2017-09-12 Tue

There are very few conquerors that have inspired such terror as Amir Timur or Timour. He is remembered as a vicious warrior who razed cities to the ground and put populations to end. He is famous for his Conquest of India to Russia till the Mediterranean Sea.

Timour belonged to the Barlas tribe near the city of Kesh on the south of Samarkand in Transoxiana. This tribe, a mix of Mongolian and Turkic ancestry, descended from hordes of Genghis Khan. The European version of Timur name was 'Tamerlane' based on Turkish nickname 'Timur-i-leng'. Till 1380 the whole of Central Asia was under him. After the conquest of Central Asia, the thirst of new conquest took Timour to Russia.

The Timurid army captured Moscow in 1395, Herat (now in Afghanistan) in 1383, and Persia in 1385. By 1396, he had conquered Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Georgia. He crossed Indus River in 1398 and entered India when due to the death of Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq, India had fallen into pieces. Due to this, the army of Delhi was destroyed and the city was ruined.

Timur conquered Syria and Baghdad in 1399 and 1401. In 1402, Timour captured Ottoman Turkey and received the submission from Egypt. Timur turned his attention to Ming China (the ethnic-Han Ming Dynasty) in 1404. Unfortunately, his men and horses died due to an exposure to unusually cold winter and with them, the 68-year-old Timur also fell ill and died on 1404 at Otrar in Kazakhstan.

To commemorate Tamerlane’s (Timur Lang) 660th Birth anniversary, Uzbekistan issued a souvenir sheet in 1996. The background of this sheet depicts an ancient Uzbek architecture.