‘The richness and abundance of this great capital and its district is such as is indeed a wonder to behold: and it is for this reason that it bears the name of Samarkand: for this name would be more exactly written Semiz-kent, two words which signify “Rich-Town”, for Semiz in Turkish is fat or rich and Kent means city or township: in time these two words having been corrupted into Samarkand.’
RUY GONZALEZ DE CLAVIJO, Embassy to Tamerlane 1403–1406
‘Samarkand, the most beautiful face the Earth has ever turned towards the sun.’
AMIN MAALOUF, Samarkand
Samarkand roared its welcome as Temur rode into his beloved capital after an absence of four years. The streets heaved with 150,000 citizens, all curious to catch a glimpse of ‘this great emperor in triumph’. For several seasons, they had heard only rumours. Temur was sick; he was on his deathbed; he had recovered and was marching north; he had been defeated and Tokhtamish was heading south to ravage Mawarannahr.
With her great parks and vineyards, her gardens and orchards in full bloom, Samarkand arranged the most sumptuous decorations to greet the emperor at the head of his army. It was a reception designed to reflect the magnificence of Temur’s triumphal procession, when it seemed that half the world trooped into town carrying before it the booty of all Asia. ‘On all sides were to be seen garlands of flowers with crowns, amphitheatres, and musicians performing the newest pieces of music to the honour of his majesty,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘The walls of the houses were hung with carpets, the roofs covered with stuffs, and the shops set off with curious pieces. There was a vast multitude of people, and the streets were covered with velvet, satin, silk and carpets, which the horses trampled underfoot.’ Through this gorgeous tableau walked slaves with bowed heads, scarcely knowing where to look as they moved through the astoundingly opulent city of dazzling domes. Behind them rode the mounted archers, endless columns of them streaming into the city in their most luxurious livery, drunk with the tumultuous celebrations whose din seemed to touch the heavens. The rapturous reception was crowned with Temur’s proclamation of a three-year tax exemption for his subjects.
Temur had good reason to feel pleased with his achievements. The Five-Year Campaign had been completed in four. Persia had been brought back into line, recalcitrant Georgia had been reconquered, and Iraq had folded weakly before him. Above all, his deadliest enemy, Tokhtamish, had been trounced and the Golden Horde exterminated. Mawarannahr now faced no external threats. With the immense treasures plundered from the campaign being carried into Samarkand on the backs of exhausted horses and camels, the empire was at its zenith.
Temur was now in his sixty-first year. For more than half a century he had braved the elements of Asia on horseback. He had endured the fiercest summers and the most brutal winters, constantly on the move. There were signs that his age was starting to steal up on him. In the summer of 1392 he had been dangerously ill for a month, confined to his bed at the outset of his campaign in the west. Mawarannahr had trembled at his sickness, only too aware that the fate of the empire rested on the shoulders of one man. However great and noble his sons and grandsons – two sons, Jahangir and, more recently, Omar Shaykh, had predeceased him*– none possessed his indomitable will, his fearless leadership and his brilliance on the battlefield. None, surely, could bear the weight of empire alone. During that previous illness, Allah in all His wisdom, grace and compassion had intervened to save Temur, but looking into the years ahead, who could fathom the wishes of the Almighty? The emperor’s upright frame was starting to stiffen, his limp was becoming more pronounced and his eyesight less keen. Izrail, the Angel of Death, could not spare him forever.
Such intimations of mortality were to be expected in a man of Temur’s years. Many, if not most, men entering their seventh decade would have been starting to withdraw from active life, looking forward to a time of greater ease and comfort during their autumn years. Temur, inevitably, was different. His career of conquest already marked him out from other men. From humble beginnings he had seized control over vast territories of Asia, retaking the former empires bequeathed by Genghis one by one. First he had risen to power at the head of the reunited Chaghatay ulus. Then he had cast his net out to the west, ransacking the Hulagid dominions and hauling them into his empire. Lastly, he had turned to the north and stamped his authority over the great Jochi ulus of the Golden Horde. Even in the rarefied world of great Asian leaders, he was without equal. Though he was now in his sixties, he betrayed no hint that he had any wish to relinquish the burdens – physical, intellectual, emotional – of empire-building. On the contrary, he was more assertive than ever. He seemed positively to thrive on the business of empire.
Historians have traditionally faulted Temur for his failure to bequeath a long-lasting empire to his successors. Though Babur, his great-great-great-grandson, founded the Mughal dynasty in India – which survived until the nineteenth century – it is true the Temurid empire was short-lived. Within a century of Temur’s death, it had ceased to exist. This impermanence owed itself to the highly autocratic system of rule he instituted. In a word, the system was Temur. As Beatrice Forbes Manz explained in her scholarly study of his life, ‘His government was that of an individual, who interfered at will in the affairs of his subordinates and demanded direct and complete loyalty from his subjects – loyalty not to his office, nor to his government, but to his person. For the period of his life this administration served its purpose well.’
Temur was able to draw on two parallel structures for the administration of his empire. First there was the Turco-Mongolian system of government, with its hereditary official positions, common to the nomadic empires of his neighbours such as the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanids. Then there was the Persian bureaucracy in the settled lands of the west. The former was tasked with the administration of the court and military affairs, the latter took charge of financial matters, most notably tax collection, though there was considerable overlap between the two.
Persian scribes and Chaghatay amirs worked side by side supervising the provincial courts – or diwans – which operated throughout the empire. Their inspections of local government occasionally unearthed instances of embezzlement and corruption, which could be punishable by death. Both could work together, too, in collecting ransom money from defeated cities and registering the contents of their treasuries. Temur retained the military Mongol office of darugha – regional governor – and usually granted it to the Chaghatays. At times, however, he appointed religious figures or Persian scribes to the post. These governors were by no means stationary officials bound to stay in their capitals. Instead, they were required to rove widely with the army on Temur’s campaigns. As Forbes Manz has underscored, what is most striking about a study of Temur’s administration is the vagueness and imprecision of official posts and the duties associated with them. For instance, though it was traditionally the duty of tovachis to conscript the emperor’s armies – as well as to ensure that they had all the proper equipment in decent order – this prestigious role was not exclusive. Amirs could equally be used for the same task.
In practice, the structure of Temur’s government was less important than the fact that power was exercised personally, rather than through institutions. Temur’s life was spent in the saddle campaigning. His energies were not given over to formalising the mechanics of government. The authority of the darughas and diwans, the princes and amirs, all depended directly on the emperor.
Temur had manipulated and subverted traditional tribal loyalties in his rise to power. As emperor, he continued the policy. Tribal chiefs, who could already count on a degree of loyalty from their kinsmen, tended not to be appointed amirs in his army. That would have conferred too much power upon them. Wherever possible, the highest offices were awarded to his sons and grandsons, princes of the royal family. Omar Shaykh, his second son, ruled Farghana, and later the kingdom of Fars. When he was killed on the battlefield in Kurdistan, his lands were given to his son Pir Mohammed, Temur’s grandson. Another grandson, also called Pir Mohammed, son of Jahangir, later inherited the kingdom of Ghazni, modern Afghanistan. Miranshah, until his summary removal, was given the kingdom of Hulagu, covering northern Persia, Azerbaijan and Baghdad. For a time, Shahrukh was governor of Samarkand. Later, he was appointed ruler of Khorasan from his capital at Herat. But no member of the imperial family was ever allowed to become too powerful. Throughout his life, Temur took care to prevent any of the royal princes emerging as a rival to the throne. This jealous guarding of power was such that by the time of his death, his designated successor had been shorn of the personal authority and military resources required to consolidate the realm. Temur’s empire was a one-man show.
A nomadic conqueror in the mould of Genghis, he exhibited the same scorn for the settled life of peasant farmers. His energy was remorseless, his career one of constant movement – from city to city, pasture to pasture, through deserts, over mountains, across steppes, along rivers. Time and again, his army marched thousands of miles across difficult country, inflicted bloody defeats on a series of adversaries, returned to Samarkand and, after only the briefest of rests, set out again on a new campaign. The only pause in this frenetic whirlwind came in winter, when camp was made during the harshest months of the year. This was a guiding principle, however, not a rule, and there were times when the implacable Temur ordered his shivering soldiers into action in the depths of January. There were occasions, too, when the amirs urged Temur to slow down, to give his soldiers more time to recuperate from the rigours of the latest expedition. But always the movement continued, a raging blur of mounted archers, piercing arrows and slashing swords leaving smoking ruins, piled corpses and towers of skulls – the instruments of terror – in its wake, with trains of horses and camels bearing off the most fantastic treasures of the world looted from its greatest cities. Only once in his entire career did Temur stop for a significant time in Samarkand. That time was now.
Temur, wrote Harold Lamb, loved Samarkand ‘as an old man loves a young mistress’. In fact, it would be more accurate to say he wooed her with the ardour of a young man trying to win the love of a beautiful, older woman. The love affair began in 1366, when Temur was thirty-one and he and Husayn, his then ally, took the city by the sword from the Sarbadars. It was his first significant victory, his first notable conquest, and brought into his orbit a city whose name, like Rome and Babylon, echoed through two millennia. He always cherished this moment as the foundation of his bid to rule the world. From that moment Samarkand occupied an unchallenged position in his aesthetic universe. As Clavijo put it: ‘Samarkand indeed was the first of all the cities that he had conquered, and the one that he had since ennobled above all others, by his buildings making it the treasure house of his conquests.’
Temur’s first move was to dress his new lover, encircling her with a girdle of fortified walls to protect her from invaders. This was out of character, insofar as it challenged the traditions established by the nomadic Genghis for whom a settled life and its associated infrastructure – towns, markets, agriculture – were anathema. The Mongol, who did not share Temur’s romantic associations with Samarkand, had swept through in 1220, arriving before the city to find massive ramparts with twelve iron gates flanked by towers. A guard of twenty elephants and tens of thousands of Turkic soldiers were unable to prevent his hordes from razing both walls and city to the ground. According to tradition, the shamanistic Genghis told the Muslims of Khorezm: ‘I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent punishment like me upon you.’ Since that dreadful storm, when the city had been ‘drowned in the ocean of destruction and consumed by the fire of perdition’, Samarkand had lain unprotected. Temur’s building works 150 years later were the first time the outer walls had been restored, an indication of the great esteem in which he held her.
For the rest of his life, Temur hurried across the world, storming, sacking, torching, razing, seizing, all for the greater glory of his adored metropolis. He rampaged through the continent as though nothing else mattered, always returning to adorn her with his latest trophies and embellishments. Captured abroad, scientists and scholars, writers, philosophers and historians congregated in the new academies and libraries he built, adding intellectual sparkle to the city. Temur, said Arabshah, ‘gathered from all sides and collected at Samarkand the fruits of everything; and that place accordingly had in every wonderful craft and rare art someone who excelled in wonderful skill and was famous beyond his rivals in his craft’. Priests and holy men preached to their flocks in the mosques, which multiplied like mushrooms throughout the city, their lofty blue domes glimmering among the clouds, their interiors bright with gold and turquoise. Parks sprang up one by one, idyllic oases of tranquillity sprawling through the suburbs. Asia surrendered her finest musicians, artists and craftsmen to the regal vanity of Samarkand. From Persia, cultural capital of the continent, came poets and painters, miniaturists, calligraphers, musicians and architects. Syria sent her silk-weavers, glass-makers and armourers. After the fall of Delhi, India provided masons, builders and gem-cutters while Asia Minor supplied silversmiths, gunsmiths and rope-makers. This was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Among the Muslim population there were Turks, Arabs and Moors. The Christians were represented by Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Catholics, Jacobites and Nestorians, joined in lifelong servitude by the Hindus and Zoroastrians. Samarkand was a melting-pot of languages, religions and colours, an exercise in imperial splendour and an act of devotion by one man, constant in his love.
Christopher Marlowe’s description of ‘Samarcanda’ was, for once, historically accurate. Attacked for the licence he took in his freewheeling masterpiece Tamburlaine the Great, he nonetheless brilliantly evoked the proud and wrathful emperor revelling in the great glories of his city.
Then shall my native city Samarcanda,
And crystal waves of fresh Jaertis’ stream,
The pride and beauty of her princely seat,
Be famous through the furthest continents;
For there my palace royal shall be placed,
Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens,
And cast the fame of Ilion’s tower to hell;
Through the streets, with troops of conquered kings,
I’ll ride in golden armour like the sun;
And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,
Spangled with diamonds, dancing in the air,
To note me emperor of the three-fold world.
In the heart of this gracious city was the symbol of its strength, the heavily fortified Gok Sarai (Blue Palace), simultaneously a citadel, treasury, prison and armaments factory where the captive artisans and armourers were put to work. The great walls reverberated with the din and clattering of burly men hammering plate armour and helmets, making bows and arrows. Others blew glass for the emperor’s palaces, alongside cobblers cutting leather for army boots and sandals. The rope-makers were set to work on piles of flax and hemp – new crops which Temur had introduced to the agricultural lands outside the city expressly to supply the ropes for the mangonels and other siege engines with which he overwhelmed defiant cities and castles. Here also were the archives, the coin-filled treasury, rooms full of Asia’s plundered treasures and formal reception halls where the emperor occasionally held court.
For all his restless roaming, Samarkand was the centre around which Temur revolved. During thirty-five years of campaigning, the city invariably marked first the launch and – with ominous regularity for his enemies – the triumphal homecoming of his expeditions. He returned in 1381 after the sacking of Herat, and again in 1384 after taking Sistan, Zaranj and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. He was back in 1392 after routing Tokhtamish. Samarkand, the Rome of the East, looked on in wonder as its illustrious emperor trampled the universe.
In 1396, after the latest catalogue of victories in Persia, Mesopotamia and the Kipchak steppes, Temur returned once more to Samarkand. Here he remained for two years, substituting peace for conquest while he embarked on his most sustained building projects yet. Peace maybe, but Temur threw himself into the glorification of his capital with all the furious energy of war.
On 8 September 1404, after a journey of fifteen months and almost six thousand miles from Cadiz, the dust-encrusted Spanish ambassador Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo rode wearily into Samarkand with his modest entourage. Arriving with the European ignorance of the East that was typical of his age, he was staggered to discover the city was larger than Seville, with a population of 150,000.*
Samarkand was approached through ‘extensive suburbs’, the awestruck envoy noted, each one contemptuously named after the great cities of the East that Temur had conquered – Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Shiraz and Sultaniya – to demonstrate that by comparison with this imperial metropolis, Pearl of the East, Garden of the Soul, they were no more than provincial backwaters. These outlying districts, densely populated, were neatly laid out with orchards, vineyards, streets and markets in open squares.
Among these orchards outside Samarkand are found the most noble and beautiful houses, and here Temur has his many palaces and pleasure grounds. Round and about the great men of the government also here have their estates and country houses, each standing within its orchard: and so numerous are these gardens and vineyards surrounding Samarkand that a traveller who approaches the city sees only a great mountainous height of trees and the houses embowered among them remain invisible.
Clavijo did not have to wait long for his audience with the Scourge of God. It took place in the evocatively named Baghi Dilkusha, the Garden of Heart’s Delight, one of Temur’s most fabulous parks, designed and laid out during the emperor’s two-year residence in his capital to mark his marriage in 1397 to princess Tukal-khanum, daughter of the Moghul khan, Khizr Khoja. The garden lay a little to the east of Samarkand among the famous meadows of Kani-gil. From the Turquoise Gate in the city walls a straight avenue of pines led directly to the summer palace. In his memoirs, Babur noted its many paintings celebrating Temur’s Indian campaign. With three storeys, a glittering dome and a forest of colonnades, it was a building of imperial dimensions.
Within hours of his arrival, the Spaniard handed over to two courtiers the gifts from King Henry III of Castile. Once these formalities were over, he was led forward by new attendants holding him by the armpits. Eventually they came to another orchard, entering via a towering gate beautifully decorated in the finest blue and gold tilework. Past the imperial doorkeepers armed with maces they walked, confronted at once by six enormous elephants with miniature castles on their backs performing tricks at the behest of their keepers. The ambassador and his companions were then led forward by a succession of courtiers in order of seniority, until they were brought before Khalil Sultan, Temur’s grandson and son of Miranshah, to whom they handed over the letter from the king of Spain to the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. The audience could now begin. The scrupulously attentive ambassador left us this portrait of the most magnificent Oriental despot.
We found Temur and he was seated under a portal, which same was before the entrance of a most beautiful palace that appeared in the background. He was sitting on the ground, but upon a raised dais before which there was a fountain that threw up a column of water into the air backwards, and in the basin of the fountain there were floating red apples. His Highness had taken his place on what appeared to be small mattresses stuffed thick and covered with embroidered silk cloth, and he was leaning on his elbow against some round cushions that were heaped up behind him. He was dressed in a cloak of plain silk without any embroidery, and he wore on his head a tall white hat on the crown of which was displayed a balas ruby, the same being further ornamented with pearls and precious stones.
The audience passed off successfully, although Temur left the Spaniard in no doubt that he regarded himself as sovereign of the world, referring to the Spanish monarch as ‘my son your King’. Henry III, Temur acknowledged, was ‘the greatest of all the kings of the Franks who reign in that farther quarter of the earth where his people are a great and famous nation’, but that was only in small-time Europe, land of the Franks. Temur’s power and riches were on an altogether more impressive scale, hence the paternalistic condescension to a petty princeling of the West.
Clavijo’s description of Samarkand in the early years of the fifteenth century, the zenith of Temur’s empire, is virtually unparalleled. The envoy, marvelling at the formally laid-out parks and gardens, could hardly believe what he was seeing. There were fifteen or sixteen of them, with names like Garden of Paradise, the Model of the World and Sublime Garden, all with palaces, immaculate lawns, meadows, babbling streams, lakes, orchards, bowers and flowers. There was the Garden of the Square, home to the two-storey Palace of Forty Pillars, then the Baghi Chinar or Plane Tree Garden, where Clavijo saw an extravagantly beautiful palace in the process of construction. Then there was Baghi Naw, the New Garden, lined with four towers surrounded by a high wall a mile long on each side. In the centre of the garden was an orchard and in the orchard was a palace. ‘This palace, with its large garden was much the finest of any that we had visited hitherto, and in the ornamentation of its buildings in the gold and blue tile work far the most sumptuous’. Inside were marble sculptures and floors with exquisite mosaics of ebony and ivory. According to Babur, a verse from the Koran was inscribed over the doorway in letters so large they could be read two miles away.
Through this network of palaces and gardens Temur glided like a gilded lion, spending several days in one before moving serenely to another. A week after his arrival, Clavijo was invited to an imperial banquet in another garden planted with fruit trees and paved with paths and walkways. All around him were silk tents with coloured tapestries to provide shade. In the centre of the garden was a richly furnished palace where the Spaniard glimpsed the emperor’s sleeping chamber, an elegant tiled alcove with a silver and gilt screen in front of which a small mattress of silk worked with gold thread lay on a dais. The walls were covered with rose-coloured silk hangings ornamented with silver spangles containing emeralds, pearls and other precious stones. Silk tassels rustled in the breeze. In front of the entrance to these chambers were two tables of gold and on them seven golden flasks, two of which were set with large pearls, emeralds and turquoises with balas rubies at their lips. Next to them stood six cups of gold, similarly set with pearls and balas rubies. Clavijo took it all in, entranced.
The Northern Garden, one of Temur’s most extravagant creations, was another of the grandiose projects conceived between 1396 and 1398. It was typical insofar as it made use of the finest materials and the most famous craftsmen from the empire. The marble for the palace was imported from Tabriz, the artists and painters from Persia, under the supervision of the celebrated Abdul Hayy, a prize from Temur’s capture of Baghdad in 1393. The images in these paintings, like those of the Registan which survive to this day, were a direct challenge to the Islamic prohibition on figurative art, symbolic perhaps of Temur’s unrivalled ascendancy, boundless self-confidence and also of his ambivalent attitude towards the faith. These frescoes, wrote Arabshah, represented ‘his assemblies and his own likeness, now smiling, now austere, and representations of his battles and sieges and his conversations with kings, amirs, lords, wise men and magnates, and Sultans offering homage to him and bringing gifts to him from every side and his hunting nets and ambushes and battles in India, Dasht [Kipchak] and Persia, and how he gained victory and how his enemy was scattered and driven to flight; and the likeness of his sons and grandsons, amirs and soldiers, and his public feasts and the goblets of wine and cupbearers and the zither-player, of his mirth and his love meetings and the concubines of his majesty and the royal wives and many other things which happened in his realms during his life which were shown in series, all that was new and happened; and he omitted or exaggerated none of these things; and therein he intended that all who knew not his affairs, should see them as though present’.
It was not just the outstanding beauty of these parks and palaces that so moved Clavijo. It was also their sheer scale. During his two years in and around Samarkand, Temur laid out another park, the Takhta Qaracha Gardens, an enclosure so vast, said Arabshah, that when one of the builders working on it lost his horse, the animal roamed about grazing quite happily for six months before he found it again. There were so many fruit trees planted throughout the city that one hundred pounds of fruit ‘would not sell for a grain of mustard’.
This was a land of plenty, watered by the Zarafshan river, with fertile soil producing bumper crops of wheat and cotton. Vineyards were plentiful. The grazing was excellent for cattle and sheep. ‘The livestock is magnificent, beasts and poultry all of a fine breed,’ the envoy remarked approvingly. There were sheep with tails so fat they weighed twenty pounds. Even when Temur and his army were camping in the outlying meadows of Kani-gil and demand for meat was high, a pair of sheep still cost no more than a ducat. Wherever he looked, Clavijo saw food. Although he was teetotal – much to Temur’s displeasure – the Spaniard was something of a gourmand, and noted with wonder the range of produce. Bread was available in all parts, while rice was sold cheaply in great quantities. Everywhere there were open squares with butchers selling meat ready-cooked, roasted or in stews, with fowl, pheasants and partridges, fruit and vegetables, including the delicious Samarkand melons, grown in such abundance that many were cured and kept for a year.
During his three months in the city, Clavijo was especially impressed by the well-stocked markets. Standing on the great Khorasan road running east from Baghdad to the border with China, Samarkand had become a major trade centre during Temur’s reign, the more so once the northern trade route had been diverted south after his destruction of the Golden Horde. In the bazaars Clavijo saw the furs, leather and linens from Russia and Tartary, the silks, rubies, diamonds, agates, pearls, musk and spices from China. The caravans from India brought nutmegs, cloves, mace and cinnamon, ginger and manna. Syria and Asia Minor provided cloth, glass and metalware. Rich in agricultural produce, Samarkand was also a centre for factories making silks, crêpes and taffetas. Some specialised in making fur linings for silk garments. During a later feast, Clavijo was amazed to see royal pavilions lined with grey squirrel and ermine, ‘the most precious fur in the whole world’.
If the Zarafshan watered the city, trade fed it and made it rich. Caravans regularly poured into town bringing plunder from the latest campaign, and tribute was always arriving from the growing ranks of vassal rulers. But commerce, and the taxes it generated for the imperial exchequer, was the backbone of prosperity throughout the empire, and was always attended to by Temur with the greatest care even if, as Clavijo suggested, this was for entirely selfish reasons. ‘Trade has always been fostered by Temur with the view of making his capital the noblest of cities,’ he wrote.
The Spaniard’s four-month overland journey from Trebizond to Samarkand allowed him to observe how trade operated within these lands. It was Temur’s boast that a child could carry a purse of gold unmolested from the western borders of his empire to its farthest reaches in the east, a claim Clavijo came close to endorsing with his observation that ‘the whole country was at peace under the rule and government of Temur’. As he travelled east towards Samarkand through some of the well-known centres of the caravan routes, he saw for himself the busy markets, astounding architecture and pockets of affluence that thriving trade had brought. ‘Tabriz is a very mighty city rich in goods and abounding in wealth, for commerce daily flourishes here,’ he wrote, admiring the well-paved streets and squares, the fine buildings decked in blue and gold tiles, the elegant drinking fountains, richly decorated mosques and elaborate bath-houses. On reaching Sultaniya, he saw that this city was an even ‘more important centre of exchange for merchants and goods’. It was ‘so full of commerce that a great sum in customs is brought in yearly to the Imperial Treasury’.
As he passed through these exotic Oriental cities, each step bringing him closer to the empire’s capital, Clavijo must have started to question his long-held assumptions of European supremacy over the savage, uncultured Orient. For several thousand miles he bore witness to the ruthless discipline with which Temur’s commands were enforced in towns and villages. ‘Wheresoever we might come and whensoever, no matter at what hour, if those of the settlement or township did not forthwith very quickly bring all that was required, they received merciless blows and beatings, suffering the same in a manner that we marvelled to witness,’ he observed. Envoys and messengers criss-crossed the empire on charging steeds, taking horses from the regularly-spaced posting stations and riding them so hard their corpses littered the routes. Whoever held sway over such territories must surely be a great emperor.
When he finally reached Samarkand in the first flush of autumn, drained from the travails of the road, Clavijo found it a revelation. ‘The richness and abundance of this great capital and its district is such as is indeed a wonder to behold,’ he exclaimed. Christendom, he had always believed, was unrivalled in the world. The rout of the Crusaders at the hands of Bayazid in 1396 had certainly challenged his confident outlook, but in his heart he was certain that the sword of Christianity would prevail over these heathens of the East. Now, as he gazed up at the shimmering portals of Samarkand, its gorgeous turquoise domes, its heavenly parks and palaces, he tried to suppress a host of troublesome thoughts. Even before reaching Samarkand he had seen enough of this empire to know that Christendom could boast no equal to the man who ruled these lands. Europe suddenly seemed a small place, a long, long way away.
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.
We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
JAMES ELROY FLECKER, Hassan: The story of Hassan of Bagdad and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand, 1922
There is nothing golden any more about the road to Samarkand. Here and there cottonfields pop up and disappear into the horizon, little changed since the days of Temur, but they tell a tale of sadness rather than romance. Cotton remains the key cash crop of Uzbekistan, where old communist habits die hard. As I approached the city from Tashkent on a clear autumn morning, passing through the drab poverty of the suburbs – originally part of Temur’s outlying districts of Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Shiraz and Sultaniya – a convoy of more than a hundred antiquated buses filled with young men and women passed in the opposite direction. I asked Farkhad, my travelling companion, who they were and where they were going.
‘Oh, they’re just students going to pick cotton,’ he replied.
I expressed surprise that such punishing work could attract such great numbers of volunteers.
Farkhad looked at me askance. ‘Of course they’re not volunteers. They have to pick cotton or they’ll be kicked out of university by the government. No cotton-picking, no degree.’
He himself had left university prematurely in the days of the Soviet Union because he could not cope with the physically gruelling, compulsory work. Then as now, students who refused to pick cotton were ejected from university without a degree. ‘These days it’s still the same. Nothing’s changed only now it’s better hidden. The cottonfields are mostly far away from the main roads, so foreigners like you can’t see what’s happening.’
The golden road to Samarkand was still tainted with the enduring stain of communism a decade after its collapse in Moscow. When James Elroy Flecker’s play first appeared, Samarkand simmered in the Western imagination as the most romantic of cities, distant and exotic – to many minds, it still does. Its very name conjured up images of caravans bearing spices and fabulous treasures, struggling against the fiercest desert sandstorms, of superb palaces and manicured gardens stretching enticingly before the eye. It was the essence of opulence and majesty, a blue-domed oasis of grace and serenity in a world of Oriental barbarism. But even in the first decades of the twentieth century these fondly cherished impressions were illusory. The Great Game, an age of elegance and chutzpah, was long over. The nascent Soviet empire was spreading south to encompass the former realms of Temur.
In 1917 the Russians seized Samarkand and the red flag fluttered over the great Registan (literally ‘sandy place’) Square. In 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was born, and a year later Samarkand was declared its capital, ushering in a new age of progress and modernity. The regime embraced the identikit paraphernalia of the Soviet experiment. Factories, schools, hospitals and high-rise housing sprang up. Broad, tree-lined avenues replaced the clutter of labyrinthine streets. The site of Temur’s Blue Palace became Lenin Square, repository of the new culture in the form of a House of Soviets, an opera house and ballet theatre. The sprawling, disorganised romance of Samarkand was tamed. As for the great monuments of the city, these were to be restored after centuries of abandon.
The Registan, the centrepiece of ancient Samarkand which for half a millennium has shocked visitors with its size and splendour, a trio of monuments rightly regarded as the apotheosis of the city’s Temurid architecture, is an ensemble which Temur would not have recognised. Each of its three madrassahs dates from after his death.
The Ulugh Beg Madrassah, named after his grandson, is the oldest of the three – built between 1417 and 1420, more than a decade after the emperor’s death – and dominates the western side of the square. Constellations of stars on the towering 110-foot portal pay tribute to the astronomer king, who also numbered mathematics, medicine, music, poetry, history, philosophy and theology among his interests. ‘This magnificent façade is of such a height it is twice the heavens and of such weight that the spine of the earth is about to crumble,’ boasts a Kufic inscription. Geometric patterns executed in glazed and unglazed brick zigzag splendidly across the exterior walls, a technique known as hazarbaf, or ‘thousand-weave’, tracing sacred names in turquoise cut tiles within borders of navy blue. Mosaic faience, for once, is used sparingly, above all on the intricate entrance iwan, while carved glazed terracotta, or haft rangi, dominates on the fading three-dimensional sections which make the rope moulding around the iwan arch. Smooth surfaces of marble appear from time to time, in the entrance iwan and along a low dado inset with strips of dark-blue-glazed tile.
Through this devastating portal the humbled visitor walks with craning neck, confronted at once by a courtyard over ninety feet square, which once housed fifty cell-like rooms on two storeys. Here a hundred of the brightest students pored over their Korans, wrapping themselves tightly against the icy draughts of winter, perspiring in the draining heat of summer. During the most irksome hours of recitation and exegesis, digging their fingernails into their hands to keep awake, they would have cast a weary eye on the portal of the mosque on the south-west side of the court, where an inscription reminded them of the fame of their institution, the greatness of its patron: ‘This portal is built to resemble Paradise … in it are teachers of the truths of the sciences useful to religion, under the direction of the greatest of sultans.’ High above the soft murmurings of the student rooms, among the gusting winds a pair of minarets loomed like watchful sentinels, laced with script in turquoise and navy blue like those of the madrassah on the eastern side of the square. Towards their summits, stretching into the skies, the script grew larger. In bold white letters, bordered with blue, the word ‘Allah’ ran continuously around the column.
The Ulugh Beg Madrassah remained a teaching school until the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, its ignominious fate would have horrified and infuriated its progenitor as the fabled college sunk first into absolute dereliction, then reincarnation as a grain warehouse. In the early twentieth century it returned to its roots, and once more the courtyard echoed to the ululating cadences of Koranic recitations, the sixty students being warned that it was not safe to enter the lecture-room area due to the frailties of the creaking structure.
Directly opposite, squaring up against the Ulugh Beg Madrassah with an equally imposing portal flanked by two minarets, is the Shir Dor (‘lion bearing’) Madrassah, built two centuries after the Ulugh Beg Madrassah between 1619 and 1636. What the visitor first notices about the portal – apart from its great size, since this applies equally to all three of the Registan’s monuments – are the stylised lions prowling after white does in front of two suns with human faces, another defiance of Islamic tradition. Legend has it that the architect paid for this heresy with his life. A similarly florid inscription – ‘The skilled acrobat of thought climbing the rope of imagination will never reach the summits of its forbidden minarets’ – decorates the portal. A little behind this superb façade, and partially eclipsed by it on either side, are two azure-blue cupolas, hallmark of the Temurid architectural style.
To the north, completing the ensemble, is the slightly later Tillya Kari Madrassah, built between 1646 and 1660. Of lower construction than its neighbours, it stretches farther across the square with a width of 230 feet, its two storeys of hujra (student rooms) topped on the western side by another cupola, larger and more dominant this time, resplendent with its sun-catching blue tiles.
The future viceroy of India George Curzon, who visited while a Tory MP in 1888, was one of countless visitors on whom the square made a profound impression. ‘The Registan of Samarkand was originally, and is still even in its ruin, the noblest public square in the world,’ he wrote. ‘I know of nothing in the East approaching it in massive simplicity and grandeur; and nothing in Europe … which can even aspire to enter the competition. No European spectacle indeed can adequately be compared to it, in our inability to point to an open space in any western city that is commanded on three of its four sides by Gothic cathedrals of the highest order.’
As an architectural set-piece the Registan, in its original state, was one of the brightest gems of the Islamic world. Its pleasing symmetry, the gorgeousness of the portals with their intricate floral motifs and epigraphic patterns, the elegance of the Kufic calligraphy, the rush of colour – azure, green, yellow and dark blue – against the desert beige, above all its sheer scale, are what grab the eye. But Curzon spoke before the Russians, and more recently the Uzbeks, set to work restoring the decrepit monuments. Today there is something inescapably artificial and new about the square. The restoration has been just that little too efficient, the mosaic details just that little too perfect, the blue majolica tiles impossibly lustrous for buildings of this age.
The Registan has become an Islamic Disneyworld, immaculate and almost devoid of flaws. The natural ageing process has been halted, wear and tear frowned upon and attended to in earnest. All this is understandable, given both the neglect into which the buildings had fallen and the desire for tourist dollars, but the effect is sterilising. After a few minutes contemplating the Registan I found myself genuinely relieved to see a wobbly-looking minaret on the Ulugh Beg Madrassah, a fault the restorers had yet to rectify. A policeman sidled up brandishing a key, and offered to take us to the top of Samarkand’s Leaning Tower of Pisa in exchange for two dollars.
Temur would not have been able to look down on the Registan from the top of this minaret, because neither it nor the rest of the ensemble had been built during his lifetime. (The vantage point would, however, be used a century later when Babur was fighting the Uzbeks.) But if the chess-playing conqueror had been able to ascend to such heavenly heights, he would have stared down on the crossroads of his capital, not on the Shir Dor or Tillya Kari madrassahs, but on a lofty domed bazaar in which the half-dozen principal roads of his city converged.
These arteries wended their way crookedly past the azure-domed mosques, madrassahs and mausolea, through a series of bazaars, located according to their trade. Here were weavers, ironworkers, goldsmiths, potters, bow-makers and tile-makers, an ever-swelling population of craftsmen from all corners of Temur’s burgeoning empire. Eventually the roads emanating from the Registan reached the six gates of the city walls, massive earthen ramparts with a circumference of five miles, surrounded by a deep ditch, that Temur had reconstructed after the devastation wrought by Genghis.
From the top of the minaret Samarkand was a sea of sparkling blue domes and iridescent portals almost as far as the eye could see. Only in the very farthest reaches of the horizon, where the brooding desert lurked on the shores of this ocean, as if ready to reclaim the city in an instant, was the effusion of light dimmed slightly. And there, in the midst of this fulgor of sunshine, several hundred yards north-east of the Registan, just south of the Iron Gate which lay between Afrosiab (ancient Samarkand) and the newly settled quarters to the south, stood the Bibi Khanum Mosque – Mosque of the Mother Queen – Temur’s pride and joy.*
The Cathedral Mosque was one of his greatest projects, a vast, towering edifice, among the most colossal monuments ever built in the Islamic world, a fitting tribute to his numerous victories. Its construction began in 1399, when Temur returned to his capital fired with zeal after the lightning assault on Delhi. According to Clavijo, it was ‘the noblest of all those [mosques] we visited in Samarkand’. Perhaps in these late years the emperor was growing increasingly aware of his own mortality and decided on a building to honour the Almighty, rather than a secular project as was generally his wont.
It may have been, as Hilda Hookham suggested, that the mosque Temur admired at Firuzabad in India inspired this new mosque. Alternatively, it might have been the Tughluk masjid of Jahanpanah in Delhi. Another possible inspiration, given the number of years his project took to complete, is the great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, which Temur had observed while camped in front of the city in 1401. ‘From whatever direction you approach the city, you see this dome, above everything, as if suspended in the air,’ gasped Ibn Battutah. In Temur’s earlier buildings, the domes tended to follow the Persian style – pointed without flowing outwards from their base. The Bibi Khanum Mosque and the Gur Amir mausoleum, with their majestic pomegranate domes, were harbingers of a new style, embraced by the Temurids after the emperor’s death and passed on to the Mughals of India, who used it to most notable effect in the Taj Mahal. The style was later exported to Russia, where it is seen in its full glory in the Kremlin.
Clavijo said the Cathedral Mosque was built in memory of the mother of Temur’s chief wife, Saray Mulk-khanum; others that it was erected in honour of the wife herself, hence its nickname of Bibi Khanum. The chronicles, for once, are silent on such details, but regardless of the inspiration, it was a project on which Temur unleashed his fearsome instincts for control. Two amirs, Khoja Mahmud Daoud and Mohammed Jalad, were put in charge of the work and sent him daily progress reports. They presided over a huge, highly skilled army of workers, each man selected for his special talents. Master craftsmen from Basrah and Baghdad joined stonemasons from Azerbaijan, Fars and India, crystal workers from Damascus and artisans from Samarkand. Among the greatest surprises for the local population were the ninety-five elephants hauling two hundred blocks of marble from Azerbaijan, Persia and India. The animals, which Temur made a point of showing off both on and off the battlefield, had never been seen before in Samarkand.
In 1404, as the mosque neared completion, the workers were surprised by the arrival of Temur, fresh from his triumphant Five-Year Campaign. The emperor was so unimpressed by the size of the portal that he ordered it torn down at once and new foundations dug. Clavijo reported that the portal was too low, Arabshah that it was dwarfed by the rival façade of the Saray Mulk-khanum Madrassah directly opposite. Whatever the reason, Temur was incandescent with rage. The two amirs responsible for its construction were sentenced to death. Temur reserved the most gruesome pre-gallows punishment for Mohammed Jalad, according to Arabshah.
Merely casting an eye upon it [the mosque], he pronounced against Mohammed Jalad sentence of death and forthwith they drew him on his face and bound his feet and ceased not dragging him and drawing him over the ground on his face, until in this manner they had torn him to pieces; and Temur took for himself all his servants, children and property Now he had diverse reasons for that deed, of which this was the chief; the queen, the chief wife of Temur, ordered to be built a college and the architects and geometers judging by unanimous consent that it should be built opposite that mosque, raised its columns high and elevated its structure and lifted its stories and walls above that mosque, wherefore it became stronger than it and stood higher, but since Temur was by nature like a leopard and the temper of a lion, no head was raised above him but he brought it low and no back grew stronger than his but he broke it and he was thus in all things which concerned or touched him. Therefore when he saw the great height of that college and that it bore itself more proudly than the slighter structure of his own, his breast was bitter with anger and he blazed forth and dealt as he did with that superintendent, who did not find the fortune which he had hoped.
Temur now took personal charge of the construction. Although in poor health and unable either to stand for long or to mount his horse, he had himself carried to the site every day in a litter. His obsession with the work astonished Clavijo.
He would stay there the best part of the day urging on the work. He would arrange for much meat to be cooked and brought, and then he would order them to throw portions of the same down to the workmen in the foundations, as though one should cast bones to dogs in a pit, and a wonder to all he with his own hands did this. Thus he urged on their labour: and at times would have coins thrown down to the masons when especially they worked to his satisfaction.
With Temur on site, the building continued night and day. The result was breathtaking. The carved stone and marble, glazed mosaics and bright blue and gold frescoes, together with the hangings and silk carpets, lent the mosque an incomparable refinement. Its scale was unique, contained within a site spanning 350 feet by five hundred feet. The portal reached over a hundred feet, outdone only by the 150-foot minarets which lanced the skyline and looked down on a great courtyard bordered by a gallery of four hundred cupolas supported by four hundred marble columns. Kufic inscriptions from the Koran traced their way around the base of the majestic dome, so large they could reputedly be read from miles away. ‘The dome would have been unique but for the sky being its copy; the arch would have been singular but for the Milky Way matching it,’ the court historian simpered.
The quality and variety of ornament were extraordinary. Large surfaces were covered with glazed brick-ends in hazarbaf technique, crammed with square Kufic designs paying tribute to Allah and his Prophet. In places these paeans to the Almighty were traced across neat arched panels parallel to the ground. In others they cascaded diagonally down the façades in staccato zigzags beneath a frieze of jagged crenellations. All of the mosque’s visible faces were covered in this profusion of colour. The entrance portal and sanctuary iwan had panels of mosaic faience, with insets of polished brick and stone matrices and majolica tiles. A spiral moulding of light blue tiles drew the eye towards the sky, while carved stone anchored the colossal structure to the earth.
Inscriptions on the entrance portal honoured Temur, relating how work began in 1399 and was completed in 1403–04. ‘The great sultan, pillar of the state and the religion, Amir Temur Gurgan ibn Taraghay ibn Burgul ibn Aylangir ibn Ichil ibn al-Amir Karachar Noyan, may God preserve his reign, was helped (by heavenly favour) to complete this jami [Friday mosque] in the year 806 [1403–04],’ read an inscription in carved stone over the main entrance.
By removing the minarets from the top of the massive iwans and placing them at the sides like the salients of a fortress gate, Temur was confidently departing from the Ilkhanid style, giving his Cathedral Mosque an unmistakable religious-military aesthetic on a grand scale. What better testament could there be to the man who regarded himself as the Sword of Islam? There were other important architectural innovations. The novel combination of lateral iwans with domed units, moving away from the traditional court mosque with its four iwans, reappeared in the Masjid-i-Shah of Isfahan and was later exported to the mosques of Mughal India.
But however magnificent Temur’s Cathedral Mosque, it had been built too quickly. The emperor’s personal intervention, not least his execution of the two amirs in charge of the project, had doubtless caused a frenzy among the workers and foremen. Perhaps they cut corners in their efforts to finish the building and escape the emperor’s ire. Perhaps the foundations were too shallow to support such a mighty edifice. The exact reasons are not known, but no sooner had the mosque been completed than it started falling down. It was not long before worshippers, their devout reflections shattered by tumbling masonry, decided to take their prayers elsewhere. Its shell remained, however, and by the nineteenth century the mosque was doubling as a cotton market and stables for Tsarist officers. Bukharan amirs had already plundered it of anything valuable, not least the famous gates of seven metals, which were melted into coins. In 1897 an earthquake hit Samarkand, and the mosque was dealt a lethal blow.
Today, the main body of the mosque remains closed to visitors, its interior dark and dilapidated. Peering through a grille into the gloom, I could make out a cavernous, largely derelict space in which only the most faded, smudged traces of painted plaster and giltpapier-mâché remained. Yet still the monument stands proudly erect, remarkable evidence of Temur’s princely vision. Restored with more sensitivity than the shiny monuments of the Registan, its twin portal towers taper elegantly towards the heavens. The detail on the façade, as fine as anything in Samarkand, has been retraced in subdued blues and beiges.
From the top of the towers, after paying the requisite bribes, I stared over a burnished Samarkand in the warm streaming wind, past the mosque’s immense dome, the azure sheen pockmarked with terracotta where the missing tiles should have been. In the courtyard in front of the portal was a massive lectern of Mongolian marble, given by the astronomer king Ulugh Beg. In former times this had housed the Othman Koran, but when the Russians seized the holy book and carried it off to St Petersburg in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was removed from the crumbling mosque for its own safety and left to fend off the elements in the open air. Far below my vantage point I made out a heavily-built matron and her daughter. The younger woman was crawling around beneath the lectern, getting up, shaking herself down and then disappearing beneath it again. Legend has it that a barren woman who crawls underneath it three times will be blessed with children.
Looking down on the ruined glory of the mosque, I wondered whether its sorry fate had harmed Temur’s status and reputation abroad, contributing to the ignorance which generally greets his name in the Western world. Perhaps if it had survived more completely it would have stood as an unparalleled tribute to the greatest conqueror of the Islamic world, reminding all who saw it that though he was a blood-soaked tyrant, he was also a man of vision and culture, a more complex and fascinating figure than either Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. The monumentality of his architecture, the rationality of its proportions, the quality of the materials used and the craftsmen employed, all were still visible in what remained of this fabulous complex. Yazdi’s comments admiring the otherworldly dimensions of the mosque came back to me as I gazed across the city of turquoise domes:
How marvellously high is the building whose upper rooms are Paradise To estimate its loftiness must confound the greatest minds.
For once, the panegyrist was barely exaggerating.
If the Bibi Khanum Mosque was Temur’s most extravagant religious building in Samarkand, the mausolea of Shah-i-Zinda (the Living King) was his holiest. The site itself, which lay beyond the city walls in the north-east of the capital over the ancient settlement of Afrosiab, predated Temur by several centuries, but under the conqueror’s lavish patronage it developed into an important centre for pilgrims, an integral part of his attempt to make Samarkand the Mecca of Central Asia.
Mausolea had existed here from at least the twelfth century, but Genghis’s hordes erased them from the face of the earth, with one prominent exception. The solitary survivor of the Mongol invasion and the centrepiece of the complex was the tomb of Kussam ibn Abbas, cousin of the Prophet Mohammed, who is supposed to have arrived in the province of Sogdiana – which included Samarkand and Bukhara – in 676. Brimming with missionary fervour, Kussam was on a mission to convert the Zoroastrian fire-worshippers to Islam. The local population did not take kindly to this foreign preacher, however, and Kussam was promptly beheaded. Notwithstanding his decapitation, the story goes, he managed to pick up his head and jump down a well, where he has remained ever since, ready to resume his reign when the time comes. The Arabs venerated him as a great martyr, and the cult of the Living King was born. Over the centuries, the tomb continued to attract the faithful. ‘The inhabitants of Samarkand come out to visit it every Sunday and Thursday night,’ wrote Ibn Battutah in 1333. ‘The Tatars also come to visit it, pay vows to it and bring cows, sheep, dirhams and dinars; all this is used for the benefit of the hospital and the blessed tomb.’
Temur sought to increase the popularity and prestige of the Shah-i-Zinda by converting it into a royal burial ground. Valiant amirs were also allowed to be buried here, and during the latter half of the fourteenth century the complex developed into one of the prize jewels in Samarkand’s architectural crown. Two of Temur’s sisters were buried there, together with other relatives and amirs who had loyally served him. It was a feast of fine craftsmanship, masonry, calligraphy and art, a street of the dead awash with all hues of blue majolica tiles. Blue domes glowed like beacons in the white light, while all around them plainer domes of terracotta baked slowly in the sun.
For most of the twentieth century, in a cruel twist of history perpetrated by the Soviets, Shah-i-Zinda languished as an anti-Islamic museum. Now freed from the shackles of communism it is enjoying its latest renaissance as one of Samarkand’s most impressive attractions. One afternoon, Farkhad and I took a taxi to the necropolis. Our driver, a retired army officer, was completely unmoved by the government’s rehabilitation of Temur: ‘You know, in the army now they teach soldiers about Temur, how he was a great warrior, how he won his many battles and how the new army of Uzbekistan fights in his spirit. All this talk of Temur is rubbish. It’s all very well mentioning him all the time, but what does any of it mean? The comparisons aren’t even accurate. Temur treated his soldiers well. The pensions we get aren’t enough to live on. This government can’t even feed its own people.’
We filed through Ulugh Beg’s elaborate portal and domed entrance halls and stepped into the complex, confronted at once by the familiar blue cupolas which top the Qazi Zadeh Rumi mausoleum, the largest on the site and thought by some to hold the body of Temur’s wetnurse. Down a narrow street shaded on both sides by tall monuments stand two of the finest tombs. The first, the mausoleum of Shadi Mulk-agha, built in 1372, housed a niece of Temur – ‘This is a garden in which lies buried a Treasury of good fortune, And this is a tomb in which a precious pearl has been lost’ reads the inscription framing the door – who had been joined later by the emperor’s eldest sister Turkanagha. Apart from the Rukhabad mausoleum in the centre of town – one of the few monuments in Samarkand that dates to Temur’s time – this was the first dome of plain brickwork I had seen, its restrained simplicity forming a counterpoint both to the turquoise sky above and the intricate panels of carved and glazed terracotta and majolica on the portal below. It is justly considered one of the most brilliant examples of early Temurid ceramic revetments, with its entire façade and interior, including the dome, sheathed in tiles in a variety of highly refined techniques.
Inside the shaded tomb, the exuberance of the decoration shows no signs of restraint. Large rectangular panels containing medallions against a background of hexagrams stretch across the walls, framed by borders of knotted Kufic to give the impression of a particularly fine carpet. The interior angles are filled with tumbling muqarnas or stalactite ornament. Above them, in the crown of the dome a magnificent star shines forth, its eight points running down into lines which divide the heavens into eight panels, each with a teardrop medallion containing a sun and six planets in red, green and bright yellow.
Directly opposite is the tomb of Shirin Bika-agha, another of the emperor’s sisters, erected a decade later, traced with mosaic faience in spiralling floral patterns of blues, yellows, white and green, vying for attention with scrolling vegetal decorations and the ornate ochre calligraphy running across the mosaics. Inside, beneath a double dome, a sixteen-sided drum tapers into an octagonal zone illuminated by shafts of sunlight stealing in through plaster-grille windows of coloured glass to reveal golden murals and a dado of green hexagons and flying cranes, the birds of heaven.
Towards the end of the street lies the Tuman-agha Mosque and mausoleum complex, named after one of Temur’s favourite young wives, a twelve-year-old whom he married when he was in his early forties. The Paradise Garden was also designed in her honour. Tuman-agha had the complex erected in 1405, the year of her husband’s death, shortly before she was forced to marry Temur’s amir Shaykh Nur ad-din by Temur’s grandson, Khalil Sultan. The unfortunate woman was widowed again when her second husband was killed by Shahrukh’s armies in 1411.
At the foot of a portal twinkling with colourful faience is a carved door and above it the sombre inscription: ‘The tomb is a door which everyone must enter.’ On the portals of the mosque is the more encouraging reminder: ‘The prophet of God, peace be upon him, said, “Hurry with prayer before burial, And hurry with repentance before death.”’ Within the mausoleum, Temur’s bride sleeps beneath a dome of eternal night, a blue sky with scattered stars of gold watching over an idyllic country landscape of trees and flowers.
At the end of the street, past the tomb of Kutlug-agha, yet another of the emperor’s wives, is the object of this pilgrimage, the deliciously cool Kussam ibn Abbas Mosque, supreme in the skyline with a trio of grand cupolas. The centre of the edifice, theziaratkhona (pilgrimage room), rebuilt in 1334, two years before Temur’s birth, is ablaze with bright tiles. An elegant dado of light blue hexagons encircles the chamber, trimmed by mosaic faience in blue, green and white.
The holy heart of Shah-i-Zinda appears in a small chamber visible through a wooden lattice frame. There lies the grand four-storey tomb of Kussam ibn Abbas, its several tiers loaded with ornamented majolica and crammed with Koranic inscriptions: ‘Those who were killed on the way of Allah are not to be considered dead,’ reads one. ‘Indeed they are very much alive.’
At the bottom of Samarkand’s University Boulevard, a cool avenue of tall plane trees leading into Registan Street, is a monumental statue in bronze of an enthroned king. His line of sight stretches down towards the Registan. Even sitting down, Temur is an intimidating fifteen feet tall. His beard is trimmed short beneath a highly ornamented crown. His arms are crossed over one another and his right hand rests on the hilt of a curved sword held against his left side. A flowing cloak with a bold border covers his broad shoulders and simply-decorated tunic, reaching down to his ankles. Large boots poke out from beneath it. The statue lords it over the boulevard, exactly as the sculptor intended.
This is Samarkand’s tribute to Temur, its version of the stirring statue of the emperor on horseback in Tashkent. A dappled light filtered down through the trees and played across the pavement. Down a side street a group of boys were fishing in a pool beside a restaurant. Others were splashing about and swimming in a fountain, the water catching the bright sunlight on their backs. Clusters of students walked and cycled past. Zhigulis and slightly larger Volga saloons, the stock Russian cars which dominate the roads of Uzbekistan, rushed by in varying states of repair. A gentle breeze took the sting out of the growing heat.
Two taxis were parked on the side of the road beneath the statue. A petite woman stepped out delicately, taking care not to disturb her wedding dress. Dwarfed by its expanding frills and ruffles, she looked as though she had come off worst in a fracas with a large white meringue. Next to her the groom shuffled awkwardly in an ill-fitting dark suit and adjusted his tie. Once the couple had composed themselves they looked up to the statue of Temur, several steps above road level, and started a slow, deliberate walk towards it. Behind them, their mothers, wearing the traditional Uzbek tie-dyed ikat silk dresses, fussed about with the bride and groom’s clothes, smoothing down the wedding gown and brushing off stray dandruff from the groom’s shoulders, as the growing ranks of the family joined them from other taxis.
The bride and groom led the way up the steps with regal formality. At the foot of the statue the woman laid a bunch of flowers on the marble dais. Then a professional photographer with a Soviet-era camera closed in on the couple and snapped them in front of, and beneath, the austere king staring down towards the centre of his capital with the familiar far-off gaze. More shots were taken of the bride and groom with the rest of the family, and with that the second part of the ceremony was over and the group made their way off. The couple had already been to the register office to get married, and had come to the statue simply to pay their respects to Temur and to seek his blessings.
No sooner had the taxis departed than another convoy arrived. Another meringue and her groom were deposited on the road and the process was repeated all over again. More fussing about the wedding dress. A sombre march up to the statue. Another bunch of flowers. More photos.
As I watched, I realised what a dramatic reversal of fortune these touching ceremonies represented. Who could have foreseen it? Who could have predicted how history would treat Temur? During the six centuries after his death he had been successively neglected by historians, erased by the Soviets, and now revered as the father of his nation. Overlooking his city’s greatest monuments, Temur had finally returned from the shadows, restored to his beloved Samarkand.
By the beginning of 1398, Temur had spent almost two years in Samarkand, by his standards an eternity. But this lull in his military campaigns had not been unprofitable, and disguised considerable activity on other fronts. The various architectural works – the fabulous parks and gardens and palaces – lent further lustre to his imperial capital, which had multiplied in size and riches during his reign. Pearl of Islam and Centre of the Universe, Samarkand was now the envy of the world.
These extravagant improvements had occupied only part of Temur’s time, however. Always the restless conqueror was looking ahead, gathering intelligence, provisioning his men and planning future conquests. For the first time in his life, his eyes turned east to his most formidable enemy, the Ming emperor of China. War with the ruler of Peking had long motivated Temur. It was the chance to win untold glory by raising the sword of Islam against the infidel in the darkest corners of the world. More important, it was an opportunity to test his power against the mightiest ruler on earth.
With this object in mind, Temur had ordered fortresses to be built in his eastern frontier regions, around Lake Issykul in Kyrgyzstan, in the shadows of the spectacular Tien Shan mountains, and in the neighbouring city of Ashpara. His favourite grandson and designated heir Prince Mohammed Sultan had been given a special detachment of senior amirs and troops and entrusted with ensuring that the land could supply the needs of the army when it marched through en route to China. After overtures to the ever troublesome Moghuls, Temur had concluded a treaty with their khan, Khizr Khoja, a cessation of hostilities celebrated by his marriage in 1397 to the khan’s daughter, princess Tukal-khanum. The way east was open.
All these preparations had been set in motion by 1398. It seemed clear where the emperor’s driving ambition would lead him and his armies next. But Temur was an unpredictable opportunist. He knew that the kingdom of Delhi, a thousand miles to the south,had been perilously weakened and was in a state of civil war. In 1394 its ruler Nasir ud-din Mohammed Tughluk had died after a rein of six years. The same year, the Angel Izrail descended on his son Humayun after only six weeks on the throne. The premature death triggered violent disputes over the succession. ‘The misfortunes of the state daily increased,’ wrote the historian Ferishta. ‘The omras [great lords] of Firuzabad, and some of the provinces, espoused the cause of Nasrut Shah. Those of Delhi and other places supported the title of Mohammed Tughluk. The government fell into anarchy: civil war raged everywhere; and a scene was exhibited, unheard of before, of two kings in arms against each other residing in the same capital.’
Up to this point, with the exception of the periodic campaigns against Moghulistan, Temur had looked west for his military conquests. Preparations had now been set in motion for war with China. While they continued, a lightning raid on Delhi would secure his southern borders and bring fresh plunder from the bulging treasuries of India. There was a third consideration. ‘His present resolution [to conquer Delhi] was further strengthened by accounts long since conveyed to him, of the gross idolatry still suffered to extend its pollutions, throughout the countries dependent on both Delhi and Multan,’ wrote David Price in an early-nineteenth-century history of India. ‘And as the views of this apostle of desolation had been for some time bent on a war of religion, it seemed of little importance whether the current of zeal impelled him south or east.’
For an ageing emperor, the opportunity to earn great honour by fighting a holy war against infidels who had turned their back on Islam was particularly inviting. Considering the extent of his conquests, Temur had yet to feature highly on the Islamic horizon. Indeed, as he looked around his fellow Muslim rulers he must have felt he had not been afforded the status – or the soubriquets – he so richly deserved within the dar al Islam. In Cairo, there was the caliph. In Baghdad, the Protector of the Faithful. Sultan Bayazid, the Ottoman emperor, was styled the Sword Arm of the Faith. These three men regarded Temur as no more than a barbaric pagan.*
There was yet another important motivation at work. To date he had met and overcome the challenge of every enemy he had encountered. Was there indeed a power on earth which could resist him? For a ruler with such a keen interest in history on the one hand and an undefeated military record on the other, it was entirely natural that Temur should wish to pit himself against the great figures of antiquity. Alexander the Great had barely crossed the river Indus. Genghis, having made little headway in India, turned back because of the appalling heat. Neither of these world conquerors had managed even to reach Delhi.
Temur put the idea to his princes and amirs. What was their opinion of this most audacious campaign against an enemy of the faith across the snow-capped mountains? They looked at him aghast. ‘The rivers! And the mountains and deserts! And the soldiers clad in armour! And the elephants, destroyers of men!’ they trembled. Surely the emperor was not serious about this most dangerous of ideas?
Mohammed Sultan, disgusted by this cowardice, cut short their protestations with an impassioned appeal to their greed and sense of honour.
The whole country of India is full of gold and jewels, and in it there are seventeen mines of gold and silver, diamond and ruby and emerald and tin and iron and steel and copper and quicksilver, and plants which are suitable for making clothes, and aromatic plants, and sugar cane. It is a country which is always green and verdant, and the whole aspect of the country is pleasant and delightful. Now, since the inhabitants are chiefly polytheists and infidels and idolaters and worshippers of the sun, by the order of God and his prophet, it is right for us to conquer them.
The emperor’s son Shahrukh added his voice to the council. ‘India is an extensive country,’ he argued. ‘Whichever Sultan conquers it becomes supreme over the four corners of the globe. If, under the conduct of our amir, we conquer India, we shall become rulers over the seven climes.’
The emperor smiled benevolently. His mind was made up. His grandson Prince Pir Mohammed Jahangir was sent ahead to put the holy city of Multan (in present-day Pakistan) under siege. The tovachis once again turned to the business of raising an army of ninety thousand. Then, in March 1398, the emperor called the traditional qurultay, at which he made clear his unswerving intention.
Although the true faith is observed in many places in India, the greater part of the kingdom is inhabited by idolaters. The sultans of Delhi have been slack in their defence of the Faith. The Muslim rulers are content with the collection of tribute from these infidels. The Koran says that the highest dignity a man can achieve is to make war on the enemies of our religion. Mohammed the Prophet counselled likewise. A Muslim warrior thus killed acquires a merit which translates him at once into Paradise. Now that the empires of Iran and of Turan* and most of Asia are under our domination, and the world trembles at the least movement we make, Destiny has presented us with the most favourable opportunities. The troops will ride south, not east. India through her disorders has opened her doors to us.
* Omar Shaykh, ruler of Fars, was killed by an arrow-shot while besieging a fortress in Kurdistan in late 1393 or early 1394. Though this was the second of Temur’s sons to predecease him, the Tatar was said not to have betrayed the slightest trace of emotion on learning the news. Omar Shaykh’s son Pir Mohammed, Temur’s grandson, was installed as ruler of Fars.
* We have the whims of Black Sea weather systems in November 1403 to thank for Clavijo’s brilliantly observed portrait of Samarkand in its finest hour. Clavijo’s embassy, which included the friar Alfonso Paez and an officer of the royal guard called Gomez de Salazar, originally intended to meet Temur in the plains of the Qarabagh in the eastern Caucasus, where the emperor and his army were wintering after campaigning in Georgia. The itinerary, however, did not go according to plan. Shipwrecked on the edge of the Bosporus, the Spaniards were forced to wait for four months in Constantinople until more favourable conditions arrived. The following spring they continued their journey to Trebizond on the north coast of modern Turkey. By this time, however, Temur had left for Samarkand, and the envoys were obliged to play catch-up, following him across his Persian dominions to the heart of Mawarannahr. There they remained for three months. It was one of history’s most auspicious shipwrecks.
* Though both the chronicles and the inscriptions on the Cathedral Mosque attribute its construction to Temur, a popular Samarkand legend has it otherwise. According to this version, it was built by Bibi Khanum, his Chinese princess wife, to surprise him on his triumphant return from India. Warned of her husband’s imminent return before the mosque was finished, Temur’s wife rushed to the architect to hurry him along. In vain she pleaded with him to redouble his efforts. Seething with passion for this predictably beautiful princess, the architect steadfastly refused to continue his work until she gave him a kiss. ‘But all women are the same,’ she replied, fearful of the consequences of kissing another man. ‘Take one of the slave girls from the harem.’ She brought him a bowl of coloured eggs. ‘Break any one of these eggs and inside they are all the same.’ Unmoved by this analogy, the architect attempted one of his own. Pouring water into one glass and vodka into another, he observed: ‘Their colour and shape are identical, but their contents are completely different. There are some women who are cold, like water. Others burn and set the veins on fire, like vodka.’ Impressed by his logic, if not his looks, Bibi Khanum consented to a kiss, covering her cheek with her hand. The mosque was finished, but such was the ardour of the lovelorn architect that his kiss burnt an imprint through the princess’s hand onto her cheek. When Temur discovered his wife’s infidelity, he ordered her to be taken to the top of a minaret and thrown to her death. The architect was also sentenced to death, but sprouted wings and flew to heaven instead.
* Temur’s armies would in due course make a mockery of these exalted titles. His own claims to greatness within the Islamic world, however, should be viewed within the context of a career in which he directed his butchery primarily against Muslims, rather than Jews and Christians.
* Turan, a vaguely defined Iranian term, refers to the land north-east of Iran. According to The Encyclopaedia of Islam: ‘The Muslim writers, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, have not been logical in the use of the term Turan. But since for the Arab geographers, the land of the Turks began only to the east of the Sir Darya and did not include Transoxiana, it seems that there was a tendency to identify Turan with Transoxiana, i.e. with the lands between the Amu Darya and the Sir Darya … The term Turan became naturalised in Europe only in the nineteenth century. Its vague character has earned it a certain degree of popularity as applied to ideas where accuracy of definition is out of the question.’