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July 18, 2006

Islamic History: Tamburlaine The Great, Scourge of Christians

Today, Popmatters published a review of the book: Tamerlane -Sword Of Islam, Conqueror of The World by Justin Marozzi, which is available from Amazon in hardback, at $17.79.

The review by Tim Neal is not as enthusiastic as one could hope for, but this book is the first researched biography of the man to have come out in the English language for many years. The author spent at least four years travelling and compiling the tome. But the history of Timurlane, or Tamburlaine, is fascinating. He has been expunged from our history books in the West, and for many years, his history was erased in the Soviet Union. What little we know of the man is often fragmentary and romanticised.

In 1587, the British playwright Christopher Marlowe composed his epic play "Tamburlaine the Great", but few have seen the performance. When it was performed last year at the Barbican in London, certain lines and scenes were altered, for fear of offending Muslims. Edgar Allan Poe's first published work was a poem called "Tamerlane", which was written in 1827.

But Edgar Allan Poe's poem owes more to the romance suggested by Marlowe, where Tamerlane abducts a princess called Zenocrate, on her way to be married off to an Egyptian prince, than to actual history. Even the names which are given to the man are only nicknames - his real name was Timur, and the suffix "lane/laine" means "lame". He was partially paralysed on his left side since childhood.

Marlowe describes Tamerlane as a "Scythian shepherd", and though he was born in Kesh in the Steppes, east of the Aral sea, homeland of the Scythians, Timur was a Tatar, a Turkicised Mongol. Though not a prince, he was certainly not a shepherd. He came from a line of minor nobles who had settled after earlier nomadic lifestyles. His name "Timur" means "Iron" in the Turkic language.

Timur's date of birth is uncertain. It is given as between 1330 and 1336. But what is known that he became a ruthless conqueror, who showed no mercy to those he vanquished. He enslaved 27 kingdoms along the silk route, forging briefly an empire that stretched from Moscow to Delhi. The accounts of his exploits were written by his enemies. They make much of his barbarism, but concede that he helped to push Islam forwards into regions where previously it had weak influence.

Only one European wrote of meeting Timur the lame - Spanish diplomat Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo. In 1403, on the command of Henry III of Castille, Clavijo had travelled to Samarkand in modern day Uzbekistan, where the conqueror had made his seat of power since the 1360s, to act as Spain's ambassador.

Timur the Lame's favourite method of showing his power was to decapitate his victims, and to then use their rotting heads to build towering structures. Though he was powerful, and caused many beautiful buildings to be erected, particularly at Samarkand, he was primarily a conqueror, who used the most brutal force to subjugate those he encountered. During 40 years of campaigns, he left an estimated 17 million corpses in his wake.

When he conquered Aleppo in Syria in October 1400, the onslaught against the population continued until "Aleppo stank with corpses", and twenty thousand severed heads were heaped into a pile outside the city gates.

Talerlane described himself as the "Scourge of Christians". When he had finished with humbling Aleppo, he went on to Damascus. The 15th century Syrian historian Ibn Taghri Birdi wrote of Tamerlane's wrath against the Damascene population, saying that they "were bastinadoed, 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."

Women and children sought protection in the ancient Umayyad Mosque, a building revered as holy throughout the Islamic world, but Tamerlane had them bound and butchered. The city was set aflame, and the flames took hold of the mosque, collapsing its walls and ceilings.

In Uzbekistan, where he is buried, there is currently a national movement to commemorate him. Perhaps there is too much fervor. The magnificent mausoleum to Tamburlaine, the Gur-e Amir (pictured) has stood in Samarkhand for six centuries since the conqueror's death in 1405, and it is still drawing in visitors. In 1404, Timur had gathered an army, ready to march on China, but when he was nearly ready to conquer the Ming Dynasty, he had died of a heart attack in Otrar. His body was returned to Samarkand.

Recently, the Independent reported in its travel section the impressions of Mark Stratton, who visited Uzbekistan, on the "bloody trail of Tamerlane". Stratton notes that since Uzbekistan separated from the Soviet Union in 1991, Tamerlane has been elevated to the status of national hero. As Oleg, Stratton's guide, noted: "We've never had any Uzbek heroes before, only Russians like Marx, so we've gone back to Tamerlane."

Inside the Gur-e Amir Mausoleum, a large slab of dark nephrite jade displays the legend: "When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble'.

Reviews of Justin Marozzi's book are mixed. Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph is concerned at some of the statistics given for Tamerlane's exploits. But he seems enthralled enough to call the biography "assured". He writes:

In one action, Tamerlane rains the severed heads of the Knights Hospitallers down on their companions. In another, he beheads the 90,000 citizens of Baghdad and builds 120 towers with the rotting skulls. How accurate these figures are is questionable. Estimates of his army at the battle of Ankara range from 1.6 million to 80,000. Given that the population of London at this time was 40,000, the lower figure is still a lot of people.

Another reviewer for the Telegraph, Jonathan Sumption, states:

Impermanence and decline are the main themes of Justin Marozzi's book, an engaging mixture of history, travelogue and contemporary reportage, which works because it is well-written and skilfully put together. The author has read widely, and has travelled over much of the vast region traversed by Tamerlane's armies six centuries ago.

.During the Soviet era, the exploits of Tamerlane h=were played down, lest they invoke nationalist sentiments in Uzbekistan. But Tamerlane was also a Muslim, and a religious fanatic. He could recite the entire Koran from memory.

Through marriage, Tamerlane was related to Genghis Khan. He had married the sister of his ally, Amir Hossein Qaraunas, ruler of Transoxiana (modern-day Uzbekistan and southwest Kazakhstan), formerly part of the Persian empire. Genghis Khan had invaded the region in 1219, and had bequeathed the region to his second son, from whom Qaraunas and his sister were descended. The alliance forged with Qaraunas, forged in 1369, crumbled in 1371, when the pair met in battle. Qaraunas and his two sons were captured, and died or were killed soon after. Tamerlane crowned himself King of Transoxiana, calling himself Sahedgharan, and ruling from Samarkand.

Though his empire dissolved after his death, and though he was a brutal medieval warlord, he did at least encourage the arts in his court at Samarkand, and supported the erection of great works of architecture. He also helped to spread Islam in ways that perhaps we would now wish had not happened. Shortly before his death, the Bibi Khanym Mosque was completed in 1404. At the time, it was the largest building in the world.

In some ways, his use of cannons and gunpowder made him a bridge between older styles of warfare, such as the devastation and pillage of Genghis Khan, and modern means of enacting "total war".

Historians stated that Tamerlane was a giant of a man. The Soviets in 1941 allowed an anthropologist, Mikhail M. Gerasimov, to exhume the body of Tamerlane from its tomb at the Gur-e Amir on June 19. From the tyrant's skull, the anthropologist reconstructed his features, proving that he had Mongoloid attributes. His lameness was confirmed. He stood at 5 foot eight inches, which for the time would have made him taller than average.

Inside the tomb, there was said to be the inscription: "Whomsoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I." Three days later, on June 22, 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

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Postscript: Marlowe and the Muslims

Christopher Marlowe's romantic epic had been only rarely performed publicly in Britain, so when last year the Barbican staged a production, it made headlines. Unfortunately, the news was mostly about how the director, David Farr, had made substantial alterations to the play, to avoid inflaming the ire of Britain's belligerent Muslims.

Marlowe had described Tamburlaine as the "Scourge of God" but it seems he also became, for a few nights in November last year, the "Scourge of Dhimmis". Marlowe had intended for his audiences to see Tamburlaine the Great burn copies of the Koran. Instead, the audience was treated to "a load of books" being destroyed, with no reference to their religious significance.

Out went all negative references to Mohammed. Tamburlaine was censored from saying that the "prophet" was "not worthy to be worshipped". Marlowe had written that Mohammed "remains in Hell". But the audience never got to hear that. Even the vituperative Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council for Britain said: "In the context of a fictional play, I don't think it will have offended many people."

These are the lines which were altered, from Act Five, scene 1:

Tamburlaine says: "Now, Casane, where's the Turkish Alcoran, And all the heaps of superstitious books Found in the temples of that Mahomet Whom I have thought a god? They shall be burn...."

"...In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet."

"My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell, Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends, And yet I live untouch'd by Mahomet."

"There is a God, full of revenging wrath, From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks, Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey."

"So Casane, fling them in the fire."

(The books are burned)

"Now Mahomet, if thou have any power, Come down thyself and work a miracle. Thou art not worthy to be worshipped That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ Wherein the sum of thy religion rests......Well soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell; He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine."

"Seek out another godhead to adore. The God that sits in heaven, if any god, For he is God alone, and none but he."

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I will be buying myself a copy of Justin Marozzi's Tamerlane. The story of a megalomaniac who slaughtered so many and yet seemed so full of his own religious certainty seems so pertinent to today's Muslim madmen. Al-Zarqawi would willingly have piled his decapitated victims' heads into piles, if he had been a strategist and able to do so.

There are few modern resources available on Tamerlane, the limping conqueror, and "sword of Islam". Edgar Allan Poe's version of the warrior king is softer and more melancholy than the portrait which would now be sketched of Tamerlane, but here is a taste of his words:

I have not always been as now:
The fever'd diadem on my brow
I claim'd and won usurpingly-
Hath not the same fierce heirdom given
Rome to the Caesar- this to me?
The heritage of a kingly mind,
And a proud spirit which hath striven
Triumphantly with human kind.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at July 18, 2006 6:02 PM

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