collided at the Battle of the Steppes, also known as the
Battle of Lake Kerguel (July 1391), which historians be-
lieve took place east of the Volga River and south of the
Kama River. Historian George Bruce writes: “[The bat-
tle was] between 300,000 Russians, under Toktamish,
and an equal force of Tartars, under Timur. The battle
began at daybreak, and by midday the Russians were to-
tally routed, and fled in disorder, leaving the camp in the
hands of Timur.” It is estimated that 30,000 Mongols
died on the battlefield. However, because his own army
had taken severe casualties, Timur decided not to pursue
Toktamish, instead falling back to Central Asia.
A series of uprisings against Timur’s rule began in
1392, and he spent the next several years putting them
down. He invaded India, and at Delhi (17 December
1398), his force was attacked by the army of the Delhi
Muslims, commanded by Mahmud Tughlak. Utiliz-
ing the river nearby to cross and confuse the Muslims,
Timur forced them to withdraw back into the city,
which he besieged, forcing its surrender; his army then
plundered it. At Aleppo (11 November 1400), Timur’s
forces met those of the Turks under the Syrian emirs.
He conquered them quickly, and his army sacked the
city. He conquered Damascus (25 January 1401) and
then stormed Baghdad, now in modern Iraq (23 July
1401), razing it and massacring thousands of people.
At Angora (today’s Anatolia, 30 June 1402), Timur’s
army, estimated at 800,000 men, struck the Turks, com-
manded by Bazajet I. Timur won a resounding victory,
taking Bazajet and one of his sons captive while another
was killed.
In 1404, Timur returned to Samarkand and pre-
pared for what he believed would be the ultimate mili-
tary expedition: a war against the Ming Dynasty in
China. He gathered every soldier, horseman, and archer
he could find and set out for China, but within months
he became ill. In February 1405, near the city of Chim-
kent in Turkestan, he died, possibly from a fever brought
on by excessive drinking. His body was carried back to
Samarkand, where he was laid to rest; his tomb, a na-
tional monument, is known as the Gur-Amir. In 1941,
more than five centuries later, his body was exhumed
by a Russian scientist, M. M. Gerasimov, who found
that Timur was 5 foot 8 inches tall and excessively lame.
Taking measurements of the skull, Gerasimov sketched
what Timur might have looked like.
The “myth” of Tamerlane has grown in the six cen-
turies since his death, with historians such as Samuel
Clarke and others writing of him. The English play-
wright Christopher Marlowe penned an ode in the form
of his 1587 play Tamburlaine the Great.References: Clarke, Samuel, The Life of Tamerlane the
Great with his Wars against the Great Duke of Moso, the
King of China, Bazajet the Great Turk, the Sultan of Egypt,
the King of Persia, and Some Others, Carried on with a
Continued Series of Success from the First to the Last...
(London, 1653); Windrow, Martin, and Francis K.
Mason, “Timur-i-Leng,” in The Wordsworth Dictionary
of Military Biography (Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth
Editions Ltd., 1997), 293; Manz, Beatrice Forbes, The
Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1989); Bruce, George, “Lake Kerguel,”
in Collins Dictionary of Wars (Glasgow, Scotland: Harper-
Collins Publishers, 1995), 135; Craig, Simon, “Battle of
Ankara: Collision of Empires,” Military History 19, no. 3
(August 2002): 58–65.Togo, Heihachiro, Count (1847–1934) Japanese
admiral
Heihachiro Togo was born in Kagoshima, Japan, on 27
January 1847 (some sources report the date as being
1848) into a family that included members of the samu-
rai class. He received only a moderate education before
he joined the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1866 (some
sources report the year as being 1863). He was assigned
to the Japanese ship Kwaiten in 1871. That same year, he
was sent to England, where he spent seven years studying
naval science and navigation and training with the Royal
Navy at Portsmouth and Greenwich. After he returned
to Japan in 1878, this experience helped him to rise in
the ranks of the Japanese navy, and by 1888 he had been
promoted to captain and given command of his own
ship, the cruiser Naniwa. In 1893, when native Japanese
in the Hawaiian islands complained to their homeland
of maltreatment at the hands of the Hawaiians, Togo
sailed to the islands and was there when American busi-
nessmen and planters staged a coup against Hawaiian
queen Liliuoikalani. He nearly became involved in an
incident when the captain of the American ship Boston
demanded his withdrawal; the captain later apologized
to him.
In 1894, Togo’s cruiser was the first ship to fire in
the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), caused by Japanese
concerns over Chinese control of the Korean peninsula.togo, heihAchiRo, count