‘Our hearts are torn with grief, for the most powerful of emperors, the soul of the world, is dead; and already ignorant youths whom he raised from the lowest state to the highest honours have become traitors to him. Forgetting the obligations they owe him, they have disobeyed his orders and violated their oaths. How can we dissemble our grief at so terrible a misfortune? An emperor who has made the kings of the earth to serve at his gate, and has indeed earned the name of conqueror, no sooner leaves us than his will is set aside. Slaves have become the enemies of their benefactor. Where is their faith? If rocks had hearts they would mourn. Why are not stones rained down from Heaven to punish these ungrateful wretches? As for us, God willing, we shall not forget our master’s wishes; we shall carry out his will, and obey the young princes his grandchildren.’
Temur’s amirs, speaking after his death.
HAROLD LAMB, Tamerlane the Earth Shaker
‘It is a common observation that the grandeur of princes is known by the monuments which remain of them after their death.’
SHARAF AD-DIN ALI YAZDI, Zafarnama
Temur’s blood had hardly cooled when the internecine fighting he had so eloquently warned against on his deathbed exploded. Rarely had the fortunes of an empire depended so entirely on one man being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pir Mohammed, the designated heir, was far away to the south in his territories of northern India. The ambitious Khalil Sultan, however, was wintering with his army in Tashkent, from where it was a march of just 160 miles south-west to Samarkand, seat of the empire. The scramble for power began.
Temur’s grandson Sultan Husayn was the first to make his bid. After a lightning attempt to take the throne failed, he took refuge with Shahrukh, who swiftly executed him. Hurrying back to the capital from Otrar, the loyal amirs Shah Malik and Shaykh Nur ad-din, intending to safeguard the succession for Pir Mohammed, found themselves barred at the gates. The governor of Samarkand, already co-opted by Khalil Sultan, the young pretender to the throne, refused them entry. In the short term, the simple facts of geography proved conclusive. Khalil Sultan, nearest to the capital when his grandfather died, seized power. In 1406, the rightful heir gathered his forces and marched north at the head of an army to give battle. He was roundly defeated by Khalil Sultan. A year later, Pir Mohammed was murdered in a coup led by his most trusted amir.
Khalil Sultan’s reign was brief. He had risen to power with the support of an army drawn largely from the populations outside Mawarannahr. These men did not have a direct interest in what was essentially one family’s fight for power, nor were they instinctively bound to their commander. Like many of the tribes and peoples Temur had won to his cause during his lifetime, they had to be bought. Over the years such loyalty had been purchased by distributing the prizes of the battlefield, the plundered palaces and the looted treasuries of Asia among the soldiers who had given him his victories. The death of Temur fundamentally altered that equation. Immersed in the vicissitudes of his domestic position, Khalil Sultan was unable to venture beyond his borders to continue the conquests on which his grandfather’s empire had depended. For four years he emptied the coffers of Samarkand for his followers, encouraged by the ambitious woman he had married. Shadi Mulk had enjoyed a meteoric rise. Rescued from the harem, she had become first a princess and now, the summit of her dreams, empress. Under her influence, the amirs fell from favour one by one until Khalil Sultan relied exclusively on his beautiful wife for advice on affairs of state. ‘This was the height of folly and madness,’ Arabshah sneered, ‘for how could he be happy, who suffers his wife to rule him?’
By 1409, there was little left to give away. Khalil Sultan’s followers, disappointed with the end of his largesse, melted away to where their prospects were more auspicious. Khalil Sultan took himself and his depleted forces to his uncle, Shahrukh, who welcomed his nephew with open arms, only to poison him. Shadi Mulk, said Arabshah, was devastated. ‘Taking a dagger, she plunged it into her throat and leant upon it with such force that it pierced her head and she burnt with her fire all that beheld her, then both were buried in one tomb.’
Shahrukh, having put down a series of bubbling rebellions in his province of Khorasan, swept in and took power. He transferred his capital to Herat, leaving Samarkand in the hands of his gifted son, Ulugh Beg. The next forty years were the golden age of Temurid civilisation. The heart of the empire remained intact, and after decades of war began to luxuriate in the benefits of peace. Shahrukh and his wife Gawhar Shad were prolific patrons of the arts and literature, presiding over an era in which Temurid culture soared to its apogee. In Samarkand, the astronomer king immersed himself in mathematics, medicine and music. A lover of poetry like his father, he was also a devoted student of history, geography, philosophy and theology. But he was noted above all for the observatory he constructed and the astronomical tables he devised, still in use at the time England appointed its first Astronomer-Royal in the seventeenth century. Magnificent monuments continued to rise, their minarets climbing to the heavens. The Registan assumed greater grandeur with the construction of a new madrassah which celebrated the constellations and paid tribute to the achievements of the astronomer king. As a chronicler put it: ‘From the time of Adam until this day, no age, period, cycle or moment can be indicated in which people enjoyed such peace and tranquillity.’
These were the last flourishes of the vast empire Temur had wrested from nothing. By the middle of the fifteenth century, both Shahrukh and Ulugh Beg were dead. After thirty-eight years of supremely enlightened government, the astronomer king was murdered by his own son. Within a century of the emperor’s death, the Temurid empire had ceased to exist. Temur’s prophetic warning against family divisions had gone unheeded. The greatest gifts it bequeathed – the blue-domed mosques and madrassahs, the dazzling minarets, the exquisite parks and palaces – lay scattered across Asia like funerary monuments to a lost civilisation. Only in the Mughal empire, founded across the roof of the world in India by Babur, Temur’s great-great-great-grandson and most illustrious descendant, did echoes of its splendour survive.
On a late autumn evening, my last in Central Asia, I bade farewell to Temur. With its 120-foot blue-ribbed dome visible across the city, flashing in the falling sun like the brightest beacon, flanked by two slender minarets, the Gur Amir mausoleum is the finest in Samarkand and the most inspired piece of Temurid architecture the world ever saw. Built by the emperor to honour his cherished grandson Mohammed Sultan, it is the final resting place of the Conqueror of the World, a ‘magnificent sepulchre’ according to that tireless sycophant Yazdi. ‘The cincture of the dome was of marble set off with gold and azure. Within it was dug a vault in which to lay the prince’s body, and a charming garden was made around it on the ruins of some houses.’ Although Temur had made plans to be buried in Shakhrisabz, his family home and the first seat of his power, Khalil Sultan interred him here, embalmed with camphor, musk and rosewater. It was one of the wayward prince’s inaugural acts on taking control of the city.
‘Then first he gave heed to the burying of his grandfather and performing his obsequies and placing him in the tomb,’ recorded Arabshah.
Therefore he had him laid in a coffin of ebony, which the chief men bore on their heads. Kings followed his body and soldiers with faces cast down, clad in black, and with them many Amirs and ministers, and they buried him in the same place in which they had buried Mohammed Sultan, his grandson, near the place called Ruh-Abad, which is well known, where he lay on supports in an open vault; and he paid him due funeral rites, ordering readings of the Koran from beginning to end and in portions and prayer and giving of alms, food and sweetmeats, and set a dome over the tomb and discharged his debt to him and scattered over his tomb his garments of silk and hung from the walls his weapons and equipment, which were all adorned with gems and gold and embroidered and decked with so much art that even the meanest of them equalled the income of a country and one grain from the heap of those gems was beyond price. He also hung star-candles of gold and silver in the sky of the ceilings and spread over the couch of the tomb a coverlet of silk and embroidery up to its sides and borders. Of the candles one was of gold, weighing four thousand sesquidrachms, which make according to the weights of Samarkand one pound, and ten according to those of Damascus.
Then he appointed for his tomb readers of the Koran and servants and placed at the college janitors and managers, to whom he generously assigned pay for each day, year and month. A little later he transferred his body to a coffin of steel made by a man of Shiraz, a most skilled master of his art, and buried him in the well-known tomb, where vows are made to him and petitions offered and prayers said. And when kings pass it, they prostrate themselves to show honour and often dismount from their beasts to honour him and do reverence.
Children scampered about outside the mausoleum. The distant sounds of family life and the aromatic smell of plov filtered through the dusk, borne on a light breeze that played around the ankles. Across the car park, sitting on a throne and staring towards the Registan, was the monumental statue of Temur where newlywed couples celebrate their marriages every weekend. Through the monumental entrance portal, a blaze of blue with an inset arch tapering into an ornate stalactite muqarnas, the courtyard was completely empty. Beyond another, less imposing, portal, the fluted dome rose skyward. Built on an octagonal plan by a celebrated architect from Isfahan – ‘This is the work of the weak slave of God, Mohammed ibn Mahmoud Isfahani,’ reads an inscription – the mausoleum is a triumph of scale, style and simplicity, a noble building which celebrates the life of a prince, the sway of a dynasty and the omnipotence of God. Beneath the textured surface of the dome, shining with tiles of navy blue, turquoise, yellow and green, runs the inscription, in huge Kufic script ten feet high, ‘God is Immortal’. Moved by the scale of the cupola, a poet had declared: ‘Should the sky disappear, the dome will replace it.’
I pressed on towards the heart of the mausoleum, momentarily blinded by the cool, dark interior as I stepped out of the glare. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I picked my way along the vaulted eastern gallery – added by Ulugh Beg in the 1420s – which led to a cavernous square chamber, each side thirty feet long, directly beneath the dome. The interior decoration was astoundingly rich, faded in places, restored to bolder colours in others. Hexagonal tiles of onyx lined the lower section of the walls, a serene dado topped with a shallow marble cornice. Above the onyx, Koranic inscriptions encircled the chamber, traced in gold and carved from jasper. Each of the four walls was inset with a tall bay, whose upper reaches seemed to cascade down in papier-mâché stalactites painted gold and blue. Beyond these vaults, at neck-craning height, amber light streamed in from marble lattice windows, illuminating the golden furnace of the inner dome above, resplendent amid geometric panels of iridescent stars.
The crowning glory of the mausoleum looked down onto seven cenotaphs gathered in the centre of the chamber behind an ornate marble rail. These are the tombs of the leading lights of the Temurid dynasty: Mohammed Sultan, the valiant prince in whose honour the mausoleum had been built; Ulugh Beg, the polymath astronomer king; his father Shahrukh, the wise patron of the arts; Miranshah, the emperor’s most troublesome son. Raised on a marble plinth in the centre of the cenotaphs lies Temur’s tomb, a slab of the darkest jade, black to the eye and six feet long, once the largest piece of the stone in the world. Cracked in the middle, intricately engraved on the top and sides, it was brought to Samarkand by Ulugh Beg in 1425 to adorn the tomb of his grandfather. The damage is supposed to have occurred in 1740, when the Persian invader Nadir Shah attempted to carry off the treasure without success. More modestly engraved than the tombs surrounding it, the slab of jade lies next to another sepulchre, belonging to Shaykh Sayid Baraka. The emperor’s instructions to be buried at the feet of his spiritual and religious mentor were honoured to the letter.
Even in death Temur has managed to intertwine the two conflicting strands of his identity. Etched across the jade is a long inscription detailing – and mythologising – his genealogy. Several generations beyond his father, Taraghay Barlas, he establishes the fictitious connection with Genghis Khan. On and on the list of names continues until it reaches his last paternal ancestor. ‘And no father was known to this glorious man but his mother was Alanquva,’ it reads. ‘It is said that her character was righteous and chaste, and that she was not an adulteress. She conceived him through a light which came into her from the upper part of a door and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man. And it said that it was one of the sons of the Commander of the Faithful, Ali son of Abu Talib.’ This is a masterpiece of propaganda. In an instant Temur has become the descendant of both Genghis Khan and the Caliph Ali, uniting the traditions of the Mongols with the heritage of Islam.
My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of an elderly caretaker. He was poorly dressed, with a tatty skullcap and a ragged suit. Two bright eyes peered at me from a wrinkled face. He pointed at his watch, told me the mausoleum was closing, and started turning off the lights. Then, as he was about to leave, beckoning for me to follow, he paused.
‘I show you real grave of Amir Temur. Two dollars.’
His eyes, wide with excitement, suggested that he alone held the key to a forbidden world. I nodded quickly. The tombstones I had seen on ground level were merely decorative. I knew from Yazdi’s chronicle that somewhere underground a vault existed where Temur and his princes were buried, but I had been told this area was closed to visitors.
Together we made our way down a hidden flight of stairs. The elderly guide fished out a key from a pocket, opened a heavy door, and we stepped into a glacial crypt. It was pitch black. There was nothing to see. Then he flicked a switch and the lights revealed a plain vault of brick and stone.
Temur’s burial place was a simple slab of carved stone engraved with Koranic inscriptions. After the pomp and colour of the mausoleum above, the drab, dark chamber was a sombre sight. This was the grave of the man who had blazed across Asia like a comet across the heavens. For a few years his descendants had watched over the glowing embers falling through the sky until the Temurid empire and dynasty had crashed to earth, extinguished altogether. In the West Temur has been all but forgotten. Those who know his name perhaps remember the fire and brimstone of Marlowe’s play about a tyrant who styled himself ‘the Scourge and Wrath of God/The only fear and terror of the world’. But to all but a few, the greatest Islamic empire-builder in history, the man who joined Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan in the trio of the world’s greatest conquerors, remains little more than that: a name. The city he had built so brilliantly and decorated so lovingly, once the envy of the world, lies in a neglected southern outpost of the old Soviet empire. Only here does his memory burn brightly. Above the door was a short inscription.
This is the resting place of the illustrious and merciful monarch, the most great Sultan, the most mighty warrior, Lord Temur, Conqueror of the World.