Despite his extraordinary success as a conqueror, the turn of the 15th-century Turco-Mongol leader Tamerlane (or more appropriately Timur or Temür—the English derives from the Persian Temür-i lang, or “Timur the lame”) is usually considered something of an also-ran to the original Mongol empire’s founder Genghis (Chinggis) Khan. But ’twas not always thus: several centuries ago, it was Tamerlane, not his predecessor, that figured in Western culture and thought: a late 16th century play by Christopher Marlowe, Tamberlaine the Great; an opera Tamerlano by George Frideric Handel from 1724; the protagonist in Antonio Vivaldi’s 1735 opera Bajazet. The latter is based on the event that gave Timur much of his currency in the West: his defeat of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid at Ankara in 1402, which arguably postponed the fall of Constantinople by several decades if not a full half-century. But then Timur fades.
Peter Jackson’s aim in From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane is not so much to reclaim Timur from this relative obscurity—he assumes a quite knowledgeable readership—but rather to uncover how he arose amidst the decline of the Mongol Empire. This he does by marshaling an extraordinarily granular accounting of tribes, peoples, rulers and families with an equally impressive command of sources in a multitude of languages. No stone, or perhaps document, is seemingly left unturned.
Those however looking for an overview of Timur’s life and career had best go elsewhere (for example, Justin Marozzi’s Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World). From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane is not an introductory text; it is however perhaps definitive, as much as that may be possible with a subject who remains elusive.

Those who, like me, had read around the subject may well go into this thinking that what had been the Mongol empire was, by the mid-14th century, all a bit of a muddle. The erstwhile empire was fragmenting and large parts had reverted back to local rulers. Timur came largely from nowhere, conquered everywhere he could reach, from Asia Minor to India (he was about to march on Ming China when he died); yet while the Mongol empire managed to continue expanding for a couple of generations after Chinggis Khan’s death, Timur’s fragmented almost immediately: something of a flash-in-the-pan, then, albeit a hugely brutal and deadly one.
Jackson’s detailed treatment on the whole reinforces that general impression. The political situation in Central Asia from the mid-14th century was confused and confusing. Genealogical links back to the original Mongol rulers were still important (even Timur felt it necessary to rule under a puppet Khan with a proper bloodline), but diffusing. Reference was still made to Mongol yasa or töre (variably, practice, law, “rule”) in a society that was otherwise largely Islamic. Mongolian as a language seems little in evidence. Jackson sets out with admirable clarity in his introduction the questions he is addressing:
Why had the Mongol world fallen apart? In what respects had the Mongol polity in Central Asia been transformed between Chinggis Khan’s death and Timur’s rise? To what extent did Timur model his aspirations on Chinggis Khan’s achievement? How far did he manipulate Chinggis Khan’s legacy? How did his methods differ from those of his illustrious exemplar? By what means did he contrive to face down the disadvantages of being a qarachu [roughly “commoner”] rather than a prince of the imperial Chinggisid blood …? How ‘Mongol’ was his empire? And how far, conversely, did his administration conform to Islamic ideals? …
Almost without exception, the answer is “it’s complicated.”
This is no apologia for “a restlessly ambitious conqueror whose cruelty became a byword”. Jackson, other than noting that
Timur, unlike Chinggis Khan and his immediate successors, exhibited a strong interest in building magnificent structures to overawe contemporaries and posterity alike …
has little good to say about him other than noting his evident political and military competence. But what he does, or can, say helps explain. Empire per se seems not to have been the objective:
A major imperative behind Timur’s restless campaigning was the acquisition of great quantities of loot … This is why Timur’s military operations have the semblance of near-ludicrous inefficiency, inasmuch as he often had to ‘conquer’ the same region more than once. There was greater profit in simply looting cities and mulcting their populations, withdrawing, and repeating the process a few years later.
And Timur left little behind:
In comparison with the Mongol empire, Timur’s was in some respects a transient phenomenon. After his death, the dominions he bequeathed to his sons and grandsons shrank in size and split into a number of rival principalities, developments that have traditionally been blamed on his failure to leave behind a durable and effective administrative structure for his conquests.
Towards the end, Jackson asks “Why did no more Timurs burst upon the Eurasian scene?” noting that “from the sixteenth century onwards the great powers of Eurasia were located not in Inner Asia but on its periphery.” He dismisses some of the most popular theories, that the decline of nomad power was due to gunpowder or the entry of Europeans into the Indian Ocean:
what really spelled the end for steppe empires was not the challenge from seaborne commerce, but rather the loss of tribute in kind (notably in furs) and the reduction of the nomads’ profitable share in the proceeds of long-distance overland trade, as the sedentary powers of Muscovite Russia and Qing China extended their own authority over northern Inner Asia and the Siberian taiga.
Indeed, Jackson writes:
if we are to search for the most successful Inner Asian leader in the two or three centuries after Timur’s death, we must look elsewhere – further east, in fact, at the forerunner and founder of China’s Qing dynasty: the leader of the Manchurian Jurchen …
If Timur himself is almost as much of an enigma at the end of the book as at the beginning, and if 14th- and 15th-century central Asia seems even more complicated than one had thought, Jackson has at least imposed some methodology and structure on the subject.
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