The History of the Renaissance World (91 page)

79.1. The Advance of Timur-Leng

Until he reached the Caspian Sea, his campaigns were against other amirs, against local Turkish dynasties that had established themselves on the outskirts of the Ottoman power, against the onetime officials of the old Il-khanate who had claimed rulership of their own cities. Now he turned his eyes on the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate that had dominated the cities of the Rus’ for a century.

Just a few decades earlier, the Golden Horde would have presented Timur with a formidable challenge. But now, the Golden Horde seemed poised for plucking. Plague had weakened both the Rus’ cities and the Mongol government that oversaw them; and then, in 1359, a fight between two brothers of the khanship had spread into a khanate-wide struggle. In the years before Timur’s arrival, pretenders all over the Horde—at one time, seven
simultaneously
—claimed to be the rightful khan. The man who eventually came out on top could claim descent from Genghis Khan’s son Juchi. His name was Toktamish and he came, originally, from the Chagatai lands; and some years before, he had sworn a vassal’s loyalty to Timur himself.
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He had claimed the khanship of the Golden Horde despite a massive rebellion by the Rus’ princes, who had hoped to throw off the Mongol overlordship altogether. Faced with the defiance of Moscow, Riazan’, and a handful of other Rus’ cities, Toktamish descended on them with full Mongol ferocity, plundered their treasuries, burned their houses, and slaughtered their women and children. By the time Timur arrived at his borders, Toktamish had terrorized the Rus’ back into submission.
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Now he turned to face his former master, refusing to surrender to Timur’s demands for the proper obedience owed to him by his vassal.

The Rus’ princes, called upon to fight
with
their oppressor against this newest arrival, chose to obey. Timur seemed the worse of the two choices: an “iniquitious, ferocious and terrible torturer and destroyer,” the Russian chronicles call him. Backed by the Rus’ princes, Toktamish met Timur’s army in 1391, just east of the Volga river; and there he was badly defeated.

He retreated to the west, leaving the eastern part of the Horde territory in Timur’s hands. During the next year, Timur fought his way through the Rus’ cities as far as Elets. There, says the Russian chronicle of the invasion, he “captured the prince of Elets and tortured to death many people.” Two hundred miles away from Moscow, he stopped, unwilling to push farther in the face of a devastatingly frigid Russian winter.
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He had rebellions to put down south of the Caspian Sea, and he had his eye on Baghdad, which he entered with little difficulty in August of 1393. He did not launch another major invasion of Toktamish’s territory until 1394.

Once again the Rus’ princes joined their Mongol overlord to fight off the Mongol threat. And once again, they were defeated. On the Terek river, in 1395, Toktamish fought against Timur for three entire days before he was forced to flee. He spent the rest of his life as a fugitive, mostly wandering through Siberia, trying to stay alive.

This time, the entire land of the Rus’ lay open to Timur. He sacked the Golden Horde capital city of Sarai, on the Volga, and then spent eight months in the land of the Rus’, destroying fortresses and reducing towns to rubble. “He subdued and subjected all without exception to his will,” wrote the Arab traveler Ibn ‘Arabshah, who visited the wrecked lands less than a decade later and saw the destruction with his own eyes. “[He] took booty and divided it, and let his men despoil and make prisoners and gave leave to use force and violence and wiped out their tribes and overturned their forts and changed the whole condition.”
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Then Timur went back to Samarkand to recover. He had another target in mind.

He had already sent an advance force into India, under the leadership of his grandson Pir Muhammad; this preliminary reconnaissance had advanced as far as the Sutlej river before retreating to the mountains. In April 1398, after careful preparation, Timur marched from Samarkand, headed south, to join Pir Muhammad.

Together, they raided through the Punjab. By September 20, Timur was camped on the banks of the Indus river, ready to plunder Delhi itself. Delhi, still ruled by the Tughluq dynasty, had passed through the hands of a score of fleeting sultans. It was no longer the center of a major empire but, now ruled by the obscure Tughluq scion Nasiruddin Mahmud, it was still a rich prize.

Just before laying siege to the city, Timur ordered all the Indian prisoners still held in his camp massacred, for fear that they might break out during the battle and join in Delhi’s defense: “On the great day of battle,” he told his officers, “prisoners cannot be left with the baggage. No other course remains than to make them all food for the sword.” Every soldier was ordered to kill his fair share of the prisoners; contemporary accounts suggest that as many as 100,000 were slaughtered, their bodies piled into a bloody mountain outside the camp.
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The sultan’s army came out to meet him the next day, December 17, 1398. It included 120 war elephants whose tusks had been poisoned; this was a little off-putting to the Mongol army, but Timur had made inquiries and learned that elephants were easily panicked. He ordered his men to pile hay on the backs of camels, set it on fire, and drive the camels towards the elephants.

Faced with screaming, flaming, charging camels, the elephants stampeded back through the sultan’s army. The lines broke, and the Mongols drove the Indian army back. Nasiruddin Mahmud escaped, fleeing to Gujarat and taking refuge there.
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79.2 Battle of the Terek River

The population of Delhi was not as fortunate. Timur entered the city the next day and allowed his forces to plunder and kill.
“
High towers were built with the heads of Hindus,” one chronicler wrote, “and their bodies became the food for ravenous beasts and birds.” The official court account recorded ten thousand beheaded in a single hour, wives and children taken as slaves, grain stores burned, jewels torn from the ears and fingers of Delhi’s women. “Excepting the quarter of the scholars,” the account concludes, “the whole city was sacked.”
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The conquest of the rest of India did not immediately follow. Instead Timur withdrew to Samarkand; the heat of the 1399 summer, in the north of India, had discouraged him from staying. He took with him thousands of captives: artists, writers, competent officials, stonemasons, bricklayers, and weavers. He intended to put them to work as slaves in his own realm; the builders were given the task of constructing a mosque that Timur planned as a monument to his own greatness. When Nasiruddin Mahmud finally crept back to his wrecked city, he found it stripped and burned, corpses stacked in the street, and its entire culture transported over the mountains, to captivity in distant Samarkand.

Chapter Eighty

Compromises and Settlements

Between 1368 and 1392,
the Goryeo dynasty gives way to the Joseon,
and the southern court of Japan gives way to the northern

E
AST OF
T
IMUR
, insulated by the sheer expanse of earth and water from Timur and from plague, Goryeo was struggling with the presence of the Ming instead.

The fall of the Yuan dynasty gave the rulers of Goryeo a chance to recover their old status. Kublai Khan had forced them to replace their traditional title of emperor with the lower rank of vassal king, and had further tied the royal family to his own through marriage; one of his (many) daughters had been sent to Goryeo as a royal bride, and since then, Goryeo kings had continued to marry Mongol wives.

When Yuan might began to deflate during the Red Turban rebellions, King Gongmin of Goryeo had begun, tentatively, to reclaim his power. The Hongwu Emperor’s coronation, in 1368, was a green light; King Gongmin immediately sent messages of friendship and respect to the new Ming emperor, and at the same time appointed the Buddhist monk Shin Ton to help carry out a purge of the Mongols in his own government.
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The cleansing of Goryeo from Mongol influence was not a simple thing. For nearly a century, Goryeo’s kings had not only married Mongol wives but had gone to Yuan China for their education; Gongmin himself had spent years studying politics and Confucian thought at the Mongol capital Dadu. But a contemporary chronicle gives us an unexpected glimpse into the resentment that must have simmered around him, after his return. When the young man and his brother went in to see their father the king, he flew into a temper and shouted at them, “Both your parents are Korean. Why do you come to see me in Mongolian clothing? . . . How do you have the face to see people? Change your clothes immediately!”
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The Mongol thread woven through Goryeo’s everyday life seems to have been a constant humiliation to Gongmin. The removal of Mongol officials soon expanded into a general reprisal against prominent Goryeo citizens who had been Mongol-friendly. With the king’s approval, Shin Ton even created a new agency, the “Directorate for Reclassification of Farmland and Farming Population,” whose sole task was to investigate pro-Yuan landholders with the intent of taking their land and slaves away, redistributing the land and freeing the slaves.
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But Gongmin’s determination to clean out the Mongol vein from the bedrock of Goryeo culture was not shared by everyone at his court. For many of his people, the ways of the Yuan had simply become their ways; the foreigners to be feared were the Ming, the aggressive new empire that no one yet knew or understood.

Adding an additional layer of disturbance, Japanese pirates, called
wokou
, were taking advantage of the divided court and ongoing civil war at home to range lawlessly through the sea. Raids on Goryeo’s coast grew so severe that Gongmin ordered warehouses on the coast, used for storing official taxes paid in rice, moved inland. Peasants who had always farmed the fertile lands along the water gave up and fled from the sea. Gongmin gave the defense against pirates over to his general Yi Seong-gye. Famous for his skills as an archer, Yi Seong-gye was personally responsible for picking off the most notorious of the pirates, the much-feared Akibatsu, with his own arrow.
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