Empire On the Steppe

"From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane

By Peter Jackson

Yale, 752 pages, $40

There was a time when tribal nomads acted as the main engine of global history, upsetting empires, spurring migrations and forcing change among settled societies. In successive waves for more than a thousand years, beginning with Attila and his Huns in the fifth century, these horse-borne hordes of the steppe invaded the Eurasian plains, plundering towns and farms, killing many of their inhabitants.

From the early 13th century onward, one such tribe conquered much of the vast swath of land that stretched from China to Eastern Europe and down to the Mediterranean, as well as a substantial chunk of what is now Russia -- thus creating the largest land empire the world has ever seen. Internal squabbling, succession battles and attrition from enemy attacks eventually fragmented the Mongol Empire, which began to collapse in the middle of the 14th century. But Tamerlane, the tireless Turko-Mongol conqueror, yoked much of the Mongol domain together for one last hurrah. When he became ill and died during a winter campaign in 1405, at the age of around 70, he was in the process of gathering a sizable horde to reinvade China.

In "From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia," Peter Jackson tells us straightaway: "The title page is the last occasion in this book when the names of the two conquerors appear in that guise." It's not Genghis, but Chinggis; not Tamerlane, but Timur -- for complicated historical-linguistic reasons. And the book is never really about Chinggis Khan so much as the setting that he and his Mongols created for Timur.

The West has largely forgotten about Timur. For centuries he loomed large in its imagination, featuring as the central figure in several operas, including Handel's "Tamerlano" (1724), as well as in Christopher Marlowe's play "Tamburlaine the Great" (1590) and Edgar Allan Poe's "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). The ruler began life as an illiterate commoner before emerging as a pitiless military campaigner and a ruthless judge of men. He had 18 lawful wives, whom he whittled down to four through divorce as he became more Islamized. He was a devoted patron of the arts, especially architecture, transferring en masse the artisans of the cities he conquered to his capital of Samarkand, in modern-day Uzbekistan, where some of his monumental buildings survive today. 

His descendants, the Timurids, perpetuated his legacy by conquering India and erecting many edifices in his honor.

Timur was a Promethean figure -- and yet the book doesn't offer a linear portrait of him or anyone else. Character narratives emerge only piecemeal, although in fascinating, even startling, detail. We first glimpse Timur's leading wife, Sarai Mulk Khanim, for instance, when he kills her chieftain husband, a former friend, and marries her. We next see her -- briefly -- 40 pages later, wearing a thin veil, her face "covered with some white unguent," at the head of a royal procession of lesser wives.

Mr. Jackson, an emeritus professor of medieval history at Keele University in England, is more concerned with assembling a thematic mosaic of the Mongol era to answer big, overarching questions, thereby conveying a sense of what life felt like for both the elites and the masses. What caused the Mongol empire to fray? "It is perhaps immaterial," says the author, "whether we attribute this to the effects on royal fertility of excessive drinking and eating or to the consequences of inbreeding through to consanguineous marriage policies, or to both." 

What held it together for several generations after Chinggis? Clue: The Mongols' term for subjection "also denoted 'peace'; to have peace with the Mongols without submission was an impossibility."

 Why did Timur's empire collapse so much more quickly after his death than Chinggis's did after his? One answer: Timur ruled with "a charismatic aura" but lacked an "institutional anchor."

The full explanations are far more lengthy and often too complex for the lay reader, who has to absorb them while wading through dense thickets of polysyllabic names of warlords or places. ('Ali-yi Mu' ayyad in Sabzawar, for example, is an easy one.) But for those who persevere, a mystifying and exotic picture emerges of a time whose values seem, to us, bizarrely contradictory. The Mongols under Chinggis, while slaughtering and enslaving entire populations, were meticulously tolerant and impartial about religion. "Competing faiths," we are told, "were strictly forbidden to resort to provocation or verbal abuse." 

By the end of Timur's reign, the Mongols had become more Islamized, not least because, for Timur, invoking jihad gave his conquests greater legitimacy. But steppe customs die hard. One ally executed numerous imams who forbade him to marry his deceased father's wives.

For sheer information, Mr. Jackson's book is incomparable. 

We learn that Timur loved to gather intelligence about his rivals. He revived a courier system of relay horses that "enabled news to be transmitted extremely rapidly." He planted spies throughout enemy territory, including "merchants, craftsmen, physicians" but also "vicious wrestlers and dissolute acrobats" as well as "charming water-carriers and genial cobblers." He also deployed "deliberate disinformation," acquiring a "reputation for guile."

We learn about the weaponry of the time, about elephants with swords attached to their tusks and flaming-oil throwers. During one short campaign, Timur's army expropriated millions of sheep and hundreds of thousands of horses, camels and oxen. The spoils of war were a big reason why Timur's men followed him loyally. 

The author suggests, intriguingly, that Timur's empire may have been the last of the pregunpowder era.

The book teems with insights. Across 700-plus pages, Mr. Jackson has produced an authoritative work of uncompromising erudition, likely to be a definitive study of the subject for many years to come." [1]

1. Empire On the Steppe. Kaylan, Melik.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Mar 2024: A.15.