Human history has produced some bloody chapters, periods of profound violence and upheaval that have not only altered the fortunes of those millions who lived through them, but that, in reverberating down through subsequent generations, have changed the very course of human civilization. Empires have been smashed and raised up, peoples celebrated and exterminated as a consequence of such chapters which have unleashed every imaginable plague, from the human to the fecal, upon the unsuspecting world. How are we to interpret the deeds of those who drenched these periods in blood? Should they be venerated for the order they formed, or reviled for the destruction they sowed? Should they be remembered as they clearly wished to be, or forgotten as a reminder to those who might take inspiration from them and attempt to improve upon their deathly designs? These are some of the questions we are forced to consider while consuming Mr. Lamb's biography of arguably the world's greatest conquerer.
In 1336, in what is now Uzbekistan, Tamerlane, known contemporarily as Timur, was born without fanfare to a family of inconsequential landowners in an Asia still reverberating from the conquests of Genghis Khan. Sixty-eight years later, he would die, in the heart of an empire that he himself had forged, having outlived his enemies, his wives, and, tragically, many of his own children. In the nearly seven decades between, in which he rode across half the world, he created a people, conquered much of Asia, terrified Europe, and waged wars of unimaginable cost in human lives to civilizations still recovering from the aftereffects of plague and ignorance. He built cities, made roads, appointed judges and laid down laws. But he did so on the still smoking ashes of his own conquests, not so much bringing order as re-shaping it into an image that pleased and properly honored the grace, the power and the dignity of the great Tamerlane, conquerer of the world that mattered.
Forced to draw from but a few contemporaneous sources, Mr. Lamb, a noted narrative historian, is at his imaginative best in Tamerlane. Capturing the richness of the palaces and the lushness of the gardens, the horror of the battlefields and the terror of the vanquished, he pulls from the clutches of legend and infamy a man of contradictions. For Timur was both of his time and ahead of it; a man of faith and a man of mass-murder; a man of principle and a man who allowed his men to drink deeply of the rapacious cup of pillage. He was a force for both widespread creation and mass destruction, making him one of history's most chaotic forces.
Mr. Lamb makes no apologies for the conquerer. While he asks his readers to consider Timur of his own time, he acknowledges that the man was ruthless when crossed and merciless when acted against, detailing the voluminous incidents in which Timur practiced his bloody form of justice. And yet, the author is careful to catalogue the glimpses of the man's humanity in his civilization-building: the art, the order, the scholars, the books. Most intriguingly, he chronicles the life and death of the young Timur's first wife, the only creature who seemed capable of restraining him, leaving the reader to imagine a future in which she had lived to temper Timur's iron with the softness of society.
While such biographies are entertaining, they fall short of edifying. Too many vital sources have been lost, leaving even the scholars among us to speculate over the fragmented truths that have descended to us from the intervening centuries. Nonetheless, considering that Timur succeeded where Napoleon failed, and capitalized where Alexander did not, an examination of his deeds and his time are an instructive chapter in the history of our bloody development. (3/5 Stars)
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