Tamerlane Terrorized the World While Alive, and Maybe Wreaked Havoc From Beyond the Grave
The last of the great barbarian conquerors to erupt from the Eurasian Steppe and terrify the civilized world was Tamerlane (1336 – 1405). He is remembered for his savagery, and his wide ranging rampage from India to Russia and the Mediterranean, and points in between. His depredations are estimated to have killed about 17 million people, or five percent of the world’s population at the time. That five percent figure, if extrapolated to 2018’s global population of 7.6 billion, would be the equivalent of 390 million deaths today.
Tamerlane was a Muslim Turko-Mongol who claimed descent from Chinggis Khaan. Born in the Chagatai Khanate in today’s Uzbekistan, Tamerlane’s rise began in 1360, when he led Turkic tribesmen in a power struggle following the Chagatai Khan’s murder. When the dust settled, Tamerlane was the power behind a throne occupied by a Chagatai puppet, through whom Tamerlane ruled. His claimed descent from Chinggis was questionable, but that did not stop Tamerlane from justifying his conquests as a restoration of the Mongol Empire. He claimed that he was simply reimposing legitimate Mongol rule over lands seized by usurpers.
Tamerlane then spent 35 years sowing death and destruction far and wide. Among the cities he left depopulated and wrecked were Baghdad in Iraq; Damascus and Aleppo in Syria; Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, and Ryazan, both in Russia; India’s Delhi, outside whose walls he massacred over 100,000 captives; and Isfahan in Iran, where he massacred 200,000. Among his fiendish atrocities, Tamerlane liked cementing live prisoners into the walls of captured cities, piling up pyramids of severed heads, and erecting towers of his victims’ skulls.
His greatest victory came at the expense of the Ottoman Turks, a rising power in their own right. Tamerlane and the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid had exchanged insulting for years, until Tamerlane finally showed up and defeated Bayezid in 1402. Taken captive, Bayezid was humiliated by being displayed in a cage at court, while his favorite wife was made to serve Tamerlane and his courtiers, naked.
Tamerlane’s rampage finally came to an end in 1405, when he took ill and died as he was preparing to invade China. He supposedly continued to wreak havoc even after death. Centuries after his demise, Tamerlane’s body was exhumed by Soviet anthropologists on June 19th, 1941. Carved inside his tomb were the words “When I rise from the dead, the word shall tremble“. Two days later, Germany invaded the USSR, in an onslaught that the Soviets survived only by the skin of their teeth. Just to be on the safe side, Tamerlane was reburied with full Islamic ritual in November of 1942, shortly before Operation Uranus. Tamerlane’s curse – if a curse it had been – was lifted, and the operation led to the first major Soviet victory at Stalingrad.