Founder of the Timurid Empire, the Central Asian Conqueror Who Claimed to Be Genghis Khan’s Heir
Tamerlane (1336–1405) was of a Turkicized Mongol noble family of Central Asia, left lame for life by a wound in his youth (whence the nickname "Timur the Lame"), who by outstanding military talent and political skill gradually unified the Transoxiana region of Central Asia, then launched a series of great military conquests reaching as far as Delhi in India and the Ottoman lands of Anatolia and Syria, building a vast empire spanning Central and Western Asia. He claimed to be a son-in-law and heir of the golden lineage of Genghis Khan, seeking to revive the glory of the Mongol Empire; his conquests were often accompanied by exceedingly bloody sacks of cities and pyramids of skulls, and his historical reputation is mixed — seen both as a brutal conqueror and, for his vigorous patronage of architecture and culture that made his imperial capital Samarkand a resplendent jewel of Central Asian Islamic architecture, the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum and other buildings still representative masterpieces of Central Asian architectural history.
In 1402 Tamerlane crushingly defeated the army of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara and took him captive — this victory accidentally slowed the pace of the Ottoman Empire’s further expansion toward Constantinople, objectively winning the remaining territory of the Byzantine Empire nearly half a century of respite, a key battle of far-reaching influence in the history of Central Asia and the Near East.
Tamerlane made his capital Samarkand the most prosperous and magnificent metropolis of Central Asia of the time, conscripting skilled craftsmen from across his lands to build mosques, mausoleums, and palaces; the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum (Tamerlane’s own tomb) is famed for its exquisite blue-tiled dome, and this architectural style thereafter profoundly shaped the design concept of masterpieces such as the Taj Mahal of the Indian Mughal Empire.
The records of the sacking of cities and the piling of skull towers in Tamerlane’s conquests are often rendered by his court historians as legitimate means of deterrence, while modern historians lean rather to viewing them as exceedingly bloody war atrocities; the difference between these two evaluative perspectives is itself a typical case in the study of the writing stance of pre-modern court histories.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
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