‘Then Temur came into those parts with a great army, nay, a turbid sea, whose soldiers carried flying arrows, sharp swords and quivering spears and were ravening lions and furious leopards, all of warlike spirit, which takes vengeance on the enemy, stoutly defends its own flag and its allies and homes and its prey and its lairs and covers with the sea of war him who opposes its waves and breakers.
‘Therefore Toqtamish sent to the lords of his subjects and the magnates of his peoples and the dwellers in sandy places and inhabitants of the borders and chiefs who were his kinsmen and leaders of the right and left of his army, whom he summoned and called to meet the enemy and wage war and they came clad in the long robe of obedience and hastening from every high mountain; and there assembled hosts and tribes of horse and foot and swordsmen and javelin-throwers and archers and attackers and defenders and warriors and slayers with the sabre and skilled archers and wielders of spears, who would not miss the mark compared with the sons of Tual, skilled spearmen. When they take their weapon and aim at what they need, they strike the mark whether sitting or flying.
‘Then Toqtamish rose to fight, ready for onslaught and battle, with an army numerous like the sands and heavy like the mountains.’
AHMED IBN ARABSHAH, Tamerlane
Temur, as he hurried back east to Samarkand to protect his homeland, must have cursed his earlier foreign policy in the north. He had used Tokhtamish as a pawn in the succession game against Urus, khan of the White Horde.* A blood feud already existed between those two men. Urus had murdered Tokhtamish’s father and was now concentrating on enlarging his empire, a direct threat to Temur’s dominions immediately to the south. At the time, distracting Urus from these grander designs by keeping him mired in internecine conflict within the White Horde had seemed eminently sensible. For as long as Urus was fighting a domestic rival, he was prevented from reunifying the fragmented Golden Horde under one ruler, and was therefore unlikely to emerge on ambitious campaigns beyond his borders.
Temur had groomed Tokhtamish, had educated him in the art of warfare and had armed and equipped him time after time in the second half of the 1370s. Repeatedly defeated at the hands of Urus, Tokhtamish had straggled back to Temur’s court, from where, with health and wealth restored, he had returned again and again to the frontline. Temur had even fought alongside him.
How Temur must have regretted these intrigues as relays of messengers galloped into his camp, bringing more details of the damage suffered during Tokhtamish’s invasion of Mawarannahr. In terms of its immediate objectives, his policy had succeeded. Urus had been emasculated. But Tokhtamish, in his wake, had proved too powerful. By 1378, he had succeeded his arch-rival as khan of the White Horde. By 1380, he was installed as leader of the combined hordes in the flourishing capital of Saray on the Volga. Two years later, his armies overran and torched Moscow. Tokhtamish now presided over the restored Jochi ulus, the Golden Horde, original patrimony of Genghis’s eldest son.
These lands, the northernmost and westernmost Mongol territories, which stretched from the Danube in the west to the Irtish in the east, were populated by an unruly and exotic cast of nomadic peoples of Turkic origin – Bulgars, Kazaks, Kyrgyz, Alans, Kankalis and Mordovians – known simply as the Kipchaks, the men of the desert, whose steppes formed the centre of this fluid movement of the tribes. The Horde reached as far as Khorezm in the south-east, its south-western borders marked by the northern Caucasus, Crimea and Moldo-Wallachia. In the north-west it included the lands of the Volga Bulgars and Mordovians. A vast swathe of steppe, it boasted well-maintained trade routes and excellent pasturage for the nomads’ animals.
The fringes of Temur’s empire and those of the Golden Horde were particularly blurred in two areas: Khorezm in the east and, more particularly, Azerbaijan in the west. These spots were potential flashpoints, the more so given the expanding arc of both Temur and Tokhtamish’s ambitions. That Tokhtamish had pushed on farther south into the bosom of Temur’s empire – he had even had the temerity to lay siege to Bukhara – into lands over which he held no conceivable hereditary claim, was an outrage and an intolerable insult.
When discussing the looming conflict between the two men it is important to remember that Tokhtamish, unlike Temur, could claim the most illustrious descent. He was a prince of royal blood, who traced his lineage back to Genghis through Tokay Temur, son of Jochi. Once he had seized power, therefore, he had the right to style himself khan, a title forever prohibited to Temur by the conventions of the steppe.
Whatever hospitality he had received from Temur, it would not have been unreasonable for Tokhtamish to regard the Tatar as an impostor on the Asian stage, a minor noble at best. If anyone was to reunite the fragmented Mongol empire, it was he and not his upstart rival in the south. The older enmity between the Jochids and the Hulagid empire of Persia, where Temur had already announced his intentions by making great inroads, merely reinforced this conviction.
From Temur’s perspective, war with Tokhtamish was now inevitable. For as long as his aggressive northern neighbour was free to launch attacks on Mawarannahr, his empire-building of necessity had to stop. This suited neither his objectives nor those of his Tatar hordes, as predictable as ever in their lust for booty and riches. Tokhtamish had to be neutralised and eliminated. There was no acceptable alternative.
Before he set about his preparations for this campaign, Temur first wanted to establish how the khan of the Golden Horde had managed to penetrate so far south. His attention to detail and discipline was, as ever, meticulous. Why, he wanted to know, had the imperial armies not driven Tokhtamish away? What explained the shameful defeat of Prince Omar Shaykh’s forces at Otrar on the Sir Darya? How could Tokhtamish have humiliated Temur in the conqueror’s own lands? Bukhara, the heart of Islam, had almost fallen to these enemies of the faith. Temur glowed with fury at the thought of it. An inquiry was held. Temur’s son was found to have led his men bravely, and escaped any charge of cowardice. One warrior, who had fought like a lion, was handsomely rewarded with land and the most distinguished title of tarkhan. Another commander, however, who had fled from the battlefield when the fighting was at its most furious, was forced to suffer a highly unusual and embarrassing punishment. His beard was shaved, his face was painted with rouge and he was forced to put on woman’s clothing. Then, ‘after having received severe reproaches for his cowardice’, he was made to run barefoot through Samarkand, to the general hilarity of the citizens and the more subdued emotions of the soldiery.
For now, war would wait. More than a year elapsed from Temur’s arrival in Samarkand in the autumn of 1388 to the departure of the imperial armies on their mission to extinguish Tokhtamish. As always, there was the business of empire and family to attend to first. Khorezm, above all, had to be taught the price of rebellion. Urganch was savagely erased from the map, fields of barley planted on its ruins. More happily, a number of marriages were celebrated within the imperial family. Brides were found for Prince Omar Shaykh and the eleven-year-old Shahrukh, later bearer of the Temurid flame, together with the emperor’s cherished grandsons Pir Mohammed and Mohammed Sultan, the heirs of Jahangir, Temur’s first-born who had predeceased him. In the Paradise Garden pavilions were erected, lined with elaborate carpets and hangings. Amidst this splendour, among pearls and rubies, gold and silver, the royal princes were married to princesses who were, said the chronicle, as fabulously beautiful as the houris of paradise.*
The amirs were stood down, the soldiers released from duty and instructed to return to their families until the return of spring and another campaigning season. Peace descended on Mawarannahr and the citizens, reassured by the arrival of their emperor after the traumas of invasion, slept soundly once again. And then, just as Samarkand was slumbering through the deep snows of winter, came more chilling news, almost too improbable to believe. Tokhtamish, at the head of a formidable army, was bearing down on Mawarannahr again. His forces had already crossed the Sir Darya and showed no signs of halting despite the vicious conditions. Panic-stricken, Temur’s advisers counselled against retaliation. This was not the time to engage the enemy, they argued. The main body of the imperial army had retired for the winter, out of reach and scattered across the empire. Even with those soldiers who remained at hand, the weather was simply too hostile to contemplate military action. The snow was too deep for the horses. Far better to sit it out in Samarkand until the advent of spring. Tokhtamish, besides, would only be exposing himself and his men to the harsh elements while skirmishing relatively harmlessly in the outlying areas. The losses would be minimal. There was nothing to be gained from attacking now, ill-prepared and motivated by rage.
There can be no doubt Temur’s pride had been stung. It was not in his nature to let such an attack go unanswered. He would not countenance any delay. Besides, retiring now would contravene his long-held military principle never to fight a defensive war. It was his enemies, not his own men, whom he forced to defend themselves behind walls, and the result was always the same: a devastating rout. He would not subject himself or his armies to such ignominy. The khan of the Golden Horde had attacked at the most unexpected and inhospitable time of year. The Tatar would make him pay for it. The invader would be expecting Temur to act as his most trusted amirs had suggested, by withdrawing to the south and avoiding battle. Ignoring this advice, he assembled an army from Samarkand and Shakhrisabz and moved north by night marches. The horses struggled ahead fitfully, with snow up to their bellies. Temur’s army reached the vanguard of Tokhtamish’s forces and succeeded in driving them back across the Sir Darya. And then the skies whitened and the air was full of stinging snow, hurled at the rival armies by the ferocious winds. Visibility disappeared altogether. Horses lost their way, falling constantly in the drifts. The men shivered within their tents, comforting themselves with already long-distant memories of warm nights at the family hearth. As quickly as it had begun, the expedition ground to a halt.
The spring of 1389 brought further indecisive skirmishing. Before he could embark on an all-out campaign against his northern adversary, one which would doubtless take many months, Temur first crushed the rebellion that had broken out in Khorasan and then drove back the Jats of Moghulistan, his long-standing enemy to the east. Driven by the time-honoured principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the Moghuls, under their new ruler Khizr Khoja, had done all in their power to assist Tokhtamish against Temur. Pacifying Khorasan – with typical brutality – secured the Tatar’s western flank. The offensive against the Moghuls, pressed home emphatically until Khizr Khoja turned tail and fled into the mountains, removed the eastern threat. The road to Tokhtamish was now clear.
A qurultay was called near Shakhrisabz in the valley where Temur had been born, at which the amirs and their army officers, from the proud binbashis, commanders of one thousand, to the most junior onbashis, commanders of ten, gathered to hear the emperor’s plans. The scale of the festivities reflected the importance of the campaign. ‘There was another magnificent feast by Temur’s order, the expenses of which were prodigious great,’ Yazdi recorded. ‘The princesses and ladies were all adorned with the richest jewels; the earth was covered with carpets of gold, China brocades, and embroidered pieces of work enriched with pearls, rubies and other precious stones: the cups, which were presented by the most beautiful women in the world, were of pure rock crystal, worked with all the delicacy and fineness which can be expected from the skill and industry of the most ingenious artists of past ages.’
Orders were given to expand the forces at the leader’s disposal. Temur wanted to put an army of two hundred thousand into the field. The Tatar did not underestimate his former protégé. He already had good grounds to respect his military talents.
It is clear from the chronicles that of all Temur’s opponents over the years, Tokhtamish was the warrior he most admired. The court records confirm how highly the Tatar valued the victories over him. The two campaigns and great battles against the khan of the Golden Horde are painstakingly detailed by Yazdi. We know more about these expeditions than most of the others: the great hardships faced by Temur’s weary army as it marched north across the barren steppes; the feint and counter-feint of master and disciple, father and son, as the two armies faced each other across the river Terek; the course of the battle as first one side, then the other, snatched advantage; the wild celebrations which concluded the campaign.
In a sense the khan of the Golden Horde was Temur’s reincarnation, for the younger man had learnt his military skills directly from his more experienced neighbour. Like Temur he was a leader who possessed cunning and guile in abundance. But Tokhtamish’s status as Temur’s arch-enemy was due also to geographical factors. His ambitions represented the most serious challenge to Temur’s supremacy in Central Asia. There were other great contemporary sovereigns, but none breathing down his neck so closely. Their empires were distant: the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I ruled far to the west, the Ming emperor held sway thousands of miles to the east.
At Shakhrisabz the qurultay was dismissed and the amirs and tovachis departed to attend to their armies. By the end of 1390, Temur was ready to depart. The Moghuls were no longer an immediate threat in the east. Khorasan had been subdued. The army had been assembled and well supplied for the campaign ahead. As a first step towards his enemy, Temur led his men two hundred miles north. Then he called a halt as the first snows of winter spiralled down from colourless skies. The emperor and his army would winter in Tashkent.
In the late fourteenth century the city of Tashkent, or Shash as it was then known, was a pale shadow of the modern capital of Uzbekistan, and Temur had very little to do with it. Samarkand was the seat of his empire, Bukhara his religious capital. As his conquests expanded from this nucleus, they incorporated an ever-growing number of cities famed throughout Asia and the rest of the world. Tashkent, by contrast, is mentioned only rarely in the chronicles. There are several references to it in Yazdi, but they say little other than that Temur camped in the pastures outside the city prior to, or on his return from, one of his many campaigns; there is certainly nothing to show that he paid the place any particular regard. Nor is there any record that he left his mark there architecturally, no mosques or madrassahs, parks or palaces.
Though history reveals the little esteem in which he held the city, in the early twenty-first century Tashkent is at the forefront of a powerfully orchestrated Temur revival. Right in the heart of the capital, in the centre of a cool, tree-lined square, is a life-size statue of a man on horseback. The pose is regal and military. The sculptor has captured the moment of a great leader in action. The warrior wears a beard and a handsome crown. His right arm is raised aloft in a gesture of control, perhaps addressing his troops or surveying the sweep of his empire. His expression is imperious, the look of a man accustomed to command. The loose folds of his cloak catch the wind and billow behind him. With his left hand he reins his horse in tightly, catching the beast in mid-stride, snorting, its head sharply bowed, its left foreleg treadmilling the air. On his left side sits a long, gently curved sword, secured above a circular embossed shield. Massive boots with protective plates rest in huge stirrups. A richly decorated blanket covers the horse’s back, edged with rows of hanging squares and pendants. Beneath the reins runs an elaborate girdle with matching fringes. Strength is engraved in every sinew of the stallion. In his thunderous chest and powerfully built legs. In his vigorous mane and pricked ears. In his voluminous tail gathered into an ordered bunch. Even in the veins running across his prodigious testicles. At the foot of the marble plinth that bears man and beast lies a tired bunch of flowers, a small donation from an anonymous admirer. On the plinth itself are the words ‘Strength in Justice’, set in bronze. And above them, in larger letters, the name of the man on horseback: Amir Temur.
Across the square, its blue ribbed dome recalling, though to a much inferior degree, the dazzling Temurid cupolas, is the Amir Temur museum, a relatively new circular building whose crude roof, complete with faux crenellations, is propped up by a series of insubstantial columns. At ground level square doors fill the lower half of tall marble arches set against a background of faded salmon. The upper half of the arches contain plain decorations that pay scant homage to the fine craftsmanship demanded by Temur.
Looking at the building on a bright September morning, I couldn’t help thinking that if the Tatar’s architects and masons had built it in his honour, they would have lost their heads. ‘If you want to judge our strength, look at our monuments,’ Temur had said. The verdict here would have been entirely unflattering. The museum lacks any sense of solidity or durability. His monuments were of an unparalleled magnificence. Built on a colossal scale, in which monumentality became virtually the official creed, they towered over everyday lives in unearthly splendour. They were built to last, and, with few exceptions, that is precisely what they did.
Buildings have always been windows onto a nation’s soul, an indication of strength and style, imagination, sense of beauty and financial muscle. They are direct expressions of the values of the cultures and civilisations which design and produce them. They speak of everything from scale and proportion to vision and technology. In their various forms they suggest concepts of harmony and comfort, the desire to please or impress, shock or inspire. It is no coincidence that some of man’s greatest monuments are those that reach out to the heavens and pay tribute to his God. Religion has produced masterpieces as utterly diverse as the Aztec Templo Mayor, Canterbury Cathedral, the Parthenon, Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon and the Great Mosque at Samarra, Iraq. Many of the finest architectural creations are possessed of a permanence that marks them out from the ordinary. There is a monumentality about, say, the Pyramids of Giza or the Coliseum in Rome, the Great Wall of China or even, in more modern times, some of the financial institutions of London and Wall Street, that bespeaks power, confidence and prosperity, man revelling in his abilities to create. In the Muslim world, one thinks of the many glories of Islamic architecture, buildings like the Alhambra in Granada, Isfahan’s Imam Mosque, the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, the Taj Mahal, the medinas of Meshed, Fes, Damascus, Aleppo and Bukhara, all designed and built with painstaking care by the most talented craftsmen using the richest materials available, in the service of often cruel but culturally and artistically enlightened rulers.
In any assessment of Temur it is vital to stress his contribution in this field, if only because he gave birth to one of the most glorious architectural epochs in history, which lasted more than a hundred years after his death. It says much about him as a man, about his understanding, all but unique in an unlettered nomad of the steppe, of the possibilities of art and architecture in a settled urban centre. Genghis, by contrast, is remembered today only for his legendary destructive powers. He flattened, but he did not build. This museum in the heart of Tashkent, though it celebrates a leader who bequeathed Asia this rich architectural legacy, though it stands in a corner of the square which bears his name, is in a very different and inferior league from its more illustrious Islamic predecessors. Even Temur’s plainest and most humble mausoleum would have put it to shame.
Inside, the centrepiece on the ground floor is a panel in which Temur is holding a diwan or council. Beneath the dais on which he sits are several courtiers humbly prostrated before him. A host of domes and great monuments stand behind him, next to a lion, astylised sun and Temur’s arms, consisting of three circles arranged thus:
Together with the motto ‘Rasti Rusti’ – ‘Strength in Justice’ – this symbol may have represented Temur’s power encircling south, west and north. Clavijo was told that it ‘signifies that he Temur is lord of all Three Quarters of the World’. A more likely explanation is that Temur simply appropriated it from Persian heraldry, in which rings representing strength and unity were engraved on the tombs of the Sassanids. The panel is illuminated by a bright gold chandelier of impressive size, suspended from the great dome above. Around the base of the cupola are a number of Temur’s sayings, some of which have been inexpertly translated into English:
Honesty and faithfulness people and army strengthen the state.
The work which can’t be done by hundred thousand cavalries can be done by one correct arrangement.
But the best clue to understanding this museum and how it fits into the broader question of Temur’s contemporary renaissance comes at the top of a grand marble staircase, where the following words have been written alongside a portrait of the pudgy Uzbek president, Islam Karimov:
If someone wants to understand who the Uzbeks are, if somebody wants to comprehend all the power, might, justice and unlimited abilities of the Uzbek people, their contribution to the global development, their belief in future, he should recall the image of Amir Temur.
It was Karimov, supported by suppliant academics, who effected Temur’s resurrection. On 1 September 1993, as part of the second anniversary of Uzbekistan’s independence, the president unveiled the statue of Temur in the centre of Tashkent. ‘Today, thanks to the return of independence and sovereignty, the great Amir Temur has returned to his Motherland,’ he told the crowd. ‘The Uzbek people, trapped for so many years in the clutches of the colonial vice, are no longer deprived of the opportunity to honour our great compatriot and render to him his historical due.’
It was a long, revealing dedication speech. ‘For many years,’ Karimov continued, ‘the name of Amir Temur was degraded and blacked out from the pages of our history in order to remove the self-awareness from the soul of the Uzbek people, in order to destroy the people’s sense of national pride and increase its sense of dependence and subordination. But the Uzbeks have not forgotten their ancestors and heroes – they have guarded them in their soul like sacred objects … There is no doubt that this image of our great ancestor, erected in the very heart of our beautiful capital – beloved, ancient Tashkent – will forever evoke a feeling of immense pride in our people.’
The museum had been hastily constructed three years later, in time for the celebrations of the conqueror’s 660th anniversary in 1996. Temur had ridden to the rescue of a communist leadership swaying in the wind after the rapid unravelling of the Soviet Union. The liberating storm had spread from Moscow, engulfing the Soviet republics one by one. In 1991, independence gusted into Tashkent, foisted on a bewildered leadership by events beyond its borders and entirely beyond its control. The solid ground on which Karimov had stood throughout his career was suddenly torn from beneath his feet. For years a communist supremo, he now needed repackaging. He and his henchmen cast about for new symbols of power and legitimacy. Who better to bolster his claim to leadership than Temur, rebranded as an Uzbek hero, the irresistible warrior whose name had been alternately suppressed and vilified for seven decades by the Soviets? He was no longer the destructive tyrant the Soviets had labelled him in their implacable determination to erase any nationalist symbols that might undermine the union. Temur was now the glorious saviour of Uzbekistan, and the answer to all of the challenges facing an emerging regional power.
He took his place, then, on the marble plinth in Tashkent’s central square as the latest in a succession of ideological or nationalist symbols. Before Temur, Marx had scowled down on passers-by. Before Marx, it had been Stalin. Before Stalin, Lenin. Before Lenin, Konstantin Kaufmann, governor-general of Russian Turkestan. The Scourge of the World was in good company.
The irony of this rehabilitation of Temur was that in its heavy-handed crudeness and utter intolerance of dissent it bore all the hallmarks of a Soviet-era campaign. Take this, for example, from Khalq sozi, the official organ of Karimov’s People’s Democratic Party.
His Highness Amir Temur is a symbol of national greatness. One of the fundamental slogans of our independence, one of the bases of our national unity … is‘Uzbekistan – the future great state’. For a nation with a great past, the future also can only be great. The deeds of the great Amir Temur in state-building, his political wisdom and fearlessness are reflected in the principles of today’s policies. It is well known that this dignified and just ruler always dealt with the world with good and kind intentions. And our independent republic, from its very first steps, has announced the very same goals – to conduct itself in the world with kindness and goodwill … The policies of our President, directed at giving due respect to the spirit of our ancestors, teach us all to be worthy of these qualities embodied by Amir Temur.
State-sponsored academics published encomiums on the hero of the motherland. Where once the Soviet establishment had humiliated and ruined those Uzbek academics who dared question the official picture of Temur as savage barbarian, now Karimov’s government leaned heavily on anyone casting doubt on the new, sanitised orthodoxy of Temur as symbol of the state.* Streets and squares were named after him. Throughout the country young couples celebrated their marriages in front of statues of him, laid wreaths of flowers before him. His picture appeared on the highest-denomination banknotes, on newspaper mastheads and street hoardings. The president appeared in portraits alongside him, and encouraged favourable comparisons with him. ‘Strength in justice’ was the new government mantra.† The proliferation of Temurabilia in Tashkent and throughout Uzbekistan, albeit hijacked by the state, was a heartening discovery. Six hundred years after his death and in the unlikeliest of circumstances, Temur was back.*
If you take the underground to Chorsu, the old city of Tashkent, and walk down a winding lane, past rows of mud-baked houses from where the myriad sounds of family life filter out into the gloaming – a mother reprimanding her shrieking child, a man repairing his ancient Lada, saucepans clattering – eventually the lane becomes a street and the street becomes a road and you find yourself in Khast Imam Square, the heart of Muslim Tashkent. On your left is the sixteenth-century Barak Khan Madrassah, a religious school founded by a Shaybanid ruler of Tashkent and descendant of Temur. It is a towering edifice with Koranic inscriptions running across its fine façade amid a medley of blue-tiled mosaics, and it is home to the Mufti of Uzbekistan, spiritual leader of the country’s Muslims. Directly opposite the madrassah is the Tillya Sheikh Mosque, which dates from the same era and, although a less notable building from the outside, is Tashkent’s chief Friday mosque.
Inside, after you have passed through the open courtyard, opened the door directly opposite you, walked down a carpeted corridor past the library, which holds a collection of eighty-five thousand books and manuscripts dating back to the earliest days of Islam in this part of the world, you reach a small room which contains the mosque’s greatest treasure, one of the most remarkable and famous books in the world and one of Temur’s most enduring gifts to posterity.
In a climate-controlled glass case, its ancient pages opened like the wings of a butterfly, sits the Holy Koran of Othman, an encyclopaedia-sized volume. It is the oldest Koran in the world. The librarian, a diminutive middle-aged man with glasses who, were it not for the absence of a beard, would look the archetypal Islamic scholar, will tell you it was written in 646 by the third caliph, Othman, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed. Well over thirteen hundred years old, the pages of gazelle skin are worn beyond measure by the passage of time. But despite the attrition of the centuries, the verses of the Koran, written in a strong and elegant hand, still dance across the ancient leather.
The librarian, if you press him, will tell you that before Othman, the Koran had been committed to memory by early Muslims and recorded variously on scraps of wood, camel bones, leaves, odd pieces of leather, even rocks. After Mohammed’s death in 632, Abubakr, the first caliph, arranged for all the known suras (verses) to be written down by scribes. It was Othman who summoned the four most distinguished Koranic scholars of his time and ordered them to be collected together and written down in one volume. This book, prepared in the holy city of Medina, became the definitive version of the Koran, superseding anything that had gone before. Othman used it as his personal Koran. Other copies were made, but none of them survives in its complete form.
The history of the Othman Koran is a tale of piety and politics, intrigue, murder, conquest and greed. The first half of Othman’s twelve-year reign as caliph was marked by peace and administrative reform. The dar al Islam, the realm of Islam, stretched from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan in the east, and in the north the call to prayer was heard as far as Armenia and Azerbaijan. During the second half of his reign, a rebellion arose and there were calls for Othman to resign. Reluctant to shed Muslim blood, he did not crush the uprising although he had the power to do so. Eventually the rebels surrounded his house in Medina and, after a long siege, on 17 June 656, a mob broke in and murdered him at the age of eighty-two. Othman, so the story goes, was reading a verse from his copy of the Koran at the time: ‘And if they believe even as ye believe, then are they rightly guided. But if they turn away, then are they in schism, and Allah will be thy protection against them,’ a verse that neatly anticipated the seismic split within the Muslim community which arose on Othman’s murder and in due course resulted in the rival Sunni and Shi’a communities. Deep in the Othman Koran, a dark stain spreads across the pages. ‘This is the blood of Othman,’ says the librarian in a hushed whisper. ‘His throat was cut while he was reading the holy book.’
Othman’s life was over, but the adventures of the book he had laboured so hard to produce were only just beginning. There are many versions of what happened next. According to one of the most popular, Othman’s successor, Ali, took the Koran to Kufa in Iraq,where it remained for several hundred years. In the fourteenth century, Temur retrieved it after his conquests in the region and brought it to the Nur Madrassah in Samarkand. There it lay for half a millennium, if you believe the librarian, until the nineteenth century and the advent of the Great Game, the elegant but deadly war between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia for supremacy in Central Asia, a conflict fought by the bravest, most brilliant spies and military officers on both sides amid the high mountain passes and the brutal, opulent courts of local potentates. Russia expanded south (by the end of the Great Game, the British and Russian frontiers, originally two thousand miles apart, separated by tracts of desert and the world’s highest mountains, lay only twenty miles from each other), and in 1868 the Othman Koran was delivered to Tsar Alexander II by General von Kaufmann, governor of Turkestan, and added to the imperial library in St Petersburg. But the Muslims of Turkestan petitioned Lenin to return the book to them, and after many attempts they were successful. The Othman Koran arrived in Tashkent, where it spent much of the twentieth century in the history museum. In 1989 it was transferred to the Tillya Sheikh Mosque, where it remains to this day.
It is kept in a tiny room in a humble mosque in a forgotten country, but the Othman Koran still attracts an impressive cast of international VIPs. ‘Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Iran, Turkey, Egypt and the Emirates, have all been to see the Koran recently,’ the librarian will tell you proudly. ‘And without Amir Temur, it wouldn’t be here today.’
Still the snows fell from leaden skies. Soldiers pulled their black sheepskins tightly round their throats against the invading cold. There was nothing to be done. It was just a matter of sitting out the dreadful winter. No one expected any action until spring. But in January 1391, without warning and at the coldest time of the year, instructions were issued from the imperial tent. The Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction had ordered the army to march north. Tokhtamish was to be found and engaged. So far there had been only indecisive skirmishes. Now Temur was resolved to settle the issue in battle.
There were mutterings of discontent in the ranks. Many could scarcely believe the reports running through the camp. What was the emperor thinking of? Moving an army of two hundred thousand halfway across Asia in these conditions was suicidal. But these murmurings remained subdued and discreet. The army knew better than to question Temur’s commands. The emperor’s will was law.
The decision to hunt out the khan of the Golden Horde amid a raging winter, and in some of the most inhospitable terrain imaginable, looked like sheer folly. In terms of logistics alone, it beggared belief. There was no way of knowing where or when Temur would happen on Tokhtamish’s army. All he could be certain of was that it was bigger than his own. The route ahead was famously barren, so much so that once you had crossed the Sir Darya river, north of Tashkent, you entered a vast tract of land called the Hunger Steppe. There were sandy deserts, empty plains, rivers and mountains to cross. The main army and the long supply convoy would be struggling in deep snow and dangerous ice from the start. How could this great body of men and women be provisioned for a campaign that might require it to operate in such inauspicious country for months on end? The plans invited disaster.
But as Temur viewed the situation, he felt he had no choice. Twice Tokhtamish had invaded, first Temur’s western dominions and, more recently, the centre of his empire in Mawarannahr. In so doing he had announced his intentions all too clearly. Until he was removed from the field, he would remain a threat to the empire. As for the most appropriate strategy for dealing with him, if Temur were to strike from the west, as he had started to do in the Caucasus, he would merely open the way for Tokhtamish to attack in the east, bearing down on Mawarannahr once again, only this time with far worse consequences. In the event of another invasion of his lands, Temur stood to lose both his seat of empire and his army to his rival. Far better to regain the offensive, however difficult the expedition might prove, than to fight a defensive and unpopular war on his own territory, where the damage would be great. There were no treasures for the army, bedrock of his authority, to gain by staying at home. The prizes awaited, as ever, beyond his borders. There was also the added element of surprise, always a favourite weapon in Temur’s armoury, to take into consideration. The khan of the Golden Horde had attacked Temur where and when he least expected it. Now, in the snowbound depths of winter, Temur intended to return the compliment.
Stealing up on Tokhtamish, catching him unawares in the sloth of winter, would be a formidable undertaking. He had his spies, too, and there is little reason to believe they were any less effective than those of Temur. Certainly they must have given him timely intelligence of his adversary’s movement north, for not long after the Tatar army had left behind the Sir Darya, envoys arrived from the court at Saray, presenting Temur with nine magnificent horses – this was considered an auspicious number – and a royal falcon, beautifully bejewelled. The talk was of forgiveness and mercy, not war. Tokhtamish, the emerging warlord, was now a humble model of contrition: ‘Your majesty has always acted the part of a father towards me; you have always nourished and brought me up as your son, and the favours I have received from you are innumerable. If my wicked proceedings and the war I have carried on by the instigation of some malicious persons, which has been my misfortune, and of which I repent and am ashamed, can once more find pardon from the clemency of my lord, this will be an addition to the obligations I owe to him.’ In short, Tokhtamish was ready to be ‘a submissive and obedient servant’ to his former mentor.
There was a long silence. The ambassadors in their fine silks did their best not to fidget nervously. This was no declaration of war they brought, nor any calculated insult to Temur, but still the role of messenger was not without its dangers, and who knew how the emperor would react? At last, long after the silence had become unbearable, he fixed them with his imperious gaze and made his reply.
When your master Tokhtamish was wounded and fled from the enemy, I received him like a son. I took up his cause and made war on Urus Khan on his behalf. I sacrificed my cavalry and equipment, which were lost that hard winter. However, I continued to support him, and placed this country in his hands. I made him so strong that he became khan of the Kipchaks, and he mounted the throne of Jochi. But when fortune had begun to smile on him, he forgot his obligations to me: and without thinking how a son ought to behave towards a father, he took the opportunity, while I was occupied with the conquest of the kingdom of the Persians and the Medes, to betray me, sending troops to ruin the borders of my empire. I pretended to take no notice, hoping that he might be ashamed of his action, and in future abstain from such extravagances. But he was so drunk with ambition, that he could not distinguish good from evil. He sent another army into my country against me. It is true that as soon as we marched against him, his advance guard fled at the very dust of our approach. Now, when Tokhtamish has heard of our march, he begs pardon, because he knows no other way to save himself from the punishment he deserves. But since we have seen him break his word and violate his treaties so often, it would be imprudent to trust his word. With the aid of God we shall carry out the resolve we have made. If, however, he speaks the truth and wants peace with all his heart, let him send to us Ali-Beg, his minister, who can then negotiate with our chief amirs.
Temur recognised the khan’s overture for what it was, merely a ruse to forestall him. He knew this because these were his very own tactics. Later, he would try something similar on Tokhtamish himself. The conflict between the two men, marked by constant manoeuvring and deception, crushing force and honeyed diplomacy, was among the most fascinating of Temur’s career, because they were so well matched.
The ambassadors were left in no doubt as to Temur’s intentions. He saw no reason to turn back. It was up to Tokhtamish how he chose to proceed. The march north, meanwhile, would continue.
By the first week of March, Temur’s army passed Yasi and Sabran in what is today Kazakhstan. Yasi, renamed Turkestan in the sixteenth century, was a thriving town on the caravan route, its markets home to merchants trading tiger skins, gold and silver from Persia, porcelain from China, astrakhan, glassware, Siberian deer, lynx and the ubiquitous silks. In the latter half of the 1390s, with the campaigns against Tokhtamish behind him and another wedding to look forward to – his latest wife was Tukal-khanum, a beautiful princess and daughter of the Moghul khan Khizr Khoja – Temur revisited Yasi and rebuilt a memorial complex there in honour of the holy Sufi dervish Khoja Ahmed Yasevi. To this day it remains one of the great examples of medieval architecture in Central Asia, a blaze of blue domes, ribbed and smooth, intricate tiled portals decorated with ivory and a riot of Islamic calligraphy, designed and constructed on a monumental scale. The main dome has a diameter of almost sixty feet. The saint’s reputation was such that three pilgrimages to the mausoleum were considered equivalent to a pilgrimage to Mecca. It still attracts large numbers of pilgrims each year.
Onto the Hungry Steppe Temur’s army now advanced like a falling shadow. Bristling with tension, the mounted archers pressed on in forced marches, still hoping to surprise and fall upon Tokhtamish’s forces. But around them the horizon was limitless, and instead of the massed ranks of Kipchaks they stared instead at dry ground with only the meanest grazing for the horses. It was a dispiriting sight. After three weeks in these vast plains, wrote Yazdi, ‘the horses were so fatigued with the great way they had gone, and the scarcity of water, that they were reduced to extremity’.
By April, after crossing the Sari Su river, they were among the Ulugh Tagh mountains. Here Temur ordered an obelisk to be erected as ‘a lasting monument to posterity’. It recorded the size of the army he was leading against Tokhtamish Khan, king of the Bulgars, and the date of its arrival in these mountains. It was indeed a gift to posterity – the obelisk was discovered in Kazakhstan in the 1930s – but it was also a distraction, perhaps deliberate, from the increasingly dire situation in which the army now found itself.
After almost four months’ march from Tashkent, Temur’s scouts scanned the horizon in vain for their enemy. Tokhtamish’s men had melted away into the farthest recesses of the steppes and, just as the amirs had worried all along, the army was now fast running out of supplies. The price of a sheep from the travelling market that accompanied the expedition had soared to a hundred dinars. Soon there were none left. Officers of all ranks were given orders ‘that no one on pain of death should bake in the camp either bread, pastry-work, mutton, pies, tarts or anything proper for boiling’. Struggling across difficult territory, shattered by the forced marches, the soldiers had to subsist on the most meagre rations. First it was a thin meat stew. Then, as the meat ran out, the stew became a broth. When the supplies of flour were practically exhausted, the broth became even thinner and the men were sipping miserably at a mixture of water and herbs, one bowl a day, if they were lucky. Fanning out across the plains, they fell on anything remotely edible. Herbs, roots, wild grasses, occasional eggs and rats were all seized greedily, supplemented by horsemeat whenever an animal succumbed to the desperate conditions. It was no way to provision an army about to fight its most testing battle deep behind enemy lines. The grumbling grew louder.
The men were at their weakest. Although in the course of their campaigns they had grown used to adversity, they were not accustomed to these levels of privation. Fears started to grow that Tokhtamish’s Kipchaks, well provisioned, well rested and entirely familiar with the terrain, would choose this moment to rise from the shadows and cut them to pieces.
It was a desperate time for Temur, and a critical test of his leadership. He faced either a rebellion from his starving soldiers or, as they beat a frantic retreat towards Mawarannahr, certain defeat by the Golden Horde, whose spies had already been joined by a number of deserters from Temur’s camp and who were well aware of his parlous position. Retreat or rebellion. Neither were words in Temur’s vocabulary. Since defeating Husayn in 1370, he had known only triumph. One by one his opponents had crumpled before him. Now he stood on the brink of catastrophe.
The first priority was to feed his men. Tokhtamish, as he had already proved so cleverly, could wait. Summoning his senior officers, Temur gave commands for a Tatar hunt. Riders galloped off to the amirs of the left and right wings, instructing them to lead their men forward steadily in a half-circle. Those soldiers in the centre remained where they were. The distance between the wings in this army of two hundred thousand was so great that it took two days just to complete the circle. When the men of the left wing joined with those from the right, encompassing an area of many square miles, orders were given to close in. The men marched inwards, each dreaming of the next meal of meat. Before them ran startled deer, hares, wild boars, wolves and antelopes, probably elk too, since the chronicle mentions a type of gazelle the Tatars had not seen before, as large as a buffalo.
When the circle had shrunk to the required size, the order was given to halt. Temur rode in first, as was customary. Despite the lameness on his right side, he was a superb shot and an excellent horseman. Riding full tilt at one moment, almost stationary the next, he unleashed his arrows at his quarry. To loud cheers from his men, he brought down a number of deer. Once the emperor had had his sport, it was their turn. For hours the hunt continued. The slaughter was immense that day, the dinner sumptuous. For days to come, the camp was wreathed in smoke as the heavy smell of game rose into the night sky from bubbling cauldrons. All the worries were quickly forgotten. The grumbling subsided.
With his army well fed and approaching the borders of Siberia, Temur chose this moment to order a general review of his troops, a move calculated to instil discipline and confidence. When the army of two hundred thousand had been brought into formation, the splendidly dressed emperor appeared before them on horseback, wearing a gold crown encrusted with rubies and carrying an ivory baton tipped with the carved golden head of a bull. Starting his review with the left wing, he made sure the soldiers were all properly equipped with a sabre on their left side, a half sabre on their right, as well as a lance, a mace, a dagger and a leather shield, each man carrying a bow with thirty arrows in his quiver. The horses were decorated with tiger skins.
There was a carefully arranged choreography and score to accompany the review. When Temur arrived in front of each tuman of ten thousand, the amir, be he senior officer, son or grandson of the emperor, dismounted, threw himself to the ground, kissed the earth, told his ruler what excellent condition the troops were in, and sang his praises with elaborate compliments. ‘Let all the world be obedient to Temur: from faithfulness and duty, we will always be ready to sacrifice our heads and our lives at the feet of his majesty’s horse,’ said Birdi Beg, leader of a tuman in the left wing. Prince Omar Shaykh pleased his father with the good order of his men and the congratulations he lavished on Temur’s conquests from the frontiers of China to the Caspian. Temur, said Yazdi, was also impressed by the Hazaras of Sulduz, battle-hardened warriors with their bows, arrows, nets, clubs, lassoes, maces and scimitars. Next he passed on to the right wing, commanded by his son Miranshah. For two days the review lasted, at the end of which Temur pronounced himself content with the state of his army.
After all the recent hardships, the successful hunting expedition had galvanised the men. From the emperor’s great kettle-drum came a roar of thunder across the plain, picked up and echoed by the drums of the divisions. Banners and standards fluttered over this immense fighting force. Fists were clenched and arms were raised. Over the drumbeats came another deafening roar, this time the cry of war, ‘Surun! Surun!’, running from the tip of the left wing to the end of the right. A bristling half-silence fell once more over the army, and in the cold grey of dawn it moved north in battle formation.
Unknown Siberia lay ahead. It was an empty place, whatever the time of year. Ibn Battutah named it the Land of Shadows. ‘No one sees the people who live in this place,’ he wrote. ‘Here the days are long in summer and the nights are long in winter.’ Would this be where Temur happened upon his enemy, or was Tokhtamish, always several marches ahead, luring the Tatars onwards to their destruction? The alien landscape, dense with fog and sodden underfoot, offered no clues to these men of the south.
Only scouting parties, sent ever deeper into enemy territory, would resolve the issue. Mohammed Sultan, the emperor’s grandson and favourite, pleaded to be sent on such a mission. Temur consented and, once the astrologers had determined the most suitable time and date at which the young man should begin, he set out in the last week of April.
Traces of human life started to reveal themselves. First of all a track, which led to the still-warm embers of half a dozen fires. The news was sent back to Temur who despatched a detachment of expert scouts to join the party. North they galloped, scouring the plains for telltale signs, until they reached the Tobol river, a tributary of the Irtish which flows into the Arctic. On the far bank they saw more fires, seventy of them, and another set of horse tracks, but no other indications of life.
Shaykh Daoud, a Turkmen with a reputation for great bravery, was sent to bring back more definite news. After riding for two days he came upon some thatched huts and hid himself away during the night. The next morning a man rode out, and was instantly seized by the Turkmen and taken to Temur. Although he knew nothing of Tokhtamish or his army, ten days before he had seen a group of ten armed horsemen camping nearby. The scent was becoming stronger. Temur sent an advance party of soldiers to find and capture the horsemen. When surrounded, they resisted fiercely but prisoners were taken and new intelligence extracted. The first skirmish had been fought.
The great Tatar army now wheeled west towards the enemy. On 11 May it reached the Ural river. Ever suspicious that the guides could be leading his men into an ambush or other misadventure, Temur disregarded the crossing places they suggested and instead swam his men and horses over at less obvious locations. The situation was not yet hopeless, but with each day that passed it was becoming increasingly dire. More than four months out of Tashkent, and still the Tatars had not engaged the Horde. Time, as the historian Harold Lamb understood, was now of the essence. ‘Temur’s long march to the north would puzzle a modern strategist, but this was warfare without rules and without palliation,’ he wrote. ‘To display weakness or to leave himself open to a surprise attack by the Horde would have been fatal. He knew that unseen eyes had watched his advance and that the Khan was well informed of his movements. Time meant everything to Temur, who must force the Horde to battle, or bring his own army into cultivated land before the end of the summer; delay was Tokhtamish’s finest weapon and he made full use of it.’
Another week of hard marching saw Temur’s weary men at the Samara river. Here a party of scouts rejoined the main body of the army with news that they had heard the enemy. At last, battle was getting closer. Prisoners started to be brought in, each of them carrying intelligence of some value. One was delivered by Temur’s zealous grandson Mohammed Sultan. Another captive reported how, until deserters from Temur’s army joined the Kipchaks, the khan of the Golden Horde was not even aware of his enemy’s approach. They had enraged him with their warning that the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction was marching north at the head of ‘an army more numerous than the sands of the desert or the leaves of the trees’.
As the two armies manoeuvred in search of advantage and the Tatars braced themselves for the long-awaited encounter, the order went out not to light any fires at night. At each camp, the soldiers were instructed to dig defensive positions and mounted guards were assigned to patrol the perimeter. The separate divisions were to remain in battle formation. Warlike music on the drums and trumpets now accompanied the daily marches. ‘When this vast multitude began to move, it resembled the troubled ocean,’ said Yazdi.
Still there was no sight of the Horde. Moving north, it had devastated the countryside before it, trampling the ground into a quagmire to the misery of the Tatar horses who followed, and systematically stripping the land of what little sustenance it offered. Mists descended on the chilly marshes, lowering the mood in Temur’s camp. It was another moment for the emperor to take charge, regain the initiative and inspire his disconsolate forces. First there had been the hunt, then the fabulous review. Now he called his senior officers together once again, gave them words of encouragement and fine robes of honour, and had new weapons distributed among the troops, including armour for man and beast alike, shields and fresh bows and arrows.
Both sides mounted ambushes against one another. Prisoners flowed this way and that, each with reports of the enemy’s whereabouts. In one particularly brutal clash, a number of Temur’s officers were killed. A retaliatory raid was launched by the emperor himself, and all those who had fought valiantly were generously rewarded, the bravest receiving the highest honour of tarkhan.
Although it was now summer, the conditions were still grim. ‘The air was so dark, the clouds so thick, and the rains so great, that one could not see three paces,’ the chronicle reported. Then, after a week of pea-soup fog, the skies cleared abruptly. It was the middle of June and the men had been marching for almost five months over a distance of eighteen hundred miles. These sons of the desert had ventured so far north that the long summer days seemed endless. The priests were thrown into confusion by the constant daylight, which completely upset the daily routine of five prayers. With Temur’s permission the evening prayer was quietly dispensed with.
Reports were streaming in now of enemy sightings. Temur made final preparations for war. The Tatar divisions moved forward in precise battle formation, based on the traditional plan of a centre and two wings, but with the additions of a vanguard to each wing and a vanguard and reserve for the centre. Mohammed Sultan, apple of his grandfather’s eye, was given command of the centre. Sultan Mahmud, son of the puppet Chaghatay khan, led the vanguard of ten thousand before it. Omar Shaykh, who was proving an exemplary officer, commanded the left wing with his troops from Andijan. His brother Miranshah led the right. Sayf ad-din, the aged but most loyal of amirs, commanded the vanguard of the left wing. Temur himself took charge of the rearguard.
Forward they marched, the sunlight shimmering on their armour so that they resembled ‘the waves of the tempestuous sea’. And then, as the horizon unfurled before them, out of the dancing light rose the horned standards of the Golden Horde, half a mile away. The enemy, at last, was ready to do battle. Death was in the air, but after all these months of anticipation, hunger, exhaustion, frustration and impatience, the Tatar army felt not fear, but relief. The rhythm of feint and counter-feint, pursuit and calculated retreat, looked as if it had finally run its course. One way or another the fight for supremacy between Temur and Tokhtamish would be settled.
But there was one last ruse to be played. As the two armies faced each other across the divide, Temur gave orders very publicly for his sumptuous tents and pavilions to be unpacked and erected, and his carpets laid out. It was a deliberate show of contempt for the Horde, and an exercise in psychological warfare typical of his imagination and audacity. According to the chronicle, although Tokhtamish’s forces were more numerous than the Tatars, this eleventh-hour performance shattered their morale.
The early hours of 18 June 1391 did not look much different from a typical summer’s dawn in these northern regions. The grey sky, flat and all-consuming, offered only the weariest of light. The cold was the same insistent force as ever, rushing in on the tails of the wind. What was exceptional on this day, though, were the odd shapes and sounds seeping through the gloom. The dark lines of the two armies stretched for several miles into the half-light until they merged with the dark earth and the pale horizon, and disappeared altogether. Here and there angular protuberances rose from this dark mass – a lance, a standard, a guard on horseback. A disturbed hush hung over the lines of war, hinting at calamity.
On the Tatar side, Temur rode out in front of his army, dismounted, kissed the earth and prayed for the assistance of almighty Allah. The soldiers, with quickening heartbeats and throbbing temples, broke out into spontaneous roars of ‘Allahu akbar, God is great.’ Imam Sayid Baraka stepped forward to add his blessings to the imminent battle. Around him the drums started to beat and the trumpets sounded their terrible call. The holy man prostrated himself on the ground, recited a passage from the Koran and scooped up some dirt. He faced the Horde and his voice rose to shouting pitch. ‘Your faces shall be blackened through the shame of your defeat,’ he yelled. Then he turned to the emperor he had served so dutifully for twenty years, and his voice lowered almost to a whisper. ‘Go where you please,’ he said, ‘you shall be victorious.’ The drums and trumpets struck up again, rising in a crescendo, the battle-cry ‘Surun, Surun’ filled the sky and Asia shuddered as her greatest armies thundered towards each other across the divide. The following words are from Arabshah:
Then both armies, when they came in sight one of the other, were kindled and mingling with each other became hot with the fire of war, and they joined battle and necks were extended for sword-blows and throats outstretched for spear thrusts and faces were drawn with sternness and fouled with dust, the wolves of war set their teeth and fierce leopards mingled and charged and the lions of the armies rushed upon each other and men’s skins bristled, clad with the feathers of arrows, and the brows of the leaders drooped and the heads of the captains bent in the devotion of war and fell forward, and the dust was thickened and stood black and the leaders and common soldiers alike plunged into seas of blood, and arrows became in the darkness of black dust like stars placed to destroy the Princes of Satan, while swords glittering like fulminating stars in clouds of dust rushed on kings and sultans, nor did the horses of death cease to pass through and revolve and race against the squadrons which charged straight ahead or the dust of hooves to be borne into the air or the blood of swords to flow over the plain, until the earth was rent and the heavens like the eight seas; and this struggle and conflict lasted about three days.
Battle began with a charge from Temur’s right wing under Miranshah against Tokhtamish’s left. The fighting was furious but indecisive, with neither side breaking through the ranks of the enemy. Horses careered wildly at each other, their riders unleashing vicious volleys of arrows at their adversaries. At closer quarters, the sabres and scimitars were unsheathed, and steel blades rained down from the sky, slashing through anything that opposed them. In the general mêlée that followed the first attack, Temur seized the advantage on the right flank and in the centre. In response, Tokhtamish directed his right wing against the Tatar left led by Omar Shaykh, detaching it from the main body of the army with the aid of his greater numbers and threatening to engulf it completely. But then, in the heat of the action, just as the men of the Golden Horde looked set to carry the day, confusion suddenly gripped them when they saw that the horned standard of Tokhtamish had vanished from the field. It was the surest sign their leader was dead. In fact he was alive, but had abandoned his men and fled the battlefield, ‘seized with fear and despair’ as Temur’s horse-tail standard bore down on him. Panic descended on the Kipchaks and spread through the ranks. Soon the army that was on the verge of routing Temur’s host was itself in headlong flight, chased and cut down without mercy by the rampaging Tatars. ‘For the space of forty leagues whither they were pursued nothing could be seen but rivers of blood and the plains covered with dead bodies,’ wrote Yazdi. A hundred thousand men and women lost their lives at the battle of Kunduzcha.*
The long march north was over. Temur kissed the earth and offered up thanks to God for delivering him this famous victory. Once more he and his army tasted the sweet fruits of victory. The amirs and princes of the blood stepped forward to congratulate him, sprinkling gold and precious stones over him, as was the custom. The booty was immense. The poorest soldiers plundered more horses than they could take back to Samarkand. There were camels, sheep and cattle. Those Kipchak men and women who had not been butchered were instantly thrown into slavery. Five thousand boys were chosen for service in the imperial household. The most beautiful girls and women were destined for the harem.
Ruthless in his prosecution of war, Temur was lavish in his celebrations of triumph. Orders were given for a grand festival on the banks of the Volga, on the very plain where Jochi, son of Genghis, had held his seat of empire. Row after row of warriors sat inside the handsome pavilions in front of golden platters heaped with roast horse-meat, toasting their invincible emperor and reliving their battlefield heroics with tall stories. At their elbows stood the most desirable captives, beguiling women dressed in silks, filling their crystal cups with wine, filling and refilling them until, unable to drink any more, the warriors collapsed on the ground or grabbed a companion for the night and staggered heavily back to their tents. For a full month they sank into these blissful excesses, forgetting the fatigues of war, losing themselves in rousing music, bumpers of wine and deep embraces. Tokhtamish, it is true, had escaped their clutches, but his Horde had been shattered. New leaders had been installed in his place, and division sown among the Kipchaks. The threat to Mawarannahr, the land beyond the river, had been removed. Their mission was accomplished.
That should have been the end of Tokhtamish. His struggle for supremacy had been fought and lost. Though the contest on the battlefield had been extremely close for several hours, in the end he had been utterly routed. Most men would have been grateful simply to have survived the slaughter. After that catastrophic reversal, few would have dreamt of resuming a career of conquest. But unfortunately for Temur, the ambitions of the khan of the Golden Horde proved more difficult to destroy than his mighty army.
Three years after the battle of Kunduzcha, Temur was campaigning in the western empire. Persia had reverted to its unruly ways and a rebellion had broken out among the eternally feuding Muzaffarid princes. The troops of Mawarannahr, levied for a new, Five-Year Campaign, left Samarkand in early 1392. Sweeping all before him, Temur blazed through Mazandaran before continuing north-west to reconquer recalcitrant Georgia. From there he marched south, retaking Shiraz and occupying Baghdad without a fight after the battle-shy Sultan Ahmed abandoned his dominions once again.
By 1394, already aware that Tokhtamish was reassembling an army and contracting an alliance with Sultan Barquq of Egypt against Temur, the Tatar was brought disturbing news.* The Kipchaks of the Golden Horde had rumbled south through Georgia and were now laying waste once more to the borders of his empire. A force was sent at once to give battle, but in typical fashion the Horde retired the way it had come, vanishing back into the steppes.
On hearing these reports, Temur must have rued his failure to capture and kill Tokhtamish when their armies had last met. The sultan of Egypt was steadily emerging as an adversary who would have to be dealt with in due course. And after the great gains made during his westward expansion, Temur’s empire was beginning to rub uncomfortably close to the lands of the Ottoman sultan. A confrontation there also looked likely. But both these opponents could wait. Having been scorched on the battlefield, Tokhtamish was now emerging phoenix-like from the ashes. He had to be destroyed.
The initial formalities took little time. An envoy was sent to Tokhtamish with a direct ultimatum:
After having given God the thanks which are due to the governor of the world; I demand of you, whom the devil of pride hath turned from the right way, what is your design in passing beyond your bounds? Who has put you upon such vain undertakings? Have you forgotten how in the last war your country and effects were reduced to nothing? You certainly behave with great rashness, since you oppose your own happiness. Is it possible you can be so ignorant that they who have testified their friendship to me, have been received with respect, and drawn great advantages from the treaties I have made with them, and which I have inviolably observed; while my enemies have not only been under continual disquiets and fears, but also been unable to escape my vengeance, though in the greatest security? You are acquainted with my victories, and are persuaded that peace or war are equally indifferent to me. You have experienced both my mildness and severity. When you have read this letter, do not delay sending me an answer; but let me know your resolution, either for war or peace.
The khan of the Golden Horde was not interested in peace. His character was far too similar to that of Temur, unable and unwilling to settle, ever striving to win new lands by the sword. The greatest difference between them was in their respective talents and fortunes on the battlefield.
Temur wintered near the Caspian, enjoying the company of his wives during these desolate months. In the spring of 1395, as the snows receded, he bade them farewell and sent them home. The pleasures of the imperial pavilion must give way to war.
Another review was ordered. The emperor reminded his amirs and their officers of their glorious triumphs of recent years. Of their conquest of Persia, Iraq and Georgia. Of their earlier destruction of Tokhtamish. This was the last time they would fight the khan of the Golden Horde, he assured them. Never again would this ungrateful princeling dare to trespass on the empire. Victory was, as always, in the hands of Allah, and in His boundless mercy and wisdom He would bless them once more against this treacherous infidel.
Never since the time of Genghis had such a vast army been seen in the region, said Yazdi. The vanguard of Temur’s left wing stood at the foot of the Elburz mountains, the right wing on the banks of the Caspian. The order to march in full battle formation was given. The army was not to be surprised by Tokhtamish. Golden eagles circled overhead, high above the forests of juniper trees and maple. Brown bears and wild boars, lynxes and leopards, roamed the landscape in the shadows of Mount Damavand, the dormant volcano.
Skirting the Caspian, the Tatars marched first west, then swung along a gentle arc north. Through the famous Derbend pass they continued, the spot where Tokhtamish had launched his predatory raids on Tabriz exactly ten years before. Once they had passed Georgia and its capital Tiflis, laying waste to vineyards as they moved through, they were in modern-day Chechnya. Here the countryside was far more enclosed than the northern steppes of the Horde, who had less room to withdraw and hide. The elaborate chase on which Tokhtamish had led Temur for five months prior to their last battle could not be repeated in this sort of territory. And so, in April 1395, at the Terek river near what is today the city of Grozny, Temur happened upon his enemy.
The advantage was with Tokhtamish, who held the northern bank after crossing the river at the only available ford. Knowing that Temur was pressing him hard, he guarded the passage to prevent his rival’s approach. The Spanish envoy Clavijo recorded the Tatar’s subsequent manoeuvres.
On coming up, Temur, finding that Tokhtamish was in possession of this passage, halted, sending envoys to Tokhtamish demanding why he acted thus, and assuring him that he, Temur, had not come to make war on him, being indeed his good friend, and calling on God to witness that he, Temur, on his part had never intended any aggression against him. Tokhtamish, however, would listen to none of his message, knowing well the guile of Temur. The next day therefore Temur broke up his camp and proceeded to march up the river bank on the south side, seeing which Tokhtamish did likewise and marched his host along the northern bank keeping pace opposite him. Thus the one following the other, both hosts took the way upstream, and at night camped each over against the other with the river in between. This business went on and was repeated during three days, neither army outstripping the other, but on the third night as soon as his camp was formed, Temur issued orders that all the women who marched with his soldiers should don helmets with the men’s war-gear to play the part of soldiers, while the men should mount and forthwith ride back with him to the ford, each horseman taking with him a second mount led by the bridle. Thus the camp was left in charge of the women disguised as warriors, with their slaves and captives under guard, while Temur went back by a forced march the three days’ journey to where the river could be crossed.
The most revealing words in this passage are ‘the guile of Temur’. The Tatar’s first attempt at trickery was brazen. He can hardly have expected it to work. After the history between the two men, after the rout at Kunduzcha, and after his pursuit of Tokhtamish across Asia to the banks of the Terek, his intentions would not have been difficult to divine. For three days, then, the battle of wits continued, the necessary prelude to conflict as both leaders vied for position. Temur only broke this stalemate by deploying the extraordinary device of dressing up the women as soldiers, a plan so far-fetched it is scarcely credible. Had it not been for the many instances in which Temur had already displayed his mastery of the art of warfare – both conventional and psychological – his grasp of the counter-intuitive and his love of highly imaginative risk-taking, we would probably accuse the Castilian of high spirits and credulousness.
As it is, we know much about Temur’s talents in these areas from a number of sources. The most remarkable example was given by Archbishop John of Sultaniya, who told the story of a young Temur outwitting his adversary through tactics as ingenious as they were improbable. The event was said to have occurred prior to his coronation in 1370. Summoned by a hereditary khan to submit to his authority or face him on the battlefield, Temur resorted to an elaborate ruse. Since he did not have an army strong enough to deploy on the battlefield, he pretended he was sick. While receiving the khan’s envoys, he started vomiting blood copiously, the result, though they did not know it, of consuming a basinful of wild boar’s blood. Predictably, the envoys returned to their master with news of Temur’s imminent death. Catching the khan and his courtly entourage entirely unawares, Temur promptly defeated them with ease.
On 22 April 1395, battle commenced. The Tatar left wing came under heavy pressure from the start. At the head of twenty-seven regiments of the reserve, and under cover of his archers’ fire, Temur charged forward to support it. The counter-attack was so successful that they drove the enemy far back, until they found themselves separated from the main force of the army, heavily outnumbered by the regrouping Horde. The emperor himself was under fierce assault, fighting hand-to-hand as wave upon wave of Kipchaks surged forward against him. ‘His arrows were all discharged, his half-pike broke to shatters,’ reported Yazdi. Seeing his leader on the point of death, Shaykh Nur ad-din rushed to his protection with a small body of fifty men. Dismounting from their horses, they formed a circle around him, kneeling on one knee and firing volleys of arrows at the Horde. Some of Temur’s officers captured three wagons from Tokhtamish’s men and used them as a barricade, over which the familiar horse-tail standard stood aloft.
While Temur and his men stood their ground in desperate straits, Mohammed Sultan rallied his right wing, took the fight to Tokhtamish’s left and inflicted heavy losses on him, forcing his adversary ever farther back. Amir Sayf ad-din Nukuz, leading the vanguard of the right wing, was hard pressed, his men dismounting under orders and defending themselves behind shields, fending off blows from swords and lances. Eventually, the left wing of the Horde gave way, turned to flight and was chased off the field. Demoralised by this loss, Tokhtamish’s centre now faced its opposite number. The two sides fought like ‘enraged lions … so that the blood flowed in this place like a torrent’. The Horde was first to buckle, at which point Tokhtamish, with his men in disorder all about him, ‘shamefully’ turned his back on the battlefield and rode for his life. Kicking their chargers for all they were worth, the Tatar horsemen galloped after Tokhtamish and his retreating Horde, hurling down their blades on them and screaming ‘Victory!’
This was a defeat from which Tokhtamish never recovered. There was nothing now to stop Temur’s men from marching north to avenge his depredations against Mawarannahr. With its army cut down or flying for its life, the Golden Horde was defenceless. It was time for plunder.
Looking at a map charting Temur’s various campaigns and the routes taken by his armies, one curiously shaped loop stands out. It is clear that this represents his northernmost venture. From the Terek river, the line of his progress through the Golden Horde swings round in a gentle north-eastern arc towards Astrakhan, thence north again to Saray, capital of the Golden Horde. After continuing towards Moscow, there is an abrupt change of direction and the line thrusts west for more than four hundred miles to the Dnieper river on the shores of the Black Sea. Here it heads first south, then east and finally north once more to form another smaller loop. The advance north continues just beyond the Russian city of Yelets before wheeling round tightly and returning south. From the Terek river to the northernmost point of the campaign, the distance as the crow flies is about 750 miles. Taking into account the frequent changes of direction, the true distance travelled in the Horde after Tokhtamish’s defeat is far longer, several thousand miles at least.
It is tempting to infer from this long and arduous march the strength of Temur’s ill feeling against Tokhtamish. It is reasonable to assume that he was motivated by a profound desire to avenge his former protégé’s disloyal behaviour – for that is how he would have seen it, notwithstanding his own highly pragmatic attitude towards alliances – but that is only part of the story.
In fact, the direct pursuit of Tokhtamish did not last long. Chasing the royal prince, the Tatars first followed the Volga river north until the khan vanished for good into the Bulgar forests. After his disappearance the priority switched to razing the main urban centres of the Horde, and pillaging without mercy. The last time Tokhtamish had been defeated, within three years he had rebounded strongly. If it was not possible for Temur to lay hands on his troublesome adversary, then at least his kingdom must be brought to ruin to ensure that this could never happen again.
The Tatars roamed at will, laying waste the surrounding countryside. Yazdi had Temur marching as far as the Russian capital, Moscow, ‘which his soldiers pillaged, as they had done all the neighbouring places dependent upon it, defeating and cutting in pieces the governors and princes of these parts. The Russians and Muscovites never beheld their kingdom in so bad a condition, their plains being covered with dead bodies.’ This is inaccurate: Temur did not reach Moscow, for he had richer prizes in his sights.* First, Tana, where the Don river feeds into the Black Sea, a thriving commercial centre with a substantial population of merchants from Europe, particularly Venice and Genoa. Reneging on his promise not to harm the population, Temur ordered the Muslims, who were spared, to be separated from the Christians, who were slaughtered.
Tana was a succulent hors d’oeuvre, preparing ‘Temur’s palate for the main feast which lay several hundred miles east on the southern Volga. When he thought of Saray, capital of the Golden Horde, he remembered the ultimate ignominy Tokhtamish had wrought on Mawarannahr in 1387, when the khan had burned to the ground the famous Chaghatay palace at Qarshi, in the valley where Temur had grown up as a boy.
Saray, reported Ibn Battutah, several decades before the ruin inflicted by Temur, was a city ‘of boundless size … choked with its inhabitants’. The bazaars thronged with metalware, leather, wool, grain, furs, timber and slaves. Now it was summarily torched, its citizens left to freeze in the snow. Under licence from their leader, the hungry Tatar hordes helped themselves to the contents of the city while Temur seized ingots of gold and silver, great quantities of weapons and slaves, flax from Antioch, Russian cloth, silks and sables black as jet, ermine, fox and furs of all description. Such was the quantity that ‘it would be tedious to give a detail of all the booty they obtained in this great country’, wrote Yazdi.
It was not just the personal vendetta that drove Temur to ravage the Golden Horde so utterly. Apart from the need to sate his exhausted soldiers’ appetite for booty, self-interest required him to do so. Determined to ensure that Tokhtamish would never again represent a military threat, Temur understood the need to wipe out his commercial cities and centres of production. A large army required domestic prosperity, and this in turn was dependent on trade. Almost overnight, Saray and Tana, both important centres on the caravan routes leading from the Black Sea through Central Asia to the Ming empire of China, ceased to exist. Urganch, a third stop on the northern trade route, had been razed in 1388. Henceforth, the northern trade route that bypassed Temur’s empire was forced into disuse. The caravans diverted south instead, through Persia and Afghanistan into Mawarannahr, thereby transferring the wealth that was once accumulated by Tokhtamish directly to Temur. It was a masterstroke of brutal efficacy.
As his armies eased south towards warmer, more comfortable climes, Temur left behind a devastated Horde. Just as he had planned, and thanks to his support of rival princes, it now fell victim to self-destructive infighting. Arabshah described how the once magnificent khanate became ‘a desert and a waste, the inhabitants scattered, dispersed, routed and destroyed’. In the century after Temur’s death, the Golden Horde collapsed into independent kingdoms, its splendour gone forever. Defeating his northern rival must have been particularly satisfying for Temur, not least because it was righteous punishment of a man who had sought refuge with him, taken his money and accepted his military supplies and support on the battlefield, only to later turn on his former protector in what was, even in the fluid world of Central Asian alliances, the height of opportunism.
As for Tokhtamish, his ambitions remained as great as they had always been. Only now, his ability to prosecute them had been crushed. It never returned. For the rest of his life he roamed across the windy Kipchak steppes in a futile bid to regain power. His days of conquest were over. He had pitted himself against one of the greatest conquerors the world had ever seen, and he had lost. Temur’s stiffest challenge had been overcome. The Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes, now at the zenith of his glory, remained undefeated.
* From the mid-fourteenth century, the Golden Horde had started disintegrating under internal pressures. The province of Khorezm had been reunited under the Sufi dynasty, while in the south-east, Urus, descended from Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi, presided over the regions bordering on Moghulistan, known as the White Horde.
* The houris are the stunning dark-eyed virgins who await every Muslim man in the heavenly afterlife. Their youth and celestial good looks are everlasting, their virginity renewable at pleasure. They are referred to in the Koran in a number of suras: ‘As for the righteous, they shall be lodged in peace together amid gardens and fountains, arrayed in rich silks and fine brocade. Even thus: and We shall wed them to dark-eyed houris’ (Sura 44: 51–54).
* In September 2000, I interviewed Professor Omonullo Boriyev, a specialist on Temur, in Tashkent. He told me that in 1968 Ibrahim Muminov, president of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, had published a book on Temur. Although the publication coincided with UNESCO’s celebrations of Temurid culture in Samarkand, its timing proved disastrous. ‘Of course, he was fired immediately. The Central Communist Committee of Uzbekistan issued a resolution removing all copies of his book. Everything he had written about Temur and his role in Central Asia was censored and ridiculed. The Soviets mobilised other historians to destroy his career, and that was the end of that. There was no way for any Uzbek writer or historian to celebrate Temur. Instead, all that was published were books and articles in which you saw Temur the barbarian, Temur the destroyer, Temur the tyrant and so on.’ Muminov’s treatise, a revisionist attempt to set the record straight by questioning Temur’s official pariah status, dropped like a bombshell on the platitudinous world of Uzbek academe. Professor Boriyev’s views, however, were typical of the new, equally rigorously enforced, orthodoxy. ‘Temur was without equal in history,’ he told me. ‘Now we are independent there is great interest in him in Uzbekistan. The people respect him very much. Streets, schools and villages are named after him, there are more and more statues of him erected across the country. School pupils and university students can now learn the truth about our hero through the conferences arranged by the Amir Temur Fund.’ I asked him what he thought about President Karimov comparing himself with the peerless Tatar. He looked uncomfortable. ‘If the president compares himself with the best, and aspires to that, can that be a bad thing?’ What of Uzbekistan’s neighbours? The Uzbek rehabilitation of Temur as national hero must have been somewhat unsettling for those countries – Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan – whose lands had once fallen under his sway. ‘That is a question for the politicians,’ he replied.
† The case of award-winning Uzbek poet and writer Mamadali Makhmudov provides an insight into what ‘Strength in justice’ means in practice for some people under Karimov’s government. Like Temur, the Uzbek president does not tolerate opposition on any level. Makhmudov was arrested on 19 February 1999, three days after a series of bomb explosions aimed at Karimov rocked Tashkent. He was charged with threatening the president and the constitutional order, and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. His chief crime appears to have been links to the Erk opposition party, outlawed by the government since 1993. The following are excerpts from his testimony smuggled out of court in 2000: ‘I was taken for interrogation by men in disguise. They put a mask on me and [kept me] handcuffed. After questioning, they dragged me across the floor half dead, back to my prison cell … They hit me with batons and kicked me until my body was covered with blood. There was no healthy part left on me. My body turned black and blue and swelled up. My hands and legs were burnt. My nails turned black and fell off. I was hung for hours with my hands tied behind my back. I was given some kind of injection and 1 was forced to take some kind of syrup. In the cold of the winter, there were times when I lost consciousness – then they poured cold water over me. They stuffed something smelly up my nose. In wet clothing, in my icy prison cell, I spent the days and nights all alone in unbearable suffering … They told me they were holding my wife and daughters and threatened to rape them in front of my eyes.’
* Temur could even be invoked in the war on terror, held up as a paragon of statesmanship and guarantor of law and order. As one member of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences wrote: ‘That which Amir Temur valued most – well-being, prosperity and, above all, peace and harmony – has been placed at the head of our independent republic’s agenda to safeguard against disorder and disturbance.’
* The battle was fought east of the Volga river between Samara and Chistopol in what is now the republic of Tatarstan.
* In seeking a treaty with Barquq, Tokhtamish was observing the well-established tradition of the Golden Horde khans by which they allied themselves with the Egyptian sultans and made common cause against the dynasties ruling Persia.
* According to the Yermolinski chronicles, Muscovites were spared Temur’s invasion in large part by the arrival in their city of an icon of the Holy Virgin which worked miracles. Although Grand Prince Vassili I of Muscovy made preparations for a defence of the city, there can be little doubt that had Temur wanted to press on to Moscow, he would have faced little opposition from this comparatively feeble Russian army.