Gunpowder Technology • 137empire to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Then, leaving the Middle
East, he turned against India. He defeated its Muslim amirs, sacked Delhi,
and filled his coffers with Indian booty, using its proceeds to march west¬
ward once more. Between 1400 and 1403 he took Aleppo and Damascus
from the Mamluks and almost wiped out the rising Ottoman Empire at
Ankara. Although his Middle Eastern realm matched his Asian empire
at Samarqand, Timur pined for an even vaster domain, equal to that of Jen -
ghiz Khan. Only his sudden death in 1405 stopped Timur's soldiers from
setting out to conquer China itself.
Some people may admire the ambition of an Alexander, a Napoleon, or a
Jenghiz Khan to build by war a universal empire under which all peoples
would live together in peace. A world full of contending tribes and king¬
doms seems anarchic, and the conquerors we have named were visionaries.
They esteemed scholars, artists, and artisans, and left legacies in the fields
of political or military organization. If we focus on social history, though,
we cannot praise Timur, whose main legacies were pyramids of human
heads and smoking ruins where cities had once stood, though he did erect
in Samarqand monumental madrasas, mosques, and mausoleums. His de¬
scendants patronized scholars, manuscript illustrators, and jewelers. His
great-great-grandson, Babur (r. 1483-1530), would found a Muslim state
in India. We call it the Mughal Empire, though it began as a Timurid off¬
shoot. It would last until 1858, when Britain took full control of India.
Except for Central Asia, Timur's conquests broke away soon after he
died. The Mamluks recovered Syria, the Turkish amirs of Anatolia won
back their independence, and various dynasties took over in Persia. Most
memorable of these dynastic states were those of the Shi'i Black Sheep and
the Sunni White Sheep Turcomans, who fought each other for most of the
fifteenth century. Out of this chaos would come a new dynasty, the Safavids
(1501-1736), to spur yet another Persian cultural revival.
GUNPOWDER TECHNOLOGYIn its earliest and most primitive phases, written history recounted the
battles and the deeds of kings. War and diplomacy preoccupied most tra¬
ditional ruling classes, so this is what they paid their clerks and scholars to
record. It was basically a "drum-and-trumpet" history of Europe or the US
that our great-grandparents learned in school. Even now, what you get in
Middle East history tends to stress politics and war, though literary and
archaeological sources are now pointing toward economic and social his¬
tory. One new field is the history of military technology. For example,