In time, such pressures told. By the 1330s, the internecine disputes, simmering for several generations, finally boiled over until the fault-line cleft the ulus in two. To the west, Mawarannahr. To the east, ruled by a separate branch of the Chaghatay family, Moghulistan – land of the Moghuls – a mountainous territory extending south from Lake Issykul in Kyrgyzstan to the Tarim basin. Though this hostile split occurred at around the time of Temur’s birth, its consequences occupied him throughout his career. In fact, with only a few intervals, the Moghuls were his lifelong enemy.
In the early fourteenth century, Mawarannahr enjoyed a brief period of prosperity under Kebek Khan (ruled 1318–26). Echoing the sedentary style of his predecessor Mubarak, he shifted his seat to the fertile Qashka Darya valley and introduced a range of administrative reforms, including his own coinage and, for the first time, a well-ordered tax system. Such behaviour did little to endear him to the nomadic elements within Mawarannahr, who chafed against this imposition of authority. His construction of a palace at Qarshi, in the heart of the Qashka Darya valley, only added to their sense of grievance, but Kebek did not back down.
The strains between the rival sedentary and nomadic populations resurfaced aggressively during the reign of his weaker successor, his brother Tarmashirin. The conflict which had ripped Chaghatay asunder now threatened to engulf Mawarannahr. Still hankering for a return to the old way of life, the nomad aristocracy urged Tarmashirin to honour the policies agreed at the qurultay of 1269. To no avail. Rather than compromise, the new khan chose instead to convert to Islam. This provocative act, coming at a time of profound instability, sealed his fate. Like Mubarak before him, he was stripped of power.
Tarmashirin’s overthrow by the nomadic clans was an important landmark. It marked the end of real power for the Chaghatay khans of Mawarannahr. From this time they became no more than puppet rulers, installed in office as a nod to the customs of Genghis by the nomadic warlords who replaced them as the true source of power and authority. The battle for the soul of Mawarannahr, for the supremacy of a way of life made famous by the Mongol conqueror, had at last been decided. The settled nobility in the towns and villages had been confronted and overcome. Henceforth, power would reside among the men of the saddle, the bearded warriors whose strength and stamina was legendary.
In 1347, Amir Qazaghan overthrew the Chaghatay khan and seized the reins of power. For a decade he led his warriors into neighbouring territories, plundering and sacking with repeated success. Then, in 1358, on the orders of the khan of Moghulistan, he was assassinated, plunging Mawarannahr into turmoil. The collapse of central control was devastating. The vacuum left by Qazaghan was quickly filled by ambitious local warlords and religious leaders. Mawarannahr was riven by petty rivalries and division. Tughluk Temur, the Moghul khan, prepared to invade.
It was into this maelstrom of feuding fiefdoms, high among the shadows cast by the roof of the world, that Temur was born.
A brick kern in the roadside village of Khoja Ilgar, eight miles to the south of the historic Uzbek city of Shakhrisabz, the Green City, marks the birthplace of the Scourge of God. As memorials go, it is an unprepossessing sight, a pile of bricks on a concrete base topped by an inscribed plaque, more like a poorly built barbecue than a monument to one of the world’s greatest conquerors. A traveller might expect this to be an important tourism site in Uzbekistan, a young country which has, since independence in 1991, resurrected Temur from the dustbin of Soviet historiography and championed him as its new nationalist figurehead, invincible hero of the Motherland. But this being the heartland of a nation still shaking off the ideological dust of communism and singularly uncomfortable with the new ethos of capitalism, there are no signs of commercialism here. No car park teeming with tour buses. No shops selling Temur T-shirts, key-rings or pens.
The site, instead, is exquisitely rural, as it was when the Spanish ambassador Clavijo arrived in Kesh, as Shakhrisabz was then known, on 28 August 1404. The ‘great city … stands in the plain, and on all sides the land is well irrigated by streams and water channels, while round and about the city there are orchards with many homesteads’, he observed. ‘Beyond stretches the level country where there are many villages and well-peopled hamlets lying among meadows and waterlands; indeed it is all a sight most beautiful in this the summer season of the year. On these lands five crops yearly of corn are grown, vines also, and there is much cotton cultivated for the irrigation is abundant. Melon yards here abound with fruit-bearing trees.’
This is an appropriate place from which to start on the trail of Temur, to stop and listen for distant echoes of the world conqueror borne across six centuries on the autumnal zephyrs. Already, there are unexpected hints of continuity bridging the historical divide. A small vineyard suggests that though this is a Muslim country, the pleasures of the grape are still observed here, taking one back to Temur’s lavish, bacchanalian feasts.
Here in the alternately serene and savage Qashka Darya valley, next to a brick kern and an amiable peasant boy fretting over pilfered melons, it is possible to imagine Temur’s early years. This was the rugged terrain in which he grew up, learning the skills of the steppe without which his dreams of world domination would amount to nothing. A local proverb would have been in his mind from an early age: ‘Only a hand that can grasp a sword may hold a sceptre.’ Self-advancement in this brutal world was inconceivable without excelling in the martial arts.
Surrounded by the snow-capped Zarafshan mountains, he would have galloped wildly across these winter-frozen steppes, accompanied by his band of ruffian friends, sharpening his skills on horseback, imagining great battle charges, lightning raids on an enemy camp, heroic victories and headlong flight. In this fertile valley and among the broad meadows which eased into the lower reaches of the mountains, he would have learnt how to hunt bears and stags. Half a century later, these skills saved his army from certain starvation during one of his most difficult campaigns against the Golden Horde, travelling across what is today a thick slice of Kazakhstan and the southern belly of Russia.
Toughened by the bone-chilling grip of winter and the skin-cracking heat of summer, the young Temur would have learnt to fight like a man in this valley, over the steppes and among the mountains, skirmishing on increasingly daring night-time missions to steal sheep from unwary herdsmen, gathering around him an entourage of like-minded brigands, steadily developing a reputation for courage and leadership which brought him to the attention of the tribal elders.
The sources are generally quiet on Temur’s childhood. We can only imagine the vicissitudes of life on the steppes in the early fourteenth century, a world governed by tribal traditions and family relationships, the unending rhythm of the seasons and a fierce struggle to survive amid the unpredictable flux of constantly shifting alliances. Temur himself did little to illuminate the darkness surrounding his early years, taking care only to exaggerate his humble origins, thereby emphasising the glory of his later achievements. Perhaps, as has been suggested, there were signs that the young Temur was destined to be a leader of men. ‘At twelve years of age, I fancied that I perceived in myself all the signs of greatness and wisdom, and whoever came to visit me, I received with great hauteur and dignity,’ he is supposed to have said.*
Arabshah provides us with another fascinating, though probably overblown, glimpse of Temur as a young man emerging as an inspirational leader among his contemporaries. Again, the value of the description arises from the hostility of the writer, a man less willing than most to acknowledge Temur’s qualities.
As a youth he grew up brave, great-hearted, active, strong, urbane, and won the friendship of the Viziers’ sons of his own age and entered into company with his contemporaries among the young Amirs to such a degree, that when one night they had gathered in a lonely place and were enjoying familiarity and hilarity among themselves, having removed the curtains of secrecy and spread the carpet for cheerful intercourse, he said to them, ‘My grandmother, who was skilled in augury and divination, saw in sleep a vision, which she expounded as foreshadowing to her one among her sons and grandsons who would conquer