Timur
Timur conquered from Delhi to Ankara, killed perhaps seventeen million people, and built the most beautiful buildings of his century. He was born about 1336 near Samarkand into a minor Turkic clan of the Barlas, in the wreckage of the Chagatai khanate, and was lamed in one leg and one arm by wounds in his twenties — hence Timur the Lame, which Europe made into Tamerlane. He was not a descendant of Genghis Khan, which mattered enormously: he could not take the title of khan, so he ruled through puppet khans and styled himself emir, and legitimated his wars as the restoration of the Mongol order. The campaigns ran for thirty-five years across Persia, the Caucasus, Russia, India, Syria and Anatolia. The method was terror applied deliberately. Cities that resisted were destroyed and their populations massacred, and towers of skulls were built at Isfahan, Delhi and Baghdad as a demonstration to the next city. Delhi in 1398 took the sultanate a century to recover from; Damascus in 1401 lost its craftsmen, who were deported to Samarkand. At Ankara in 1402 he defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, which gave Constantinople another fifty years. Samarkand received everything: architects, tilework, madrasas, the Bibi Khanum mosque, and the observatory his grandson Ulugh Beg built. He died in 1405 marching on China at about sixty-eight. His tomb at Samarkand was opened by Soviet archaeologists on 19 June 1941, confirming the leg wound and the height. An inscription said to warn that whoever disturbed it would release an invader has been attached to the date ever since, since Germany invaded three days later.
- Lived: 1336 CE – 1405 CE
- Nationality: Uzbek
- Roles: military_leader, leader
