then, of course, there were the horrors of the Black Death, which spread west along the trade routes from Asia and coursed through Europe like poison. By 1347 it had reached Constantinople, Rhodes, Cyprus and Sicily, moving onwards into Venice, Genoa and Marseilles. A year later it infected Tuscany, central Italy and England. By mid-century it was ravaging Scandinavia, penetrating as far north as Iceland and Greenland. One-third of the population of Europe was wiped out by a disease so terrifyingly ghastly many felt it was a heaven-sent punishment for the sins of the world.
‘I do not know where to begin describing its relentless cruelty; almost everyone who witnessed it seemed stupefied by grief,’ wrote the Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, who buried five of his children with his own hands. ‘They died almost immediately; they would swell up under the armpits and in the groin and drop dead while talking. Fathers abandoned their children, wives left their husbands, brothers forsook each other.’ Dogs dragged hastily-buried corpses into the streets and gorged on them before collapsing themselves. ‘Nobody wept for the dead, since each was awaiting death; and so many died that everyone thought that the end of the world had come.’ The Black Death killed an estimated twenty-five million people, precipitating an agricultural crisis due to the severe shortage of labour to farm the land. The accompanying breakdown of law and order only added to the havoc left in its wake.
While war, plague and famine sapped Europe internally, external threats were also beginning to mount. Christendom’s eastern frontier was under pressure as the weakening Byzantine empire faced attack from the Ottomans. One by one it started to lose its possessions, first in Asia Minor with the fall of Brusa and Nicaea, later and more ominously with Adrianople, Gallipoli and Thessalonica. In 1389, a Christian army under the Serbian king Lazarus was crushed at Kosovo by a Turkish army led by Sultan Murad I. By 1394, Constantinople itself was under siege. Two years later, Christendom roused itself from its sickbed for a final assault on the Muslim foe and put its last Crusader army into the field at Nicopolis, on the banks of the Danube. It was cut to pieces. Europe shuddered to consider what the resurgent infidel planned next. Islam was on the march.
If matters on the European mainland were unpromising, hopes of heavenly salvation seemed equally fraught. Though the Church began the fourteenth century confidently, with Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming in his Unam Sanctam bull of 1302 that ‘the spiritual power excels in dignity and nobility any form whatsoever of earthly power’, it steadily lost much of its authority during this period. Besieged by the dangers of warring Italy, the papacy withdrew shortly afterwards to Avignon on the banks of the Rhône, from where a succession of French popes plotted wars in the papal states and pacification in Europe, the necessary prelude to taking up the fight against the Muslims of the East. They were remembered, and resented, more for the staggering size and ostentation of the papal palace, and the punitive taxes which went to pay for it, than for their commitment to the defence of the faith or the spiritual nourishment of their flock. Then, in 1378, disaster struck as the Church split over the election of the irascible Italian Pope Urban VI. Another Frenchman, Clement VII, was elected to replace him, precipitating the Great Schism. For the next four decades, one pope presided in Rome while another, the anti-pope, held sway in Avignon. The prestige of the papacy sunk further.
The Europe of Temur’s time, then, in Muslim eyes at least, was little more than a barbarian backwater. Church and state were divided and weak. The age of imperial adventure had expired, not to be revived until the later fifteenth century. Edward the Black Prince might have cut a dashing figure on the battlefields of Europe, but the Islamic world scarcely registered this sorry land of the infidel. The real treasures of conquest were not to be found in what the Koran referred to as the dar al-harb (the abode of war), home of the unbelievers. They lay in the East. As Bernard Lewis wrote: ‘For the medieval Muslim from Andalusia to Persia, Christian Europe was still an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief, from which the sunlit world of Islam had little to fear and less to learn.’
Europeans were no more impressed by the Oriental heathens. Temur’s whirlwind conquests went largely unnoticed in the West until, in 1587, a fire-and-brimstone Tamburlaine sprang onto the Elizabethan stage like a thunderbolt from the heavens.
Temur’s neglect at the hands of Western historians, which continues to this day, allowed Marlowe’s bloodthirsty Tamburlaine to provide the enduring popular image of a magnificent, God-defying Oriental despot, fearless in conquest, unforgiving in triumph, yet simultaneously capable of scaling the poetic heights with his beautiful lover Zenocrate. It is one of history’s small ironies that a man who took such care to ensure his place in posterity by having his civil and military record meticulously chronicled should find his posthumous reputation in the hands of an Elizabethan playwright with a taste for the sensational.
Brilliant in battle, unvanquished on the world stage, Temur’s efforts to secure the recognition he so richly deserved came to nothing. ‘These cares were ineffectual for the preservation of his fame, and these precious memorials in the Mogul or Persian language were concealed from the world or, at least, from the knowledge of Europe,’ wrote Edward Gibbon. ‘The nations which he vanquished exercised a base and impotent revenge; and ignorance has long repeated the tale of calumny which had disfigured the birth and character, the person, and even the name, of Tamerlane. Yet his real merit would be enhanced rather than debased by the elevation of a peasant to the throne of Asia.’
Passed over by historians, Temur has fared little better on the stage. Though Marlowe’s play is more than four hundred years old, productions have been remarkable for their extreme rarity. Tamburlaine the Great went through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without a single recorded performance. One problem is the play’s length: it is really two full-length plays, rather than one. Another is the potentially monotonous series of conquests and slaughter, which continue, as they did historically, until Tamburlaine’s death. C.S. Lewis famously described the play as ‘a hideous moral Spoonerism: Giant the Jack Killer’. Suffice it to say that the plot is not as complicated as it could be. As a result of these and other difficulties, the first professional production of modern times came in London as late as 1951, when Tyrone Guthrie directed Donald Wolfit in the lead role with the Old Vic company. A quarter of a century later, Peter Hall chose the play to open the Olivier Theatre at the National, with Albert Finney in the lead role. Hall judged Tamburlaine variously as a ‘Boy’s Own Paper story’, ‘an immoral Morality play’, ‘the first atheist play’ and ‘the first existential play’. ‘One thing I know very strongly about Tamburlaine now,’ he wrote in 1976. ‘It reeks of the theatre as the circus reeks of sawdust and horse shit.’ Yet theatre-goers still had to wait until 1993 for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first production of the play, directed by Terry Hands in Stratford. It was worth the wait.
Audiences were captivated by Antony Sher’s snarling barbarism in the lead role, an explosive and athletic performance which rejoiced in the tyranny and bounding majesty of what one reviewer called ‘the megalomaniac’s megalomaniac’. While the sultan Bajazeth and his Turks strut awkwardly across the stage on golden stilts, Tamburlaine swings in Tarzan-like, kicking Bajazeth to the ground. In victory he glorifies in sneering sadism, rubbing his fingers in Bajazeth’s sweaty hair, licking them and offering them to Zenocrate to smell. Bathed in blood, he mocks the famished, caged sultan and encourages his henchmen to urinate on scraps of reeking bread with which they taunt him. Then, with a leering grin, he cuts off one of the sultaness’s fingers. Marlowe’s virgins of Damascus, yet more victims for the ‘scourge of God’, become flaxen-haired children sweetly proffering posies. If the 1993 production proved anything, it was that with an actor of Sher’s stature, together with careful editing – in this case Tamburlaine was whittled down to three hours – opulent costumes and imaginative special effects, Marlowe’s most sensational play could be big box office. There was another, more enduring, lesson to be taken from Tamburlaine, a critic noted: ‘As events in the Middle East and elsewhere continue to show, we ignore him and his descendants at our peril.’
Had Temur lived long enough to see Tamburlaine the Great, he might conceivably have
