PLANET NERD

THE GREAT LAME

The world had not heard the last merciless Mongols. In 1336 a boy called Timur was born at Kesh, near Samarkand. He was the great-great grandson of Genghis Khan and conceived the desperate dream of rebuilding his forefather’s empire, by then divided into a multitude of smaller principalities. Locals nicknamed him Timur I Leng, or Timur the Lame, because of disability which made him limp. But the world remembers him as Tamerlane the Great, a wicked warmonger with savage sadistic streak.

At 33 he usurped the Transoxian throne at Samarkand and gained the power base he need for his conquests. Superb military management earned him mastery of Persia, Turkistan, the Ukraine, the Crimea, Georgia, Mesopotamia and Armenia. Governors who appealed to him for help frequently found themselves betrayed once he had restored their realms. He dethroned a rival Khan to occupy Russia, then over-ran India, leaving a trail of carnage all the way to Delhi, where he reduced the city to ruble and massacred 100,000 inhabitants.

Like his ancestors, Tamerlane, tall with a huge head and white-haired from childhood, found that fear was no way to establish allegiance among the peoples he conquered. Revolts in the growing empire were frequent, but repressed ruthlessly. Whole cities were destroyed out of spite and their populations slaughtered. Massive towers or pyramids of skulls were constructed for the emperor’s enjoyment. Twice he had thousands of opponents bricked up alive for agonizing slow suffocation and starvation. Another time he hurled all his prisoners to their deaths over cliff.

After his Indian campaign, Tamerlane stormed into Syria to settle old scores with leaders who refused to help in his wars. Aleppo was sized and sacked and Damascus occupied in 1400. Baghdad, still smarting from Halagu’s atrocities a century earlier, was devastated again by fire, and 20,000 people put to the sword. In 1402 Tamerlane unleash his wrath on Anatolia –now Turkey and beheaded 5,000 Ottoman fighters after one siege. Their sultan was killed in captivity in a barbarous iron cage.

The nightmare return to the depravity of an earlier age ended only with Tamerlane’s death. His hordes were on their way to attack china when, in January 1405, he fell ill while camping on Syr Daria river and died. By a bizarre twist of fate, it happened at Otrar the town whose governor had unwittingly sparked off the fury of the Mongols under Genghis Khan nearly 200 years earlier when he executed 100 traders. Millions had since paid the Mongols’ bloody price for that rash act.