Timur called his realm Turan while claiming Mongol glory
From 1370 to 1405 the Turco-Mongol warlord Timur built a Persianate Muslim empire across Iran, Central Asia, and beyond. He styled himself restorer of Genghis’s order—yet lacking Genghisid blood, he married a princess and took the title Gurkani, “son-in-law.”
Timur came from the Barlas, a Mongol tribe of the Chagatai ulus that had become Turkic in speech, and historian Peter Jackson calls his Mongol ancestry unimpeachable. He took Samarkand in 1366 and Balkh in 1369 and won recognition in 1370 while ruling through the figurehead khan Suurgatmish. Sharaf al-Din’s Zafarnama and the Karsakpay rock inscription call the state Turan, and it also appears as Mawarannahr.
From 1380 he pushed west into the Ilkhanate’s successor states, taking Isfahan in 1387 and ousting the Kartids from Herat by 1389. In 1398, drawn by chaos in the Delhi Sultanate, he sent grandson Pir Muhammad across the Indus to besiege Multan for six months, then led the main army after him. In 1400–1401 he took Aleppo, Damascus, and eastern Anatolia and razed Baghdad; at Ankara in 1402 he beat the Ottomans and plunged them into civil war, while Samarkand became his showpiece capital.
Foreign visitors heard different labels: Ibn Khaldun, meeting him outside Damascus in 1401, recorded a sultan of Mongols and Tatars, and the Castilian envoy Clavijo in 1404 wrote of Mugalia. Later court writing blurred the line between Turk and Mongol; a seventeenth-century memoir traced the family to Turk, son of Japheth, and Ulugh Beg’s history filed Mongols under Turks.
Timur gave governorships to sons and grandsons, and after his death in 1405 they fought civil wars. Shahrukh won and ruled from Herat until 1447, holding off the Qara Qoyunlu, but Jahan Shah then drove the Timurids into eastern Iran. After Abu Sa’id’s defeat and death in 1469 the Aq Qoyunlu took most of Persia, and by 1500 the partitioned principalities had lost nearly everything, though Husayn Bayqara still ruled a Khorasan emirate.
Source: Timurid Empire
