The Master of Chess and Mass Murder

Timur (1336-1405), the last Mongol conqueror of Central Asia, was so good at shatranj, the direct predecessor of chess, that he created his own, much more complex version. Where chess employs 16 pieces of six types on a board of 64 squares, Timur's game used 28 pieces of 11 different types on a board of 112 squares. His domination and expansion of the chessboard paralleled his success on the battlefield, where he showed opposing armies no mercy and extended his domain. A leg injury earned Timur the nickname Timur-I-Leng (Persian for "the iron limper"), which became Anglicized as Tamerlane, but the resulting limp belied his military prowess. Through surprise, tactical feints, and the effective use of cavalry (like Genghis Khan before him), Tamerlane enjoyed 35 years of virtually uninterrupted conquest. Although his empire eventually stretched from Syria to Tibet, his objective was not to capture territory but treasure, and after looting one city, he would wait a few years and return to loot it again. The people who stood in his way frequently were slaughtered en masse. After capturing Delhi in India, for example, Tamerlane killed all the defenders and piled their skulls--some 80,000 in all--into a pyramid as a warning to others. Indeed, until eclipsed by 20th century practitioners of genocide like Adolf Hitler, Tamerlane was the archetype of despotism in Western minds. Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe and American poet Edgar Allan Poe both invoked his name to symbolize cruel, ruthless tyranny. But in his capital of Samarkand (now a city of modern Uzbekistan), Tamerlane was revered as a man of culture and learning, who brought the city wealth and prestige. Beautiful mosques and monuments paid for by his plunder still remain, including the mausoleum in which his corpse rests in an ebony coffin covered by a slab of jade.