Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (43 page)

In 1331 an epidemic broke out in part of North China, killing nine-tenths of the population.
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This appears to mark the initial outbreak of the Black Death, the worst pandemic in recorded history. In Persia Abû Sa’îd, the last Il-Khan, contracted the plague and apparently died of it in 1335.
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In 1338–1339 a Nestorian merchant community near the Issyk Kul in Central Asia was devastated by bubonic plague.
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In 1346 plague struck a Mongol army besieging the Crimean port city of Caffa on the Black Sea. The epidemic spread to the city, and ships spread it from there like wildfire throughout the Mediterranean and into Europe. At least a third of Europe’s population died from the previously unknown disease, which came to be known as the bubonic plague.
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The disease is now popularly believed to have been due to the Mongol conquests, the argument being that it was inadvertently carried west and south by them from the plains of central Manchuria and the Gobi Desert, where it is thought to have first arisen. However, the great discrepancy in time—nearly a century—between the end of the conquest period and the appearance of the plague in China makes it clear that the Mongol conquest itself could not have had anything to do with its spread.
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It is possible, though, that the increase in direct communication between East, West, and South Asia via Central Eurasia under the Pax Mongolica provided a ready pathway for the rats and fleas who carried the disease to be transported to all parts of Eurasia, and beyond, from its home. In any case, the Black Death was disastrous for the Mongol successor states as much as for the other states of the time.

The Mongol Political Heritage

The fourteenth century was afflicted with plague, famine, floods, and other disasters without precedent in world history. Much of the world suffered so greatly it is not surprising that rebellions and dynastic collapses were endemic. Despite their efforts to cope with the natural disasters, the Mongol dynasties of the Il-khanate in Iran and the Yüan in China both collapsed, probably much earlier than they would have in better times.

In China, a rebellion broke out against the Mongols, who were denounced as evil alien rulers. In 1368 the Yüan capital at Ta-tu was captured by the forces of Chu Yüan-chang, founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Toghon Temür (r. 1333–1368 in China and Mongolia), the last Great Khan who was also emperor of the Yüan Dynasty, escaped on horseback with much of his court to Mongolia, where he continued to rule over the shrunken Great Khanate in the Eastern Steppe until his death in 1370.
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In the Central and Western steppes, the Golden Horde maintained itself very well for another two centuries. By contrast, with the death of the last great Il-Khan, Abû Sa’îd, in 1335, the Il-Khanate was torn apart by tribal and sectarian violence.

In Central Asia, the Chaghatai Horde had very early fractured into several warring factions and suffered perennial instability. After the death of Tarmashirin Khan (r. 1318–1326), the Chaghatai Horde split into western and eastern halves: the western part centered in Transoxiana retained the Chaghatai name, while the eastern part, with a more heavily nomadic population, came to be known as Moghulistan ‘Mongolia’. The western part also acquired some of the most important cities across the Oxus to the south, including Balkh and Herat, around this time.

Membership in the lineage of Chinggis Khan had become the legitimizing factor in a ruler’s establishment in Central Asia, but the failure of a Chaghatayid to establish firm rule there led to the end of the direct line when Kazaghan (r. 1346/1347–1357/1358), emir of the Kara’unas people, killed the last Chaghatayid khan, Kazan, in 1346/1347. Although Kazaghan and his successors maintained the fiction that they ruled in the name of the Chaghatayids, and installed puppet khans to legitimize their reigns, they actually ruled in their own names.

Tamerlane and the Timurids

Tamerlane (Temür or Timur the Lame) was born in the 1320s or 1330s in Kišš (modern Shahr-i Sabz), a settled agricultural region of Western Central Asia near the great city of Samarkand.
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He was a Barlas by birth, and the Barlas were in origin the Mongol Barulas. However, Tamerlane and the other Barlas spoke Central Asian Turkic and Persian, not Mongol, as did other Mongol peoples who had settled in Central Asia. He was also not a nomad and never attempted to conquer the steppe zone; like most of the other leaders and warriors of the region at that time he was perfectly at home in walled cities.
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By the time Emir Kazaghan was assassinated in 1357/1358 Tamerlane had a personal comitatus
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and perhaps a small additional force of his own.
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When the Moghuls (or Mughals, i.e., Mongols) of Moghulistan invaded the Chaghatayid realm early in 1360, Tamerlane submitted to them and was rewarded with appointment over the Barlas and the territory of Kišš. The appointment was confirmed two years later by the Moghul khan, who appointed his son Ilyâs Khwâja (Khoja) to rule the Transoxiana part of the reunified Chaghatayid realm. But Tamerlane and many other local leaders considered the Moghuls to be tyrants and withdrew outside their territory.

The grandson of the assassinated Emir Kazaghan, Emir Ḥusayn, had an army larger than Tamerlane’s, so Tamerlane made an alliance with Ḥusayn. In 1364 the two attacked and defeated the Moghuls. In spite of setbacks, they eventually succeeded in eliminating them from Chaghatayid Central Asia. Then, through good leadership and clever intrigue, Tamerlane united most of the leaders of the Chaghatai realm and defeated Ḥusayn. By April 9, 1370, Tamerlane was sole ruler. He spent the next dozen years cementing his actual control over the Chaghatai territory.

The eyewitness accounts of his day show Tamerlane to have been an intelligent, generous ruler, brave in battle, who was absolutely ruthless with rebels and anyone he thought was unworthy to rule, for whatever reason. He was also one of history’s greatest generals, several times defeating forces much larger than his own. Having established his largely unopposed rule in Western and Southern Central Asia,
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Tamerlane led his army on far-ranging conquests outside his home region of Transoxiana. They began in 1384/1385, when he took northern Iran and Mazandaran.

In 1385/1386, Tokhtamïsh, khan of the Golden Horde, who had won his throne with crucial help from Tamerlane, attacked the Timurid city of Tabriz, in Azerbaijan. In 1386 Tamerlane campaigned in Iran and the Caucasus. He established his power in central Iran, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Other rulers in the area voluntarily submitted to him.

In 1387, with Tokhtamïsh on his way to attack the Caucasus again, Tamerlane sent an army and defeated him. Then Tokhtamïsh attacked Transoxiana, invading as far south as the Oxus, while Tamerlane was away campaigning to the south in Iran. Unaware of the threat to his home territory, Tamerlane campaigned against the Turkmen Kara-Koyunlu around Lake Van, then via Kurdistan down to Fars, where Isfahan and Shiraz submitted. When Isfahan rebelled, Tamerlane retook the city and ordered that the population be executed. Then he found out about Tokhtamïsh’s invasion of Transoxiana.

In response, Tamerlane turned to the north, defeating and completely subjugating Khwârizm, which had joined with Tokhtamïsh. In 1388/1389 Tamerlane turned back Tokhtamïsh’s attacks and in the late fall of 1390 prepared for a great expedition against him. In June 1391 he met Tokhtamïsh’s forces and defeated them, took and sacked the Golden Horde capital, and chased Tokhtamïsh up the Volga.

In fall 1392 Tamerlane campaigned in Iran again. He and his sons subdued the country in 1392 and 1393, and in the summer of 1393 they took Baghdad. He also demanded that the Turkmen of western Iran and Anatolia submit to him.

At the end of 1394, he learned that Tokhtamïsh had again raided his territories in the Caucasus. He campaigned once more against the Golden Horde, defeating Tokhtamïsh and advancing as far as Moscow. He then returned, sacking the Golden Horde cities on the way. This was too much for the people of the Golden Horde, who overthrew Tokhtamïsh. The Golden Horde was now so seriously weakened it was no longer a threat to Tamerlane.

In 1398 Tamerlane invaded northwestern India, capturing and sacking Delhi in December 1398. There his troops apparently got out of control and inflicted great damage, killing thousands of people. He returned home in 1399. In that fall, he went to western Iran to suppress a rebel, retake Georgia, and retake Baghdad.

In the same year he also campaigned against the Mamluks in Syria, who had murdered his ambassadors and also had sheltered rebels against him and refused to hand them over.
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In 1400/1401 he captured Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus, but did not establish any permanent administration in Syria. On July 20, 1402, his army met a larger Ottoman force in the Battle of Angora (ancient Ancyra, now Ankara), crushing them and taking Sultan Bâyazîd captive.
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Tamerlane campaigned through Ottoman territories, collecting tribute from its major cities, before withdrawing. As in Syria, he did not establish any permanent administration in Anatolia.
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Back in Samarkand in 1404, Tamerlane met foreign envoys, including Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, an envoy from King Enrique III (Henry III) of Castile and León, and then prepared for his biggest campaign of all, the conquest of China. He gathered an enormous army and set off in late fall 1404. He reached Utrâr, where he stopped to spend the winter, but he was already ill and died there on February 17 or 18, 1405.
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His body was brought back to Samarkand, where he was buried in an ebony casket in the beautiful mausoleum now known as the Gur-e Emir ‘Tomb of the Prince’.

On the whole, Tamerlane’s campaigns were indistinguishable from those of a European, Persian, or Chinese dynastic founder. There were no lightning cavalry raids across vast distances nor, of course, any great naval campaigns. He had cavalry in his army and used it to great effect, but the vast majority of his forces were infantry, and his targets were exclusively cities, which he was an expert at capturing.

He was content with the submission of his enemies, especially if they submitted voluntarily, and he nearly always left rulers on their thrones as long as they paid taxes and did not rebel against him.
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“He was interested in controlling and garrisoning the largest cities, in collecting and organizing taxes through the use of bureaucrats from his settled territory, and in using soldiers from these territories in further campaigns.”
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Tamerlane’s rule marks the first and only time that urban Central Asia was both the cultural and the political center of Eurasia. His attempt to reconquer the territories of the former Mongol Empire partly succeeded, but his failure to establish a stable imperial government structure in his empire, and his children’s rejection of his succession plan, doomed his efforts to failure. In short, while Tamerlane was a brilliant general, he was a true product of his fractious Central Asian homeland and his urban and agrarian upbringing.

His heirs were not content with the shares of his empire he had allotted them. They fought for some fifteen years until only his youngest son, ShâhRukh (1377/1405–1446), remained alive. By that time most of the empire outside of Transoxiana and neighboring regions had broken up into its constituent parts. The legacy of Tamerlane and the Timurids was to be in patronage of the arts.

The Apogee of Central Asia and the Silk Road