‘The Alcoran says the highest dignity man can attain to is that of making war in person against the enemies of his religion. Mahomet advises the same thing, according to the tradition of the mussulman doctors: wherefore the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of his conquests.’
SHARAF AD-DIN ALI YAZDI, Zafarnama
Shivering around the campfires, hugging themselves and rubbing their frozen hands together as the winds gusted through their ranks, two hundred thousand troops on the plains around Samarkand awaited the emperor’s order to march. They had come from near and far, from Mawarannahr and Mazandaran, from Asia Minor, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, from Persia and Iraq. Their adversary, the Ming emperor of China, together with his immense army, lay half a world away. To reach him they must first march three thousand miles and brave a winter that even now, only days after the departure of the Spanish ambassadors, looked like being one of the most ferocious in living memory.
Everything was ready. The emperor had made his speech to the great council of war. His sons and grandsons and the amirs of his army had listened to, and approved, his plans to attack China. They knew this campaign represented the summit of his ambition. With death awaiting him, perhaps Temur sincerely believed that this expedition against the infidels of China would atone for all the bloodletting against his brother Muslims. More likely he was moved by the opportunity to test his undefeated army against the only power on earth capable of opposing him. Added to those weighty motivations were the inevitable prospects for plunder. Temur knew that the treasures in Peking were greater than any he had ever set eyes upon.
Over the years, the moral justification for Temur’s campaigns, although fascinating to observe, had evolved into a formality. If the objects of his attentions happened to be Muslim, as they almost invariably were, then they had become bad Muslims. If they were infidels, so much the better. Temur would raise the banner and Crescent of Islam and convert them by the sword. His desire to safeguard his legacy for future generations meant that the court chronicles made great play of his explanations for waging war. And in Yazdi, Temur had the consummate apologist. Before the Tatar rose to power, the Persian wrote à propos of the China campaign, Asia had been ruled by a number of usurpers who were continually subjecting their peoples to wars. As a result there was no peace, prosperity or security. The world was like a human body infected by ‘some corrupt matter’, desperately in need of ‘strong medicine’. Although this treatment would cause ‘some inconveniences’, it would also remove the disease.
In the same manner, God, who was pleased to purge the world, made use of a medicine which was both sweet and bitter, to wit the clemency and the wrath of the incomparable Temur; and to that effect inspired in him an ambition to conquer all Asia and to expel the several tyrants thereof. He established peace and security in this part of the world so that a single man might carry a silver basin filled with gold from the east of Asia to the west. But yet he could not accomplish this great affair without bringing in some measure upon the places he conquered destruction, captivity and plunder, which are the concomitants of victory.
If the ethical dimension to Temur’s campaigns proved relatively straightforward to establish, the practical preparations for them, particularly this groundbreaking attempt to defeat China, were more demanding. First came the most important appointments. Khalil Sultan, Temur’s twenty-year-old grandson, was given command of the right wing. Another grandson, Sultan Husayn, was to lead the left. Next came the critical question of provisioning the army. The tovachis were ordered to supply each horseman with enough supplies – equipment and food – for ten men. Every soldier was also given two milking cows and ten goats. These were in addition to the thousands of she-camels which would provide milk and, in extremis, meat. Several thousand wagonloads of grain were to be sown on the army’s march to China. Survivors would be able to harvest the crop on their return journey to Samarkand. Preparations for cultivating the land along Temur’s eastern marches, and building fortresses and fortifications, had begun in earnest much earlier. The emperor himself, too infirm now to ride long hours in the saddle, would make the journey in a litter, followed by a truly imperial personal baggage caravan of five hundred wagons.
Though the astrologers, after consulting the heavens, had given their blessing to the timing of the expedition, the conditions beneath the stars could hardly have been less auspicious. ‘The violence of the cold was so great, that several men and horses perished in the road, some losing their hands and feet, others their ears and noses,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘The snows and rains were continually falling, the whole face of the heavens seeming to be covered but by one cloud, and the whole earth by one piece of snow.’ As the soldiers prepared for the longest, coldest and most dangerous march of their lives, many must have wondered whether the astrologers had fatally miscalculated. ‘Astronomers remark that at this time there was a conjunction of the three superior planets in Aquarius which was a presage of some great misfortune,’ Yazdi noted with hindsight.
Temur was not to be deterred by such considerations. Astrologers were useful only insofar as they supported enterprises he had already decided upon. In earlier days, he might have spent the winter resting and feasting in and around Samarkand, waiting for the campaigning season of spring. But with the Angel Izrail preparing to gather him up from the mortal world, he would not be delayed. Ensconced inside his litter and swathed in fur rugs, Temur issued his orders. The army would march against China.
Winter now fell upon them in all its fury. Arabshah, with his dramatist’s eye and a penchant for both shocking his readers and holding them in suspense, was the perfect writer to record these death-defying manoeuvres across Asia. His winter is a new protagonist, bursting into the chronicle like a gale, a supernatural force which has declared war against the world in general, and Temur in particular. ‘He intended by his coming that breath should freeze, noses and ears be frostbitten, legs fall off and heads be plucked off.’
With heads bowed against the driving winds and the horses coated in a blanket of snow, the ghostly army struggled on. The first halting-place came at Aqsulat, before the Sir Darya. Here, Khalil Sultan was sent to Tashkent with the right wing, while Sultan Husayn was ordered to take his force to Yasi. Both were to return with their men in spring. Temur would continue towards Peking.
At Aqsulat, the emperor attended to a number of family matters. His grandson, Khalil Sultan, commander of the right wing, had appalled the imperial family by marrying Shadi Mulk, a concubine who belonged to the harem of the late Amir Sayf ad-din. Temur, infuriated, had ordered the woman’s arrest, but Khalil Sultan had resisted his grandfather’s command and hidden her. When she was found, she was condemned to death. Had it not been for the intervention of another grandson, Pir Mohammed, the concubine-turned-princess would have been swiftly executed. When Temur reached Aqsulat, however, he discovered that Khalil Sultan had defied him by refusing to give her up. In a blazing passion, he ordered her execution for the second time. This time the empress Saray Mulk-khanum interceded on the woman’s behalf, moved by the grief of the prince she had helped raise. The two senior amirs, Shaykh Nur ad-din and Shah Malik, were persuaded to inform Temur that Shadi Mulk was pregnant with Khalil Sultan’s child. The ruse worked. The execution was cancelled. Shadi Mulk was entrusted to the care of another of Temur’s queens for the duration of her pregnancy. After she had given birth she would be guarded by eunuchs, whose main duty would be to ensure that Khalil Sultan would never lay eyes on her again.
With the matter settled, the march east resumed. The turbulence of relationships within the imperial family faded from memory as savage storms whipped in across the steppes. To protect his men from the onslaught, Temur had provided them with heavy tunics and warmer lined tents, but still the chill was excruciating. By day they rocked in the saddle to keep warm, gripping their horses for all they were worth, trying to absorb as much of the animals’ body heat as possible. By night, as temperatures plummeted and the stars seemed like freezing pinpricks assailing them from the heavens, they shrouded themselves in filthy woollen blankets, huddled around puny fires which quickly devoured the meagre fuel they had foraged.
When they reached the Sir Darya they found it frozen solid, like all the other rivers they had passed. The advantage this gave them in terms of avoiding detours and difficult fording-places was offset by the problem of finding drinking water. Men had to dig four or five feet into the ice to find it, said Yazdi. Their fingers, already swollen from scraping away snow on their hunts for scraps of wood to burn, bled freely into the ice. They were too cold to feel the pain.
Amid the snowstorms, the army’s stubborn progress continued. Temur was defying nature, wrote Arabshah, refusing to back down in the face of its merciless attack. ‘But winter dealt damage to him, breaking on him from the flanks with every wind kindled and raging against his army with all winds blowing aslant, most violent, and smote the shoot of the army with its intense cold … The winter poured round them with its violent storms and scattered against them its whirlwinds sprinkling hail and roused above them the lamentations of its tempests and discharged against them with full force the storms of its cold.’ It was a personal duel, said Arabshah, and so determined to win it was Temur that he ignored the sufferings of his soldiers and would not call a halt. Casualties were heavy, according to the Syrian, and fell indiscriminately on noble and poor alike. Notwithstanding these losses, Temur and his hordes pressed on towards Peking. Arabshah’s winter was unrelenting:
‘Mark my warning and by Allah the heat of piled coals shall not defend you from the frost of death nor shall fire blazing in the brazier!’ Then he measured over him from his store of snow what could split breastplates of iron and dissolve the joints of iron rings and sent down upon him and his army from the sky of frost some mountains of hail and in their wake discharged typhoons of his scraping winds, which filled their ears and the corners of their eyes and drove hail into their nostrils and thus drew out their breath to their gullets by discharging that barren wind, which made everything it touched putrid and crushed; and on all sides with the snow that fell from above the whole earth became like the plain of the last judgement or a sea which God forged out of silver. When the sun rose and the frost glittered, the sight was wonderful, the sky of Turkish gems and the earth of crystal, specks of gold filling the space between.
Winter’s attack was so intense that even the sun trembled and froze with cold. When a man spat, his phlegm hit the ground as an ice-ball. When he breathed, his breath froze on his beard and moustache.
In mid-January the army reached Otrar in Kazakhstan. Here Temur and his most senior amirs were lodged in the palace of Amir Birdi Beg, the local governor. Scouts were sent out to find whether the way ahead was passable in these treacherous conditions. They returned, shaking their heads solemnly, with reports that everywhere they had travelled the snow lay as deep as two spears. The horses, camels and wagons would not be able to force a way through. At this time an embassy arrived from the downtrodden Tokhtamish, who since his defeat at Temur’s hands in 1395 had wandered through the Kipchak desert like a vagabond, wrote Yazdi. Despite the history between the two men, Temur gave the envoys a magnificent reception. Tokhtamish’s message was conciliatory and apologetic. He had deserved every misfortune which had befallen him, he said. Now he had no option left but to throw himself at the emperor’s feet, begging forgiveness and promising to serve Temur in any way possible. In reply, the Tatar wrote that after his return from China he would help reinstall Tokhtamish on his throne.
While the bitter storms raged around Otrar, the weakening emperor was suddenly stricken with a cold. Although inside his litter he had been better protected from the dreadful winter than his men, he was far older than most of those around him, and he was also recovering from the sickness that had troubled him while Clavijo was in Samarkand. Hot drinks, laced with drugs and spices, were prepared and fires lit throughout the palace to ward off the cold. Still the symptoms refused to go away. The brilliant court physician Maulana Fadl of Tabriz, one of the most celebrated doctors in Asia, prescribed a number of treatments. One of them, bizarrely, involved covering the emperor’s stomach and chest with ice. All waited nervously for Temur’s improvement.
The doctor’s efforts did not have the desired effect. The cold became a fever. The wrinkled emperor twisted and turned in his bed, shivering with cold one minute, bathed in sweat the next. In his burning hallucinations he heard the houris call down to him, urging him to repent before he faced his maker. He knew his end was near. Summoning his wives and most senior amirs to hear his last wishes, his voice dropped until it was almost inaudible.
I know my soul is about to leave my body and I am to be taken to the throne of God who gives life, and takes it away. I beg you shed no tears at my death. Rather than tearing your clothes and running around like madmen, pray to God to have mercy on me. Say Allahu akbar, God is great, and recite the Fatiha to comfort my soul.*Since God enabled me to give laws to Iran and Turan so that throughout those kingdoms the great do not oppress the poor, I hope he will forgive my sins, which are without number … I declare Pir Mohammed, son of Jahangir, my sole heir and lawful successor to my throne. He must possess the throne of Samarkand with absolute sovereignty and independence so that he can administer the business of empire, the army, and all the countries and cities under his jurisdiction. I command you all to obey him and sacrifice your lives to maintain his authority so that the world will not fall into disorder and that the fruits of my labours over so many years are not lost. If you remain united, no one will dare oppose you, nor offer the slightest challenge in executing my last wishes.
He ordered his amirs, lords and army commanders to come before him and swear to observe these instructions. The amirs Shaykh Nur ad-din and Shah Malik pledged their eternal obedience, and were unable to hold back the tears. They offered to write to Khalil Sultan, summoning him to Otrar so he could hear his grandfather’s dying wishes in person. But Temur, barely able to move or talk, shook his head. There was no time for that. ‘This is the last audience you will have of me. I have no other desire than to see Prince Shahrukh, but that is impossible. God will not have it.’ On hearing these words, the princes and ladies of the court, standing silently in the emperor’s antechamber, started sobbing. Temur turned to them for the last time. He looked weak and broken, but his eyes burned with their customary fire.
Remember to do everything I have told you to keep peace and public order. Always keep yourselves informed about the affairs of your subjects. Be valiant and keep your sword in your hand with courage that like me you may enjoy a long reign and a vast empire. I have purged Iran and Turan of their enemies and disturbers of the peace and I have brought them justice and prosperity. If you follow my last wishes and make justice the guide of all your actions, the empire will long remain in your hands. But if discord and disunity creep in, ill fortune awaits you. Enemies will start wars which will be difficult to end and irreparable damage will befall the state and religion.
After these words, the fever worsened. Outside the emperor’s chamber imams were reciting from the Koran. A priest stood at the bottom of his bed reading verses affirming the unity of God. At about 8 o’clock Temur, mindful of the Prophet’s promise that he whose last words were ‘La ilaha illa’llah, there is no god but God’ would enter heaven, declared his faith aloud. Then, said Yazdi, ‘he gave his soul to the angel Izrail, who called him in these words: “O hopeful spirit, return to your Lord with resignation. We belong to God and to God must we return.”’*
For a moment there was silence inside the bedchamber. Outside, all that could be heard was the wind tearing at the palace walls in that cold, black night deep in the Asian steppe. Candles threw a veil of gold over Temur’s pale features. Then the princes and the ladies, the amirs and the great lords of the court, the doctors and the attendants, all gave in to their grief and wept profusely. The emperor, centre of their universe, was dead.
* The fatiha is the opening sura of the Koran:
In the Name of God,
The Compassionate,
The Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe,
The Compassionate, the Merciful,
Sovereign of the Day of Judgement!
You alone we worship, and to You alone
we turn for help.
Guide us to the straight path,
The path of those whom You have favoured,
Not of those who have incurred Your wrath,
Nor of those who have gone astray.
* Arabshah, of course, recorded Temur’s last hours rather differently. Even at the end, he could not restrain his violent dislike for the man who had sacked and destroyed his native city, Damascus. The chapter in which Temur dies is headed: ‘How that Proud Tyrant was Broken and Borne to the House of Destruction, Where he had his Constant Seat in the Lowest Pit of Hell’. The prose is as apocalyptic and unforgiving as ever: ‘His heart was crushed and neither his wealth nor his children availed him anything and he began to vomit blood and bite his hands with grief and penitence … And the butler of death gave him to drink a bitter cup and soon he believed that which he had resolutely denied, but his faith did not help him, after he had seen damnation; and he begged for assistance but none was found; and it was said to him: “Depart, O impure soul, who were in an impure body, depart vile, wicked sinner and delight in boiling water, fetid blood and the company of sinners.” But if one saw him, he coughed like a camel which is strangled, his colour was almost quenched and his cheeks foamed like a camel dragged backwards with the rein; and if one saw the angels that tormented him, they showed the joy with which they threaten the wicked, to lay waste their homes and utterly destroy the whole memory of them … Then they brought garments of hair from Hell and drew forth his soul like a spit from a soaked fleece and he was carried to the cursing and punishment of God, remaining in torment and God’s infernal damnation.’