The Europe of Temur’s time, then, in Muslim eyes at least, was little more than a barbarian backwater. Church and state were divided and weak. The age of imperial adventure had expired, not to be revived until the later fifteenth century. Edward the Black Prince might have cut a dashing figure on the battlefields of Europe, but the Islamic world scarcely registered this sorry land of the infidel. The real treasures of conquest were not to be found in what the Koran referred to as the dar al-harb (the abode of war), home of the unbelievers. They lay in the East. As Bernard Lewis wrote: ‘For the medieval Muslim from Andalusia to Persia, Christian Europe was still an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief, from which the sunlit world of Islam had little to fear and less to learn.’
Europeans were no more impressed by the Oriental heathens. Temur’s whirlwind conquests went largely unnoticed in the West until, in 1587, a fire-and-brimstone Tamburlaine sprang onto the Elizabethan stage like a thunderbolt from the heavens.
Temur’s neglect at the hands of Western historians, which continues to this day, allowed Marlowe’s bloodthirsty Tamburlaine to provide the enduring popular image of a magnificent, God-defying Oriental despot, fearless in conquest, unforgiving in triumph, yet simultaneously capable of scaling the poetic heights with his beautiful lover Zenocrate. It is one of history’s small ironies that a man who took such care to ensure his place in posterity by having his civil and military record meticulously chronicled should find his posthumous reputation in the hands of an Elizabethan playwright with a taste for the sensational.
Brilliant in battle, unvanquished on the world stage, Temur’s efforts to secure the recognition he so richly deserved came to nothing. ‘These cares were ineffectual for the preservation of his fame, and these precious memorials in the Mogul or Persian language were concealed from the world or, at least, from the knowledge of Europe,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘The nations which he vanquished exercised a base and impotent revenge; and ignorance has long repeated the tale of calumny which had disfigured the birth and character, the person, and even the name, of Tamerlane. Yet his real merit would be enhanced rather than debased by the elevation of a peasant to the throne of Asia.’
Passed over by historians, Temur has fared little better on the stage. Though Marlowe’s play is more than four hundred years old, productions have been remarkable for their extreme rarity. Tamburlaine the Great went through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without a single recorded performance. One problem is the play’s length: it is really two full-length plays, rather than one. Another is the potentially monotonous series of conquests and slaughter, which continue, as they did historically, until Tamburlaine’s death. C.S. Lewis famously described the play as ‘a hideous moral Spoonerism: Giant the Jack Killer’. Suffice it to say that the plot is not as complicated as it could be. As a result of these and other difficulties, the first professional production of modern times came in London as late as 1951, when Tyrone Guthrie directed Donald Wolfit in the lead role with the Old Vic company. A quarter of a century later, Peter Hall chose the play to open the Olivier Theatre at the National, with Albert Finney in the lead role. Hall judged Tamburlaine variously as a ‘Boy’s Own Paper story’, ‘an immoral Morality play’, ‘the first atheist play’ and ‘the first existential play’. ‘One thing I know very strongly about Tamburlaine now,’ he wrote in 1976. ‘It reeks of the theatre as the circus reeks of sawdust and horse shit.’ Yet theatre-goers still had to wait until 1993 for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first production of the play, directed by Terry Hands in Stratford. It was worth the wait.
Audiences were captivated by Antony Sher’s snarling barbarism in the lead role, an explosive and athletic performance which rejoiced in the tyranny and bounding majesty of what one reviewer called ‘the megalomaniac’s megalomaniac’. While the sultan Bajazeth and his Turks strut awkwardly across the stage on golden stilts, Tamburlaine swings in Tarzan-like, kicking Bajazeth to the ground. In victory he glorifies in sneering sadism, rubbing his fingers in Bajazeth’s sweaty hair, licking them and offering them to Zenocrate to smell. Bathed in blood, he mocks the famished, caged sultan and encourages his henchmen to urinate on scraps of reeking bread with which they taunt him. Then, with a leering grin, he cuts off one of the sultaness’s fingers. Marlowe’s virgins of Damascus, yet more victims for the ‘scourge of God’, become flaxen-haired children sweetly proffering posies. If the 1993 production proved anything, it was that with an actor of Sher’s stature, together with careful editing – in this case Tamburlaine was whittled down to three hours – opulent costumes and imaginative special effects, Marlowe’s most sensational play could be big box office. There was another, more enduring, lesson to be taken from Tamburlaine, a critic noted: ‘As events in the Middle East and elsewhere continue to show, we ignore him and his descendants at our peril.’
Had Temur lived long enough to see Tamburlaine the Great, he might conceivably have been gratified by his dramatic depiction (though he would certainly have objected to the use of his derisive nickname). Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is one of the most intensely realised warrior heroes of the stage. Shakespeare’s Henry V and Coriolanus seem poorer creatures by comparison.
For Tamburlaine rises beyond the mortal sphere. As the Persian lord Theridamas remarks on first seeing this ‘Scythian shepherd’ early in Act I:
His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods,
His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth …
Tamburlaine, the audience rapidly discovers, is interested only in omnipotence:
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about,
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere,
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.
After routing his Arabian and Egyptian enemy at the close of Part I, he explains his victory to the Soldan of Egypt, who is mourning the loss of his throne. The god of war has resigned to Tamburlaine, the defeated Egyptian is told, and will soon make him ‘general of the world’. Even Jove suddenly looks ‘pale and wan’, fearing Tamburlaine is about to dethrone him. Not content with comparing himself favourably to the gods, he throws down the gauntlet to the Prophet Mohammed, burning the Koran and daring him out of the heavens:
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.
For Elizabethan audiences this was shocking stuff, blasphemy in the eyes of the authorities and an affront to properly Christian sensibilities. Gossip was already afoot concerning Marlowe’s supposed atheism, heresy and dissolute life, dangerous charges at a time when the authorities were rounding up those suspected of libel, sedition or even ‘unsafe’ opinions. Contemporary critics rounded on the play as a glorification of impiety. In his prefix to the largely forgotten Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), Robert Greene condemned Marlowe for ‘daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan’.
On 12 May 1593, the popular playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested and tortured. He wrote a letter, almost certainly under duress, condemning Marlowe’s ‘monstrous opinions’ and his tendencies to ‘jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men’. A shady character called Richard Baines, another informer, wrote of Marlowe’s ‘damnable judgement of religion and scorn of God’s word’, including wild allegations that the playwright professed ‘That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest,’ ‘That if there be any god or good religion, then it is in the papists,’ ‘That all Protestants are hypocritical asses’ and that Christ and John the Baptist were sodomites. Such testimonies had the desired effect. On 18 May, the Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. He was stabbed to death in the notorious