‘“You see me here a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arm has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan and the Indies. I am not a man of blood, and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity.” During this peaceful conversation the streets of Aleppo streamed with blood and re-echoed with the cries of mothers and children, with the shrieks of violated virgins. The rich plunder that was abandoned to his soldiers might stimulate their avarice, but their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command of producing an adequate number of heads, which, according to his custom, were curiously piled in columns and pyramids.’
EDWARD GIBBON, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The crowds gasped as captured elephants, decked out in brilliant colours, strode through the streets of Samarkand. Few, if any, of the citizens had ever set eyes on such gargantuan creatures. Fabulous stories about these great beasts told how they were invulnerable to swords and arrows, could uproot trees just by running past them and toss man and mount to their destruction with their swinging trunks. As Temur rode past, slaves scattered precious stones beneath his horse’s hoofs. Others threw gold dust and pearl seed into the air to honour him. Men and women cheered and clapped and shouted until they were hoarse. Spring sunlight glinted on the blue domes of mosques and palaces that rose throughout the city and on the many minarets tiled in azure majolica. Never had the emperor’s triumphal homecoming appeared so exotic and magnificent. After three decades watching Temur depart from the capital on one or other campaign, waiting for news of his battles until, several years later, he reappeared victorious, there was a sense of inevitability about his successful return. All that seemed to change, rising inexorably beyond the mortal sphere, was the scale of his victories and the richness of his plundered treasures. Now India had bared its coffers to him and Samarkand ruled the world.
In a style befitting this latest whirlwind conquest which had taken him a little over a year to accomplish, Temur made a grand, stately progress through his kingdom to celebrate it. After a fortnight holding court in the as yet unfinished Ak Sarai palace at Shakhrisabz, he continued north, first to the rolling lawns and pastures of Takhta Qaracha park, one of Samarkand’s most luxurious, thence to the Garden of Heart’s Delight. His route was a roll-call of his tireless building works: to the city baths; the Shah-i-Zinda complex of shrines; the madrassah of Great Queen Saray Mulk-khanum; then a further round of park-hopping, from the Garden of the Plane Trees to the Model of the World, Paradise Garden and High Garden.
As Samarkand simmered with excitement at the emperor’s return, Temur announced his greatest construction project yet. The Cathedral Mosque would be a tribute both to his countless conquests and to the God who had enabled them. Scores of Indian masons, taken prisoner after the sacking of Delhi, were put to work alongside craftsmen from Basrah and Baghdad, Azerbaijan, Fars and Damascus as well as artisans from Mawarannahr. The mosque was still being built when the Spanish envoy Clavijo arrived in Samarkand in late 1404 to find Temur directing much of the work in person, shouting instructions and throwing chunks of roast meat to the workers sweating in the foundations.
‘At length, under his conduct, this great edifice was finished,’ the dutiful Yazdi reported. ‘It contained 480 pillars of hewn stone, each seven cubits high. The arched roof was covered with marble, neatly carved and polished: and from the architrave of the entablature to the top of the roof were nine cubits. At each of the four corners of the mosque without was a minaret. The doors were of brass: and the walls, as well without as within, as also the arches of the roof, were adorned with writing in relief, among which is the chapter of the cavern, and other parts of the Alcoran. The pulpit, and reading-desk, where the prayers for the emperor were read, were of the utmost magnificence: and the niche of the altar, covered with plates of iron gilt, was likewise of perfect beauty.’
For a while, at least, the Cathedral Mosque marked the apotheosis of Temur’s architectural creations. But Yazdi neglected to relate how quickly this monument to the emperor’s hubris started to collapse, the result of its hasty construction. As a court historian, this would have been impolitic in the extreme.
All of a sudden, the high-spirited celebrations accompanying Temur’s return were dramatically interrupted. From the Caspian came dark news in the beautiful shape of Khan-zada, widow of Temur’s first-born Jahangir and wife of Miranshah, who ruled the Hulagid kingdom in his father’s name. Trembling before the Conqueror of the World, this princess who could trace her ancestry to Genghis told him how Miranshah’s behaviour had degenerated appallingly and how he was, as she spoke, plotting to seize Temur’s throne. Pleading for mercy and sobbing uncontrollably, she threw herself at the emperor’s feet, saying she could no longer suffer her husband’s intolerable abuse and would never return to him.
Though shocking, the news did not come as a complete surprise to Temur. Already, on his way back from India, word had reached him of Miranshah’s uncontrolled debauchery. There were stories of riotous gambling, of marathon drinking bouts inside mosques, and of gold coins being thrown from palace windows into the hands of frenzied mobs. The state treasury had been bled dry to fund the prince’s hedonistic pursuits.* Further evidence of his disturbed mind came with reports that he had desecrated the tomb of the Mongol prince Oljeytu in the famous green-domed mosque of Sultaniya. Another, that of the Persian historian Rashid ad-din, he ordered to be destroyed and the bones transferred to the Jewish cemetery. Other fine buildings throughout the city were also being summarily demolished. Clavijo doubted reports of Miranshah’s insanity, however, attributing his bizarre behaviour to nothing more than insecurity and attention-seeking. The Spaniard quoted one report which had Miranshah saying to himself: ‘Forsooth I am the son of the greatest man in the whole world, what now can I do in these famous cities, that after my days I may be always remembered?’ Indulging in a very personal building spree, according to this account, the decadent prince soon realised that none of his monuments in any way surpassed those of his predecessors.
Considering this he was heard to say: ‘Shall nothing remain of me for a remembrance?’ and added ‘They shall at least remember me for some reason or other,’ and forthwith commanded that all those buildings of which we have spoken should be demolished, in order that men might say: that though Miranshah forsooth could build nothing, he yet could pull down the finest buildings of the whole world.
As for his plotting to succeed Temur, Arabshah had Miranshah writing a letter to Temur whose contents, if true, would surely have resulted in his immediate execution. It was time, said the upstart prince with excruciating directness, for the emperor to make way for the next generation.
Certainly through your advanced age and weak constitution and infirmity you are now unequal to raising the standards of empire and sustaining the burdens of leadership and government and above all things it would befit your condition to sit as a devotee in a corner of the mosque and worship your Lord, until death came to you. There are now men among your sons and grandsons, who would suffice to you for ruling your subjects and armies and undertake to guard your kingdoms and territory … You govern men, nay also you administer justice, but unjustly; you feed, but it is on their wealth and corn; you act the defender, but by burning their hearts and ribs; you lay foundations, but foundations of afflictions; you go forward, but on a crooked road …
Whatever the truth of Miranshah’s mental state, his military talents, or rather the lack of them, gave his father greatest cause for concern. The record of recent years suggested he was ill equipped to rule a notoriously unruly region populated by Georgians, Turkmens, Armenians and Azerbaijanis who were invariably loath to recognise Temur’s supremacy. Sultan Ahmed Jalayir of Baghdad, having been expelled from his capital by Temur in 1393, had reoccupied it the following year. Miranshah had attempted to drive him out for good but his mission had ended in ignominious retreat. To the north, he had been similarly humiliated. Sultan Ahmed’s son had been hard pressed under siege by the Tatars in the city of Alanjiq in Azerbaijan. Instead of pressing home his advantage and storming the stronghold, Miranshah had been overcome by a rescue party of Georgians. He had lost both his quarry and the city.
Such a poor performance did not commend itself to his father. Although the chronicles report how Temur loved drinking bouts, particularly after great battles, or at weddings and festivals, the difference was that unlike Miranshah, he did not let the drinking get in the way of either winning wars or administering his empire. The answer to the problem was self-evident. Something had to be done with this wayward son.
In October 1399, only four months after returning from India, Temur left Samarkand at the head of his army. Mohammed Sultan, his designated successor, whose name was already read out at Friday prayers and minted on the imperial coinage, had been summoned to Mawarannahr to take care of the kingdom in the emperor’s absence. Son of Jahangir and Khan-zada, this grandson remained Temur’s favourite.*
With barely a summer in which to rest and recuperate, the troops had been levied for a Seven-Year Campaign in the west. Temur was still not ready to press east. His southern borders had been secured with victory in India. To the north, his defeat of Tokhtamish had sown internal dissension in the lands of the Golden Horde and crushed its capacity to challenge him. But there was unfinished business in the west.
In 1393, when Temur seized Baghdad, Sultan Ahmed had fled to Cairo, where he took refuge at the court of Barquq, sultan of Egypt and Syria. At the time Temur had sent an embassy proposing friendly relations between the two states, but Barquq had imprisoned and murdered the Tatar envoys, the leader of whom was related to Temur by marriage.* Equally provocative was the Mamluk sultan’s decision to rearm Ahmed and support his successful bid to retake Baghdad, an alliance he later cemented by marrying one of the Iraqi’s daughters.
Temur had come close to engaging Barquq in battle while campaigning in Iraq in 1394 but, with his troops exhausted, had resolved to wait until a more favourable day. Now came news that Barquq had died, leaving his ten-year-old son Faraj at the mercy of various powerful factions in court. It was an opportune moment for Temur to avenge the murder of his ambassadors and, more important, extend his western borders to the Mediterranean. But first there was a family matter to attend to which could not wait any longer. Miranshah’s capital at Sultaniya lay directly on Temur’s westward route. The wayward prince would be shown the error of his ways.
Officers were sent ahead of the army to establish exactly what intrigues had been brewing at the prince’s court. Reporting back to Temur, they resorted to the classic diplomatic ruse of blaming the monarch’s advisers. Miranshah, they said, had been corrupted by the scandalous company he kept. A louche entourage of scholars, poets and musicians were responsible for the disastrous state into which the kingdom had descended. Temur’s decision was swift. Maulana Mohammed of Quhistan, a celebrated scientist and poet, together with Qutb ad-din of Mosul, a famous musician, and other court favourites were sentenced to death. The witty repartee of the main protagonists continued right up to the scaffold. ‘You had precedence in the King’s company,’ observed Maulana Mohammed to his friend; ‘precede me, therefore, now.’* Miranshah himself escaped the ultimate punishment, but was relieved of his throne and ordered to remain with the imperial party on the coming campaign. Those of his officers who had been involved in the shameful defeat at Alanjiq were either severely beaten or fined between fifty and three hundred horses.
With discipline restored, the westward march continued. The army wintered in the meadows of the Qarabagh, from where Temur launched another punitive expedition against the Georgians in revenge for their role in the revolt against Miranshah and the assistance they had given Sultan Ahmed’s besieged son, Prince Tahir, in Alanjiq. Once more, the snow-lined valleys ran with blood as Tatar troops forged north, ransacking and burning churches, vineyards, houses, and entire towns and villages. The carnage was interrupted only in the depths of winter, when the army withdrew to their pastures to join the emperor’s celebrations at news of the latest addition to the imperial family. Khalil Sultan had had a son. At the age of sixty-three, Temur had a great-grandson.
The auspicious news meant little to the Georgians. Certainly it did not prevent Temur ordering yet another expedition against the recalcitrant Christian kingdom, the fifth in his lifetime, in the spring of 1400. This time the catalyst for hostilities was the refusal by King Giorgi VII of Georgia to surrender Prince Tahir, who had taken refuge at his court, to Temur. Faced with another Tatar invasion, the Georgians retreated to higher ground, secreting themselves in impenetrable mountain caves. The difficult terrain and the unexpected tactics of his adversary demanded a new approach. First, Temur had baskets woven that were big enough to hold a man. Archers stepped inside them and were lowered over the cliffs until they reached the mouths of the caves. Once there, they fired flaming arrows soaked in oil into the farthest recesses, smoking the enemy out and sending them to agonising deaths. The capital, Tiflis, first seized by Temur in 1386, was stormed again. Within a short space of time mosques, minarets and muaddin occupied the ground on which the Christian churches and their priests had stood. At the point of a sword, pragmatic Georgians recited the sacred words which defined themselves as Muslim: ‘La ilaha illa’llah, Mohammedan rasul Allah’ (There is no god but God and Mohammed is his Prophet). Death was the penalty for those who clung on to Christianity.
King Giorgi, however, managed to elude the Tatar forces, striking out towards the western Caucasus. Prince Tahir he sent south to take sanctuary with the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I, in a move surely intended to plant the seeds of conflict between the Turk and the Tatar. He did not know it, but these would soon bear fruit in spectacular fashion.
War between Temur and Bayazid was not inevitable. In fact, the Tatar tried on several occasions to broker peace, just as he had done with the Egyptian sultan. The best guide to understanding how Bayazid and Temur came to face each other on the battlefield does not come from the chronicles. For once it is not Yazdi, or Arabshah, or Nizam ad-din Shami who provides the answers. It is an atlas. Here, on a map of Asia Minor, it becomes clear how both political and geographical considerations were beginning to affect the dynamic between two supremely ambitious empire-builders.
As ever, there were the usual grievances about various enemies who had sought and been given sanctuary at the two courts. Thus it was anathema to Bayazid that Temur should give shelter to the princes of the ten provinces of Anatolia, known as Rum, whose kingdoms the Turk had first crushed and then sucked into the Ottoman orbit as it expanded eastwards. Equally, it was a serious affront to Temur that Bayazid should harbour adversaries both new (Prince Tahir) and old (Sultan Ahmed Jalayir and Qara Yusuf, chief of the Black Sheep Turkmen tribes which had rebelled so frequently against Temur in the regions between Mesopotamia and Asia Minor).
Through his extensive intelligence network, Temur was well aware that moves were afoot to construct a grand alliance against him. Such plans were being actively discussed by Bayazid, Sultan Ahmed and the Egyptian authorities with whom he had sought protection. Temur despatched a letter to the Ottoman warning him against war and directing him to abandon his intrigues with Sultan Ahmed and Qara Yusuf. He himself, he said, had refrained from aggression only because Bayazid was then fighting the infidel Europeans and war would damage the common cause of Muslims and aid the unbelievers. No one, he assured Bayazid, had ever fought him and prospered. The Ottoman should remain within his borders lest he precipitate his own downfall.
Since the ship of your unfathomable ambition has been shipwrecked in the abyss of self-love, it would be wise for you to lower the sails of your rashness and cast the anchor of repentance in the port of sincerity, which is also the port of safety; lest, by the tempest of our vengeance you should perish in the sea of punishment which you deserve … Take care of yourself and try by your good conduct to preserve the dominions of your ancestors and let your ambitious foot not attempt to tread beyond the limits of your little power. Cease your proud extravagances, lest the cold wind of hatred should extinguish the flambeau of peace. You may remember the precept of Mohammed to let the Turks remain in peace, while they are quiet: don’t seek war with us, which no one ever did and prospered. The devil certainly inspires you to your own ruin. Though you have been in some notable battles in the forests of Anatolia and have gained advantages over the Europeans, that was only through the prayers of the Prophet and the blessings of the Islamic faith which you profess.
The Ottoman forces were no match for the all-conquering Tatars:
Believe me, you are nothing but a pismire: don’t seek to fight against the elephants because they will crush you under their feet. The dove which rises up against the eagle destroys itself. Shall a petty prince, such as you are, contend with us? But your rodomontades are not extraordinary, for a Turk never spoke with judgement. If you do not follow our counsel, you will regret it. This is the advice we give you. Behave as you think fit.
The letter reflected the geopolitical realities which were beginning to leave little room for manoeuvre on the ground. The straightforward fact of the matter was that Bayazid, having blazed through the Balkans and put the cream of European chivalry to the sword at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, was now cutting a swathe through the east. Temur’s relentless westward progress has been well documented. From Samarkand he had first conquered Herat, before continuing across Persia and into the Caucasus, subduing all before him. By the turn of the fifteenth century, then, both men’s military triumphs had reached the point where any further territorial conquest by either – to the east by Bayazid, to the west by Temur – would represent a direct encroachment on the other’s lands. That the region in which the two empires were beginning to clash was historically rebellious to the yoke of foreign powers and saw itself as independent only added to the sense that it was fair game for either side to seize it by the sword.
The Ottoman was unimpressed by the Tatar’s strong words. Temur was nothing but a ‘ravening dog’ from whom the Turks had nothing to fear: ‘For a long time we have wanted to wage war against you. God be praised, our will has now been achieved and we have decided to march against you with a formidable army. If you don’t advance to meet us, we will come and seek you out and pursue you as far as Tauris [Tabriz] and Sultaniya. Then we shall see in whose favour heaven will declare and which of us will be raised to victory and which abased by a shameful defeat.’
There were, moreover, clear signs that encroachments on each other’s empires were starting in earnest. While Temur was punishing the Georgians in the winter of 1399–1400, the Ottoman had sent his eldest son Prince Sulayman to make inroads into Armenia, a successful expedition which resulted in the defeat of Temur’s ally Prince Taharten of Arzinjan, who, under heavy pressure from the Ottomans, had been forced to surrender the city of Kamakh (in present-day eastern Turkey).
Temur was sufficiently moved by these developments to mount a lightning attack on Anatolia in the summer of 1400. He was joined by forces led by Prince Taharten, who on account of the Ottomans relieving him of both his treasure and his harem now made common cause with the Tatar. Great Queen Saray Mulk-khanum was sent to Sultaniya, the customary signal that battle was imminent. Temur set his eyes on Sivas, the base from which the Turks had made their recent incursions.
‘This city was among the finest of great cities, set in a beautiful region, remarkable for public buildings, fortifications, famous qualities and tombs of martyrs renowned above all,’ wrote Arabshah. ‘Its water is pure, its air healthy for the bodily tempers; its people modest, lovers of magnificence and pomp and devoted to means of ceremony and reverence.’ Among its other, more practical, qualities were its massive stone walls, built by the Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Kaikobad 160 years before, and a large moat. Such defences were considered necessary for a city that had developed into a thriving centre of regional trade and that was, besides, the strategic gateway to the heart of Anatolia.
In August, the siege of Sivas began. Stout walls and a moat stood between the garrison of four thousand Sipahi cavalry and Temur’s far greater force. This included eight thousand prisoners pressed into service to assist the sappers whose task it was to undermine the city’s defences. Tunnels were dug beneath the walls, propped up by wooden supports which were later set on fire to precipitate their collapse. The familiar war engines lumbered into action, hurling fire and rocks into the city. For three weeks the sappers and the battering rams went about their destructive mission until at last the walls started to crumble. Fearing disaster unless they came to terms immediately with Temur, the city elders trooped out to sue for peace and beg for mercy. Clemency was granted to the Muslim population in return for a ransom. The Armenians and any other Christians, however, were taken prisoner. As the bulk of the cavalry that had defended Sivas so manfully were Armenians, their fate was settled. Temur’s murderous ends were not to be frustrated, though on this occasion the Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes resorted to the basest trickery to achieve them. In the words of the fifteenth-century Syrian historian Ibn Taghri Birdi: ‘Seizing its armed men, three thousand individuals, he dug for them an underground vault into which he threw them and then covered them with earth. This was after he had sworn to them that he would shed the blood of none of them; and he then said: “I have kept my oath, since I have not shed the blood of any of them.”’
The Tatar, who had long aspired to recognition within the Islamic world as the greatest defender of the faith, took pains to inflict miserable deaths on the city’s Christian community. While the Sipahis were buried alive, others had their heads tied between their thighs before being thrown into the moat to drown. According to Johann Schiltberger, the Bavarian squire captured by Temur in 1402, nine thousand virgins were carried off into captivity. Those who were fortunate enough to escape the slaughter fled from Sivas in horror. As for the city itself, it was, reported Arabshah, ‘utterly destroyed and laid to waste’.
The confrontation at Sivas was a shot across the Ottomans’ bows. But Bayazid had shown himself willing and able to mount military expeditions into the Tatar’s empire, and the potential for a more decisive test of each other’s powers on the battlefield had only increased with these initial skirmishes.* At this stage, however, Temur was not minded to move to all-out battle with Bayazid. That would come in time, if Allah willed it. For now there were other priorities. Egypt must come first.
The death of Sultan Barquq in 1399 removed an obdurate and powerful adversary from the scene. But it must also have reminded Temur, if such a reminder was necessary, that it was only a matter of time before the Angel Izrail descended upon him also. These reflections can only have been impressed on him more forcefully with the news, in the same year, that the Ming emperor Chu Yuan-chang – nicknamed Tonguz Khan, the Pig Khan, by the Tatars – had died, together with Khizr Khoja, khan of the Moghuls. Temur had already outlived two of his sons, Jahangir and Omar Shaykh, and would also outlive one of his most cherished grandsons. But amid these sober thoughts would have come more positive considerations, for in the death of a rival there was opportunity, and none was better at discerning it than the Emperor of the Age. Disorder had accompanied the death of both the Ming emperor and the khan of the Moghuls, opening the way east for Temur in the future. The deaths of two of Delhi’s rulers in quick succession had condemned the sultanate to chaotic instability from which Temur had been swift to exact a bloody profit. More immediately, disorder had followed the death of Barquq, plunging Egypt into a turmoil which the Tatar felt impelled to exploit.
This, then, was an opportune moment to strike at Faraj, the newly installed boy-sultan in Cairo. While the Ottomans at this time were only beginning to emerge on the world stage, the Egyptian empire had, since the days of Sultan Saladin in the twelfth century, been the leading light within thedar al Islam, the pillar of the faith’s defence against Christian Crusaders. Saladin had recaptured Jerusalem, driven out the invaders and united the territories of Syria with those of Egypt. Under the Mamluk dynasty, which took power in the middle of the thirteenth century, Egypt’s lands stretched from the Nile to the Levant, from south-eastern Anatolia to the Hijaz.* During the reign of Sultan Baybars, who cut and thrust his way to power, the empire’s glory reached new heights. In 1260 his army put an end to the Mongols’ relentless westward advance, inflicting the first heavy defeat on them at the battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine. From routing the Mongols, Baybars turned to crushing the Crusaders, winning a number of savage victories over the Christian knights. After taking Antioch in 1263, he had the city’s garrison of sixteen thousand slaughtered in cold blood. One hundred thousand men, women and children were sold into slavery.
Triumphant on the battlefield, the Mamluks were no less impressive in amassing riches and turning their capital into the wonder of the Middle East. Khalil al Zahiri, a fourteenth-century Persian visitor to Cairo, reported that the city was the same size as the ten largest towns in his country put together. Leonardo Frescobaldi, a Florentine traveller, wrote in 1384 that one street in Cairo contained more people than the entire population of his home city. He went on to estimate the number of ships docking at Cairo’s Nile port of Bulaq as equivalent to three times the number of vessels at Venice, Genoa and Ancona combined. Through the cities of Cairo and Damascus Egypt lorded it over the trade routes with India. She also controlled the pilgrim route to the holy places of Mecca and Medina. Her bright Islamic lustre blazed still more brilliantly as home to the Abbasid caliph after the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1250. Now on its knees as internecine fighting ran riot around the ten-year-old Sultan Faraj, the Egyptian empire must have appeared impossible to ignore for a predator like Temur.
The Tatar was camped at Malatiyah, south-east of Sivas in eastern Anatolia, a position which neatly severed the connection between the Ottomans and the Egyptians, but which also left him exposed to both. He was aware of these dangers, because a precedent for joint action between his two opponents had already been set. In response to a request from Faraj for help in seeing off a rival to the throne, Bayazid had sent a sizeable force to assist him. Temur’s spies may also have informed him that the Ottoman’s ambassadors had appeared in Cairo shortly after the fall of Sivas, pressing for an alliance against Temur. The proposal fell on deaf ears, not least because Bayazid had seized Egyptian-held Malatiyah after Barquq’s death. For now, there was no alliance, but Temur understood that at any moment the Ottoman and Egyptian sultans could agree to join forces and put an immense army into the field against him.
Once again, prior to hostilities, he despatched a letter. It threatened dire consequences if Faraj refused to comply.
The Sultan your father committed many odious crimes against us, among them the murder of our ambassadors without cause and the imprisonment of Atilmish, one of our officers. Since your father has surrendered his life to God, the punishment of his crimes must be brought before the divine tribunal. As for you, you have got to consider your own survival and that of your subjects, so you must immediately return Atilmish to us, lest our furious soldiers fall upon the people of Egypt and Syria in a cruel slaughter, burning and pillaging their properties. If you are so stubborn as to reject this advice, you will be responsible both for spilling Muslim blood and for the total loss of your kingdom.
The message was clear, but Faraj, ‘the crooked branch of an evil stock’, and his advisers chose to ignore it. Far worse, the ambassador who brought the letter was seized by Sudun, viceroy of Damascus, and sliced in two at the waist. ‘It is not surprising that a plebeian should commit such a cowardly act,’ wrote Yazdi of the affair. ‘What then may we expect from a Circassian slave?’* Temur would not let such an action go unanswered. The order to march south was given.
One hundred and sixty miles south-west of Malatiyah lay the city of Aleppo, a thriving political, commercial, and cultural centre. Its markets, crammed with the exotic produce of India, were an important outlet on the trade routes linking the Mediterranean with Iran and eastern Anatolia. Its citadel, as one would expect, was ‘large and strong’, according to Ibn Battutah. This, the Moroccan traveller wrote, was where Ibrahim (Abraham) was said to have performed his devotions and where the tenth-century poet El Khalidi penned the following lines:
Land of my heart, extended wide,
Rich in beauty, great in pride:
Around whose head to brave the storm,
The rolling clouds a chaplet form.
Here ’tis the empyreal fires glow,
And dissipate the gloom below.
About thy breast in harmless blaze,
The lightning too forever plays;
And like the unveiling beauty’s glance,
Spreads round its charms to astonish and entrance.
A storm, with black rolling clouds, now gathered over Aleppo as Temur’s men marched south, sacking fortresses along the way. The lightning about to strike this ancient city, and the blaze that would engulf it, would be anything but harmless.
While the storm thundered overhead, rumblings of discontent broke out beneath the dark skies. Temur’s amirs began to voice their concerns to the emperor. The men were exhausted, they argued. They had had only the briefest time in which to recuperate after the gruelling marches to India and back. Since leaving Samarkand they had embarked on two arduous campaigns in Georgia, had taken both Sivas and Malatiyah, and were already being pressed into action again. They were marching through the heart of a country that belonged to an enemy rich and strong, with well-provisioned cities, towering castles and Mamluk soldiers handsomely equipped with the finest weapons. Such doubts were given short shrift by the emperor, who reminded his amirs that their fortunes and his were, as always, in the hands of God. The forced marches continued as the Syrians massed their troops for the defence of the city. They came from Antioch and Acre, Hama and Horns, from Ramallah, Canaan, Gaza, Tripoli, Baalbek and Jerusalem.
Opinion within the city was divided between those who wanted to sue for peace, including Damurdash, its governor, and those who preferred a more robust response. ‘The prince who comes before us today is exceedingly powerful,’ Damurdash warned. ‘He and his armies have performed deeds unrivalled in history. Wherever he has marched, he has conquered towns and overcome fortresses. Whoever tried to resist him, always regretted it and suffered the cruellest punishment.’ Such an adversary was surely protected by God. Far wiser not to cross him, to coin money in his name, proclaim him in Friday prayers and send priests, doctors and sharifs, loaded with priceless gifts, to sue for peace. ‘He is a prince favoured by fortune, powerful, active, glorious and ambitious,’ the governor continued. ‘His wrath burns a thousand times fiercer than fire; and if it is kindled, not even the sea will be able to quench it.’
The hawks were unimpressed, according to Arabshah: ‘Our cities are not built with mud or brick, but solid and impenetrable rock. They are filled with good garrisons equipped with plenty of food and ammunition. It would take a year just to take one of them … Our bows are from Damascus, our lances from Arabia, our shields made in Aleppo. We have on the registers of this realm sixty thousand villages. We need but one or two brave men from each village to supply us with a vast army. These Tatars have lodgings of cord and canvas, while we live in good fortresses, of hewn stone from the battlements to the very foundations.’
Damurdash’s urgent appeals for assistance from Sultan Faraj went unanswered. The Syrians would have to confront Temur’s army alone. By the end of October 1400, the Tatars were camped before Aleppo. For several days Temur sent skirmishing parties to reconnoitre the city and its surroundings. These were the same tactics he had used to tempt the Indians out from behind Delhi’s city walls – to avoid a protracted siege – and they were no less successful in Syria. The gates were opened and the army assembled in battle formation. Sudun, the viceroy of Damascus, led the right, with troops from that city reinforced with Mamluks. Damurdash took command of the left, at the head of forces from Aleppo supplemented with more Mamluks. In what was a serious tactical blunder, the unmounted soldiers of Aleppo were placed in the front lines.
On the Tatar side, the rehabilitated Miranshah and Shahrukh led the right wing. Sultan Mahmud, the puppet Chaghatay khan, commanded the left. Two of the emperor’s grandsons, Miranshah’s son Abubakr and Sultan Husayn, took charge of the vanguard of the right and left respectively. The war elephants, seized from Delhi and now Temur’s favourite military novelty, were stationed at the front of the army, resplendent in their ornately decorated armour. It was an army, said one historian, that ‘filled the landscape’.
To the customary cry of ‘Allahu akbar!’ the two Muslim armies rushed at each other. The fighting was furious as the Syrians threw themselves against these barbarian invaders to defend their city. The air rang with the clash of metal on metal and hummed with the flight of arrows. Urging the elephants against the Syrian left wing, which scattered in disarray, Temur stole the early initiative. Under heavy pressure from the Tatars, it eventually turned and fled to the gates of the city in full view of the rest of the army. The example of Damurdash, who made for the citadel, was the trigger for complete pandemonium. In an instant the plain was filled with Syrians charging towards the safety of the city walls, hotly pursued by the Tatars. In the mayhem soldiers were trampled to death by horses, drowned in the moat that was soon piled high with corpses, run through three or four at a time by pikes and torn to pieces by the archers. Brave women and boys who had joined the defence of their city were cut down where they stood.
Damurdash had little option but to surrender Aleppo to Temur in the hope of preventing further bloodshed. He was well treated, but Sudun, who had killed Temur’s ambassador, was taken prisoner. The treasures of this famous city now belonged to the irresistible conqueror. But the viceroy’s hopes of a peaceful conclusion to the battle were cruelly shattered, as the historian Ibn Taghri Birdi, whose father was commander-in-chief of Sultan Faraj’s armies, related.
The women and children fled to the great mosque of Aleppo and to the smaller mosques, but Tamerlane’s men turned to follow them, bound the women with ropes as prisoners, and put the children to the sword, killing every one of them. They committed the shameful deeds to which they were accustomed; virgins were violated without concealment; gentlewomen were outraged without any restraints of modesty; a Tatar would seize a woman and ravage her in the great mosque … in sight of the vast multitude of his companions and the people of the city; her father and brother and husband would see her plight and be unable to defend her … because they were distracted by the torture and torments which they themselves were suffering; the Tatar would then leave the woman and another go to her, her body still uncovered. They then put the populace of Aleppo and its troops to the sword, until the mosques and streets were filled with dead, and Aleppo stank with corpses.
For four days the massacres and looting continued. Trees were hacked down, houses demolished and mosques burnt. One account spoke of the mass slaughter of the city’s Jews, who had taken shelter in the synagogue. ‘He left the city fallen on its roofs, empty of its inhabitants and every human being, reduced to ruins; the muezzin’s call and the prayer services were no longer heard; there was nothing there but a desert waste darkened by fire, a lonely solitude where only the owl and the vulture took refuge.’*
Looming high over this devastated city were Temur’s dreadful totems. This time the piles of bloody heads were shaped like knolls, fifteen feet in height and thirty in circumference. Vultures, scenting carrion, wheeled overhead, swooping down to pluck eyes out of sockets as twenty thousand expressions of abject terror, horror, disgust and defiance stared out into a blank sky.
The road to Damascus was now open. The first city of the Levant, one of the greatest in the Mediterranean and among the oldest in the world, lay just two hundred miles to the south. After the precipitate fall of Aleppo it was inconceivable that the conqueror should ignore this prize, inevitable that the marches south continue, whatever the protests of his amirs. These officers now suggested that the army should retire to the winter pastures around Mount Lebanon, where the weary soldiers could rest, but Temur refused to countenance this. The sultanate of Egypt was divided and off balance. It must not be given time to prepare its defences. On the Tatars pressed, and the cities, towns and fortresses that lay between them and Damascus collapsed like houses of cards, first Hama, then Homs, quickly followed by Baalbek, Sidon and Beirut.
But Temur’s focus was on Damascus herself, a city which had grown rich at the crossroads of Asian and European commerce. To her west stood the Anti-Lebanon mountains, which rose up mightily to ten thousand feet before sweeping down towards the Mediterranean; to the east stretched the burning wilderness of the Badiyat ash Sham desert. Damascus had grown wealthy on the back of revenues from the caravans which arrived daily, rich also in the arts and crafts for which she was famed. In the bazaars worked metalsmiths, glassblowers, farriers, weavers, tailors, gem-cutters, carpenters, bow-makers, falconers, craftsmen of every kind. It was a highly cultured and cosmopolitan city, with mathematicians and merchants, astronomers and artists. From 661 to 750 she had been the home of the caliphs, capital of the Arab Islamic empire.
One building more than any other recalled those glorious years. ‘Damascus surpasses all other cities in beauty, and no description, however full, can do justice to its charms,’ wrote Ibn Battutah. ‘The Cathedral Mosque, known as the Umayyad Mosque, is the most magnificent mosque in the world, the finest in construction and noblest in beauty, grace and perfection; it is matchless and unequalled.’ Three minarets leapt towards the firmament, soaring above a princely lead dome which presided in turn over a grand arcade and gallery and a central courtyard which could house a multitude. Glittering mosaics traced their way across the façades with images of paradise gardens, colonnaded palaces, lofty castles, rivers and verdant landscapes. ‘Even now, as the sun catches a fragment on the outside wall, one can imagine the first splendour of green and gold, when the whole court shone with those magic scenes conceived by Arab fiction to recompense those parched eternities of the desert,’ wrote Robert Byron in The Road to Oxiana.
Damascus, wrote Ibn Taghri Birdi, was ‘the most beautiful and flourishing city in the world’. Now, as streams of refugees from Aleppo flooded through her gates in distress, telling terrible stories of the slaughter, she braced herself for Temur’s arrival and the most calamitous attack in her history. The disarray which had followed Barquq’s death, communicated to the Tatar by his spies, now made itself felt on a military level. Since there was no single overarching source of command, the Syrians and Egyptians fell prey to ‘discord, confusion, division, conflict and altercation’, lamented Arabshah, who was eight or nine at the time. Too many energies were being expended on competition between the amirs for ‘offices, fiefs and control of the government’, said Ibn Taghri Birdi, too little on the imminent danger of Temur, which was treated ‘as though it did not exist’.
By January 1401, the Tatar forces were camped within reach of the city. The Egyptian sultanate now made a desperate but inventive attempt on the conqueror’s life by sending an assassin disguised as a dervish into his camp. The would-be killer’s manner aroused suspicion, however, and when a hidden dagger was found on him he was instantly killed. The two men accompanying him were returned to Faraj with their ears and noses cut off.
Another envoy was despatched to Faraj, demanding the return of Temur’s ambassador Atilmish, and advising the young Egyptian to coin money in his adversary’s name and to surrender:
This you ought to do, if you have any compassion for yourself or your subjects. Our soldiers are like roaring lions, which hunger for their prey. They seek to kill their enemy, pillage everything he owns, take his towns, raze his buildings to the ground. There are only two ways to choose. Either peace, the consequences of which are quiet and joy; or war, which will lead to disorder and desolation. I have set both before you. It is up to you which path to follow. Consult your prudence and make your choice.
Faraj promised to comply, but stalled for time. A series of incidents then convinced the Damascenes that the tide was now flowing in their favour. First, Temur withdrew from the walls of the city in order to secure pasturage for his army’s horses. Not unreasonably, the besieged concluded the Tatars were in retreat. Next came news that Temur’s grandson Sultan Husayn, who had led the vanguard of the right wing at Aleppo, had defected to the Syrian cause. Finally, when they looked out across the plain, where only days earlier Temur’s army had been camped, there now stood the troops of Faraj, just arrived from Cairo. In the excitement whipped up by these auspicious developments, a force of Damascenes threw open the gates of the city and started attacking Temur’s rearguard.
Disaster now seemed imminent, for Faraj had broken his agreement to surrender. Worse, some of Temur’s men had been killed in the hot-blooded assault. Furious, the emperor ordered his troops to wheel around 180 degrees and close in on Damascus. Althoughweakened by months of continual campaigning, they still presented a fearsome sight. At night the line of their campfires was said to extend for 150 miles. Faraj, sensing ruin, despatched a formal apology for the attack, blaming it on a local rising within the city and assuring Temur that he would come to terms. The conqueror was unlikely to be pacified so easily.
The only hope for Damascus lay with Faraj’s army. Unlike the Tatars, his Mamluks were well rested and had not had to cross half a continent in forced marches. They were a formidable fighting force. But on the morning after Temur’s men had encircled the city, the Damascenes woke to a terrifying sight. The Egyptian army had simply melted away, like the cruellest desert mirage, under the cover of darkness. Faraj was returning to Cairo, from where he had heard rumours of court intrigues to overthrow him, leaving Damascus to face a vengeful Scourge of God alone.
While detachments of Tatars pursued the fleeing Egyptians and cut down some of Faraj’s senior officers and bodyguards, Temur turned to the task at hand. Damascus, now facing devastation, barricaded the city gates and called a jihad against the invader. As at Delhi and most recently Aleppo, Temur was not inclined to mount a long siege. He was far from home, sandwiched between the two hostile sultans Faraj and Bayazid. A lightning assault or an immediate surrender were the favoured options. Besides, the city was heavily protected and rich in supplies. Bringing her to her knees by siege would be a massive undertaking.
Instead, Temur resorted to diplomacy, doubtless confident that military action, if required, would achieve everything the negotiations failed to deliver. Another envoy was sent into the city proposing peace terms. In return, Damascus sent its own delegation. It contained a man who was in Damascus by chance rather than inclination. He had been invited to join Sultan Faraj’s expedition only to be abandoned in the city after the Egyptian’s surprise departure. This man happened to be the greatest historian ever to emerge from the Arab world. The stage was set for a truly remarkable meeting.
Twenty years earlier, in what is today Algeria, Ibn Khaldun finished his monumental Muqaddimah or Foreword, the first volume of his Universal History. Originally conceived as a comprehensive history of the Arabs and Berbers, it evolved into something far more complex, a philosophy of history and a pioneering analysis of how societies change and dynasties rise and fall over several generations. Given his education and the turbulence of North African politics of his time, Khaldun was uniquely well equipped to comment on such matters.* By the time he reached Damascus with Sultan Faraj he had achieved widespread renown during a peripatetic, rollercoaster career. He had enjoyed the patronage of Sultan Barquq, served as Malikite chief qadi (judge) of Cairo, and worked as secretary, chamberlain, statesman, adviser, negotiator and ambassador to all of the leading rulers of North Africa. Perhaps his most unusual appointment came while a senior court official in Granada, when he was despatched to Seville as an envoy to Pedro the Cruel, king of Castile. He had also experienced the insides of various North African prisons. Despite, or perhaps because of, his many talents and considerable patronage, Khaldun made enemies wherever he went. Sometimes they were seen off, at others they prevailed. Just as his position seemed secure, he tended to fall victim to the latest intrigue against him; and he was equally guilty of plotting against sultans and viziers himself.
In his account of their fateful meeting, the Tunisian diplomat and scholar describes how, having advised the city elders to surrender to the Tatar, he feared for his life from a hostile faction advocating all-out war. One morning he had himself lowered over the city walls to seek an audience with the conqueror. The details of those discussions he scrupulously recorded.
His first sight of Temur was in the audience tent, where the emperor was ‘reclining on his elbow while platters of food were passing before him while he was sending one after the other to groups of Mongols sitting in circles in front of his tent’. Temur held out a hand for the Tunisian to kiss. ‘May Allah aid you – today it is thirty or forty years that I have longed to meet you,’ the historian began with all due deference. ‘You are the sultan of the universe and the ruler of the world, and I do not believe there has appeared a ruler like you from Adam until today.’ Khaldun told Temur how he had met a priest and divine in the Mosque of al Qarawiyin in Fes who had, in 1358, predicted the Tatar’s rise to power. The imminent conjunction of the planets, the priest said, was momentous: ‘It points to a powerful one who would arise in the north-east region of a desert people, tent dwellers, who will triumph over kingdoms, overturn governments, and become the masters of most of the inhabited world.’
The calculated flattery found its mark. Khaldun was invited to dine in the emperor’s tent, where the conversation turned to history and geography. Temur asked his guest numerous questions about North Africa. He wanted to know the location of Tangier, Ceuta and Sijilmasa. Khaldun did his best to explain, but it was not good enough for Temur. ‘He said, “I am not satisfied. I desire that you write for me a description of the whole country of the Maghreb, detailing its distant as well as its nearby parts, its mountains and its rivers, its villages and its cities – in such a manner that I might seem actually to see it.”’
Khaldun returned to the city, where he rushed out the required volume in a matter of days. In all he spent thirty-five days in the Tatar camp, and was eyewitness to a number of discussions between Temur and his amirs, evidence of the high regard in which he was held. He watched imperial audiences and receptions, and even listened to councils of war in which Temur directed his amirs to find the most vulnerable points in Damascus’s defences. Given his historical expertise, he was asked to pronounce on the legitimacy of a request made by a claimant to the caliphate to be restored to his rightful place in Cairo. Khaldun obliged, judging the man’s claim after lengthy debate ‘not valid’. ‘Temur then said to this claimant: “You have heard the words of the judges and the jurists, and it appears that you have no justification for claiming the caliphate before me. So depart, may Allah guide you aright!”’
One of Khaldun’s friends, well acquainted with the etiquette of the Tatar court, advised him to offer a gift to Temur, ‘however small its value might be, for that is a fixed custom on meeting their rulers. I therefore chose from the book market an exceedingly beautiful Quran copy, a beautiful prayer rug, a copy of the famous poem al-Burda by al-Busiri, in praise of the Prophet – may Allah bless him and grant him peace; and four boxes of the excellent Cairo sweetmeats.’
These offerings, extremely modest in comparison with the treasures he was accustomed to receive from submissive leaders, nevertheless pleased Temur and further endeared the Tunisian to him. He was invited to sit on Temur’s right-hand side, a public display of the emperor’s high regard for him. A consummate diplomat, well versed in the arts of courtly practice, Khaldun recognised this as an opportune moment to plead for the lives of the learned men brought to Damascus as part of Sultan Faraj’s entourage:
These Quran teachers, secretaries, bureau officials, and administrators, who are among those left behind by the Sultan of Egypt, have come under your rule. The King surely will not disregard them. Your power is vast, your provinces are very extensive, and the need of your government for men who are administrators in the various branches of service is greater than the need of any other than you.
He asked me, ‘And what do you wish for them?’
I replied, ‘A letter of security to which they can appeal and upon which they can rely whatever their circumstances may be.’
He said to his secretary, ‘Write an order to this effect for them.’
I thanked him and blessed him, and went out with the secretary until the letter of security had been written.
Khaldun had achieved his mission. The white-robed clerics were spared.
Towards the end of Temur’s stay at Damascus, Khaldun recorded one of his more baffling conversations with the Tatar. Temur, it emerged, was something of a mule-fancier.
After we had completed the customary greetings, he turned to me and said, ‘You have a mule here?’
I answered, ‘Yes.’
He said, ‘Is it a good one?’
I answered, ‘Yes.’
He said, ‘Will you sell it? I would buy it from you.’
I replied, ‘May Allah aid you, one like me does not sell to one like you, but I would offer it to you in homage, and also others like it if I had them.’
He said, ‘I meant only that I would reimburse you for it generously.’
I replied, ‘Is there any generosity left beyond that which you have already shown me? You have heaped favours upon me, accorded me a place in your council among your intimate followers, and shown me kindness and generosity, which I hope Allah will repay to you in like measure.’
He was silent. So was I. The mule was brought to him while I was with him at his council and I did not see it again.
Later, when Khaldun had returned to Cairo, the Egyptian sultan’s ambassador to Temur sent a messenger to him with a sum of money from the Tatar reimbursing him for the loss of his mule. Corruption was no stranger to Egyptian politics at this time. The messenger apologised that the cash was ‘not complete’, insisting that this was the sum that had been given to him.
According to Arabshah’s account, Temur permitted the Tunisian to leave him only on condition he return with his family and great library, a promise he never kept. Khaldun himself, however, remembered things differently. He wrote of his offer to serve in Temur’s court and the conqueror’s reply in the negative, instructing him instead to ‘return to your family and to your people’.
Safely out of Temur’s orbit, Khaldun wrote a letter to Abu Said Othman, ruler of the Maghreb, recounting the Tatar’s advance on Damascus. ‘Temur had conquered Aleppo, Hama, Hims and Baalbek and ruined them all, and his soldiers had committed more shameful atrocities than had ever been heard of before,’ he reported. In an apologetic tone, he explained how he had had ‘no choice but to meet him’. He had been treated kindly, he added, and thanks to his diplomatic efforts ‘obtained from him amnesty for the people of Damascus’.
There followed a potted history of the Tatars, whom he defined as ‘those who came out of the desert beyond the Oxus, between it and China … under their famous king Jenghiz Khan’. From Genghis, Khaldun moved on to a portrait of Temur and his hordes.
The people are of a number which cannot be counted. If you estimate it at one million it would not be too much, nor can you say it is less. If they pitched their tents together in the land, they would fill all empty spaces, and if their armies came even into a wide territory the plain would be too narrow for them. And in raiding, robbing and slaughtering settled populations and inflicting upon them all kinds of cruelty they are an astounding example.
Khaldun gave a valuable profile of the Tatar emperor, confirming his powerful intellect and passion for wide-ranging scholarly debate. ‘This king Temur is one of the greatest and mightiest of kings,’ he began. ‘Some attribute to him knowledge, others attribute to him heresy because they note his preference for the “members of the House” [of Ali, i.e. the Shi’ites]. Still others attribute to him the employment of magic and sorcery, but in all this there is nothing. It is simply that he is highly intelligent and very perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also about what he does not know.’
He went on to describe Temur’s injury. ‘His right knee is lame from an arrow which struck him while raiding in his boyhood, as he told me. Therefore he dragged it when he went on short walks, but when he would go long distances men carried him with their hands.’ Like Clavijo, Khaldun saw for himself the pain this injury could cause Temur. After one audience with the historian, the aged conqueror ‘was carried away from before us because of the trouble with his knee’. But although he was in his sixty-fourth year, Temur was evidently neither too old nor too infirm to ride on horseback, for Khaldun noticed how ‘he sat upright in his saddle’.
After a month observing Temur at close quarters, Khaldun came to a simple conclusion: ‘He is one who is favoured by Allah. The power is Allah’s, and he grants it to whom he chooses.’
If Temur enjoyed divine protection, Damascus now found itself completely bereft. Although initial signs suggested the surrender would be honoured – Tatar amirs were put on guard at the city gates to prevent their soldiers entering, and any troops caught plundering were publicly crucified in the silk bazaar – history suggested the city would pay a high price for the resistance it had staged. Nor did these intimations of disaster take into account the possibility that the Syrians themselves might not honour the surrender negotiated with Temur. Ominously for the people of Damascus, this apparently remote possibility now became reality. The governor of the fortress, fired with zeal against the Tatar invaders, ordered his garrison to resist. Temur’s soldiers, preparing for victory celebrations, suddenly found themselves under attack. One thousand were killed, said Ibn Taghri Birdi, their heads severed and taken back to the citadel.
When Temur learnt of this strike, he ordered the fortress to be taken immediately. Sappers set to work and the walls were undermined. Wooden towers were built from which the soldiers trained their fire on the garrison, loosing volleys of arrows and hurling Greek-fire at the besieged. Still the governor refused to capitulate. Next the catapults rumbled forward, unleashing rocks, boulders and fireballs into the fortress. Day after day the punishing barrage continued. Weakened by the sappers, pounded by the war engines, the walls started to crumble, but were quickly, if patchily, repaired by the stubborn defenders. Only after twenty-nine days withstanding this hourly onslaught did the governor finally bow to the inevitable and yield to Temur. But by now the Tatar was well beyond forgiveness and mercy. He ordered the governor to be beheaded. The citadel gave up its treasures, opening its gates to reveal a surviving garrison of just forty Mamluk slaves.
Negotiations between Temur and the city elders of Damascus were delicately poised. The advantage, as both sides fully understood, lay entirely with the Tatar. Whatever he demanded must be given, for in his hands alone lay the power to spare this great city or reduce it to ashes. A ransom of one million dinars was agreed, only for Temur to turn around to the cringing officials once it had been collected and demand ten million. No sooner was this sum harried and beaten out of the city’s beleaguered population than Temur claimed that only a third of the total had been paid. Now he laid claim to the fortune of the entire city. The negotiations began to look like a pretext for wholesale rape and pillage. The skies darkened again. The furious storm that had engulfed Aleppo was about to break over Damascus.
An order ran out through the ranks. Hungry soldiers, exhausted by months of campaigning, lean from the gruelling forced marches, looked at each other in delight and cheered to the heavens. Damascus was to be put to the sword. It was a bitter, seismic shock for the young Arabshah, one from which he never recovered. ‘Those evil unbelievers suddenly fell upon men, torturing, smiting and laying waste, as stars fall from the sky, and excited and swollen they slaughtered and smote and raged against Muslims and their allies, as ravening wolves rage against teeming flocks of sheep.’
The tempest of destruction overran the city. The people of Damascus, wrote Ibn Taghri Birdi, ‘were subjected to all sorts of torture; they were bastinadoed, crushed in presses, scorched in flames, and suspended head down; their nostrils were stopped with rags full of fine dust which they inhaled each time they took a breath so that they almost died. When near to death, a man would be given a respite to recover, then the tortures of all kinds would be repeated.’ In their remorseless hunger for booty, the Tatars introduced new cruelties previously unheard of in Damascus.
For example, they would take a man and tie a rope around his head and twist it until it would sink into his flesh; they would put a rope around a man’s shoulders, and twist it with a stick until they were torn from their sockets; they would bind another victim’s thumbs behind him, then throw him on his back, pour powdered ashes in his nostrils to make him little by little confess what he possessed; when he had given up all, he would still not be believed, but the torture would be repeated until he died; and then his body would be further mutilated in the thought that he might be feigning death. And some would tie their victim by his thumbs to the roof of the house, kindle a fire under him and keep him thus a long time; if by chance he fell in the flames, he would be dragged out and thrown on the ground till he revived, then he would thus be suspended a second time …
So great was the quantity of treasure seized from Damascus, claimed Yazdi, that the combined caravans of horses, mules and camels were unable to carry it all. Articles of gold and silver, together with precious belts from Egypt, Cyprus and Russia had to be jettisoned to make room for more valuable trophies.
Arabshah, who was understandably at his most jaundiced when recounting the sacking of his native city, claimed that Temur captured a ninety-year-old Syrian officer who had led the resistance in the citadel. The emperor would not execute him, he told the old man, since that would not avenge the loss of the brave Tatar soldiers at his hands. ‘I will torture you despite your age and add affliction to your affliction and weakness to your weakness,’ Temur is supposed to have jeered. A heavy chain was fastened to the man’s knees, and he was thrown into captivity.
As the flames spread through the streets of Damascus, the dome of the Umayyad Mosque towered over the city through the smoke. Whipped up by the wind, the fire roared towards it, sucking up timber houses, palaces, mosques, bath-houses, felling everything in its way. ‘It continued to burn until it reached the Great Mosque,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun. ‘The flames mounted to its roof, melting the lead in it, and the ceiling and walls collapsed.’ One of the wonders of the world, a sparkling eighth-century monument to the Muslim faith, had been desecrated by an army of Muslims under the command of a man who actively sought recognition as the Warrior of Islam. ‘This was an absolutely dastardly and abominable deed,’ Khaldun continued, ‘but the changes in affairs are in the hands of Allah – he does with his creatures as he wishes, and decides in his kingdom as he wills.’*
What might strike the modern Western reader as complacency or an unnatural fatalism on Khaldun’s part is no more than the submission to Allah traditionally required by Islam, a tenet of faith which continues to this day. But there was another reason, perhaps, for his calm and measured tone. Although Damascus was a pile of blackened, smoking ruins, its citizens butchered to the last man, he at least was safe and well.
‘The whole city had burned, the roofs of the Umayyad Mosque had fallen in because of the fire, its gates were gone, and the marble cracked – nothing was left standing but the walls,’ Ibn Taghri Birdi recorded sadly. ‘Of the other mosques of the city, its palaces, caravanserais, and baths, nothing remained but wasted ruins and empty traces; only a vast number of young children was left there, who died, or were destined to die, of hunger.’*
While Cairo trembled at the prospect of sharing an equally apocalyptic fate, while Miranshah and Shahrukh laid waste to Antioch and the surrounding region, the conqueror lay stricken with boils and a damaged back. Illnesses and infections were beginning to attack him in his autumn years.
Dreading Temur’s continued progress south and west, preparing for imminent flight, the people of Cairo met the reports of his northward marches with undisguised joy. Sultan Faraj meanwhile assured the Tatar that the envoy Atilmish would be restored to his master. But Temur, once he had recovered from his latest affliction, had other concerns. Returning to the business of empire, he summoned his favourite grandson and heir Mohammed Sultan from Samarkand, appointing him ruler of the Hulagid dominions, formerly governed by the young man’s debauched uncle Miranshah. In the clearest sign that he had no intention of returning home, whatever his ailments, he ordered Mohammed Sultan to bring fresh troops, and gave separate instructions for the imperial family to join him. There was no question of stopping now. The only issue was where to turn his restless energies next. The campaign would continue. The troops had been levied for a Seven-Year Campaign.
Temur now turned north towards the Caucasus, where he intended to winter among the congenial pastures of the Qarabagh. Hardly had he departed than reports arrived bringing discouraging news. The twenty thousand troops he had sent to retake Baghdad, five hundred miles to the east, had so far failed to make an impression. Rather than countenance this setback, Temur resolved, in typical fashion, to remedy it in person.
Baghdad, long known as Dar as Salam (the House of Peace), had been home to Temur’s old adversary Sultan Ahmed, as well as the Turkmen chief Qara Yusuf of the Black Sheep tribe, to whom he had given sanctuary. In Temur’s hard-headed calculations, the city was worth the abrupt detour. ‘This city is more famous than can be described and the aroma of its excellence and merits more fragrant than can be shown,’ wrote Arabshah. Ibn Battutah admired it as ‘one of the largest of cities’, steeped in Islamic history, home to the graves of Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Ahmed ibn Hanbal, two of the founders of the four principal schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam.
By the time Ibn Battutah visited Baghdad in 1327, it had lost its status as glorious capital of the Islamic world, home of the caliphs, which it had enjoyed since 756. Descending on the city from the west with his Mongol hordes in 1258, Hulagu sacked and virtually destroyed it with a ferocity that would have pleased his grandfather Genghis Khan. For forty days fires consumed the city, burning down the Mosque of the Caliph, the shrine of the Shi’a imam Musa al Kazim and the tombs of the caliphs at Rusafah, together with most of the streets and houses.
Half a century after Hulagu had stormed through, Baghdad remained a barely twitching corpse. A long succession of invaders – Persian, Turk, Mongol – had shattered its very fabric. Around 1300, an anonymous author underlined the extent of the destruction in an update of the famousGeographical Dictionary compiled by Yakut in about 1226:
Hence nothing now remains of western Baghdad but some few isolated quarters, of which the best inhabited is Karkh; while in eastern Baghdad, all having long ago gone to ruin in the Shammasiyah Quarter and the Mukharrim, they did build a wall round such of the city as remained, this same lying along the bank of the Tigris. Thus matters continued until the Tatars under Hulagu came, when the major part of this remnant also was laid in ruin, and its inhabitants were all put to death, hardly one surviving to recall the excellence of the past. And then there came in people from the countryside, who settled in Baghdad, seeing that its own citizens had all perished; so the city is indeed other than it was, its population in our time being wholly changed from its former state – but Allah, be He exalted, ordaineth all.
After the sacking of Hulagu, though Baghdad continued to enjoy considerable prestige as one of the great Islamic cities, in reality it was barely more than a provincial town living on its past as capital of Arabian Iraq. Ibn Battutah found the city still on its knees, but stirring.
The western part of Baghdad was the earliest to be built, but it is now for the most part in ruins. In spite of that there remain in it still thirteen quarters, each like a city in itself and possessing two or three baths. The hospital is a vast ruined edifice, of which only vestiges remain. The eastern part has an abundance of bazaars, the largest of which is called the Tuesday bazaar.
Besides the markets, Ibn Battutah saw the three great mosques of the former home of the Abbasid caliphs still standing – the eighth-century mosques of Mansur and Rusafah, and the eleventh-century Mosque of the Sultan. He admired Baghdad’s two bridges, ‘on which the people promenade night and day, both men and women. The town has eleven cathedral mosques, eight on the right bank and three on the left, together with very many other mosques and madrassahs, only the latter are all in ruins.’
To judge from his account, Battutah took more interest in the city’s baths than in what remained of its historical treasures: ‘The baths at Baghdad are numerous and excellently constructed, most of them being painted with pitch, which has the appearance of black marble.’ The Moroccan was much taken by their sophistication, remarking approvingly on the ‘large number of private bathrooms, every one of which has also a wash-basin in the corner, with two taps supplying hot and cold water’. What most fascinated him was the practice of giving each bather three towels, one to wear around his waist on entering the baths, one for when he left, and another with which to dry himself. ‘In no town other than Baghdad have I seen all this elaborate arrangement,’ he applauded.
Whatever the destruction it had suffered in recent times, Baghdad remained a city of prodigious size on Temur’s arrival. Ibn Battutah’s contemporary, the geographer Hamd Allah Mustawfi al Qazwini, described its walls, divided east and west across the river Tigris, as two sweeping semi-circles of eighteen thousand and twelve thousand paces respectively.
Aleppo and Damascus had folded before Temur’s onslaught. It was unacceptable for Baghdad to defy the inevitable. Striking out from Syria, the Tatar hordes reached their latest target after a succession of forced marches. The order was given to surround the city, and the soldiers struck camp on both sides of the Tigris. Though Baghdad was more than six miles in circumference, said Yazdi, the huge army encircled it with ease. A bridge of boats was built over the Tigris and archers stationed downriver to prevent the inhabitants escaping. Upriver, Miranshah and Shahrukh guarded the approaches to the city.
For the people of Baghdad it was the worst possible time to find themselves under siege. It was an extraordinarily fierce summer. The heat was so intense, said the chronicler, that birds fell dead in mid-flight and armoured soldiers ‘melted like wax’. Looking out at Temur’s numberless army encamped around their city, ‘the astonished inhabitants no longer looked upon their city as the house of peace, but as the palace of hell and discord’. Panic-stricken, the defenders struggled to repair the mined walls as they tumbled about them. Temur’s princes and amirs pleaded with him to order an all-out assault, a request he refused, Yazdi explained (rather improbably), on the grounds that the inhabitants would soon come to their senses and that it would be a shame to lay waste to this fine city.
Six weeks into the siege, on a day so hot that the defenders propped their helmets up on sticks behind the ramparts, abandoned their positions and returned home, the emperor ordered his men to storm Baghdad. The valiant Shaykh Nur ad-din was first up a scaling ladder, mounting Temur’s famous horse-tail standard, crowned with a half moon, on the walls. Many of the inhabitants threw themselves into the Tigris in desperation, only to be cut down by the waiting archers. The governor and his daughter tried to escape in a boat but it was shot at and overturned. They drowned in the foaming Tigris.
Baghdad belonged to Temur again. To mark his retaking of the city which had caused him such trouble, he issued one of his most vengeful orders, born of his rage at losing so many men. The city could expect no mercy. Each soldier must fetch him a Baghdad head. Arabshah, who said the figure was two heads per man, described what happened next.
They brought them singly and in crowds and made the river Tigris flow with the torrent of their blood throwing their corpses on to the plains, and collected their heads and built towers of them … Some, when they could not have Baghdadis, cut the heads off Syrians who were with them and other prisoners; others, when heads of men were wanting, cut off the heads of ladies of the marriage-bed.
Only the religious leaders and scholars of the city were granted quarter. They were given new robes of honour, fresh mounts and safe conduct out of Baghdad.
Next came the order that every house must be razed. Mosques, colleges and hospitals alone were to be spared, said Yazdi, though after events in Damascus, including the destruction of the Umayyad Mosque, this seems distinctly doubtful. Markets, caravanserais, monasteries, palaces and bath-houses went up in smoke. ‘Thus, says the Alcoran, “The houses of the impious are overthrown by the order of God.”’
With the Tigris red with blood and the air putrid with rotting corpses, Temur sailed serenely upriver to the tomb of Imam Abu Hanifa in eastern Baghdad – a graceful shrine topped with a white cupola – ‘to implore the intercession of this saint’.* As he prayed, his soldiers were putting the finishing touches to the 120 towers of skulls they had erected around the flattened city. What Arabshah termed the ‘pilgrimage of destruction’ was almost at an end. Antioch and Acre, Baalbek and Beirut, Hama and Homs, all lay in ruins. Damascus had been torn apart and gutted. In Aleppo, twenty thousand heads had been severed. In Baghdad the atrocities had reached new heights. This time the vultures had ninety thousand to feed on.
History does not record the emotions of Temur’s soldiers as they marched north from Baghdad to seek their winter quarters in the plains of the Qarabagh. Relief and joy, we can be sure, mingled with grief and exhaustion. There were numerous injured among them, their lives in the gift of the Almighty. Not all would live to see another campaigning season. Among the fit and well, many had grown rich from looting, their horses and camels staggering beneath loads of plunder. Some had been promoted for their heroic actions on the battlefield. Others simply longed for home.
Once more, Temur’s Tatar hordes had given him the victories he had ordered. As he rode towards the Caucasus, the emperor must have cast a proud eye over this unflinching army. ‘Soldiers, whether associates or adversaries, I hold in esteem,’ he is supposed to have said. ‘Those who sell their permanent happiness to perishable honour and throw themselves into the field of slaughter and battle, and hazard their lives in the hour of danger.’
For now, these men looked forward to nothing but rest. Banquets, drinking bouts, the pleasures of the flesh, all these awaited the weary soldiers in the rolling pastures of the Qarabagh. But the implacable Temur had other thoughts on his mind. As ever, the brilliant chess-playing warrior was one move ahead. War against his mightiest adversary had been brewing for some time. The first skirmishes had already been fought. Though his soldiers did not realise it, the hour of danger was close at hand.
* These bacchanalian revelries had taken their toll on the prince’s health and physique, according to Clavijo, who met Miranshah and was entertained by him in Sultaniya, en route to Samarkand. The Spaniard described him as ‘a man of advanced age, being about forty years old, big and fat, and he suffers much from the gout’.
* Even the invariably hostile Ibn Arabshah acknowledged Mohammed Sultan’s qualities. He was, said the Syrian, ‘a manifest prodigy in his noble nature and vigour. And when Temur saw in his nature signs of singular good fortune and that in the excellence of his talents he surpassed the rest of his sons and grandsons, he disregarded all of them and turned his mind to this one and appointed him his heir.’
* There are fascinating records of the correspondence, in rhyming couplets, between Temur and Barquq in the aftermath of the Mamluk sultan’s murder of the Tatar ambassadors. In one, Temur threatens annihilation of the Egyptian if his rival chooses war over peace:
‘Our forces are numerous, and our valour is vigorous; Our horses forward dash, our lances deeply gash, our spearheads like lightning flash, and our sabres like thunders crash. Our hearts are as the mountains strong, like sands in number our armies’ throng, and we among the heroes and Himyar’s kings belong. Our kingdom none can assail, our subjects from harm shall never ail, by our might our rule shall ever prevail. To him who makes peace with us will safety ensue, but he who makes war on us will repent and rue, and he who doth avow of us what he doth not know of us – he is a fool.’
Barquq’s reply, casting scorn on Temur’s confused style and rhetoric, was equally direct:
‘For you were the fires of hell created, kindled that your skins be incinerated … For our horses are Barcan, our arrows Arabian, our swords are from Yaman, and our armour Egyptian. The blows of our hands are hard to contest, we are renowned in all of the East and all of the West. If we kill you, how good will be the gain! And if you kill one of us, only a moment between him and Paradise will remain …’
* As the noose slipped around his neck, his last words were a punning verse whose elegance suffers somewhat in translation:
‘’Tis the end of the matter and the last round, O heretic!
Whether thou goest or not, the choice is no longer in thy hand!
If they lead thee, like Mansur, to the foot of the gibbet [pa-yi-dar]
Stand firm [pay-dar] like a man, for the world is not enduring [pay-dar]!
(Mansur was a tenth-century mystic executed in Baghdad for making comments implying he was God.)
* The historian Herbert Gibbons saw the fall of Sivas as a landmark, arguing that in his earlier days the Ottoman would have met such a setback with a swift political, diplomatic or military response. This time there was only inertia: ‘He had become a voluptuary, debauched mentally and physically. His pride and self-confidence had increased in inverse ratio to his ability to make good his arrogant assumptions.’
* The Mamluks (from the Arabic word for ‘owned’) were originally Turkic slaves brought to Egypt as boys and given extensive military training which, if they performed well, culminated in their freedom and subsequent service as senior administrators and bodyguards to the caliphs and sultans. The thinking behind the creation of this new military elite was that since the Egyptian state was in effect its parent, the Mamluks would always remain loyal to the throne. In fact these foreign imports, initially of Kipchak Turk origin, later Circassian, proved so successful that they seized power and ruled Egypt as a new dynasty from 1250 until 1517, when they were conquered by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I. They continued to rule locally as Ottoman viceroys but were fatally weakened by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. The remaining Mamluks were massacred by Mohammed Ali in 1811.
* A disparaging reference to Faraj’s origins. His father, Barquq, was the first Circassian Mamluk sultan.
* This apocalyptic picture of an empty ghost city was not altogether accurate, for we know from the chronicles that before he departed Temur took time to indulge his passion for theological debate and summoned the city’s qadis before him. He fired a series of questions at them, the wrong answers to which, as they knew, could lose them their heads. Why had they chosen the wrong path, he asked, by following the Sunni creed of Islam, not the Shi’a? This question completely threw the religious scholars, for they thought Temur himself was a Sunni Muslim. As Arabshah put it, ‘The Muslims were in perplexity and their heads were being cut off.’ There followed a more deliberately provocative question. Which was the martyr of Islam destined for paradise, the soldier who gave his life in defence of Aleppo or he who died while fighting for Temur? A deathly silence fell upon the qadis. Then a Hanafite scholar, Muhib ad-din Mohammed, stood up. ‘The prophet of God (God bless him and grant him peace!) was asked this question and he answered: “He who fights that the word of God be supreme is a martyr.”’ Temur was pleased with the answer, so much so that he was moved to spare those who had survived the violence, prompting the same Ibn Taghri Birdi who earlier had detailed the piles of stinking corpses to venture the observation that Temur’s behaviour towards the people of Aleppo was ‘comparatively mild’.
* It is worth quoting Arnold Toynbee’s verdict on Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual achievements: ‘He is indeed the one outstanding personality in the history of a civilisation whose social life on the whole was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. In his chosen field of intellectual activity he appears to have been inspired by no predecessors, and to have found no kindred souls among his contemporaries, and to have kindled no answering spark of inspiration in any successors; and yet, in the Prolegomena (Muqaddimat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place. It was his single brief “acquiescence” from a life of practical activity that gave Ibn Khaldun his opportunity to cast his creative thought into literary shape.’
* Among these early reports of the sacking of Damascus, opinion was divided as to whether Temur ordered the destruction of the Umayyad Mosque. Schiltberger, the Bavarian whose accounts are littered with inconsistencies, claimed that a bishop, pleading for his life and those of his priests, was told to take them and their families to the mosque for protection. They numbered thirty thousand, he said. ‘Now Temur gave orders that when the temple was full, the people should be shut up in it. This was done. Then wood was placed around the temple, and he ordered it to be ignited, and they all perished in the temple. Then he ordered that each one of his [soldiers] should bring to him the head of a man. This was done, and it took three days; then with these heads were constructed three towers, and the city was pillaged.’ The court histories, however, report that Temur did all he could to prevent the conflagration in the mosque.
* In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, the fall of Damascus is similarly grisly. Under siege, the governor of the city stalls for time before surrendering. While he delays, the flags flying in Tamburlaine’s camp change from white to red to black, spelling disaster.
The first day when he pitcheth down his tents,
White is their hue, and on his silver crest,
A snowy feather spangled white he bears,
To signify the mildness of his mind,
That, satiate with spoil, refuseth blood:
But when Aurora mounts the second time,
As red as scarlet is his furniture;
Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood,
Not sparing any that can manage arms:
But if these threats move not submission,
Black are his colours, black pavilion;
His spear, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes,
And jetty feathers menace death and hell;
Without respect of sex, degree, or age,
He razeth all his foes with fire and sword.
In a frantic attempt to save Damascus, the governor sends four virgins to Tamburlaine to plead for mercy ‘with knees and hearts submissive’. The attempt is in vain. The virgins are butchered on the spot, their ‘slaughtered carcasses’ hoisted up onto the city walls, ‘A sight as baneful to their souls, I think,/As are Thessalian drugs or mithridate,’ Tamburlaine observes. ‘But go, my lords,’ he continues, ‘put the rest to the sword.’ Damascus dissolves in flames.
* By the tenth century there were four schools of Islamic law based on the Koran, the hadith and the interpretations of the ulema (clergy). Abu Hanifa (699–767) founded the Hanifite system of jurisprudence which sought new ways of applying the tenets of Islamic law to everyday life. In practice, this interpretation of Muslim law is tolerant of differences within Muslim communities, and gives judges great discretion when neither the Koran nor the Sunna (traditions of the Prophet) are applicable.