Tamerlane (April 8, 1336–February 18, 1405) was the ferocious and terrifying founder of the Timurid empire of Central Asia, eventually ruling much of Europe and Asia. Throughout history, few names have inspired such terror as his. Tamerlane was not the conqueror’s actual name, though. More properly, he is known as Timur, from the Turkic word for “iron.”
Early Life
Timur was a member of the Turkicized Barlas tribe, a Mongol subgroup that had settled in Transoxania (now roughly corresponding to Uzbekistan) after taking part in Genghis Khan’s son Chagatai’s campaigns in that region. Timur thus grew up in what was known as the Chagatai khanate. After the death in 1357 of Transoxania’s current ruler, Amir Kazgan, Timur declared his fealty to the khan of nearby Kashgar, Tughluq Temür, who had overrun Transoxania’s chief city, Samarkand, in 1361.
Tughluq Temür appointed his son Ilyas Khoja as governor of Transoxania, with Timur as his minister. But shortly afterward Timur fled and rejoined his brother-in-law Amir Husayn, the grandson of Amir Kazgan. They defeated Ilyas Khoja (1364) and set out to conquer Transoxania, achieving firm possession of the region around 1366. About 1370 Timur turned against Husayn, besieged him in Balkh, and, after Husayn’s assassination, proclaimed himself at Samarkand sovereign of the Chagatai line of khans and restorer of the Mongol empire.
For the next 10 years Timur fought against the khans of Jatah (eastern Turkistan) and Khwārezm, finally occupying Kashgar in 1380. He gave armed support to Tokhtamysh, who was the Mongol khan of Crimea and a refugee at his court, against the Russians (who had risen against the khan of the Golden Horde, Mamai); and his troops occupied Moscow and defeated the Lithuanians near Poltava.
In 1383 Timur began his conquests in Persia with the capture of Herāt. The Persian political and economic situation was extremely precarious. The signs of recovery visible under the later Mongol rulers known as the Il-Khanid dynasty had been followed by a setback after the death of the last Il-Khanid, Abu Said (1335). The vacuum of power was filled by rival dynasties, torn by internal dissensions and unable to put up joint or effective resistance. Khorāsān and all eastern Persia fell to him in 1383–85; Fars, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Georgia all fell between 1386 and 1394. In the intervals, he was engaged with Tokhtamysh, then khan of the Golden Horde, whose forces invaded Azerbaijan in 1385 and Transoxania in 1388, defeating Timur’s generals.
In 1391 Timur pursued Tokhtamysh into the Russian steppes and defeated and dethroned him; but Tokhtamysh raised a new army and invaded the Caucasus in 1395. After his final defeat on the Kur River, Tokhtamysh gave up the struggle; Timur occupied Moscow for a year. The revolts that broke out all over Persia while Timur was away on these campaigns were repressed with ruthless vigour; whole cities were destroyed, their populations massacred, and towers built of their skulls.
In 1398 Timur invaded India on the pretext that the Muslim sultans of Delhi were showing excessive tolerance to their Hindu subjects. He crossed the Indus River on September 24 and, leaving a trail of carnage, marched on Delhi. The army of the Delhi sultan Mahmud Tughluq was destroyed at Panipat on December 17, and Delhi was reduced to a mass of ruins, from which it took more than a century to emerge. By April 1399 Timur was back in his own capital. An immense quantity of spoil was conveyed away; according to Ruy González de Clavijo, 90 captured elephants were employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a mosque at Samarkand.
Timur set out before the end of 1399 on his last great expedition, in order to punish the Mamlūk sultan of Egypt and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I for their seizures of certain of his territories. After restoring his control over Azerbaijan, he marched on Syria; Aleppo was stormed and sacked, the Mamlūk army defeated, and Damascus occupied (1401), the deportation of its artisans to Samarkand being a fatal blow to its prosperity. In 1401 Baghdad was also taken by storm, 20,000 of its citizens were massacred, and all its monuments were destroyed.
After wintering in Georgia, Timur invaded Anatolia, destroyed Bayezid’s army near Ankara (July 20, 1402), and captured Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes. Having received offers of submission from the sultan of Egypt and from John VII (then coemperor of the Byzantine Empire with Manuel II Palaeologus), Timur returned to Samarkand (1404) and prepared for an expedition to China. He set out at the end of December, fell ill at Otrar on the Syr Darya west of Chimkent, and died in February 1405. His body was embalmed, laid in an ebony coffin, and sent to Samarkand, where it was buried in the sumptuous tomb called Gūr-e Amīr. Before his death he had divided his territories among his two surviving sons and his grandsons, and, after years of internecine struggles, the lands were reunited by his youngest son, Shāh Rokh.
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Not to sound melodramatic, but I survived layoffs at my company recently. The survivor’s guilty is wild, as is the fear of deeper layoffs and the increased workload now so many people have gone. That combined with seeing ghoulish execs manoeuvring for position….fuck I hate corporations so much.
And still, tech workers won’t unionize
Talking to writers has taught me that neurotypical social norms are applied highly selectively; as an autist, infodumping anywhere outside of Hexbear will be met with brutally awkward silence.
Conversely however, if you ask an aspiring writer about their work, at all, they will fill your DMs unprompted with an absurd volume of loredumping and character explanations, the likes of which could be an article on its own.
I do not resent them for this, I uncritically support infodumping becoming a more normal part of conversation. My best exchanges on this webzone have been trading many paragraphs back and forth with wonderful people But I do resent that neurotypical rules about how much is acceptable to say are applied arbitrarily. Yes, death to neurotypicals!
The best part about having an e-reader is that your Maoist friends can’t come over and embarrass you by spine-checking your copy of Settlers.
You don’t have any highlights or bookmarks in your copy of Das Kapital? Curious.
The flash memory controller in your e-reader hasn’t swapped out any of the blocks that store your copy of Capital due to overuse by multiple reads or writes? Interesting…
It says here that your e-reader’s operating system has been up for 3 months, has 1 GB of free memory and yet your copy of Blackshirts and Reds isn’t even cached… hmmm…
The access time recorded on your copy of Imperialism is the same as the creation time… very interesting
a table came in kinda late tonight, muslim woman (she was in some kind of headwrap) with her 3 daughters. she was making a big fuss for the host and the host came up to me after seating them with a kind of eyeroll and a “watch out for her” look.
idk what was going on with the host but lady was a peach. i got her a larger table than she really needed (like a big round 10 top vs a 6 top half-booth) so the rest of her family could be comfortable when they arrived. she asked for coffee, so i started to brew coffee even tho we had already closed down that station, when she protested against that i was like “look it’s already dripping so…” and she lit up.
at the end of the meal i asked them some questions, apparently it’s the end of ramadan and they were celebrating, so i jokingly congratulated them on surviving the fast and i asked them how to say “goodbye” as it was the end of their meal and we would likely not see each other again. she just laughed and said “goodbye?” and we all cracked up and i bid them goodnight.
i pick up the check as i’m cleaning up the big table and there’s a 50% tip on the CC receipt along with a note:
Salam Alaikum
“peace”
This is our greeting. Thanks for excellent service ❤️
i wanted to cry when i picked it up. that’s going up on my scrap wall for sure. it’s cool what kind of experiences you get when you approach people and their culture with humility and respect.
