Timurid Empire

Legacy

The Timurid courts at Samarkand and Herat sparked a brilliant flowering of Persian art, architecture and science, and Timur's descendant Babur founded the Mughal Empire.

Timeline of Timurid Empire

1. 1387
   Timur takes Isfahan, massacring the city after it revolts

   Timur, a Turco-Mongol warlord from Transoxiana, had made himself master of the western Chagatai Khanate by 1370. After the collapse of the Ilkhanate, Persia was split among rival dynasties, and from 1383 Timur set out to conquer them. When he reached Isfahan in 1387, the city surrendered and was at first treated mercifully, but its people then rose up and killed his tax collectors and soldiers, and Timur ordered a massacre. The death toll is reckoned at 100,000 to 200,000, and an eyewitness counted towers of skulls. Central Persia now came under Timur's rule.

2. 1389
   Kartid rulers removed from Herat

   The Kartid dynasty ruled Herat, a great city of Khurasan in western Afghanistan. Timur began his Persian campaign there, and when Herat refused to surrender he reduced it to rubble and massacred most of its people. The Kartid rulers then became his vassals. In 1389, less than a decade later, Timur's son Miran Shah removed them and annexed their kingdom outright. Herat was now firmly part of Timur's empire, and in the next century it became one of its two great capitals, alongside Samarkand.

3. 1393
   Timur captures Shiraz and seizes Baghdad

   In 1393 Timur turned to southern Persia and Iraq. Shiraz, the capital of the Muzaffarid dynasty, surrendered, and when the Muzaffarid prince Shah Mansur rebelled he was defeated and the dynasty was annexed. In August the same year Timur took Baghdad by surprise, marching there from Shiraz in only eight days. Its Jalayirid ruler, Sultan Ahmad, fled to Syria, where the Mamluk sultan Barquq sheltered him. Timur's empire now reached across Iraq to the edge of Mamluk Syria.

4. 1395
   Timur crushes Tokhtamysh's Golden Horde (1394–95)

   Tokhtamysh had become khan of the Golden Horde with Timur's help, but he turned against his former patron and invaded Timur's lands from 1385. After years of fighting, Timur launched a final assault in 1395 and routed Tokhtamysh at the Battle of the Terek River on 15 April. He then destroyed the Golden Horde's major cities, including its capital Sarai, Astrakhan and the Italian trading posts at Tana. The Golden Horde never recovered its former power. Timur did not keep the steppe lands, but he had broken his most dangerous rival in the north.

5. 1398
   Timur invades India and sacks Delhi

   The Delhi Sultanate was weakened by quarrels within the Tughlaq dynasty. In 1398 Timur invaded India, crossing the Indus on 30 September with an army reported at 90,000. On 17 December 1398 he defeated the army of Sultan Mahmud Shah II outside Delhi. The city, one of the richest in the world, was sacked and reduced to ruins, and Timur soon returned to Samarkand with enormous plunder. He did not try to hold India, which stayed outside his empire on the map.

6. 1401
   Damascus taken; Baghdad destroyed

   In 1399 Timur went to war with the Mamluk sultan of Egypt and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I. In 1400 he invaded Armenia and Georgia, then turned to Syria and sacked Aleppo and Damascus, where he met the historian Ibn Khaldun in 1401. In June 1401 he attacked Baghdad, which had been retaken by its former rulers, and destroyed the city and massacred its people. Timur's armies now dominated the whole region from Syria to India, though he did not try to rule Syria directly.

7. 1402
   Timur defeats and captures the Ottoman sultan at Ankara

   Timur and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I were the two great powers of the Muslim world, and they quarrelled over vassals in eastern Anatolia. In 1402 Bayezid broke off his blockade of Constantinople to meet Timur. When the armies met on the Çubuk plain near Ankara on 28 July 1402, Timur's army of about 140,000 defeated Bayezid's smaller force, as the Black Tatars and Anatolian troops deserted Bayezid and joined Timur. Bayezid was captured, the only Ottoman sultan ever taken in battle, and he died in captivity. The Ottoman state fell into a decade of civil war.

8. 1405
   Timur dies at Farab (Otrar) on his way to invade China

   After his western victories Timur returned to Samarkand and prepared to invade Ming China. In December 1404 he set out east with a large army, despite the winter. He fell ill while camped beyond the Syr Darya and died at Farab, near Otrar, on 17 or 18 February 1405, before reaching the Chinese border. He was buried in the Gur-e-Amir in Samarkand. His sons and grandsons soon began fighting over his vast empire, and its western lands began to fall away.

9. 1447
   Shah Rukh dies; the Qara Qoyunlu drive Timurids out of western Iran

   Timur's son Shah Rukh emerged victorious from the struggle for succession and ruled from 1405 to 1447, moving the capital to Herat. His reign was a golden age of art and learning, the 'Timurid Renaissance'. When he died in March 1447, his empire lost its strong central ruler. The Qara Qoyunlu, a Turkmen confederation from Azerbaijan under Jahan Shah, drove the Timurids out of western Iran and later even briefly occupied Herat in 1458. The map shrinks sharply in the west.

10. 1449
    Ulugh Beg executed after his son's revolt; civil war follows

    Ulugh Beg, Shah Rukh's son, had governed Samarkand for decades and was a famous astronomer and mathematician, who built a great observatory and a madrasa there. He became ruler on his father's death in 1447, but he was a poor politician and could not control his relatives. His own son, Abd al-Latif, revolted, and in October 1449 Ulugh Beg was overthrown and killed. His death plunged the Timurid realm into civil war among rival princes. The empire was soon divided among competing branches of the family.

11. 1469
    Abu Sa'id killed by Uzun Hasan; Persia lost for good

    Abu Sa'id Mirza, a great-grandson of Timur, reunited much of the empire in the 1450s, taking Herat in 1457. After the Qara Qoyunlu leader Jahan Shah was killed in 1467 by Uzun Hasan of the rival Aq Qoyunlu Turkmen, Abu Sa'id marched west to claim western Iran. In early 1469 Uzun Hasan defeated and captured him and handed him to a rival Timurid prince, who had him executed. The Timurids lost Persia permanently to the Aq Qoyunlu, and the empire was divided for good.

12. 1501
    Uzbeks under Shaybani Khan take Samarkand

    After 1469 the Timurid lands were split between rival princes in Transoxiana and Herat. The Uzbeks, nomads from the steppe north of the Syr Darya, were led by Muhammad Shaybani, a former soldier in Timurid service. He drove the Timurids from Samarkand in 1500. The young Timurid prince Babur briefly retook the city, but in 1501 Shaybani captured it again and took Bukhara, founding the Shaybanid dynasty. Transoxiana, the Timurids' homeland, was lost, and Babur was forced to seek a new kingdom further south.

13. 1507
    Herat falls to the Uzbeks; main Timurid rule ends

    Herat, ruled from 1469 by Husayn Bayqara, had become the last great centre of Timurid culture, home to artists and poets. Husayn Bayqara died in May 1506, and his sons were unable to resist the Uzbeks. In 1507 Muhammad Shaybani captured Herat, conquering almost all the surviving Timurid principalities. The main line of Timurid rule ended. One Timurid prince, Babur, survived in Kabul, and in 1526 he invaded India and founded the Mughal Empire.

Periods and reigns

• Timur (r. 1370–1405) 1375–1405
• Shah Rukh 1405–1447
• Ulugh Beg 1447–1449
• Abu Sa'id Mirza 1451–1469
• Husayn Bayqara (at Herat) 1469–1506

Rulers

• Timur (Tamerlane) 1370 – 1405

  Founder and conqueror

• Shah Rukh 1405 – 1447

  Ruled from Herat; patron of the arts

• Ulugh Beg 1447 – 1449

  Astronomer-king who built the Samarkand observatory

• Abu Sa'id Mirza 1451 – 1469

  Briefly reunited much of the empire

• Sultan Husayn Bayqara 1469 – 1506

  Last great Timurid; his Herat court was a cultural centre

Realms on the map

• Timurid Empire 1375–1525

Chapters

• The world in 1400: Timur's Storm
• The world in 1492: Worlds About to Collide