Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World [Hardcover]

Justin Marozzi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2006

Tamerlane, aka Temur-the Mongol successor to Genghis Khan-ranks with Alexander the Great as one of the world's great conquerors, yet the details of his life are scarcely known in the West. Born in obscurity and poverty, he rose to become a fierce tribal leader, and with that his dominion and power grew with astonishing speed. He blazed through Asia, razing cities to the ground. He tortured conquered inhabitants without mercy, sometimes ordering them buried alive, at other times decapitating them. Over the ruins of conquered Baghdad, Tamerlane had his soldiers erect a pyramid of 90,000 enemy heads. As he and his armies swept through Central Asia, sacking, and then rebuilding cities, Tamerlane gradually imposed an iron rule and a refined culture over a vast territory-from the steppes of Asia to the Syrian coastline. Justin Marozzi traveled in the footsteps of this fearsome emperor of Samarkand (modern-day Uzbekistan) to write this book, which is part history, part travelogue. He carefully follows the path of this infamous and enigmatic conqueror, recounting the history and the story of this cruel, cultivated, and indomitable warrior.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By the time of his death in 1405, the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane-a pejorative derivative of the nickname "Temur the Lame"-commanded as much land and fear as any ruler in history. Literally following in the footsteps of Ghengis Khan, he built his empire with one invasion after the next, eventually amassing a kingdom that stretched "from Moscow to the Mediterranean, from Delhi to Damascus." Nonetheless, Tamerlane remains relatively unknown in the Western world, taking a historical backseat to Ghengis despite a reign and ruthlessness every bit as remarkable. Faced with such a complex and underreported subject, Marozzi delivers an exceptional account of the emperor's life, revealing him to be both an extravagantly merciless tyrant and tireless proponent for the cultural and architectural progress in his beloved Samarkand (in modern day Uzbekistan). One peculiar choice, however, is the book's subtitle, as Tamerlane killed tens of thousands of his fellow Muslims along his so-called "pilgrimage of destruction," including a particularly bloody massacre of Baghdad that left 90,000 dead, "their heads cemented into 120 towers." The subtitle certainly wasn't chosen for a lack of nicknames, as Tamerlane's life produced plenty: "Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction." "Emperor of the Age." "Unconquered Lord of the Seven Climes." "Scourge of God." The list goes on, too, leading one to wonder how it is that such a large part of the world hardly recognizes name.
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From The New Yorker

This revisionist history traces the rise of the fourteenth-century warlord Temur -- known in the West as Tamerlane -- from a crippled peasant boy wandering the steppe to ruler of half the known world. Marozzi asserts that while Temur, like Genghis Kahn, specialized in razing cities and slaughtering their inhabitants, he also had the wisdom to rebuild, and Islamic art and architecture flourished on his watch. Marozzi quotes widely from contemporaneous accounts, relishing the fantastical detail. In India, for example, Temur countered the armored elephants of Delhi with "roaring camels on fire," then had the defeated beasts brought before him and forced to kneel. Along the way, Marozzi makes a pilgrimage through Temur's former empire, and argues that the Soviets outdid the warlord in destruction by turning the once fertile basin of Central Asia into a dust bowl.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; First American Edition edition (February 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030681465X
• ISBN-13: 978-0306814655
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #730,004 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well researched, well written, enjoyable to read., March 17, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Hardcover)

The exploits of Genghis Kahn in the 1200's are well known in the west, there was even a movie about him starring John Wayne. About a numdred and fifty years later Tamerlane, almost repeated his conquests. Tammerlane got into Turkey, down to Damascus, almost to Moscow.

Unlike many biographies, particularly from strange parts of the world, Mr. Marozzi traveled to the places where Tamerlane traveled. He reports on what the area looks like today, and what remains from the time when Tamerlane and his army went through. It serves as a good reminder that the Middle East has changed less than nearly anywhere else in the world.

I like the writing style Mr. Marozzi uses. It is a well researched, well written biography, but written almost like a novel. You are left wondering what he was going to do next. Particularly when he had come close to entering Europe, the kings of England, France and Spain could really offer little or no resistance to such an army as his. It was only Tamerlane's decision that Europe wasn't worth bothering with that prevented a dramatic change in how history played out.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Missing the Mark, March 20, 2008

By 

William Scopa - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World (Hardcover)

If you're looking for a detailed, clear narrative of Tamerlane's life and achievements, Justin Marozzi's book is not it. Failing to develop Tamerlane as an individual from his youth onward, and failing to explain exactly how he came to be so successful, Marozzi diverts perhaps half the book to recounting his own travels in Tamerlane's homeland. As descriptive and rare the author's experiences may be, a journalistic description of former metropolises in modern-day Central Asia does not provide a better understanding of the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. Throughout the book, Marozzi views Tamerlane more through the distant lens of someone in awe of his achievements, rather than the skeptical and down-to-earth approach necessary for biographers to truly evaluate who their particular subject really was.
This is the flow of the book: a few very narrowed down pieces of Tamerlane's life, each separated by an equally large amount of journalism. The reader can neither fully assess the achievements of Tamerlane's career, nor gain a certain familiarity with his personality.
The purpose of biography is to find out what kind of person the subject of the book was, and evaluate his/her achievements. In the case of Tamerlane, the reader is never really given an explanation for how someone conquered territory so successfully and rapidly, or how a man could rise from the status of desperado to all-powerful emperor. The main argument presented is that Tamerlane, while committing atrocities, also had many cultural achievements, most notably the building of several Islamic monuments now mostly in ruins or completely nonexistent. There is no assessment of Tamerlane's psyche, what led him to believe in his destiny, just how he outwitted his opponents, and what his legacy was. Why are western scholars, even military theorists, so unfamiliar with someone whose military career was as successful and immaculate as Alexander's? How did Tamerlane as a politician manage to rise so far and fast? What psychological condition could Tamerlane have had that may have motivated his ambition, and more significantly, the genocides he so ruthlessly committed? What aspect of his personality made him an electrifying leader, and gave him the energy to vigorously campaign even up to his death as an old man? These are essential questions about Tamerlane that should be answered, or at least examined, so that readers can analyze Tamerlane with the same level of understanding as western heroes such as Alexander and Napoleon.
Instead, Justin Marozzi gives a hollow carcass of a biography, decorated with fanciful quotations and literary comparisons, but completely lacking in the real substance essential to a book that seeks to give the public an understanding of one of the greatest conquerors in history. In studying Tamerlane, we shouldn't look for the decrepit and virtually forgotten ruins and former cities of Central Asia. That does not highlight our understanding of him as a man. We need to know what he did, how he did it, why he did it, and what affect it had. We need to know these things as much as possible so that we may truly form an accurate perception of him as a statesman, soldier, and human being.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read, March 28, 2006

By 

N. Ahmed (London) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tamerlane (Hardcover)

This book is a great read for anyone wanting to understand Temur and how he became the leader he was. The book is well written and conveys interesting perspectives on Temurs life, conquests and thinking. All in all a thoroughly good read.