as he had been shocked by the scale and opulence of Samarkand, the beauty of its monuments, the graciousness of its parks and palaces, Clavijo was now struck by the largest, most exotic gathering of humanity he had ever beheld. The account of his three-year embassy to the court of Temur runs to three hundred pages. Fifty of those, written in a tone of profound wonder, are devoted exclusively to the feast of Kani-gil, a celebration that began in the last few days of September 1404 and lasted two months. Yazdi and Arabshah both refer to the festival with their usual sycophancy and prejudice respectively on display, but once again it is to the flourishing pen of Clavijo we must turn for the most meticulous reportage of an emperor and his people at the zenith of their power. It is worth quoting from him at length.
In the plain here Temur recently had ordered tents to be pitched for his accommodation, and where his wives might come, for he had commanded the assembly of the great Horde, which until now had been encamped in the pastures beyond the orchards round and about the city. The whole of the Horde was now to come in, each clan taking up its appointed place: and now we saw them here, pitching the tents, their womenfolk accompanying them. This was done in order that all [these Chaghatays] might have their share in the festivities which were going forward for the celebration of certain royal marriages now about to be declared. From their custom as soon as the camp of his Highness thus had been pitched all these folk of the Horde exactly knew where each clan had its place. From the greatest to the humblest, each man knew his allotted position and took it up without confusion in the most orderly fashion. Thus in the course of the next three or four days we saw near twenty thousand tents pitched in regular streets to encircle the royal camp, and daily more clans came in from the outlying districts. Throughout the Horde thus encamped we saw the butchers and cooks who passed to and fro selling their roast and boiled meats, while others sold barley and fruit, and bakers with their ovens alight were kneading the dough and making bread for sale. Thus every art and craft was to be found dispersed throughout the camp, and each trade was in its appointed street of the great Horde. There were baths and bathers established in the camp who, pitching their tents had built wooden cabins adjacent to each other, each with its iron bath supplied with hot water, heated in cauldrons which they had there together with all the other furniture they required.
The Chaghatays continued to pour in, until Clavijo estimated there were fifty thousand tents pitched around the imperial enclosure on the banks of the Zarafshan river, with more in the meadows beyond. Within the various enclosures, arranged in strict hierarchy, were the emperor himself, the princes his sons and grandsons, the amirs, the sayids, descendants of the Prophet, the scholars, the shaykhs, the muftis, the qadis, the Kipchak ambassadors, the envoys from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, India and Spain, the binbashis, commanders of a thousand, the yuzbashis, leaders of a hundred, together with all the magistrates and high officials.
On 2 October the Spanish delegation was instructed to adjourn to a garden where its host, whom Clavijo referred to as the Grand Doorkeeper, was preparing a banquet. Temur had received reports that Clavijo was not drinking wine, an anomaly he was minded to rectify.
This lord informed us that Temur being perfectly well aware how it was our custom, as with all Franks [Europeans], daily to drink wine, his Highness had nonetheless noticed that we did not willingly ever do so in his presence when it was offered to us after the Tatar fashion. For that reason his Highness had arranged for us now to be brought to this garden where dinner was about to be served to us and wine provided, that thus we might eat and drink at our ease and to our fill. We found that ten sheep and a horse had been sent by order of Temur to supply the banquet with meat, also a full charge of wine and on this fare we dined sumptuously. At the conclusion of the feast they presented each of us ambassadors with a robe of gold embroidery and a shirt to match, also a hat. Furthermore, we each received a horse for riding, all these gifts being presented to us by order of the Lord Temur.
Four days later, the emperor announced a grand feast in the Royal Camp, to which he had invited all the members of the imperial family, the lords of the court and the chiefs of the clans. The ambassadors were taken to join the horde. While they observed the preparations for the banquet taking place around them, Clavijo studied the tent in which Temur was giving audiences. The first aspect of it he remarked upon was its impressive size, one hundred paces long on each of its four sides, and as high as three long lances. ‘The ceiling of the pavilion was made circular to form a dome, and the poles supporting it were twelve in number, each as thick as a man’s chest,’ in bright blue and gold and other colours. The interior of the dome was the pavilion’s ‘mark of greatest beauty’, for the canopies hanging from it formed four archways whose corners were emblazoned with pictures of eagles with folded wings. The inner walls of the pavilion were lined with beautifully woven crimson tapestries and silk embroidered with gold thread. Inside, the emperor gave audiences from a dais lined with a carpet and several fine mattresses. The outer walls were made of silk woven into bands of yellow and white. Low galleries adjoined these walls, supported by smaller poles. At each of the four corners stood a tall staff capped with a burnished copper ball surmounted by a crescent. Above the dome was a square-shaped turret made of silk, complete with simulated battlements and also decorated with balls and crescents. Despite its fairytale-castle style, the audience pavilion was eminently practical. A gangway led from the ground to its summit, enabling workmen to repair any damage caused by high winds. Five hundred crimson ropes held the structure securely in place. Running around the pavilion was an outer perimeter, a wall of cloth made from multi-coloured silks, ‘as high as a man on horseback may reach up to’, and patterned with battlements. An arched gateway within the wall contained double doors of canvas beneath another highly ornamented turret. The enclosure stretched three hundred paces across and contained many other tents and awnings. Clavijo found the entire effect astonishing. ‘From a distance indeed this great tent would appear to be a castle, it is so immensely broad and high,’ he marvelled.
In all there were eleven such royal enclosures, each containing a splendid array of pavilions. Wherever he wandered, whatever he saw, Clavijo was electrified. There were tents of all shapes and sizes. One was decorated with a massive figure of an eagle with outspread wings in silver gilt. Beneath it were ‘three falcons in silver gilt … very skilfully wrought, they have their wings open as though they were in flight from the eagle, their heads being turned back to look at him. The eagle is represented as though about to pounce.’ There were tents without ropes, their walls supported by slender poles, with borders made from spangles of silver inlaid with precious gems. Some were lined with red tapestries and shag velvet, others more luxuriously with furs of ermine and squirrel.
Great feasts were announced daily, to which Clavijo and his entourage were invariably invited. On 8 October they made their way to a banquet given by the once famously beautiful princess Khan-zada, ‘now some forty years of age … fair of complexion and fat’. She was the widow of Temur’s cherished first-born Jahangir, later remarried to Miranshah, from whom she had fled in 1399 at the time of his erratic and bullying behaviour while governor of Sultaniya. All around her were jars of wine and a drink called busa, mares’ milk sweetened with sugar. A group of musicians were accompanying a chorus of singers. One by one the royal women were presented with goblets brimming with wine, each one downed in one or two draughts. Occasionally one of the male servers was invited to drink a bumper, after which he would turn the cup upside down ‘to show his dame that not a drop had been left in the bottom’, and would then ‘boast of his feats of drinking and of how much wine he could put away, at which the ladies would laugh merrily’. This was another occasion at which Clavijo’s teetotal habits aroused a certain interest and disapproval. Temur’s chief wife, Saray Mulk-khanum, also present at the banquet, ‘commanded that we the ambassadors should come forward, when with her own hand she offered us the wine cup and persisted in the attempt to make me Ruy Gonzalez drink of the same, but I would not, though scarcely could she be brought to believe and understand that I never did drink wine’. Such behaviour would not have been welcomed. It was considered disrespectful towards one’s host not to finish a cup of wine. Not even to taste it would have been judged the height of eccentricity or bad manners. Either way, it would have done little to endear the Spaniards to their royal hosts.
Notwithstanding the abstemious Europeans, the revels continued. ‘Now when this drinking of theirs had gone on for some considerable time, many of the men present sitting before the Princess were beginning to show signs of being in their cups, and some indeed were already dead drunk. This state forsooth they deem a sign of manliness and at none of their feasts do they consider hilarity is attained unless many guests are properly in drink.’ Clavijo derived more pleasure from the food, ‘an abundance of roast mutton and horse-flesh, with various meat stews’. There were dishes of rice, vegetables, sugar breads and cakes.
As part of the celebrations for one of his grandsons’ weddings Temur gave orders that all the tradesmen of Samarkand should leave the city and set up their stalls among the horde. Merchants, jewellers, cooks, butchers, bakers, tailors and cobblers hurried to the meadows, where they were told to arrange exhibitions of their trades and crafts. Once they had arrived, none was allowed to leave without the emperor’s permission.
It was not all joyful feasting and carousing, however. At the busiest points on the plain, Temur ordered great gallows to be built. ‘He let it be known that whereas he intended to gratify and give enjoyment to all the common folk at his festival, he also intended to give a warning and example of those who had offended him and done evil deeds, and he would proceed to the public execution of the criminals.’
The first to swing was the governor of Samarkand, appointed to administer the city seven years earlier during the emperor’s campaigns in India and Asia Minor. Clavijo described him as the greatest official in the entire empire. Reports had reached Temur that this man had abused his position and oppressed the people. He was summarily judged and strung up. ‘This act of high justice condemning so great a personage to death made all men tremble,’ the envoy wrote, ‘and notably he had been one in whom his Highness had placed much confidence.’ A friend who attempted to intercede on the governor’s behalf was also hanged. Another would-be intermediary, possibly one of Temur’s nephews, offered a substantial ransom to save the official. As soon as the emperor had received payment, he ordered the unfortunate man to be tortured until he disclosed where the rest of his fortune lay. Then he was ‘hung on the gallows by the feet head downwards till he died’.
A number of other officials were executed, together with various merchants judged to have been overcharging for their goods. Such grim spectacles, however, formed only a small part of the Kani-gil festival. Though they served as a warning to all that no one was above the law, and that the law was Temur, they were eclipsed by the riotous round of parties and entertainments, banquets, dancing, revelling and singing, to which there seemed no end.
During his wide-eyed wanderings, Clavijo was able to meet the most senior members of the imperial family. Prince Pir Mohammed, who had not seen his grandfather Temur for seven years, according to Clavijo, had been called back from Afghanistan to attend the celebrations. He was ‘a young man of about twenty-two years of age, swarthy and yellow of skin and he had no beard’. After the death of Mohammed Sultan he had been appointed Temur’s heir, and now appeared in all his youthful majesty, ‘sumptuously attired as is the Tatar custom, wearing a robe of blue Zaytuni silk embroidered in gold circles, like small wheels, which back and front covered his chest and shoulders and passed down the material of his sleeves. On his head he wore a hat garnished with many great pearls and precious stones, and on the top was displayed a fine clear balas ruby. The people whom we found in attendance on him all paid him the utmost deference.’ When the Spaniards were ushered into his presence, the prince was watching a wrestling match.
Clavijo also left us a detailed portrait of Temur’s chief wife, Saray Mulk-khanum, or the Great Khanum, as he called her. He observed her during another feast to which Temur had invited the Spaniards, and apart from her ability to down large quantities of wine, it was her dress which most fascinated him. She wore an outer robe of red silk embroidered with gold, complete with a flowing train carried by fifteen ladies-in-waiting. One senses Clavijo struggling somewhat when it comes to describing her make-up and headwear: ‘The Khanum’s face appeared to be entirely covered with white lead or some such cosmetic, and the effect was to make it look as though she were wearing a paper mask. This cosmetic it is their custom for the women to smear on their faces both summer and winter to keep off the sun when they go out.’
Her face was further protected by a thin white veil, though it was the rest of the head-dress, an elaborate creation ‘very like the crest of a helmet, such as we men wear in jousting in the tiltyard’, that particularly interested the envoy. Made of red fabric, its border was draped over the queen’s shoulders.
In the back part this crest was very lofty and it was ornamented with many great round pearls all of good orient, also with precious stones such as balas rubies and turquoises, the same very finely set. The hem of this head-covering showed gold thread embroidery, and set round it she wore a very beautiful garland of pure gold ornamented with great pearls and gems. Further the summit of this crest just described was erected upon a framework which displayed three large balas rubies each about two finger breadths across, and these were clear in colour and glittered in the light, while over all rose a long white plume to the height of an ell, its feathers hanging down so that some almost hid the face coming to below the eyes. This plume was braced together by gold wire, while at the summit appeared a white knot of feathers garnished with pearls and precious stones.
As she walked the head-dress waved backwards and forwards. Her hair, long, loose and black, ‘the colour they most esteem’, hung over her shoulders. Numerous ladies-in-waiting walked alongside her to support the head-dress. In all, Clavijo estimated there were three hundred attendants. In addition, a man held a graceful parasol of silk over her to protect her from the sun. The grand procession was completed by a large body of eunuchs who marched in front of their queen. In this stately fashion she made her way to a dais beside, and slightly behind, her husband the emperor.
One by one Temur’s wives came into the pavilion, each one observing to the letter the strict hierarchy which prevailed, taking her place on a slightly lower dais than her predecessor. Clavijo counted eight in total. The latest addition to the imperial household was a lady called Jawhar-agha, ‘which in their tongue signifies the Queen of Hearts’. The emperor’s desires appeared to be as strong as ever. He had married her only a month previously.
One day, the Spaniards were invited to Saray Mulk-khanum’s enclosure. This was the apotheosis of luxury and extravagance. It was also a vivid example of how plundered treasures were put to new use. In this case the enclosure was entered through ‘double doors covered with plates of silver gilt ornamented with patterns in blue enamel work, having insets that were finely made in gold plate. All this was so beautifully wrought that evidently neither in Tartary nor indeed in our western land of Spain’ could such superlative craftsmanship have been achieved. Clavijo was correct. These outstanding doors were the gates of Brusa, taken after Temur’s rout of Bayazid in 1402. On one door was an image of St Peter, on the other St Paul. Inside the tent, covered with red silk and ‘adorned with rows of silver gilt spangles running from the top to the bottom of the walls’, were more treasures. First there was a cabinet of solid gold, ornamented with enamel and encrusted with jewels and pearls. Nearby was a small table, also of solid gold, with a large slab of translucent jade set into its surface. But one piece stood out above all others, and once again Clavijo spared no detail.
Standing and set beside this table, was to be noticed a golden tree that simulated an oak, and its trunk was as thick as a man’s leg, while above the branches spread to right and to left, bearing leaves like oak leaves. This tree reached to the height of a man, and below it was made as though its roots grew from a great dish that lay there. The fruit of this tree consisted in vast numbers of balas rubies, emeralds, turquoises, sapphires and common rubies with many great round pearls of wonderful orient and beauty. These were set all over the tree while numerous little birds, made of gold enamel in many colours, were to be seen perching on the branches. Of these some with their wings open seemed ready to fly and some with closed wings seemed as though they had just alighted on the twigs from flight, while some appeared about to eat of the fruits of the tree and were pecking with their bills at the rubies, turquoises and other gems or at the pearls which grew from the branches.
Gaping at the profusion of precious stones, Clavijo asked where the balas rubies were mined. The king of Badakhshan, a territory in northern Afghanistan ten days’ march from Samarkand, in whose territories the gems were found, was on hand to answer.
He replied graciously and told us that close to the capital city of Badakhshan was a mountain where the mines were situated. Here, day by day men go and seek and break into the rocks on that mountainside to find these precious stones. When the vein is discovered where they lie, this vein is carefully followed, and when the jewel is reached it must be cut out little by little with chisels until all the matrix has been removed. Then, grinding the gem on millstones, it would be further polished. We were told also that by order of Temur a strong guard had been established at the mines to see to it that his Highness’s rights were respected.
Lapis lazuli and sapphires, meanwhile, came from an area slightly further south.*
Among all this finery the young royal couples were married in celebrations which mingled Islamic law with Mongol tradition. They were given the most gorgeous robes of honour, then dressed and undressed nine times, the most auspicious number according to custom. Earlier Clavijo had watched servers place silver trenchers piled high with comfits and cakes as gifts to Temur from two of his most senior lords, ‘laid down nine by nine, such being the custom when any gift is offered to his Highness’. While the young couples changed from one robe to another, attendants showered them with precious stones, rubies, pearls, gold and silver. Camel and mule trains filed through the joyous crowds, bearing more gifts for the newlyweds.
The bacchanalian festivities roared on. By day, musicians, acrobats, gymnasts, tight-rope walkers and clowns entertained the noble crowds. Richly decorated elephants raced horses and chased men. A giraffe, a long-legged gift from the Egyptian ambassador, loped about to everyone’s astonishment. Such beasts were even more exotic than the elephants. By night, Temur and his amirs, the princes and the princesses, the great warriors and the elders of the Barlas clan, sat before enormous trenchers piled high with roast horse-meat and mutton, vegetables and fruit, cakes and sweetmeats, carousing into the early hours. With the feasting over, there were other appetites to be satisfied, and here too there was no restraint. Temur had announced a suspension of the strict rules and conventions that governed society. Free rein was to be given to all pleasures.
‘This is the time of feasting, pleasure and rejoicing,’ Yazdi had the emperor proclaiming. ‘Let no one complain of or reprimand another. Let not the rich encroach upon the poor, or the powerful upon the weak. Let no one ask another, Why have you done this? After this declaration everyone gave himself up to those pleasures he was most fond of, during the feast: and whatever was done passed unobserved.’ Arabshah, who disapproved of ‘those foul and base things’, recorded how all rushed to take advantage of this imperial declaration in favour of free love. Here his usually tumultuous prose tilted towards the phallic. ‘Every suitor hastened to his desire and every lover met his beloved, without anyone harassing another or dealing proudly with inferior, whether in the army or among citizens … nor was the sword drawn except the sword of contemplation; nor the spear brandished except the lances of love that bent by embrace.’
Such pleasures, of course, had to come to an end. For Clavijo and his party the celebrations ended abruptly, and in disappointment. On 3 November, after several days waiting unsuccessfully for a final audience with Temur, the envoys were instructed to return to Spain. ‘On receiving this message we immediately made our protest, urging that as yet his Highness had not granted us our dismissal nor had he given any answer to the message we had brought him from our lord the king of Castile, we said we could not and would not leave.’
The Spaniards’ arguments were dismissed. The emperor’s health had declined alarmingly, and he was in no position to receive them.
His Highness was in a very weak state, having already lost all power of speech, and he might be at the very point of death according to what the physicians prognosticated. They plainly said that this haste in thus dealing with us and our mission was necessary from the fact that Temur appeared to be dying, for our own sakes we must be off and away before the news of his death was made public, and above all before that news reached the provinces through which on our journey we should have to pass.
They were to travel in the company of the ambassador from Egypt. For a fortnight, however, the Spaniards lingered, terrified of returning to Castile empty-handed after such a long embassy. They protested to the end, but to no avail. On 21 November they made their final departure from Samarkand.*
The two months of abandoning all cares, indulging all pleasures and satisfying all desires drew to a close. Clavijo’s dismissal marked the end of the Kani-gil celebrations. The bright light he had shone on them faded into an autumnal blur. A decree came from the great Lord Temur. All the laws against improper and immodest behaviour, suspended for the festivities, applied as before. There was to be no more unlicensed hedonism and debauchery. The foreign ambassadors were dismissed. The empire was now on a war footing.
While the disconsolate Spaniards returned west, and the Tatar army made ready for war in the east, the feasting of autumn gave way to the sober chill of winter. As an observer and chronicler of those momentous days among the meadows of Samarkand, Clavijo is unrivalled. He was alternately astonished, enraptured, overawed, nervous and disapproving, and these feelings, and many more besides, inform his prose and make it by far the liveliest and most compelling account. But as winter descended and Temur made his final arrangements for the most dangerous war of his life, there is no one to match the furious, thundering style of Ibn Arabshah.
Soon [winter] with his storm-winds roared and raised over the world the tents of his clouds which went to and fro, and with his roaring shoulders trembled and all reptiles for fear of that cold fled to the depths of their Gehenna, fires ceased to blaze and subsided, lakes froze, leaves shaken fell from the branches and running rivers fell headlong from a height to lower places, lions hid in their dens and gazelles sheltered in their lairs. The world fled to God the Averter because of the winter’s prodigious vehemence; the face of the earth grew pale for fear of it, the cheeks of gardens and the graceful figures of the woods became dusty, all their beauty and vigour departed and the sprout of the earth dried up to be scattered by the winds.
The weddings, womanising and wassails were over. Already they seemed to belong to another era. Samarkand, summoning the courage born of many years’ experience, prepared to say farewell to her aged, ailing emperor. The hordes would march east.
* It is probably fair to say that Ambassador An, unlike his captor Temur, did not have a great gift for timing. Like many people who undergo unusual adventures, he wrote a book about them. Any hopes he might have entertained of his memoirs becoming a Chinese bestseller, however, were cruelly dashed. His collected poems, On Curious Things Seen on a Journey to the West, were not released during his lifetime. The volume was eventually published in the seventeenth century.
* ‘Fou-ma’ referred to Temur’s title of Gurgan, son-in-law of Qazan, the last Chaghatay khan of Mawarannahr, through his marriage to Saray Mulk-khanum, his Great Queen.
* An allusion to the vase of Jamsheed, the first king of Persia. Tradition has it that the turquoise vessel was unearthed from the ruins of Persepolis, the city he was said to have founded. His name means ‘vase of the sun’ in Farsi.
† It is hardly surprising that the court chronicles have little to say on the less than glorious subject of Temur’s relations with Peking. As the French historian Edgard Blochet, writing in 1910, put it: ‘Tous les historiens officiels des Timourides, sauf Abd er Razzak el-Samarkandi, qui ne voulait se plier à aucune complaisance pour ses souverains, ont fait le silence le plus absolu sur ces rapports de la terre d’Iran et du Céleste Empire, dans l’espérance que la postérité n’en retrouverait jamais l’humiliant souvenir.’
* Yazdi gave Temur particular credit for the restoration of the former capital of the Islamic world and home of the caliph. The speech he attributed to the emperor, though overblown, nevertheless reinforced the point that, unlike Genghis Khan, the Tatar was a creative force as well as a destroyer: ‘The war which the inhabitants of Baghdad have undertaken against us, having been obstinately prolonged by them, has been the cause of their state’s desolation, our vengeance having inflicted total ruin upon them. Nevertheless, if we consider that this is one of the principal cities in the Mohammedan world, that the knowledge of the law is derived from there, and that the doctors of other countries have drawn from it the most sacred elements of our religion, and the most useful learning; it would be a crime utterly to destroy this famous city: wherefore we design to reinstate it in its former flourishing condition, that it may again become the seat of justice, and the tribunal both of religion and laws.’
* Ibn Sina (980–1037), or Avicenna as he is known in the West, was the most famous Islamic physician, philosopher, mathematician, encyclopaedist and astronomer of his time. Born in the province of Bukhara, he served as a physician in the courts of local princes. His philosophical works borrowed from the teachings of Aristotle and neo-Platonism, and were a major influence on the development of thirteenth-century scholasticism. His Canon of Medicine, written when he was just twenty-one, drew on his personal understanding of the science together with Roman and Arab medicine, and remained the principal authority in medieval medical schools in both Europe and Asia.
* Visiting Bukhara at the close of the nineteenth century, the young George Curzon patted himself on the back for seeing the city before the inevitable intrusions of the modern secular world in the form of the advancing Russians: ‘For my own part, on leaving the city I could not help rejoicing at having seen it in what might be described as the twilight epoch of its glory. Were I to go again in later years it might be to find electric light in the highways. It might be to see window-panes in the houses and to meet with trousered figures in the streets. It might be to eat zakuska in a Russian restaurant and to sleep in a Russian hotel; to be ushered by a tchinovnik into the palace of the Ark, and to climb for fifty kopecks the Minor-i-Kalian [Kalon Minaret]. Civilisation may ride in the Devil’s Wagon but the Devil has a habit of exacting his toll. What could be said for a Bukhara without a Kosh Begi, a Divan Begi and an Inak – without its Mullahs and kalanders, its toksabas and its mirzabashi, its shabraques and chupans and khalats? Already the mist of ages is beginning to rise and to dissolve. The lineaments are losing their beautiful vague mystery of outline. It is something, in the short interval between the old order and the new, to have seen Bukhara while it may still be called the Noble, and before it has ceased to be the most interesting city in the world.’
Interesting it must have been, but nineteenth-century Bukhara also had its dark side. Discipline was enforced through terror. A strict nightly curfew was instituted. The population was locked inside the city walls. Murderers were decapitated. Some had their eyelids cut off and their eyes gouged out. The Hungarian philologist and explorer Arminius Vambery witnessed several men suffering this punishment in the early 1860s: ‘They looked like lambs in the hands of their executioners. Whilst several were led to the gallows or the block, I saw how, at a sign from the executioner, eight aged men placed themselves down on their backs upon the earth. They were then bound hand and foot, and the executioner gouged out their eyes in turn, kneeling to do so on the breast of each poor wretch; and after every operation he wiped his knife, dripping with blood, on the white beard of the hoary unfortunate. Ah! Cruel spectacle! As each fearful act was completed, the victim liberated from his bonds, groping around with his hands, sought to gain his feet! Some fell against each other, head against head; others sank powerless to the earth again, uttering low groans, the memory of which will make me shudder as long as I live.’ Women were covered up and hidden. Anyone who did not avert their eyes from the Amir’s passing harem received a heavy clubbing from his entourage of guards. Religious police stopped men in the streets to quiz them on some arcane detail of Islamic law. If they gave the wrong answer, they received another beating. The authorities searched houses at will looking for alcohol. Life was austere and brutal, unless you happened to be the Amir, in which case it was lavish and depraved. Forty dancing boys were kept to satisfy his passions.
* To this day lapis lazuli is mined at the foot of Koh-i-Bandakor, a twenty-one-thousand-foot peak in southern Badakhshan, Afghanistan.
* Clavijo’s unceremonious departure reflected the generally low esteem in which his embassy was held by Temur. It contrasted with the more dignified treatment accorded to the Egyptian embassy sent by Sultan Faraj, a greater power by far, and Islamic to boot. Unlike the Spaniards, the Egyptians left with many precious gifts, including a letter which measured 130 feet by five. It demanded that the young sultan, who had already submitted to Temur, send him Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad, alive and trussed, and the head of the Turkmen chief Qara Yusuf.