Bloody tyrant was also a scholarly charmer

Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World

by Justin Marozzi (HarperCollins, Pounds 25)

THE Amir Temur, Emperor of the Tartars, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction of the Planets, can lay claim to being the greatest conqueror the world has ever seen.

Known in Britain partly because of Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, Temur "the Lame" (he was wounded in his right arm and right leg in a skirmish as a mercenary) was famed throughout Central Asia in the late 14th century because of his quite astonishing cruelty. Yet this excellent biography brings out several other important sides of Temur's character as well as the profound depths of his horrific sadism.

The cruelty first: in the course of laying waste to vast swathes of Asia, Temur's Tartar hordes would leave huge mounds of the enemy's skulls on their battlefields, 90,000 in Baghdad, 70,000 in Isfahan, 20,000 outside Aleppo, and so on. When he captured Delhi (something that proved beyond both Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan) he ordered more than 100,000 executions. After taking one city in 1400 he had 3,000 prisoners buried alive; in another he cemented 2,000 prisoners into towers to starve to death.

By 1402, after 32 years of almost constant rapine and conquest, Temur had carved out an empire that stretched from the coast of Turkey in the west to the borders of China in the east, and from near Moscow in the north to Delhi and Baghdad in the south. The only Ottoman sultan ever to be captured (Bayazid I) was his prisoner and the list of cities that had fallen to him was as long as it was distinguished. If he had not died of natural causes in January 1405, there can be little doubt that Temur would have vanquished his newfound enemy, the Chinese emperor, too. We in the West can thank our own "fortunate conjunction of the planets" that he never marched into Europe after his great victory at the battle of Ankara.

Yet the explorer-author Justin Marozzi, whose researches for this book took him to Temur's capital of Samarkand, to Bukhara, Tashkent, and Taliban-held Afghanistan, also portrays a scholarly and rather charming Temur, someone who enjoyed theological discussions, was a chess grandmaster and a lover of history.

Temur took full advantage - who wouldn't? - of the code by which conquerors inherited the harems of those they defeated. He only had a dozen or so known wives, several of whom he married for dynastic reasons, but on campaign he "was wont to deflower virgins" by the score.

Today the Order of the Amir Temur is the highest honour that can be awarded by Uzbekistan, where after years of denigration by the Soviets, Temur is now revered. The worst abuse the Soviets visited upon him came on 22 June 1941, when his grave was opened and his body inspected for signs of lameness, which were duly found. Fulfilling Uzbek forebodings of tragedy, that very same day the news arrived of Hitler's invasion of the USSR.

By honouring chessplayers, historians and Islamic scholars greatly, showing fine personal bravery, but above all leaving magnificent architectural monuments that can still overawe six centuries later, Temur cannot be seen as simply yet another of history's bloodstained tyrants. Marozzi never seeks to downplay the monstrous viciousness that made Temur what he was, but he also provides a superbly rounded and vivid portrait of one of history's most fascinating personalities.

. Andrew Roberts edited What Might Have Been (Weidenfeld).

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