We know little about the early life of Timur, until he stepped into world history in 1370. That’s when he became the ruler of Balkh, in Afghanistan, and began to prosecute a new “Mongol” war of conquest. He wasn’t a descendant of Genghis Khan, but he seems to have been born in the region that Genghis’ son Chagatai had traditionally ruled. His father was a minor nobleman near the city of Kesh. Timur (or temür) means “iron,” parallel to “Temu” in “Temujin,” the personal name of the Great Khan.
As a child, Timur and his family appear to have been carried off by a raiding party to Samarkand, where he finished growing up. He was somehow wounded in the leg. In one story, he had become a young sheep-stealer and was shot by a shepherd’s arrow, while in another, he was wounded in mercenary battle action in Khorasan. In either version, we get a sense of what young Timur was like. He had that combination of high intelligence and super aggression that often propels a nobody onto the world stage. His aggression trumped his lameness, although he is known to history as “Tamerlane,” from Persian Timur Lang, Timur the Lame.
Timur’s family were Muslims, and in that part of Central Asia, both Mongolian and Turkish were mother tongues. Timur additionally learned Persian and served some Iranian kings before supplanting them. He was a Sunni Muslim, with mixed sympathies toward Shi’ites in Iran.
They were probably much more Turkish than Mongolian, but Mongolian heritage had much higher prestige in Central Asia. When Timur took over the city of Balkh, he married one of the former ruler’s wives who was descended from Genghis. That way, he could claim the Mongolian title of son-in-law, (Gurgan or Jurjen) which had conferred immense prestige in the Great Khan’s time. Usually, though, he was known as the Amir (Emir), which implied that there was a higher king (a figurehead Mongolian).
Although Timur had 18 wives, his Khan-descended wife remained his principal queen. Later, he found a second descendant of Genghis to set up as his second-ranking queen. Neither of these women bore him an heir, but their presence legitimized his power in the region. Sarai, the first, acted as Timur’s regent at times, and was by all accounts a very close friend; she also formally raised the sons who would become his heirs so that they had Mongolian manners and language. Their Mongolian title meaning “a born princess” was “khanum,” which eventually became in Turkish a polite title for any lady, “hanim.”
Timur spent the 1370s consolidating power around Khorasan, Samarkand and Balkh. In 1382, he sent a captain called Tokhtamysh (many variations in the spelling!) against the Golden Horde in Sarai, Russia. Tokhtamysh burned Moscow and made himself Khan of the Golden Horde. A few years later, he turned against Timur’s authority by invading Azerbaijan, and the two forces began a civil war. In the course of their power struggle, the cities of Ryazan, Sarai and Astrakhan were all burnt. The Golden Horde, remnant of Genghis Khan’s first invasions of Russia, was broken. Timur’s lineage continued to rule Russia for a while, but in time, Russian dukes won back independence.
In the early 1380s, Timur invaded and conquered much of Iran. Since the death of the last Mongolian Ilkhan from plague, the region had been fragmented into shifting territories of whichever local rulers could stay on top. Starting with Herat, Timur massacred the people and destroyed the city. It’s in this Iranian campaign that we first start to hear about really horrific war crimes. Nominally, Timur was following Genghis’ principle that surrender meant mercy while fighting meant death, but he added fresh layers of terror. In Isfizar, they say he cemented living men into the city walls. After Isfahan rebelled, he beheaded the citizens and ordered towers to be built with their heads: 28 pyramids of 1500 heads.
In 1398, Timur turned his attention to Delhi, where the descendant of Ibn Battuta’s old friend was ruling. The dynasty had been much weakened by civil war, and the rebellious Hindus of Ibn Battuta’s time had stopped paying their jizya unbeliever tax. So when Timur’s by-now very large army crossed into India, the Delhi dynasty was not equipped to stop it.
Timur’s army, though, was afraid of the exotic elephants that were the backbone of Delhi’s cavalry. He knew enough about elephants to realize that they could be frightened, if not overpowered. So he ordered that a group of camels be loaded with hay, which was set on fire. The poor doomed camels were whipped toward the line of elephants, who panicked on seeing fiery camels running at them. After that, the Delhi army had no chance.
In the conquered city of Delhi, both Muslims and Hindus were against the occupiers. The city’s streets turned to urban warfare, and Timur ordered slaughter. Much of the city’s population was wiped out in street fighting and massacres, with heads and bodies mounted on pikes for the carrion birds. The city of Delhi did not recover economically for at least a century. Eventually, Timur’s great-grandson would invade again and set up the Moghul Empire. “Moghul” was the last variant on “Mongol” and the last reflex of Genghis Khan’s ambition.
Amir Timur’s next wave of invasions to the west were even bloodier than the first ones, perhaps with expectations altered by the massacres in Delhi; the threshold for massacre was set much lower. In 1399, he set out to tackle the Mamluks in Cairo (and all of their holdings to the east) and the Ottomans in Bursa.
Timur slashed and burned his way through Georgia and Armenia in 1400, taking slaves and leaving corpses and rubble. He came to Aleppo and Damascus, where he carried out a large-scale massacre. Perhaps to win points with his Iranian subjects back home, he declared that Damascus had to pay for the deaths of Hasan and Husein, Mohammed’s grandsons. Damascus had been the Umayyad capital, so therefore its population in 1400 had to pay.
In 1401, Timur came to Baghdad. The city had been torn down to foundation stones in 1258 by Hulegu Khan’s army, but it had recovered some regional stature in the 140 years since. Timur sacked it, of course: tore it down, burnt it, massacred its citizens. Ibn Arabshah, a Damascene who observed and wrote about Timur’s invasions, reported that he ordered every soldier to come back with two heads; under this imposed quota, some panicking soldiers began killing captives, women, and even their own family members, when the heads began to run short.