Thursday, 12 March 2015

Tamerlane

Timur, historically known as the Tamerlane (Timuur the Lame) was the Turko-Mongol conqueror and the founder of the Timurid dynasty in the Central Asia. Born into the Barlas confederation in the Transoxiana during the 1320s or 1330s, he gained control of the Western Chagatai Khanate by the 1370. From that base, he held military campaigns across the West, South and Central Asia and emerged as the most powerful ruler in the Muslim world after defeating Mamluks of the Egypt and Syria, the emerging Ottoman Empire, although it fragmented shortly after his death.



He is considerable the last of the great nomadic conquerors of the Eurasian steppe and his empire set the stage for the rise of the more structured and lasting gunpowder empires in the 1500s to 1600s.
Timur envisioned the restoration of the Mongol Empire of the Genghis khan. As the means of the legitimating his conquests, Timur relied on the Islamic symbol and the language, referring to himself as the Sword of the Islam during his lifetime. The army of the Timur were inclusively multi-ethnic. Timur also decisively defeated the Christian Knights Hospitaller at the Snyrna, styling himself a ghazi. By the end of his reign, Timur had also gained the complete control over the remnants of the Chagatai Khanate, I khanate, Golden Horde and even the attempted to restore the Yuan dynasty.
 Armies of Timur were throughout the Asia, Africa and Europe,sizable parts of which were laid waste by his campaigns, scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the death of the 17 million people.

He was grandfather of the Ulugh Beg who ruled the central Asia from the 1411 to 1449 and the great-great-great grandfather of the Babur founded of the Mughal Empire which ruled parts of the South Asia for the art and architecture as he interacted with the Muslim intellectuals such as  Ibn Khaldun and Hafiz-i-Abru.

Capture of Delhi:

The battle took place on 17 December 1398. Sultan Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq and Mallu Iqbal's army had war elephants armored with chain mail and poison on their tusks. With his Tatar forces afraid of the elephants, Timur ordered his men to dig a trench in front of their positions. Timur then loaded his camels with as much wood and hay as they could carry. When the war elephants charged, Timur set the hay on fire and prodded the camels with iron sticks, causing them to charge at the elephants howling in pain: Timur had understood that elephants were easily panicked. Faced with the strange spectacle of camels flying straight at them with flames leaping from their backs, the elephants turned around and stampeded back toward their own lines. Timur capitalized on the subsequent disruption in Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq's forces, securing an easy victory. Delhi was sacked and left in ruins. Before the battle for Delhi, Timur executed 100,000 captives.
The capture of the Delhi Sultanate was one of Timur's greatest victories, arguably surpassing the likes of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan because of the harsh conditions of the journey and the achievement of taking down one of the richest cities at the time. After Delhi fell to Timur's army, uprisings by its citizens against the Turkic-Mongols began to occur, causing a bloody massacre within the city walls. After three days of citizens uprising within Delhi, it was said that the city reeked of decomposing bodies of its citizens with their heads being erected like structures and the bodies left as food for the birds. Timur's invasion and destruction of Delhi continued the chaos that was still consuming India and the city would not be able to recover from the great loss it suffered for almost a century.

Just before his death, Timur designated his grandson Pir Muhammad ibn Jahangir as his successor. However, his other descendants did not abide by this wish, and spent the next fifteen years engaged in violent infighting.

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