Secondary sources Quotes
21 quotes
"Let the mantle of worldly enjoyments hang loose about you, that it may be easily dropped when death comes to carry you into another world."
"As specimens of those acts [atrocities] mention may be made of his massacre of the people of Sistan 1383–4, when he caused some two thousand prisoners to be built up into a wall; his cold-blooded slaughter of a hundred thousand captive Indians near Dihli [Delhi] (December, 1398); his burying alive of four thousand Armenians in 1400–1, and the twenty towers of skulls erected by him at Aleppo and Damascus in the same year; and his massacre of 70,000 of the inhabitants of Isfahan (November, 1387)."
"Their first conqueror was Tamerlane himself—more properly Timur-i-lang—a Turk who had accepted Islam as an admirable weapon, and had given himself a pedigree going back to Genghis Khan, in order to win the support of his Mongol horde. Having attained the throne of Samarkand and feeling the need of more gold, it dawned upon him that India was still full of infidels. His generals, mindful of Moslem courage, demurred, pointing out that the infidels who could be reached from Samarkand were already under Mohammedan rule. Mullahs learned in the Koran decided the matter by quoting an inspiring verse: “Oh Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity.” Thereupon Timur crossed the Indus (1398), massacred or enslaved such of the inhabitants as could not flee from him, defeated the forces of Sultan Mahmud Tughlak, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold blood, plundered the city of all the wealth that the Afghan dynasty had gathered there, and carried it off to Samarkand with a multitude of women and slaves, leaving anarchy, famine and pestilence in his wake."
"Tamerlane, who built the last great Empire in the Steppes of Central Asia, seems a worthy heir of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. He piled up the skulls of defeated enemies in monstrous pyramids and struck fear wherever he went. Yet he was a patron of learning who created an Empire that brought enormous benefits to his homeland. He made his capital Samarkand one of the greatest and most sophisticated cities in the Islamic world. He was a tyrant whos atrocities were carried out abroad rather than at home."
"It has been noted that the Jenghiz-Khanite Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century was less cruel, for the Mongols were mere barbarians who killed simply because for centuries this had been the instinctive behavior of nomad herdsmen toward sedentary farmers. To this ferocity Tamerlane [Timur] added a taste for religious murder. He killed from Qur'anic piety. He represents a synthesis, probably unprecedented in history, of Mongol barbarity and Muslim fanaticism, and symbolizes that advanced form of primitive slaughter which is murder committed for the sake of an abstract ideology, as a duty and a sacred mission."
"Tamerlane's [Timur's] conquering activities were carried on from the Volga to Damascus, from Smyrna to the Ganges and the Yulduz, and his expeditions into these regions followed no geographical order. He sped from Tashkent to Shiraz, from Tabriz to Khodzhent, as enemy aggression dictated; a campaign in Russia occurred between two in Persia, an expedition into Central Asia between two raids into the Caucasus.…[Timur] at the end of every successful campaign left the country without making any dispositions for its control except Khwarizm and Persia, and even there not until the very end. It is true that he slaughtered all his enemies as thoroughly and conscientiously as the great Mongol, and the pyramids of human heads left behind him as a warning example tell their own tale. Yet the survivors forgot the lesson given them and soon resumed secret or overt attempts at rebellion, so that it was all to do again. It appears too, that these blood soaked pyramids diverted [Timur] from the essential objective. Baghdad, Brussa (Bursa), Sarai, Kara Shahr, and Delhi were all sacked by him, but he did not overcome the Ottoman Empire, the Golden Horde, the khanate of Mogholistan, or the Indian Sultanate; and even the Jelairs of Iraq Arabi rose up again as soon as he had passed. Thus he had to conquer Khwarizm three times, the Ili six or seven times (without ever managing to hold it for longer than the duration of the campaign), eastern Persia twice, western Persia at least three times, in addition to waging two campaigns in Russia.…[Timur's] campaigns “always had to be fought again,” and fight them again he did."
"It is the Qur'an to which he continually appeals, the imams and [<nowiki/>Sufi] dervishes who prophesy his success [emphasis added]. His wars were to influence the character of the jihad, the Holy War, even when—as was almost always the case—he was fighting Muslims. He had only to accuse these Muslims of lukewarmness, whether the Jagataites of the Ili and Uiguria, whose conversion was so recent, or the Sultans of Delhi who…refrained from massacring their millions of Hindu subjects."
"This strange champion of Islam had come to deliver a stab in the back to the vanguard of Islam at the fringe of India. He was to adopt the same attitude toward the Ottoman Empire on the marches of Rumania."
"A careful study of Timur’s invasion leads to the conclusion that it symbolises little more than the fulfilment of an ambition without a distinct object. After all why did he invade India? If conquest of the country was his object, he had certainly not achieved it."
"But even in the deepest darkness light persists. Timur’s gruesome invasion had a silver lining. Hindus and Muslims all stood up to a man to fight him wherever he went. The days of Mahmud of Ghazni were a story of the past, and Timur met resistance everywhere. The people of India were known for their disunity in the face of a foreign invader. But they stood united against Timur. At Tulamba, Ajodhan, Deopalpur, Bhatnir, Meerut and Delhi—nay everywhere —the Hindus and Muslims fought shoulder to shoulder against the invader. Shaikh Sa’iduddin interceded with Timur on behalf of the Hindu chief of Bhatnir. At Meerut, Ilyas Afghan, a Muslim, burnt his womenfolk in the fire of jawhar. During Timur’s visitation the Hindus and Muslims learnt to sink their differences and stand united."
"Tamerlane was a world conqueror, statesman and military commander of astonishing brilliance and brutal ferocity who built an empire stretching from India to Russia and the Mediterranean Sea. Never defeated in battle, the ultimate hero-monster, he ranks alongside Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great as one of the great conquerors of all time yet he left in his wake both pyramids of human skulls and the aesthetic beauty of his capital Samarkand."
"A ruthless killer, whose armies were responsible for unrivalled pillage and brutality, Tamerlane was equally a shrewd statesman, brilliant general and sophisticated patron of the arts. Revered in Uzbekistan to this day — his monument in Tashkent standing where Marx’s statue once presided — Tamerlane was buried in a beautiful simple tomb in Samarkand. Legend said that the disturber of his tomb would be cursed: in June 1941, a Soviet historian opened the tomb. Days later, Hitler attacked Soviet Russia."
"The citizens of the capital, headed by the ulema, waited on the conqueror and begged quarter. Timur agreed to spare the citizens; but, owing to the oppressive conduct of the soldiers of the invading force, the people of the city were obliged to offer resistance. Timur now ordered a general plunder and massacre which lasted for several days. Thousands of the citizens of Delhi were murdered and thousands were made prisoners. A historian writes: “High towers were built with the head of the Hindus, and their bodies became the food of ravenous beasts and birds…such of the inhabitants who escaped alive were made prisoners.”"
"Timur left [India] prostrate and bleeding. There was utter confusion and misery throughout northern India. [India's] northwestern provinces, including northern tracts of Rajasthan and Delhi, were so thoroughly ravaged, plundered and even burnt that it took these parts many years, indeed, to recover their prosperity. Lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of men, and in some cases, many women and children, too, were butchered in cold blood. The rabi crops [grown in October–November, harvested around March, including barley, mustard, and wheat] standing in the field were completely destroyed for many miles on both sides of the invader's long and double route from the Indus to Delhi and back. Stores of grain were looted or destroyed. Trade, commerce and other signs of material prosperity disappeared. The city of Delhi was depopulated and ruined. It was without a master or a caretaker. There was scarcity and virulent famine in the capital and its suburbs. This was followed by a pestilence caused by the pollution of the air and water by thousands of uncared-for dead bodies."
"Along with Moisiodax, Rigas Velestinlis (he too a Vlach), Nikolaos Zervoulis, Dimitrios Darvaris, Nikolaos Piccolos, and Arhanacios Vogoridis had all assimilated into Hellenism at the time. During much of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, Hellenism served in the Balkans as an ecumenical cultural ideal, very much like the role it played in the eastern Mediterranean of the Hellenistic period and of late antiquity. Although not supported by military might as was the case in Alexander’s time, it attained enormous prestige. Indeed, Greek culture along with Orthodoxy and the Ottoman administration served as the three unifying forces in the Balkans. Hellenism expanded throughout the region because Greeks had dominated the four areas— religion, economy, administration, and intellectual life—that constituted the shared substratum of Balkan life (Tsourkas 1967: 212). Ethnic Greeks occupied positions of enormous prestige and influence in the Ottoman administration and served for decades as governors of Walachia and Moldavia. Greek had become the language of commerce and Hellenism the secular culture of the Balkans (Camariano-Cioran 1974: 15, 311). The economic and political power of the Greeks enabled them to have more contacts with Westerners than their neighbours, which explains in part their earlier attempts at modernization."
"It is also important that the process of nation- building he distinguished from related social phenomena. For instance if we accept as do most theorists of nationalism, that nations ate modern constructs, it becomes imperative to differentiate nation-building from expansionist ethnicism, The latter phenomenon for instance. describes the pattern to he found after 987 in Capetian France among the Zulus of the nineteenth century and among lateral-aristocratic ethnies like the Greeks (Smith 19**6. 141—2; Smith 1991: 57, Francis 1976: 28—31). The spread of ethnic consciousness within these pre-modern populations sprang from the efforts of clerics, monarchs, warrior bands or wandering performers, whose activities lacked the intensity, coordination or precision that is associated with nation-building (Armstrong 1982)."
"In antiquity, the power of Greek cities was manifested by their ability to found far—off, independent colonies, where the cities and colonies were connected more by language, culture, and history than by law or a hierarchical relationship. This is what the French geographer Georges Prévélakis calls a “galactic” organization, as opposed to a “dendritic” organization based on the relation between a centre and its periphery. The spread of Roman power—first by the republic, then the empire—over the entire Mediterranean did not cause Hellenism to disappear as a cultural unity. After the empire split in two in 395, Hellenism actually blossomed in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, where it became the principal cultural component, especially in the religious domain: The Great Schism of 1054 divided Roman Catholics from the Greek Orthodox. Even political power became Hellenized. The seizure of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire, but Hellenism survived in the Ottoman Empire. Along with the Jews and the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church was allowed to establish an autonomous religious community, called milliet, that was responsible for the allocation and collection of taxes and for such matters as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. With the development of the Mediterranean trading system in the sixteenth century, Greek communities appeared outside the empire, including western Europe (Livorno and Venice) and Russia. Contact with Enlightenment philosophy and the ideas of 1789 fed the aspiration for a Greek state. This was created in 1830, founded on the ambition of restoring Greater Greece by recovering the Ottoman territories of Asia Minor. That hope collapsed in 1922-23 with the end of the Greco-Turkish war and the territorial agreement between the two countries."
"Their raging, day-long battle would become a testament to the warriors’ tenacious determination to protect their territory and to the treasure hunters’ wherewithal to defend themselves against the overwhelming odds of 15 to one."
"His San Saba heroics marked him braver than the average land speculator."
"Most people believe that when a dog howls near a house it forebodes death, for it is said a dog can distinguish the awful form of Azra'il, the Angel of Death."
"In Sharifabad the dogs distinguished clearly between Moslem and Zoroastrian, and were prepared to go, with a diffident politeness but full of hope, into a crowded Zoroastrian assembly, or to fall asleep trustfully in a Zoroastrian lane, but would flee as before Satan from a group of Moslem boys. Moslems are not, of course, invariably unkind to dogs. Some themselves own herd- or watch-dogs, and apart from this there are naturally many Moslems who would not deliberately harm any creature. But undeniably there are others who are savagely and wantonly cruel to dogs, on the pretext that Muhammad called them unclean; but there seems no factual basis for this, and the evidence points rather to Moslem hostility to these animals having been deliberately fostered in the first place in Iran, as a point of opposition to the old faith there. Certainly in the Yazdi area na-najib Moslems found a double satisfaction in tormenting dogs, since they were thereby both afflicting an unclean creature and causing distress to the infidel who cherished him. There are grim old stories from the time when the annual poll-tax was exacted, of the tax gatherer tying a Zoroastrian and a dog together, and flogging both alternately until the money was somehow forthcoming, or death released them. I myself was spared any worse sight than that of a young Moslem girl in Mazra' Kalantar standing over a litter of two-week old puppies, and suddenly kicking one as hard as she could with her shod foot. The puppy screamed with pain, but at my angry intervention she merely said blankly, ‘But it’s unclean.’ In Sharifabad I was told by distressed Zoroastrian children of worse things: a litter of puppies cut to pieces with a spade-edge, and a dog’s head laid open with the same implement; and occasionally the air was made hideous with the cries of some tormented animal. Such wanton cruelties on the Moslems’ part added not a little to the tension between the communities."