Timurid Empire

The last great steppe conquest, made by a man who claimed Mongol authority he did not possess and left behind an artistic legacy out of all proportion to the destruction. Timur, lamed by an early wound and known in Europe as Tamerlane, was a Turco-Mongol from near Samarkand who was not a descendant of Genghis Khan and so could never take the title of khan; he ruled through puppet khans and married into the line instead. From the 1370s he campaigned almost without pause across Iran, the Caucasus, India, Syria and Anatolia. His methods were deliberately terrifying, including towers built of skulls at Isfahan and Delhi, and the death toll has been estimated in the millions. He defeated the Golden Horde, sacked Delhi in 1398, took Damascus, and captured the Ottoman sultan at Ankara in 1402 - a defeat that delayed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople by half a century. He died in 1405 setting out to invade China. What he brought home was as important as what he destroyed: craftsmen deported to Samarkand built the Registan and the Gur-e-Amir, and the city is a World Heritage site. His descendants presided over a brilliant Persianate culture, and his grandson Ulugh Beg built an observatory at Samarkand and produced a star catalogue of lasting accuracy. The empire fragmented within a century. Babur, a Timurid prince, founded the Mughal Empire in India in 1526. The empire ran from Anatolia to the edge of India at its height. Samarkand was its capital. Timur died at around 68 after some 35 years of campaigning. Herat under his successors became a centre of Persian miniature painting.

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