The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (28 page)

Although Toktamish escaped
, his major cities—Sarai and Astrakhan—were taken and looted.

Southwest (1393)

Persia again.

Northwest (1395)

Toktamish again.

Southeast (1398–99)

In the summer of 1398 Timur set out to punish his fellow Muslim, the sultan of Delhi, for tolerating all cultures and letting Hindus walk around free, which Timur considered an affront to Islam. By December, he had crossed all of the mountains, deserts, and rivers that separated India from the rest of the world, and led his army down onto the plain of Punjab. As he pushed on through India, he accumulated thousands of Hindu prisoners to be brought home as slaves.

Timur’s army overwhelmed the forces of the sultan under the walls of Delhi, defeating their war elephants with the flaming camel tactic described earlier. During the battle, Timur heard his prisoners cheering the Indian attacks, so he had them killed—100,000 of them, according to the chronicles. He originally planned to spare Delhi, but as his soldiers looted and raped their way across the fallen city, fights and scuffles broke out with the inhabitants. This coalesced into a full riot against the invaders, which Timur put down with typical ruthlessness. Around 50,000 citizens were massacred, and their heads were stacked up outside the four corners of the city. He then hauled off all the treasure that had accumulated in this great capital over the years, along with tens of thousands of new slaves.

West (1400–4)

In October 1400, Timur struck west. Having reduced Persia from great empire to mere shortcut, he swept through and attacked beyond it. He took all of the major cities in his path, and buried alive the garrison of Sivas. He destroyed Aleppo and piled up 20,000 heads. Then he pillaged, burned, and depopulated Damascus in March 1401.

Showing uncharacteristic mercy, he resettled some defeated Turkmen soldiers in Syria. Homesick, they tri
ed to sneak back to their native land, supporting themselves by robbery. Timur caught them near the city Damghan and piled their bloody heads out in the countryside. A Spanish diplomat to Timur’s court described passing them: “Outside Damghanat the distance of a bowshot we noticed two towers, built as tall as the height to which one might cast up a stone which were entirely constructed from men’s skulls set in clay. Besides these there were other two similar towers, but these appeared already fallen to the ground in decay.” These towers were said to emit supernatural flames in the night for years after that.
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A small force sent to secure Baghdad had made no headway, so Timur returned with his full army and beseiged it for six weeks. On an unbearably hot day, when the defenders retreated to the shade, Timur struck. After the city was secured, Timur ordered every one of his warriors to bring him a severed head—some sources say two. Only clergy and scholars were spared the massacre. When it turned out that there were fewer inhabitants of Baghdad than Timur’s quota, heads were taken from the Mongols’ own camp followers, prostitutes, and personal slaves, because no one dared defy a command from Timur. The Mongols leveled every secular building and surrounded the ruins with 120 towers, assembled from 90,000 heads altogether, while Timur made a pilgrimage to a nearby shrine to pray.
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The westward invasion brought Timur into conflict with the Ottoman Turks, who were busy erasing the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. The Turkish sultan, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, had crushed a string of enemies in both Europe and Asia, and all he needed to cap off his career and be proclaimed the greatest warrior in the history of Islam was to take Constantinople, seat of empire, valve of the Black Sea, and gateway to Europe that had held against Muslim invaders for centuries.

Then, in 1402, Timur’s hordes came thundering out of the east and Bayezid had to abandon his siege of Constantinople to stop him. Bayezid marched out with a huge battle-hardened army and caught up with Timur at Ankara. It was a tough battle, and several units of Bayezid’s disgruntled conscripts switched over to Timur’s side, throwing the Ottoman position into chaos. Bayezid was defeated and captured along with his entourage. Timur had unwittingly saved Europe from the Turks for half a century.

Many stories are told of the
humiliation that the ex-sultan suffered at the hands of Timur. They say Bayezid was kept on public display in a cage, that his wife was forced to serve meals to the court naked, that Timur used him as a footstool.
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These stories are probably not true because they didn’t appear until late in history. The earliest available historians claimed that Bayezid was well treated.

Upon reaching the far coast of Anatolia (the peninsula of Turkey), Timur laid siege to the Knights of Rhodes in the Christian city of Smyrna, which held for a few weeks and then fell to the customary massacre and pillage. When a Christian fleet later arrived to assist the knights by breaking the siege, Timur taunted them and proved that they were too late by catapulting the severed heads of the former defenders onto their ships.

Amir Timur

Timur had great respect for scholars and attracted many to his court. He commissioned magnificent Korans from the finest calligraphers. He was also a chess master, and the most complicated version of the game is still named after him. In Tamerlane chess, the board has nearly twice as many spaces as regular chess and more pieces, such as elephants that jump two squares diagonally and giraffes that move one diagonal and three straight.

Like most tyrants, Timur imposed strict and swift justice in his domains, and he was not prone to weighing subtleties. When Timur returned from his war against the west and heard that the governor of Samarkand had been oppressive and gree
dy in his absence, Timur had the governor hanged. All of this man’s ill-gotten gains were taken into the treasury. There’s no great surprise in any of this, but Timur then hanged an influential friend of the governor’s who had tried to buy the governor’s freedom. Then Timur hanged yet another official who had interceded on behalf of the governor. After that, everyone got the message.
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His simplistic approach to problem solving shows up again and again: “Timur now gave orders that a street should be built to pass right through Samarqand, which should have shops opened on either side of it in which every kind of merchandise should be sold, and this new street was to go from one side of the city through to the oth
er side, traversing the heart of the township. . . . No heed was paid to the complaint of persons to whom the property here might belong, and those whose houses thus were demolished suddenly had to quit with no warning, carrying away with them their goods and chattels as best they might.”
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Endgame

Now seventy-one, Timur had crushed the two most powerful empires in Asia: Delhi and the Ottomans. He had conquered in every direction but one: eastward into China. The native Ming dynasty led by Zhu Yuanzhang had recently tossed the Mongols out of China, and Timur decided that this could not be allowed to stand. With a new army, he set out to restore the empire of Chinggis Khan, but old age caught up with him and he died in 1405 before he got his army across the border.

The significance of Timur’s conquests—however huge, bloody, and colorful—is minor and full of ironies. He was a
devout Muslim who almost exclusively destroyed Muslim enemies, and it was the losers in his wars who established true legacies while Samarkand became a desert backwater under forgotten khans.
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The Ottomans regrouped and dominated the Middle East for a half millennium. The Golden Horde and its Tatar successors blocked Russian expansion into the steppe for several centuries. Timur’s most lasting impact is that one branch of his descendants forged its own destiny as the Mughals of India (see “Aurangzeb” for details).

One final story is told about Timur. It involves his own severed head. In 1941, hoping to make the definitive portrait of Timur, the Soviet scientist Mikhail Gerasimov opened his tomb and took away his skull for facial reconstruction. Locals had warned him that a curse awaited any lord who disturbed the tomb of Lord Timur. Gerasimov scoffed and proceeded with his tomb robbery. Within a couple of days, the curse came true, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The new Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan is rehabilitating Timur as a national hero. A magnificent equestrian statue of hi
m now dominates the main square of the capital city, Tashkent, replacing the bust of Karl Marx that had been there in the late Soviet era, which had replaced the earlier statue of Stalin, which replaced the original tsarist statue of Konstantin Kaufman, Russian conqueror of Central Asia. Apparently, this plaza has never honored a likeable person.
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CHINESE CONQUEST OF VIETNAM

Death toll:
probably not 7 million
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Rank:
61

Type:
war of conquest

Broad dividing line:
China vs. Vietnam

Time frame:
1406–28

Location:
Vietnam (also called Dai Viet or Annam at the time)

Who usually gets the most blame:
China

W
HEN HO QUY LY, THE CHIEF MINISTER OF DAI VIET (MEDIEVAL VIETNAM)
, usurped the throne in 1400, he smoothed it over diplomatically with his neighbors—especially China—by swearing that no heir remained from the previous Tran dynasty. Then an outcast Tran prince ruined everything by showing up in China to ask the Ming for their help in restoring his family to the throne. The Chinese mobilized 800,000 troops in their southern provinces during the summer of 1406 and invaded Vietnam.

In previous invasions southward, Chinese troops experienced difficulty defeating the war elephants of Southeast Asian armies, but now they h
ad horses disguised as lions and primitive guns shooting fire arrows to drive them back. The Chinese invaders overran most of the country, and in the middle of 1407, they captured and executed the current king of Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly’s son. They put their man on the throne, restoring the Tran dynasty.
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But then the Chinese wouldn’t go home. They began to establish new administrative districts with tax offices, salt offices to enforce the monopoly, Confucian schools, and Buddhist registries. When the king of Vietnam insisted that it really was time for the Chinese to leave, war erupted. It was a confusing rebellion, with a new leader of the Tran dynasty popping up every time the Chinese killed the old one. In 1413, the last of these, Tran De Qui Khoang, was beaten in battle and captured, later committing suicide.

The Chinese took direct control of Vietnam and set out to eradicate the native culture. “Chinese dress and customs were imposed on the people; women were compelled to wear short pants and vests; people had to wear long hair; public instructions were taught in Chinese while Vietnamese books were suppressed.”
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The people were brutally overworked to extract the country’s resources.

An aristocratic landowner, Le Loi, rose in rebellion, but his forces were quickly scattered by the Ming in 1418. He regrouped and rebuilt his army deep in the inaccessible mountains. They hid in remote areas of the country, moving out occasionally to ambush Chinese forces for supplies. If that didn’t work, they ate their horses or scrounged wild rice and grass.

Over the next ten year
s, Le Loi wore down the Chinese by attacking isolated garrisons and supply convoys and then retreating into the mountains when larger forces arrived. By paying off corruptible officials, Le Loi gained additional supplies and breathing space. Finally, the Chinese gave up and abandoned the country to Le Loi, who established the Le dynasty in 1428.