Above is the brief prologue that, in late 1587, introduced an audience in Elizabethan London to the first performance of Tamburlaine, Christopher Marlowe’s bold new play. No audience in England had heard anything like it before. In point of form, its author had broken radically with literary convention, and he knew it. The play’s very first lines airily dismiss the entire legacy of Renaissance drama – its ‘jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits’ – as mere clowning. Now, for the first time, audiences would hear blank verse, freed from rhymes, in the very iambic pentameter that William Shakespeare would soon deploy in his own plays.
Tamburlaine was so popular – the 1594–5 season saw fourteen performances – that Marlowe had to write a sequel to it. But its significance lies not just in its vivid language, its blank verse, or its complex character development. Most striking was the larger-than-life ‘Tamburlaine’ himself, whom Marlowe presented as a cold-blooded Machiavellian warrior. Exulting in his barbarism and cruelty, Marlowe’s hero is determined to crush, subdue or win over any and all opponents in his singular quest to conquer the world. We thus see him feeding scraps to a defeated king placed in a cage, or using the king’s live body as a footstool, or driving a chariot pulled by a team of defeated monarchs, harnessed like horses in their traces. In his unchecked excess, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine must defy and master not just men, but also the gods, as at one point he even burns a copy of the Qur’an. Indeed, this hubristic figure, depicted by Rembrandt in the mid seventeenth century [see Fig. 5], probably planted in Europe’s collective subconscious the archetypal Asian tyrant that emerged in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship as the ‘Oriental despot’ anticipated by Marx or Weber and elaborated by Karl Wittfogel. Later, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that same archetype – violent, authoritarian and above all, Muslim – would be incarnated in some Euro-American quarters in figures such as Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Husain.
Marlowe’s outrageous protagonist is very loosely based on the historical Timur (1336–1405), a remarkably successful warlord and one of history’s most astonishing figures. ‘Tamerlane’ is a European corruption of the Persian Timur-i lang, or ‘Timur the lame’, in reference to a limp acquired from a crippling wound suffered in his youth. Like Marlowe’s character, the historical Timur rose from humble beginnings in a clan of pastoral nomads in Central Asia. He happened to reach adulthood in the mid fourteenth century just as the last successor states to the Mongol empire in Iran and Central Asia had crumbled into a collection of feuding principalities. Timur sought to unify this politically fragmented region by creating, in effect, a neo-Mongol empire. Although himself an ethnic Turk unrelated to Genghis Khan, he married a princess descended from the great Mongol empire-builder and on this basis proudly titled himself gurkan, or ‘imperial son-in-law’.
Politically, Timur emerged around 1360 as the head of a minor tribe in the region of Samarqand, then a vibrant oasis town on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean basin, surrounded by semi-arid lands ideally suited for pastoral nomadism. Rich oasis towns such as Samarqand were inhabited mainly by Persian-speaking communities of Sunni Muslims – artisans, merchants, officials, religious clerics, scholars – while their surrounding hinterlands were populated chiefly by Persianized Turks. Recently integrated into Muslim life, these clans of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists had mastered horse warfare, and as such were powerful players in Central Asian politics. Timur’s career began by negotiating the balance between peoples inhabiting these two mutually interdependent ecological and cultural niches: the pastoral and the sedentary. In the 1360s he manoeuvred his way through a maze of local tribal politics, forging alliances with other clans while expanding both commercial and political linkages within Central Asia. A natural leader endowed with personal charisma and military genius, he repeatedly transformed rivals and would-be enemies into allies, thereby building up formidable armies of mounted archers.
By 1370 Timur dominated Samarqand, which he ruled through a Mongol puppet khan by exploiting his ‘imperial son-in-law’ status. Several years later he annexed the rich and fabled Ferghana valley in present-day Tajikistan [see Maps 1 or 5]. In 1383 he marched southwards in a series of campaigns that over the next decade ravaged the entire Iranian plateau, either destroying or subjugating such centres of high Persian culture as Herat, Zaranj, Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz. While systematically using terror tactics against recalcitrant urban populations, Timur spared cities that submitted to his armies, sending literati, artisans and artists back to Samarqand to adorn his capital with spectacular works of architecture. In the 1390s he campaigned across western Iran and Iraq, sacking Baghdad in 1393. His armies then turned north to the Caucasus, subduing chieftains and destroying cities of the Golden Horde in Crimea and the Don and Volga valleys, briefly occupying Moscow in 1395. In 1400 he seized Tiflis, reducing the Georgian monarch to a vassal. From there he pressed south to Syria, capturing Aleppo and Damascus. In 1402 he marched on Anatolia, defeating the main army of the fledgling Ottoman state near Ankara, where he captured the hapless Sultan Bayazid I. By this time Timur had acquired such a fearsome reputation that he secured the submission of both the Byzantine emperor and Egypt’s Mamluk sultan without investing either Constantinople or Cairo. In 1404 he returned in triumph to his capital at Samarqand, where he received a host of foreign emissaries while preparing for what would have been the capstone to his grandiose plan of recreating Genghis Khan’s Mongol imperium – the conquest of China. In early 1405 his armies had barely left Samarqand, however, when he was overtaken by a brief sickness and died.
His failure to conquer China notwithstanding, in one important respect Timur accomplished what the Mongols themselves had repeatedly attempted but failed to do – namely, invade India and sack Delhi. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the sultans of Delhi had prudently garrisoned soldiers in the mountain passes leading from Afghanistan to the Punjab, thereby thwarting Mongol attempts to invade India. But by the end of the fourteenth century the sovereign territory of the Tughluqs had shrunk drastically following numerous mid-century rebellions. In 1351 Muhammad bin Tughluq was succeeded by his cousin Firuz Shah Tughluq (r. 1351–88), who led several failed expeditions to reconquer Bengal, although he did reduce both Orissa and Sind to tributary states in 1361 and 1363 respectively. He also managed to stabilize what little remained of the Delhi sultanate. To enhance irrigation and expand cultivation in Delhi’s immediate hinterland, he oversaw the construction of a number of major canals in the Punjab; he promoted education by building madrasas in Delhi; he established hospitals to provide treatment for the poor; and he adorned Delhi with rest-houses, gardens, water tanks and wells. But he also relaxed some of the sounder administrative practices of the system he had inherited. Whereas revenue assignments (*iqta‘*s) had formerly reverted to the crown upon the death of their holders, under Firuz they became inheritable by their holders’ descendants, thereby creating a powerful landed gentry with vested interests in permanent holdings in the countryside. This policy, accompanied by a decline in land-tax collection, considerably weakened the state’s central power. Worse, the ten years following Firuz’s death in 1388 saw a rapid succession of five weak sultans, putting the city and the sultanate in a fatally vulnerable state. The fifth of these rulers, one of Firuz’s grandsons, would prove no match for Timur, a world-conqueror who had already swept over many of the most populous and fabled cities on earth.
In the late summer of 1398, having conquered the Iranian plateau and placed loyal governors in its principal cities, Timur marched through Afghanistan and, bypassing Kashmir, crossed the Indus that September. Encountering little resistance, his cavalry rolled across the Punjab to Panipat, some sixty-five kilometres north of the capital, where he met and crushed a Tughluq cavalry of 10,000, only a quarter the size of the sultanate’s army of just several decades earlier. For about a month Timur plundered Delhi with impunity, massacring a reported 80,000 inhabitants and so thoroughly ruining the built landscape that it took the city nearly a century to recover. Unlike Muhammad Ghuri and his slave generals two centuries earlier, however, Timur had no intention of remaining in India, or of integrating the remnants of the sultanate’s territories into his sprawling empire. Instead, like a violent storm that disappears as suddenly as it appears, in January 1399 he quit India, hauling back to Samarqand an immense amount of booty; elephants taken from this expedition were used to transport quarried stone for his ambitious construction projects there.
Although the Delhi sultanate survived Timur’s destructive onslaught, and even experienced something of a revival in the late 1400s, it would never regain the power or prestige it had enjoyed in the days of Muhammad bin Tughluq. In reality, Timur’s invasion inaugurated what has been called India’s ‘long fifteenth century’, that is, the period bracketed on the front end by Timur’s invasion in 1398–9, and on the back end by the advent of Mughal rule (1526–1858). The founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur (r. 1526–30), was a direct descendant of Timur and claimed the right to govern north India as his legal patrimony. One might therefore think of the period 1398–1526 as a long interregnum between the planting of the idea of Timurid rule in India by Timur himself, and its eventual realization by Babur.
There are good reasons to regard this as a coherent era in India’s history. Although the Delhi sultanate had unified much of South Asia by the early fourteenth century, Timur’s invasion at the end of that century shattered the sultanate as a stable political or cultural entity – even if such status had only ever been imperfectly realized. By 1400 the northern two-thirds of the subcontinent had become a patchwork quilt of independent kingdoms, as former Tughluq governors, or their sons, rebranded themselves as independent sultans ruling sovereign states. Politically, then, Timur’s invasion accelerated a process of devolution that had already begun in the mid fourteenth century with the breakaway of former provinces such as Bengal or the Deccan. As ever more former Tughluq provinces became independent sultanates, horizons were lowered, and a wider, pan-Indian world, at least in a political sense, vanished.
Much conventional historiography portrays the long fifteenth century as a dreary period when the stage lights in the theatre of history seem to have dimmed while onlookers are forced to sit in darkness, waiting for the curtain to rise to reveal the dazzling dawn of the Mughal era, when India would once again see a large, centralized empire. But in fact it was one of India’s most vibrant and creative eras. The fragmentation of northern India catalysed by Timur’s invasion meant, among other things, increasing demands for literary and military specialists, as throngs of competing chieftains and warlords sought to fill power vacuums created by the collapse of Delhi’s authority. Instead of a single, centralized locus of patronage, dozens of smaller such centres now mushroomed across north India’s landscape, each headed by an aspiring state-builder.
The present chapter therefore explores three interconnected themes that characterize India’s long fifteenth century: the emergence of regional courts in territories formerly under the Delhi sultanate’s rule; the emerging idea of ‘Rajput’ as a social category; and the rise of vernacular literatures and its significance.