All right, hello there students. Welcome to our second lecture on the Mongols, or really on medieval Central Asia. Because Timur the Great, I mean he's technically a Mongol, but he's also kind of not a Mongol. We'll talk about that. But sort of this is the world created by the Mongols anyway.
So second lecture on the Mongols, the fourth of our four lectures on sort of violence in the medieval world. And next we'll move into... We'll begin transitioning towards modernity, and you'll see gestures towards that even at the end of this lecture, because Timur the Great himself is kind of a bridge between the medieval period and the modern period. And of course, once we get to the modern period, our class is over. I think this is going to be a fun lecture.
I've never actually given this lecture. I've taught this class several times and decided to add this one in new this semester. So hopefully it turns out good. I at least had fun making it, and Timur is quite fun to study. So let's talk about Timur the Great and the last Central Asian superpower.
So we've already talked about the Mongols. You should be familiar with these guys. We have one great big Mongol Empire.
After a couple disputed secessions and a civil war between Kublai Khan and a couple other pretenders to the Mongol throne, the Mongol Empire breaks into four smaller pieces. And we get the Yuan Dynasty, which basically controls China. We get the Chagatai Khanate. which controls sort of the Central Asian steppe homeland of the Mongols, right? So Mongolia and most of what would be modern-day, say, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
And then we get the Ilkhanate. The Ilkhanate controlled the Middle East, basically modern-day Persia, or modern-day Iran, sorry, so what we've been calling Persia in our class, and also parts of Mesopotamia and Anatolia. And then the fourth piece was the Golden Horde, and the Golden Horde controlled the easternmost part of Europe, which today is all Russia and Ukraine. So again, four pieces, Yuan in China, Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, the Ilkhanate in the Middle East, and the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe.
So Kublai Khan is in charge of the Yuan Dynasty. He continued trying to expand the Yuan Dynasty both south and east. So south into what would be today Vietnam and Cambodia. It didn't really work too well.
East meaning Japan. He twice attempted to invade Japan, who we haven't talked about yet in class, but we will soon. So he twice attempted to invade Japan.
Both times he failed. Once he failed due to a huge storm, he tried to invade Japan. Of course, Japan's an island, so if you're going to invade them, you need ships.
Of course, the Yuan Dynasty had ships. Remember, they needed ships to win the great big battle of Yaman to defeat the Song Dynasty. So they used their navy. They set sail for Japan.
And a huge cyclone, or a typhoon as the Japanese would call it, a huge typhoon comes and destroys the invasion fleet. And only a few ships actually make it to Japan. And the samurai warriors in Japan easily defeat the few Mongols who manage to crash land on Japan. The Japanese in legend consider this wind a divine wind.
They call it the divine kamikaze wind. The second time the Yuan Dynasty tried to invade Japan, they were again hit by a storm, but a few more made it. The battles in Japan at the time were actually kind of close to even.
But Japan sort of neutralized the natural advantages that the Mongols had. Remember, the major Mongol advantage is speed and reconnaissance. And just the nature of invading, you know, like of an...
amphibious assault on Japan sort of neutralized those huge advantages. And so Kublai Khan and the Yuan dynasty were never able to actually conquer Japan. So Japan very much prides itself on being unconquered. Another one of the four divisions of empire is the Ilkhanate right in the Middle East.
The Ilkhanate quickly converted to Islam and then it disintegrated in the 1320s due to secession issues. And By the 1320s, the Ilkhanate and that whole area, the whole basically of the Middle East, was wracked by the Black Death and the destruction wrought by the Bubonic Plague, right, that we mentioned at the end of the last lecture that killed maybe as much as, you know, 100 million people over the course of a century, right? And so the Ilkhanate then sort of basically, there's not much of the Ilkhanate left by 1320, and we'll talk about what happens to the Ilkhanate later. Timur will come visiting, let's say.
Remember the third part there is the Golden Horde. The Golden Horde that was in Russia, they too convert to Islam around 1320. While they were already in decline, they ended up losing about half of their territory to Catholic Lithuania and Poland in Europe in the 1330s through 1360s. If you'll recall from our Second Crusades lecture, the Grand Ducky of Moscow was a vassal of the Golden Horde, so they owed a Golden Horde tribute. and they would eventually revolt against the Golden Horde, defeat them in battle, and then they would go and conquer most of this land from Lithuania and Poland. So most of this land would go to Russia, say, by 1550. But it was with the Golden Horde until the 1350s or so, and then Lithuania took it, and then the Russians would take it from them.
And again, it eventually weakened to the point that vassals in the Golden Horde began to rebel. Again, most famously Muscovy's grand stand on the Ugra River that we talked about a couple lectures ago in 1480. The one part that I didn't talk about, there's four parts, the Yuan, the Ilkhanate, the Golden Horde, and Chagatai. So I haven't talked about Chagatai, the Chagatai Khanate.
So we're going to talk about them the most because that's where Timur is from. Chagatai, of course, the fourth piece of the divided empire. Like the others that we just discussed, it thrived throughout the 13th century, but it was on the decline as early as 1302. By 1350, Chagatai was a shell of its former self. It had the same problems as all the other Mongol empires. There were major secession issues, a great deal of administrative incompetence.
The Mongols weren't very good at governing. They were terrible at collecting taxes. Taxes are obviously quite important for paying for other things that were related to governing.
And the Mongols seem to be particularly prone to factionalism. Though, as we've seen throughout the semester, most societies sort of devolve into factionalism sooner or later. The Mongols just seem to do it a little earlier.
One of the reasons they have secession issues is that other major issue of the Mongols that we've discussed. They were raging alcoholics and so they died quite young. and when all your rulers die young, you typically have quite a few secession issues. The Chagatay Khanate Turkicized.
And this is an important concept and one that we will allude to a couple times, but we're not going to get into it in a lot of detail. Perhaps in future semesters, maybe I'll focus on this in a little more detail. But to Turkicize basically means adopting Turkic language and Turkic... customs. Now we've mentioned the Turks several times, right, beginning with our Crusades lectures, but the Turks, you know, come from, they're steppe nomads, right, from the Central Asian steppe, so they come from much closer to Europe than the Mongols, right, so the Mongols come from what is modern-day Mongolia, which is pretty far east on the steppe.
The Turks originally come from the Caspian Sea Basin. An area of the steppe called the Pontic Steppe, the Pontic and Turkic Steppe, which is around the Caspian Sea. Today, say, the modern-day country of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in particular would be sort of the Turkic homeland.
But the Turkic peoples would spread far and wide out of that area. And we're going to talk about several Turkic groups in this lecture. And a lecture near, you know, one of our final two lectures as well will be on Turkic groups, right? And so the Turkic groups, again, are just Turkic-speaking step nomads who usually will leave the steppe, right? So the Chagatai Khanate, they don't leave the steppe, right?
They're a steppe nomadic kingdom, right? But other parts of the other Turkic tribes would leave the steppe, right? And we talked about these, for instance.
the Seljuk Turks who fought the Crusaders. Next week we'll talk about the Ottoman Turks, who will conquer actually a great deal of Europe and be one of the great powers at the beginning of the modern era. Later in this lecture we'll talk about Turkic tribes who conquered into India and Turkic tribes who conquered into Egypt.
There's a lot of Turkic tribes. The Chagatai Khanate are not Turkic, right? They Not Turkic in terms of by birth, right? They're Mongol.
But they Turkicize, right? In other words, they adopt Turkic language and customs, and so they become Turkic over time. And again, Turkic languages, that's just a language group that includes languages obviously like Turkish today or modern-day Turkmen, right, which is what is spoken in Turkmenistan.
Uzbek, right, is another Turkic language. And then Turkic customs refer to all kinds of things, but they're mostly nomadic-like customs and, you know, refers to things like food and dress. And...
Almost all Turkic tribes by the late medieval period are Muslim, right? And so the Chagatay Khanate also converts to Islam when it Turkicizes. So basically when we say they Turkicize, it basically means they speak a Turkic language and now they're Muslim. By 1370, the Chagatay Khanate was so sort of depleted and diminished that it split into two halves, an eastern half and a western half. The western half contained sort of two regions, one small region and one big region.
The big region is called Transoxana. And in 1317, the region called Transoxana came under the rule of a military leader called Timur. So this is where Timur emerges, right?
He becomes the leader of the western half of the Chagatay Khanate, the province basically of Transoxana. in 1370. Timura would go on to become one of the greatest military strategists and conquerors in all of world history. In nearly 40 years of fighting, right, his career span nearly 40 years, he never once lost a single battle, right?
And this wasn't like some trick where he, you know, kind of almost, you know, like, you know, this wasn't like a technicality, right? It wasn't like a... He kind of lost the battle, but not really. Like, you know, think about the U.S. today, right? The U.S. has never lost a war.
I mean, really, the U.S. has lost several wars, right? Like the Vietnam War or the war in Afghanistan, right? I think most people would argue he lost the war in Iraq. You could even argue he lost the war in Korea in the 50s, right? But because of technicalities, right, the U.S. has never lost a war, right?
That's not the case here with Timur. Timur never lost a battle, and it wasn't even close, right? He easily won every battle.
If it was like a basketball game, he wasn't winning like 102 to 101 in triple overtime on a bad referee call. He was winning like 99 to 46 in regulation. He didn't just not lose a battle.
He never actually really came close to losing a battle. And so he's arguably the greatest military genius of all time. He definitely ranks right up there with Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. Cyrus the Great, Napoleon, Vogue and Giapp, and several others.
So let's talk about Timur's rise to power. Timur is born in a Turkicized Mongol tribe in central Chagatai in the late 1320s. Timur, through his propaganda, suggested that his family was poor.
Historians push back against that, and we don't think Timur is poor. family was poor his father would later become the leader of the tribe and so we we figure that timor was born a nobleman right so he's born into the upper class of his tribe but again he wanted his rise to seem more special he wanted to seem more like a plucky underdog so in his own sort of biography his own sort of like um uh commissioned or official biography that he basically paid someone to write for him right uh he he showed himself as you know poor at birth he probably wasn't born poor Sometime in his 20s, he was severely injured by two arrows. And again, we're not sure how he was injured.
There are two stories. One story argues that he was a raider. He was basically raiding on trade caravans, traveling the Silk Road and passing through Chagatai. And he and basically a gang of other, basically teenagers, would hit these trade caravans and steal some of their goods and basically run off and sell them. And that's how they made their money.
And one time as he was fleeing or while he was attacking, but during a raid, he got hit by two arrows. Another story, and this is the one that Timur himself told, but again, Timur's telling of his own life story is definitely propaganda. That doesn't mean it's not true. But it means it's framing his life in a specific way so he can be seen in a specific way that he himself is choosing. So it may not be true.
But anyway, his telling of it is that he was a sort of a low-level military commander, basically, in a tribal war and got shot during the war by two arrows. But no matter how he got hit, he got hit by two arrows on his right side. One went through his right hand around the wrist. One hit him in his right thigh as he was riding away, and then he had to ride away for several days with people pursuing him.
And so he couldn't properly see to his wounds, and by the time he was able to see to his wound, he had basically lost most use of his right hand, and his right leg was also somewhat crippled. So these two arrow wounds maim him for life, and this led to a nickname that he had, particularly among Europeans, as Tamerlane or Tamor. the lame. We try not to use that name just because, A, it's kind of mean, right? It's mean-spirited name.
And B, to me, it implies that Timur wasn't, you know, such a great threat, right? He was some, like, lame guy, but he wasn't, right? Timur, again, was sort of the greatest military power of his age.
So historians today typically say Timur or Timur the Great, and we've moved away from, you know, Tamerlane or Timur the Lame. In his 40s, he came to power during the secession crisis in western Chagatai. So remember, Chagatai split into east and west. In western Chagatai, there was a huge secession crisis in the 1360s.
And secession crisis usually means like a civil war, right? So it was a small-scale civil war. Sensing an opportunity to try to reunite Chagatai into one big whole, right?
Instead of being Eastern Chagatai and Western Chagatai, there has to be one big Chagatai. The ruler of Eastern Chagatai invaded Western Chagatai to basically take it over while they were fighting the Civil War, right? This is a pattern we've seen a lot in class. When there's a secession crisis that creates a civil war, it often leaves that society open to invasion because they're weaker or distracted or both.
And Timur was sort of sent. by the factions fighting the civil war to go take care of the invader. So Timur goes and takes care of the invader. He doesn't fight him.
He makes a deal with him. So he helps the invader from eastern Chagatai, and then that invader wins the civil war and gives Timur charge of Transakshana, which is, again, most of western Chagatai and also probably the richest province in Chagatai. From there, Timur just never really stopped increasing his profile and his power. So he more or less immediately subjugated other Chagatayan tribes, including the eastern half as well.
He won supporters in the very important trading town of Balkh. So Balkh is still a major town in sort of western Afghanistan today. It's very famous for being just sort of like this very cosmopolitan crossroads of multiple empires. And so for over a thousand years now, there's been Chinese and Persian and Russian and Indian and sort of Himalayan peoples and step nomads, of course, because it's a step pounds on the step. Passing through Balkh and of all different religions and ethnicities and languages.
And so Balkh has always been one of these great international cities. It was a very wealthy city. It was part of Transakshana, I should note. Timur sort of won over the city of Balkan. Again, there's a lot of wealthy and important people there, and this helped him win basically a power contest with his brother-in-law.
So either Timur or his brother-in-law were going to inherit all of eastern Shagatai, and his brother-in-law seemed to be like a real ass who alienated people, whereas Timur was a great politician and won over people. So this allowed Timur to sort of... take over all of eastern shogatai he changes the name of eastern shogatai to the timurid empire he's crowned the emperor of the timber empire in the city of bulk in 1370 and then goes about just conquering basically the everyone right uh and for the next 30 plus years would just make war around eurasia and adding territory to his burgeoning and ever-growing timurid empire It seems that Timur wanted to recreate the Mongol Empire and then, of course, be in charge of it. But he couldn't claim direct leadership of the Mongol Empire because there was like a rule written into the book. So you could only claim direct leadership of the Mongol Empire if you were a direct descendant of Genghis Khan.
And Timur was not a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. His brother-in-law's wife, I know that makes it sound like it was his sister, but it wasn't. His brother-in-law had multiple wives. One of his brother-in-law's wives was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, and Timur married her, but that still didn't allow him to sort of claim control over the Mongol Empire, but allowed him to sort of manipulate politics a little bit. The capital of the Timurid Empire was the city of Samarkand.
And Samarkand is a really cool city. I used to tell students that from about 1370 or so, when Timur takes power, from about 1370 to about 1450 or so, but particularly from 1400 to 1450, Samarkand was probably the most interesting place in the world to be. It's probably the most interesting city in the world. It had always been a major trading town like Balk.
It's just one of these crossroad towns on the Silk Route trading network. It's much closer to Siberia, so you get a much different kind of people passing through. Whereas Balk, you get a lot of South Asians.
In Samarkand, you get a lot of Siberian tribesmen. It would have just been a really cool place to be. Timur and his heirs will make the city even larger and more vibrant and just thriving.
And so Samarkand becomes probably the richest city in the world as well, right, in the 15th century. And again, it's a really interesting place. It's still there today, right?
It's the second biggest city in the modern day country of Uzbekistan. So as I already told you, Timur will expand to the southwest of the Timurid Empire are the small pieces of the fractured Ilkhanate, right? Remember the Ilkhanate was one of those Mongol... break off kingdoms and it had shattered in the 1320s and 1330s so it's just in like seven or eight smaller pieces.
These are very rich Persian lands that have all kinds of you know glorious trade goods and rich culture and really talented sort of artisans and artists and again just a lot of trade goods. It's the exact kind of place you would like to conquer if you wanted to be a great world conqueror. So that's where Timur goes first because it's weak and rich. And in the 1380s, Timur conquers the Persian lands of the former Ilkhanate.
Some of the cities like Herat, Herat is also in modern-day Afghanistan, but at the time was in the Ilkhanate. Herat resisted. So cities like Herat that resisted were destroyed completely. And Timur does not waste time being nice.
He very much fights like he's a Mongol. So he murdered all of the citizens of the city of Herat and made mountains out of their skulls. And he completely destroyed the city.
He destroyed every single building in Herat. It was the first Ilkhanate town that he came to. And so really it was his first sort of major battle outside of the borders of the Chagatai Khanate, where he'd been fighting for a decade already to come to power. This was his first foreign battle.
And he basically wanted Herat... to serve as an example for all of the world. This is what happens if you resist me.
Don't mess with me. Just surrender when I show up, or you'll be like Herat. He's putting basically the world on blast, to use a modern internet term. After Herat, most cities peacefully surrender, like Tehran. They were spared and would prosper, because, again, Timur brings prosperity, because he brings better trade networks, better trade deals, and just general economic...
prosperity, right? Much like we talked about in the last lecture with something like the Pax Mongolica. With the peace and stability brought by Timur, you know, you could really thrive.
Other cities try to have it both ways, right? So the city of Isfahan, for instance, surrendered peacefully. But then when Timur told them what they had to pay for taxes, they rebelled. Timur entered the city and massacred it.
We don't know precisely the death toll. It's at least 100,000 people were killed, maybe 200,000 people were killed in Isfahan. One eyewitness account of a survivor said that he personally, who came to the city afterwards, he's basically a resident of Isfahan who was out traveling and then came back to the city like a week later.
And he reports counting 28 towers of skulls, and he estimated that there were at least 1,500 skulls. and each tower i haven't done the math yet but 1500 or yeah 1500 times 28 is what 30 30 000 plus um Another 12,000, 42,000. So he counted personally 42,000 skulls.
In the middle of attacking Persia, he kind of got bored and decided he'd go take some land from the Golden Horde. So he swept north up into the Golden Horde. So again, the Golden Horde is basically most of modern-day Russia. So basically, if you think about Russia today, Russia basically consists of three major parts.
There's sort of the Russian homeland. which is from the Ural Mountains, which is kind of the border between Asia and Europe, right? So the Ural Mountains west towards Europe, right? So everything from the borders with, say, Poland and Belarus towards the Ural Mountains, that's Russia proper, right, or the Russian homeland. And then the other two parts are on the other side of the Ural Mountains, right?
The northern half is Siberia, and the southern half is the steppe, right? And so Chagatai is the steppe part. Siberia is Siberia.
So the Golden Horde then is basically the rest, right? That's Russia proper. So Timur goes up there and fights for a while against the Golden Horde.
He captures most of what is modern-day Ukraine and parts of southern Russia. He then returns to Persia and finishes them off by 1388. Again, never losing a battle. He'll come to a position of hegemony.
We've talked about hegemony before, right? This basically just means a period of undisputed dominance, right? So Timur will have a period of undisputed dominance, at least in his part of the world. In the 1390s, he begins moving into Mesopotamia.
He would capture the city of Baghdad three times. The first time he captures Baghdad was in 1390, but they would sort of wiggle out of his grasp, and he'd come back and take them again and again. After he had messed up the Golden Horde for a while, right, up there in Russia, he'd put a vassal in charge, and his vassal decided to rebel.
I don't know why anyone would rebel against Timur. It seems like a terrible idea. And Timur is about to prove that it's a terrible idea. So his vassal leading the Golden Horde rebels.
Timur goes, all right, Mesopotamia, I'll come back and murder all of you guys later. I have to go take care of this asshole in Russia. And so he leaves Mesopotamia, goes back up into Russia, and he literally chases this guy all around Russia, in Russia proper, Western Russia. They fought battles as far up as the Ural Mountains. Timur's soldiers got really upset.
So again, they're Muslims. The Muslim prayer cycle is determined by basically the day-night cycle. They were campaigning. In other words, the fighting was happening in the summer.
And they got very far north. I don't know how far north you've been, but obviously the closer you get to the North Pole, the longer day lasts in the summer. I remember one time I was camping in Scotland with my wife, and the sun went down about midnight and then rose again at like 1.30 in the morning.
So it was only an hour and a half of darkness. And so his troops got—they were so far north that— But the day was basically, there was like 20 hours of daylight. And his troops were upset because it messed with their prayer cycle. So when I say he chased this guy all over Russia, I mean he literally chased him basically to the Arctic Circle.
He chased him nearly to the North Pole. And he finally defeated his vassal in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Again, mountains that no one in Chagatai even knew existed.
Timur and no one Timur had ever known had ever been to the Ural Mountains. And there he is conquering them. By the way, as he's marching, he would come to cities and destroy the cities if they didn't surrender to him immediately. So he destroyed the city of Ryazan, he destroyed the city of Sarai, and he destroyed the city of Astrakhan. Those were three of the biggest cities in Russia at the time.
And just again, when I say destroyed them, I mean he literally destroyed them, murdered tens of thousands of people, basically all of the residents. He was on his way to Moscow and then... just for whatever reason stopped and didn't go to Moscow, but he very nearly destroyed Moscow. And in the great sort of legendary history of Russia, Russians say this is because the leader of the great Russian Orthodox church in Moscow had basically prayed for deliverance. And so basically God intervened and distracted Timur to go somewhere else.
But if he had come to Moscow, he would have destroyed the city and killed everyone there. They could not have resisted him. As a result of all this, the Golden Horde was completely devastated and never recovered.
Remember, we've alluded to this in the previous two lectures, but the country that is Russia will emerge out of being a vassal of the Golden Horde, and the reason they're able to emerge as a vassal is because the Golden Horde is weak. Why is the Golden Horde weak? Because Timur murdered basically everyone who lived there.
After this, he didn't continue on to Mesopotamia. He changed his mind. He went on to India instead.
So he basically marches around Russia for about five years. He goes back home to Samarkand around 1396. He hangs out in Samarkand for about a year and a half and then marches from Samarkand south into modern-day India, right into the Indian subcontinent, and fights the Delhi Sultanate in 1398. He fought a couple of major battles. The biggest one was the Battle of Delhi on December 17, 1398. He should not have won this battle.
He was outnumbered 3-1, and the Delhi Sultan had had these amazing battle elephants. And Timur's troops were terrified of the elephants. They had never seen elephants, and they were really scared of them.
And they probably would have broken pretty quickly if the elephants charged. And, of course, that's what the Delhi Sultan was going to do, right? They were going to charge in with elephants.
And then Timur's soldiers would retreat, and then Timur would be defeated. And Timur knows all this is going to happen because, again, he's a military genius. And so he says, I know.
I once heard that elephants scare easily. And when they get scared, it's chaos. And so how can I scare these elephants?
I know what I'll do. So he orders all the camels from his army, right, so the Timurid army. They bring forth all their camels, and they got hundreds of camels.
And he basically builds. wooden boxes on top the on the on top the camels and fills the wooden boxes with hay and straw and when the battle starts he orders the the hay lit on fire the camels obviously don't like having their backs on fire and so the camels stampede and they run at the indian army right at the delhi sultanate's army with all their elephants the elephants see the charging camels the elephants don't know what to do right imagine if you're an elephant you got hundreds of them flaming camels running at you at full speed and screaming in pain and panic, right? The elephants then panic, the elephants then stampede and destroy the army of the Delhi Sultanate. And then Timur just kind of waltzes in unopposed to Delhi. But of course he doesn't treat the city well.
Cause again, if you resist Timur, then you have to face the wrath of Timur, the Delhi Sultanate and the city of Delhi resisted. So then he sacks the city and murders more than a hundred thousand of the city's residents. And he sacked the city of Delhi. Delhi was probably the richest city in the world in 1398. If it wasn't the richest, it was among the richest.
This is quite the prize. It would help make Samarkand one of the richest cities in the world. So he sacks the city of Delhi and then goes back to Samarkand, again, undefeated in battle. This is Timur, by the way.
It looks like a... Looks like the kind of guy you wouldn't want to mess with, right? If I saw that guy coming into my classroom, I'd be like, yeah, he gets an A.
Right, so here is a map of the Timurid dynasty, right? And it's the Timurid Empire at its largest. So here's Samarkand.
The other major trading towns in this area were Bukhara and Merv, right? Merv, by the way, that's where the Abbasid revolution started against the Umayyad Caliphate. Here's poor Isfahan that was reduced to rebel. Shiraz would also be reduced to rebel.
There's Tedran, who was sensible and, you know, basically surrendered straight away. Here's the golden horde that he went up and wrecked. So technically it wasn't part of the Timurid dynasty, right? But he controlled it through, it was his vassal, right? This one, this, by the way, was the Ilkhanate.
And this is Chagatai. This is Transdakshana, part of Chagatai. Here's Balkh, where he was crowned. There's Herat, another city he completely destroyed.
So before we talk about Timur a little more, we should probably talk about the Delhi Sultanate. It's been a while since we've talked about India. And then after we talk about the Delhi Sultanate, we're going to talk about the Mamluk Sultanate because that's where Timur is going to go next.
India begins to become Islam. Islam comes to India in a big way around the year 1200. One of the great symbols of that is called Qutub Minar. So Qutub Minar is a UNESCO World Heritage site today.
But it's basically a huge Muslim temple and school complex, most famous for the Minar, right? Which is what this is. It's several hundred feet high. It's completely gorgeous.
The whole complex is just beautiful. It's about the size of like a large college campus, right? Well, not like a medium college campus.
I don't know what college campuses you've been on, but it's about the size of the University of Louisville or maybe of Yale. But it's not really big. It's not the size of Ohio State University or something or the University of Michigan. It's just basically its own city.
But it's a big complex, and you can visit it. If you're ever in Delhi, it's only a 20-minute taxi ride from the airport. I would highly recommend it. It's one of the most visited places in the whole world. Anyway, so this was like a precursor to the Delhi Sultanate.
Again, this is one of the first real pieces of evidence of Islam in India. The Delhi Sultanate itself began in 1206 as a Turkic Mamluk kingdom. So we've talked about Turkic, right? Turkic means Turkicized.
In the Indian context, Turkic means step nomadic. It also means Turkic language. It also means Islamic or Muslim. Mamluk is a new term for us.
Mamluks were slaves taken and given to Muslim noblemen or Muslim rulers, particularly Arab Muslims. And the Mamluks would be Turkish tribesmen who would be captured in warfare. And when they were captured, they weren't yet Muslim because in Islam, you're not allowed to take a Muslim slave.
But your slave can then convert to Islam and you're allowed to keep him if he converts after he's made a slave. So the Mamluks then were non-Muslim Turkic peoples who would be taken as slaves and then given to sort of Islamic noblemen or Muslim noblemen throughout the Muslim world. And because the Turks were sort of renowned as just great fighters again, they are among the greatest fighters in the world, right?
They're step nomads. They're fierce warriors. So the Mamluks basically became like a slave army that would defend Islamic kingdoms in the medieval period.
And so there are lots of Mamluks around, right? There are Mamluks all over the place. There are Mamluks as far as, say, Morocco and Malaysia, right? Just all over the world there are Mamluks.
And again, they were originally non-Muslim Turkic slaves. So the Delhi Sultanate was started in 1206 as a Turkic Mamluk kingdom. What does that mean?
That means the slaves took over, right? It started as a slave revolt. They took over a kingdom started by a guy called Muhammad Ghori.
Muhammad Ghori helped build... Manar. Muhammad Ghori was basically a Muslim conqueror who created an Islamic kingdom in Delhi in 1192. When he died, his slaves took it over and renamed it the Delhi Sultanate, and then they would run it for nearly 500 years.
There was another simultaneous or contemporaneous. Contemporaneous means happening at the same time. So I don't know. Let me think.
The Han Dynasty in China and the Roman Empire in Rome, or in the Mediterranean world, were contemporaneous. They happened at the same time. So while the Mamluks were establishing the Delhi Sultanate, there was a contemporaneous Muslim conquest of eastern India, led by a guy called Bhakti Yarkadji.
And Bhakti Yarkadji was very, what should we say, he was like an ethnocentrist. He did not appreciate Indian culture or Indian religion. He didn't like Indian people.
And so his conquest was very cruel and murdered a lot of people. It was very much trying to force his own sort of Turkic and Islamic culture and religion on the people of India. The Delhi Sultanate was not like that. The Delhi Sultanate was very cosmopolitan, very willing to embrace other ideas, other cultures, other languages, other religions.
And so in the Delhi Sultanate, Muslims and Hindus live side by side peacefully and happily. Again, not true farther east in Bhakti Arkadji's empire, which was called the Bengal Empire or the Bengal State, which not quite forcefully converted the people of eastern India, but more or less forcefully converted the people of eastern India. It was much crueler, in other words. The Delhi Sultanate, again, much more humanistic, much more open place. And the Delhi Sultanate was extraordinarily wealthy.
India is one of the more naturally rich and wealthy regions of the world, just in terms of the way that wealth was accumulated in the medieval and early modern periods. And so Delhi is sort of just bound to be rich, just because of the agricultural and trade goods that come from there. They can grow a ton of food.
They have... and really expensive trade goods like ivory, a lot of gold, a lot of gemstones, spices. Dyes, right, for dyeing clothing, dye was really important, and India is just naturally rich in those sort of goods, and so the Delhi Sultanate was also quite wealthy.
It was also famous for just beautiful architecture, right, not quite the Taj Mahal, that would be the next people after the Delhi Sultanate, but sort of the precursor to the Taj Mahal. And it also became famous in the 13th and 14th centuries as a safe haven for refugees fleeing the Mongols. I remember the Mongols begin conquering around the year 1200 or so. That's when Genghis Khan really starts conquering.
It's also around the time the Delhi Sultanate is started. And people begin fleeing the Mongols and running in every direction. Most of them the Mongols would eventually catch up to because the Mongols conquer most of the world.
But the Mongols again never... across the Himalaya. So those who fled into the Delhi Sultanate were safe, right?
This really was a major boon to the Delhi Sultanate, right? Taking in refugees is typically really good for a society because you get all kinds of new ideas. You typically get a lot of like trained craftsmen or intellectuals, right? And so it sort of boosts society, right?
You can think about the U.S., right? During World War II, the U.S. takes in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Who were some of those Jewish refugees? Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, one of the great philosophers in the world, Vladimir Nabokov, a famed novelist. So it really helped the U.S. to take in those refugees, just like it helps the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century to take in refugees fleeing the Mongols.
The Delhi Sultanate would last until 1526 when they were defeated by the Mughals. We'll talk about the Mughals again in a couple slides. If you're taking the second half of the World History Survey, you would get a whole lecture on the Mughals. The Mughals are a very, very fascinating society.
But, of course, the Delhi Sultan had to face up to Timur. Now, Timur never completely took them over. Again, they lasted until 1526. But Timur did defeat them in 1398 and stole a bunch of their wealth.
But they recovered and lasted for another 100-plus years. The next enemy after the Delhi Sultanate that Timur is going to take on is called the Mamluk Sultanate. We already told you who Mamluks are. Those are those slaves, the Turkic slaves.
The Mamluk Sultanate would start in Egypt. And in Egypt, the great leader of Egypt is a sultan. That's what you call the leader of Egypt. So the leader of Egypt was Sultan As-Sadi Ayyub. He was the last of the Ayyubid dynasty.
We talked about the Ayyubid dynasty when we were talking about the Crusades, Saladin. had started the Ayyubid Caliphate or the Ayyubid Dynasty. And so Sultan As-Siddi Ayyub would be the final caliph or ruler of the Ayyubid Caliphate or the Ayyubid Sultanate or the Ayyubid Dynasty.
Those all mean the same thing. So again, the final Ayyubid ruler. He had attained about a thousand Mamluks, right, just through conquest or as gifts.
Again, Mamluks being originally non-Muslim Turkic slaves. who were also really good at warfare. He treated his men extremely well. He basically made them government officials.
He put them all in prominent political roles all around his empire. His empire was Egypt, but also the Levant. He even controlled the Hejaz. Remember, the Hejaz is that part of northwestern Saudi Arabia, where the Prophet Muhammad had lived, and where the cities of Mecca and Medina are. So the Ayyubid caliphate then controls really, really good territory, really important, wealthy territory, territory that's very culturally and religiously important to Muslims.
He placed his mamluks in, again, prominent sort of administrative and political roles throughout his sultanate, basically to, again, keep the peace and to represent him to the people. So, again, they sort of become representatives of the government. The Sultan Salih dies in 1249. This is during the Seventh Crusade, and during the Seventh Crusade, King Louis IX of France was invading Egypt, or the Ayyubid Caliphate, basically, Ayyubid territory, as part of the crusade. So when Sultan Salih died, and he died of natural causes, he didn't die because of the crusade.
It just happened that the crusade was happening at the same time. And his son, who's supposed to inherit the throne, was away. He was off in Mesopotamia doing I don't know what.
And so basically the Mamluks were left in charge. The Mamluks then organize an army, and they meet Louis IX in battle, and they fight the Crusader army. They defeat it in two battles.
In the second battle, they completely destroyed the Crusader army. I believe 11 Crusader troops survived the second battle. They were all prisoners. One of the prisoners was...
King Louis IX. By the time they had defeated the crusader army, Sultan Salih's son had come and made himself the new sultan. He treats the Mamluks like garbage, so the Mamluks don't like him, and they assassinate him and take power themselves. So just like in the Delhi Sultanate, the Mamluks have risen to power themselves. And so we have these two great Mamluk sultanates on either end of the Islamic world.
And they controlled Egypt and the Levant until 1517. And much like Delhi... Egypt and the Levant are sort of naturally wealthy lands. They have access to great agricultural land and also just tremendous sort of trade power and trade wealth. And the Mamluk Sultan, it would be extraordinarily wealthy and got a lot of its money by making trade deals with the various Italian thalassocracies, particularly the thalassocracy of Genoa.
Again, they last till 1517 when they were ultimately defeated by the Ottoman Empire, who we'll talk about next week. We won't make it all the way to 1517. That's the modern period. So you can see here we're tying up loose ends. They were making it out of the medieval period into the modern period in this lecture. The Mamluk Sultanate became a major center of scholarship and culture.
Again, any great trade empire is a great center of scholarship and culture. Because trade means exchange, exchange leads to scholarship and ideas, to artistry, to architecture, to great writing. And most famously, the Mamluk Sultanate hosted the very, very famous Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, who's the inventor of sociology, of historiography, of economics, depending on who you ask, of archival science, depending on who you ask. One of the great scholars and sort of thinkers in world history. and lived in the Mamluk Sultanate.
So in other words, basically all of the great learning that had been done in Baghdad, I remember Baghdad was destroyed by the Mongols, so all the great learning of Baghdad sort of migrated west towards Egypt. And then at the same time as all of this is happening, the Catholics are basically reconquering Spain. So remember Spain at this time is called Al-Andalus. And Al-Andalus is also a Muslim kingdom.
But beginning in the 13th century, the Christians really began to take it over again. And so all the great scholars that were there as well, remember Al-Andalus had great scholarship, particularly in the city of Cordoba. And so all the great scholars of Cordoba and all the great scholars of Baghdad basically come to the Mamluk Sultanate. And the Mamluk Sultanate then becomes the great center of Islamic learning and scholarship. scholarship is sort of at the top of the world at the moment in the medieval period onwards so to more than we'll approach europe uh this and he's going to fight the two great muslim powers on the edge of europe right we've already talked about manluks of egypt and the levant the other great muslim power on the edge of europe are the ottomans who are in anatolia and again we're gonna have a whole lecture on the ottomans next week so i'm not going to go into a lot of detail here but the ottomans are turkic step nomads right who have come off the steppe and will conquer Anatolia and, again, a large chunk of Europe as well.
And these two great Muslim powers between Timur and Europe. So he's going to fight them. He decides to fight the Mamluks first.
He enters the Levant in 1400 and 1401. Very easily takes and sacks the cities of Aleppo and Damascus. He kills basically the entire population of Aleppo and Damascus, except the artisans. By this time, Timur has become a great patron of the arts. He really sponsors arts and artists and craftsmen of all kinds.
He spares the artisans of Damascus and Aleppo, but he forces them to move. He deports them, basically. He forces them to move to Samarkand, where they'll help him build up Samarkand and make it one of the great cities of the world.
Again, we'll talk about it in a moment, called the Timurid Renaissance. But everyone who was an artisan he killed made a mountain of those skulls, the usual stuff. In Damascus, he met Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun was one of the defenders on the walls of Damascus.
I'm a history professor. Ibn Khaldun's a history professor. You won't see me defending cities from the greatest military leader of all time, but there's Ibn Khaldun. He's definitely a more badass history professor than me is what I'm trying to say. He negotiated the surrender of Damascus to Timur to try to spare some of the city, and it was successful.
He and Timur became friends. To do the negotiations is actually a really cool story. They lowered him in a basket over the wall, right?
So he's defending on the wall of Damascus, and he wants to negotiate with Timur. And so he basically communicates that to Timur, and so they stop fighting. And they put Ibn Khaldun in the basket, and they lower him down in the basket, and he's sitting in his basket, like, hanging, like, you know, eight or ten feet off the ground.
And here comes Timur on his horse, because, you know, Timur's a Mongol, right? So he doesn't walk anywhere. Timur comes up on his horse, and the two talk.
And Ibn Khaldun is trying to negotiate the surrender. And Timur knows who he is. Again, Timur, a very learned man. a patron of the arts. He knows who Ibn Khaldun is, and they become friends.
Ibn Khaldun would then, and Timur tells him his plans, right? Timur tells him, look, I'm going to take this city and murder all the people, and then we go up to Anatolia and fight the Ottomans for a while. Their sultan is really annoying me, right? There's a huge rivalry between Timur and the Ottoman sultan, the guy called Bayezid. I'll go up there, I'll fight Bayezid for a while, and I'll take him prisoner, and I'll murder all his people.
And then we go into Egypt and... I'll take all the great cities of Egypt. I always wanted to see those pyramid things, and I'll murder all those people, and then we'll go back to Samarkand. Well, Ibn Khaldun survives the taking of Damascus, and Ibn Khaldun immediately goes to Egypt and tells all the leaders, this is what Timur is going to do. So Ibn Khaldun kind of double-crossed him.
At this point, Baghdad had revolted against Timurid rule, so after he takes Damascus, he swings over to Baghdad. takes the city a second time, kills 20,000 of the residents, makes a mountain of skulls, moves on, and finally invades the Ottoman Empire. Again, Bayezid, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, and Timur had had a rivalry.
And Bayezid was basically, because they're both Turkic nomadic conquerors, and Bayezid's like, I'm the great Turkic nomadic conqueror, and Timur goes, scoreboard, buddy, look at my territory, look at your territory. I've never lost a battle. I think I'm the great.
you know, Turkic nomadic conqueror. Bayezid's like, no, I think you, if you came over and saw my empire, you'd understand, sir, that you're wrong. So why don't you come over and try to take this empire from me? And they literally, like, it sounds like I'm making this up.
They're sending letters back and forth to one another. And they really are just like trash talking and shitting on each other. And they finally meet, right? So Timur finally invades the Ottoman Empire in 1402. Bayezid meets him outside the capital of Ankara. And they fight the Battle of Ankara in 1402. Timur completely destroys the Ottoman army.
He takes Bayezid prisoner. Bayezid would die in captivity. He then, of course, sacks the city of Ankara and murders all the people, makes a mountain of their skulls, and says, Bayezid, didn't I tell you I'm the great Turkic conqueror?
And Bayezid goes, yes, sir, you are the great Turkic conqueror. He then continues fighting throughout Anatolia. His only real battle against Christian forces.
was the city of Smyrna. So Smyrna, which is today called Izmir. Smyrna was this great sort of a crusader state, right?
It's a city that belonged to the Crusader Knights of Rhodes, right? So the Knights of Rhodes is one of these great crusader knight orders that we talked about. We talked about the Crusades. And they had conquered the Isle of Rhodes, which is just off the Turkish coast, right? Or off the coast of Anatolia, excuse me.
And they'd also conquered Smyrna, which is, you know, on the, again, on the, on the Anatolian mainland. So Timur goes and he takes the city of Smyrna, murders all the knights of Rhodes in December 1402. This is his only real fight against, again, Christians. He's going to invade on into Europe.
It's like, you know what, I heard Europe sucks. I think I'd rather take China. So he leaves it behind. He turns east, turns around, marches back home to Samarkand. He would spend the next two years or so in Samarkand planning the invasion.
of China and basically having a major celebration and just enjoying his riches before we get to China. It's at this point we actually know quite a bit about Timur in this little visit in Samarkand. Again, he's there for close to two years.
I mean, it takes him a long time to get there, right? So from the time he leaves Anatolia... on his way to Samarkand until the time he leaves Samarkand to go to China. It's been a couple years.
But the reason we know so much about it was that the king of Castile, Castile which will become Spain, it's not quite Spain yet, but the king of Castile had sent an envoy, right, like a diplomatic mission to find Timur and meet him. This is because he wanted to meet the guy who had destroyed the Ottomans, right, because the Ottomans were just wrecking Europe. The Europeans had no answer for the Ottomans at all.
And here comes this guy. Again, the Europeans don't know Timur exists. They don't know the Mongols.
They don't even know, again, they kind of know that there's a place called China. And that there's a lot of land in between Europe and China, but they don't know anything at all about any of that land. So they've never heard of Timur.
They've never heard of Chagatai. They've never heard of the Timur dynasty. And these people that they've never heard of just show up and wipe out the Ottomans, again, who had just been crushing Europe. And the king of Castile's like, I need to meet that guy.
I want him to be my friend because if he's my enemy, Castile is screwed, basically. And so he sends an envoy to go find Timur. right and so the envoy's like well where in the hell do you look for tamor right and so he talks to a bunch of you know italians because italians know everything right because they're the great traders and the italians go oh yeah he's in samarkand where's samarkand i don't know it's east somewhere right and so they basically this this envoy they just kind of make their way east slowly uh and a lot of them die of like sickness or malnutrition or dehydration but they make it right they make it all the way to samarkand and they meet tamor And Timur's like, oh, it's lovely to meet you. And, of course, they show up with all kinds of gifts.
And they bow before Timur. And they describe the bowing ritual, right? You have to bow, get on both knees. You cross your hands across your chest. And you never make eye contact with Timur.
If you make eye contact with Timur, they drag you out back and kill you. And then Timur offers them wine and throws a big feast in their name. And then he throws a big feast every day, right?
I'm talking like a big feast. Like if you went to the feast, you would get like 8,000 calories. He does this every day for months and months and months with these Castilian envoys. And then he finally says, OK, Castile, I don't know anything about you guys.
I don't care about Europe. I don't care about Castile. So it was lovely meeting you, but you guys should get out of my face. I'm going to go invade China. The Castilian envoys then return to Europe.
They make it home to Castile and they write down everything they saw and did on their journey. And we still have the writing today. This is why we know so much about Timur.
They describe his tents. So he's a steppe nomad. Steppe nomads live in tents.
They describe his tent as being so big, you could fit the entire cathedral of Rome inside it. There wasn't a European cathedral big enough that it couldn't fit inside Timur's tent. So just to sort of give you a sense of the luxury and the style of Timur. So Timur's about to go fight.
the Ming Dynasty. So remember the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol Yuan Dynasty had controlled China for a while. In the 1360s, the Chinese revolted against the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. They revolted for several reasons, right? The Yuan Dynasty were basically, again, terrible at governing, right?
There were extremely high taxes. There was a terrible inflation that sort of wiped out economic activity. The Yuan rulers...
practiced widespread discrimination against Han Chinese, right? So all of the prominent people were Mongols. And then the Yuan were also really terrible at maintaining the irrigation works, which caused massive flooding, particularly along the Yangtze River.
And so the Chinese had enough of this mismanagement and they revolt against the Yuan dynasty in the 1360s. There were literally dozens of rebel groups. One of the most important was a secret society called the Red Turban Society. Within the Red Turban Society, there emerged a new leader, a Buddhist monk called Zhu Yongzhang.
He emerges as a leader, again, just a Buddhist monk, emerges as a leader of the Red Turban Society. He captured the very important city of Nanjing, which had been the capital of the Song Dynasty. He captures the great Song city of Nanjing.
In 1356, he begins consolidating power, basically trying to make himself the dominant Han Chinese force, right? So they could take on the Yuan Dynasty himself. He does this mostly by winning another one of the competitors for the largest naval battle in all of history. Again, largest naval battle, depends on how you count it, right? But the Battle of Lake Poyang, right?
So it took place in a freshwater lake. So personally, this is my favorite of all the great naval battles because all the rest happened in saltwater. This one happened in freshwater.
It involves something like 1,100 ships and 900,000 men. Zhu Jianzhang was outnumbered three to one in terms of fighting men and in terms of ships. But he won the battle by employing something called fire ships. So basically he said he would take ships and fill them with gunpowder. and set him on fire and then he'd have the sailors jump out right and then crash him into the other side and they'd blow up he also did this thing where uh He put the very top of the mast, basically like a crude bomb.
Again, the Chinese have gunpowder, but they don't quite have guns, right? So he basically got a big ball of gunpowder. And in the ball, they throw all kinds of little bits of metal, right?
They just take ground-up copper bits and ground-up iron bits and basically make a big sticky bomb of shrapnel and gunpowder. And they put it in the very top of the mast of a ship. And the ship would sail and they would basically fight.
So these ships are full of fighting troops. And the ships basically smash into one another. And then the troops on both ships would fight each other. And then they each had cannons and they would try to dismass the other ship. So as these ships would come up to fight the enemy ships, the enemy ship would try to dismass them.
And if they dismass them, the huge bomb at the top of the mast would crash down and blow up. I can't remember the exact phrasing. You can look it up.
I think it's even on Wikipedia. I didn't find it on Wikipedia, but I think I saw it there later. But the Chinese phrasing in the Chinese annals said, and these bombs would explode and ruin everything, something like that. So this was just an insane battle.
Again, 900,000 men on 1,100 ships, some of which were fire ships. That happens in 1363. What you need to remember, other than just the fun details that are fun, what's actually important is that Zhu Yanjiang wins the battle and eliminates his chief rival for power and becomes the number one Han Chinese ruler in China. In 1368, he then marches on the Yuan Dynasty. He goes and captures the Yuan capital, which the Yuan, or the Mongols, called Dadu. He captures Dadu without a fight.
He changes his name to Beijing. And, of course, it's still called Beijing today. But the Mongols had created the city. Remember, Kublai Khan had created the city when he created the Yuan Dynasty, and he called the city Dadu. And so this, therefore, establishes the Ming Dynasty.
Zhu Yanjiang changes his name to the Emperor Hongwu. And Emperor Hongwu becomes the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. These are the people that Timur is marching to fight.
So after nine months of celebration and consolidation of power in Samarkand in 1404, Timur marches towards China. He had prepared the path ahead with supplies. This is my favorite detail. How does a Mongol horse nomadic warlord prepare for battle?
He sends farmers ahead and makes them create farms. And so it takes years and thousands of laborers, but they basically just take the whole path between Samarkand and the Great Wall of China and plant farms. And then with like wheat and stuff that horses can eat and also stuff that people can eat. Right. So they basically have like pigs and cattle and they're not pigs because they're Muslim.
But like all kinds of cattle and goats and sheep and then just grazing ground. Right. And then the horses can march through. And this is how you prepare a path ahead with supplies.
Again, just a detail I love. For reasons that we're not sure of, Timur set out in winter. This was highly unusual for Timur.
He usually fought in the spring and the weather is. particularly terrible on the, particularly on the eastern Eurasian steppe during winter. It's extraordinarily cold and snowy. The wind is particularly awful, and this was a particularly bad winter, the winter of 1404, and so thousands of Timur's troops would die of exposure or would starve because, you know, the supplies weren't ready yet. The Ming know he's coming. They had delegates in Samarkand, and he basically told them, I'm going to come kill all of you people, make mountains out of your skulls, right?
So they went back and told the Ming emperor, hey, he's going to make mountains of our skulls. So the Ming are ready. They had heavily fortified the Great Wall of China.
So the Great Wall of China by 1400 basically looks like it looks today, right? So they sort of put the finishing touches on the Great Wall of China and had particularly fortified the Jiayu Pass, which is the westernmost point. of the Great Wall of China. That's where Timur is going to hit first.
So they're ready for him. Timur never shows up. He got sick on the march and he died on February 17th, 1405. That's the end of Timur. I've already alluded to this, right, but one of the great legacies of Timur is the Timurid Renaissance. He became a major patron of the arts.
This is why he became such friends with Ibn Khaldun. Timur and his offspring were particularly fond of architecture. And under Timur, but particularly under Timur's grandson, Samarkand became an architectural wonder with dozens of beautiful buildings, most of which remain today. I'll show you a picture in a moment of Registan Square, which is the most famous.
of Timur's buildings. Again, Timur himself didn't build the buildings. Timur also loved chess and he invented his own harder variation of chess because chess was too easy for him. In particular, his two heirs, his son Shahrukh and Shahrukh's son, so Timur's grandson Ulug-Beg, continued the Timurid renaissance for another century. Shahrukh rebuilt Herat.
Remember, Herat was that first city that Timur had captured. And he completely destroyed the city, including all of the buildings. So Shah Rukh, when he ruled the Timur dynasty, he moved the capital from Samarkand to Herat.
And he rebuilt Herat and made it a great architectural wonder. One of the great architectural cities of the world at the time. Uliq Beg, again, Timur's grandson, Shah Rukh's son, became a very, very famous astronomer and mathematician.
He built one of the first astronomers. one of the first astronomical observatories. He's recognized today by historians of science as the great astronomer of the 15th century. And he's also famous for making numerous advances in particularly spherical trigonometry, but in various sort of branches of mathematics. He's a brilliant mathematician.
And he would basically govern, so in the early, so basically from 1410 to 1450, Shah Rukh. governs the whole Timurid dynasty and is based in Herat. Uligbeg was sort of the provincial ruler, like the ruler of the province where Samarkand was. He was the ruler of Transoxiana and he was the governor of Samarkand. So Uligbeg and Shah Rukh continue the Timurid Renaissance and build up Herat and Samarkand from again 1410 to 1450 or so.
The Timurid Renaissance is happening, happens a little earlier than the Italian Renaissance. It starts about 30 years earlier and ends about 30 years earlier than the Italian Renaissance, but it's often heralded as equal to the Italian Renaissance. And whereas the Italian Renaissance was much more focused on painting and sculpture and the visual arts, the Timbered Renaissance was much more focused on architecture and science. And the Italian Renaissance is much more like painting and poetry and sculpture.
So here's Registin Square, where you get another UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is one I haven't visited, but boy would I love to. And again, it was built by Ulig Beg in the late 1410s and early 1420s. This is called the Ulig Beg Madrasa.
Madrasa is an Islamic school. So Ulig Beg built the Ulig Beg Madrasa in the late 1410s. So what happens after Timur dies?
Timur had outlived his first two heirs. On his deathbed, as he's dying of sickness on the way to Ming China, he names Pir Muhammad as his new heir. And this third heir has too little support to govern, leading to a secession war.
Shah Rukh, another son of Timur, emerged as the victor of the secession war in 1409. But by this point, the Timurid Empire had lost most of its western territory, so it was basically back to the same territory. that had been Chagatai plus Persia. So it's basically Chagatai plus the Ilkhanate, and it had lost all the rest of its land. Shahrukh is the opposite of his father.
He's not at all a martial leader. He never leads troops into battle. He never fights a battle, really. But he's a great administrator and, again, an extraordinary patron of the arts.
So he focused on stabilization of the empire, on creating trade deals and trade contacts with his neighbors to establish peaceful relations. and again on patronizing the arts, and particularly again on rebuilding the city of Herat. And again, his son Ulig Beg is a great mathematician and astronomer, and Shah Rukh appoints him as the governor of Samarkand. And it's Ulig Beg again who builds Registan Square, and the Ulig Beg Madrashah in the late 1410s. Ulig Beg would succeed his father as the next Timurid Sultan from 1447 to 1449. He had no support at all from the rest of the population.
He was beloved. in Samarkand and in Transakshana, but nowhere else. And so he was very quickly overthrown and assassinated, and the Timurid dynasty breaks into civil war again. And it would never really be the same or never really be as powerful. And in 1467, the Timurids lost most of Persia to a new political power emerging there, another Turkic nomadic kingdom called Aguquianlu.
And Aguquianlu defeated the Timurids and took most of Persia from them. And from this point, the Timurids, you know, sort of declined into a very, very minor power in the middle of the Asian steppe. So what's Timur's legacy and importance, right?
This is what really matters, right? Timur wanted to recreate the Mongol Empire. He nearly succeeded. He basically had everything but China. Much like the Mongols, he left death and destruction in his wake and is responsible personally for killing about 5% of the world population at the time.
His great-great-grandson, great-great-great-grandson, Babur, would go on to found that Mughal Empire that I was talking about, right, that takes over India and becomes one of the great... empires of the world. His direct descendants make some mark and inherit important architectural and trade centers.
But most importantly, right, Timur is the bridge between the medieval and the modern periods in Asia, right? So Timur is the last of the great medieval rulers, medieval kingdoms, medieval conquerors in Asia. And what comes after him is the modern period, right?
We get modern empires, like the Mughal Empire is a modern empire. What Shah Rukh and Uliq Beg are doing in Samarkand and Herat looks much more like what modern rulers do. Again, fostering trade relationships, patronizing the arts, building beautiful buildings.
That's modern stuff. Timur is not about building beautiful buildings. Timur breaks buildings down.
Timur doesn't build buildings. He builds mountains of skulls. That's medieval. uh tomorrow is also the last of the great step nomadic warrior kings throughout the entire semester i've been talking about step nomads right china was doing something great and then step nomads came in right india was doing something great oh look step nomads well here's some cool stuff happening in uh in persia oh step nomads right here's here's europe look europe's finally recovering from the fall of rome oh step nomads right tomorrow is the last of those great steppe nomadic warrior kings who come in and just wreck shit.
They come in and constantly destabilize the lands of Europe, Russia, China, Persia, and India. And after him we get a much more stable world. The world map doesn't change as much after Timur.
We get these great conquerors. And it's not just steppe nomads who do this. Alexander the Great is also one of these great world conquerors.
We don't get any more of those. Again, the British Empire will end up being bigger than the Mongol Empire, but it's a very different kind of empire. There's no mountains of skulls. The British Empire was about making money. Timur was about controlling territory.
In the Muslim world, Timur will be followed by the three great and extraordinarily stable, what we call gunpowder empires. So the Ottomans, the Ottomans were already around, but they changed after Timur. After Timur comes in.
and basically kicks their ass, they change. So they change their empire and become one of these gunpowder empires. The Safavids will control Persia, and the Mughals, again, will control India. We call them gunpowder empires because they have muskets and cannons, and their armies are gunpowder armies, and they're very stable. Again, it's a very stable world that emerges in the modern period.
This isn't to say that it's peaceful or there's not a lot of war. There's all kinds of war. in the early modern and modern periods but it's a different kind of war and we don't get this global conquest kind of stuff like timor is pulling off and he's he's the final one of those and again there hasn't been a world conquering emperor since timor uh and so i mean i'm not nostalgic for timor right you're gonna kill five percent of the world population there's a brutal murdering maniac but at the same time right uh that is something that's gone now you're not necessarily I could be sad about it, but at least it's noteworthy.
That's all I have. Again, that's my first time giving that lecture. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did. And I'll see you next time as we start moving closer and closer to the modern period, and we'll focus on Europe.
I'll see you then.