EDWARD G. BROWNE, A Literary History of Persia
If we are to understand Temur’s unparalleled life, his numerous campaigns and victories, the motivation which impelled him halfway across the world to seek them and the brilliant tactical acumen which left him undefeated on his deathbed, if we are to appreciate his love of magnificence, bravery and beauty, his intolerance of laziness, cowardice and corruption, his lifelong respect for learned men and religious scholars, the cunning and cruelty which proved fatal to millions, the generosity and forgiveness which came to the rescue of so many others – in short, if we are to make sense of perhaps the greatest self-made man who ever lived, then there is no better place to begin than with his contemporaries.
The most flattering profile of Temur is provided by the Persian court historian of the early fifteenth century, Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi. Zafarnama, the Book of Victory, is a veritable panegyric, peppered with passages singing the emperor’s praises, so much so that the reader is inclined to skim through the sycophancy and dismiss Yazdi as a hopelessly servile commentator. But what is interesting about the Persian’s ingratiating chronicle is the fact that both he and Ibn Arabshah, Temur’s inveterate critic, single out several attributes in common.
‘Courage raised him to be the supreme Emperor of Tartary, and subjected all Asia to him, from the frontiers of China to those of Greece,’ wrote Yazdi. ‘He governed the state himself, without availing himself of a minister; he succeeded in all his enterprises. To everyone he was generous and courteous, except to those who did not obey him – he punished them with the utmost rigour. He loved justice, and no one who played the tyrant in his dominion went unpunished; he esteemed learning and learned men. He laboured constantly to aid the fine arts. He was utterly courageous in planning, and carrying out a plan. To those who served him, he was kind.’*
Arabshah, surprisingly, provided the most valuable portrait of the conqueror. As we have seen, the Syrian was anything but a dispassionate observer, having witnessed at first hand the devastation wrought on his native Damascus by the Tatar hordes in 1401. Appalled by the torture and slaughter of the city’s inhabitants, it is little wonder that he succumbed to the temptations of invective in his life of Temur. The recurrent references to his subject as a bastard, viper, demon, despot, treacherous impostor, wicked fool, owl of ill omen and the like do little for Arabshah’s credibility as an objective biographer.
Yet Arabshah is a critical character witness precisely because of this profound enmity. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the final chapter of his book, the very heading of which pulls the reader up short. It is entitled ‘Of the Wonderful Gifts of Temur and his Nature and Character’. Unlike the preceding chapters, which rarely exceed five pages, and are frequently only one, this runs to thirty-five pages. Its opening passage leaves us with a picture of the conqueror at the end of his life, and is worth quoting from at length. It begins with a physical description:
Temur was tall and lofty of stature as though he belonged to the remnants of the Amalekites, big in brow and head, mighty in strength and courage, wonderful in nature, white in colour, mixed with red, but not dark, stout of limb, with broad shoulders, thick fingers, long legs, perfect build, long beard, dry hands, lame on the right side, with eyes like candles, without brilliance; powerful in voice; he did not fear death; and though he was near his [seventieth] year yet he was firm in mind, strong and robust in body, brave and fearless, like a hard rock.
The Soviet archaeological team which opened Temur’s tomb in 1941 found that he was a well-built man of about five feet seven inches, ‘tall and lofty of stature’ for that time. His lameness was likewise established. An injury to his right leg, where the thighbone had merged with his kneecap, left it shorter than the left, hence the pronounced limp referred to in his pejorative nickname. When walking he dragged his right leg, and his left shoulder was found to be unnaturally higher than the right. Further wounds were discovered to his right hand and elbow. The red colour Arabshah mentions in Temur’s colouring may well be a reference to his moustache and beard, traces of which were found still attached to the skull.
‘He did not care for jesting or lying,’ Arabshah continues. ‘Wit and trifling pleased him not; truth, even if it were painful, delighted him; he was not sad in adversity nor joyful in prosperity … He did not allow in his company any obscene talk or talk of bloodshed or captivity, rapine, plunder and violation of the harem. He was spirited and brave and inspired awe and obedience. He loved bold and valiant soldiers, by whose aid he opened the locks of terror, tore men to pieces like lions, and through them and their battles overturned mountains …’
It is as though the dignity and grandeur of Temur’s character, suppressed by the Syrian for nine-tenths of the book, is finally too much for him to contain. After the long summaries, and vituperative denunciations, of Temur’s campaigns, it is time for Arabshah to deliver his verdict on Temur the man. And suddenly, the language has changed. The conqueror is ‘wonderful in nature’, his fearlessness is mentioned twice within a few sentences, rather like Yazdi’s emphasis of his courage. He is the object of his soldiers’ awe. The man who Arabshah has been telling us for three hundred pages revels in wanton cruelty and spilling blood does not, it transpires, tolerate any talk of bloodshed, rape or plunder in his presence. As Arabshah continues, you sense that after all these pages filled with hatred he finds himself, despite his intentions, re-evaluating his subject in a vastly more favourable light. It is a marvellous and highly revealing moment. Temur, he goes on, was:
A debater, who by one look and glance comprehended the matter aright, trained, watchful for the slightest sign; he was not deceived by intricate fallacy nor did hidden flattery pass him; he discerned keenly between truth and fiction, and caught the sincere counsellor and the pretender by the skill of his cunning, like a hawk trained for the chase, so that for his thoughts he was judged a shining star.
No longer the coarse viper, Temur is the consummate diplomat and politician, masterful in the business of empire, attuned to deceit and subterfuge, a ‘shining star’ in the intellectual firmament. In his first chapter, Arabshah poured scorn on Temur’s lineage. He was born, said the Syrian, into ‘a mixed horde, lacking either reason or religion’. Brought up in the nomadic traditions of the steppe, the Tatar spoke both Turkic and Persian fluently, but was illiterate. By the end of his book, Arabshah has arrived at a rather different judgement on Temur’s intelligence and his respect for learning.
Temur loved learned men, and admitted to his inner reception nobles of the family of Mahomed; he gave the highest honour to the learned and doctors and preferred them to all others and received each of them according to his rank and granted them honour and respect; he used towards them familiarity and an abatement of his majesty; in his arguments with them he mingled moderation with splendour, clemency with rigour and covered his severity with kindness.
Temur’s harshest critic, the man who had seen his great city reduced to ashes, its men and women raped and butchered, is at pains to stress that the Tatar was no mindless, uncouth, heathen tyrant. Temur liked to gather the most illustrious minds about him. Few could expect mercy when he torched a city, but scholars, poets, men of letters, Muslim clerics, shaykhs, dervishes and divines, artists and architects, miniaturists, masons and skilled craftsmen of all descriptions were invariably spared.
If soldiers were his first love as an emperor, Temur’s admiration for holy men and men of letters came a close second. Under his rule Samarkand attracted – voluntarily and otherwise – Asia’s most distinguished minds, and this at a time when high culture in that continent shone more brightly than in benighted Europe. From Baghdad came Nizam ad-din Shami, author of the original Zafarnama, the inspiration for Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi’s later work of the same name. Persian scholars thronged to the conqueror’s court. There was Sa’d ad-din Mas’ud at Taftazani, one of the celebrated polymaths of his era, a theologian, grammarian, lawyer and exegetical teacher. He was joined by Ali ibn Mohammed as Sayyid ash Sharif al Jurjanj, the mystic and logician, and Abu Tahrir ibn Yaqub ash Shirazi al Firuzabadi,