The National Library of Spain preserves one of the most fascinating travel books from the Late Middle Ages, following the tradition of other illustrious literary travelers such as Marco Polo, John Mandeville, Ibn Battuta, and others. It is impossible to determine who authored it, with speculation suggesting that it might have been King Henry III of Castile himself, as he was the one who sent the diplomatic mission described in the text. However, the credit for writing it is generally given to the man who led the odyssey, the nobleman Ruy González de Clavijo. Written in 1406 and preserved in the National Library, it is titled Embassy to Tamerlane and recounts how Clavijo traveled across Central Asia to seek an ally against the Ottomans in the ruler of the Timurid Empire, the great Tamerlane.

This was not the first encounter between Castilians and Tartars. Henry III the Suffering sent an initial embassy in 1402, comprising the knights Pelayo de Sotomayor and Fernando de Palazuelo. They reached the Timurid court, were received by Tamerlane, and returned with an ambassador who carried a letter for the king. Additionally, they brought back two Spanish women who had been rescued from Ottoman captivity, as Sotomayor and Palazuelo had the opportunity to witness the Battle of Angora (Ankara), in which the Turco-Mongol leader defeated the army of Sultan Bayezid.

Henry III was delighted with the favorable reception of his proposal and organized a second embassy, led by the royal chamberlain, the aforementioned Ruy González de Clavijo. He was joined by the guard Gómez de Salazar and the friar Alonso Páez de Santamaría. They departed from Puerto de Santa María and took three years to reach their destination, Samarkand, crossing the Mediterranean with stops in the Balearic Islands, Gaeta, Rome, Rhodes, Chios, Constantinople, Trebizond, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Uzbekistan, and more. Not all of them survived the journey; the friar passed away along the way.

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Ruy González de Clavijo in an 1860 lithograph by Rufino Casado. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

They were received by a septuagenarian Tamerlane, who hosted them in his court for two and a half months before sending them back, laden with gifts and having tacitly accepted the alliance proposed by Castile. However, the Turco-Mongol leader died before Clavijo returned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 1406 (where he allegedly began writing the aforementioned book). Pir Muhammad Mirza, Tamerlane’s grandson and heir amid the deaths and challenges among his sons, was unable to maintain the empire’s unity as a destructive succession war broke out.

In fact, the Timurid Empire was a personal achievement of Tamerlane, bearing the name of the eponymous dynasty, also called Gurkani, a term derived from the word gurkan or kuragan, meaning “son-in-law”. This was due to the Timurids’ marital connection to Genghis Khan, as Tamerlane married one of his descendants. It was their main honorific title, and the empire was known locally as Gurkani or Turan. The clan had Turco-Mongol origins, Sunni Muslim faith, and a culture heavily influenced by Persia.

The Timurids were what remained of the old Mongol Empire of Genghis after its dissolution. They were a confederation of tribes called Barlas, established in Transoxiana, Uzbekistan, and southern Kazakhstan, in what was known as Mogolistan (or Mugolistan). Their integration with local peoples had considerably Turkified them. The dynasty’s eponymous founder was Tamerlane himself, whose real name was Timur Beg Gurkani (Timur, or Temur, means “Iron”). He was the son of Taraghai, emir of Kesh, in the Chagatai Ulus (the khanate of Genghis’s second son). He was born in that city, though the exact date is uncertain, likely in the third or fourth decade of the 14th century.

The story of Timur’s marital connection to Genghis through his wife is questionable, as it is unclear if she truly descended from the Mongol emperor. Similarly, Timur’s claimed blood relationship with Tumbinai Khan, a common ancestor he supposedly shared with Genghis, is also doubtful. It should be noted that the term “wife” here refers to only one of the forty-three he had, including concubines. Even his mother, Tekina Khatun, adds an element of uncertainty, as although she is linked to the Mongol leader in some accounts, she is rarely mentioned in sources, suggesting she may have been of humble origin.

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Forensic reconstruction of Tamerlane’s face. Credit: shakko / पाटलिपुत्र / Wikimedia Commons

Timur’s childhood was somewhat turbulent. Along with a group of friends, he attacked travelers to steal their goods and livestock. On one occasion, this resulted in two arrow wounds: one to his leg and another to his hand. The former left him permanently lame, and the latter caused the loss of two fingers, rendering him partially disabled. This earned him the Persian nickname Temūr Lang, from which the name by which we know him today, Tamerlane, derives—meaning Timur the Lame. However, some sources suggest he sustained these injuries not through robbery but while fighting as a mercenary for the khan of Sistan in southwestern Afghanistan.

Despite these adversities, he overcame his circumstances. According to legend, while lying wounded among ruins with an arrow in his leg, he observed an ant persistently attempting to carry a grain up a wall. The insect fell repeatedly but continued its efforts, finally succeeding on the seventieth try. This inspired Timur to persevere in adversity. By his thirties, he had become a military leader who, despite his disabilities, led his forces in a series of mostly victorious wars over more than three decades.

He started by participating in numerous campaigns of the Emir of the Chagatai Khanate, Qazaghan, invading the Iranian region of Khorasan, conquering the Uzbek city of Urgench, seizing the region of Khwarezmia (south of the Aral Sea), and devastating Volga Bulgaria. Qazaghan was assassinated, and while disputes arose over his succession, the territory was invaded by Tughlugh Timur, the Khan of Kashgar (Eastern Chagatai). Timur, sent to stop him, ended up joining him and was rewarded with the governorship of Transoxiana.

Shortly afterward, his father passed away, and Timur succeeded him as leader of the Barlas. This was too much for Tughlugh, who attempted to replace him with his son, Ilyas Khoja, but Timur had already seized power and had no intention of relinquishing it. He defeated Tughlugh’s forces and became the ruler of the entire Chagatai Khanate. Some opposed him, such as Amir Husayn, his brother-in-law and former comrade-in-arms, but in exchange, he gained the favor of many social classes that Husayn had burdened with taxes and confiscations, which Timur cleverly returned to win them over.

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The Timurid Empire created by Tamerlane. Credit: HetmantheResearcher / Wikimedia Commons

Both eventually clashed on the battlefield, with Timur prevailing. He married Husayn’s widow after the latter’s death shortly thereafter. She was the aforementioned Saray, a presumed descendant of Genghis Khan, and with this union, they were both accepted as leaders of the Chagatai. However, not directly, as Timur was not from that lineage and thus could not rule. Therefore, he appointed a puppet, Suyurghatmish, related to Jochi (Genghis’s firstborn), while he governed from behind the scenes with the title of emir and strengthened his lineage by taking as his second wife the princess who passed on the title of güregen (royal son-in-law).

To also achieve religious power, he needed the caliph’s appointment, but this was also forbidden to him as he was not from the Islamic lineage. Since this was more difficult to overcome, he decided to follow the Islamic tradition of self-investing in ethereal titles he would receive directly from Allah, such as Sahib Qiran, meaning “Lord of the Conjunction”, referring to the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, which augured a new era and thus transformed him into both a kind of messiah and a spiritual heir of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law.

In other words, Timur was the de facto leader of the Barlas tribes, and as emir (equivalent to general), he began an expansion process that occupied him for three and a half decades, extending his domains to nearly eight million square kilometers from Iraq and Turkey to almost India, including Syria, the Middle East, parts of Russia, Central Asia… The fame of these unstoppable conquests, combined with the fact that even the Ottoman Empire faced difficulties, reached the West, which is why Henry III proposed the aforementioned alliance.

Timur is considered a military genius who commanded a formidable multi-ethnic army that operated like a well-oiled machine. However, his conquests were not aimed at creating a true empire but rather at emulating Genghis Khan and seizing the riches of each place without establishing local political structures or delegating authority. Thus, while he managed to maintain loyalty in the conquered territories during his lifetime, his empire lacked continuity after his death. Of course, he did not hesitate to order brutal massacres: it is estimated that he caused the deaths of seventeen million people, approximately five percent of the world’s population at the time.

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Exterior view of Tamerlane’s mausoleum in Samarkand. Credit: AChubykin / depositphotos.com

However, he offset his warrior ferocity with intellectual pursuits. Despite being illiterate, he made an effort during his travels to learn Persian, Mongolian, and Turkish languages—although he failed with Arabic—and he was a patron of art and religion. He supported scholars such as Ibn Khaldun, Hafez, and Hafiz-i Abru (to the point that his era is known as the Timurid Renaissance), founded Islamic educational institutions, and converted local leaders to that faith. In reality, he was not a nomadic steppe dweller like his claimed ancestors but a self-made monarch whose motto was rāstī rustī, roughly translating to “truth is security”. Some even credit him with erudition in chess, attributing the invention of the so-called Tamerlane chess variant to him.

Above all, he was a warrior who caused a genuine upheaval in his time. To form the Timurid Empire, he first had to defeat Tokhtamysh, Khan of the Golden Horde, who had previously sought Timur’s help against Muscovy but later turned against him. Tokhtamysh was defeated and ultimately lost his throne in 1395 after a second insurrection. Meanwhile, Timur conquered Persia, taking advantage of its power vacuum and ongoing civil war; this campaign took him ten years, from 1383 to 1393. He then felt strong enough to embark on the conquest of the Delhi Sultanate in 1398.

He achieved this easily, partly because the ruling Tughluq dynasty, in power since 1320, was in decline, partly because the enemy aristocracy surrendered without a fight, and partly because of the fear he inspired. News spread like wildfire that he had ordered the execution of 100,000 captured slaves and that, to counter the fear his men felt toward the war elephants of Sultan Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah Tughluq, he sent fire-laden camels, causing panic among the elephants and making them flee in terror, turning against their own ranks.

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Tamerlane visits his prisoner, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, artwork by Stanislaw Chlebowski. Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Then he exterminated thousands of jats (peasants and shepherds who used to raid caravans) and plundered the extremely wealthy city of Delhi, enslaving its inhabitants. To suppress a rebellion born out of the people’s desperation, he carried out a massacre, leaving such a vast number of corpses—arranged into macabre structures—that, it was said, the stench of their decomposition could be perceived from afar. Ironically, one of his great-great-grandsons, Babur, would become the founder of the Mughal Empire in the 15th century, ruling over most of the Indian subcontinent.

In 1399, it was time to confront the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, who had begun annexing territories in Anatolia. Timur responded by conquering Georgia, Armenia, and Syria, the latter at the expense of the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. Massacres and mass deportations marked that campaign, as Timur ordered each soldier to return from the front with at least two enemy heads as trophies; if they weren’t warriors, the heads of prisoners or family members sufficed. The war in that region ended in 1401 with the capture of Baghdad; Anatolia was next.

In July 1402, Bayezid was defeated at the Battle of Ankara, an event attended by the first Castilian envoys as privileged witnesses. The sultan himself was captured and died shortly thereafter in captivity, perhaps regretting the insulting letters he had exchanged with his adversary. Timur reinstated the Seljuks to the throne, whom he considered legitimate because the Mongols had once elevated them. Bayezid’s son, Mehmed Çelebi, was left as a vassal and even had to mint coins in the name of the victor.

However, despite his good diplomatic relations with Castile, Timur considered himself a ghazi or warrior of Islam and soon proved it. The Hospitaller Knights of Smyrna were the first to experience this, exterminated in 1402. Next in line might have been the Genoese and Venetians, whose ships were rescuing Ottomans by ferrying them to Thrace, having heard the terrifying stories circulating and preferring a familiar bad enemy over an unknown worse one. But something interfered.

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The black sarcophagus where the mortal remains of Tamerlane rest. Credit: aljber / depositphotos.com

It was the capture of Baghdad by Qara Yusuf of the Kara Koyunlu dynasty (a Shiite tribal confederation), who nevertheless could not retain the city against the counterattack led by Abu Bakr ibn Miran Shah, another grandson of Timur, while the latter returned to Samarkand to rest and hold a kurultai (council) to select a new puppet ruler (the previous one had died) and prepare the invasion of Mongolia and China. In China, the Ming emperor Hongwu ruled, who had sent envoys demanding submission. Timur responded by imprisoning the emissaries first and then allying with Mongol tribes to carry out the campaign.

He wouldn’t have time to complete it. At the end of 1404, he set out to attack the Chinese border, but shortly after crossing the Syr Darya River (the Jaxartes or Oxus of Greco-Roman sources), having camped in Farab (now Otrar, Kazakhstan), he fell gravely ill and died in February 1405. His body, embalmed with rose water and musk, was wrapped in linen, placed in an ebony coffin, and sent to Samarkand. He was buried in the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum, where the remains of another grandson, Ulugh Beg, also rest.

Pir Muhammad Mirza, whom Timur had named his successor because his sons had died prematurely (one was also mentally incapacitated by an accident, and another was deemed too weak of character to rule), did not gain the support of his relatives and never even reached Samarkand from Multan (India), where he was governor. His cousin Khalil Sultan defeated him in battle and took the throne but was very unpopular, and Shahrukh Mirza, Timur’s son, overthrew him. Meanwhile, the western half of the empire was lost, leaving the next leader, the aforementioned Ulugh Beg, to inherit only Transoxiana; he was murdered by his own son in 1449.


This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on December 30, 2024: Tamerlán, el caudillo turcomongol que acordó una alianza con el Reino de Castilla en el siglo XV


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