Timur | 600 - 1450 Regional and interregional interactions | World History | Khan Academy

Where we left off in the last few videos, we saw the Empire of the Mongols fragment into the various Khanates. In the East, you have the Yuan Dynasty established by Kublai Khan, and then in the West, you have the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, and then the Ilkhanate in much of the Middle East and Persia.

Now, as we go a little bit further into the 14th century, and in particular the 1330s, you might remember when we studied Europe that the Bubonic Plague hits. It doesn't just hit Europe; it hits Asia. One of the causes often given for the rapid spread is that you had relative stability formed by these Khanates so that trade was able to happen. But with that trade, you also have the spread of disease.

The Bubonic Plague, or the Black Death of the 1330s in particular, does damage to the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Middle East. Not only the emperor, but his sons all die from the Bubonic Plague. You see here on this timeline that the Ilkhanate goes into a rapid decline because of the Black Death.

At the same time, in the southwest corner of the Chagatai Khanate, a future conqueror is born: Timur, which means iron. He's often known as Tamerlane because, when he was young, he was injured in both the hand and leg by arrows, which impaired his movement. This is why the Europeans called him Timur the Lame, which became Tamerlane.

Despite his physical impairments, he's able to conquer much of the Chagatai Khanate eventually and the Ilkhanate and establish a dynasty of his own. The empire gets established in 1370 when he gains effective power over much of the western Chagatai Khanate. He comes from a Turco-Mongol tradition.

Now, you'll hear these terms, Turco-Mongol, a lot because, even though the Mongols conquered this large swath of territory, they did so with significant help from people speaking Turkic languages from Central Asia, Turkish being the most well-known of the Turkic languages. Many of the conquerors, especially the Muslim conquerors of Central Asia and Persia of this period, are of a Turco-Mongol ethnicity.

Even though there's no evidence of him being a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, he views himself as the successor. He wants to recreate the great Mongol Empire. By the time of Timur's death, the Timurid Empire encompasses much of Persia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

His legacy is a bloody one as he expanded territory and took over cities. It was not uncommon for his soldiers to kill tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of civilians who revolted against Timur's rule. His forces famously attacked the Delhi Sultanate not hoping to conquer India but to take its spoils.

In 1398, he was able to successfully defeat the sultan who had battle elephants. He was able to defeat them by sending camels that had flames on their backs to scare the elephants. Famously, when his forces took Delhi, they killed 100,000 to 200,000 people and took the spoils of the city.

There are some estimates that Timur's forces killed as many as 17 million people as the empire expanded. To put this into perspective, this is roughly 5% of the world's population at that time. Now, once Timur dies in 1405, you can see from this timeline that the empire does not last long.

As we get to the second half of the 15th century, it is in decline. Some of his descendants end up ruling over fragmented portions of this empire. As we get into the 16th century, we'll see one descendant in particular: his grandson's great-grandson takes on the Delhi Sultanate and establishes the Mughal, which is Persian for Mongol, and establishes the Mughal Empire in Northern India.