He was born in the 1330s in the Chaghatayid Khanate formerly the Mongol Empire in Central Asia. On the unforgiving steppe, he rose from a lowly sheep thief to become one of history’s greatest conquerors, uniting nearly all of Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran under his rule. But was he a great state builder or a bloodthirsty tyrant?
Order! Order! Who do we have on the stand today? Tamer...lane?
That wasn’t his name, your Honor. The great Timur— meaning iron— was nicknamed “Timur the lame” by enemies who mocked permanent injuries to his leg and arm.
Injuries he sustained raiding a rival tribe’s sheep herd— he was a thief and a scoundrel from the start!
Maybe— we actually don’t know for sure— but even if that’s true, raiding rivals was just part of nomadic life at the time. Timur was not born into a ruling family, so he had to prove his worth through daring and horsemanship.
He was hardly a commoner. Timur’s family was minor nobility. His uncle and brother-in-law were high-ranking officials. And when they trusted Timur on a diplomatic mission, he defected to a rival khan!
Strategic maneuvering! He reconciled with his uncle and brother-in-law soon after.
Only for long enough to consolidate his own power. Then he went to battle against his brother-in-law— supposedly his closest ally. He was assassinated, and Timur seized power!
They may have been friends, but he was a corrupt man who alienated a lot of people. Timur was right to oust him. Afterward, he managed to reunite most of the khanate’s territories and put an end to decades of bloody infighting.
Okay, so where are we? I can hardly keep up.
1370, your honor.
And he’s khan now?
Well, not quite. Timur was not a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, so he couldn’t claim the title. Instead, he appointed figurehead khans and referred to himself as amir, or commander, and later as güregen, or son-in-law, after he married a woman who was descended from Genghis Khan.
He claimed to be a divinely ordained protector of the Mongol and Muslim worlds, yet he undermined both Mongol and Muslim power by relentlessly waging war against his neighbors, weakening them so much that Christian Europe romanticized him as an ally. His campaigns killed as many as 17 million people!
Propaganda. Timur’s official biographies deliberately exaggerated the number of deaths to deter rebellions. Like the Mongols, Timur offered cities the chance to surrender and only ordered massacres if they revolted. He rebuilt irrigation canals to support agriculture, and regularly distributed food to the poor. Just in his hometown of Kesh, he paid for the meat of 20 sheep to be given to the poor every day. His campaigns were brutal, but by unifying Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran, he was also able to reinvigorate the Silk Road. Much of Eurasia benefited from the revival of long-distance trade, and Central Asian cities, such as Samarkand and Herat, became thriving commercial hubs under his rule.
And meanwhile, other cities like Baghdad, Aleppo, and Delhi were plundered and burned and took decades to recover. This illiterate warlord destroyed centuries’ worth of cultural heritage, leaving nothing but pyramids of skulls in his wake.
Timur may have been illiterate, but he was also an active patron of culture and the arts. During his conquests, he spared artisans and scholars, sending them to work on public projects like schools and mosques. Unlike many women in the world at the time, his wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law were highly educated and politically active. Timur also personally met with— and impressed— the famed Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in Damascus, and he so thoroughly mastered chess that he is said to have enjoyed a more complex variant that was named for him.
So what happened after that?
Timur died from an illness in 1405, when he was likely in his early 70s. The empire he founded lasted another hundred years, ushering in an architectural, artistic, literary and scientific renaissance across Central Asia. In Samarkand, Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, built the largest astronomical observatory in the world at the time. Even after the fall of Timur's empire, his descendant Babur re-established himself in India, founding the Mughal Empire, which would become home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population and which built such splendors as the Red Fort and Taj Mahal. Timur's legacy is still celebrated in monuments across Central Asia, where he is remembered as “Buyuk Babamiz” or “our great forefather.”
And yet today in Europe, India, and much of the Middle East, he's remembered as a butcher.
That’s more reflection of the success of his own propaganda than of the man himself.
Hold on now, I think I’ve almost got the king cornered!
Emerging from relative obscurity, Timur’s conquests formed a legacy lasting nearly 500 years that remains on trial even today.
