Where Timur Emerges a Bit from the Shadows

Tamerlane: The Earth Shaker by Harold Lamb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had previously read a couple of his novels--Omar Khayyam and Nur Mahal--and thought this was another novel telling the fictionalized life of a historical figure. It isn't. It's actually a biography, and so has a very different feel. There are few scenes that feel intimate or genuine, since little of that survives in the historical sources, and it's a shame. I was disappointed.

Naturally, as a biography, the book is largely summarized narrative. Although it's well done, complete, concise, and as clear as such a complex story can be, and although it's much more compelling than a textbook or wiki article or other typical non-fiction source, it still isn't as engrossing as his novels. So: good--4 stars good--but not quite as fun as a novel might have been.

Oh well. It's all good.

I've learned to trust Harold Lamb's fairness and scholarship when approaching his books set in Asia and the Middle East. His attitude, as always, is surprisingly modern and inclusive for a white guy writing in the 1920s, writing as much as possible from the perspective of the people and cultures he's dealing with. This is clearest in the surprisingly even-handed way he treats Timur, a historical figure I'd always considered merely brutal without any positive qualities beyond making himself a successful conqueror. However, Lamb focuses just as much on Timur's personal bravery, quick thinking, economic programs, and relentless labor to build wealth and develop the lands of his empire as he does his bloody record. All those things are true about "Tamerlane."

In a note in the end matter, Lamb says:

"In this volume no attempt has been made, consciously, to ignore the cruel side of Timur's character, or the destruction he wrought. He has been presented to us so often in the past as an architect only of pyramids of skulls, and as a barbarian destroyer, that an effort must be made to realize what the man actually was."

A little later, he says:

"We find the European princes of his day little more inclined to mercy--the Black Prince made a shambles of Limoges, and Charles of Burgundy killed like a wolf among sheep at Dinant. At Agincourt the English killed French prisoners in order to be rid of them for the final phase of the battle; at Nicopolis, the English, German and French crusaders massacred the Serbian and Turkish prisoners before the battle. The massacres ordered by Timur differed only in being on a vaster scale."

Without excusing his brutality, a reputation he surely earned, we see it at least put it into the context of the time, allowing us to consider other details worth knowing.

This is entertaining non-fiction, and I learned a lot. The final 60 pages or so of notes and sources is also informative and worth reading. His section addressing the terms Tatar, Mongol, and Turk, along with some related words, is the clearest I've found on that confusing topic. (And it's almost 100 years old!) In fact, that may be his genius--making the history and lives and culture of distant people, remote in time, comprehensible to a western audience.

I'm confident there are superior histories written since this book came out, filled with newer scholarship, but I doubt any are as entertaining and instructive. Recommended.

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