Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World | Justin Marozzi

book: Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World | Justin Marozzi

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Tamerlane: Sword o...

	Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World Justin Marozzi Da Capo Press, 2007 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Tamerlane (1336-1405)-the tartar successor to Genghis Khan-ranks with Alexander the Great as one of the world?s greatest conquerors. His armies were ferocious, feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. They blazed through Asia like a firestorm, razing cities, torturing captives, and massacring enemies. Anyone who dared defy Tamerlane was likely decapitated, and towers of bloody heads soon became chilling monuments to his power throughout Central Asia. By the end of his life, Tamerlane had imposed his iron rule, as well as a refined culture, over a vast territory-from Syria to India, from Siberia to the Mediterranean. Justin Marozzi traveled in the footsteps of this infamous and enigmatic emperor of Samarkand (in modern Uzbekistan) to tell the story of this cruel, cultivated, and powerful warrior.

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Missing the Mark

If you're looking for a detailed, clear narrative of Tamerlane's life and achievements, Justin Marozzi's book is not it. Failing to develop Tamerlane as an individual from his youth onward, and failing to explain exactly how he came to be so successful, Marozzi diverts perhaps half the book to recounting his own travels in Tamerlane's homeland. As descriptive and rare the author's experiences may be, a journalistic description of former metropolises in modern-day Central Asia does not provide a better understanding of the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. Throughout the book, Marozzi views Tamerlane more through the distant lens of someone in awe of his achievements, rather than the skeptical and down-to-earth approach necessary for biographers to truly evaluate who their particular subject really was.
This is the flow of the book: a few very narrowed down pieces of Tamerlane's life, each separated by an equally large amount of journalism. The reader can neither fully assess the achievements of Tamerlane's career, nor gain a certain familiarity with his personality.
The purpose of biography is to find out what kind of person the subject of the book was, and evaluate his/her achievements. In the case of Tamerlane, the reader is never really given an explanation for how someone conquered territory so successfully and rapidly, or how a man could rise from the status of desperado to all-powerful emperor. The main argument presented is that Tamerlane, while committing atrocities, also had many cultural achievements, most notably the building of several Islamic monuments now mostly in ruins or completely nonexistent. There is no assessment of Tamerlane's psyche, what led him to believe in his destiny, just how he outwitted his opponents, and what his legacy was. Why are western scholars, even military theorists, so unfamiliar with someone whose military career was as successful and immaculate as Alexander's? How did Tamerlane as a politician manage to rise so far and fast? What psychological condition could Tamerlane have had that may have motivated his ambition, and more significantly, the genocides he so ruthlessly committed? What aspect of his personality made him an electrifying leader, and gave him the energy to vigorously campaign even up to his death as an old man? These are essential questions about Tamerlane that should be answered, or at least examined, so that readers can analyze Tamerlane with the same level of understanding as western heroes such as Alexander and Napoleon.
Instead, Justin Marozzi gives a hollow carcass of a biography, decorated with fanciful quotations and literary comparisons, but completely lacking in the real substance essential to a book that seeks to give the public an understanding of one of the greatest conquerors in history. In studying Tamerlane, we shouldn't look for the decrepit and virtually forgotten ruins and former cities of Central Asia. That does not highlight our understanding of him as a man. We need to know what he did, how he did it, why he did it, and what affect it had. We need to know these things as much as possible so that we may truly form an accurate perception of him as a statesman, soldier, and human being.

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