‘If the rulers of Hindustan come before me with tribute I will not interfere with their lives, property or kingdoms; but if they are negligent in proffering obedience and submission, I will put forth my strength for the conquest of the kingdoms of India. At all events, if they set any value upon their lives, property and reputation, they will pay me a yearly tribute, and if not, they shall hear of my arrival with my powerful armies. Farewell.’
LETTER FROM TEMUR TO SARANG KHAN OF DIPALPUR
‘It is difficult to take an empire like a bride to your bosom without trouble and difficulty and the clashing of swords. The desire of your prince is to take this kingdom with its rich revenue. Well, let him wrest it from us by force of arms if he is able. I have numerous armies and formidable elephants, and am quite prepared for war.’
SARANG KHAN’S REPLY
Once more the plains around Samarkand echoed to the thunder of arms. A thick pall of dust hung over the army as ninety thousand soldiers manoeuvred into position. Ninety thousand men, awaiting the emperor’s command, pondered the battles ahead. Among the veterans there was bluff confidence and a certain heartiness, a resignation to the will of Temur and the expectation, rarely disappointed over the years, of great reward. Temur’s generosity to his soldiers was famous the length and breadth of Asia. ‘I saw the duration of my power in this,’ the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction is supposed to have said. ‘That I should divide among my soldiers the treasures which I had gathered together, both the money and the effects.’ This he had done assiduously from his early days as a desperado and mercenary to the height of his glory as emperor. It was one of the reasons he had triumphed over Husayn in 1370. The battle-hardened men remembered the lavish spoils from previous campaigns. If they fought valiantly again, they would win honour and new riches. All knew that a soldier distinguishing himself exceptionally in battle, be he the most junior infantryman or the greatest amir, might be awarded the exalted title of tarkhan. It was a prize worth fighting for.
Delhi lay a thousand miles to the south-east as the crow flew. In practice it was much farther, given the complicated manoeuvrings and battles that would have to be fought along the way. Their marches would take them across some of the most treacherous terrain on earth, over the mighty Hindu Kush mountains, known to Arab geographers as the Stony Girdles of the Earth, with twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks soaring into the heavens. Here lived the warlike Kafir tribes which even Alexander the Great had been unable to subdue. As the amirs had warned, there were rivers and deserts which guarded the approach to Delhi. And even if they managed to overcome all these natural obstacles, they would then face the dreadful beasts of India, the colossal armoured elephants of which blood-curdling tales were told. They could uproot trees and houses, crash through walls, impale men on their sword-like tusks and rip heads clean off with their trunks. From lofty castles on their backs, Indian soldiers rained down arrows upon their enemies. Perhaps the emperor in his later years was miscalculating the host of dangers that lay before him.
Ninety thousand interwoven destinies lay on these plains. Some young men, with tightly drawn, implacable features looked forward to war with a quiet assurance. Plucked from small, obscure lives on the steppes, in the towns and villages among the deserts and mountains, all of them steeped in poverty, they knew that by joining Temur’s army they were serving some higher purpose.
Amid the smoke of the campfires that glowed like fireflies in the night, among the sweet smell of roast horse and mutton, the talk was all of war. Wizened veterans would have boasted of their past heroics on the battlefield, telling tall stories to credulous neophytes and describing with as much detail as they could muster how they would give these infidels a slow and excruciating death. Others probably spoke of the treasures they would steal from Delhi, the slaves they would make of their enemies and the beautiful women they would despoil. And as these stories dissolved into the night, the silent young men who dreaded this campaign more than anything in their short lives must have struggled to control a mounting fear.
The emperor was troubled by no such doubts. He moved, as he knew, under almighty Allah’s protection, raising the sword of Islam against the infidel. His intelligence told him everything he needed to know. Fratricide, rampant since the death of Firuz Shah in 1388, had torn India apart. The country had degenerated into petty kingdoms – Bengal, Kashmir and the Deccan. Delhi, ancient treasure-house of the empire, was locked in internecine conflict. ‘Within ten years five kings, the grandsons and the youngest sons of Firuz, followed one another on the throne of Delhi like transient and embarrassed phantoms,’ wrote the historian Sir George Dunbar. ‘The state of the country was an open invitation to an invader.’
The invitation was accepted, and in March 1398 the order to march south was given. Ninety thousand soldiers – sons, husbands, fathers, grandfathers – said their prayers and set their eyes towards the Great Snow Mountains of the Hindu Kush.
The M-39 south from Samarkand, which traces the route by which the Emperor of the World led his men to Delhi in 1398, is a notoriously dangerous road, crumbling and potholed in many places, and the annual death toll is heavy. In winter it is particularly unsafe, and reckless driving among the icy passes of the Zarafshan mountains, part of the Pamir range, accounts for numerous lives.
The road starts climbing almost immediately after leaving Samarkand, pressing forward into High Asia and the distant outlines of the mountains, submerged in haze. There are dusty villages lined with white acacias, Persian walnut, pine and plane. Shepherd boys encourage their flocks along with sticks as the Darhom river sweeps past in full flow. Orchards hang in bright blossom. Mud bricks bake in the sun by the roadside. Apricots dry on rooftops. Old men trot along on donkeys, the long sleeves of their chapangowns flapping like birds’ wings as they bump gracelessly up and down.
Soon the M-39 is snaking tortuously uphill into the snowy mountains, and the Ladas, the Uzbek taxi drivers’ cars of choice (the choice is limited), labour up the 5,500-foot Takhtakaracha pass with engines screaming. The view from the summit of the pass, named after a palace built in 1398 by Temur at Qara Tepe, thirty miles south of Samarkand, is worth the effort. The country opens up magnificently, overlooking the broad Qashka Darya valley which is dominated by a dry riverbed littered with the debris of what must have been a spectacular landslide. Rocks the size of large houses have detached themselves from the upper slopes of the mountains and tumbled down towards the green fields of wheat and cotton and the villages below. Thousands of feet below the pass the road twists suddenly to avoid the latest rockfall. Somewhere down there, way off in the blurred distance, is Shakhrisabz, the Green City, birthplace of Temur.
The immense scale of this country turns one’s thoughts to the unfathomable logistical difficulties of Temur’s expedition. How to move an army of ninety thousand with twice that number of horses a thousand miles across the roof of the world? The enormous variety of terrain the army had to cover, and the different climates it was required to endure, would have been the undoing of a lesser leader. Between Samarkand and Delhi there were freezing mountain ranges and scorched deserts, great swathes of land where supplies to provision the soldiers simply did not exist. Everything would have had to be carried by horse. How would they have managed at high altitude, stumbling among the precipices with heavy burdens on their backs as slashing rain and snow raged against them? This mountainscape has lost none of its grandeur since Temur led his army across it. It is big, bleak and raw. What the soldiers thought of it at the time we can only guess at. What we do know is that six hundred years later, with conditions vastly improved, taxi drivers cosily insulated in their heated cars still complain bitterly about the dangerous conditions and the icy passes.
South of Shakhrisabz, a dark smudge on the horizon marks the Hissar mountains. The road continues through villages and hamlets, past orchards and ploughed fields, old homesteads and abandoned plots of land. Flocks of sheep graze on the plain beneath the hills, kicking up glittering veils of dust that linger over them. Farmers fork straw into growing mounds. The occasional yurt indicates nomadic families still eking out a living in this wild landscape.
Beyond the Hissar mountains, two days’ ride from Shakhrisabz, Temur and his army rode through the famous Temur Darwaza, or Iron Gates of Derbend in the Baysun Tau mountains (literally ‘turban-wearing’, to describe their mantle of snow). These gates earned their name many centuries before Temur’s time. Travelling to Termez in 629, the Buddhist monk Xuan Zang remarked on the double set of heavy wooden doors, reinforced with iron and hung with bells, that guarded the mountain pass. By the early fifteenth century, when Clavijo traversed the pass, the doors had disappeared but the Iron Gates retained their name, in addition to their vital role as a customs and immigration post for Temur’s empire. As ever, it was the Spanish envoy who left us the most detailed description of the place at that time.
The mountain range … is very lofty and the pass that traverses it is a narrow cleft where the passage seems to have been cut through by the hand of man, with the mountain wall on either side rising vertical to an immense height. The roadway itself is quite level, passing deep down in the cleft. Here in the midst of surrounding heights stands a village, and the place is known as the Iron Gates. In the whole length of this mountain range there is no other pass to cross it, save this one, which is thus the Guard House of the Imperial city of Samarkand. It is only by this one pass that all who travel up to Samarkand from India can come: nor can those who go down from the Imperial City voyaging to India travel by any other route. The lord Temur is sole master of these Iron Gates, and the revenue is considerable to the state from the customs imposed on all merchants who come from India going to the city of Samarkand and to the regions beyond.
The Iron Gates also represented an expression of Temur’s power, for one thousand miles west of the Caspian Sea lay another Temur Darwaza, guarding the Derbend pass through which Tokhtamish had launched his raids on his rival’s territories. All the land in between the two Iron Gates, as Clavijo recorded, was controlled by one man. ‘Between these Gates of Samarkand and those Gates of Derbend indeed is a distance of at least 1,500 leagues of land and of this great territory, as you must know Temur is lord. He is master of both these Iron Gates, and the Iron Gates of Derbend yield him a very considerable yearly tribute from customs, as do those of Samarkand.’
As he passed through the Iron Gates south of Samarkand, bound for war against the sultanate of Delhi, Temur might have remembered an auspicious journey along the same road twenty-eight years before. In 1370, he rode this way en route to Balkh and a final confrontation with his rival Husayn. Now he sent his prayers towards most compassionate Allah, asking for divine protection in his latest task to defend the faith.
Today, the Iron Gates are a disappointment. A roadside sign marks the Temur Darwaza on a downward slope of the road, in what can best be described as a very minor escarpment. It would not be stretching the bounds of geographical terminology to call this a gorge – it would be breaking them completely. Clavijo’s lofty mountains are nowhere near. There is no ‘narrow cleft’ and the village itself has long disappeared. I asked the taxi driver and the other passengers what had happened to the famous pass through the towering gorge. No one could tell me.
At Derbend, the M-39 checks its south-easterly meanderings and heads south with new purpose. It bisects the pretty village of Sairob, whose main claim to fame is a pair of ancient plane trees which would have been mere four-hundred-year-old saplings when Temur’s army passed this way. One of them is eighty feet high and has a huge hollowed trunk – with a thirty-five-foot perimeter – you can easily walk into. In 1920 it was the village soviet, where the elders gathered and pontificated over the issues of the day. In 1936, after a spell as a regimental library, it became a village shop. Today it lies empty. Across the road, at the foot of a sprawl of stone cottages which line the hillside, is a spring. According to local legend, the dark grey fish which throng the waters are holy, and therefore protected. Anyone who dares to eat one will die instantly.
Past Sairob the last contours of the Hissar mountains soon splutter out, until the road is slicing south across desert plains towards the ancient city of Termez, the Amu Darya, and Afghanistan. Several miles north of Termez, Uzbekistan’s southernmost town, a sign by the road points towards the Hakim at Termezi mausoleum, its most important historical site, a complex containing a tenth-century mausoleum, a twelfth-century mosque and a fifteenth-century khanaqah (dervish hostel).
The monuments honour Abu Abdullah Mohammed ibn Hassan ibn Bashir al Hakim at Termezi, a Sufi mystic and jurist who was, mercifully, given a more concise nickname. ‘On account of his deep knowledge and cleverness the contemporaries named him Al Hakim, i.e. a wise person,’ reads a marble plaque inside the mausoleum. It goes on to praise his ‘honest labour and sacrilegious [sic] life’, a reference to his prolific literary output – four hundred or so works, including The Secrets of Holy Trips and Rare Stories about the Prophet Rasul. Educated in Balkh and already a haj at twenty-seven (a title conferred upon those Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca), Hakim at Termezi led a life of irreproachable holiness until his death in 869. The marble plaque which tells his life story was provided by Temur’s son Shahrukh in the fifteenth century.
The most striking feature of the complex is not the individual monuments – handsome enough in their own way, but bland by comparison with those of Samarkand and Bukhara – but the setting. Only yards behind the mausoleum, past flowerbeds teeming with daisies and rich red gladioli, is an electrified fence, on the inside of which stands a second fence of barbed wire. Behind these lies one of the most memorable sights in Central Asia.
Arab geographers of the Middle Ages referred to it as the Jayhun, and included it with the Tigris, Euphrates and Jaxartes (Sir Darya) as one of the four Rivers of Paradise. For much of its 1,800 miles the Oxus of antiquity, the Amu Darya of today, forms the northern border of Afghanistan. It is the longest river in the region. Tumbling down from the Pamir mountains, it is destined to end its course dribbling weakly into the sands far short of the Aral Sea it once fed. But it is not so much the geographical facts which impress, more a sense of this river’s place in the history of Central Asia, its role in tumultuous centuries long past.
It is difficult to say exactly why – the romantic setting undoubtedly plays a part – but as soon as you see this steaming band of silver for the first time you understand at once that with all its suggestions of mystery, adventure, history, empire-building and war, with all its redolence of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and the memories of the ancient cities which lined its banks and those of its tributaries – Bukhara, Samarkand, Termez and Balkh – this is one of the great rivers of the world.
When Temur arrived in Termez, or Tirmidh as it was then known, in the spring of 1398, the city was rising from the ashes left by Genghis Khan in 1220. For centuries it had thrived at the crossroads of Asia, a prospering Silk Road emporium, with caravans streaming through en route to the markets of Khorasan and India to the south. Well before Islam arrived, Termez was a cradle of Buddhist civilisation, brought across the mountains of Afghanistan by the currents of trade and embraced by King Kanishka of the Kushan dynasty in the second century.* Xuan Zang, the Buddhist monk who passed through the Iron Gates on his way to Termez, counted more than a dozen monasteries during his visit to the city. Within the city walls, that ran for seven miles, were something like 1,100 monks. Zang reached Termez shortly before Buddhism was swept brutally off the stage by the Arab invasion in the dying years of the seventh century. Termez duly transferred its religious devotions to Islam and was integrated into the territories of Transoxiana.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, though surrounded by great mountains and almost a thousand miles from the nearest coastline, the city found unlikely fame as a port. The boats it built and exported plied the length of the Oxus. By 1333, when Ibn Battutah arrived, a century after the Mongol sacking, new Termez was ‘a large and beautiful city, abounding with trees and water’, not to mention a palace, a prison, a fine canal, and city walls with nine gates. Its markets heaved with merchants and customers seeking the city’s famous soaps and perfumes. ‘It abounds in grapes and quinces of an exquisite flavour, as well as in flesh-meats and milk,’ the Moroccan continued. ‘The inhabitants wash their heads in the bath with milk instead of fuller’s earth; the proprietor of every bath-house has large jars filled with milk, and each man as he enters takes a cupful to wash his head. It makes the hair fresh and glossy.’
Visiting Termez in 1404, Clavijo failed to remark upon the shine and bounce of local hairstyles, but still thought it a ‘great city’. ‘We were liberally entertained, all our needs being amply supplied,’ he noted approvingly.
The following centuries saw Termez alternately conquered and destroyed by rival warlords, including Temur’s son Shahrukh and his grandson Ulugh Beg. The strategic importance of its position on the Oxus marked it out as a glittering jewel to be seized by one or other ambitious empire-builder. By the nineteenth century, Termez found itself a Russian bulwark against British expansion during the Great Game, when both sides sought to maintain Afghanistan as a buffer state between their empires, using dashing multilingual spies and bribery to advance their cause. In 1937, Fitzroy Maclean’s high-spirited arrival shed some light on a forgotten Soviet outpost; but Maclean aside, the city was effectively beyond limits to foreign travellers.*
The town’s strategic appeal reasserted itself in 1979, when Soviet tanks first rolled into Afghanistan. For the next decade Termez was the command centre for the Red Army invasion. It was one of the USSR’s most inglorious military adventures, however, and in 1989 Termez watched in disbelief as soldiers straggled back across the Oxus after a humiliating retreat. Her raison d’être snatched away again, the town quietly staged her own withdrawal from the world stage and sank back into obscurity. Today all that remains of Moscow’s tragic imperial blunder are unhappy memories and rows of rusting artillery guns in front of the old fort. Termez is a poverty-stricken ghost town stranded on the sandbanks of the Oxus.
To follow Temur’s route into Afghanistan you must cross the Oxus. In 1398, this was not a problem for the Conqueror of the World. Whenever he wanted to cross a river, he ordered a bridge built. As soon as he and his army had reached the other side, the structure was immediately dismantled. The Oxus was a defining, semi-closed border for his empire, as Clavijo reported.
None may be given passage from the province of Samarkand to go into the lands to the south of the river unless he has been granted a permit and warrant. This must declare whence he has come and whither he is about to go: and such permit is necessary even though he be a free born native of Samarkand. On the other hand any persons who wish to pass the river going into the Samarkand province may do so unhindered and none need show any warrant for the passage. All the ferry-boats thus have guards stationed in them, set there by order of Temur to oversee and control the passage.
Northbound traffic was welcomed. Southbound departures were not tolerated. There were good practical (and somewhat sinister) reasons for this.
The true reason why these guards have thus been set here is that Temur … has brought to Samarkand in captivity from his wars an immense concourse of folk to people this province of his, causing them to migrate hither from all the conquered provinces. This he has done to repopulate the country of Samarkand and to ennoble the same, and the order above given is that none shall escape him to return home to the place whence they have been brought captive.
In the early twenty-first century, the southbound traveller faced similar difficulties. The so-called Bridge of Friendship linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan had been closed for two years. Tashkent was no friend of the Taliban. Fearful of Afghanistan exporting radical Islam across the Oxus, the Uzbeks had sealed their side of the bridge.
I made a plea for permission to continue my journey across the border. Beyond the Oxus Afghanistan loomed temptingly in the haze. The commander of the military base, an ethnic Uzbek with large shades, four stars on his epaulettes and an inscrutable air, arrived in a Jeep. ‘You have come to a prohibited area without permission and your visit has been recorded,’ he told me peremptorily. ‘You must leave at once.’
‘Sir, the journey I am making is in honour of the great Amir Temur, symbol of your new independent Uzbekistan. I am researching a book on this historical hero. It is essential I cross the Oxus to pay tribute to his mighty conquests.’
He removed his shades and shot me a hard look. ‘I don’t give a shit about Temur or your book. This is a restricted area. Your time at the border is over. Get out of here. Goodbye.’
Temur, of course, was confronted by no such governmental obstruction in 1398. He was the government. Swiftly crossing the Oxus, he led his army south-east past Balkh, scene of his coronation in 1370. For 150 miles they marched on until they reached Andarab, from where the Stony Girdles of the Earth rose before them in all their dreadful splendour. Here Temur left the main body of his army and took a smaller mounted fighting force thirty miles east. As snow fell around them, they crossed the Khawak pass which at 12,600 feet was the natural defence of the marauding Kafir tribes. Since, in Yazdi’s words, ‘the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of his conquests’, it was only natural that he should now turn his attention to this warlike race.
Here on the roof of the world, amid the icy peaks and passes of the Hindu Kush, the weather deteriorated rapidly. Temur’s men were hardy warriors from the desert and steppe, but of these terrible conditions they had no experience. Horses slipped and stumbled to their deaths. Casualties were high. Travelling by night to avoid losing their foothold on melting ice, the expeditionary force pressed on. In places they came upon precipices which were impassable without ropes. At one, Temur’s men had to lower the aged emperor a thousand feet on a litter. They tried the same with the horses, but only two survived, and Temur was forced to walk on foot like the humblest infantryman. The whole body of men was now unmounted. Still he would not call a halt. Whatever the difficulties, and they were mounting by the day, the mountain infidels had to be subdued before he would turn his thoughts to Delhi.
At last the small force reached the home of the Kafir tribes and stormed their mountain stronghold. The fighting was fierce and Temur lost many men, said the chronicle, a guarantee, if only the Kafirs knew it, that he would be merciless in victory. Surrender came too late for them, however, and before long the snows of the Hindu Kush were marked with spreading stains of blood and the trademark towers of skulls. Only now would Temur rejoin his main army and resume his southerly progress.
By August they had reached Kabul, where Temur paused to attend to the business of empire. Ambassadors arrived from the Kipchak princes Idigu and Kutluk-oghlan, who had fought with Temur against Tokhtamish. They repented for their past disobedience when, contrary to their agreement to bring their armies back to Temur, they had ‘wandered in the desert like thieves without a home’, and expressed their hope that the gracious emperor would ‘forget all our sins and faults and cross out with lines of forgiveness the pages of our wrongs’. Another envoy arrived from his former adversary Khizr Khoja, the Moghul khan, pledging his allegiance.
The highlight of Temur’s stay in Kabul was the presentation by Shaykh Nur ad-din of all the wealth plundered from Persia in the Five-Year Campaign which had concluded two years previously, in 1396. ‘He brought with him an immense treasure,’ wrote Yazdi, ‘with abundance of jewels of inestimable price; likewise animals proper for the chase, and birds of prey; leopards, gold money, belts enriched with precious stones, vests woven with gold, stuffs of all colours, arms and all sorts of utensils for war, Arabian horses with saddles of gold, great camels, several carriages and riding mules, fine stirrups, the straps embroidered with gold and silver; umbrellas, canopies, pavilions, tents and curtains of scarlet and all colours.’
It took the secretaries of the diwan three days just to record all these treasures – ‘the fingers of the book-keepers grew weary with the writing’ – and two days for Temur to see them pass before him in review. As a morale-booster for the troops, of course, this magnificent ceremony was difficult to outdo. Those soldiers who had been dreading the battles that lay ahead now turned their thoughts to the pleasures of plunder. Up to this point everything had gone according to plan, just as the emperor had assured them. The defeat of the wild Kafir tribes, warriors who had refused to bow before Alexander, had been sudden and complete. There was no reason to expect the battles which awaited them to be any less successful. They had crossed the roof of the world. The worst of their journey was over.
Twenty-first-century Kabul is a ruined city, its historical monuments prised apart, bombed, shot at, plundered, smashed, swept away by centuries of conflict. The past has been forcibly erased by the present. It is a city of derelict palaces, destroyed factories, devastated parks and gardens, hollowed houses, broken mud walls, torn-up roads and shattered lives. Here are the familiar victims of conflict, the veiled widows, beggars young and old, amputees, unemployed men, victims of landmines, sick, malnourished children, proud, poverty-stricken fathers, the flotsam and jetsam cast up by the retreating tides of war. It is a modern-day reincarnation of a city visited in fury by Temur.
After the debacle at Termez, I had entered Afghanistan via Pakistan. Without much hope of success I picked my way through the subdued corridors of Kabul University’s damaged cubist sixties buildings to Professor Abdul Baqi, Afghanistan’s only specialist on Temur, an elderly man with a blunt nose, full lips and obligatory white beard.
When I asked him what Temurid secrets the city could offer, he smiled sadly. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much in Kabul,’ he said. The ancient Balar Hissar fortress was a military base closed to visitors. What little Temur had built in the city had long since disappeared.
My disappointment was obvious. A long silence followed.
‘You know, there is one thing you should see while you’re here,’ the professor eventually added. ‘Go to Babur’s Gardens. They were designed by Temur’s most famous descendant. You’ll find his tomb there.’
Laid out in the middle of the sixteenth century, Babur’s Gardens occupy a large rectangular sweep of ground on the western slopes of Mount Sher-i-Darwaza. One of the grandest horticultural projects the city had ever seen, the gardens were a striking reminder of Temur’s magnificent cultural legacy. Today they offer a valuable glimpse into how a city like Kabul would have looked in its full Temurid bloom. The natural adornments were of a grace and sophistication no longer found, an aesthetic triumph built on a scale which blended monumentality with harmony.
From the moment he conquered it in 1504 and made it the first seat of his empire, Babur loved Kabul with a passion, so much so that he asked to be buried in these gardens. Much of his memoirs, a fascinating window into the late Temurid world, is devoted to describing the city. The climate was perfect. ‘If the world has another so pleasant, it is not known. Even in the heats, one cannot sleep at night without a fur coat.’ Then there were the ‘heady’ local wines, ‘famous for their strength’. Like his world-conquering great-great-great-grandfather, Babur was a prodigious drinker of some renown, writing light-heartedly about one evening when he downed so much wine he could barely stay on his horse. ‘Very drunk I must have been, for, when they told me next day that we had galloped loose-rein into camp carrying torches, I could not recall it in the very least.’
When he was not quaffing the fine local wines, Babur was something of a naturalist. He counted thirty-two varieties of wild tulips on the mountainsides and admired the fecundity of the fields and orchards, which produced ‘grape, pomegranate, apricot, apple, quince, pear, peach, plum, almond and walnut’ in abundance. Oranges, lemons, rhubarb, melons and sugarcane also grew plentifully, and apiaries produced honey. There was no shortage of firewood. Throughout the city and among the valleys of the outlying villages, beneath snow-capped mountains, birds filled the air with their song. There were nightingales, herons, mallards, blackbirds, thrushes, doves, magpies and, most stately of all, cranes, the birds of heaven, ‘great birds, in large flocks, and countless numbers’. In the rushing waters of the Kabul river and its tributaries, fishermen took to the banks and ‘many are netted and many are taken on wattles fixed in the water’. The city, Babur wrote in a passage which would have interested his ancestor, was ‘an excellent trading centre. Down to Kabul every year come 7, 8, or ten thousand horses and up to it, from Hindustan, come every year caravans of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand heads-of-houses, bringing slaves, white cloth, sugar-candy, refined and common sugars, and aromatic roots. Many a trader is not content with a profit of thirty or forty on ten. In Kabul can be had the products of Khorasan, Rum, Iraq and China, while it is Hindustan’s own market.’
New parks, palaces and mosques sprang up during Babur’s reign as he sought to beautify the city, just as Temur had done in his own capital. Trees were planted on a rise he named the Four Gardens in memory of the Samarkand he had left behind. One of them, known as the Great Garden, had been seized by Temur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg. Babur bought it from its then owner and described it in some detail in his memoirs. A river descended from the mountain,
with gardens green, gay and lovely on either bank. Its water is quite pure and so cold that it need never be iced to drink … Around this enclosure large plane trees spread their shade, making pleasant sitting places beneath, and through it runs a perennial stream, large enough to turn a mill wheel. I ordered its winding course to be made straight … Lower down there is a fountain called the Revered Three Friends, with oak trees growing on hillocks at either side … On the way down from this fountain towards the plain many places are covered with the flowering Arghwan [Judas] tree, which grows nowhere else in the country … If, the world over, there is a place to match this when the Arghwans are in full bloom, their yellow mingling with red, I do not know it.
As late as 1977, Nancy Hatch Dupree, an expert on the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, wrote admiringly of Babur’s Gardens:
On entering, the first structure to meet the eye is the charming summer pavilion built by the Amir Abdur Rahman (1880–1901). It is shaded by magnificent plane trees so beloved by the Moghuls [Mughals]. From the graceful pillared veranda one looks down upon terraced gardens dotted with fountains. Inside, the ceilings are beautifully painted in the style of the late nineteenth century …
Two decades of fighting had changed the place beyond all recognition. Dupree’s description was of another world. Babur’s Gardens were no more than a giant slope of wasteland overlooking a visibly shattered city. Mortars had ripped into the park and craters had replaced flowerbeds. The neat lawns which once stretched down towards the city had disappeared altogether. Fountains had been smashed and removed. The once magnificent plane trees were charred trunks, hacked down and burnt as precious firewood.
My guide in the gardens was Shukur, an Afghan in his early thirties. He had fled to Pakistan after both his parents were killed in a rocket attack on Kabul sixteen years earlier. He used to visit the gardens regularly with his family, he told me, but had not returned to the capital since his parents’ death. Seeing the extent of the damage to Babur’s beloved gardens was a powerful shock. As we surveyed the desolation around us he grew tearful. ‘There used to be lots of plane trees here,’ he said, pointing to another charred trunk. ‘There were flowerbeds filled with flowers, everywhere there were bushes. Many families came here for picnics in the afternoons and weekends. It was a very beautiful place. It’s all gone now. Fighting has killed everything.’
We continued up the barren slope to Babur’s tomb, next to a badly damaged marble mosque built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in 1646. Next to it was an empty swimming pool with a broken diving board. In the nineties, the ‘charming’ summer pavilion remarked upon by Nancy Dupree succumbed to the ravages of war.
The tomb itself consists of a simple slab of marble on a raised platform grazed by random bullets. Above it are these words:
Only this mosque of beauty, this temple of nobility, constructed for the prayer of saints and the epiphany of cherubs, was fit to stand in so venerable a sanctuary as this highway of archangels, this theatre of heaven, this light-garden of the God-forgiven angel king whose rest is the garden of heaven, Zahiruddin Mohammed Babur the Conqueror.*
Babur had chosen his burial place with care. It gave the finest views over the city. Warfare had disfigured this picture, and many of the buildings which rose into the skyline were skeletal ruins, beyond repair. Far beneath us on the plain loomed the stark outline of rocket-savaged Habibiya high school, a building which had been hit so many times it looked like a concrete colander. In the distance beyond was the war-torn outline of Darulaman Palace, built for King Amanullah Khan in 1923. Yet for all this, Kabul managed to retain its natural beauty. Beneath a shameless blue sky a veil of haze drifted upwards from the amphitheatre of mountains which girdle the city. Fighting had raged here in recent times, but the flourishing pockets of green suggested that the parks and gardens had weathered the onslaught. Just as it had done since Kabul was founded at least 2,500 years ago, the Kabul river meandered dreamily through the city.
Babur had asked that nothing should cover his grave, so that rain could fall and sun could shine on him. For a long time after his Afghan wife Bibi Mubarika (Blessed Lady) Yusufzai brought his body back from Agra to Kabul, his instructions were honoured. But in the reign of King Nadir Shah (1929–33), a marble stone was installed over the grave, together with a pavilion to protect it from the elements. Ironically, the recent fighting had helped fulfil the last wish of Babur. Gunfire had removed much of the roof, which now contained more rectangles of sky than tiles. It was an oddly inappropriate monument to a man of such genius, but at least it had survived.
‘The people who did this had no respect for our history,’ Shukur said softly. ‘They were not good men. Looting and destroying, that was what interested them. That was all they knew.’
Listening to these wistful recollections, the stories of plunder six centuries after the rampages of Temur’s hordes, I recalled Ibn Battutah’s description of Kabul. He had passed through in 1332 in the course of his epic peregrinations across the world. Then, as now, destruction was the order of the day. Kabul, he wrote, was ‘once a large city; but it is now, for the most part, in ruins’.*
With the inspection of his fabulous treasures at an end in Kabul, Temur ordered the army to continue south in three divisions. Sultan Mahmud Khan, the puppet Chaghatay ruler whom Temur had installed in 1388 after the death of his father Suyurghatmish, took the left wing towards Delhi. Sulayman Shah led the vanguard to clear the way through hostile territory. Temur himself ranged south to meet his grandson Pir Mohammed, who was occupied with the siege of the holy city of Multan, in what is today the Pakistani province of Punjab.
By September the emperor reached the Indus, at the very spot, said Yazdi, where Jalal ad-din, king of Khorezm, swam across in flight from the wrathful Genghis. Another bridge was constructed and within two days the army had crossed the great river. But more obstacles lay ahead: first the Jhelum and shortly afterwards the Chenab and Ravi rivers. Fearfully Temur’s amirs had warned of the difficulties of overcoming these natural defences which guarded the approach to Delhi. None proved a significant obstacle, however. The army pressed on.
In October Temur stopped at the Sutlej river for his rendezvous with Pir Mohammed. Multan, the City of Saints, had mounted a vigorous defence before it fell to the Tatar invaders. After a siege lasting six months, conditions inside the city were intolerable. ‘The inhabitants were in such great want of victuals, that they were constrained to eat unclean things, and even dead bodies,’ wrote Yazdi. Outside the city walls, the situation of Pir Mohammed’s men had been scarcely better. Racked by disease, the great majority of his horses had perished, prompting a rebellion by the recently conquered local rulers. Only when news of Temur’s imminent arrival reached the rebels did they think better of their rising and withdraw in rapid flight. Pir Mohammed was congratulated by his grandfather for subduing the enemy. His reward was thirty thousand fresh horses and the command of the right wing.
Closing in on Delhi, Temur swept through the Punjab, driving all before him. He took particular care to take revenge on those who had risen up against his grandson. One by one whole towns and villages emptied in terror as the conqueror approached, put them to the sword and burnt them to the ground. At Bhatnir, refugees from Dipalpur and Pakpattan crowded beneath the city walls as Temur’s army bore down on them. Their efforts to flee were in vain. Those who escaped the massacre were beaten and carried off as prisoners. The slaughter was so intense the city stank with rotting corpses, the court chronicle reported.
By December, Temur was poised to strike. Everything on the path to Delhi had fallen to him. It only remained to seize the greatest prize. At Loni, north of the city, he set up camp and surveyed the terrain from raised ground above the Jumna river. ‘A great city, where men skilled in various arts are gathered; a home of merchants, a mine of gems and perfumes’, Delhi lay invitingly before his army. Though she had been perilously weakened by internal division, within her walls was an army of ten thousand horse, between twenty and forty thousand infantry, and 120 elephants equipped for war.
The first skirmish came when Temur’s reconnaissance party of seven hundred cavalry was attacked by the forces of Mallu Khan, who was then ruling Delhi through Sultan Mahmud Khan. The Tatars held off the Indians and returned safely to camp, but there were important consequences. First, Temur had managed to tempt Mallu into battle, albeit little more than a scuffle. This augured well. After the interminable siege of Multan, Temur was minded to take Delhi as quickly as possible. He did not want to be forced to sit and wait for the city to surrender from starvation. Far better to lure Mallu into a pitched battle and settle the issue without delay. Second, the rush of troops against the Tatars had been met with roars of approval from the hundred thousand Hindus taken prisoner en route to Delhi. Such was the fervour of their reaction, born out of hopes of liberation, that Temur, fearing a rebellion in his rearguard, gave orders for each and every one to be killed on the spot. The command was to be obeyed on pain of death. Even the holy men travelling with Temur’s army were required to act as executioners, and many were their tears as they sent innocent men and women to their deaths in cold blood. ‘The history of mankind cannot furnish another example of so horrid an act of deliberate cruelty,’ wrote the nineteenth-century historian Sir Malcolm Price, ‘yet the being who perpetrated it has been exalted by historians and poets into a demi-god; and several, not contented with ascribing to him that valour, policy, and martial skill, which he undoubtedly possessed, have extolled him for his numberless virtues; and, above all, for his justice and clemency.’
Perhaps this unexpected butchering of captives added to the sense of foreboding within Temur’s ranks. Certainly there was real fear among his men. Of greatest concern were the mighty Indian elephants, of which they had heard dark stories in Samarkand and had now seen for themselves in the opening skirmish. Covered in heavy armour-plate, carrying flame-throwers, archers and crossbowmen in protected turrets on their backs, and armed with tusk-mounted scimitars that were rumoured to be poisoned, they made a terrifying sight. Arrows and sabres were no use against them.
‘The rows of mighty elephants, clad in complete steel, emptied the brains of the chieftains of their ardour,’ wrote the sixteenth-century historian Khwandamir. ‘Since they had never seen a battle with elephants, and on the subject of their dreadful aspect, and the power of their deeds, they had heard exaggerated accounts of these strange animals, hence they entertained great fears and regarded the overcoming of the elephants as an impossibility; and the misgivings of the noble and the great on this account had been raised to such a pitch, that at the time of appointing the position of the officers, when his majesty the Sahib-Qiran [Temur] asked the distinguished persons and accomplished scholars of exalted rank, which place they liked … [they] answered that their place was to be with the ladies.’ It was yet another test of Temur’s leadership and tactical acumen. The amirs, officers and men needed to be reassured. A strategy for combating the elephants had to be devised.
Temur ordered his soldiers to dig deep trenches, reinforced with ramparts, to protect their positions. Next, he had men fashion caltrops, three-pronged iron stakes, which were then strewn across the elephants’ path. Buffaloes were tied together at the neck and feet by leather thongs and lined up in front of the trenches. Camels were also roped together with wood and dried grass on their backs. The archers were told to concentrate their fire on the exposed mahouts who controlled the elephants.
With the preparations complete, attention turned to the court astrologers. Prior to joining battle, it was customary for them to pronounce their satisfaction that the planets were in an auspicious position. This time, whether through lingering fears of the elephants or other less worldly concerns, they expressed unease about the timing of Temur’s plans. To no avail. For once, the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction declared himself in no wise interested in the conjunction of the planets or the state of the heavens. The cowering astrologers were scolded. Temur would not wait for their verdict, favourable or otherwise.
Publicly, he called for his Koran to be brought before him. With marvellous convenience it was opened at a passage proclaiming the annihilation of a people by the perseverance of its powerful enemy. According to Ghiyath ad-din Ali, author of an original Persian diary of the Indian campaign, Temur read from the chapter of Yunis (Jonah):
This present life is like the rich garment with which the earth adorns itself when watered by the rain We send down from the sky. Crops, sustaining man and beast, grow luxuriantly: but, as the earth’s tenants begin to think themselves its masters, down comes Our Scourge upon it, by night or by day, laying it waste, as though it did not blossom but yesterday … Those that do good works shall have a good reward, and more besides. Neither blackness nor misery shall overcast their faces. They are the heirs of Paradise, wherein they shall abide forever. As for those that have done evil, evil shall be rewarded with evil. Misery will oppress them (they shall have none to protect them from God), as though patches of the night’s own darkness veiled their faces. They are the heirs of the Fire, wherein they shall abide forever.
The good news coursed through the ranks. What the stars could not support, the Koran could confirm. Once again Allah had spoken. Delhi was theirs for the taking.
On 17 December 1398, the army of Mallu and Sultan Mahmud marched through the gates of Delhi to give battle beneath a heavy sky. The Indian troops drew up with the elephants in the centre, each beast carrying its deadly contingent of men armed to the teeth. Both sides drew into the traditional formation employed by Muslim armies at this time, with left and right wings, a centre and an advanced guard.
Temur had stationed himself on high ground overlooking the field of battle. As was customary in the final few moments before the fighting began, while the tension occasioned by the imminence of bloodshed bristled among the opposing armies, the emperor dismounted, threw himself onto the ground and beseeched Allah for His blessings. He had done all he could. The rest was in the hands of the Almighty.
‘So hot a battle was never seen before,’ Yazdi reported. ‘The fury of soldiers was never carried to so great excess; and so frightful a noise was never heard: for the cymbals, the common kettle-drums, the drums and trumpets, with the great brass kettle-drums which were beat on the elephants’ backs, the bells which the Indians sounded, and the cries of the soldiers, were enough to make even the earth to shake.’ Amid this terrible cacophony, the skies darkened as Temur’s archers loosed their arrows against the Indian right wing. Mallu and Sultan Mahmud responded by directing their left wing and vanguard against the Tatar right, but in a brilliant manoeuvre they were overcome at their flank and rear by Temur’s vanguard. After losing several hundred men in their first charge, they broke in rout. Temur had seized the initial advantage.
Watching the scattered ranks of their left wing in retreat, Mallu and Sultan Mahmud gave a prearranged signal. The plain shook with thunder as the war elephants lumbered forward in tight formation, the heavily-armed men in their miniature castles poised to strike. Pounding the ground as they approached the Tatar lines, the huge armoured beasts struck fear in Temur’s men. Following orders, the archers directed their fire at the mahouts, but still the elephants advanced.
From his vantage point, Temur saw the commotion caused by the elephants among his men. He had made preparations to deal with these exotic beasts of war. It was time to unveil them. The amirs ordered the camels bearing bundles of dried grass and wood to be driven forward. As the elephants approached, the loads were set alight and the camels rushed forward in panic. Suddenly the elephants were being charged by roaring camels on fire. Their response was instinctive. They wheeled round in terror and charged headlong into their own troops, trampling them to the ground, impaling themselves on the vicious caltrops and causing mayhem among the Indian lines. ‘The Indian troops on the left and the right fell on the ground like shadows,’ wrote Khwandamir. ‘The heads of the Indians were reduced to atoms, they were like coconuts dropped from the trees.’
The valiant Pir Mohammed led a charge at the head of the right wing, and soon the Indians were in full retreat, cut down without mercy as they sought the safety of Delhi’s city walls. Another prince, the fifteen-year-old Khalil, distinguished himself by overcoming an elephant, together with its guards, and marching it back as a gift to his grandfather. Temur was so impressed by the young man’s bravery that he awarded him the title of Sultan. The sixteenth-century Muslim historian Ferishta wrote disparagingly of the Hindu defence of Delhi: ‘The Indians were, in a very short time, totally routed, without making one brave effort to save their country, their lives, or their property.’
The battle was over. ‘The sun of victory and triumph rose from the east of his majesty’s banners and a whirlwind of happiness powdered the eyes of the enemy with the dust of misfortune,’ wrote Ghiyath ad-din Ali, diarist of the Indian campaign. ‘So great were the heaps of corpses that the battlefield resembled a dark mountain and rivers of blood rushed across it in mighty waves.’
Temur’s Tatars had secured one of their greatest victories. Outdoing both Genghis and Alexander, they had marched across the most forbidding mountains of the world, crossed rivers and deserts and brought one of the richest cities in the world to its knees. Its divided rulers had failed to defend it from the northern invaders. Now its untold treasures lay before them.
As the battlefield smouldered around him, Temur moved smoothly from the pain of war to the pleasures of peace. The day after the battle he entered Delhi in triumph. His standard was erected on the walls of the city and the sumptuous imperial pavilion unfurled and pitched. Into it filed the trembling sharifs, qadis, court officials and men of letters, confirming the formal surrender of Delhi and pleading for their lives now that Mallu and Sultan Mahmud had abandoned them to the mercy of the conqueror. Beautiful music played around the emperor as he spared them in return for a crippling ransom.
How sweet this victory must have tasted as, one by one, the hundred or so surviving elephants were brought before Temur and made to kneel in submission and bellow their greetings to him. Once they had paid their respects to the new master of Delhi, they were sent to the far corners of his empire, to the princes of the line in Tabriz, Shiraz and Herat, to Prince Taharten at Arzinjan and Shaykh Ibrahim of Shirvan. Messengers accompanied them, spreading news of this famous victory to the farthest reaches of Asia, while in the mosques of Delhi the Friday prayers were called forth in Temur’s name.
With these agreeable formalities over, it was time to move on to the serious business of calculating – and then removing – the treasures of the city. Temur’s officials were busy collecting money and belongings from the inhabitants of Delhi. At this stage there were no signs of trouble. The surrender of the city had passed peacefully and a ransom had been agreed. Nevertheless, an ominous trend was underway. For several days after the battle, the number of Tatar soldiers entering Delhi rose rapidly. Some were tasked with separating the inhabitants of Delhi, who had been granted an amnesty, from those taking refuge in the city, who had not. Others were engaged in assessing the ransoms to be paid by householders and property-owners. Several thousand besides, said Khwandamir, were inside the city walls to requisition sugar and corn for the troops.
Still others had entered without official sanction. These were soldiers who came to satisfy their curiosity, satiate their sexual appetites or indulge their taste for plunder. When word came that the ladies of the imperial household wished to make a tour of the conquered city, the gates were opened and not locked up again for hours. The numbers of Tatars inside Delhi swelled again. Yazdi’s account mentions fifteen thousand soldiers entering the city at this time.
It is impossible to identify exactly what precipitated the chain of events that now unfolded and that would be remembered with horror by Indians for centuries to come. Perhaps it was a single instance of rape or murder that ignited local passions. Maybe all that was required to unleash destruction was a disagreement between one hot-headed Tatar and a furious Indian protecting his property. Whatever the immediate cause, the carnage that ensued was momentous even by Temur’s standards. Casting scorn on the Indians’ feeble resistance, Ferishta portrays the terrors of a city given over to fire and the sword.
The Hindus, according to custom, seeing their females disgraced, and their wealth seized by the soldiery, shut the gates, set fire to their houses, murdered their wives and children, and rushed out on their enemies. This led to a general massacre so terrible that some streets were blocked by the heaps of the dead; and the gates being forced, the whole Mongol army stormed inside, and a scene of horror ensued easier to be imagined than described. The desperate courage of the Dehlians was at length cooled in their own blood, and throwing down their weapons, they at last submitted like sheep to the slaughter … In the city the Hindus were at least ten to one superior in number to the enemy; and had they possessed souls, it would have been impossible for the Mongols, who were scattered about in every street, house, and corner, laden with plunder, to have resisted.
Through the streets the Tatars advanced, chasing the beleaguered Indians into Old Delhi, where they sought sanctuary in the Cathedral Mosque. With a detachment of five hundred men, two of Temur’s amirs smashed into the mosque and ‘sent to the abyss of hell the souls of these infidels, of whose heads they erected towers, and gave their bodies for food to the birds and beasts of prey. Never was such a terrible slaughter and desolation heard of.’ For three days the massacre continued. Yazdi blamed it on what he called the ‘ill conduct’ of the inhabitants. As a court historian, he was hardly likely to do otherwise. Ghiyath ad-din Ali, who wrote the original report of events at Delhi, recorded how the Tatar soldiers rampaged through the city like ‘hungry wolves falling on a flock of sheep or eagles swooping on weaker birds’.
Whatever kindled the conflagration, Delhi, the city of gems and perfumes, was a blazing inferno reeking with the stench of slaughter. Carousing in his tent, celebrating his famous victory with a magnificent banquet in the company of the ladies of the imperial household, Temur was reportedly unaware of the bloodbath. While the amirs in the city were frantically – and unsuccessfully – trying to bring the marauding mob to heel, none of their colleagues apparently dared to disturb the emperor at play. These accounts are somewhat suspect, however, not least because Temur was not a man who lost control. It is doubtful he was not well informed about events within Delhi’s city walls. Elsewhere in the sources, much is made of the discipline of his troops, upheld on pain of death. Plunder, until official permission had been granted, was a serious crime. Knowing this, would these soldiers really have dared to cross their emperor?
With or without his sanction, the Tatars helped themselves to the coffers of Delhi. Teeming with treasures, these shocked the soldiers by their sheer opulence. There was gold and silver without end, jewellery, pearls and precious stones, coins and rich clothing; so much, said Yazdi, that words could scarcely describe it all. Above all, there were slaves, the customary trophies of battle – ordinary citizens of Delhi, men and women alike, thrown into servitude directly upon their capture. Many of the Tatars marched out of the city with a column of 150. The poorest soldier seized at least twenty.
For two weeks Temur remained in Delhi, accepting the surrender of local Indian princes and adding their gifts to his lengthening train of treasure. Master craftsmen and the masons of Delhi, renowned for their excellence, were thrown in chains for the return march to Samarkand. The chronicles remark on one present which particularly impressed Temur, a pair of white parrots which for years had graced the antechambers of the Indian sultans.
Then, abruptly, the emperor gave the order to leave. One of the local princes, Khizr Khan, founder of the Sayid dynasty, who claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed, was quickly installed as Temur’s governor of what is today Punjab and Upper Sindh.*Temur was less interested in the administration of empire – history has judged this as one of his greatest failings – than the glory of conquest.
Laden with booty, the army made laborious progress on its northward journey, sometimes as little as four miles in a day. One of Temur’s first stops was the celebrated marble mosque built by Sultan Firuz Shah on the banks of the Jumna, where the emperor gave thanks to Allah for his recent success, and which may have inspired Temur’s monumental Cathedral Mosque in Samarkand.
This was to be no leisurely return, however. More battles awaited the Tatars, for the jihad had not ended. There were still many more infidels to be killed or converted. First the army swung round to the north-east, sacking the stronghold of Meerut before reaching the Ganges and slaughtering forty-eight boatloads of Hindus in addition to an undisclosed number of Zoroastrians. Into the foothills of Kashmir and the Himalayas Temur’s forces continued, fighting twenty or so pitched battles and plundering profitably wherever and whenever the occasion presented itself. The Muslim Shah of Kashmir submitted with promises of a vast tribute. The Hindu Raja of Jammu was captured in an ambush and hastily converted to the true faith. An expedition was sent against Lahore to punish a prince who had already submitted to Temur but had conspicuously failed to reappear as instructed. Lahore was seized and the careless prince executed.
By March Temur had satisfied his lust for war and treasure. He said goodbye to the princes of the royal line and gave them permission to return to their provinces. In Kashmir, to the great concern of his amirs and princes, he had been stricken by a tumour on his arm. Now, as he forged north out of Kabul, he developed boils on both hands and feet, so serious an incapacity that he could no longer remain on horseback. His return journey through the lofty Hindu Kush had to be made in a litter borne by mules. During one day alone, wrote Yazdi, the route was so circuitous the royal entourage had to cross the same river forty-eight times.
In the first days of spring, as the trees blossomed in welcome, Temur crossed the Oxus and at Termez was met by the bulk of the imperial household. Here was the Great Queen Saray Mulk-khanum, his most senior wife, closely followed by Tukal-khanum, the Lesser Queen, and Tuman-agha, his latest and most youthful wife. Here also were two of the emperor’s grandsons, Ulugh Beg and Ibrahim Sultan, joined by several of the princesses and a delegation of senior officials from Samarkand. All hurried forward to greet and congratulate the old emperor on his most recent triumph.
The royal party pressed on towards Samarkand in high spirits, stopping for a fortnight at Shakhrisabz where Temur paid his respects at the tombs of the saints and that of his own father, Amir Taraghay. As they neared his beloved capital, thoughts turned to the triumphal entry that lay only hours away. It would be the most spectacular yet.
One thousand miles away, Delhi lay in ruins. The extraordinary wealth amassed by generations of Indian sultans had vanished in a matter of days. Temur had sown devastation across an already damaged kingdom and northern India had suffered one of its most catastrophic invasions. Stores of grain and standing crops had been destroyed. Fields lay empty. Famine and disease were rife. Heaps of putrefying corpses poisoned air and water alike. Towers of rotting heads rose from the rubble. The skies were silent. ‘Delhi was utterly ruined and those of its people who were left, died, while for two months not a bird moved wing in the city.’
The Scourge of God had left his terrible mark and darkened the pages of Indian history. It took more than a century for Delhi to recover.
* King Kanishka (78–144) was the greatest king of the Kushan dynasty that ruled over the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia. He is remembered above all as a great patron of Buddhism. A cosmopolitan and tolerant king, he presided over an era in which trade with the Roman empire and the exchange of ideas between East and West flourished. The fusion of these two worlds was best exemplified in the Gandharan school of art, in which Greco-Roman classical lines found new expression in images of the Buddha.
* Fitzroy Maclean, the British army officer, envoy of Winston Churchill, writer, politician, spy and fearless traveller, reached Termez after a long and riotous train journey whose only refreshments consisted of untold quantities of vodka and ‘pink Soviet sausages’. In Eastern Approaches, the classic story of his adventures in Soviet Central Asia, he described his unlikely mission to cross the Oxus by boat from Termez into Afghanistan. Predictably obstructive, the Soviet authorities advised him to return several thousand miles to Moscow overland and then fly to Kabul rather than attempt the river crossing. The unstoppable Maclean favoured the more direct approach. Finding a suitable vessel to make the journey was no easy matter. The boat he finally chose, ‘which rejoiced in the name of The Seventeenth Party Congress … was handicapped by the absence of an engine or motor of any kind’. Its captain was a singular character who informed Maclean he was learning English from a book entitled London from the Top of an Omnibus. ‘For purposes of conversation, however, his knowledge of the English language seemed to be limited to the one cryptic expression: “Very well by us” of which he was inordinately proud, and it was to repeated shouts of “Very well by us!”, heartily reciprocated by myself, that some time later I embarked on The Seventeenth Party Congress.’ The crossing completed, the crew were counted to ensure no one had fled, and without further ado ‘the remarkable craft started off stern first for the Soviet Union as if the whole capitalist world was infected with the plague’.
* According to another epitaph: ‘In the year 937, on the 6th of the 1st Jemadi [26 December 1530], as the Emperor was in the Char Bagh [garden near Agra] which he had made, he was seized with a serious illness and bade farewell to this transitory world. Let it suffice to say that he possessed eight fundamental qualities: lofty judgement, noble ambition, the art of victory, the art of government, the art of conferring prosperity upon his people, the talent of ruling mildly, the people of God, ability to win the hearts of his soldiers, love of justice.’
* A visit to Kabul in the summer of 2004 was a happier experience. After the departure of the Taliban in late 2001, the Afghan capital was pulling itself together again, helped by an army of NGOs and UN agencies, not to mention the 5,500 troops from thirty-three nations who made up the International Security Assistance Force. Reconstruction was the order of the day, and Babur’s Gardens were one of the many beneficiaries of the new climate of peace and development. Through a $3 million restoration programme carried out under the auspices of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the gardens were steadily being transformed. What four years earlier had been a barren slope of earth was now green, and getting greener. Five hundred trees had been planted – plane, apricot, apple, mulberry, fig, walnut, pomegranate – and another 1,500 were due to be planted in 2005, including wild cherry, which Babur is supposed to have introduced from north of Kabul, cypresses, hawthorn, roses and jasmine. ‘The idea is to restore the original character of the garden,’ Ratish Nanda, a conservation architect with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, told me. ‘Babur was always very careful looking after these gardens. Even when he was in India, he continually sent messages to his governor telling him to take care of them, reminding him to look after the plants and sending him very specific instructions.’
Restoration work had been complicated by the fact that for much of the past twenty years the gardens had been on the front line between warring factions. Ordnance was everywhere. In one month alone, Nanda’s team uncovered thirty rocket-propelled grenades and thirteen artillery shells. How sustainable the restoration work would prove was anyone’s guess. ‘Once this project is completed in 2006, our hope is that the local population will protect it, but there is always a worry at the back of my mind,’ Nanda admitted. In Afghanistan, peace can never be taken for granted. Without ISAF’s presence in Kabul, many fear the city – and the country – would tear itself apart again.
* Delhi itself was left without a ruler and, like the rest of northern India, remained racked by internecine conflict among the princes. Mallu Shah and Sultan Mahmud returned to the fray, joined in time by other would-be rulers. By the time Khizr Khan captured the city in 1414, these depredations had taken their toll and the once illustrious kingdom of Delhi had shrunk so dramatically that its territories barely extended beyond the city walls.