DAILY MAIL (London)
February 3, 2005
SULTAN OF BLOOD
by ANDREW ROBERTS
ENEMIES were beheaded in their hundreds of thousands, whether they
surrendered or not. In the killing fields, their heads were piled
into grotesque knolls 15ft high and 30ft wide. One historian recorded
that ‘vultures, scenting carrion, wheeled overhead, swooping down to
pluck eyes out of sockets as 20,000 expressions of abject terror,
horror, disgust and defiance stared out into a blank sky’.
This was the work of the Emperor Tamerlane, whose kingdom was founded
on blood-lust and sadism, the like of which the world had never seen.
The mere mention of his name — a derivation of Temur the Lame, after
he was wounded in his youth — instilled fear in any who stood in his
way.
Tamerlane — who was also known as Amir of the Tartars, Sword of
Islam and Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction of the Planets — died
600 years ago this month. And despite the passing of the centuries
and the litany of gruesome and worthy contenders, he is still
considered by many historians to be the most cruel and bloodthirsty
— and most successful — military conqueror ever.
When he came across a city to conquer, he put the entire population
to the sword — children as well. The women died only after they had
been raped and mutilated.
Occasionally, because he was an intellectual who spoke many languages
and enjoyed chess, he would spare historians or chess masters. But
anyone else who stood in his path was doomed.
When one town attempted rebellion during his reign of terror, its
2,000 inhabitants were taken prisoner and a tower constructed out of
their living bodies.
As one historian recalls: ‘They were piled one upon the other with
mortar and bricks, so that these miserable wretches might serve as a
monument to deter others from revolting.’
There was method in Temur’s homicidal madness; he knew that if his
‘Golden Horde’ of Tartars were so feared that people would submit to
any humiliation rather than fight them, his empire would extend
through that reputation.
And the method worked. Because of his quite astonishing viciousness,
this Tartar chieftain, who was born in 1336 but whose early life
remains a mystery, created a massive empire.
It stretched thousands of miles in every direction and reached into
the modernday Balkans, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Iran,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and even stretched to the borders of
China.
Wherever he went, he left desolation. When he marched his 100,000-
strong army into a province of Afghanistan, then known as the ‘Garden
of the East’, Tamerlane razed its capital Zaranj so completely that
even now, nearly six centuries later, it remains deserted.
THOUGH the city had surrendered, recorded historian Arabshah: ‘Temur
drew the sword upon them and billeted upon them all the armies of
death. He laid the city waste, leaving in it not a tree or a wall,
and destroyed it utterly.’
Everyone perished, ‘from persons of 100 years old, to infants in the
cradle’.
At the holy Persian city of Isfahan in 1387, he ordered every woman
prisoner’s breasts to be cut off and demanded that his 70,000
soldiers cut off one man’s head each and hand it in to his adjutants.
Some baulked at this bloody demand and paid the more enthusiastic
killers 20 dinars per head to commit the deed on their behalf. But
such was the scale of the beheading, the price per head soon fell to
half a dinar.
An eyewitness described what happened next: ‘He ordered the children
under seven years of age to be placed apart from their families, and
ordered his warriors to ride over them.
‘When his counsellors and the children’s mothers saw this, they fell
at his feet and begged that they would not kill them. He got angry
and rode himself and then they were obliged to ride over the
children, and they were all trampled upon. There were 7,000.’
The historian Hafiz-i-Abru later walked around Isfahan and counted 28
towers each built out of 1,500 severed heads.
The sacking of Baghdad in 1401 was more terrible yet. Temur built a
bridge of boats over the River Tigris and stationed his archers on it
to prevent any of the inhabitants escaping by boat.
Upriver, he besieged the city in the hottest summer known in decades.
After six weeks he attacked; the lucky inhabitants were the ones who
drowned in the Tigris trying to escape.
Arabshah records how Temur once again demanded each soldier bring him
a head, and how: ‘They brought them singly and in crowds and made the
river Tigris flow with the torrent of their blood, throwing their
corpses on to the plains, and collected their heads and built towers
of them.’
As was often Temur’s wont, scholars and historians, religious men and
chess grand-masters were not only spared, but were given ‘robes of
honour, fresh horses and safe conduct’ away from the human abattoir.
Meanwhile, 120 towers of heads were built around the ashes of the
city.
Temur’s recent and best biographer, Justin Marozzi, calculates that
in the putrid air of Baghdad’s rotting corpses, ‘this time the
vultures had 90,000 bodies to feed on’.
Although Temur described himself as ‘Ghazi, Warrior of the Faith’,
fellow Muslims could never expect better treatment than that which he
meted out to Hindus, Christians and Jews.
He was indiscriminate. In 1398 near Delhi, he ordered the massacre of
100,000 Hindus, and two years later he ordered 4,000 Armenians living
in Sivas to be buried alive.
The historian Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, writing about his conquest
of Smyrna in Turkey in 1402, recorded that ‘Tamerlane butchered the
inhabitants in an orgy of cruelty that would become legendary.
‘While the inhabitants slept, his men stealthily undermined the
city’s walls and propped them up with timber smeared with pitch. Then
he applied the torch, the walls sank into ditches prepared to receive
them, and the city lay open. Smyrna’s would-be defenders, the Knights
of Saint John, escaped to their ships by fighting through a mob of
panicstricken inhabitants. They escaped just in time, for Tamerlane
ordered 1,000 prisoners beheaded and used their skulls to raise a
monument in his honour.
‘He rode on to Ephesus, where the city’s children were sent out to
greet and appease him with song. “What is this noise?” he roared, and
ordered his horsemen to trample the children to death.’
Yet such was his military success that today the highest decoration
in Uzbekistan is the Order of Temur.
At Aleppo in Syria, surrender was attempted, but it failed to turn
away Tamerlane’s wrath, since one of his ambassadors had been
murdered there.
AS A result, related historian Ibn Taghri Birdi, ‘the women and
children fled to the great mosque of Aleppo, but Tamerlane’s men
followed them, bound the women with ropes and put the children to the
sword, killing every one of them.
‘They committed the shameful deeds of which they were accustomed;
virgins were violated without concealment; gentlewomen were outraged
without any restraints of modesty; a Tartar would seize a woman and
ravage her in sight of the people of the city; her father and brother
and husband would see her plight and be unable to defend her because
they were distracted by the tortures they themselves were suffering.’
Temur had a dozen or so known wives, several of whom he married for
dynastic reasons, but on campaign he ‘was wont to deflower virgins’
by the score.
In each devastated city, Temur took the pick of the ruler’s harem and
looted all his treasures, which were taken back to the great cities
he was building at Samarkand and Bokhara in Uzbekistan.
Once, on returning to Samarkand, he decided the portal of the great
mosque there was insufficiently lofty, so he had all the architects
involved executed.
The result was a building so magnificent that, in Lord Curzon’s words
in 1888: ‘There is nothing in Europe which can even aspire to enter
the competition.’
At the age of 69, Temur died peacefully on his way to China, where he
had hoped to humiliate the Emperor just as he had the Sultan of
Turkey — whom he had kept in an iron cage and had used as a human
footstool, and whose wife he had forced to serve him food naked.
How must the people of Central Asia and beyond have sighed with
relief when they heard that the man they called ‘The Scourge of God’
was no more.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress