Autumn 1400 – 1401
Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad, 1400–1401
From Sivas Timur marches south, takes Malatya and enters Mamluk Syria. The Mamluk army of Syria gathers at Aleppo, and Timur defeats it and sacks the town in October or November 1400. Hama, Homs and Baalbek surrender, and in December he lays siege to Damascus.
Timur watches Damascus burn, in a Zafarnama made at Shiraz in 1533, British LibraryWikimedia Commons, unknown painter, Public domain (Folio 358r. Siege of Damascus in 1400 (detail). Timur watches the flames as the city burns. Ẓafarnāmah, 16th century, Shiraz (British Library, IO Islamic 137).jpg)
The Mamluk sultan Faraj comes from Cairo with an army, but for fear of a revolt in Egypt he leaves it in Syria and hurries home. The historian Ibn Khaldun, who has come with him, stays in the besieged town for seven weeks. He is lowered over the wall on ropes to treat with Timur and meets him several times early in 1401. Damascus surrenders and is plundered, the Umayyad Mosque burns in March 1401, and many of the town’s craftsmen are taken to Samarkand.
Ibn Khaldun’s own handwriting in a manuscript of his Muqaddima, Süleymaniye Library, IstanbulWikimedia Commons, Ibn Khaldun, Public domain (Handwriting of Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, MS Atıf Efendi 1936, f. 7a.png)
Timur marches north again by Mardin and lays siege to Baghdad, the seat of Ahmad Jalayir. He storms it after forty days in the summer of 1401, has much of its population killed and winters again in Karabagh. While he is away, Bayezid marches on Erzincan, takes Taharten captive and then leaves him the town as a vassal. He keeps the castle of Kemah with an Ottoman garrison and sends Taharten’s family to Bursa as hostages. Timur demands Kemah and Taharten’s family back, Qara Yusuf dead or alive, and one of Bayezid’s sons as a hostage.
Sources
- Ibn Khaldun, Autobiography (al-Taʿrīf, about 1405).
- Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, Zafarnama (1425).
- Ibn Arabshah, ʿAjāʾib al-maqdūr fī nawāʾib Tīmūr (1435).
- Walter J. Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn and Tamerlane (1952).
- Beatrice Forbes Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (1989).
- İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 1 (1947).
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