TheIndosphere

An encyclopedia of Indian civilization.

IslamicLate Medieval

Timurid Empire

The Timurid empire was the state founded by the Turkic conqueror Timur in Central Asia and Iran in the late fourteenth century, ruled by his descendants from Samarkand and Herat until 1507, and the ancestral line of the Mughal emperors of India.

See it on the atlas →

Timur

Timur was born in 1336 near Kesh, south of Samarkand, into the Barlas, a Turkicised Mongol tribe of the Chagatai khanate. A wound in his youth left him lame, which gave him the Persian name Timur-i Lang, from which European writers made Tamerlane. By 1370 he had made himself master of Transoxiana. Not being a descendant of Chinggis Khan, he did not take the title of khan but ruled as amir, in the name of puppet khans, and married into the Chinggisid line.

Over the next thirty-five years he campaigned across Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, the lands of the Golden Horde, Syria and Anatolia, where he defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at Ankara in 1402. His campaigns were notorious for massacres and pyramids of skulls. In 1398 he invaded India, defeated the army of the Tughluq sultan, and sacked Delhi. He died in 1405 at Otrar, setting out to invade China.

Samarkand and Herat

Timur filled Samarkand with buildings raised by craftsmen taken from the cities he conquered: the great mosque named after his wife Bibi Khanum, his own tomb, the Gur-i Amir, and palaces and gardens. His empire fragmented after his death, but his son Shah Rukh (r. 1405–1447) restored much of it from Herat. Shah Rukh's son Ulugh Beg, who governed Samarkand, built an observatory there and compiled star tables that were the most accurate of their time.

In the second half of the fifteenth century Timurid authority shrank to Transoxiana and Khurasan, divided among rival princes. Herat under Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r. 1469–1506) was one of the great courts of the Islamic world: the poet Jami and the statesman and poet Ali-Shir Nava'i, who made Chagatai Turkish a literary language, worked there, and the painter Bihzad led the school of miniature painting that later influenced Mughal painting.

The end and the Indian sequel

The Uzbeks under Muhammad Shaybani Khan took Samarkand around 1500 and Herat in 1507. One Timurid prince, Babur, a fifth-generation descendant of Timur on his father's side and of Chinggis Khan on his mother's, lost Samarkand to them and established himself at Kabul. In 1526 he defeated Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat and founded the empire in India that Europeans called Mughal, but which its rulers called the house of Timur, the Gurkani.

The Mughals kept their Timurid identity throughout their history. They used Timurid models in their court culture, gardens and tomb architecture, and treasured objects associated with Timur and his descendants.

Further reading

  • Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
  • Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999

See also

  • Timur's invasion of India — Timur's invasion of India was a campaign by the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, known as Tamerlane, against the Delhi Sultanate in 1398, culminating in the sack of Delhi and the mass killing of its population.
  • Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
  • Delhi Sultanate — The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) was a series of five Turkic and Afghan Muslim dynasties that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent from Delhi, beginning with the Mamluk dynasty founded by Qutb-ud-din Aibak.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.