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Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, was born in the 1330s into the Barlas, a Mongol tribe that had become Turkic-speaking, Muslim and settled in what is now Uzbekistan. Lacking Genghisid blood, he founded his empire at Samarkand in 1370 as an emir, ruled through puppet Chagatai khans and married Saray Mulk Khanum, a descendant of Genghis Khan, to take the title Gurkani, son-in-law. His Turco-Mongol cavalry was paid by a Persian bureaucracy that taxed the cities, and he took Herat, Isfahan, Shiraz and Baghdad, crushed Tokhtamysh of the Golden Horde with a winter march, and at Ankara in 1402 diverted the Ottomans’ water, used Indian elephants and captured Sultan Bayezid.

At Delhi in 1398 he sent burning hay-laden camels at the sultan’s war elephants, sacked the city and spared only skilled craftsmen, deporting them with others from Damascus and Baghdad to Samarkand. Their forced collaboration produced the Timurid style of tile mosaics and double domes seen in the Gur-e-Amir and the Bibi-Khanym Mosque. Timur died in 1405 on his way to invade Ming China, his heirs split the empire under the appanage system, and the Uzbeks took Samarkand and Herat by 1507. His descendant Babur fled to Kabul and in 1526 founded the Mughal Empire in India.

• Timur’s armies are estimated to have caused about 17 million deaths.
• Saray Mulk Khanum served as regent in Samarkand and built her own madrasa.
• His grandson Ulugh Beg built the Fakhri Sextant, a curved stone trench over 130 feet long, and cataloged more than a thousand stars.
• Mughal, the dynasty’s name, is the Persian word for Mongol, and the Taj Mahal’s double dome descends from Timurid design.
• A Spanish ambassador described Timur’s seal as three circles in a triangle.