Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World. Justin Marozzi

a prosperous centre of trade and agriculture and a distinguished seat of Arabic learning, is now a neglected corner of the former Soviet empire, a fatally dry and dusty desert province struggling to survive. The aridity of the region, the root of its poverty and disease, finds its echoes in the story of Urganch’s last ill-fated tussle with Temur. For in tearing it apart wall by wall and house by house, Temur spared nothing. The sprawling irrigation system, which watered vast numbers of fields and underpinned all agricultural activity, was ripped up and destroyed. Urganch was left to the desert. Over the years that followed, it gradually recovered, but it never regained its former splendour. In time it was displaced by the neighbouring city of Khiva as the capital of Khorezm.

      Today, Urgench, as it is now known, is a grey, open-air Soviet museum, a city of straight lines and stony faces. Its people have been doomed to live in a region condemned to permanent drought, but in their poverty they have nowhere else to go. Lenin, pioneer of the Soviet experiment that helped turn the province into this poisonous dustbowl, has disappeared, but other monuments, such as that honouring the Martyrs of the Revolution, remain in concrete defiance. Clues to understanding Khorezm’s decline are clustered around the city. Cotton motifs decorate the buildings, the soulless apartment blocks, even the streetlights, paying tribute to the region’s main source of income and the architect of its environmental collapse. Under constant pressure since the 1960s, when the Soviet Union earmarked Central Asia as its cotton basin, the two rivers which flowed so freely in Temur’s time and fed the Aral Sea have now been bled dry by this most thirsty of crops. Neither the Amu Darya nor the Sir Darya even reaches the sea any longer.

      What Temur began in those moments of fury, the Soviets unwittingly accelerated. Where the Tatar obliterated the irrigation network, the Soviets expanded it with a vengeance. The ecological disaster they unleashed is widely regarded as the world’s worst. The environmental problem is so acute that Urgench, which until recently saw snow in winter and rain in spring, now has neither. Instead, it is warm and dry all year round. Elsewhere in the region summers have become hotter and winters colder. Clouds which once skimmed over the Aral Sea, collecting water which fed the region as rain, now pick up salt instead.

      In the space of a generation, the area of the Aral Sea has been halved, the volume of its waters cut by three-quarters. Each year the water level drops by a further three feet, releasing new swathes of contaminated land to the winds scouring its surface. The herbicides and defoliants used to improve cotton yields leach into the evaporating sea until they are left as chemical crusts, disintegrating into dust and then scattered across the region by the gusting north-east winds and recurrent sandstorms. Driven away or simply destroyed, the number of species of mammals in the region has fallen from seventy to thirty, the number of bird species from 319 to 168. The salt content of the Aral Sea has trebled over thirty years, killing all twenty-four species of its fish – including carp, perch, sturgeon and salmon – and dealing a death blow to the city of Muynak, once its largest port, now the graveyard of Soviet hubris. Rusting hulls of fishing boats lie discarded on their sides, a hundred miles from the sea’s retreating shores. These vessels are all that remain of the once mighty Aral fleet which in 1921, responding to an appeal from Lenin to help the starving Volga region, caught twenty-one thousand tonnes of fish and sent them north to relieve the famine. In the 1970s and eighties, the annual catch was forty thousand tonnes and more. Now, apart from the negligible quantities of fish with carcinogenic tissue surviving in the scattered salt-water ponds, the sea is empty.

      Muynak is a desperate place. The sea has fled under man’s assault, uncovering his legacy of contamination to the winds, leaving the town beached on the sand-flats like a tragic shipwreck, a port without a sea. Health problems abound. Tuberculosis and anaemia are common. Diets are poor. Meat is almost impossible to find and any vegetables grown locally contain traces of harmful chemicals. The water is polluted. Even the air the people breathe is frequently contaminated, as winds whip up chemical dust and pass it into their lungs.

      ‘Fish are our prosperity’, reads a sign in front of the tatty municipal building, flanked by painted hoardings on which smiling sailors with bulging muscles unload their catch into the arms of buxom factory workers. On the top floor is the office of the mayor, a corpulent and corrupt man who takes more interest in dubious construction projects and the beautification of his mansion than in the hunger, disease and economic misery of his townspeople.

      Even in that most autocratic of empires under Temur, corrupt behaviour by an official was, if uncovered, unlikely to have gone unpunished. Had he served Temur in local government, the present-day mayor of Muynak would probably have been a marked man. In 1404, returning to Samarkand after five years’ campaigning in western Asia, Temur learnt that Dina, the city’s governor, had been ruling capriciously during his absence. ‘His Highness since his return had come to know that this man had betrayed his trust, using his office to misgovern and oppress the people,’ Clavijo related. ‘He therefore now commanded this Dina the Chief Mayor to be brought before him, and after judgement forthwith he was taken out and without delay hanged.’

      The punishment did not end there. The money the mayor had appropriated from the subjects of Samarkand was returned to the imperial treasury. An influential friend who had tried to buy Dina’s pardon was also hanged. Another official, a favourite of Temur who had likewise tried to intercede on the mayor’s behalf, was arrested and tortured until he had revealed the whereabouts of his entire fortune. No sooner had he done so than he was dragged off to join the governor of Samarkand on the gallows, where he was hanged upside down until dead. ‘This act of high justice condemning so great a personage to death, made all men to tremble, and notably he had been one in whom his Highness had reposed much confidence.’

      The only employer left in Muynak is the fish-canning factory, but its days are numbered. Back in 1941, when it was founded, the sea was only five hundred yards away, and fishermen deposited their catch at the gates. Now the few fish being processed come from small salt-water lakes in the region, a token, state-directed effort to keep the factory afloat. It hasn’t worked. Like the hotel, the canning plant is facing imminent bankruptcy. Salaries haven’t been paid for a year. Only a small fraction of the 1,200 workers who packed fish in happier days remain. Most of these look beaten down by the dreadful conditions. Inside, it resembles a dark, damp dungeon. Unlit corridors penetrate deep into the heart of the building. It is freezing, the sort of cold that hurts your head, shoots through your clothes and passes directly into your bones. The walls are filthy. Just visible beneath the grime, occasional Soviet-era slogans praising the workers overlook teams of men and women hunched over medieval machines. The whole place stinks of an evil combination of putrefying fish and rusting equipment. At the back of the factory, a group of men with makeshift trolleys congregate in front of a counter full of watermelons, the sort which in Temur’s time had so impressed Ibn Battutah (‘the very best and biggest’ in the world, he thought). It looks like a greengrocer with limited stock – one sort of fruit and no vegetables – but the reality is more depressing. This fish-canning factory in Central Asia’s most advanced country has run out of money. It pays its workers in melons.

^* The chief whispering in Husayn’s ear was none other than Kay-Khusrau Khuttalani, the same man to whom Temur had handed over Amir Husayn for execution in 1370, to satisfy an outstanding blood feud. Kay-Khusrau paid for his subsequent desertion to the Sufis of Khorezm. When captured, he was handed over by Temur to Amir Husayn’s family, who executed him in turn. This was typical of Temur’s acuity in tribal dealings. In both cases he kept his own hands clean.

^† The obscurity surrounding the names and numbers of Temur’s wives clears up slightly when it comes to his sons. Temur’s first-born, Jahangir, was born in around 1356 when Temur would have been twenty. His mother’s name, according to the sixteenth-century historian Khwandamir, was Narmish-agha. Omar Shaykh followed, with Miranshah, the third son, born in 1366. Shahrukh, the youngest, was born in 1377.

       3 ‘The Greatest and Mightiest of Kings’