160 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Some admiration has even accrued to Genghis Khan and his immedi-
ate successors based on the fact that they conducted mass-murder as a
canny battle strategy and not out of sheer cruelty, destroying some cities
utterly in order to make other cities give in without a fight. Reading such
analyses, one might almost suppose the Mongols did their best to avoid
needless bloodshed!
It is true that the most famous Mongol conquerors from Genghis to
Hulagu look almost good in comparison to their descendant Timur-i-lang
(Tamerlane, to the west) who emerged from Central Asia at the end of the
fourteenth century and went on a bloody rampage that claimed countless
further lives. Timur represented a last burst of the horror that began with
Chengez Khan, rather like one of those movie monsters that twitches its
tail after it seems dead and with that one final twitch cuts a sickening
swath of new destruction.
For Timur, bloodshed was not just a canny battle strategy. He seemed
to relish it for its own sake. It was he (not Chengez) who took pleasure in
piling up pyramids of severed heads outside the gates of cities he had plun-
dered. It was he, too, who executed captives by dropping them, still living,
into tall, windowless towers until he had filled the towers to the brim.
Timur banged and slaughtered his way to Asia Minor and then banged
and slaughtered his way back again to India, where he left so many corpses
rotting on the roads to Delhi that he made the whole region uninhabitable
for months. His rampage was too horrific to go entirely unmentioned in
any world history, but it doesn't deserve long consideration because it was
essentially meaningless: he came, he saw, he killed, and then he died and
his vast empire crumbled at once and no one remembers much about him
anymore except that he was scary.
So yes, as an embodiment of pure savagery, Chengez Khan looks good
compared to his descendant Timur (at least Timur claimed Chengez as an
ancestor, though the line of descent remains obscure). But the original
Mongol conquests had greater impact: they altered the trajectory of
history.
First of all, they sparked a crisis for Muslim theology, and some re-
sponses to that crisis had ramifications that we are still wrestling with
today. The crisis was rooted in the fact that Muslim theologians and schol-
ars, and indeed Muslims in general, had long felt that Islam's military sue-