Tamerlane Sacks Aleppo and Damascus
Timur took Aleppo and Damascus in the winter of 1400 and 1401 and destroyed both. He was about sixty-four, had built an empire from Central Asia to India, and had already sacked Delhi two years earlier. The Syrian campaign was directed at the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, whose sultan had killed his envoys. Aleppo fell in October 1400 after its garrison came out to fight rather than hold the walls. The city was sacked, and Timur's practice of building towers from the heads of the dead was applied there. Damascus surrendered in January 1401 after negotiation, and the negotiation is the part that has kept the episode in the record. Ibn Khaldun, the historian, was in the city with a Mamluk expedition that withdrew and left him behind. He was lowered over the wall by rope and spent thirty-five days in Timur's camp, and wrote an account of their conversations — on the Maghreb, on genealogy, on whether Timur was the world-conqueror of prophecy. He got a safe-conduct for himself and a number of others. The city was sacked anyway. Craftsmen were deported to Samarkand, which is how Damascene steelworking and glassmaking reached Central Asia, and the Umayyad Mosque burned. Timur turned on the Ottomans the following year and captured Bayezid I at Ankara, which nearly ended that empire in its turn. He died in 1405 marching on China. Damascus took generations to recover. Ibn Khaldun's account is the closest thing we have to an interview with him. The two men had circled each other for a month, and the historian who had spent his life explaining why empires rise and fall spent it in the tent of a man demonstrating it.
- Year: 1400 CE
- Category: Military
