About Amir Temur
Timur
, among his other names, he is commonly called as
Tamerlane
. He was a 14th
century Turco-Mongol conqueror of much of western and central Asia, and founder of
the Timurid Empire and Timurid dynasty in Central Asia, which survived until 1857.
Timur belonged to a family of Turkicized Barlas clan of Mongol origin. He was Turkic
in identity and language, he aspired to restore the Mongol Empire. He was also steeped
in Persian culture and in most of the territories which he incorporated, Persian was the
primary language of administration and literary culture.
Thus the language of the
settled «diwan» was in Persian and its stribe had to be adept in Persian culture,
regardless of their ethnic origin.
Timur was a military genius and his troops were essentially Turkic-speaking. He
wielded absolute power, yet never called himself more than an emir, and eventually
ruled in the name of tamed Chingizid Khans, who were
little more than political
prisoners. His heaviest blow was against the Mongol Golden Horde, which never
recovered from his campaign against Tokhtamysh. Despite
wanting to restore the
Mongol Empire, Timur was more at home in a city than on a steppe as evidenced by
his funding of construction in Samarkand. He thought of himself as a ghazi, but his
biggest wars were against Muslim states.
He died during a campaign against the Ming Dynasty, yet records indicate that for part
of his life he was a surreptitious Ming vassal, and even his son Shah Rukh visited
China in 1420.
He ruled over an empire that, in modern times, extends from
southeastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, through Central Asia encompassing
