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The Tīmūrids

771–913/1370–1507

Transoxania and Persia

1. The rulers in Samarkand

2. The rulers in Khurasan after Ulugh Beg’s death

3. The rulers in western Persia and Iraq after Tīmūr

Tīmūr arose from the Barlas clan of Turkicised Mongols which had nomadised within the Chaghatayid ulus (see above, no. 132). Although his family may subsequently have claimed Chingizid descent, Tīmūr personally never did, and always contented himself with the Arab-Islamic title of Amīr, and not the Turkish one of Khān. He did, however, acquire the title güregen/küreken, in Mongolian ‘royal son-in-law’, by virtue of his marriage to a Chingizid princess. He put together a vast military empire in central, western and southern Asia. But Tīmūr’s interests were in the settled lands of ancient Islamic or Indian culture rather than in the steppes and mountains of Inner Asia, thus marking him off from the earlier Mongol steppe conquerors. He eventually built himself a permanent capital, Samarkand; and though clearly not a religious man, he found the religious ideology of Islam a useful aid in his campaigns into such regions as the Caucasus and India.

Tīmūr’s rise to power took place in a fragmented Transoxania, weakened by the decay of the Chaghatayids of the west, during which various attempts from Mogholistan to re-establish the ulus failed. There was still a certain feeling, however, for the legitimacy of Mongol rule, and when Tīmūr first came to power he installed puppet Chingizid khāns in Transoxania, including a descendant of the Great Khan Ögedey, Soyurghatmïsh, and his son.

His first campaigns were in Khwārazm and Khurasan, after which he began the conquest of Persia in earnest. During the ‘Five Years’ War’ beginning 797/1395, the Muẓaffarids of Fars were destroyed and the Jalāyirid Aḥmad b. Shaykh Uways driven from Iraq. Tīmūr’s northern frontier was an open one, and his great rival in the steppes was Toqtamïsh, Khān of the White Horde, by now supreme across the whole Qïpchaq steppe of South Russia and south-western Siberia (see above, no. 134). Tīmūr accordingly invaded Qïpchaq in 797/1395, penetrating as far as Astrakhan and Muscovy. But his main efforts were directed aganst the Islamic heartlands, where his campaigns had a cataclysmic effect on the political structures of the time. During the Indian campaign of 800/1398–9, Delhi was sacked and the end of the Tughluqids hastened (see below, no. 160, 3), facilitating in the fifteenth century the rise of independent provincial sultanates such as those of Jawnpūr, Gujarāt, Mālwa and Khāndesh (see below, Chapter Sixteen). In the west, Tīmūr’s defeat of Sultan Bāyazīd I at Ankara in 805/1402 meant the restoration for a few decades longer of many of the Anatolian beyliks absorbed by the Ottomans (see above, Chapter Twelve).

Before his death, which occurred just as he was about to leave for China, Tīmūr had divided up his territories among his sons and grandsons. The steppe tradition that an empire was not the personal property of the supreme ruler, but belonged to all male members of the ruling family, meant the parcelling-out of the Tīmūrid empire among its numerous princes, and in the absence of a clear succession principle left the field open for disputes and fragmentation. Three lines of Tīmūrids are listed above, but there were several other members of the family ruling either with varying degrees of independence or as vassals of other Tīmūrids in regions as far apart as the Caspian provinces, Kirman, and Kabul and Kandahar in eastern Afghanistan. And although possession of Tīmūr’s old capital Samarkand conferred prestige within the dynasty, it did not automatically entail headship or supremacy; thus Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr Bayqara was, in his time, the greatest ruler among the later Tīmūrids, but reigned at Herat and not Samarkand.

Once the terror inspired by Tīmūr was gone, the later Tīmūrids eventually sank to the status of local rulers in Khurasan and Transoxania, with the western lands abandoned to the rising power of Türkmen dynasties like the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu (see below, nos 145, 146). At first, there were two great kingdoms, in western Persia and Iraq, and in Khurasan and Transoxania, these latter two regions being first united by Tīmūr’s son Shāh Rukh and then with his suzerainty extended over the western lands as well. Shāh Rukh’s great-nephew Abū Sa‘īd was, next to the Ottoman Muḥammad the Conqueror, the most powerful monarch of his age, although he was unable to prevent the Özbegs, the ultimate destroyers of Tīmūrid power, from raiding across the Oxus (see below, no. 153), and his campaign of 872/1468 to help the Qara Qoyunlu against the rising power of the Aq Qoyunlu leader Uzun Ḥasan, with the hope also of regaining the former western territories of the Tīmūrids, ended in disaster.

The Tīmūrids were the last great Islamic dynasty of steppe origin. After their time, the rise of powerful settled states like those of the Ottomans, the Ṣafawids and the Mughals, all employing firearms and more advanced military techniques, tilted the balance against any further large-scale invasions by horsemen from the Inner Asian steppes. The Tīmūrid period of Transoxanian and Persian history, essentially the fifteenth century, was also one of the most glorious ones of mediaeval Islamic art and culture, with outstanding schools of Persian and Chaghatay Turkish literature and of architecture, painting and book production, and with a final flowering at the court in Herat of Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr b. Bayqara, where the poets Jāmī and ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī and the painter Bihzad worked.

Justi, 472–5; Lane-Poole, 265–8; Sachau, 30–1, nos 78–83; Zambaur, 269–70 and Table T; Album, 50–3.

R. M. Savory, ‘The struggle for supremacy in Persia after the death of Tīmūr’, Der Islam, 40 (1964), 35–54.

H. R. Roemer, ‘Tīmūr in Iran’, ‘The successors of Tīmūr’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, VI, 42–146, with genealogical tables at p. 146.

Beatrice Forbes Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, Cambridge 1989, with a genealogical table at p. 166.

Robert C. Grossman, ‘A numismatic “King-List” of the Timurids’, Oriental Numismatic Society Information Sheet no. 27, September 1990.