Tamerlane

I have been reading Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi. I think there has been a failure of imagination, either by the author of by me, possibly both.

War is terrible, but the wars of Tamerlane were even worse than most. The book did not convey the pain of those wars to me.

Think about the Tartar hordes. They traveled thousands of miles, away from home for years at a time, living in camps and on horseback, often hungry, always exhausted, and frequently hungry. Not only did they fight terrible battles with large numbers of casualties, they must have suffered from many diseases in a time before understanding of communicable disease, traveling in large numbers and living in unsanitary conditions. The policy of the Tartar military was, as I understand it, to separate the rank and file from their traditional tribal leaders and to organize ethnically mixed units so that these presumably simple, unlettered soldiers were denied their tribal support. The survivors would return with relative riches, but the likelihood of failure to survive to the end of a campaign must have been relatively high. How could the Tartars have been forced to serve, or how desperate must have been their homelife to make military service a desired alternative.

For the people conquered by Tamerlane's troops the situation must have been even worse. Before the arrival of the Tartar hordes their lives would have been pretty bad; medieval life was not great for most people. If they promptly surrendered to the Tartars they had to pay huge ransom plus continuing tributes, and were likely to suffer from the attentions of the conquering soldiers. If they fought, they were invariably defeated and then were killed in large numbers, the rest being robbed, raped and vandalized.

I know people descended from the Tartars and the Ottomans, and as far as I can see they are pretty much the same as people here and in the other countries in which I have lived and/or worked. They don't seem likely to be more immune from pain and suffering. I try but can not imagine myself as a Tartar soldier or a resident of one of the conquered cities -- the hardship beggers my imagination.

Unfortunately, reading Marozzi did not immediately convey that hardship, it took some independent thinking to recognize how hard were the lives of even the winners of Tamerlane's battles, and how desperate were the lives of those who lost.