Timur's official birth year may have been invented to link him to a dynasty
Timurid chronicles give Timur's birth as 8 April 1336, the year the last Ilkhanid ruler died. Yet people who knew him described ages pointing to the late 1320s, and several scholars suspect the later date was chosen for symbolism. Timur, whose name means iron, cared intensely about such links to Mongol royalty.
Timur was born near Kesh, now Shahrisabz in Uzbekistan, about 80 kilometres south of Samarkand, in what was then the Chagatai Khanate. His people, the Barlas, were a Mongol tribe that had become largely Turkic in custom, and his family had served Genghis Khan's successors since the 13th century. His father Taraghai is often called a minor noble, though the historian Manz argues he was reasonably wealthy and that Timur played down his rank to make his own rise look more impressive.
Timurid histories trace his father's line to Tumbinai Khan, an ancestor of Genghis Khan, and an ancestor named Qarachar who reportedly married a daughter of Chagatai. No record from Timur's lifetime confirms a direct link, but contemporaries such as Ibn Khaldun, who met him in Damascus in 1401, and the Castilian envoy Clavijo called him a Mongol. His mother Tekina Khatun remains mysterious; Timur told Ibn Khaldun she descended from the Persian hero Manuchehr.
By 1370 he controlled the western Chagatai Khanate. His campaigns defeated the Golden Horde, the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria, the rising Ottomans and the Delhi Sultanate, making him the strongest ruler in the Muslim world, undefeated in battle. He called himself the Sword of Islam and even tried to restore the Yuan dynasty in China. Scholars estimate his wars cost millions of lives, with Khwarazm, which kept revolting, hit hardest.
He also patronised scholars and poets, including Hafez, and his reign sparked the Timurid Renaissance. He spoke Chagatai, Mongolian and Persian, using Persian for diplomacy. His empire broke apart soon after his death in February 1405, but his grandson Ulugh Beg became a noted astronomer, and his descendant Babur founded the Mughal Empire.
Source: Timur
