Click here to buy tickets for this exhibition, or telephone +44 (0)870 8488484.
Click here to buy the Turks catalogue from the Royal Academy’s main website.
Justin Marozzi on Tamerlane, the Turkic Genghis Khan
One afternoon in August 1401, on a day so hot that the defenders of Baghdad had reportedly propped their helmets up on sticks behind the ramparts, abandoned their positions and gone home, the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur (better known in the West as Tamerlane) rode serenely in and put the city to the sword. The siege had lasted six weeks and he had lost a significant number of his men. Retribution was swift, inevitable and devastating.
Every soldier was ordered to bring him at least one head. Men, women and children were cut down where they stood. Many jumped into the foaming Tigris, as recorded in this miniature, from a fifteenth-century copy of the Zafarnama (an illustrated book of Timur’s conquests), only to be killed by Timur’s waiting archers, the backbone of his armies. The great river, said the chronicles, flowed red with the blood. ‘The astonished inhabitants no longer looked upon their city as the house of peace [Dar al-Salam, as Baghdad was formerly known], but as the palace of hell and discord.’ When the rout was finished, 22 towers rose from the plains. They contained 90,000 skulls.
For all his violence, executed on a breathtaking scale unmatched in history either by Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan before him, Timur was a powerful creative force. Fascinated by art and architecture, he was a prodigious patron of the arts. At its crudest, such patronage took the form of forcing artists and artisans, miniaturists, poets and calligraphers, glass-blowers, silversmiths and weavers, not to mention the population of scholars and holy men from each ransacked city of the East, to relocate to his imperial capital Samarqand.
‘When he had laid waste a great city,’ wrote the fifteenth-century Syrian chronicler Ibn Arabshah, ‘in all its gardens he built a palace and in some of these palaces he had depicted his own assemblies and likenesses, now smiling, now austere, and representations of his battles and sieges and his conversations with kings, and lords, wise men, and magnates, and sultans offering homage to him and bringing gifts to him from every side and his hunting-nets and ambushes and battles in India, Dasht and Iran and how he gained victory…’
Such art portrayed the astonishing opulence of courtly life and conveyed in bold and vivid colours the sheer majesty of Timur, the ambition of his architectural projects and the audacity of his vision. From the blood and pillage of the Turco-Mongol’s conquests issued a cultural achievement that bore his name and would never be forgotten. Kindled by the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, the fires of Timurid culture flamed through Asia to create one of the most important epochs in Persian history. Although he was not Persian, Timur adopted sophisticated Persian court culture as his own to glorify his rule.
Though Timur’s empire proved short-lived, his cultural legacy was more enduring. The blue domes of Central Asia, the exquisite paintings of Bihzad (the illustrious Persian artist from Herat who ushered in a new era of naturalism) and the lyrical romanticism of the poet Jami all paid tribute to the ravishing vision of an unlettered warrior of the steppes, one of the most remarkable men who ever lived.
• This feature first appeared in RA Magazine as ‘Dynastic Visions’. For more Turks features visit www.ramagazine.org.uk
• Click here to buy tickets for this exhibition, or telephone +44 (0)870 8488484.
• Click here to buy the Turks catalogue from the Royal Academy’s main website.
