(12) TIMURID CONQUESTS & INVASIONS (1370-1405)

 

The wars of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur or Tamurlane were the last of the great horse blitzkriegs – “the last of the major nomadic conquerors of the Eurasian Steppe” mauling other states of such formidable reputation as the Golden Horde, Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottomans, and Delhi Sultanate. He was even eyeing off Ming China before his death.

If I were to pick which of the four major successor states to the Mongol Empire were to rival its reputation in conquest, I would have picked any of the other three – the Golden Horde, the Yuan Dynasty in China, or the Ilkhanate in Persia – before the runt of the litter, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Of course, by the time of Timur, the Ilkhanate had disintegrated into fragmentation, and the Yuan had fallen to the new Ming Dynasty, but even then I would have gone with the Golden Horde.

I certainly wouldn’t have picked the Chagatai Khanate to defeat the Golden Horde – nor to defeat the Mamluks who had defeated the OG Mongol Empire or the Ottomans who had just started to steamroller their way up the Balkans, but then I hadn’t reckoned on the Timurnator (heh)

“The Timurid conquests and invasions started in the late 14th century with Timur’s control over the Chagatai Khanate and ended at the start of the 15th century with the death of Timur. Due to the sheer scale of Timur’s wars, and due to the fact that he was generally undefeated in battle, he has been regarded as one of the most successful military commanders of all time. These wars resulted in Timur’s supremacy over Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus, the Levant, and parts of South Asia and eastern Europe, and they also resulted in the formation of the short-lived Timurid Empire”.

Timur gained control of the western Chagatai Khanate (in Transoxiana) but because he was not descended from Genghis Khan, he ruled under the title of Amir through a puppet Khan, although he was to marry a descendant of Genghis (the widow of his defeated opponent) and style himself as the son-in-law of Genghis Khan. He also styled himself as the Sword of Islam, although ironically his major opponents were the other major Islamic states of Eurasia.

As the Sword of Islam and in the Mongol family tradition, he unleashed all hell across Eurasia, with casualties estimated in the millions. Timur gained control of the western Chagatai Khanate in 1370 and for the next thirty five years he conquered the remnants of the Ilkhanate in Persia and “led a series of military campaigns defeating the Khans of the Golden Horde, the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria, the emerging Ottoman Empire, as well as the Delhi Sultanate in the Indian subcontinent…these conquests led to the creation of the Timurid Empire, which fragmented shortly after his death.”

Shortly before his death, Timur “had even attempted to restore the Yuan dynasty” in China.

The Golden Horde never recovered from Timur, disintegrating into smaller khanates that were ultimately swallowed up by the Russian state. While the Ottomans were defeated by him – giving the Byzantine Empire some small respite before its death – they bounced back to bigger and better things.

As for the Delhi Sultanate, “Delhi’s conquest was one of the greatest victories of Timur, arguably surpassing Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan, because of the harsh conditions of the journey and the achievement of taking down the richest city of the world at the time. Delhi suffered a great loss due to this and took a century to recover.”

Even after that century, Timur still conquered India from beyond the grave – or more precisely through one of his descendants, his great-great-grandson Babur, who conquered India to forge arguably the most powerful imperial state in the subcontinent prior to the British, the Mughal Empire, which survived even in decline to the nineteenth century.