Genghis Khan’s vast thirteenth century Asian empire had disintegrated into bickering regional states called khanates by the mid-1300s. During the closing years of the fourteenth century, however, another nomadic Mongol, born in 1336 near Samarkand in the Chagatai Khanate, embarked on a campaign of conquest which rivalled that of Genghis Khan in its territorial scope and the carnage it inflicted on communities throughout Asia.

In his thoughts and behaviour, Tamerlane represented a curious blend of idiosyncratic personal traits and cultural traditions. While not descended directly from Genghis Khan, he married two of Genghis’ descendants, and regarded the great warrior as his spiritual ancestor. Something of a mystic, he placed great store in the predictive powers of medieval astrology. He called himself "the scourge of God," believing he had been sent to earth to punish sinners. Though a devout Muslim, he drank and gambled in the tradition of a Mongol warrior. At the same time, he was keenly interested in scholarship and enjoyed such refined activities as the game of chess.

The Game of Chess

According to the Mamluk historian Ibn-Khaldun, Tamerlane was "highly intelligent and very perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also about what he does not know." He was also a dedicated patron of the arts, a role he pursued with terrifying determination. Taking care to protect craftsmen and teachers from the armies he sent to plunder foreign cities, Tamerlane’s typical practice was to herd captured artisans back to Samarkand to beautify the Chagatai capital architecturally, and adorn it with fine paintings, books, elegant metal and woodwork, and other exotica. Above all, he was a superb, ruthless and highly ambitious soldier.

Wounded in a youthful sheep-stealing escapade, Timur "the Lame" -- or Tamerlane -- possessed charismatic courage and military talent that won him many followers early in his life. By 1371, he had elevated himself into the role of Chagatai leader through both diplomacy and coercion. Between 1381 and 1405, Tamerlane and his devoted army marched through the Hindu Kush and the Caucasus Mountains, the Persian deserts, the southern Russian steppes, Anatolia and Syria, sacking cities and murdering the inhabitants as they advanced across the landscape. They pillaged Christian Georgia, a favourite target, six times. By 1395, Tamerlane had defeated the rival Mongol empire of the Golden Horde, destroying the capital of Sarai. After entering Afghanistan in 1398, the army descended into India, occupying Delhi, capital of the Islamic Delhi sultanate, and slaughtering most of the residents. The Chagatai then turned their sights westward to the territories of the Mamluks and the Ottoman Turks.

In 1400, with the aid of war elephants acquired in India, Tamerlane and his men seized Aleppo. They then moved on to storm Damascus and Baghdad, and destroy the Christian port city of Smyrna, Turkey. Tamerlane’s response to a European rescue mission sent to Smyrna after the Chagatai victory illustrates the terrifying nature of Tamerlane’s military tactics. As the fleet of rescue ships approached Smyrna’s harbour, Tamerlane had the severed heads of Smyrna’s garrison floated out to sea on candlelit dishes to warn the vessels away. In 1402, Tamerlane succeeded in capturing one of his most dangerous enemies, the Ottoman ruler Bajazet. At the time of his death in 1405, he was poised to enter China.

Tamerlane's (Timur's) Empire in 1405
© The Applied History Research Group

Tamerlane’s military goals and his empire both collapsed quickly after the charismatic leader died. The Chagatai army disintegrated and the men returned to their horse and camel herds, and flocks of sheep. More interested in conquest than in occupation, and lacking the administrative personnel and expertise to rule a diverse collection of nomadic territories and settled agrarian states effectively, his successors quickly lost control of the lands Tamerlane had overrun. Nevertheless, Tamerlane's exploits had a lasting impact on Old World history and the patterns of cross-cultural contact that crystallised in the years after his death.

Unlike Europe, India, and China, the Islamic Middle East, which bore the brunt of Tamerlane's fury, was slow to recover from the internal political, social, and economic dislocations that marked the latter half of the 1300s. Tamerlane’s exploits also helped shift the focus of cross-cultural commercial interaction from the traditional caravan roads of the Asian hinterland to the safer maritime byways of the Indian Ocean. The brief but violent fourteenth century Mongol resurgence thus contributed significantly to the conditions that transformed Portugal into a major player in the on-going drama of cross-cultural contacts in Old World history.

The European Voyages of Exploration

The nature of the military campaigns that the Mongol warrior Tamerlane conducted in the late 1300s, and the events that triggered them provide one clear illustration of the subtle ways in which armed conflict, trade and commerce, and the movement of settlers are linked together as agents of cross-cultural contact and change.