Timur
A last great steppe conqueror devastates from Delhi to Anatolia.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 35 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Timur builds an empire from Samarkand between 1370 and 1405, campaigning into Persia, India, Syria and Anatolia with enormous slaughter — towers of skulls are recorded repeatedly — while patronising architecture and scholarship at home. He captures the Ottoman sultan at Ankara in 1402, delaying the fall of Constantinople by fifty years. His descendant Babur later founds the Mughal Empire, and his grandson Ulugh Beg builds a great observatory.