Empire: World History - 113. Timur: Scourge of God

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Timur, known to many as Tamburlaine the Great from the iconic Marlowe play. Despite having a limp and struggling to get onto a horse, he erupted from what is now Uzbekistan at the head of a mounted army to conquer Persia and much of Eurasia. He delved deep into Russia, reached the shores of the Mediterranean after taking much of Anatolia, and conquered much of the Levant. He even sacked Delhi, in so doing surpassing Genghis Khan. His conquests were legendary, as was his brutality. Listen to William and Anita as they delve into the life of this cruel, bloody, and heartless man. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello, Empire Podcast listeners, Anita here. Look, this episode is going to be one perhaps if you're of a delicate disposition, or you've got small children or even slightly bigger children who don't like gory story. You may not want to listen to it with them. Anyway, just a friendly warning on with the show.

I see seven sky blue pillars rise out of the bare fields against the delicate, heather-coloured mountains. Down each the dawn casts a highlight of pale gold. In their midst shines a blue melon dome with the top bitten off. On close of view, every tile, every flower. every petal of mosaic contributes to its genius to the whole. Even in ruins such architecture tells of a golden age. Has history forgotten it? Strolling up the road towards the minarets, I feel, as one might feel

who has lighted on the lost books of Livy or an unknown Botticelli, these oriental Medici were an extraordinary race. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremple. So this is the wonderful passage in the Rootoxiana, which many people think is the greatest of all the pre-war travel books by Robert Barron. And the whole of the Rootoxiana is a progress towards this point where he crosses the Persian frontier and comes to Herat, somewhere, which have basically been closed off to the British, certainly a casual British travellers, until that time. And what Byron is seeing is one of the great masterpieces of Persian architecture, which has never been studied. 1933, I think he's there, has never been put into the illustrated books of the world.

And he realizes, as he walks across the fields to these extraordinary minarets, that he is discovering one of the great moments of civilization of our race. Yeah, and that certainly comes across from the writing, you know, just the sheer wonder of it, the man. of it, the surprise of it. But these are the works, the whispers of the Timurid dynasty, an extraordinary dynasty that ruled much of Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia. And I think what Byron was so surprised at was that traditionally Timor was known in Britain. It wasn't like he's an unknown quantity. Look, I mean, Tamerlane, thanks to Marlowe, Tamerlane the Great. Exactly. The scourge of God, he's called. It's one of the great sort of horror plays of the Elizabethan stage. But it is there throughout European culture, Handel wrote an opera about it,

so did Vivaldi, so did Scarlatti. So there was a point in sort of the 18th century when you had to try quite hard to avoid having Timor pop up. And in all these various media, he's famous as one of the great brutes of history. He burns down cities, he massacres populations. He puts the Ottoman emperor in a cage, which is where we last met him on this podcast series, when we were talking about at the run-up to the fall of Constantinople last year. But the extraordinary twist in the story is that Timor, who really is very nearly as bad as he's traditionally meant to be, he really is one of the great sort of mass murderers and conquerors and enslavers and burners downers and destroyers of history.

But what's extraordinary is that his grandchildren are like the Medici. They inspire extraordinary architecture, extraordinary painting. and produce in this unlikely venue of Afghanistan, what's now, it was Bekistan, Turkmenistan, and Persia, one of the great moments of human painting and the arts. And to go there, even today, I mean, I've been to Herat and Samarkand. Even today, it's very exciting to find these extraordinary masterworks in somewhere that, you know, coming from Europe feels very, very remote. We ought to really clarify, because I think most people are saying,

hang on, why are you putting him in Persia? Because the assumption is that this is a great part of Mongol history, Tamerlane, at Timor. Why in Persia? Because Timor, although he had Mongol blood through his wife, and so married into the Mongol dynasty, was himself a Turk resident in the old heartlands of Persia. Today, again, this is something we've been talking about throughout this Persian series, that today we think of Iran on the map as being sort of contained by Afghanistan to the north.

But in Persian history, Persia extends right through Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, to upmanistan, and Kazakhstan even. And all these areas were Persian speaking, were places where the great Persian epics last time we were talking about Ferdousi. And it's where Faddaozy writes about and where these great Persian epics are set. So this is historic Persia, even though today Samarkand, I suppose, is modern Uzbekistan, as is Shari Sab's, the other capital of Timor, and Herat is in Afghanistan. None of them are in modern Persia, but they are the venue of one of the great renaissances of Persian art and history. I'm going to make a very neat comment now, and I know you are going to laugh at me, but what did he look like? Well, I found one.

What did he look? Yes, that's all very well. That's all very well, William Dower. What did he look like? I found one description that said he had short fair hair like a leopard. What else do we know about what it looked like? Because that doesn't sound like this great sort of either Persian hero or Mongol hero. Well, no, he's not Fabio from McCannes. Definitely not. He is, well, I'll read the description of Archbishop John of Sultania. Oh, yes, please. We want a more comprehensive picture than just hairdo. So tell us more. So the Archbishop says he is of middling build and has the tartar countenance and a white beard al-espagnol. In other words, this is a short goatey. Pointy goatey. Yeah, coifford, yeah. Broad brow, headstrong and vigorous, possessing broad shoulders and a loud voice.

But despite being this sort of stocky, short mongle with a limp, he had obviously a magnetic personality. And one of the great sort of moments that we can focus in in his life is when he's outside Damascus. And he meets the great genius of his day, Ibn Caldun, who's from originally Algeria or certainly North Africa, and who meets him outside Damascus to plead with him or unsuccessfully to spare Damascus, which is one of the great sort of cities of the Middle East and of Islam. And Ibn Caldun is oddly impressed by him, although Timor then goes on to kill everybody almost in Damascus, except the falconers, who he's very excited by and who he sent back to Samarkar for his hunting. Ibn Caldun says that he had this extraordinary presence, was highly intelligent and very observant. So even Coulton is quite impressed by him, although Ibn Cald is a kind of polymath and a genius, and although Timor is not showing himself at his best interest. Mascus were massacring half the city. No, being a slightly murdering pillaging fellow.

But where did that intelligence come from? Because I don't think we've really done enough to put his origin story front and centre. Okay, so let me sketch us what's going on in Central Asia or in Asia at this point. When our last podcast ended, we were in the early 10th, 11th centuries with Mahmoud of Ghazni about to attack India and failing to pay for Dawsey. the gold coins that he knew he was worth, and only belatedly does he send it only to discover that the Fadaisi's dead. He's dead. We booed and hissed at him with a great deal of gusto. So since then, Central Asia witnessed a great revival of the arts of sciences, people like

Albaruni write great works in Central Asia. But this whole world receives a sort of catastrophic knock in the 13th century with the arrival of the Mongols. And Jenghis Khan rides right through Eurasia, burning, looting and pillaging. And in the aftermath of that, everything, all the pieces on the board are rearranged. Baghdad has been burnt down. The Mongols have reached as far as the Mediterranean. They penetrated into Russia. And you see slowly over the course of the 13th and 14th century, this enormous Mongol megastate, which extends literally from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, with no boundaries in between, which allows Marco Polo to travel with just one passport from Jerusalem all the way to Zanadu, Kubla Khan's great palace.

But that breaks down in the course of the 13th and 14th century. And it looks as if the days of the Mongols are over. There's a great defeat, I think, in 12th. of 60 near Gaza, fun enough, at the Battle of Aynjulut when the Egyptian Mamlux come up and passively defeat the Mongols. It looks like the Mongols are over. And then Timor comes and Timor changes everything. So he sort of tap dances on the graves of the Mongols. That's interesting. I mean, we touch on it and we ought to do a whole series on the Mongols. I think they're fascinating. Genghis Khan is such an enormous figure. I would love that. Let's do it. And a lot of

interesting books have been written about him lately, which means there's lots of interesting things to say. Well, we should do it. I'm writing it on our list. But the reason for the collapse of the Mongol Empire was what? Is it the same old story that we come across all the time here at the Empire podcast, that it's over-extension, over-ambition, and then just actually lack of money? What happened? Do we know why the Mongols suddenly imploded? So it's a problem with succession. Initially, it's just one ruler, Genghis Khan, and then it splits between his sons, and you get what's called the Ilkanid Mongols out of Sultania in Iran and various other smaller four, it's first all four Mongol kingdoms. And then it sort of disintegrates. There's the golden hoard in the Crimea.

There's Kubla Khan, who's the big boss, the Prima Sintapar is he's in Zanadu and runs the whole of China and is planning a seaborne invasion of Japan that goes badly wrong and gets caught in a storm. But Timor is on the edge of all this. Timor is not himself a Mongol. He's a barless Turk. And though he marries into the Mongol royal family and calls himself the son-in-law, Gurgin, he's not actually a Mongol himself. Oh, that's interesting. So he needs to claim the lineage because, again, that gives you the pedestal. We've seen that numerous occasions before. But there was also the small matter of the Black Death. I mean, that didn't help, did it, with the Mongol Empire. So this is a very important point. and you're quite right to bring this up. So it does affect the Mongols. The Mongols obviously are some of the people who it affects first, but it affects them less than it affects the settled city dwellers of Persia and the Levant. And you have massive deaths. In some places, it's two-thirds of the population. In other places, it's one-third, which is what it is also in Europe when it gets there on a Genoese ship at the beginning of this period. And the wipeout of some of these

great Persian cities leaves a power void which Timmore plans to fill. And Timmore himself, we said he's from a humble background. He starts off literally as a brigand, according to his enemy, is stealing sheep. He's literally a sheep stealing. Oh, it's a Robert Clive story. Got these, aren't there just sort of little echoes of people who rise to the foremost positions of power where they start from? That's interesting. Exactly that. They're always expelled from school or end up in prison young or whatever it is. They're not the ones getting A, stars, are they? Generally speaking. No, certainly not. And Timor allegedly gets his limp, which is a feature very much of his life.

He can't, for example, easily get onto a horse, which is the thing that a good Mongol leader is meant to do effortlessly. Genghis Khan could swing onto his stallion and lead his troops in battle and lead the horse archers. But Timor needs a lot of help getting onto a horse. And towards the end of his life, he's actually carried around in a litter suspended between four. asses, which is rather like sort of Cleopatra's, asses, baths, milk and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that doesn't sound, that doesn't sound too glorious. But just on his, again, this really sort of wonderful mosaic you've given us of his background, does he consider himself? I know he claims Genghis Khan's lineage. What would he call himself? If you met Timor down the pub, would he say, you know, I am a Persian, I am a Mongol. What would he call himself?

Well, he actually formally takes the title of son-in-law, Gurgen, because he's proud of his posh wife, but he's aware that he himself is not posh. Okay, all right, but he says posh wife, but he would deem himself to be a Mongol, even though actually, as you're pointing out, he is very much in this Persian story. Well, to complicate matters, I think he, though he spoke good Persian and wrote a little Persian, he wasn't particularly literate, he could read, but slowly and with effort. But actually, ethnically, he is personally a Turk, just to complicate matters again. So he's neither Mongol nor a Persian. I'm now asking a really existential, why are we here? Why are we here? Okay, it will become clear.

It will become very clear because this is a Persian story. Even though this is quite an unlikely character, although not, as we said before, you know, it was always the ruffians who would do very well in empires. He does have some early military success. Tell me about, you know, what age he is when he is. he starts to do his conquering. Well, I mean, some of the standards of some of the world conquerors that we've dealt with, like Alexander, you know, who kicks off in his teens with all his mates from the gym.

The embryo Alexander. He's not a benchmark you want to use, frankly. Timor doesn't have that. And it takes nine battles over 18 years for him to first conquer his local metropolis of Samarkand. But once he captures Samarkand and gets control of what's now, was Bekistan, which is very fertile and very central territory at this point. This is the center of the world. Then he gets going. And he erupts out into Persia, which as we say, is just recovering from a very, very bad bout of the black death. I know you have some beautiful poetry from Hafez,

who was alive at this time and describes the kind of, well, what it was like to be visited by Timor. Can you read those out for it? So the Persians in particular remember for Genghis Khan's arrival as something of complete horror. And for a hundred years, the Persians were under the Mongol foot. And by this period, by the period that Timor is capturing Samakand, everyone thinks that this is this period or hopes that this period is over, that this terrible cataclysm is now entered history, but not. And when Timor bursts out and attacks Persia, hafers, who's living in the south near Shiraz, writes, Again, the times are out of joint. The wheel of fortune is a marvellous thing.

What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring? The night is pregnant. What will the dawn bring to birth? Tumult and battle rage in the plains. Bring blood red wine and fill the cup again. Again, beautiful. And we should not throw out names of people and just assume people know who they are. But Hafez is a huge literary figure and is known in the East very, very well. When you go to Persepolis as a tourist and then go to Shiraz next door to it, the main tourist site in Shiraz is the tomb of Hafez. And it's still a place that is filled with poets and students touching Hafez's grave as if it's a sacred relic. And this is a huge. thing for Persians. The Persians love their poets and you go there and these wonderful

chikarnas, these tea houses around the outside of the tomb garden and everyone is sitting there reading Hafez to each other and it's one of the great places of Persian culture. But Hafez lives to see this terrible return of the nightmare of these great conquests. And it's a recurring nightmare because everywhere Timor goes, he leaves this trail of devastation, destruction and blood. That's just his signature. And what's clear is that he deliberately terrifies people. He wants people just to surrender, not fight. He doesn't want to have to go through endless battles. So whenever he is resisted, when a city does not hand its keys to him and offer him tribute, he just kills hundreds of thousands of people. Having burst his way through Persia and then attacked

Russia and the Mongols there and the Crimea, the Golden Horde, an invasion which rather improbably comes to a close according to Russ sources because of, and I quote, a nocturnal vision of the Virgin Mary. Who has the vision? He does. He has allegedly, according to the Russian sources. Right. Who says, can you stop doing this, please? And he says, okay. All right, then. But he really gets into form when he arrives in Delhi. And in 1398, He heads down to this very rich Delhi sultanate, which had not been conquered by the Mongols. There was a famous moment in the Mongol invasions. We'll deal with this if we do do a Mongol series. There's a wonderful scene that I'm amazed has never been filmed when the Mongols tried to take the great Delhi fortress of Tuklakabad,

which is still there today on the planes outside Delhi. And Tukukhabat is built with an incredible series of hydraulic engineering locks that, like a canal can be opened and shut. And they just let the sluices out. And so the Mongol army, with all their thousands of horses, with horse archers, which has swept around the rest of the world, is drowned by the Delhi Seltons, and they never capture it. So Tim does what Genghis couldn't do.

I mean, that's a massive plume in his hat, isn't it? And he very much sees this as the challenge that Genghis didn't manage to take Delhi, but he did. and he writes autobiography and he writes about the terror of the elephants which have terrified the mongers they know that their tiny little horses

are not going to be able to take this on By the way, just to aside, reminds me of that moment in Lord of the Rings when the hobbits first set eyes on an elephant, they think it's a mythical creature that doesn't exist and then they finally see them. Well, I mean, that trivialises the real life. I just reminded me.

This is what Timor, in 1398-ish, has to say about elephants. It had been constantly dined into the ears of my soldiers that the chief reliance of the armies of Hindustan was on their mighty elephants, which, completely encased in armour, marched into battle in front of their forces, that arrows and swords were of no use against them, that in height and bulk, they were like small mountains, while their strength was such that at a given signal, they could tear up great trees and knock down strongly built walls, and that in the battlefield, they could take up a horse and his rider with their trunks and hurl them into the air. Is that brilliant?

I'd be worried too, frankly. You can see the worry. So how does he deal with it? He talks about how he deals with it. So he does two things. He, first of all, brilliantly, he sets, I mean, he wouldn't get any marks in the RSPCA, but he sends, he loads the camel, the baggage camels of his army with haystacks, and then drives them forward and lights the haystacks.

So these camels feeling themselves burning, run faster and faster towards the elephants, which are coming towards them. And the one thing that drives elephants crazy is fire. So these sort of line of haystacks charging at the elephants drives the elephants back on their own troops. They panic and they crush the deadly armies. And then he says, this wonderful description goes on,

I gave orders to my brave fellows who were in attendance upon me, that they cut their way to the sides of the Amirs who were fighting on the forefront of battle. They brought the elephant drivers to the ground with their arrows and killed them, after which they attacked and wounded the elephants with their swords. The soldiers of Sultan Mahmoud and Malukhan, who were the two Delhi generals, showed no lack of courage and bore themselves manfully in the fight, but they could not withstand the successive onslaughts of my soldiers. Seeing their plight and that of their soldiers and elephants surrounded them,

their courage fell and they took to flight. And there's then this terrible sack of Delhi, which is remembered in Delhi's history as one of the worst moments. Can I read a little bit about what that felt like? The flames of strifeless lighted spread through the entire city from Janapana and Siri to old Delhi, consuming all they reached. The savage Turks fell to killing and plundering while the Hindus set fire to their houses with their own hands, burned their wives and children in them, and rushed into the fight and were killed. the Hindus and infidels of the city showed much alacrity in the boldness of their fighting.

I just, how many people did he have with him? I mean, to have this kind of unstoppable wave of destruction, to take Delhi too. The figures are disputed, but it is an unstoppable force of sort of quarter of a million by this stage. He's now in his stride, so to speak, and he's got these enormous armies that are completely unstoppable, all on horseback,

horse archers. And in his own account that we've just been reading there, he sets himself up very much as the champion of Islam, killing infidels. But in fact, he's twisting the facts because Delhi is already, at least in government, a Muslim city. It's ruled by Farishar Tuk. When you go to Delhi today, there is all these Tukukh citadels. There's Tukukh, and then there's the area of housecast, which today is rather so trendy restaurant area. Oh, it's a very shis-hi, very boutiquey. You can find a nice boutiquey shoe in Housecast, yeah. And a very nice momos and good Tibetan restaurants and all that sort of stuff. But anyway, that area is burnt to the ground. There's a big university there. Tim Moore Sachs it.

He goes on what one of the historians describes as a sort of plundering tourism, saying, I have that, and I like that. And oh, let's find the builders who built that because I could do with one of those in some accounts. So he strips Delhi of many of its craftsmen. And according to some accounts, this is disputed and it may well not be true, but according to some accounts, it is the weeping of the Hindus taken by Timor back to some account, which is the derivation of the Hindu Kush Mountains, the tears of the Hindus. Oh, wow. I mean, I want that to be true. I always thought it was true. Apparently it isn't, but it's a story that's told at least, even if it isn't true. It's poetic and tragic, but just numbers we can estimate. I mean, it's around 100,000 people in Delhi that he kills outright.

Is that right? And yes, and as I say, he builds this as killing infidels. But the army and this city is certainly very significantly Muslim. It's not a Hindu rule city. But anyway, this whole idea of being a champion of Islam falls apart, because the next thing he does is invade Anatolia, and this is now completely Muslim. We are going to take a break there. So join us after the break where we find out how Timor deals with Anatolia and the Levant.

Join us then. Hello and welcome back. And just before the break, we were talking about the devastation that had been reigned upon the people of Delhi. As William pointed out, largely a Muslim population by Timor, a man who said he was cleansing the land of infidels and was, what did you call it, shopping pillaging? What was it? There was a very neat phrase used. What was it? Pillaging tourism. Pillaging tourism, that's right. So you did sort of hint that his next target was going to be Anatolia. Tell us how that started. And we have sources, don't we have Armenian historians who tell us what this was like.

That's right. We got a wonderful account by the Armenian historian Thomas of Metsov, who I think is based in Arni, which is the great Armenian capital today on the boundaries of Turkey and Armenia. of it just inside modern Turkey. And having crossed into what's now Ottoman territory, the army of Timor heads for the great university town of Sivas, which was famous as one of the great centres of medicine. And there's a wonderful madrasa when you go there called the Shafaya Madrasa, which was famous for curing psychological illnesses. And people would take people from across the whole region to go to Sevas for a cure. But you didn't do that. But you didn't do that. when Timor was on the way. No, and can I just say here follows.

I mean, it is an utterly devastating part of history here. So if you've got small children in the car, you might want to just turn down the volume for the next two minutes or so because this does involve children, William, doesn't it? I've given a sufficient warning now. So can we tell this story which is just so awful? It's awful. So the people of CVAS having heard what's happened to the people of Delhi,

and knowing that Tim Moore quite liked his reputation as a champion of Islam and was keen on this, they have the clever idea of sending the children of the city out, wearing white dresses. The Muslim children. Muslim children. In white, holding each one of them a copy of the Quran and saying, we want peace. Just don't. This is, we are yours. We are of the same profit.

And does that make a jot of difference, William? Nope. Timor sends in the heavy cavalry and tramples them underfoot. Trampling children to death. He's a bastard, William. He then besieges the city, mines the wall, and storms the breaches. And at this point, the people in the city surrender and say, okay, promise us, you won't kill us. And he says, I promise I will not shed a drop of your blood.

And having made that promise, he then orders his generals to take the defenders in groups of a thousand. And he digs special pits. and he trusses them up in such a way that the defenders have their heads between their thighs and he then shoves them into the pits and buries them alive but does not shed their blood. Well, what a stand-up guy he is keeping to his promise. He does something else before that.

I mean, can I just add to the, God, this man is a bastard. First, though, he requires 9,000 virgins of both sexes to be carried off to the Imperial Haram. I mean, he's so ghastly. And then what does he leave behind in, see of us. Is there anything left after he's finished this? No, it's just burnt and left empty. And when you go to the Shafaya Madrasa and the Gok Madrasa today, these two wonderful Seljuk University buildings, they were the great Ormond Street of 13th century and 14th century Anatolia. They are destroyed by Timor and never recover. Has anyone excavated these mass graves or anything like, to your knowledge? I mean, there must have been, I suppose.

I know that the madrasas have been restored and are now very sort of fancibly displayed since my first visit. I went, I suppose, in the mid-80s for the first time to Sevas. And I've heard that now they've turned this whole area into a sort of historic park at the bottom of the hill. But Timor, anyway, doesn't stop at Sevas. He goes on in similar forms, destroys Aleppo, destroys Baghdad's. Only shakes and dervishes, he say, are exempt from the slaughter. And this is where he gets the idea of building powers of skulls. He calls them minarets because he's a good Muslim, he says,

and he builds minarets of heads facing neatly outwards with the captured and beheaded defenders. And then one of Timur's last victories was at Izmir on the Aegean coast of Turkey. And we last were in Izmir with Giles Milton at the burning of Smyr at the end of the Ottoman period. But at this period, it's still a fortress in the hands of the crusading knights' hospitlers. Now, what's the difference? Because that's really interesting. So those who don't know their knights, what's the difference between the Templars and their hospitalers? So there are two rival orders of military monks set up for the Crusaders. The Templars are based in what the Crusaders thought was the Temple,

which is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. And the Hospitlers are based, I think, in the great hospital in Jerusalem. And they're rivals, rather like the... People's front of Judea and the Judean people's front kind of situation. Monty Python Territory. This is more the knights who say near from Holy Grail. So these guys are in Smyrna and Timor again makes very short work of their castle in Bodrum. And half the knights managed to escape on their galleries because they've got, of course, Is it the island of Rhodes is the big headquarters of the Knights?

They have these fantastic fortifications on roads. And also on Koss, where I was last summer, there's the Hospitaller. Anyway, Timor sees the Knights of Spittlers fleeing in their galleys. And he says, right. Yeah, half of them. He says, okay, take the ones that we've captured, behead them, and catapult the heads into the galleys. He's so Game of Thrones, isn't he? He just overdone everything, doesn't he, this man?

We've never seen that in Game of Thrones We haven't seen catapulted heads Of Knights Templars Our producer, Calum is writing in The Orks at Ministerseth in Lord of the Rings too Can I just say this is why we all get on and say Well, we are such nerds It's a remarkable thing that any of us

Have ever found anyone to love us Because we really are just very weird Because as soon as you read that I was like, oh yes Great catapulting of head scenes in Yes, yes, that's right Yes, that happened Okay, look, so that happens. It's another one, another postcard from a bloodbath that he can send home. His big ambition was to capture what was then the richest prize of the mall, which is China.

And in 1495, he plans a devastating assault on China, which is then he calls the Chinese Emperor Fat Pig Khan. That's his name for him. And he's also, he's busy getting all his troops ready. and that's the point at which he has a premature heart attack. But he dies of natural causes, William. What is the justice in this? He just basically clutches his chest and collapses. Rather disappointingly, yeah, for the end of the movie.

But he does this in a Samarkand, which is now transformed, because for the previous 20 years, he's been taking masons and tile makers and cramacres, and craftsmen and carpenters from all the cities that he's destroyed, and brought them to his two twin cities, Samakand and Shari Subs, the Green City. And he's not just a sort of megalomaniac in war. He fancies himself as a bit of an architect.

And he plans these enormous citadels with which he gets these captured artisans, these captured craftsmen to build. And they are ridiculously massive. The arches on one of his palaces and shari subs is 73 feet in span and can be seen 25 miles away. And the pylons that support them soared up to 164 feet, the equivalence of a 14-story building today. And this is in 1495. So he has this sort of megalomania in terms of building.

It's gigantic mania is what it is. It's like, you know, everything I can build is bigger than anything anyone else can build. And then he builds a mosque in Samarkand, got the Bibby Kayam Mosque for his wife, which is two and a half times the size of an international football field. God, can you imagine being married to this fellow, though? She should probably deserve it, like something even bigger than that. But I think, you know, it's obviously quite magnificent. It's, there's an envoy from the King of Spain who comes to visit at this point. And he describes the new Axarai Palace near Samarkand.

And he says, the gateway was beautifully adorned with very fine work in gold and blue tiles, while the principal reception room was panelled with gold, and the ceiling was entirely of gold work. Even the famed craftsman of Paris would not have been able to produce such fine workmanship, he says. But that's nothing in comparison to Somercand itself and Tim was court, which was decorated with gold trees, with trunks as thick as a man's leg. and among the gold leaves were fruits which on closer inspection turned out to be rubies, emeralds, turquoise stones, sapphars, along with large, perfectly round pearls. But again, this is all slightly sort of bling, and it's designed by Timor, rather than the proper architect. So even in his own lifetime, these buildings start to collapse. And one by one, they come down.

When you go to Shari Shab's and Samakhan today, half of them are just sort of a single pylon reaching into the air with no arch and no. dome and half of them you can't go into. Incidentally, the ones in Samarkand are very, very heavily restored by the Soviets. We were talking in the great game when episodes about the Soviet conquest of this area. And one of the things they do in the early 20th century is they send in these teams of restorers who I think under Stalin's watch are sent to restore Samakun to its full glory. And they just cover everything in gold and shininess. It's like a sort of secret policeman's bathroom.

It's sort of Macabarach gold. Well, I mean, to me it sounds like he's sort of very much the Nouveau-Riche of the imperial world, where, you know, coming into an enormous amount of wealth and not necessarily having the taste of it, he just throws bling without structure. But, I mean, we're going to in the next episode talk about those who follow him, who certainly do have, you know, the taste of refinement. And this is what we talk about when we talk about the Persian Renaissance. Shall I just tell a little travel.

a traveller's tale from just to finish off this episode. Yes, I would love to. You've been to a lot of these places. I would love it. Yes, please. So a few years ago, I went to Samakand. And while these enormous mosques two and a half times the size of a football pitch are all very well, they are not only sort of slightly bad taste in that they're so overly guilt,

they're also badly over-restored by Stalin's restorers. and I heard about one surviving early Timurid mosque, which has never been fiddled with, never restored, and which is in perfect condition. And this is about four or five hours drive from Samakhan to a place called Langa Otta. And maybe I just finished today by reading about going to see this wonderful early Timurid mosque and Sufi shrine. And what was fascinating was that the Sufis had come back. They'd, of course, been banned from using the...

the shrine during the Soviet period. They'd had to pray on mountaintops. And I talked to this guy, Abu Hussein, who was the Sufi in charge of this beautiful, beautiful, perfect Timurid mosque, with immaculate, gorgeous tilework. And he said, more and more people now come to pray here. He said, pilgrims from all over, Uzbeks, Afghans, Turks, Hindustanis, Arabs, even Europeans. The whole world comes, especially on a Thursday, the Holy Day for the Sufis. And he said, the saint knows, every time we step inside this building. He knows what we wish for, and he tells God all the things we wish. 360 Sufis are buried near here, and it has very strong barricat, very strong spiritual power. Many people are cured of illness, especially of mental illnesses. Barren women become pregnant,

fevers of the sick disappear, the poor, find sustenance. And I asked him, how did the shrine escape the Soviets? And he said, it didn't. The Soviets completely closed this place down. During the Soviet time, we prayed on the mountain in tops and read the Quran but in secret. It was illegal to have a Quran. If they found one, they put you in jail. Keeping the memory of the saint alive, that is now my life. And I said, how did you do that? He said, we sing his poems. His words are remembered, wherever we pray here, we sing, and only after that can my heart find rest. Would you like to hear? And I said, I would. So Abol Sang began to sing, and he did so with all his heart, filling the shrine chamber with a beautifully strong tonic descant of minor chords,

rising to a climax and falling gently away again. He fell quiet when he had done so. His hand cups, his eyes closed, lost in prayer. Outside, you could hear the birds chattering amid the roses and the mulberry and almond blossom. Who comes here, praise to Allah, he said eventually, with their wishes always fulfilled. You pray to the saint and he tells the Lord, God sees everything.

The Soviets have come and gone, but here at last I felt I touched on, something vital and undamaged that was still strong, something that Timor would have recognised and loved. And as we were leaving, Abba Khashan said, where I'd come from. And I said, I'd come from Delhi. And his face lit up and he quoted some Persian texts by the now obscure here poet Bedel. He died in Delhi. He said, do you know his work? Do they still tend his tomb? Oh, you write good. You should write good books. That's really beautiful. No, it's lovely. Look, I think this is quite a tantalising place to leave today's podcast. Join us next week to hear about the extraordinary renaissance of Persian culture under the Oriental Medici's. Until then, goodbye from me, Anita Arnandh. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.