Eyes, when that Ebena steps to heaven,
In silence of thy solemn evening’s walk,
Making the mantle of the richest night,
The moon, the planets, and the meteors, light.
Later, she falls sick, and Tamburlaine is consumed by the darkest grief. The bloodstained emperor is the poet-lover once more.
Black is the beauty of the brightest day;
The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams,
And all with faintness and for foul disgrace,
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Zenocrate, that gave him light and life,
Whose eyes shot fire from their ivory bowers,
And tempered every soul with lively heat,
Now by the malice of the angry skies,
Whose jealousy admits no second mate,
Draws in the comfort of her latest breath,
All dazzled with the hellish mists of death.
But nothing can save her. Lying in her bed of state, surrounded by kings and doctors, her three sons and her husband, she dies. A distraught Tamburlaine rails against ‘amorous Jove’ for snatching her away from him, accusing the god of wanting to make Zenocrate his ‘stately queen of heaven’. The martial imagery and force of language return in his distraught response, but for once they are born of desperation and tragic futility.
The play closes with Tamburlaine’s death. Even here, at the end of his life, there is no regret or repentance, no sense that he is being defeated by a greater force. Instead, he calls for a map and points to this and that battlefield around the world, reliving his great victories in front of his sons. There is time to crown his heir Amyras, and then nature achieves what none of Tamburlaine’s earthly foes could manage. At the final moment, in the throes of death, his arrogance does not desert him:
Farewell, my boys! My dearest friends, farewell!
My body feels, my soul doth weep to see
Your sweet desires deprived my company,
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.
As a dramatist, Marlowe is guilty of all the usual sins: exaggeration, historical infelicities, geographical inaccuracies, sensationalism. Yet his Tamburlaine is a triumph of imaginative genius. Nowhere else has the Tatar been so brilliantly conceived, so passionately realised. The grandeur of the poetry, the sweeping cadences of the line, the constantly unfolding military drama, all keep the audience rapt. It is little wonder that Marlowe, rather than the historians, holds the key to the popular image of Tamburlaine, with the full flash and fury of his God-defying protagonist. In the play, as in life, the ‘Scythian shepherd’ transcends all earthly limitations, embarks on a crushing career of conquest, and destroys everything in sight. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine rises even higher than his historical counterpart as a figure of boundless power. His is an irresistible, unworldly force that lifts him above his fellow mortals towards the heavens. He tramples over our moral universe, butchering innocent virgins, slaughtering wholesale, all the while consciously setting himself up as a rival to the gods whom he despises for their weakness. As his contemporaries recognise only too well, this is a man
That treadeth Fortune underneath his feet,
And makes the mighty god of arms his slave.
However great his ambition, however broad the stage on which he sought to make his mark, it is doubtful that the real Temur entertained such elevated comparisons in 1370. The titles he had gained, though magnificent, were deceptive. Master of a small swathe of Central Asia, beset on all sides by hostile forces, Temur was neither Emperor of the Age nor Conqueror of the World. It would take several decades of constant campaigning before he could make such exalted claims.
Mindful of Mongol tradition, which he never tired of using to bolster his position, Temur’s priority on acceding to the throne was the reunification of the fractured Chaghatay empire. Demonstrating the astute opportunism which would sustain him through numerous challenges over the course of his career, he sought to place himself in the line of rulers harking back to Genghis Khan. His marriage to Saray Mulk-khanum had already eased him, albeit somewhat tenuously, into that position. Now he intended to capitalise on that auspicious beginning by restoring the diminished empire to its former glory. These lands, bequeathed to Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatay, had disintegrated in the vortex of conflict. To the north-west, the fertile region of Khorezm, formerly within the Chaghatay ulus, now lay independent under the Qungirat Sufi dynasty. To the east, Moghulistan, once also an integral part of the ulus, was now a direct enemy whose continued depredations against its western neighbour, Mawarannahr, Temur was resolved to end.
For the next decade he led campaigns against both, now attacking the Moghuls in the east, now taking his armies north into Khorezm. There were expeditions farther afield, too, but for now the priority was to expand and consolidate his base. Today, constant warfare may seem a futile waste of resources, but in Temur’s time it was the most effective way of retaining the loyalty of the nomadic tribes, uniting them under the banner of plunder and booty. There were regular challenges to his authority, however, from tribal leaders who resented the loss of power occasioned by his rapid rise. Such moves were frustrated by Temur’s clever consolidation of his armies. He and Husayn had amassed powerful forces during their alliance, and on Husayn’s assassination they were transferred to his command. He therefore presided over an impressive body of fighting men, including the Qara’unas armies, the largest in Chaghatay. Further support came from the settled populations, for whom war was anathema, stability and prosperity a cherished dream. They understood, as feuding tribal leaders would not, that only a strong ruler could impose the peace that would allow them to flourish.
Temur led his first expedition against his eastern neighbours in 1370, the year of his enthronement. His adversary was the Moghul leader Qamar ad-din, who had succeeded the assassinated Ilyas Khoja. This first campaign was indecisive, though sufficiently successful for Temur’s forces to return laden with plunder. Qamar ad-din would remain an irritant for years to come. Though there were more noteworthy campaigns against the Moghuls – the next came in 1375 – their chief evaded capture. Legend tells of an incident during one of these expeditions through the Tien Shan mountains, high above Lake Issykul in what is today Kyrgyzstan. Pursuing Moghul archers over the San-Tash pass, each one of Temur’s soldiers was ordered to pick up a stone and place it on a pile. Once they had routed their enemy they returned, each soldier collecting a stone and taking it back with him to enable Temur to calculate his army’s losses. By the time his men had left the mountains, a towering cairn still remained, so heavy were the casualties. In the late 1370s, more expeditions took Temur’s men into Moghulistan, and by 1383, when another heavy defeat was inflicted on the Moghuls, Qamar ad-din was in his dotage, militarily speaking. He was ousted by Khizr Khoja, son of the former Moghul khan Tughluk Temur, in 1389, although that was still not the last of him. The following year, taking advantage of Khizr Khoja’s flight from Temur’s armies, he tried to seize power again, only to be chased back once more. The last we hear of him, possibly apocryphally, is sometime around 1393 when, unable to keep up with his retreating army, he was left in a forest by his officers with several concubines and enough food for several days. He was never seen again.
Temur’s eastern question was resolved more or less permanently shortly afterwards, when Khizr Khoja came