While finding some information on the Mughal emperors of the Indian Subcontinent, I came across a statement that Babar, the first Mughal emperor, is said to have been descended from Ching’gez Khan (on his mother’s side) and Timur (from his father’s side). I know Ching’gez is (obviously) Mong’gol, but what was Timur? What was he known for? What did he do?
(And I do hope Tamerlane will come forth to entertain us with information on his namesake.)
WRS
Why don’t you just look in an encyclopedia or use Googol?
Timur-i-lang ( 1335/36 - 1405 ) was born a Turk of the Barlas tribe within the Ulus Chagatai. The Barlas were a nomadic group based in central Transoxiana, specifically ranging from the town of Qarshi on the Kashka river to the town of Kish. Generally speaking the nomads functioned as a ruling class, to which the settled elements of the Ulus Chagatai were subject to ( like the aforementioned Qarshai and Kish and even larger cities like Bukhara and Samarqand ). The Barlas themselves took their name ( and the leading clan traced descent from ) one of Chagatai’s regimental commanders, Qarachar Barlas - it was common for particular Turco-Mongolian military units from Chingiz’s period to become tribalized over time and this is probably where the Barlas originated. It is worth noting that Timur was not a member of the most prominent clan, though he was a scion of one of the five main lineages within the tribe.
The Ulus Chagatai was the western half of the old Chagatai Khanate - basically it encompassed Transoxiana and northern Khurasan ( nebulous frontier, result of Chagatai elements staking control in the area as the Il-Khanate disintegrated ) - roughly western Central Asia east to the Pamirs and T’ien Shan mountains. The eastern half of the old Chagatai state was referred to as Moghulistan. The two halves had always been rather tenuously connected geographically and culturally ( seperated by mountains, with Islam predominating in the west and Buddhism/Shamanism predominating in the east ) and in 1340 the state fractured into two. The east retained cohesiveness and Chagataid rule a bit longer than the west - by the time of Timur’s rise to power ( as head of the Barlas ) in 1370 the Ulus Chagatai was a disunited patchwork of competeing tribes, with just a bare framework of the old imperial ideal holding it together.
I won’t go into the details of his rise - suffice it to say that he created a state centered on the Ulus Chagatai ( from which the bulk of his military resources were drawn throughout his career ) that eventually encompassed as well modern Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. He also campaigned much farther afield - sacking Delhi in the far west and Smyrna in the far east ( port on the western coast of what is today Turkey ) and Sarai to the north ( capital of the Golden Horde on the Russian steppe ). In those cases he did not bother trying to incorporate territory - the assault on Delhi was more a gigantic raid, Sarai was a punitive campaign to break his opponent Tokhtamish, the crushing of the Ottoman state was followed by him simply restoring many of the previously independent Turkish petty emirs in eastern and central Anatolia ( the last of which were finally re-absorbed by the Sultan Mehmed II decades later ). A superb military commander he is known primarily for the campaigns against the Golden Horde ( battle of the Steppes - 1391, decisive battle of Terek - 1395 ) and the Ottoman state ( battle of Angora - 1402 ), which he broke, carrying off the Sultan to captivity where he soon died ( Bayezid I, who had crushed a crusading army at Nicopolis in 1396 and had been right at the point of taking Constantinople when he was invaded ) .
Timur himself was not of royal blood ( and the romantic appeal of the Chingisid lineage among the Turco-Mongolian tribes that made up his primary following was still very powerful ) and thus came up with various creative ways to legitimize his rule. For one thing he eschewed titles like Sultan or Khan in favor of the more modest amir ( sometimes a little less modestly amended to Kalan amir or bezerg amir - i.e. “great amir” ) and installed a puppet Khan of the house of Chagatai as a figurehead. He also later in like married a Chagataid princess, thus gaining the additional title of guregen ( royal son-in-law ). However though she was a favorite, all of Timur’s surviving sons were born prior to this marriage and as noted the Timurid Moghuls of India traced descent to Chingis not throught the Timurid line, but rather through Babur’s mother, Qutlugh Nigar ( from the eastern branch of the family - hence “Moghul” ). He also achieved legitimacy the old-fashioned way - by sheer strength and ability. This may in fact account for his incredible brutality at times, which Delhi aside ( the horrific sack there seems the one genuine instance where he lost his normal iron-control of his army ), was generally cold-bloodly exact - it hearkened directly back to stories of Chingis Khan and the imitation ( which actually exceeded Chingis at times ) was quite likely very deliberate. Either that or he was just a naturally murderous motherfucker, though the two needn’t be contradictory.
The state was quite rationally and tightly organized, but it was all centered on the personal rule of Timur. He was Louis XIV’s statement “L’etat, c’est moi” taken to its furthest extreme. Of his sons, only the youngest, Shah Rukh, stayed in one place long enough to develop any sort of independent powerbase and unsurprisingly he was most successful of Timur’s immediate successors. Unlike Chingis Khan, Timur did not break up tribal units or confederacies - he just subjugated and suborned them to his personal rule and they remained intact with allegiance to him and only to him holding the state together as a cohesive unit. When he died, the state immediately began to fall apart, both due to infighting among the Timurid princes and due to confederacies like the Jalayirids, Aq Qoyonlu and Qara Qoyonlu attempting to reassert themselves.
This was part and parcel of Timur’s own personality - he was extremely jealous of his power. He led virtually every campaign himself, claimed credit for the few he didn’t and was extremely suspicious of his offspring ( probably not without cause ) and any other possible source of independent influence. Iliterate, he was nonetheless a tremendously intelligent person and although he functioned a religious bigot in some respects, within the bounds Islam he showed a certain amount of flexibility ( he seems to have been very heavily influenced by Naqshbandi Sufism ). The speculation that he might have been an albino isn’t very well attested, but it does appear he was going blind by his death at age 70.
At that point ( 1405 ) embarked upon a grand campaign against Ming China and it is interesting to note that the Ming did not take this threat lightly. Apparently it was the threat of a resurgent nomad superpower under Timur that had initially inspired the ‘Treasure Ship’ expeditions of Zheng He as a way to attempt to diplomatically outflank the Timurids.
Anyway, that’s probably enough for starters. Further specifics upon request ;).
My heavens. Tamerlane, might I inquire as to how someone comes to know all that offhand? I don’t mean to be nosy but that was impressive.
Probably about 85-90% of that stuff can be dug out of a cite I should have included in that post - The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane by Beatrice Forbes Manz ( 1989, Cambridge University Press ). It’s a thin volume, but just packed with details on the sociopolitical structure of the region immediately before Timur and during his reign. Less useful as a military history, though she does spend some time, again, on the sociopolitical structure of Timur’s army.
As for the rest - the tidbits on Ming China and the Ottomans can be plucked from any decent history of the same and the name of Babur’s mother I looked up in the introduction to a translation of the Baburnama - a late-medieval autobiography that’s worth a gander ( Babur was of course the terminator of the Sultanate of Delhi and founder of the new Moghul empire in northen India, but even before that he had a fascinating life, losing, then winning, then losing again a kingdom in Central Asia ).
I have heard that some of the worst atrocities associated with “Mongols” - such as making towers of skulls out of the civilian populations of cities - were actually attributed to Timur.
What’s the straight dope on that?
Thank you for that wonderful information!
It’s amazing just what one person can accomplish. Certainly, Timur must be among the greatest singular rulers in world history.
You said he was a religious bigot (even though lenient within Islam). How was this so? What bigoted actions was he known for?
Also, were there any Naqshbandi groups that claimed Timur as an adherent?
Where are the descendants of Timur now (I’m guessing South Asia but I could be wrong)?
Are there any aspects of Timur’s rule or military tactics that his descendants used/copied?
(Side question 1: how long before Timur did the Mong’gols abandon their shamanistic religion for Islam or Buddhism?
(Side question 2: What’s the difference between Turks and Mong’gols?)
As usual, Tamerlane, you amaze me. I bow before your erudition.
WRS
Yes an no.
The Mongols definitely did raze at least one large area to possibly permanent effect - Khurasan, which was very deliberately terrorized by Chingiz’s youngest son, Tolui ( father of the famous Kublai Khan ). This includes tremendous sacks of cities like Nishapur ( though the contemporary estimates of dead are best taken as symbolic of the thoroughness of the slaughter - no way those cities contained anywhere near the number of people cited as being killed ). Further they did have a ‘surrender or be sacked’ policy that resulted in some pretty frightful atrocities - terror of the consequences of not submitting to them was definitely a weapon in their arsenal.
Hulegu ( another son of Tolui ) and Timur were the skull stackers - I don’t think Chingiz himself ever seems to have taken that particular step ( could be misremembering, I don’t have a reference in front of me ) and Hulegu did so maybe once that I can determine ( and not generally, but of certain folks from Baghdad ). So Timur gets more credit for that one. In general it seems Timur followed the same ‘resist or be razed’ policy, but perhaps a bit more wantonly ( a lot of nasty torture ) and not always- especially when confronted with elements ( like the Karts of Herat or the Muzaffirids of Fars ) that he felt he couldn’t easily shoehorn into his state ( in both cases those families were slaughtered near to extinction ). He somewhat more often indulged in major razzias without intent to conquer and while these usually had some political reasoning behind them, the end result was an appearance of a little more random slaughter than the Mongols. To further that impression he would campaign repeatedly in the same areas as local rulers would rise in rebellion - the Mongols were a bit more thorough in restructuring their conquered areas, at least in the Middle East, from the get go.
So both were enormously destructive in some ways, but Timur comes off a bit worse. Timur probably was a bit more nakedly brutal ( Mongols usually just killed folks - as mentioned Timur’s forces would also torture people to death ) and his failure to secure a lasting system of administration ended up resulting in even more destructive chaos after he died ( though Khurasan under his son and grandson did undergo a real cultural effloresence ). In contrast the Mongols instituted stable government over an immense area for at least a couple of generations that resulted in a major restructuring of the world economy.
Just to let you know, I’m not ignoring you, but I will have to get back to you a little later WeRSauron. Sadly, I have to attend to my boring job :).
He is given “credit” for all but destroying the Nestorian church in the east, seriously weakening the Jacobites and badly damaging the Armenian church in eastern Anatolia. Actually the Nestorians had been in decline since the Il-Khanate converted to Islam and with the fervor of the newly converted began persecuting them. But Timur is generally thought of as having done the lion’s share of actual damage.
His actual religious affiliation is a bit clouded. Some have put forward the idea that he was inclined to Shi’ism because of certain associations ( for example his tombstone claimed, erroneously, descent from Ali ) and the use of Shi’a troops in his army. However it is more likely he was Sunni - he was almost certainly raised as such and his main religious advisor was a Hanafi scholar. He patronized and cultivated numerous Sufi sheikhs - one of his great buildings ( and I should have mentioned before he was a tremendous builder ) was the tomb he had constructed for Ahmad Yassawi, founder of the Yassawiya order. The Naqshbandi connection derives from their increasing dominance in the region - the various Sufi orders formed the predominant brand of Islam among the nomadic elements of the Ulus Chagatai.
If any remain, they would be in India, I suspect. The Timurids were squeezed out of Central Asia bit by bit and the last figurehead Moghul Padishah was deposed in India in 1858 after the Great Sepoy Mutiny. I have no idea what the line of descent was following him.
Quite possibly, though it is bit hard ( for me at least ) to trace. Timur’s army was a composite force that relied on a core of armored heavy calvary as the arm of decision - these were specially recruited and partially de-tribalized ( while Timur didn’t completely dissolve tribes like Chingiz did, he radically weakened the independent influence of the tribes of the Ulus Chagatai by essentially converting them into dependent appendages of his personal rule, drawing their military manpower into a permanently on the march army under his direct control ), forming his own personal retinue dependent only on him. It retained its traditional base of light steppe calvary, plus auxillary infantry ( usually recruited from sedentary peoples ) and eventually a small corps of elephants. He also made use of very early artillery and hand-guns. Really only the Ottomans in the Muslim world had similarly composite force.
It is likely that sucessors like Shah Rukh retained or tried to retain that general structure. The problem was that the new structure that Timur had built was so tied to him personally and the various princes so disunited that its cohesive, composite nature probably fractured very quickly. The princes turned against one another, the sub-commanders that had formed Timur’s new elite as his personal following quickly sought their own advantage, abandoning the dynsaty, the submerged tribes of the Ulus Chagatai re-asserted themselves and the never-submerged vassal tribal confederacies in the west did likewise.
Certainly the confederacies of the west, that quickly ousted the Timurids from Iraq and western Iran, continued as standard steppe armies of light calvary. It was that sort of army that was fielded by Uzun Hasan of the Aq Qoyonlu, then ruler of the entire aforementioned area, that was defeated by the composite army of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II at Bashkent in 1473. It was that same sort of light calvary army that was fielded by Isma’il, the founder of Persia’s Safavid dynasty, at Chaldiran in 1514, where it was again broken by the Sultan Selim I. So in the west of what had been the Timurid state, the composite army apparently disappeared until re-invented on a more Ottoman-style model by the Safavid Shah Abbas the Great in the late 16th century.
The later Moghuls of India by contrast did rely on a heavy calvary based army. So it is not unlikely that the eastern Timurid princes, that continued to rule in that area until ousted by the Uzbeks, retained that structure. However it is worth noting that at the decisive battle of Panipat in 1526, where Babur broke the larger army of the Sultanate of Delhi, the formation he used was straight out of Selim I’s playbook at Chaldiran - mobile calvary on the wings, with an immobile center of artillery and hand-gunners behind rope-chains ( Babur’s gunnery officer, I believe, had served at Chaldiran ). And the later Moghul armies at least suffered from lack of complimentary light calvary - the rough-riding early Maratha light horse could run rings around them.
Well, the Mongols were religiously diverse all along. Berke, brother and successor to Batu of the Golden Horde, converted to Islam even before Baghdad fell to Hulegu in 1258. The Il-Khan Teguder converted in the 1280’s. However the definitive conversion of the elite of the Il-Khanate was probably with Ghazan ( 1295 - 1304 ). In the Golden Horde it is usually dated from Ozbeg ( 1313-1343 ), in the Khanate of Chagatai with Tamashirin ( 1331-1334 ).
In the east Buddhism was strong even earlier, as it had been the official faith of the Qara-Qitai and common among the Uighurs, to whom the Mongols owed so much in administrative terms and of course was endemic in China. Kublai Khan is said to have favored it. After the expulsion from China in 1368, Shamanism appears to have resurged in Mongolia proper until the 16th century when Altan Khan ( r. 1542-1582 ) brought Tibet back within the east Mongol sphere and confirmed Tibetan Yellow Hat Buddhism as the official creed ( it was Altan Khan who declared the then Panchen Lama as Dalai Lama as well, creating that title ).
Linguistics. Jomo Mojo is the man for details on that.
But when I was speaking of Turco-Mongols earlier I was referring rather to a composite identity - the Ulus Chagatai was overwhelmingly Turkic linguistically, but was still tied in loyalty to the Chingisid dynasty and the imperial Mongol legacy. Turkic in people, Mongol in state, perhaps might be one way of putting it.
Thank you so much, Tamerlane!
I’ll take a day to digest everything. 
I might buy the book you cited. Sounds very interesting!
WRS - Allah hu Jalal ud-Din Muhammad Akbar bin Humayun bin Babar bin Timur wa Chingez
Thanks a lot Tamerlane! You know an awesome amount about Mongols, and I really appreciate you taking the time to give such detailed and thoughtful answers!
If I may, I have a follow-up question: I have heard that the impact of repeated waves of Turco-Mongol invaders on Persia and Iraq were so detrimental to the the people and agriculture of those lands (such as the underground Quanat (sp?) system, which needs to be maintained continuosly to work) that the population of those areas only recovered its numbers in the 20th century from its peak during the Abassid Caliphate.
What is the straight dope on that?
Just minor clarification to the PhD thesis laid out in this thread. Just a reincarnation issue really. Altan Khan proclaimed the 3rd Dalai Lama as the Dalai Lama (the first two were proclaimed posthumously). The Dalai Lama has traditionally been based in Lhasa. It was the Great 5th Dalai Lama that instituted/recognized the position of the Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lama has been headquartered in the Tashilhunpo Monastary since that time (although the current Panchen Lama is in an undisclosed location).
The First Dalai Lama (1391 - 1474) was a disciple of Tsong Khapa. He founded **Tashilhunpo Monastery **, at Shigatse, and was its first abbot. This is the seat of the Panchen Lama.
The Second (1475 - 1542) served as the abbot of three great Yellow Hat monasteries while disputes raged between rival Tibetan sects.
The Third (1543 - 88), an abbot of Drepung Monastery (near Lhasa). This was the first “official” Dalai Lama recognized while still living.
A few odd ones from memory:
His campaign in India is one of the most destructive the world has ever witnessed, putting him in the super-league with such as Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler and Mao when it comes to lives taken. It was in part inspired by criticism that he wasn’t hard enough on non-Muslims.
He founded or re-founded the city of Samarkand and made it the centre of his empire. Ever the soldier’s soldier (he personally led his armies and shared their deprivations and hardships though long campaigns and treks over mountains and through deserts) he had little respect for artistic and intellectual pursuits, yet he still imported all sorts of artisans and intellectuals from all over his empire to make Samarkand a city worth an emperor.
His names, Tamerlame, has something to do with him having a lame leg or foot.
He liked to address himself as “The Scourge of God” (or some variant thereof) after the moniker first given to Attila the Hun by Christian Europe. He saw himself as a successor not only to Genghis Khan but also the Huns.
The Scythians, Huns & Mongols were all steppe people. What if any were connection between them? Are the ethically, linguistically and/or culturally in family?
Probably true. Though it probably wasn’t purely a factor of nomadic invasion. For example there is some suggestion that soil salinization caused by millenia of over irrigation combined with limited drainage was increasingly depressing agricultural production in Iraq. Further the political disruptions from 9th century on ( the chaos and violence of the Fourth Fitna + praetorization of the Caliphate with a concommittant decrease in infrastructure spending ) were taking a very serious toll - the land revenue of Iraq in the 10th century was probably ~1/3 what it had been in the 7th. Also there was a persistent climatological trend towards increasing aridity in the region.
But the nomadic eruptions did hurt badly. From mid-Abbasid times on the Turkish horse-archer ( at first imported mercenaries and slave-soldiers ) became the gold standard for Middle Eastern militaries. Once the Seljuqs advanced into the ME they cemented this and henceforth the new pastoral Turkic populations would function as the military elite until at least the fifteenth century and as an important military institution into the 20th ( the pastoral Bakhtiyari tribal confederacy in Iran played a major role in the Constitutional crisis in the1920’s ). As such the pastoralists were dominant over sedentary populations and rulers were frequently obliged to cede land to these groups that provided them with their primary reservoir of military manpower. So large, formerly cultivated areas were given over to pasturage - much of Azerbaijan, large chunks of Iran, Iraq, Anatolia ( in Iraq for example, an agricultural juggernaut in ancient times, economic engine of a half-dozen major empires, fully 50% of the population in south and 23% of the population in the center were still nomadic in 1867 - aggressive late Ottoman sedenterization policies led to that declining to 19% and 7% respectively by 1905 - as a side note this is when the majority of Iraq’s population shifted to Shi’ism and it was exactly those seedentarizing tribes that converted ). Khurasan, a relatively peaceful and prosperous oasis from the troubles in the west up to that point, was, as mentioned, subject to a incredibly damaging scorched earth campaign from the Mongols an suffered a similar fate.
The qanats, the underground irrigation canals in Khurasan weren’t as vulnerable to governmental neglect ( unlike riverine irrigation ), as they were a de-centralized system maintained by the local populace. But aside from destroying many, by driving the settled populace from the land or otherwise disrupting them, neglect would eventually cause the qanat to fail. And then you have something of a death spiral, as the failure of qanats led to a decline to semi-desert in which pastoralism became the only viable economic activity, which sometimes meant more nomads would be encouraged to move into the area ( in order to extract some revenue ), which could lead to more disruptions of sedentary populations, etc.
[c]China Guy** - Thanks for the correction/addition - those posthumous titles do get a bit confusing :).
The sack of Delhi was pretty horrific, surely one of the most traumatic events in northern India:
Delhi was so spent in the wake of his orgiastic attack that for months the city lay in the death throes of famine and pestilence, “not a bird moving.”
From A New History of India by Stanley Wolpert ( 1977, Oxford University Press ).
However it wasn’t prompted by any accusations against Timur’s impiety. Rather that was the charge leveled by Timur against Delhi and used as his justification to attack the Sultanate. The already declining Sultanate had fallen into chaos after the death of Firoz Tughluq ( 1351-1388 ) with various claimants fighting over the throne for a decade. Timur claimed that they were disrupting trade and were insufficiently harsh with their Hindu subjects.
The actual sack, again, appears to have been a rare mistake - Timur apparently wanted that particular ( exceptionally wealthy ) city intact, at least for the nonce. But to save supplies during the run up to the climactic finale of the assault he ordered the massacre of thousands of captives, which resulted in an explosion of bloodlust that got out of hand and ended up venting itself on Delhi.
Samarqand was an ancient city. The original one was laid to waste by Tolui in 1220, dropping to maybe a quarter of its original inhabitants and shifted site slightly. Timur didn’t re-found it himself, but he did vastly revitalize it.
Actually though illiterate, he was apparently fascinated with learing and was quite the intellectual in some respects:
What is most impressive, because least expected, is the scope of Temur’s intellectual interest and ability. Although he could neither read or write he had the use of those that could, and he was thus effectively literate in Turkic and Persian. The histories of his reign extol his knowledge of medicine, astronomy and particularly of the history of the Arabs, Persians and Turks. His delight in debating with scholars was inexhaustible and in his opinion at least he often had the better of them. The Timurid histories might be expected to present a favorable picture of Temur’s intellectual abilities, but they are born out by an independent source: the autobiography of Ibn Khaldun, who met Temur after the siege of Damascus in 1400-1. The two men discussed a number of topics and Ibn Khaldun remarked on Temur’s impressive intelligence and fondness for argumentation.
From the aforementioned Manz cite.
I might mention that Ibn Khaldun was one of the great political and social theorists produced by the Islamic world, though his ideas mostly languished after his death.
Correct, but it isTamerlane. The last part isn’t derived directly from the English word “lame”, but rather was just a euphonius transliteration for “lang” or “lenk”, which means lame.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it is probably highly unlikely he ever heard of Attila or his Huns. Even if he had, he would have been unlikely to pay him higher praise than Genghis, a much more immediate and impressive predecessor.
“The Scourge of God” moniker was given to him by Christopher Marlowe.
The Scythians were Indo-Iranians, relatives of the early Persians and Medes. The Parthians started as a Scythian tribe. They were displaced on the Russian steppe by first the Sarmatians ( a people that were perhaps somewhat culturally distinct, but ethnically and linguistically probably pretty similar ) and then eventually Altaic ( Turkic ) speaking peoples.
The “Black Huns” of Europe ( Attila et al ) as a state were eventually something of a multi-ethnic confederacy that included East Germans, probably Indo-Iranians ( like the Alans ) and Finno-Ugrian peoples like the Magyars. However the stereotypical Huns were probably Altaic speakers ( i.e. Turco-Mongols ). They left no good records as to their language, but circumstantial evidence points in that direction - descriptions report them as being distinctly Mongoloid in appearance and it is possible the Onogur Bulgars, a better attested Turkic people, were a native rump of the old Hunnish state.
The “White Huns” or Hephthalites that bedeviled Persia and India around the same period were at one time thought to be primarily Indo-Iranian based on some coins, but now some think they may have been primarily Turkic as well ( possibly related to the later Avars of eastern Europe ). It is pretty plausible that they were also somewhat multi-ethnic, with both Turkic and Indo-Iranian elements. Again it is hard to say for sure. The superficially similar names ( “Huna” in Sanskrit ) might indicate a weak political kinship to the Black Huns or might mean nothing.