The empire of Timur: map, campaigns and heirs

Timur — Amir Temur in Uzbekistan, Tamerlane in Europe — ruled Transoxiana from 1370 to 1405. In that time he assembled one of the largest states of his age, from the Caucasus and Anatolia to Delhi and from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf. His capital was Samarkand, and his descendants, the Timurids, ruled for another century, leaving cities, mosques and an observatory that still stand. Timur's empire on the globe

Who was Timur

Timur was born in 1336 near Kesh (today's Shahrisabz) into a family of minor nobles of the Turkic Barlas tribe. As a young man he was wounded in the leg and hand and walked with a limp for life — hence the Persian nickname "Timur-i Lang", "Timur the Lame", which Europeans turned into "Tamerlane".

Timur never called himself khan: by steppe custom that title belonged only to descendants of Genghis Khan. He ruled as "amir", kept Chinggisid puppet khans for form's sake, and married a Chinggisid princess so he could style himself "Güregen" — "son-in-law" of the royal house.

How the empire grew: the main campaigns

• 1370 — power in Transoxiana. Having defeated his rivals, Timur becomes master of the former Chagatai Khanate and makes Samarkand his capital.
• 1380s — Khwarazm, Khorasan, Iran. Urgench, Herat, Tabriz and Isfahan surrender or are stormed one after another.
• 1391 and 1395 — war with Tokhtamysh. The khan of the Golden Horde, once Timur's protégé, had burned Moscow in 1382 (Tokhtamysh burns Moscow). Timur crushes Tokhtamysh on the Terek broke the Horde: Timur sacked Sarai and Astrakhan, reached Yelets and turned back without marching on Moscow.
• 1398 — India. Timur sacks Delhi: the city never became part of the empire, but the raid brought loot and craftsmen who would later build Samarkand.
• 1401 — Baghdad and Damascus. Timur sacks Baghdad was among the most brutal episodes: Timur's campaigns were accompanied by mass killings, and contemporaries wrote of "towers of skulls".
• 1402 — Ankara. Battle of Ankara: Timur defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I the Thunderbolt. The Ottoman state fell into a decade of civil war — and Constantinople gained another half-century.

In the winter of 1405 Timur set out against Ming China, but fell ill and died at Otrar, aged 68.

Map of Timur's empire

At its height the empire covered, by common estimates, about 4.4 million km² — smaller than the Mongol Empire, but larger than any European state of the time. Its core was Transoxiana (between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya) and Khorasan; in the west Azerbaijan, Iraq and eastern Anatolia acknowledged him, while India, Syria and the Golden Horde were raided rather than ruled.

On the Panchronia globe, drag the timeline from 1370 to 1405 to watch the Timurid Empire grow, then further on to see it shrink to Transoxiana and Khorasan after the founder's death. The world in 1370

Samarkand, capital of the world

Timur brought craftsmen to Samarkand from every land he conquered and wanted the city to outshine Baghdad and Damascus. Tradition says he named the surrounding villages Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Shiraz, so that his capital would be "greater" than all of them.

• Timur builds the White Palace — the White Palace in his home town, inscribed "If you doubt our power, look at our buildings".
• The Bibi-Khanym Mosque — the great congregational mosque; the court historian says 95 Indian elephants hauled its stone.
• Gur-e-Amir, Timur's tomb — the mausoleum of Timur and his descendants; in 1941 the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov reconstructed Timur's face from his skull.

The Timurids after Timur

The empire split among his sons and grandsons at once, but did not vanish. His youngest son Shah Rukh moved the capital to Herat, while Shah Rukh's son Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand for forty years and became famous as an astronomer: Ulugh Beg's observatory and Registan: Ulugh Beg's madrasa are his work. His "Zij", with positions of more than a thousand stars, was the first major star catalogue since Ptolemy.

Late-15th-century Herat saw a flowering of poetry and miniature painting: Alisher Navoi wrote there, arguing that Turkic was every bit the equal of Persian (Navoi defends the Turkic language). Between 1500 and 1507 Muhammad Shaybani took Samarkand and Herat, and the Timurid state came to an end.

The dynasty did not. Timur's descendant in the fifth generation, Babur, began as ruler of Fergana, lost his homeland, went to Kabul, and after the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 founded the Mughal Empire in India. Its rulers called themselves Timurids until 1857.

What else was happening

While Timur fought Tokhtamysh, Dmitry Donskoy won the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) in Russia, the Hundred Years' War dragged on in Europe, and the Ming dynasty was consolidating its hold on China. Ulugh Beg was charting the stars in the same years that Brunelleschi's dome was rising over Florence Cathedral.

Questions