1493: The Timurid Empire

[General_Paul]

Rebirth of the Nomadic Kingdoms: The Timurid Dynasty and Islam (1494-1500)

1494: Since the establishment of the Timurid Empire under Tīmūr bin Taraghay Barlas in 1369 with its capital at Samarkand, the Timurids have been in a position that granted them access to both great opportunities for wealth, as well as a position that placed them between two settled civilizations: Islamic society to the west, and Indian and Chinese society to the east. However, in 1494, the Timurid Empire, and the dynasty itself has been in a state of flux with dynastic rulers claiming legitimacy in Herat and Samarkand. Along with the two heirs in Herat and Samarkand, Abu'l-Khayr Khan (1428-68) and his two grandsons have been moving to organize the Uzbek tribes since Abu'l-Khayr Khan took the throne in 1428. With the confusing and ever shifting alliances of the successor states of Genghis Khan, there is little stability in the region.

In the Timurid Dynasty in Herat, Husayn Bayqarah has been trying to hold the empire together amidst a series of attacks by Uzbek and Kazakh tribal attacks, and failed attacks against successor states in the steppe.

In the Timurid Dynasty in Farghana, a tributary of the Samarkand Timur Dynasty, Umar Sheikh Mirza has been attempting to ready his 11 year old son, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, to lead the kingdom.

1495: Umar Sheikh Mirza dies of an infection caused after a hunting trip gone wrong left him with a shattered leg that was a result of loosing control of his horse and being thrown to the ground with such force that it shattered his femur. The 12 year old son of Mizra, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, is too young to be an effective leader, yet under the inheritance laws, he must take the throne. (In OTL, Mizra would die in 1498 when Babur was 14 years old.)

With Babur's inheritance, a cabal of his father's best generals and high ranking community leaders, rather than shoving the 12 year old Babur off the throne and out of the kingdom, decided that the best alternative was to kill Babur on the eve of his 13th birthday in February and claim legitimacy on their own, rather than risk his gaining support from the rest of the kingdom.

February 14, 1496: An assasin, under the orders of the cabal, attempts to poison Babur in his sleep. What the assasin failed to notice was the dagger Babur had taken to sleeping with since his ascention to the throne the year before, and the fact that Babur was a notoriously light sleeper. Once he entered the chambers of Babur, he awoke to see the assasin opening a bottle of poison. Babur immediatly drew the dagger from under his pillow and in one swift motion, drove it directly through the heart of the assasin. It is with this gesture of self-defense that Babur uncovered his own strength as a leader. (Babur would not truly become a respected leader until he was driven out of his father's kingdom in 1500 and became ruler of Kabul in 1504).

1496: After the killing of the would be assasin, Babur took it upon himself to uncover who had sent the assasin. After several of the members of the cabal were too careless and mentioned in passing their relationship to the assasin during court conversations, Babur began to systematically hunt down and kill those who attempted to kill him. Their deaths were not a public spectacle. Instead, Babur would enter their sleeping chambers by himself, and kill them in the way that they tried to kill him, with a bottle of poison in their sleep. With some of the married men with families, Babur would not only kill the male, but his wife and children as well, sometimes in grusome manners used to frighten other members of the cabal out of hiding. By the end of the year, the 13 year old Babur had gone from being a frightened, naiive leader who only ruled because of his father's death, to becoming a Machiavellian style leader who used cruelty and violence to enforce his rule.

1497: With the events of the last year still fresh in his mind, Babur began the long, difficult process of solidifying his power base. Rather than attempting to draw support from the generals and high civilian leaders as his father had, Babur found that going to the leaders of the individual clans and tribes himself and working out deals face to face got him farther with them than going through middle men as his father and predacessors had. The concept of a council of elders, where the elders/leaders of the different tribes would come to Farghana and meet with Babur to discuss important domestic issues, sprung forth in the next decade due to Babur's growing connections with the tribal leaders rather than the old gentry of generals, ministers, and imam's.

Also, Babur found out by the end of the year that many of his uncles were in the planning stages of a coup to remove him from his father's throne in a power grab. With these reports, Babur's paranoia, left over from the events of the last year of dealing with the cabal, grew larger and more prevalent in his decision making.

January-May, 1498: In a five month orgy of bloodshed and inter-familial violence, Babur dispatches four of his uncles who were involved in the plot to overthrow him to take power for themselves, as well as laying siege to, sacking, and burning many cities, towns, and villages where his uncles held sway among the population. It is said that in several villages high in the mountains, none were left alive to tell the grusome tale of slaughter to relief expeditions mounted by Babur's uncles, leaving only empty villages filled with frozen corpses in the winter to mark the trail of death and destruction Babur blazed to secure his legitimacy. By the end of May 1498, Babur had killed three of the four uncles involved in the plot, and had driven the last uncle and his pitiful, starving band out of Farghana and into the Taklamakan Desert in western Turkestan.

June-December 1498: In the wake of his successful quelching of civil insurrection lead by close family members, Babur began to solidify his power base in Farghana in preparation for possible expansion west and south into the areas under the control of Samarkand, as well as Husayn Bayqarah in Herat. However, while Babur's plans for expansion and conquest in line with Timur's founding of the Timurid Empire are realistic and possible, the long term emotional and psychological effects of his struggles to survive on the throne have yet to fully manifest in his outward actions. Within his personal thoughts, however, Babur is beginning to show signs of increasing paranoia and dillusions that members of his court are plotting behind his back. These ideas are made apparent in his journal entries of the time, with his repeated paranoid rants that included, "...should my father have been alive, I am sure he would have enjoyed the slaughter of his unfaithful brothers and uncles...there are those within the court who I believe would follow in their footsteps, I will be sure to guard my flanks against any threats to my legitimacy...I will not make the same mistake twice."

These paranoid rants will become more and more frequent as the years go by and will seize control over his every waking moment, turning into an obsession that controlled his actions in the decade leading up to his death.

1499: Plans are finalized by Babur and his trusted generals to march on Samarkand and kill off his greatest percieved rival, Muhammad Shaybani, khan of the Uzbeks. These plans are part of a greater strategy put together by Babur and his generals to first regain control of Samarkand, then to march on Herat and Kabul, seizing control over the largest cities of the Afghan area, and setting Babur up for an eventual march on Baluchistan or Persia, depending on what Babur felt would be the better option.

[General_Paul]

April 20, 1500: One week after the spring weather began and the snow in the passes became melted enough for armies to pass through, military campaigning season opened. Babur lead an army of 27,000 men, mostly Mongol horsemen, footmen, archers, and a handful of men who wielded crude muskets and gunpowder weaponry who were either veterans of his campaigns two years prior to eliminate his disloyal relatives and members of the so-called, "cabal," or men who served under his relative's banners and came to his army instead, in an effort to bring Samarkand under his control.

On April 20, 1500, on the hills and grasslands outside of Samarkand, Babur engaged in combat against an army of equal or greater strength lead by his chief adversary, Muhammad Shaybani, khan of the Uzbeks. In a struggle lasting most of the day, no less than 65,000 men engaged in battle. However, modern historians can only estimate the numbers of either army, since in the intervening 400 years most records had been destroyed or lost, and Babur was not known to keep meticulous records before the sack of Herat.

The fight between Babur and Shaybani became a hand to hand struggle late in the day when the sun was beginning to set in the west. The two men met near the center of the combat area, and proceeded to engage in mounted combat. It is said that when Shayabani drew a bag of gunpowder to throw at the feet of Babur's horse, he proclaimed, "No man claiming lineage from the great Genghis Khan would stoop to such lows to secure victory!" With one swift motion, Babur removed the head of Shaybani with his sword, letting it fall to the ground, mouth still agape, before stabbing the head, raising it in the air, and screaming at the top of his lungs to the still battling armies, "Look how your bastard half-khan has faired in battle!"

While most did not bother to pay attention, within hours of this disasterous turn of events, the army of Muhammad Shaybani dissolved under the directed pressures of Babur's repeated cavalry charges and cleaver use of his small number of musket armed men in tangent with archers to scare the enemy horses as well as drive gaping holes in their defenses.

It is said that as day turned to night and as the forces of Shaybani either fled to the hills or surrendered to Babur's army, the crescent moon rose over the cupola of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, built by Timur in 1404. With this, Babur declared, "It is the will of Timur and the past leaders of the Mongol people that I should have this day as mine to celebrate this glorious victory!"

Afterwards, Babur entered the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, and prayed for the first, and only, time in his life. Close advisors to Babur would claim in later decades that his prayers were only of one thing, that Allah would bless his armies in all their campaigns in the future and would see fit that it would be his rule from a throne in Samarkand that would be the litigating factor in Earthly politics with his authority answerable only to the will of Allah and the will of Timur.

The last effort which Babur undertook on this day was to take the severed head of Muhammad Shaybani from the battlefield and place it in a box of salt to keep it safe and remind him of what must be done to secure that which he wanted most, power.

May-December 1500: In the wake of his successful capture of Samarkand, Babur's securing of his domain takes a brutal toll on the subjects of Samarkand who still held loyalty to the fallen Khan, Muhammad Shaybani. Those who refused to submit to Babur's authority, most of whom were more wealthy landowners, were killed outright, without any warning. The family of those landowners killed had their familial rights of inheritence stripped of them, their wealth was taken, and their land and wealth was distributed amongst the peasant farmers who lived on and worked the land, some for generations on end. Finally, the bodies of the landowners were decapitated, the heads placed on pikes outside their homes and their bodies thrown to wild animals to be devoured as a warning to all those who would oppose his domain over the lands.

These actions may be seen as being revolutionary for the time, however Babur carried with him alternate motives. He needed a strong power base in Samarkand and the surrounding regions to have legitimacy in his rule, and to eliminate any future threats from the peasantry. With the peasantry behind him, the greater majority by numbers, the elites would have little choice but to fall in line and agree with his rule.

With the placating of Samarkand by the end of 1500, Babur began planning his next moves: The conquests of Herat and Kabul.