Peter Jackson’s From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia was something I got the second it was released. It has long been my assertion that English language works on the Timurid period are rare enough. Much less ones also covering the post-unity Mongol prelude that led up to it. Sure, there are specific academic works about certain places or kingdoms in this period, but seeing the process of Mongol decline and Timurid rebirth all at once is an important and overlooked aspect of these two states. Indeed, as Jackson asserts, they really aren’t two different states at all. Or, more specifically, the Chaghatai Khanate (the Mongol successor state in Central Asia) and the Timurid Empire are the same state, but simply domestically usurped. You wouldn’t say the Napoleonic Empire was not a French state would you? And unless chroniclers of the time were refering to Timur as in an individual specifically, they usually referred to his state and army as Chaghataiid.

A brief overview of the rise of the Mongols and then a focus on their post-unity decline and various fates of the successor states give us a full and meaty text. We then see the intermediate period of full Ilkhanate and partial Chaghatai state failure and fragmentation and then, only in the third, final (but most substantial) book subsection, the rise of Emir Timur with a short final chapter on the fairly rapid fall of the empire. Jackson does not deny the differences in the periods at the start and end of his work, but emphasizes continuity in many places which are often overlooked. We get citations from numerous contemporary historians to all kinds of aspects of this period, such as attitudes towards various peoples, how rule was legitimized, the large amount of the nomadic people that retained shamanism even after official societal conversion to Islam, and the courtly public debates between Chinggis Khan’s proto-constitutional Yasa (eventually called Tore) and Sharia law. There are also numerous asides about rival dynasties that emerged in the political vacuums that arose in the post-Mongol world. (If you would like another great book on this subject do check out Patrick Wing’s The Jalayirids.)

I cannot emphasize enough how useful as a reference and source this book is to those into Turco-Mongolian history. We get chapter by chapter breakdowns of these empires and how their histories flow into each other. How Timur rose from relative obscurity into a local warlord, then greater Samarkand bigwig, and then finally a warlord ruling through a puppet Chaghatai Khan. An extreme respecter of the Mongol experience before him, Timur married into the Chaghatai family to merge dynasties for his descendants, but never declared himself the head of the state even though he was by all definitions its sovereign. His descendants would end up claiming the joint heritage, most famously Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire (itself named as a Chaghatai term for the more nomadic of the Central Asian lineages still connected to the Mongol invasions).

Many historians have posited that Timur wished to restore the Mongol Empire, but Jackson disagrees. The author sees the Emir as a usurper/restorer of the declining Chagatai state. Giving one of the less successful long-term successor states of the Mongol period a moment to outshine the others and go from least important to most important. A major part of this was the economic reorientation of Silk Road trade from its more northerly line through the Kipchak Khanate (Golden Horde) and into Yuan (and then Ming) China and back into its pre-Mongol Central Asian focus. There was a level of regional patriotism here too, with the plunder and tribute from abroad fueling Timurid building, art and science patronage, and, I believe, a sincere attempt to recover an economic dynamism for a region that had been declining ever since the Yuan and the Kipchak Khanate had ended up as the much more successful of the Mongol successor states than the Chaghatai and Ilkhanate were.

Jackson and I agree on all of the above. Indeed, I even wrote about the Timurid period as one of a strong example of a core vs periphery form of imperialism (World Systems Theory) rather than one based on constant territorial annexation in my own book. There is, interestingly, one point that only comes up in the end where Jackson and I disagree though. Jackson believes that the reason Timur was the last of these truly Eurasia-spanning successful nomadic army warriors (though others like the Aq Koyunlu and Dzungars would have some strong moments to come) was because of the state and military mobilization changes made to mixed regimes like Muscovy and the Manchu Qing dynasty. I completely agree that this played a huge role, and that the 17th Century was really the period of Manchurian military domination, but to make this point Jackson disavows that economic changes reorienting Eurasian trade towards the oceans had yet to play an important role. I believe it was both. Granted, this would not yet have been apparent at the time and is much more of a hindsight argument, but the Manchus and Muscovites and Safavids all were beginning to grow their connections with the more maritime parts of the world in addition to reforming their armies to take the best of both the settled and nomadic worlds. After all, the Timurid army itself was one of the first of these mixed armies (though much more tilted in the nomadic direction than these later states) but was already clearly acting in a way that implied fear of global trade networks moving away from in inland heartland. Nevertheless, this is a point where reasonable people can disagree and my quibbles in no way change my view of the book overall.

The book is both accessible to the non-academic but also rigorous and citation heavy and well worth your time.

In the meanwhile, enjoy a traditional-style but modern song in the Chaghatai language about Timur: