‘The world is like an ocean and in the ocean is a pearl, and the pearl is Herat.’
ANCIENT PERSIAN PROVERB
‘In Herat if you stretch out your feet you are sure to kick a poet.’
ALI SHER NAWAI
Five hundred miles south-west of Samarkand, a forest of slim minarets rose from the drab desert plain. Herat was, with Merv, Balkh and Nishapur, one of the four great capitals of Khorasan, the Country of the Rising Sun.* Straddling a branch of one of Asia’s busiest trade routes, it was a city of antiquity, culture and riches. The Herat river, snaking down from the Hindu Kush mountains of central Afghanistan, wended its way westwards past the throng of mosques and minarets before turning north and petering out in the sands of the Qara Kum desert. Little rain fell in this part of the world, and irrigation was provided by an ancient network of canals. East of the city, the Paropamisus range, an extension of the Hindu Kush, was virtually impassable. In practical terms this meant that Herat lay on the first route running north and south through the mountains west of Kabul.
The city’s fortifications reflected its strategic location. The walls were nine thousand paces in circuit, according to Hamd Allah Mustawfi al Qazwini, the fourteenth-century geographer and historian, and around them stretched a suburban girdle of eighteen villages. The powerfully reinforced citadel on a hilltop two leagues north of the city offered further protection from attack. The city reached its apogee in the twelfth century, al Qazwini wrote, when there were twelve thousand shops in the markets, six thousand hot baths and 659 colleges. The population was 444,000.* Apart from the dervish convent, a Zoroastrian fire temple and numerous caravanserais, the many mills ‘turned by wind, not by water’ particularly impressed him.
More impressive still were Herat’s many treasures, admired and envied throughout the region. Most famous were the textiles – fabulous silks, tapestries, hangings, cottons, cushions, cloaks and carpets. The markets thronged with dealers selling metalwork and precious stones – gold, silver, rubies, turquoise, lapis lazuli – and fruit – melons, grapes, pomegranates, apricots and apples. Slaves could be found in plenty. The indefatigable traveller Ibn Battutah found Heratis ‘religious, sincere and chaste’ when he visited in the early 1330s. It was, he reported, ‘the largest inhabited city in Khorasan’, a centre of commerce and culture at a time when Merv and Balkh still lay in ruins after the Mongol invasion of 1221.
In fact, Herat was one of the finest cities in the empire which had been carved out by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu, the Buddhist founder of the Ilkhanid dynasty, in Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria during the 1250s, the high point of Mongol expansion. As their name, Ilkhans (‘subordinate khans’), suggested, they owed their authority to the Great Khans in Mongolia and China until the close of the thirteenth century.
Moving west from Mongolia at the behest of his brother, Great Khan Mönke, in 1253, Hulagu was given the task of destroying two powerful enemies, both of them Muslim. First were the Ismailis, a radical Shi’ite sect also known as the Assassins, who had established themselves in mountain strongholds south of the Caspian, centred in Alamut, ‘The Eagle’s Nest’. Mönke’s hostility to the Ismailis, according to the missionary William of Rubruck, who was sent to Karakorum by Louis IX of France, derived from the unsuccessful attempt by four hundred Assassins in disguise to kill him in his imperial capital. There is more than a whiff of revenge about Hulagu’s subsequent campaign during 1256 and 1257, in which he utterly destroyed the Ismailis, who had terrorised Persia’s Sunni leaders for almost two centuries, with consummate ease. As Gibbon dryly remarked, the Mongols’ crushing of the Ismailis was a ‘service to mankind’.
The second enemy Hulagu was sent to defeat was the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, which for five centuries had been the beating heart of Sunni Islam. He arrived before the walls of the venerable city in 1258. After it refused to surrender, it was besieged, stormed and sacked. The numbers of those killed in the onslaught range from Hulagu’s estimate of two hundred thousand to the eight hundred thousand suggested by al Qazwini. Either way, the bloodshed was devastating. When it finally came, the caliph’s surrender was too late. Though it was the Mongols’ custom not to shed the blood of noble enemies, as the caliph discovered to his cost, this did not mean they were spared. The distinguished leader of the Sunni Islamic world was wrapped up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses.
Fresh from this impromptu execution, in 1260 Hulagu continued west into Syria, then ruled by the Ayubid dynasty founded by Saladin the previous century. The ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo quickly fell, and the Crusader authorities of Antioch and Tripoli lost little time in kneeling before the Mongol invaders. But Syria was destined to remain beyond the boundaries of the Hulagid empire. Once again the momentous death of the Great Khan was to shape world history, as that of Ogedey in 1241 had spared Europe the horrors of the Mongol advance. Hulagu learnt of his brother Mönke’s demise in the same year he conquered Syria. The news prompted the inevitable struggle for succession to the Mongol throne between his brothers, and Hulagu withdrew from Syria, leaving only a nominal force behind. Later in 1260, a Mamluk army defeated the Mongols at the famous battle of Ain Jalut in Galilee, a date which in retrospect looks like the pinnacle of Mongol conquest. Though there were repeated attempts to retake Syria, the Ilkhanid territories had by this time reached their limits. To the west, their lands ranged as far as the Euphrates, to the north up to the Caucasus mountains running from the Black Sea to the Caspian, with the Oxus and Punjab rivers marking their easternmost boundaries. Hulagu reigned until his death in 1265, but the Ilkhanid dynasty, a hybrid of Buddhist, Christian and latterly Islamic leaders, lasted until the 1350s (ever since Ghazan’s renunciation of Buddhism in favour of Islam in 1295, Persia has been governed by a Muslim ruler).
In sum, Mongol rule was an exceptionally traumatic experience for Persia. According to al Qazwini, a thousand years would not have been enough to repair the damage done by Genghis’s initial massacres. Juvayni, one of the most distinguished official historians of the Mongol period, wrote that ‘every town and every village’ had fallen victim to repeated pillage and slaughter so severe that the population would never reach even 10 per cent of its former total again. The civilian population of cities such as Merv, Balkh, Nishapur, Hamadan, Tus, Ray, Qazwin, and Herat were systematically put to the sword. In many areas of Persia agriculture was obliterated as peasants fled their land, irrigation channels fell into ruin and the desert reclaimed the once fertile land. This process was only accelerated with the arrival of nomadic Mongol hordes who gravitated towards the best lands as pasturage for their animals.
Historians have judged Ilkhanid rule as a time of cultural efflorescence, when communications between East and West improved through increased trade. Religious barriers were similarly taken down with the steady assimilation of the Mongols – led by their rulers – into the Islamic fold. From this time Persia started to replace Arabic as the language of high culture. Mongol rule also witnessed the birth of official histories of Persia with the writings of Rashid ad-din, chief minister of the Ilkhanate for two decades, Juvayni and Wassaf. With these strengthening cultural cross-currents, Chinese landscape painting began to influence the Persian school of miniaturists, which now embarked on its golden age.
Such cultural benefits to Persia of Mongol rule were all very well. But, as David Morgan concluded in a recent study of medieval Persia: ‘We may justly have our doubts over how impressed the Persian peasants, as they did their best to avoid the Mongol tax-collectors, would have been by developments in miniature painting. For Persia, the Mongol period was a disaster on a grand and unparalleled scale.’ It is difficult to disagree.
As for Herat, the city proved remarkably resilient, as evidenced by its renewed prosperity by the time of Temur’s campaign. This despite the fact that it had been one of the centres worst affected by the Mongol depredations. Infuriated by an uprising of Heratis after the city had surrendered in 1221, Genghis had issued orders to his general Aljigidey to return and spare no one. Saifi, the fourteenth-century historian of Herat, recorded his command: ‘The dead have come to life again. This time you must cut the people’s heads off. You must execute the whole population of Herat.’ For a week Aljigidey cut down the inhabitants until none remained. Several days later, after he had withdrawn, he despatched a force of two thousand horsemen back to the city to make sure anyone who had gone into hiding was put to death. Another two thousand were killed. Only sixteen survived the final slaughter, Saifi wrote. Such was the devastation about them that they were forced to eat the corpses of men and animals. For four years they found food only by raiding occasional caravans.
With the disintegration of the Ilkhanid dynasty in 1335, Persia fell victim to vicious infighting once more, crumbling into competing kingdoms for the most part disputed by rival princes of the powerful Muzaffarid family. Their control was by no means absolute, however, as other dynasties reasserted themselves in the absence of the Mongols. In Baghdad, the Jalayirid clan held sway, while in Sabzawar (in the north-eastern Iranian province of Khorasan) the Sarbadars clung on to power.
Three hundred miles to the south-east, the city of Herat remained under the control of Malik Ghiyas ad-din Pir Ali, leader of the Kart dynasty which had governed the city and much of modern Afghanistan as vassals of the Mongols since the middle of the thirteenth century. Great patrons of literature and the arts, lavish builders of mosques and fine public buildings, the Karts were largely responsible for creating the wealth and opulence of the city amid the ruins of the Mongol conquests.
This, then, was the city Temur now resolved to conquer.
Galloping across the steppe, fording rivers and threading his way through rocky passes, Temur’s envoy delivered a portentous summons to Ghiyas ad-din Pir Ali in 1379. The letter requested his attendance at one of the Tatar’s qurultays, a formal notification that Temur now regarded the head of the Kart dynasty as a vassal. This would come to be a typical device prior to the invasion of new lands, invariably giving him the casus belli he was looking for.
It was an ominous, as well as a galling, message to receive. In former, less auspicious times as a roving mercenary, Temur had been taken into the service of Ghiyas ad-din’s father, Malik Muizz ad-din Husayn. When he died, Ghiyas ad-din had continued the cordial relations, marrying off his eldest son to Temur’s niece. Now he was being asked to acknowledge the authority of the man who only a few years before had been his father’s liege. Stalling for time, he replied that he would freely come to Samarkand, and only required an escort to guide him. Temur’s trusted amir Sayf ad-din Nukuz duly set out to accompany him to Mawarannahr, but arrived instead to discover the ruler of Herat fortifying his walls in preparation for the defence of his city. He had no intention of giving up his kingdom.
Temur’s course was set. The tovachis sprang into action, assembling an army for the first campaign outside its own provinces. Each soldier’s equipment was inspected by his commanding officer, who reported in turn to his superior. The amirs, gorgeously turned out in their bright armour, finely embossed shields, long lances and bows, stood out from the dark ranks of their tumans, the bodies of ten thousand soldiers. Preparations were meticulous, for like Genghis, Temur planned to the last detail. Spies were sent ahead to scout the lie of the land and assess the strength of enemy lines. Provender was packed and loaded for the horses. Women and families collected their belongings for the weeks and months that lay ahead. Supplies were checked and double-checked until, at last, the army was ready to march. Then the amirs lifted their horse-tail standards and the trumpets and kettle-drums sounded the deafening call to war. The Three-Year Campaign was under way.
South-west the army rode to the garrison town of Fushanj, reinforced to guard the approach to Herat. Under all-out assault, it fell as soon as the hordes had breached its defences through an aqueduct. The garrison was cut down where it stood. Blood ran through the streets.
Learning of the disastrous news, Ghiyas ad-din retreated behind his city walls, much to the contempt of Arabshah. ‘He shut himself in the fortress, thinking that in this way he would be inaccessible – because of the weakness of his counsel and the stupidity and folly which were his ruin,’ the Syrian wrote. The city was under siege. Frantically, he tried to muster a defence but the inhabitants of Herat, having heard of the precipitate collapse of Fushanj and the slaughter of its garrison, were in no mood to take on Temur. He had ‘encircled the perimeter of the city and its suburbs like the bezel around the stone of a ring, like the halo around the moon, and like flies on sugar’, and was not going to release his grip until his demands had been met. A master of psychological warfare, the Tatar offered an incentive to the besieged by letting it be known that all those who refused to fight him would be spared. The proposal was eagerly accepted from within the walls. Only by surrendering promptly would their expensive properties be safeguarded, the Heratis reasoned. Resistance against the Tatar’s superior forces was futile. It would only be met by the sword and the flame. Swayed by these considerations and mindful of the marauding hordes who were already undermining his walls, the Kart prince capitulated. Accompanied by the notables of Herat, he offered his submission in a humiliating public ceremony. ‘Temur pardoned him and caressed him,’ wrote Yazdi, ‘gave him a belt of honour, and a belt set with precious stones, and then dismissed him.’ The city paid for the lives of its inhabitants with a punitive ransom.
The vast treasures of Herat now belonged to Temur. A carefully established system, intended to minimise losses to his treasury, specified precisely how they were to be taken. It was generally observed with the same rigorous discipline which characterised the command of his armies. First, all the gates in the city walls bar one were sealed – on occasions they were even walled up – to prevent both premature plundering by his soldiers and the smuggling away of portable property by the citizens. Once this had been completed, the torturers and the tax collectors marched in, confiscating property, searching houses, extracting confessions from those suspected of having hidden wealth or knowing other families who had yet to detail their belongings. All goods surrendered were taken to collection centres, where they were registered by the amirs, among whom the ransom money was distributed. The houses of the local aristocracy, which had contributed most of this payment, were generally spared. A military cordon was thrown around their neighbourhood. Only when Temur’s officials had completed their requisitions were his soldiers allowed to plunder. If they acted prematurely and were caught in the act, they paid with their lives. Like Genghis, Temur preferred to take a city by ransom, not out of any reticence about shedding the blood of innocents, but from purely economic considerations. Seizing it by force inevitably led to outbreaks of unlicensed plunder and a sharp loss of revenue.
In the case of Herat, the massive operation to extract anything and everything of value went smoothly, and the coffers of the most opulent metropolis in Khorasan were opened to reveal wonderful riches. ‘It is remarkable that there were in this city all sorts of treasures, as silver money, unpolished precious stones, the richest thrones, crowns of gold, silver vessels, gold and silver brocades, and curiosities of all kinds,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘The soldiers, according to the imperial order, carried away all these riches upon camels.’ The monumental iron-clad Darvazaya Malik, the King’s Gate of Herat, adorned with sculptures and inscriptions, was cut down and taken to Shakhrisabz. Just as their counterparts in Urganch had been taken prisoner after that city’s fall, the intellectuals and artisans of Herat – the scholars and churchmen, artists and craftsmen – were rounded up and sent to Samarkand, the second in a lifelong series of forced expulsions intended to glorify Temur’s capital with the intellectual and artistic fruits of their labour. Ghiyas ad-din, the defeated Kart prince, was permitted to remain in office as Temur’s vassal. Determined that neither he nor the city should ever resist him again, Temur had the defensive walls pulled down.*
Herat had fallen to him with hardly a murmur. A city long revered by the poets, prosperous from trade and rich in culture, had slipped into the net of his empire so easily it must have given Temur pause for thought. Having harnessed the loyalties of the competing tribes of the Chaghatay ulus, he had rewarded them with the plunder of the fallen city, establishing his leadership and expanding his territorial sway in the process. It was the beginning of a long-standing equation, in which the confederation of steppe tribes exchanged their loyalty and military service in return for the fruits of Temur’s campaigns. Once united, the soldiers offered Temur the opportunity to win new lands by the sword. He offered them the chance to enrich themselves and to win distinction and lucrative promotion on the battlefield. This coalescence of interests was the central pillar sustaining Temur’s long career. Herat offered other lessons, too. If he could achieve such success beyond his borders without even engaging his men in battle, what greater trophies awaited when they were put to the test? There was time to contemplate this question during the hard winter months that followed, when the Amu Darya and Sir Darya rivers turned to ice and Temur and his men encamped in the snowy pastures around Bukhara.
Spring, the beginning of the campaigning season, would bring the answers. The push west, scarcely started, would continue. Herat was no isolated event. In the words of the German historian H.R. Roemer, it was instead ‘the prelude to one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of Iran’.
The forest of minarets which greeted the fourteenth-century visitor to Herat is no more. Steadily cut back over the centuries, it has dwindled until only the smallest copse remains. From afar, the tapering towers loom from the mountain-bound plain like industrial chimneys. After the rigours of six hundred years, they totter dangerously, alternately silhouetted against the skyline and submerged in the blowing dust that makes the approach to Herat such a dramatic journey. Close to, it is not chimneys they resemble but rather the arthritic fingers of a giantess, petrified in death, clutching at the sky from the bowels of the earth.
These towers are almost all that is left of the architectural heart of Herat. South of the Injil canal stand the remains of its most outstanding monument. The Musalla complex, a mosque and mausoleum, was built between 1417 and 1437 by Queen Gawhar Shad, wife of Temur’s son Shahrukh. Appropriately, since her name means ‘Joyful Jewel’, this was the high point of Temurid art and architecture, a dazzling fusion of form and colour which paid tribute both to Allah and to His powerful servant on earth. Four minarets, elegant columns of turquoise more than a hundred feet high, shone like bright beacons, marking the corners of the queen’s musalla, or place of worship, dominating a smaller cluster of minarets beside them. Here stood Herat’s first great congregational mosque, a monument which married colossal proportions with the most elegant taste, replete with dancing frescoes and arabesques, its exceptionally fine glazed brickwork a lustrous façade against the dreary desert. Linking the four principal minarets were four galleries, oriwans, looking out onto a central courtyard. Bold Kufic inscriptions ran around marble plaques at the decagonal base of each minaret, giving way, as the eye travelled up towards the sky, to sparkling lozenges of blue flowers and amber petals outlined in white faience. In these arid lands the iridescent blue was a refreshing reference to water and a homage to the heavens. Today, the forlorn minarets retain only a smattering of this polished armour, and among the war-torn debris of the site it requires a truly giant leap of imagination even to begin to picture the monument in its all but vanished glory.
It was in Herat, and Samarkand, that one of the Temurids’ most remarkable and enduring cultural legacies was bequeathed to future generations. Since Khorasan lacked sufficient supplies of both wood and building stone, the great majority of structures were built from baked brick. This greatly restricted the sculptural possibilities, but did allow for a shining sheath, or revetment, of coloured tiles to enliven the sun-dried surfaces. On this Masjid-i-Jami, the mosque for Friday prayers, the exquisite blue-and-white tile mosaics were laid in such profusion that not a plain terracotta brick was visible on the entire exterior, an astounding achievement in a monument of these dimensions. For once Robert Byron, that most opinionated and least excitable of travel writers, was pulled up short, calling it ‘the most beautiful example in colour in architecture ever designed by man to the glory of his God and himself’. Hyperbole, perhaps, but high praise from a man who wrote that Rembrandt left him with ‘an unremitting sense of disgust’, and who had dismissed Shakespeare’s entire canon as ‘exactly the sort of plays that I would expect a grocer to write’.*
Next to the minarets, a ribbed dome of azure blue, the defining Temurid architectural signature, topped the squat mausoleum of the queen, murdered in 1457 when she was well into her ninth decade. These glazed blue tiles of Herat became the model throughout much of Asia. The simplicity of the mausoleum’s exterior belied the profusion of decoration in the interior, where floral patterns and bands of white calligraphy ran riot. To this day, the three-dimensional ornamentation is of superb complexity. Arches, squinches, domes and stalactite niches trace their shapes across the walls in harmony, painted in ancient hues of terracotta, gold and the faded blue of crushed lapis lazuli from the mines of Badakhshan, in northern Afghanistan.
Unlike much of the devastation wrought on the historical monuments of Afghanistan, the desolation of the Musalla complex cannot be blamed on domestic feuding or age-old tribal warfare. Byron was horrified to learn that his own countrymen were responsible for its destruction. At the height of the Great Game in 1885, Russian troops attacked Afghans south-east of the city of Merv. Fearing a subsequent advance on Herat, which would give St Petersburg access to the Kandahar road and allow it to open a railroad right up to the Indian border, British officers ordered the demolition of most of the buildings in the complex, which occupied a site in the north of the city from where the anticipated assault would come. In fact, the Russian advance never materialised, but ‘the most glorious productions of Mohammadan architecture in the XVth century, having survived the barbarism of four centuries, were now rased [sic] to the ground under the eyes, and with the approval, of the English Commissioners’. Only nine minarets were left standing.
What man had started, nature continued. Earthquakes in 1931 and 1951 accounted for the loss of three more minarets. Then, in 1979, a century late, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Herat’s monuments were in the line of fire once again. One more minaret was felled, another received a direct hit from an artillery shell, the hole now used by nesting birds. The pounding stripped the minarets of more of their colour. Floral mosaics, brilliant lozenges of white and light blue, tumbled to the earth, joining the scattered remnants of sparkling faience prised from the towers by five centuries of sand and wind. The Soviets even laid mines around the minarets to prevent Ismail Khan, the local warlord, retaking the city. Those minarets which escaped the destruction once overlooked the magnificent madrassahs of Gawhar Shad and Sultan Husayn Baiqara, the last of Herat’s Temurid rulers. Today they preside over mostly bare ground, the isolated mausoleum and a handful of shacks and rusting steel containers converted into shops.
Late one afternoon, I walked through the crowded markets towards the one edifice which still dominates Herat on raised ground in the north of the Old City. Rearing up from the desert earth were the smooth walls of the Qala-i-Ikhtiyaruddin, the citadel beneath which Temur’s armies, and those of Genghis Khan before him, had fought their adversaries. Built in sun-dried bricks in its present form by the fourteenth-century Kart prince Fakhr ud-din, restored by Temur’s son Shahrukh a hundred years later, it has seen empires and dynasties rise and fall. Over the centuries it has been home to the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, Ghorids, Mongols, Temurids, Safavids, and even the Taliban, who used it as an army base and arsenal.
Looking at its massive ramparts, buttressed with bulging corner towers and dotted with holes from where the garrison could defend itself, it was not difficult to understand why Ghiyas ad-din had retreated behind them so promptly as he considered his chances of holding out against Temur’s siege. Its elevated position and the imposing strength of its defences give it an air of utter invulnerability. Had the Kart prince not surrendered in a timely fashion to Temur, who knows whether the citadel would have survived to this day. The ruthlessness with which the Tatar crushed resistance from other cities suggests it would have disappeared from the face of the earth.
A monumental Kufic inscription in mosaic-faience, three feet high, originally dominated the wall beside the north-west tower. ‘AL-MULK LI’LLAH’ (The Kingdom is God’s), it proclaimed in alternating dark-green and amber letters, visible to all high above the city. If the citadel owed its inspiration to the Almighty, it became, in the fourteenth century, a tribute to Temur. When Shahrukh restored it with baked brick and stone, the fifteenth-century panegyrist Hafiz-i-Abru penned the following lines to the founder of the Temurid dynasty, sections of which appeared on the tiles of the citadel.
Until the day of judgement the world will not be empty of the descendants of Temur Khan
From that purer lineage, so excellent a race will follow that one conqueror will follow after another
Where a pearl should be, they will not see other than pearls; they should not look for anything other than gold from a gold mine
The King of Islam, Shah Rukh Bahadur, the world has become resplendent with his justice
[He is] so magnificent that the stars are like his army, he is the commander of his nobility which reaches the summit of the heavens
The world is trifling compared to his power like the surging sea. The heavens are an atom and his outlook is luminous
May the world be adorned with his descendants, may the world be perfumed with his race …
The prosperity of the world comes from his sound rule. Just as one attains heaven by proper devotions
They laid the foundations of this lofty citadel
In an auspicious time and a favourable horoscope
Rabi II 818 hijrat [1415–16] …
First they assigned a location for Herat
So that five gateways were fixed in it
See those five doors of the five towers of its fortress
And consider them gates of victory
Know the proof of the permanence of the building
Regard it well even if you are meticulous
(Your kingdom) will be increased and it will not be destroyed
This prosperity will remain until the day of judgement
The engineer placed within and without it muqarnas, mansions and round towers
The stars are proud of its architecture
Its completion has brought glory to the army
In elegance like the aivan of Kisra
In solidity like the dam of Sikandar
In the completeness of its strength like the aivan of Kaivan
The passage of time will not destroy it
It will not be subject to the damage of calamities
Calamities cannot touch the king
From the top to bottom it is beautiful and decorated
Its corners are golden and bejewelled
Its essence is like life in the pillars of the universe
Its splendours are like light in the eyes of the stars
A surly Taliban soldier on duty told me that both the citadel and the museum it housed were closed, but after a little encouragement, and the promise of a tip, he agreed to show me around the ramparts, on which nine gun emplacements had been mounted. As we clambered up the steep, dusty track he stopped every few moments to show me another piece of ordnance. There were grenades, bullets live and spent, machine-gun rounds, piles of rockets and mines. He picked up an old grenade, pulled at the ring, and made as if to throw it at me. Then, seeing my horror, he disappeared behind a wall and threw a large stone onto an unexploded landmine. There was, mercifully, no explosion. He sniggered and continued up the path.
From the ramparts and their jagged towers Herat stretched before us. Women paced through the market, a blue blur of burqas. Children guided goats through the crowds, struggling to avoid the throng of cyclists. Pigeons wheeled in the sunset. Mina birds squawked from treetops in an evening chorus joined by barking dogs below. Peddlers pushed makeshift trolleys along, selling scrap metal and pieces of plastic. Sheep entrails hung over the bicycle handlebars of a mobile butcher like flourishing maroon balloons. A cloth merchant reclined sleepily in the entrance to his shop. Next door a tailor in a coloured skullcap sat cross-legged, busily cutting and sewing. A row of turbaned ‘white-beards’, the elders of Herat, sat on a mosque rooftop talking among themselves while they waited for the call to prayer. On the mud roofs around them, boys of all ages ran here and there, shouting and chasing each other wildly amidst the smoke drifting upwards from the kitchens below. Many were flying home-made kites (in contravention of one of the Taliban’s many bans), and a myriad coloured cut-outs fluttered in the breeze, gathered around the sinking sun like excited moths. In the distance, lights were being turned on in the thirteenth-century Masjid-i-Jami, the principal Friday mosque. Inside, in pride of place, stood the vast bronze cauldron, four feet in diameter, from which worshippers were served sweet drinks during the reign of the Kart princes in the fourteenth century. In the woven light, Herat was a kaleidoscope of beige and green, bursts of trees amid the subdued colours of the desert. The occasional blue dome, testament to the city’s ravishing Temurid legacy, added a flash of azure to the scene. Farther off, hovering over Herat like a dark cloud, was the black-crayon smudge of the Paropamisus mountains.
Then it came. First a crackling, croaky whirr, an amplified intake of breath and then, rising above the static, the melodious voice of the muaddin calling the faithful to the maghrib, or evening prayer. ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, God is great, God is great,’ he intoned, and the white-beards started to stir. The twin minarets of the Kherqa Mubarak Mosque at the foot of the citadel seemed to stiffen in response. As the call continued, a tide of men, swelling by the minute, flowed across the city towards the mosques. ‘Haya alas-saleh, haya alas-saleh, come to prayer, come to prayer,’ the voice chanted. On the streets the men hurried along dutifully, ‘encouraged’ by the Taliban religious police, the most feared members of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.*‘La ilaha illa’llah, there is no god but God,’ and the white-beards descended carefully from the roof to pray. Across the city the minarets from various generations loomed like saluting exclamation marks.
Few cities have suffered such recurrent disasters as Herat. The catalogue of its misfortunes reads like a history of Afghanistan in miniature, doomed by tribal rivalries and foreign interventions which continue to this day. In 667, Arab armies introduced Islam at the point of the sword. The Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud annexed the city in 1000. Two centuries later, in 1206, Herat fell to the Khorezm Shah invading from the north. Scarcely had it recovered from that attack than Genghis Khan and eighty thousand of his Mongols flattened it again in 1221, slaughtering all but sixteen of its inhabitants. In 1381, Herat prudently bowed before Temur’s armies, sparing itself the worst of his outrages, only to rebel two years later with fatal consequences for the Kart dynasty. On behalf of his father, Miranshah duly put the city to the sword. Babur, Temur’s most illustrious descendant, founder of the Mughal empire in India, was unable to save the city from the Uzbek empire-builder Shaibani Khan, who seized it in 1507.
The eighteenth century was no stranger to war and intrigue in Herat. Ahmed Shah Durrani, known as the Father of Afghanistan, waged war on the city in the late 1740s as he carved out the new country. Another army marched on Herat in the last decade of the century, when the city found itself the centre of a power struggle between rivals within the Sadozai Shah dynasty. In 1818 it was Persian forces, stretching their tentacles east, who assaulted the city. They returned twenty years later and Herat was under siege for ten months, a bitter experience repeated in 1863 when Amir Dost Mohammed captured the city, his final act in unifying Afghanistan before his death a month later. Peace still proved elusive for its westernmost capital, however, as ruling family divisions returned to the fore. In 1881, Amir Abdur Rahman was fighting his cousin Sardar Ayub Khan for its possession. Before the decade had ended, the British were tearing out its historical heart, a harbinger of the damage inflicted by the Soviets when they invaded the following century. Twenty years after that the Taliban held the reins of power and Herat, like the rest of Afghanistan, was on its knees again. In the spring of 2001, as the Taliban – to the horror of the world – were dynamiting the two-thousand-year-old monumental sculptures known as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, officials destroyed any historical artefacts considered sacrilegious. Pre-Islamic sculptures, outstanding examples of their kind, were among the casualties. In late 2002, Herat returned to the rule of local warlord Ismail Khan. Amid the confusion and chaos of war, more ancient relics were plundered from the city’s museum.
Yet somehow all these centuries of destruction and the horrors of the Taliban regime have failed to subdue this desert city. Staring down on it from the restored citadel, its greatness seemed undiminished. The Taliban were merely the latest and by no means the nastiest scar on its surface, a short-lived experiment that barely merited a mention in the city’s long history. The ancient cultural centre would outlive these philistine warriors of Islam just as she had seen off other invaders before. The bright home-made kites, scraps of paper and plastic taut in the wind, careered merrily across the sky like totems of hope.
Another evening, as dusk started to steal down from the sky, throwing a wonderful honeyed veil over Herat, I arranged to visit some of the city’s shrines with two of its most distinguished elders. Maulavi Said Mohammed Omar Shahid, president of Herat University, and Maulana Khudad, president of the council of mullahs, were both in their sixties. Like many Afghans who had endured the twin evils of war and malnutrition, they looked considerably older, their withered walnut faces peering out from pristine white turbans.
Together we walked north of the Musalla complex to the shrine of the fifteenth-century Sufi poet Abdur Rahman Jami, the last great classical poet of Persia. It was a mournful, windswept site, as romantic as the poetry which had thrilled, inspired and saddened so many in his lifetime, so many more in the centuries since his death. The tomb itself was of simple design, protected from the sun by an elderly pistachio tree. Overhead, banners, pendants and flags of green, white and yellow flapped like sheets in the streaming wind. A group of teenage boys, strangely silent, had also come to pay their respects. Jami, one of Herat’s most famous sons, was the most celebrated poet of his generation. His literary influence and the beauty of his verses coursed through the continent.
When your face is hidden from me,
Like the moon hidden on a dark night,
I shed stars of tears
And yet my night remains dark
In spite of all those shining stars.
This tomb in a corner of benighted Afghanistan was just one small piece of the vast cultural legacy bequeathed by Temur. Poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture and craftsmanship, all had flowered under his watchful eye, a tradition continued still more lavishly by his descendants. From the blood of his conquests and the cut of his sword had issued a cultural renaissance that bore his name and would never be forgotten. Herat, Shahrukh’s imperial city of the Temurids, was another Samarkand, doted on by his queen, Gawhar Shad, wildly generous patron of the arts. Kindled by Temur, the fires of Temurid culture, one of the most important epochs in Persian history, flamed through Asia. Jami kept these fires alive, but his death in 1492 marked the end of the golden era of classical Persian poetry. In one moment the Temurid cultural blaze was extinguished.*
I asked Maulavi Said whether, given this great legacy, he considered Temur a hero. He looked horrified. ‘No! Definitely not. He was a killer and an invader, a bloody man and a barbarian. He did nothing for culture here. It was his son Shahrukh who made up for all his father’s destruction by supporting the arts. Temur’s family was civilised but he was just a thug.’
His elderly companion shook his head but said nothing. We moved on to Gazargah, the fifteenth-century shrine complex built by Shahrukh several miles east of the city. Past the mulberries and rose bushes beggars young and old swarmed around the ornate portal created by the Persian architect Quram ad-din Sherazi, towering so high it was visible from Herat. Some had made this place their home, and shuffled about in ragged cloaks and blankets. Inside were hundreds of headstones. The most ancient, smooth with age but with many of their beautiful inscriptions intact, leaned precariously in the ground like twisted teeth. Elderly men with unkempt beards, little changed in dress or appearance from the times of Temur, sat cross-legged and quiet, whispering thanks for any alms given by visitors. A few yards behind them stood a fifteen-foot marble pillar from the mid-fifteenth century, finely carved, a model of the highly skilled craftsmanship which Temur so actively supported. Nearby was another exceptional monument, the nineteenth-century tomb of Amir Dost Mohammed. We paused by the shrine of Khoja Abdullah Ansari, eleventh-century Sufi poet, philosopher and patron saint of the city,* set in the shade of an old ilex tree and the once gleaming blue iwan, an arched niche within an eighty-foot wall surmounted by a domed turret at either end. Patches of blue glaze survived at the lower level of the iwan, but most of the decorative tiles had fallen like winter leaves, leaving a dull beige façade.
While we walked slowly among these funerary monuments Maulana Khudad resumed our conversation where we had left off. He disagreed with his colleague’s damning verdict on Temur. ‘From my point of view he was certainly a hero. Generally, those who called him a barbarian came from the West. Temur was spreading Islam and they didn’t like it so they denigrated him.’
He cast a mischievous glance towards his old friend and continued. ‘Though at first he wreaked havoc in Herat, he also brought great benefits and honoured Islamic scholars like Mohammed Said Sharif Gurgani, Maulana Saad ad-din Taftazani and Maulana Razi. His children and grandchildren – men like Shahrukh, Sultan Baysunqur, Ulugh Beg and Abu Said – served Islam greatly. In Temur’s time there were 350 madrassahs just in Herat. One of them, the Mirza Madrassah, had forty thousand students, many of them foreign. Four thousand graduated every year. The whole thing was supported by Temur. And it wasn’t just Islam which benefited. He had great creative vision. For example, he built twelve huge irrigation canals around Herat which changed agriculture here forever. And just think of the great artist Bihzad, who worked at the court of Sultan Husayn Mirza.* And of course, then there was the emperor Babur, who founded the Mughal empire in India. None of this would have happened without Temur.’ He shot a defiant glare at his friend again. ‘This was not an ordinary man. He was a man of war, yes, but of culture, too. We will always remember him for these fine buildings. My friend is not right. For Herat, Temur was the greatest hero the city ever knew.’
With Herat conquered and the winter snows thawing amid the first hints of spring, Temur resumed his heroic ambitions in the west. ‘Asia trembled from China even to the borders of Greece,’ wrote Yazdi, and well it might. In 1382, the Tatar armies rumbled north-west towards Mazandaran, the province immediately south of the Caspian Sea. Protected both by the Elburz mountains, with summits of up to seventeen thousand feet, covered with thick forest, and by treacly swamps, it was inauspicious terrain for an invader, but after stiff resistance Amir Wali, the local ruler, was defeated and forced to offer his submission. Four years later, Mazandaran rebelled. Temur was well positioned to deal with the challenge, having recently begun the first of his three major campaigns in Persia. He wrote a letter to Amir Wali demanding his surrender. Alone among his chiefs, Amir Wali refused to comply, despatching pleas for assistance to Shah Shuja Muzaffar, who ruled Fars in the south, and Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad and Azerbaijan. No help arrived. Amir Wali was forced to join battle without his allies, conscious that defeat spelled certain death.
‘When the armies were in sight of each other and blows of javelins, swords and spears were being dealt indiscriminately, Shah Wali withstood some time his adverse fortune; then he turned his back after deciding upon withdrawal and flight,’ wrote Arabshah. He was subsequently captured and lost his head, literally. It was brought to Temur’s throne in a gesture which paid tribute to the yasa of Genghis Khan.
Mazandaran’s fall in 1382 was followed a year later by an act of calculated brutality by Temur. Once again it was inflicted on a city which had rebelled, and once again the price was calamity. Isfizar, a city south of Herat, fell, and two thousand inhabitants were taken prisoner. Rather than execute them on the spot, Temur chose instead to make an example – if any were needed – of the consequences of rebellion. A tower was constructed, though this time the prisoners who went into it were not dead. ‘There were near two thousand slaves taken who were piled alive one upon the other with mortar and bricks, so that these miserable wretches might serve as a monument to deter others from revolting,’ wrote the unsympathetic Yazdi.
Invigorated by this dreadful act, Temur led an army of one hundred thousand into Sistan, the south-western province of Afghanistan. Zaranj, its prosperous capital, mounted a valiant defence. Such was the ferocity of the fighting that Temur felt impelled to throw himself into the heart of the battle, at great personal risk. When his horse was shot from beneath him, he vowed revenge. Sistan already held painful memories, for this, most probably, was where he had received the wounds that left him lame in both right limbs, either while fighting as a hired sword in the service of the local khan or – the more prosaic version – when caught in the act of stealing sheep. Whatever his feelings, Zaranj felt his fury, and the capital of a fertile province known as the Garden of Asia and the Granary of the East was pitilessly razed. Arabshah wrote that the residents of Zaranj sued for peace, which Temur granted on condition they surrender all their weapons. ‘And as soon as they had given this guarantee, he drew the sword against them and billeted upon them all the armies of death. Then he laid the city waste, leaving in it not a tree or a wall and destroyed it utterly, no mark or trace of it remaining.’ Men, women and children perished in the slaughter, echoed Yazdi, ‘from persons of a hundred years old, to infants in the cradle’. Windmills, agricultural lands and, worst of all, dykes and irrigation canals, were destroyed. In time, the desert moved to reclaim what it had lost, the sands swept in, and the once green province gave way to the Dasht-i-Margo (Desert of Death), the Dasht-i-Jehanum (Desert of Hell) and the Sar-o-Tar (Place of Desolation and Emptiness). To this day the region remains poverty-stricken and deserted.
From Zaranj, Temur swung east to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, which fell to him in 1384, its governor thrown in irons and hanged. No sooner had he seized Kandahar than he abruptly doubled back on himself, marched west halfway across Persia and, after the feeble flight of its ruler Sultan Ahmed, accepted the surrender of Sultaniya in the same year.
This was a development of enormous significance. Sultaniya was an important commercial centre, a ‘great city’, as Clavijo reported on his arrival on 26 June 1404, twenty years after it had passed into Temur’s dominions. Founded in about 1285 by Arghun, the sixth Ilkhanid ruler of Persia, who was attracted by its abundant pastures and used it as his summer capital, Sultaniya became the seat of empire under his son Mohammed Oljeytu Khudabanda in 1313. The city was expanded aggressively, the outer walls increasing from twelve thousand paces in circumference to thirty thousand. At its heart stood a powerful square citadel with heavy fortifications, built of cut stone with walls broad enough for several horsemen to ride abreast on their ramparts. Sixteen towers looked down onto an encircling moat beyond the outer walls, decorated with turquoise tiles, Arabic inscriptions and pictures of horsemen fighting heads of lions.
Oljeytu intended Sultaniya to become a fully functioning capital, no mere royal camp. He duly embarked on a terrific building spree, ordering his courtiers to design graceful palaces and gardens. The vizier Rashid ad-din built an entire quarter of a thousand houses. Another, Taj ad-din Ali Shah, built a lavish, ten-thousand-dinar palace called Paradise, its doors, walls and floors studded with pearls, gold, rubies, turquoise, emeralds and amber. A city of monuments made from baked brick, stone and wood sprang up on the desert plain, luxuriously decorated with bronze doors, inlaid window grilles, marble revetments and mosaic faience.
The most famous architectural creation, however, was Oljeytu’s monumental octagonal tomb, 120 feet in diameter, which alone today recalls Sultaniya’s illustrious past. The tomb complex, which incorporated a mosque, madrassah, hospital and khanaqah (a hostel for travelling dervishes), was one of the grandest pious endowments of its time. Octagonal in plan – a reference to the eight gates of Paradise – the rectangular burial chamber projected from the southern iwan. Within the portals, courtyards of white marble dazzled the eyes, which were drawn inexorably towards the giant shadow-making dome and the eight minarets which guarded it at each of the corners of the upper terrace. Beneath the dome stood two storeys of eight-bay arcades. A third opened onto the exterior. Inside, four bays were especially elaborately decorated in geometric patterns of brick and delicate strips of glazed and unglazed terracotta. A dado of hexagonal glazed tiles divided the chamber into two. Above it, the entire interior, including that of the dome, was covered in plaster, painted with decorative patterns and inscriptions. It was a truly imperial creation.
‘The total of those who worked on the foundations was ten thousand men,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Mamluk biographer al Yusufi. ‘Five thousand moved dirt, and five thousand cut and dressed stone. There were five thousand wagons to move rock and other materials, for which there were ten thousand donkeys. They made a thousand kilns for brick, and a thousand kilns for lime. Five thousand camels transported wood, and two thousand persons were assigned to cut wood from the mountains and other places. Three thousand smiths were employed to work sheets of metal, windows, nails and the like. There were five hundred carpenters, and five thousand men laid marble. Supervisors were appointed over them to urge them on in the work.’
Trade, meanwhile, flourished. Although its population was less than that of Tabriz, capital of Azerbaijan to the north-west, Sultaniya was ‘a more important centre of exchange for merchants and goods’, said Clavijo. According to the Ilkhanid chronicler Abul Qasim al Kashani, the city had more than ten thousand shops filled with bales of Chinese brocade, small boxes, cups, ewers and a host of other materials. In June, July and August each year, weary camel caravans trudged in from the deserts laden down with spices – cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, manna and mace – from India and Afghanistan, cotton and taffeta from Shiraz and silks from the southern shores of the Caspian.*‘The city then is in a state of great commotion, and immense are the customs dues that accrue to the Treasury.’ Merchants from Persia, Genoa and Venice gathered to buy the cloth; large quantities were also exported to Syria, Turkey and the Crimea. Sultaniya was also a centre of the trade in pearls and precious stones. From China came pearls, mother of pearl and rubies, shipped to the port of Hormuz in southern Persia. Here they were expertly drilled and strung and exported ‘to all parts of the western world’. Many were loaded onto camels for the sixty-day caravan journey to Sultaniya where they were bought by merchants ‘from Christian lands’ and from Turkey, Syria, and Baghdad.
Such was the city’s size and strategic importance, straddling a major east – west trade route, that Pope John XXII set up an archbishopric at Sultaniya in 1318. Archbishops were appointed until 1425. By the time Clavijo arrived, shortly before Temur’s death, Sultaniya had passed its apogee. The outer defensive walls had gone, he reported. The city was losing its importance. In the seventeenth century, the Persian ruler Shah Abbas moved his capital to Isfahan and Sultaniya’s decline accelerated. Today, the metropolis is long gone, whittled down over the centuries to the point where Oljeytu’s tomb looks down upon nothing more than an insignificant mud-brick village in northern Iran.
For Temur, the importance of seizing Sultaniya was by no means exclusively commercial. Of far greater consequence was what its capture represented. It is easy now to overlook the milestones in his military career. Sometimes the victories seem to merge into a remorseless blur of savagery and slaughter. But though it seems to have been largely neglected by the court chroniclers and historians in subsequent centuries, the taking of Sultaniya represented a definite landmark both in the scope of Temur’s ambitions and in his ability to fulfil them. His successes until this point, though impressive, were essentially domestic achievements. Herat represented the first foray abroad, militarily decisive but still tentative in purely geographical terms, rather as though Temur were testing the waters before he plunged in deeper. The temperature evidently suited him, because that challenge had been overcome with contemptuous ease.
Herat ushered in a new era of conquest. Henceforth, for practically the rest of Temur’s life, spring would herald a new campaigning season. Winter was a time for hibernation and planning the next target for his armies. His first campaign was instructive. First Kandahar crumpled and then, in one fell swoop, he had led his men across the Persian deserts to seize the prize of Sultaniya, a thousand miles west of Samarkand, without so much as a battle. As an entrance onto the international stage it was a move of astonishing audacity, a trumpet blast to the world and an announcement, in the most dramatic terms, of Temur’s empire-building intentions. In fact, with a more or less united confederation of tribes under his single command, all hungry for reward, it was imperative for him to lead them beyond their borders – beyond Mawarannahr and the Chaghatay ulus – to new triumphs abroad. This, indeed, was the only way to retain their allegiance and service. Steppe tribesmen traditionally would remain loyal to a leader only for so long as he proved victorious on the battlefield. Temur understood this acutely. Any analysis of his career necessarily dwells on the observation that essentially it was one long campaign, punctuated with only the briefest of interludes. Quite simply, he needed to keep his armies on the move.
These initial manoeuvres, from the fall of Herat to the bloodless defeat of Sultaniya, also demonstrated his capacity to surprise, a key weapon in his armoury and one that he would employ throughout his campaigns. They also revealed his willingness to use terror to project and increase his power through Asia. The razing of Zaranj and the extermination of its population were inspired by what Temur saw as the need to acquire a reputation for complete ruthlessness, as a man who, if challenged, would unleash every instrument of cruelty and destruction at his command. It was in his interests for this reputation to filter across the continent. Equally, the events at Zaranj were intended to show other would-be opponents the futility of resistance to this unstoppable force. The skulls severed from the corpses of his defeated opponents – soldiers and civilians, men, women and children alike – should be understood in this context of terror. Far better, both for Temur and the cities and dynasties which blocked his expansion, that they surrender quickly and be spared. Defiance would only meet with the swiftest and most terrible retribution. Little wonder that Sultan Ahmed had no stomach for the fight as Temur marched into his lands. The loss of Sultaniya was a great blow. Once assimilated into Temur’s emerging empire, it steadily assumed a greater political role to match its commercial preeminence. By the time Clavijo passed through, it had taken its place as the capital of Persia.
If Temur had learnt any lessons from his seizure of Herat and Sultaniya, it was this: that issuing unexpected ultimatums, reinforced by the rapid manoeuvring of his armies across great distances and the threat of massive, terrifying force in the style of Genghis Khan, was a potent strategy. As Arabshah put it: ‘He ran to the ends of the earth, as Satan runs from the son of Adam and crept through countries as poison creeps through bodies.’
Tempted by Tabriz after seizing Sultaniya, Temur returned instead to winter in Samarkand, to rest his soldiers and allow them to enjoy the fruits of their endeavours. In his absence came disturbing news. Tokhtamish Khan, his one-time protégé, had thrust south from the Golden Horde of Russia and sacked Tabriz himself. From Temur’s perspective, this was an unacceptable development. His earlier acts of friendship had been thrown back in his face. Had Tokhtamish already forgotten how Temur had clothed him so richly when he had arrived destitute in the Tatar’s court in 1376? How Temur had financed repeated military campaigns to win him his kingdom in the north, even fighting alongside him until he was installed as khan of the Golden Horde? Such ingratitude so soon augured badly. The sweeping steppes of Asia, its wide deserts and snow-capped mountains were beginning to look too small to encompass the rival ambitions of the two warrior princes.
In taking Tabriz, the khan of the Golden Horde had issued a direct challenge to the Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes. It was not in Temur’s character to let it go unanswered. Had the city been of little consequence, it is probable he would have acted no differently. The point was that Tokhtamish had announced his ambitions overtly. Failure to respond decisively would have represented, in Temur’s mind at least, an admission of weakness and an invitation to further attacks.
In any case, the Azerbaijan capital was one of the greatest cities in the world outside China. It stood at the centre of the busiest international trade routes. Merchants and caravans streamed through on the Khorasan road running east from Baghdad as far as the frontier with China. Others arrived from Cairo, Constantinople and Trebizond in the west, from Damascus, Antioch and Aleppo in Syria. Pilgrims and merchants travelled the well-trodden path from Mecca north to Baghdad and Tabriz, while from India came more itinerant traders, crossing overland from the port of Hormuz.
The city walls measured twenty-five thousand paces (compared with nine thousand in Herat and ten thousand in Samarkand), encompassing a vast population in the region of 1.25 million, based on the two hundred thousand households recorded by Clavijo.*Travellers competed with each other for superlatives when they arrived at this booming metropolis. Marco Polo described Tabriz in around 1270 as ‘a great and noble city’ teeming with a cosmopolitan crowd of Armenians, Nestorians, Jacobites, Georgians and Persians. Writing at the turn of the fourteenth century, the Persian historian Rashid ad-din commented on the throng of ‘philosophers, astronomers, scholars, historians – of all religions, of all sects’ gathered in Tabriz. There were Indians, Kashmiris, Chinese, Uighurs, Arabs, Franks, Turks and Tibetans. The city’s prodigiously stocked markets, arranged according to the various trades and products – jewellery, musk, ambergris, silks, cottons, taffetas, unguents, lacquers from China, spices from India – were the envy of all.
‘I entered the town and we came to a great bazaar, one of the finest bazaars I have seen the world over,’ gasped Ibn Battutah. ‘Every trade is grouped separately in it. I passed through the jewellers’ bazaar, and my eyes were dazzled by the precious stones that I beheld. They were displayed by beautiful slaves wearing rich garments with a waist-sash of silk, who stood in front of the merchants, exhibiting the jewels to the wives of the Turks, while the women were buying them in large quantities and trying to outdo one another.’
Tabriz was fantastically rich. ‘This city, I tell you, is the finest in the world, for trade,’ observed Friar Oderic, writing in the early fourteenth century. ‘Every article is found here in abundance. It is so marvellous that you would scarcely believe everything unless you saw it … The Christians of this place say that the revenue it pays to its emperor is greater than the revenue all of France pays to its king.’ In 1341, the treasury’s revenues from Tabriz amounted to almost nine million dinars, a staggering total for the time.
Such prosperity was evident in the magnificence of its mosques, madrassahs, palaces and hospitals, resplendent with marble, limestone and glazed blue tiles. Clavijo, the most diligent of eyewitnesses, was taken by the sheer number and quality of the public buildings, lavishly decorated with mosaics of blue and gold. The city owed its architectural grandeur both to the prosperity generated by trade, he was told, and to a thriving culture of one-upmanship among its architectural patrons.
All these fine buildings had been erected in days past when there had been living in Tabriz many famous and rich men who had vied each with his neighbour as to who should build the finest house, each spending willingly his wealth in what he did. Of such buildings we visited especially one, a great palace that stands surrounded by its own wall most beautifully and richly planned, and within this building were twenty thousand rooms and separate apartments.
It was an elegantly planned city, with good roads, plenty of open spaces and many caravanserais for passing merchants. Clavijo and his entourage spent nine days there, handsomely entertained by Temur’s darugha, the governor or mayor. Like those travellers before him, the Spaniard admired the markets and luxuriated in the steaming bath-houses which he thought ‘the most splendid’ in the entire world. Fed by the river which irrigated the outlying fields, open channels of water gurgled through the streets, providing refreshment for the merchants haggling furiously in the bazaars with women draped in white sheets, their eyes hidden behind veils of horse hair: ‘In the streets and squares of this city there are many fountains, and in summer they fill them with pieces of ice, and put brass and copper jugs near them, so that the people can come and drink.’
This, then, was the city which Tokhtamish, thundering through the alpine meadows of the Caucasus, had seized so suddenly and which now, in the spring of 1386, attracted Temur’s attention. The khan of the Golden Horde, said the dutiful Yazdi, had sacked the city with a ninety-thousand-strong army of ‘infidels of a cruel and merciless nature’. They had ‘pillaged the place and exercised all imaginable cruelties and abominations: the desolation was universal, and all the riches, treasures, and rarities which had been amassed there during a great many years were consumed in less than six days’. The Persian chronicler obligingly supplied the religious justification for Temur’s move on Tabriz. ‘The emperor having advice of this devastation was incensed at the violence and tyranny which had been exercised against the Mussulmans,’ he wrote. A crime had been committed against Islam.
In Samarkand, where Temur had returned after seizing Sultaniya, the glacial winds of winter had given way to the pleasant zephyrs of spring. The mountains had shed their snowy coats and the Zarafshan (Gold Spreader) river was bursting its banks, watering the orchards and vineyards that lay all around the city. The streets hummed with activity. From the treasury came the din of crashing metal as swordsmiths went about their business. Hundreds of craftsmen and metalworkers, rounded up and imprisoned as Temur spun his web of empire, sweated in workshops fashioning body armour and helmets for the army. In the bazaars, saddlemakers reeking of tanned hides and oil gossiped with merchants about the forthcoming season, comparing notes on the imperious government couriers riding through on horseback with despatches and instructions. Temur, it was said, was assembling an army for a Three-Year Campaign in Persia, his most ambitious undertaking yet. The tovachis were busier than ever, gathering the forces, procuring supplies and checking that the soldiers were properly equipped. Confidence was high among these war-hardened tribesmen. Over the course of the long winter they had eaten and drunk and spent their way through much of last season’s plunder from the fall of Herat and Sultaniya. The family coffers were almost bare. It was time to leave Samarkand again to make war in distant kingdoms. These men placed great faith in their leader. They did not doubt for an instant that he would win them new treasures. He had never failed them yet. There was no reason to suppose he would now. Final preparations were made, the baggage caravans were counted and recounted and the amirs announced their readiness to the man who would conquer the world. One by one the horse-tail standards were lifted. With a roar, Temur’s army marched west again.
The mountain tribes of Lurs, south of Sultaniya, were first to feel the Tatars’ steel. They had been ransacking the pilgrim caravans which plied the routes to and from Mecca, an outrage which demanded retaliation. After a forced march at the head of a select body of troops from the main army, Temur attacked. The tribesmen were shattered. ‘They were flung headlong from the tops of mountains,’ Yazdi reported.
The richest prize still awaited. From Lurs, the army marched north towards Tabriz. An ill-prepared Sultan Ahmed started mustering forces to defend the city, but it was too little too late and his attempt came to nothing. With Temur’s army at the gates, once again he disappeared in ignominious flight, leaving the city to take its chances. A detachment of Temur’s men was sent after him and pursued him closely – Arabshah called him an ‘opportunist fugitive’ – but he managed to escape. Without its leader, Tabriz had little option but to surrender. Out trooped the city’s notables, the amirs and religious leaders, less magisterial now that their protector had abandoned them to the Scourge of God. In front of Temur they sued for peace and pleaded for their lives. Tabriz, since it had surrendered without a struggle, was spared. Seizing one of the greatest cities in the world had not cost Temur a single soldier.
Instead of putting the citizens to the sword, he punished them with a huge ransom. For the rest of the summer he and his army remained in Azerbaijan while local leaders arrived to pledge their loyalty to the new ruler. Skilled craftsmen, artists, mathematicians and scientists were once more despatched east, joining colleagues from captured lands to adorn Temur’s growing capital of Samarkand. Such was the importance of Tabriz within his expanding dominions that it was conferred to the rule of Mohammed Sultan, youthful son of the late Jahangir, Temur’s beloved first-born who had died a decade earlier.
Clavijo’s portrait of Tabriz, observed eighteen years after Temur had won it, is valuable for a number of reasons. It is one of the few detailed accounts we have of it at that time, and one of the only descriptions of a city under his rule. As Harold Lamb noted in his 1928 biography of Temur, the Spaniard’s testimony undermines the arguments of those who would dismiss the conqueror as ‘an architect only of pyramids of skulls and as a barbarian destroyer’. Tabriz was clearly flourishing architecturally, economically and intellectually within his empire. The picture of a smouldering pile of ruins – far more the signature of Genghis than of Temur – could hardly be further from the truth.
As a rule Temur made a distinction between those cities that surrendered without resistance – which were spared – and those that cost him dearly, in terms of time, effort and the lives of his soldiers – which were ravaged. But even when he unleashed his hordes, he still tended to spare the cities’ public buildings – mosques, madrassahs, schools and shrines. And even in those instances where he gave his men free rein to burn and pillage, more often than not the architects, builders and craftsmen were later ordered in to repair the damage. Teams of soldiers were left behind to restore canals, encouraging the devastated agricultural economy with a view to maximising future tax revenues. Temur’s Persian panegyrist made a point of mentioning this, of course, for it was much to Temur’s credit as a man of the holy book. ‘The Alcoran remarks that the rebuilding of places is one of the most glorious actions which princes can perform in this world, and which conduces most to the good of society,’ Yazdi wrote with typical complacency.
Temur had no intention of turning back after these rapid gains. This was no time to exchange the challenges of campaigning for the comforts of Samarkand. After Tabriz he abruptly called a halt to the westward advance and pushed north instead. On a map this decision to march his men into the mountains of the Qarabagh, rather than continuing west along easier territory, looks odd, particularly given the inhospitable season, but it was a direct response to the gauntlet thrown down by the khan of the Golden Horde who had led his army south through the Caucasus to seize Tabriz. By incorporating this unruly region into his empire Temur intended to ensure that Tokhtamish could never repeat such mischief again. No one could be allowed to show the slightest mastery over Temur. His will was supreme.
There was another incentive to attack, though this would have weighed less heavily with him. Georgia was an unsightly island of Christianity amid the mighty seas of Islam. Conquering it was an opportunity to win favour as a Ghazi, or warrior of the faith. King Bagrat the Great must be forced to see the error of his ways. ‘God hath recommended to Mohammed to excite the Mussulmans to make war on the enemies of their religion, because it is the most excellent of all actions,’ noted Yazdi, ever ready to please his paymaster, ‘and the Alcoran praises above all others those who risk their fortunes and lives in such a war.’
Winter had fallen. ‘The violence of the cold was extraordinary, and the air was full of ice and frost,’ said the chronicle, but still the marches continued. Dreaming of the summer pastures of Samarkand, the soldiers struggled across freezing plains, urging their exhausted horses over ground that had been churned into a quagmire. Into the mountains they stumbled, hauling their vast quantities of equipment behind them.
At the Georgian capital of Tiflis (Tbilisi), the Tatars encountered a vigorous defence. Both the city walls and the citadel were heavily fortified. The Georgians were also famously resilient soldiers. These were not the sort of people to surrender their city without a fight like the cowardly Sultan Ahmed of Azerbaijan. Calmly, Temur ordered the siege machines to be prepared, and the assault was launched. When the walls had been weakened he rallied his men with the terrible cry, ‘Allahu akbar, God is great,’ the signal to storm the city. With sword in hand he led the army into Tiflis, where the defiant king was captured, put into chains and brought before his new master. Later, after divisions of the Tatar army had subdued the region, razing towns and castles before them, Bagrat was given another audience with Temur in which the compelling truth of Islam was impressed upon him. The Georgian king was no less opportunist a ruler than Temur, and it did not take him long to see the wisdom of conversion. In front of his victorious opponent, he declared: ‘La ilaha illa’llah, Mohammedan rasul’ Allah, there is no god but God and Mohammed is his Prophet,’ the seven words which identify one as a Muslim. Bagrat underwrote his loyalty to Temur by presenting him with a coat of mail said to have been forged by the prophet David.
Pleased by Bagrat’s show of devotion and repeated professions of loyalty, Temur granted him his freedom as a vassal king. It was to prove a fairly short-lived treaty. Georgia was the most rebellious region within Temur’s empire. In 1393, six years after his first triumphs here, the conqueror was campaigning again in the Caucasian mountains. By then, Bagrat had died and his son Giorgi VII had succeeded him on the throne. Like his father, he too required a show of arms to concentrate his mind. In all, Temur mounted six campaigns against Georgia. He was still fighting there as late as the autumn of 1403, a stooped old man of sixty-six.
The fifteenth-century chronicle of T’ovma Metsobets’i, a native of the region north of Lake Van (close to the Turkish border with Armenia), described that first campaign in the most apocalyptic of terms. Like Arabshah, Metsobets’i had felt at first hand the dislocation and devastation brought by Temur’s armies, repeatedly having to flee for his life at this time. ‘A man named Tamerlane, holding the faith and precepts of the obscene Mahomet, precursor of the Antichrist, appeared in the East, in the city of Samarkand, merciless, cruel, treacherous, filled with all the evil, impurity and stratagems of the tempter Satan,’ he began. En route to Georgia, Temur and his army ‘tormented the entire multitude of believers with starvation, the sword, enslavement, and with unbearable tortures and bestial behaviour they made the most populous district of Armenia uninhabited. Many people were martyred and were worthy of the crown; they are known only to the One Who receives them, Christ our God.’ North the Tatars continued into Georgia, bloodshed attending their every advance. ‘Temur took booty, plunder, and countless captives. No one can relate the disasters and bitterness of our people. Going with numerous troops to the city of Tiflis, he took it and captured countless people; and it is believed that those killed outnumbered those left alive.’
More troublesome news reached Temur that winter. Tokhtamish had mounted another expedition into the strategically important Darband region on the western shores of the Caspian Sea, a corridor which controlled access into Temur’s newly won lands – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan of today – from the north. The Tatars clashed with the vanguard of the invaders and a number of the soldiers of the Golden Horde were taken prisoner. Rather than killing them in cold blood, Temur set them free and sent them back to their master with a message reminding him of his obligations and the treaty between the two men. ‘How comes it that your prince, whom I regard as my son, uses me so ill as to send an army into this country, without any provocation given him?’ Temur asked. ‘For you know there is between us a certain relationship like that between father and son. And why is he the occasion of the loss of so many thousands of Mussulmans?’ It is unlikely Temur expected a conciliatory reply. The khan’s recent manoeuvres suggested that filial respect for his southern neighbour was far from his mind. On the contrary, the relationship between the two appeared to be growing ever more hostile. With each year that passed, full-scale war between the two would-be world conquerors seemed the most likely outcome.
As the first buds and blossoms of spring arrived in the rugged pastures of the Caucasus on the shores of the Blue Lake in 1387, Temur, his great amirs and the massed hordes who fought so furiously in his name stirred like a hibernating giant awakening from the winter sloth. Queen Saray Mulk-khanum, Temur’s chief wife, and other members of the royal household who had helped warm the emperor’s bed during these freezing months departed for Samarkand. What lay ahead did not concern them.
During three decades, the timetable of Temur’s campaigns rarely changed. In the winter months the soldiers were stood down, returning to their families across the empire, heavily laden with the booty of the last season. As the cold months passed and the temperatures started to rise, as the frozen lakes thawed, the troops braced themselves for the emperor’s next campaign. For the best part of thirty years, spring habitually meant one thing: war.
From Armenia the army marched west, seeping into Asia Minor like poison. Perhaps Temur already envisaged a confrontation with one of the greatest rulers in the world, Bayazid I, the Ottoman sultan on whose borders he was close to trespassing. But for now his sphere of action lay slightly to the east, in an unruly region held by feuding Turkmen tribes. Word came to Temur that they had been massacring caravans of pilgrims en route to Mecca, another pretext to raise the banner of jihad. Erzerum and Arzinjan quickly fell to him. High on a rocky peak the impregnable citadel of Van, ‘which had never been conquered by any sovereign’, represented a more difficult challenge. Yet it surrendered after just two days. The defenders of the fortress who refused to join their prince in submission were overrun after a siege of twenty days. Those who were not butchered by the sword met an even more dreadful fate, tied by the hands and feet and hurled into the abyss, a thousand steps below, to their destruction.
This procession of victories marked the western limits of Temur’s Three-Year Campaign. As abruptly as he had pushed north from Sultaniya, he now swept south across Azerbaijan, riding back into Persia at the head of his army of mounted archers. Such unexpected changes of direction, employed regularly during his campaigns, consistently wrong-footed his enemies. Temur was a brilliant military tactician. Unaware of his approach, oblivious to the threat, sultans, kings and princes suddenly found their cities, castles and armies under attack without warning. The element of surprise achieved formidable success.
This time Temur had another target in sight. Glittering on the desert plain like a brooch of emerald and sapphire, its cool waters and lush orchards equally inviting, lay Isfahan. It was, reported Ibn Battutah, ‘one of the largest and fairest of cities’, a place of plenty and splendour. Its architecture was graceful, its markets thick with merchants, famed for hundreds of miles. Watered by the Zayandeh river, it was a fertile oasis surrounded by limitless horizons of sand and salt. ‘It is rich in fruits, among its products being apricots of unequalled quality with sweet almonds in their kernels, quinces whose sweetness and size cannot be paralleled, splendid grapes, and wonderful melons,’ wrote the Moroccan traveller. ‘Its people are good-looking, with clear white skins tinged with red, exceedingly brave, generous, and always trying to outdo one another in procuring luxurious viands.’ Arabshah agreed. Isfahan was ‘a great city, full of excellent men and teeming with nobles’.
Although an early proponent of blitzkrieg, Temur liked to justify his military actions before they began. A pretext was needed before he could lay claim to Isfahan. He did not have to cast about for one for long. Prior to leaving Samarkand on this Three-Year Campaign, he had received a highly unusual letter from Shah Shuja Muzaffar, the ruler of the Persian province of Fars, with whom he had previously contracted an alliance. After a decadent life indulging heavily in wine and women, the patron of the poet Hafiz was now on his deathbed, from where he entrusted the protection of his remaining family to Temur.
‘Great men are aware that the world is the theatre of inconstancy,’ Shah Shuja’s letter began:
Men of learning are never given to trifles – nor transitory pleasures and beauties – because they know the passing of all things … As to the treaty between us, deigning never to break it, I look upon the gaining of the Imperial Friendship as a great conquest, and my chief wish – dare I say it – is to have in my hand this treaty with you at the Day of Judgement, so that you should not reproach me with breaking my word … Now I am called before the tribunal of the Sovereign Master of the Universe, and I thank the Divine Majesty that I have done nothing for which my conscience can reproach me – notwithstanding the faults and sins which are inseparable from life and the depraved nature of man – and I have tasted all the pleasures I could reasonably expect during the fifty-three years I have stayed upon the earth … In brief, I die as I have lived, and I have abandoned all the vanities of the world. And I pray God to give his blessing to this monarch [Temur] as wise as Solomon and as great as Alexander. Although it is not at all necessary to commend to you my loved son Zayn al Abidin – God grant him a long life under the shadow of your protection – I leave him to the care of God and your Majesty. How could I doubt that you will keep this treaty? I also beg of you to say the final prayer for your devoted friend, who is happy in departing out of this life in friendship with you, that through the prayers of a Prince so great and fortunate, God may be merciful to me and raise me up among the saints. This is what we pray your Majesty to carry out, as our last will, for which you will be answerable in the next world.
The Muzaffarid prince gave Shiraz, capital of Fars province, to his son and heir Zayn al Abidin. The old man’s nephew Shah Yahya received Yazd, his brother Sultan Ahmed inheriting Kirman. Isfahan was bequeathed to his valiant nephew Shah Mansur. The letter and Shah Shuja’s will gave Temur just the opportunity he was waiting for. Testing the loyalty of his new vassal, he summoned Zayn al Abidin to swear loyalty to him at his travelling court. The prince failed to present himself.
Suddenly the Tatar hordes were lined up in full battle formation before the walls of Isfahan. It was a terrifying sight for its governor and citizens, who knew Temur’s reputation only too well. A false move and the city would be turned to ashes. Rushing out to pre-empt certain slaughter, the governor and his officials offered their surrender. Temur accepted, on condition the city pay a typically heavy ransom. Once this had been agreed, he rode into Isfahan with a magnificently arrayed entourage to inspect his latest acquisition.
Tension gripped the city. No one knew what Temur would do next. Gossip, rumour and wild speculation coursed through the bazaars. Some said Isfahan was going to be spared, and that Temur would soon be on his way after seizing the ransom. Others, mindful of previous outrages, expected the city to be torched, and retreated into their cellars, determined not to move until the conqueror and his army had left.
A new governor was appointed, and then, as suddenly as he had arrived, Temur wheeled around, spurred his horse and galloped back to his camp outside the city, well pleased with the day’s events. Night fell and the cloak of darkness descended on Isfahan. An uneasy peace bristled in the streets. Tatar officers guarded the gates to the city, reinforced within the walls by a garrison of soldiers. No one else was allowed entry. Camped outside after several months on the march, seventy thousand hungry and exhausted soldiers thought longingly of plunder, picturing the sexual and gastronomic pleasures that surely awaited them, and wondered what the morning would bring.
Some time in the night, according to Yazdi, Isfahan awoke to the noise of a blacksmith beating his drum and urging his fellow citizens to fall upon the Tatar soldiers stationed inside the walls. Gripped by fear and moved by hatred, they rose up against their new conquerors and the garrison of three thousand was slain. In a matter of minutes the massacre was complete. Toasting their success, the hot-blooded rebels swore that Isfahan would remain free. But the celebrations did not last long. The first flush of victory quickly receded, replaced by the chilling realisation that Temur would certainly avenge these killings, carried out in defiance of a treaty agreed with the city elders. No quarter could be expected from him now. With this recognition that they had signed their own death warrants rather than liberated Isfahan, the mood of the warriors changed and their limbs started to tremble. And then another silence, heavy with dread, hung over the roofs of the city.
At dawn, wrote Arabshah,
Temur perceived that evil crime; and Satan puffed up his nostrils and he forthwith moved his camp and drew the sword of his wrath and took arrows from the quiver of his tyranny and advanced to the city, roaring, overthrowing, like a dog or lion or leopard; and when he came in sight of the city, he ordered bloodshed and sacrilege, slaughter and plunder, devastation, burning of crops, women’s breasts to be cut off, infants to be destroyed, bodies dismembered, honour to be insulted, dependants to be betrayed and abandoned, the carpet of pity to be folded up and the blanket of revenge to be unfolded … then he loosened the reins of the cutting sword in the fields of their necks and made their graves in the bellies of wolves and hyenas and the crop of birds; and the whirlwinds of destruction did not cease sweeping them from the trees of existence, until they counted the number of dead, who were six times more than the people of Nineveh.
Temur ordered the killing of every man, woman and child. Seventy thousand lost their lives in the bloodbath. Each division of the army, from the detachments of ten and one hundred to the tumans of ten thousand, was ordered to bring back a certain number of heads, and the tovachis were appointed to count them. At first, Yazdi observed, there was great reluctance among the soldiers to murder fellow Muslims in cold blood. Many bought heads from more willing executioners. Heads changed hands for twenty dinars apiece until the soldiers lost their scruples and the torrent of slaughter raged unabated through the city; the price plunged to half a dinar. Those who had escaped the initial slaughter, hiding in their houses, crept out at night and fled through the snow. They were hunted down the following morning and butchered where they stood.
No mercy was shown Isfahan’s children. Schiltberger, the Bavarian squire captured and taken prisoner by Temur’s army at the battle of Ankara in 1402, described what happened after the slaughter inside the city walls.
Then he ordered the women and children to be taken to a plain outside the city, and ordered the children under seven years of age to be placed apart, and ordered his people to ride over these same children. When his counsellors and the mothers of the children saw this, they fell at his feet, and begged that he would not kill them. He would not listen, and ordered that they should be ridden over; but none would be the first to do so. He got angry and rode himself [amongst them] and said: ‘Now I should like to see who will not ride after me?’ Then they were obliged to ride over the children, and they were all trampled upon. There were seven thousand.
The familiar totems of Temur’s wrath sprang up around the city like an unholy halo of death. The historian Hafiz-i-Abru walked halfway round Isfahan shortly after the bloodshed and counted twenty-eight towers of fifteen hundred heads each.
In the final weeks of 1387, Temur was celebrating the peaceful surrender of Shiraz, two hundred miles to the south. There was reason to be content. Like Herat, Tabriz and Isfahan, the city had emptied its coffers to him, this time for a crippling ransom of ten million silver dinars. In the mosques, Temur’s name was read in the khutba – the sermon in Friday prayers – as the new sovereign. The rival princes of the Muzaffarid dynasty were now vassal kings. Victory letters were despatched to Samarkand commemorating, in florid prose, the sweep of his triumphs. The lion’s share of the empire carved out by Hulagu now owed its allegiance to the upstart sheep-stealer-turned-emperor from Samarkand.
It was in Shiraz, according to a popular story, that the poet Hafiz, the brightest star in the literary firmament, was summoned before Temur to explain himself. He had written a verse which had come to the Tatar’s attention and displeased him mightily.
If that unkindly Shiraz Turk would take my heart within her hand, I’d give Bukhara for the mole upon her cheek, or Samarkand.
Temur’s voice, though calm, was full of menace. ‘I have subdued with this sword the greater part of the earth. I have depopulated a vast number of cities and provinces in order to increase the glory and wealth of Samarkand and Bukhara, the ordinary places of my residence and the seat of my empire; yet you, an insignificant individual, have pretended to give away both Samarkand and Bukhara as the price of a little black mole setting off the features of a pretty face.’
It was a dreadful moment for Hafiz. His life hung in the balance. A careless answer would cost him his head. ‘Alas! O Prince,’ he replied, ‘it is this prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you see me.’
Far from offending Temur, the poet’s reply amused him. Instead of ordering his immediate execution, he presented him with extravagant presents and asked him to stay in the imperial court.
These weeks of courtly pleasures were suddenly interrupted. From Samarkand, eleven hundred miles away, came desperate news. Mawarannahr was under attack. The heart of the newly won empire was besieged. Prince Omar Shaykh, Temur’s eldest surviving son, had only narrowly escaped death on the battlefield. Enemy forces had surrounded Bukhara. Some were marauding in the Qashka Darya valley, where Temur had been born. Soldiers were laying waste to towns and villages. The palace at Qarshi, one of the defining symbols of the Chaghatay empire, had been razed to the ground. Worse still, the Jats, Temur’s long-standing adversaries in Moghulistan, had wasted no time in joining the rebellion, accompanied by the Sufi shah of Khorezm.
It was a bitter blow. By the mid-1380s, Temur ruled, or rather had conquered, lands stretching west from Samarkand as far as Georgia and the fringes of the Ottoman empire. Although much of these territories would require periodic reconquest, it was Temur, and no other man, who could justifiably claim to be emperor over them. But while he had been winning these new lands with the sword a thousand miles away in the west, a hostile army, taking advantage of his absence from the seat of empire, had struck decisively in the east. His adversary had mounted a lightning raid where it was least expected, using precisely the sort of tactics which Temur himself had employed with such success. The brilliantly executed manoeuvrings had completely wrong-footed the master of warfare. Now, after years of peace and plenty, Samarkand, his beloved capital, was under threat. It was the most serious challenge he had ever faced. Failure to confront and overcome it would spell the humiliating end to his career of conquest.
But what made the news even harder for Temur to stomach was the identity of his enemy. The grating irony was that it was the very man whose incursions had prompted him to campaign in the Caucasus to shore up his western defences. Here was an adversary of an altogether different nature, of far greater mettle, than those Temur had faced and defeated before, an audacious warrior in his own mould. The one-time protégé had unleashed his sword against his former mentor. The son had turned against his adopted father. Tokhtamish, khan of the Golden Horde, wanted war.
* Today, Khorasan refers only to the north-eastern province of Iran, but in medieval times it covered a far larger territory. For Arab geographers it encompassed everything from Dasht-i-Kavir, the central desert of Iran, to the borders of China in the east, and to those of India in the south. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, it had shrunk to the equivalent of Iranian Khorasan, southern Turkmenistan, and northern and north-western Afghanistan.
* To give an idea of the size of European towns in the fourteenth century, in Italy only four – Milan, Venice, Naples and Florence – could boast populations of over fifty thousand. Paris had in the region of eighty thousand inhabitants. Cologne, the largest city in Germany, had a population approaching forty thousand, almost identical to that of London.
* Despite these precautions, the people of Herat rebelled against Temur only two years later. This time the conqueror sent his son Miranshah to quash the uprising, a task he completed with brutal efficiency. The members of the Kart royal family were executed and towers piled high with the skulls of the dead. The city never rebelled again. In 1389 Miranshah killed Pir Mohammed, the last survivor of the dynasty. According to one story, he cut off the prince’s head in the middle of a high-spirited banquet, an act he later blamed on the vast quantities of wine he had consumed.
* Byron’s languid peregrinations through Asia in 1933–34 left him with a profound appreciation of the Temurids’ artistic and architectural achievements. Queen Gawhar Shad, wife of Shahrukh, particularly intrigued him. ‘I feel some curiosity about Gohar Shad,’ he confessed, ‘not on account of her piety in endowing religious foundations, but as a woman of artistic instinct. Either she had that instinct, or she knew how to employ people who had it. This shows character. And besides this, she was rich. Taste, character, and riches mean power, and powerful women, apart from charmers, are not common in Mohammadan history.’
* Under Taliban rule, the Masjid-i-Jami, Herat’s Friday mosque, one of the greatest buildings in the Islamic world and among Afghanistan’s most important historical monuments, was closed to all non-Muslims. Mosque officials enforced this ban zealously, out of fear, they said, of beatings by the dreaded religious police.
* Like his predecessor Hafiz, Jami did not hide his light under a bushel. He claimed never to have met anyone who could best him in an argument, one reason presumably why he refused to acknowledge the obligations of a pupil to any teacher. He described himself as a great poet, a great scholar and a great mystic, a master of all literary genres and subjects: lyrical and romantic poetry, exegesis of the Koran, analysis of the divine mission of the Prophet Mohammed, Arabic grammar, rhyme, prosody and music. In his own words: ‘My verses have achieved so much fame in the whole world that a minstrel begins singing with my verses. If the caravan of my verses reach Fars, souls of Sa’di and Hafiz welcome it. If they reach India, Khusraw and Hasan come out to receive it. Sometimes the Emperor of Constantinople Rum sends his greetings to me while at other times, Cheepal sends messages to me from Hind.’
* Robert Byron, as ever, had his own counter-intuitive views on this celebrated saint. ‘Khoja Abdullah Ansari died in the year 1088 at the age of eighty-four, because some boys threw stones at him while he was at penance. One sympathises with those boys: even among saints he was a prodigious bore. He spoke in the cradle; he began to preach at fourteen; during his life he held intercourse with a thousand sheikhs, learnt a hundred thousand verses by heart (some say 1,200,000) and composed as many more. He doted on cats.’
* Born in the late fifteenth century, Bihzad first entered the service of Ali Sher Nawai, the statesman, poet, father of the Chaghatay language, generous patron of the arts and friend of Sultan Husayn Mirza, before graduating to royal appointments. Though little is known about him, he worked in Herat, ushering in a new style of Persian miniature painting which was characterised by firm lines, strong colours, unprecedented detail and exquisite delicacy. His work is now regarded as marking the high point of the Islamic miniaturist’s craft and a major influence on Persian painting. Writing around 1523, the historian Khwandamir left this glowing profile of his contemporary: ‘He sets before us marvellous forms and rarities of art; his draughtsmanship, which is like the brush of Mani, has caused the memorials of all the painters of the world to be obliterated, and his fingers, endowed with miraculous qualities, have wiped out the pictures of all the artists among the sons of Adam. A hair of his brush, through its mastery, has given life to the lifeless form … At the present time, too, this marvel of the age, whose belief is pure, is regarded with benevolence by the kings of the world and is encompassed with the boundless consideration of the rulers of Islam.’ Bihzad’s magnificent illustrations can be seen in Yazdi’s Zafarnama. They include fascinating pictures such as ‘Temur granting audience on the occasion of his accession’, ‘The Building of the Great Mosque in Samarkand’, ‘Destruction of the remnant of the Kipchak army’, and ‘The Assault on the fortress of the Knights of St John at Smyrna’. After the capture of Herat by the Safavids in 1510, Bihzad moved to Tabriz, and possibly Bukhara.
* Clavijo, though he greatly admired the fabulous silks of Sultaniya, was inconvenienced by the tremendous heat of the region. His comments, which anticipate the complaints of British tourists holidaying abroad by some six hundred years, are particularly interesting from a Spaniard based in Castile. ‘These countries where silk is made are all so hot that any strangers who go there suffer much from sunstroke, which indeed at times may kill; they say that the stroke goes straight to the heart, causing first vomiting and then death. To the sufferers their shoulders will seem to burn, and they say too that those who escape with their lives ever afterwards are yellow in the face or grey, never regaining their natural complexion.’
* Such figures, as has been noted, are considered exaggerated today.