Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Justin Marozzi

1637. Both the Memoirs and the Institutes were generally accepted as legitimate historical documents until the late nineteenth century. Major Charles Stewart, who translated them for the London edition of 1830, claimed ‘the noble simplicity of diction’ and ‘the plain and unadorned egotism’ that ran through them proved their authenticity. Subsequent generations of scholars have been less impressed. Why, if these documents came from Temur, did neither of the contemporaneous writers Nizam ad-din Shami and Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi make any reference to them? Why was the original manuscript – from which al Husayni’s translation was made – never retrieved? Finally, how could such an important chronicle, which Temur purportedly wrote for posterity, have remained a secret for 232 years? Until such doubts can satisfactorily be removed, and the Memoirs and Institutes definitively authenticated, they are best regarded as specious. It should be noted, however, that the state-controlled academia in Uzbekistan – which since the 1990s has been required to support the official Temur revival – considers both to be beyond reproach.

^* On 22 June 1941, Temur’s tomb was opened by the Soviet archaeologist Professor Mikhail Gerasimov, who confirmed the injuries to both right limbs. Those who believe in spirits of the dead exercising power beyond the grave made much of the exhumation. Uzbeks had argued vehemently against it, predicting catastrophe if the emperor’s tomb was disturbed. Hours after Gerasimov prised it open, the world learnt of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Shortly after Temur’s skeleton and that of Ulugh Beg, his grandson, were reinterred with full Muslim burial rites in 1942, the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad.

^* The measured voice of Gibbon put the two writers admirably into perspective. On Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi: ‘His geography and chronology are wonderfully accurate; and he may be trusted for public facts, though he servilely praises the virtue and fortune of the hero.’ On Ibn Arabshah: ‘This Syrian author is ever a malicious, and often an ignorant enemy: the very titles of his chapters are injurious; as how the wicked, as how the impious, as how the viper etc.’

^* The Sarbadars had established an independent state in Khorasan in the 1330s. They took their name from the word for a gibbet or ‘gallows-bird’. Rather than accept the rule of the hated Mongols in Mawarannahr, they were prepared to go to the gallows resisting them. One of their most notable victories came in Samarkand, where they successfully overcame the siege of Ilyas Khoja’s forces. Hovering like vultures around the weakened city, Temur and Husayn moved quickly to exploit this favourable development and seized power.

^* Though his tomb was later removed to the Gur Amir mausoleum of Samarkand, where he was interred next to Temur, a shrine to Imam Sayid Baraka remains to this day in Andkhoi, a small town in the remote north-west corner of Afghanistan, several miles from the border with Turkmenistan. A humble building with a whitewashed façade and brown mudbrick domes, it is one of the few historical monuments to have escaped the destruction caused by more than two decades of war.

^* In selecting Balkh as the place of his enthronement, Temur was emphatically demonstrating his new supremacy in a famous seat of power which had attracted both Alexander the Great and Genghis before him. Balkh, known by eighth- and ninth-century Arabs as the Mother of Cities, is a place of great antiquity. Zoroaster was preaching fire-worship here sometime around 600 BC. Its position north of the Hindu Kush mountains and south of the Amu Darya made it a strategically important toehold in Afghanistan, and from 329 to 327 BC it served as Alexander’s military base. In the first centuries after Christ, when Buddhism was thriving in Afghanistan under the Kushan dynasty, numerous pilgrims flocked to its many temples. By the seventh century its architectural renown was such that the Chinese traveller Xuan Zang could claim it boasted three of the most outstanding monuments in the world. The invasion of the Arabs, bringing Islam in their wake, lent further lustre to Balkh as mosques and madrassahs sprang up in abundance. By the ninth century there were forty Friday mosques within the city walls and Islamic culture was flourishing. Balkh also became an important centre of Persian poetry. Many consider Maulana Jalaluddin Balkhi, the thirteenth-century mystic known to Western readers as Rumi, to be the greatest Sufi poet ever.

       A moment of happiness,

       you and I sitting on the verandah,

       apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.

       We feel the flowing water of life here,

       you and I, with the garden’s beauty

       and the birds singing.

       The stars will be watching us,

       and we will show them

       what it is to be a thin crescent moon.

       You and I unselfed, will be together,

       indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.

       The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar

       as we laugh together, you and I.

       In one form upon this earth,

       and in another form in a timeless sweet land.

      It was, predictably, the dark storm of Genghis Khan that swept away forever these days of glory and romantic poetry. In 1220, at the head of ten thousand soldiers, the Mongol warlord rode into Balkh and ravaged it completely. In 1333, more than a century later, Ibn Battutah found Balkh ‘an utter ruin and uninhabited, but anyone seeing it would think it inhabited on account of the solidity of its construction. The accursed Tinkiz destroyed this city and demolished about a third of its mosques on account of a treasure which he was told lay under one of its columns. He pulled down a third of them and found nothing and left the rest as it was.’ By the eighteenth century, Balkh had recovered sufficiently to become the seat of the governors-general of Afghan Turkestan. In 1866, however, after catastrophic outbreaks of cholera and malaria, the city was abandoned in favour of nearby Mazar-i-Sharif to the east.

       Today it is a quiet backwater, but the echoes of Temur, fainter with each passing century, still remain. The blue-ribbed dome which sits atop the shrine of the fifteenth-century theologian Khwaja Abu Parsa, with its corkscrew pillars and stalactite corbels, recalls the imposing magnificence of late Temurid architecture. The badly damaged monument looks down on the tomb of Rabia Balkhi, the first woman of her time to write poetry in Persian. She died when her brother slashed her wrists, furious to discover she had been sleeping with a slave lover. Her last poem, it is said, was written in her own blood as she lay dying. Since 1964, when her tomb was discovered, young lovers, especially girls, have come to pray at her tomb for guidance in their own tangled affairs of the heart.

       2 Marlowe’s ‘Scourge of God’ 1370–1379

       ‘Our quivering lances shaking in the airAnd bullets like Jove’s dreadful thunderboltsEnrolled in flames and fiery smouldering mistsShall threat the gods more than Cyclopian wars;And with our sun-bright armour, as we march,We’ll chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyesThat stand and muse at our admired arms.’

      CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,

      Tamburlaine the Great

      While a ten-year-old Temur was learning the martial skills that would make him such an accomplished warrior, three thousand miles to the west one man bestrode the battlefields of Europe. For any child with a taste for romantic knights and heroic endeavours, his is a stirring story, his royal tomb an arresting sight.

      Edward