Tamburlane

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30082, 16 March 1963, Page 3

Tamburlane

Tamburlane The Conqueror. By Hilda Hookham. Hodder and Stoughton. 344 PP. There is always charm about the very name of Samarkand, where Timur the Lame or Tamburlane, born in 1336, came into power in 1370, yet another of the series of conquerors who swept through Central Asia over the centuries. In this book the story of his conquests is told, and in terms of military success it is a very remarkable tale of unbroken victory ate the building of an empire which stretched from Delhi almost to Moscow, and from the Mediterranean to a point far east of Samarkand. In this wade area Timur (who was on his way to China when he died in 1405) established order, but at a tremendous

cost in human suffering, and enriched himself by lavish acquisitions ta goods and people to be sent back to add to the material splendour of Samarkand.

Europe too was affected by this violent man, for his victory over the. Turks at Angora ta 1402 had a double result; it delayed the fall of Constantinople and the collapse of Byzantium for half a century, and at the same time turned the line of the later Turkish advance westward into Christendom.

Timur himself emerges from the story as a tough and extremely dismal nomad conqueror, whose most engaging quality was an enthusiasm for chess, of which he played an unusually elaborate variety on a board of ten squares by eleven with camels, giraffes, and other additional pieces. So unattractive a man is not a promising subject for a biography, but Mrs Hookham has overcome this disadvantage by writing an objective and scholarly account of an important era in the history of Central Asia, a littleknown part of the world which the general reader may study with advantage. It is a complicated story with a background of continuous tension, and Mrs Hookhum has a firm grasp of her difficult subject. The book is well "provided with maps and contains a number of plates, both black-and-white and coloured, as well as four appendices, a glossary, a note on sources and a general bibliography.