Visual history of a war
Thirty-five years of campaigns from Delhi to Ankara that killed perhaps 17 million people, built Samarkand, and left towers of skulls.
- Fought
- 1370 to 1405
- Duration
- 35 years
- Dates
- 1370 to 1405
- Deaths
- About 17 million (estimates range 8 to 20)
- Timur's opponents
- Golden Horde, Delhi Sultanate, Mamluks, Ottomans, Georgia, Persian dynasties
- Signature battles
- Kondurcha and Terek (1391, 1395), Delhi (1398), Ankara (1402)
- Result
- Timurid Empire; devastation from Anatolia to India
The conquests of Timur (Tamerlane), 1370-1405, created the last great nomadic empire of the Middle East. From Samarkand Timur conquered Persia and Iraq, ravaged the Golden Horde and destroyed its cities (1395), sacked Delhi (1398), Aleppo and Damascus (1400-1401) and Baghdad (1401), and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at Ankara (1402). He died in 1405 marching on Ming China. His campaigns are estimated to have killed 17 million, about 5 percent of the world's population, and were marked by massacres and pyramids of heads; he also brought artisans to Samarkand and made it the jewel of Central Asia.
When it was fought: the era ribbon
The bold bar is Conquests of Timur. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.
Reported death tolls of Timur's sacks
Contemporary numbers are inflated but indicate scale.
Timeline of the Conquests of Timur
- 1370Timur master of Samarkand
- 1387Isfahan massacre
- 1391Kondurcha
- 1395Terek; Sarai burned
- 1398Sack of Delhi
- 1401Damascus and Baghdad taken
- 1402AnkaraBayezid captured.
- 1405Timur dies at Otrar
Persia and the Horde
Timur, a Barlas Turk lamed in youth, became master of Transoxiana in 1370 and ruled through Chinggisid puppets. In three great campaigns from 1386 he conquered Khorasan, Persia and Iraq, punishing resistance with mass killings: 70,000 heads piled at Isfahan in 1387. He turned on his former protege Tokhtamysh, khan of the Golden Horde, defeating him on the Kondurcha in 1391 and the Terek in 1395 and burning Sarai and Astrakhan, which ruined the Horde's trade for good.
India and Syria
In 1398 Timur crossed the Indus, defeated the Delhi Sultan's elephants and sacked Delhi, massacring perhaps 100,000; the city took a century to recover. He then marched west against the Mamluks, taking Aleppo and Damascus in 1400-1401 (where the historian Ibn Khaldun negotiated with him) and Baghdad in 1401, where 90,000 heads were reportedly piled up.
Ankara and death
Bayezid I, the Ottoman conqueror of the Balkans, met Timur at Ankara on 20 July 1402; Timur's diversion of the water supply and the defection of Bayezid's Anatolian Turkish troops brought a crushing victory. Bayezid died in captivity and the Ottoman state fell into a decade of civil war, giving Constantinople 50 more years. Timur received Castilian and Chinese envoys at Samarkand, then set out in winter 1404 to conquer China and died at Otrar in February 1405.
Related empires and wars
Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.
Empires of the same era and region
- Timurid Empire (1370 to 1507)
- Golden Horde (Jochi Khanate) (1242 to 1502)
- Delhi Sultanate (1206 to 1526)
- Mamluk Sultanate (1250 to 1517)
- Ottoman Empire (1299 to 1922)
- Chagatai Khanate (1226 to 1347)
- Ilkhanate (1256 to 1335)
- Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644)
- Mughal Empire (1526 to 1857)
Wars of the same era and region
- Bahmani-Vijayanagar wars (1362 to 1509)
- Mongol invasions and conquests (1206 to 1368)
- Ottoman-Venetian wars (1396 to 1718)
8 surprising things about the Conquests of Timur
- Timur's tomb was opened by Soviet scientists on 20 June 1941; Nazi Germany invaded two days later, and legend says the tomb bore a curse.
- The exhumation confirmed he was tall for the time, lame in the right leg and missing two fingers.
- Timur left towers of skulls outside cities as warnings; at Baghdad each soldier was ordered to bring two heads.
- He never took the title of khan, ruling as 'amir' and 'son-in-law' of the Chinggisids.
- The Castilian ambassador Clavijo described Timur's court feasts and the vast Bibi Khanum mosque under construction.
- Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great made him a byword in Elizabethan England.
- Bayezid was said to have been kept in a cage; the story is probably an embellishment.
- Timur's descendant Babur founded the Mughal Empire, so his line ruled India for three centuries after his sack of Delhi.