Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, spent nearly his entire adult life at war, building an empire that ran from the edges of China to the Mediterranean coast. In the winter of 1405, in his late sixties and still leading his army in person, he set out to conquer Ming China. He never got close. A fever caught up with him at a camp near Otrar, and the man who had outlasted nearly every rival he ever faced died the same way he'd made countless enemy soldiers die: far from home, in the cold, in a tent.
This final episode of the series follows what happened after. Timur's great mosque in Samarkand started shedding bricks from its dome within a few years of his death. His sons and grandsons tore the empire apart fighting each other for the throne. His grandson Ulugh Beg, a genuine astronomer who built one of the great observatories of the medieval world, was overthrown and beheaded on the order of his own son. And the empire itself, the thing Timur had spent a lifetime of sieges and forced marches building, was gone within about a hundred years, conquered by the Uzbeks.
What outlasted all of it was something nobody could have planned: a wandering, defeated descendant named Babur, who lost the ancestral capital of Samarkand three separate times before turning south and founding the Mughal Empire in India, a state that lasted three times longer than Timur's own. The episode closes with a real, well documented postscript: the 1941 Soviet exhumation of Timur's tomb, three days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the legend of the "Curse of Tamerlane" that grew up around it.
Sources include Ibn Arabshah's hostile eyewitness account of Timur's court, the official Timurid chronicle of Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo's embassy record of Samarkand, Babur's own memoir the Baburnama, and modern histories by Beatrice Forbes Manz and Justin Marozzi.
Content Warning: this episode discusses war, siege warfare, executions, and the assassination of a father by his own son.
Enjoyed this episode? Dive deeper into Islamic history with the Archives app - bite-sized lessons, real stories, and daily adventures you can finish in 5 minutes.
📲 Download the Archives app here
🌐 Learn more here
📸 Follow Basel on Instagram here
If this episode helped you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Assalamu alaykum, and we'll see you in the next one.
