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

towers and bloody pyramids built from the skulls of their decapitated victims, deadly warnings to anyone who dared oppose them.

      Now, as the soldiers stared up at the distant silhouette of a man on horseback, framed against the heavens, they steeled themselves for another victory. Truly their emperor had earned his magnificent titles. Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction (of the Planets, a reference to the auspicious position of the stars at his birth); Conqueror of the World; Emperor of the Age; Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes. But one name suited him above all others: Temur, Scourge of God.

      On his vantage point beneath the smouldering midsummer sky, the emperor felt no disquiet. Moments away from the most important battle of his life, he felt nothing but the unshakeable faith in his destiny that had served him so well. Dismounting from his stallion, he knelt to offer up his customary prayers to the creator of the universe, humbly prostrating himself on the scorched earth, dedicating his victories to Allah and asking Him to continue bestowing divine favour on His servant. Then, with all the saddle-stiffness of his sixty-six years he rose to his feet and looked out over the field of battle, where the future of his dynasty lay with his beloved sons and grandsons.

      The left wing was commanded by his son Prince Shahrukh and grandson Khalil Sultan. Its advance guard was under another grandson, Sultan Husayn. Temur’s third son Prince Miranshah led the right wing, his own son Abubakr at the head of the vanguard. But it was the main body of the army, a glittering kaleidoscope of men under the command of his grandson and heir Prince Mohammed Sultan, on which the emperor’s clouded eyes may have lingered longest. From the midst of these men rose Temur’s crimson standard, a horse-tail surmounted by a golden crescent. Newly arrived from the imperial capital of Samarkand, unlike their battle-weary brothers in arms, these troops were splendidly attired, each detachment resplendent in its own colour. There were soldiers carrying crimson ensigns with crimson shields and saddles. Others were clad from head to toe in yellow, violet or white, with matching lances, quivers, cuirasses and clubs. In front of them stood a line of thirty exquisitely equipped purveyors of destruction, war elephants seized after the sacking of Delhi in 1398. On their backs, guarded behind wooden castles, stood bodies of archers and flame-throwers.

      The Tatar army was, wrote the fifteenth-century Syrian chronicler Ibn Arabshah, a devastating sight. ‘Wild beasts seemed collected and scattered over the earth and stars dispersed, when his army flowed hither and thither, and mountains to walk, when it moved, and tombs to be overturned, when it marched, and the earth seemed shaken by violent movement.’

      Staring at them across the sweltering plain were the ranks of Temur’s mightiest enemy. The Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I, the self-styled Sword Arm of Islam, had put a similar number of troops into the field. There were twenty thousand Serbian cavalry in full armour, mounted Sipahis, irregular cavalry and infantry from the provinces of Asia Minor. Bayazid himself commanded the centre at the head of five thousand Janissaries – the makings of a regular infantry – supported by three of his sons, the princes Musa, Isa and Mustapha. The right wing was led by the sultan’s Christian brother-in-law, Lazarovic of Serbia, the left by another of his sons, Prince Sulayman Chelebi. These men, victors of the last Crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, where they had snuffed out the flame of European chivalry, were thirsty, exhausted and dispirited after a series of forced marches. Even before battle commenced their morale had been shattered by Temur’s brilliant tactical manoeuvrings. Only a week earlier they had occupied the higher ground on which their adversary’s army now stood. Feigning flight, the Tatar had outmanoeuvred them, diverted and poisoned their water supply, doubled back, plundered their undefended camp and taken their position.

      All was still on both sides. A ripple stirred through Temur’s lines of cavalry as the horses sensed a charge. Then, slicing through the silence, came the heavy rumble of the great kettle-drums, joined by cymbals and trumpets, the signal for battle. Now the valley echoed to the thundering of horses’ hooves, the swoosh of arrows and the clash of metal upon metal. From the first blows struck the fighting was ferocious. Charging across the plain came the formidable Serbian cavalry, bright globules of armour amid the choking wreaths of dust stirred up by their mounts. Under pressure, the Tatar left flank retreated, defending itself with volley after volley of arrows and flames of naphtha. On the right wing Abubakr’s forces, advancing against Prince Chelebi’s left wing under cover of a cloud of arrows, fought like lions and finally broke through their enemy’s ranks. Bayazid’s Tatar cavalry chose this moment to switch sides, turning suddenly against Chelebi’s Macedonians and Turks from the rear. It was a decisive moment which broke the Ottoman attack. Temur, a master of cunning, had engineered the defection of the Tatars in the months before the battle by playing on their sense of tribal loyalty and holding out the prospect of richer plunder. Seeing both the disarray of his own forces who were being overwhelmed by the Tatars, and the confusion of the Ottoman right wing, in desperate retreat from the mounted cavalry of Temur’s grandson Sultan Husayn, Chelebi judged the battle lost and fled the field with the remainder of his men.

      Temur watched history unfurl itself before him on the valley floor. He was interrupted by the rushing blur of a gorgeously armoured man on horseback. Throwing himself off his mount, Temur’s favourite grandson Mohammed Sultan went down on one knee and begged his grandfather for permission to enter the battle. It was the right time to press home the advantage, he insisted. The emperor listened gravely to the young’s man arguments and nodded his agreement with pride. Mohammed Sultan was a fearsome warrior and a worthy heir.

      The elite Samarkand division, together with a body of the emperor’s guards, charged the Serbian cavalry, who, observing with horror Chelebi’s departure from the field, buckled under the attack and followed him in retreat towards Brusa. It was a bitter blow for Bayazid, whose infantry were now the only forces left intact. Worse was to follow. The Tatar centre now moved forward to settle the affair with eighty regiments and the dreaded elephants. They held the ground. The Ottoman infantry was routed; anyone left standing was slaughtered on the spot or captured.

      Sultan Bayazid, the man whose name struck fear in the hearts of Europe’s kings and princes, stood on the brink of catastrophe. Most of his army had fled. Only the Janissaries and his reserves held on. Still he would not surrender, and the fighting continued furiously until nightfall, Bayazid’s forces defending their sultan valiantly.

‘Yet they were like a man who sweeps away dust with a comb or drains the sea with a sieve or weighs mountains with a scruple,’ wrote Arabshah. ‘And out of the clouds of thick dust they poured out upon those mountains and the fields filled with those lions continuous storms of bloody darts and showers of black arrows and the tracker of Destiny and hunter of Fate set dogs upon cattle and they ceased not to be overthrown and overthrow and to be smitten by the sentence of the sharp arrow with effective decree, until they became like hedgehogs, and the zeal of battle lasted between those hordes from sunrise to evening, when the hosts of iron gained the victory and there was read against the men of Rum the chapter of “Victory”.^* Then their arms being exhausted and the front line and reserves alike decimated, even the most distant of the enemy advanced upon them at will and strangers crushed them with swords and spears and filled pools with their blood and marshes with their limbs and Ibn Othman [Bayazid] was taken and bound with fetters like a bird in a cage.’

      The battle of Ankara, and the career of Sultan Bayazid, had ended. Temur had achieved his most outstanding victory. ‘From the Irtish and Volga to the Persian Gulf and from the Ganges to Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in the hands of Timour,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘His armies were invincible, his ambition was boundless, and his zeal might aspire to conquer and convert the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already trembled at his name.’ Now he stood at the gates of Europe; its feeble, divided and penurious kings – Henry IV of England, Charles VI of France, Henry III of Castile – trembled indeed at the ease with which this unknown warlord had trounced their most feared enemy, rushing off sycophantic letters of congratulation and professions of goodwill to ‘the most victorious and serene Prince Themur’ in the hope of forestalling invasion. All feared his advance.

      In the Tatar camp there were no such fears. Temur’s men, from the highest amirs to the most lowly soldier, wondered what the emperor would do next. Perhaps he would lead the hordes farther west