Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official

by Sir W. H. Sleeman

The city was soon after taken, and the people commanded, as usual, to purchase their lives by the surrender of their property—troops were sent in to take it—numbers were tortured to death—and then the usual pillage and massacre of the whole people followed without regard to religion, age, or sex; and about a hundred thousand more of innocent and unoffending people were murdered. The troops next massacred the inhabitants of the old city, which had become crowded with fugitives from the new;[47] the last remnant took refuge in a mosque, where two of Tīmūr's most distinguished generals rushed in upon them at the head of five hundred soldiers; and, as the amiable historian tells us, 'sent to the abyss of hell the souls of these infidels, of whose heads they erected towers, and gave their bodies for food to birds and beasts of prey'. Being at last tired of slaughter, the soldiers made slaves of the survivors, and drove them out in chains; and, as they passed, the officers were allowed to select any they liked except the masons, whom Tīmūr required to build for him at Samarkand a church similar to that of Īltutmish in old Delhi.

He now set out to take Meerut, which was at that time a fortified town of much note. The people determined to defend themselves, and happened to say that Tarmah Shirīn, who invaded India at the head of a similar body of Tartars a century before,[48] had been unable to take the place. This so incensed Tīmūr that he brought all his forces to bear on Meerut, took the place, and having had all the Hindoo men found in it skinned alive, he distributed their wives and children among his soldiers as slaves. He now sent out a division of his army to murder unbelievers, and collect plunder, over the cultivated plains between the Ganges and Jumna, while he led the main body on the same pious duty along the hills from Hardwār[49] on the Ganges to the west. Having massacred a few thousands of the hill people, Tīmūr read the noon prayer, and returned thanks to God for the victories he had gained, and the numbers he had murdered through his goodness; and told his admiring army that a religions war like this produced two great advantages: it secured eternal happiness in heaven, and a good store of valuable spoils on earth—that his design in all the fatigues and labours which he had undertaken was solely to render himself pleasing to God, treasure up good works for his eternal happiness, and get riches to bestow upon his soldiers and the poor. The historian makes a grave remark upon this invasion: The Korān declares that the highest glory man can attain in this world is unquestionably waging a successful war in person against the enemies of his religion (no matter whether those against whom it is waged happen ever to have heard of this religion or not). Muhammad inculcated the same doctrine in his discourses with his friends; and, in consequence, the great Tīmūr always strove to exterminate all the unbelievers, with a view to acquire that glory, and to spread the renown of his conquests. 'My name', said he, 'has spread terror through the universe, and the least motion I make is capable of shaking the whole earth.'

Tīmūr returned to his capital of Samarkand in Transoxiana in May, 1399. His army, besides other things which they brought from India, had an immense number of men, women, and children, whom they had reduced to slavery, and driven along like flocks of sheep to forage for their subsistence in the countries through which they passed, or perish. After the murder on the banks of the Jumna of part of the multitude they had collected before taking the capital, amounting to one hundred thousand men, Tīmūr was obliged to assign one-tenth of his army to guard what were left, the women and children. 'After the murder in the capital of Delhi,' says the historian, an eye-witness, 'there were some soldiers who had a hundred and fifty slaves, men, women, and children, whom they drove out of the city before them; and some soldiers' boys had twenty slaves to their own share.' On reaching Samarkand, they employed these slaves as best they could; and Tīmūr employed his, the masons, in raising his great church from the quarries of the neighbouring hills.[50]

In October following, Tīmūr led this army of demons over the rich and polished countries of Syria, Anatolia, and Georgia, levelling all the cities, towns, and villages, and massacring the inhabitants without any regard to age or sex, with the same amiable view of correcting the notions of people regarding his creed, propitiating the Deity, and rewarding his soldiers. He sent to the Christian inhabitants of Smyrna, then one of the first commercial cities in the world, to request that they would at once embrace Muhammadanism, in the beauties of which the general and his soldiers had orders generously and diligently to instruct them. They refused, and Tīmūr repaired immediately to the spot, that he might 'share in the merit of sending their souls to the abyss of hell'. Bajazet, the Turkish emperor of Anatolia, had recently terminated an unavailing siege of seven years. Tīmūr took the city in fourteen days, December, 1402;[51] had every man, woman, and child that he found in it murdered; and caused some of the heads of the Christians to be thrown by his balistas or catapultas into the ships that had come from different European nations to their succour. All other Christian communities found within the wide range of this dreadful tempest were swept off in the same manner, nor did Muhammadan communities fare better. After the taking of Baghdad, every Tartar soldier was ordered to cut off and bring away the head of one or more prisoners, because some of the Tartar soldiers had been killed in the attack; 'and they spared', says the historian, 'neither old men of fourscore, nor young children of eight years of age; no quarter was given either to rich or poor, and the number of dead was so great that they could not be counted; towers were made of their heads to serve as an example to posterity.' Ninety thousand were murdered in cold blood, and one hundred and twenty pyramids were made of the heads for trophies. Damascus, Nice, Aleppo, Sebastē,[52] and all the other rich and populous cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Georgia, then the most civilized region of the world, shared in the same fate; all were reduced to ruins, and their people, without regard to religion, age, or sex, barbarously and brutally murdered.

In the beginning of 1405, this man recollected that, among the many millions of unbelieving Christians and Hindoos 'whose souls he had sent to the abyss of hell', there were many Muhammadans, who had no doubt whatever in the divine origin or co-eternal existence of the Korān; and, as their death might, perhaps, not have been altogether pleasing to his God and his prophet, he determined to appease them both by undertaking the murder of some two hundred millions of industrious and unoffending Chinese; among whom there was little chance of finding one man who had ever even heard of the Korān—much less believed in its divinity and co- eternity—or of its interpreter, Muhammad. At the head of between two and three hundred thousand well-mounted Tartars and their followers, he departed from his capital of Samarkand on the 8th of January, 1405, and crossed the Jaxartes[53] on the ice. In the words of his judicious historian, 'he thus generously undertook the conquest of China, which was inhabited only by unbelievers that by so good a work he might atone for what had been done amiss in other wars, in which the blood of so many of the faithful had been shed'.

'As all my vast conquests', said Tīmūr himself,[54] 'have caused the destruction of a good many of the faithful, I am resolved to perform some good action, to atone for the crimes of my past life; and to make war upon the infidels, and exterminate the idolaters of China, which cannot be done without very great strength and power. It is therefore fitting, my dear companions in arms, that those very soldiers, who were the instruments whereby those my faults were committed, should be the means by which I work out my repentance, and that they should march into China, to acquire for themselves and their Emperor the merit of that holy war, in demolishing the temples of those unbelievers and erecting good Muhammadan mosques in their places. By this means we shall obtain pardon for all our sins, for the holy Korān assures us that good works efface the sins of this world.' At the close of the Emperor's speech, the princes of the blood and other officers of rank besought God to bless his generous undertaking, unanimously applauding his sentiments, and loading him with praises. 'Let the Emperor but display his standard, and we will follow him to the end of the world.' Tīmūr died soon after crossing the Jaxartes, on the 1st of April, 1406, and China was saved from this dreadful scourge. But, as the philosophical historian, Sharaf- ud-dīn,[55] profoundly observes, 'The Korān remarks that if any one in his pilgrimage to Mecca should be surprised by death, the merit of the good work is still written in heaven in his name, as surely as if he had had the good fortune to accomplish it. It is the same with regard to the "ghaza" (holy war), where an eternal merit is acquired by troubles, fatigues, and dangers; and he who dies during the enterprise, at whatever stage, is deemed to have completed his design.' Thus Tīmūr the Lame had the merit, beyond all question of doubt, of sending to the abyss of hell two hundred millions of men, women, and children, for not believing in a certain book of which they had never heard or read; for the Tartars had not become Muhammadans when they conquered China in the beginning of the thirteenth century. Indeed, the amiable and profound historian is of opinion, after the most mature deliberation, that 'God himself must have arranged all this in favour of so great and good a prince; and knowing that his end was nigh, inspired him with the idea of undertaking this enterprise, that he might have the merit of having completed it; otherwise, how should he have thought of leading out his army in the dead of winter to cross countries covered with ice and snow?'

The heir to the throne, the Prince Pīr Muhammad, was absent when Tīmūr died; but his wives, who had accompanied him, were all anxious to share in the merit of the holy undertaking; and in a council of the chiefs held after his death, the opinions of these amiable princesses prevailed that the two hundred millions of Chinese ought still to be sent to 'the abyss of hell', since it had been the earnest wish of their deceased husband, and must undoubtedly have been the will of God, to send them thither without delay. Fortunately quarrels soon arose among his sons and grandsons about the succession, and the army recrossed the Jaxartes, still over the ice, in the beginning of April, and China was saved from this scourge. Such was Timūr the Lame, the man whose greatness and goodness are to live in the hearts of the people of India, nine-tenths of whom are Hindoos, and to fill them with overflowing love and gratitude towards his descendants.

In this brief sketch will perhaps be found the true history of the origin of the gipsies, the tide of whose immigration began to flow over all parts of Europe immediately after the return of Tīmūr from India. The hundreds of thousands of slaves which his army brought from India in men, women, and children, were cast away when they got as many as they liked from the more beautiful and polished inhabitants of the cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Georgia, which were all, one after the other, treated in the same manner as Delhi had been. The Tartar soldiers had no time to settle down and employ them as they intended for their convenience; they were marched off to ravage Western Asia in October, 1399, about three months after their return from India. Tīmūr reached Samarkand in the middle of May, but he had gone on in advance of his army, which did not arrive for some time after. Being cast off, the slaves from India spread over those countries which were most likely to afford them the means of subsistence as beggars; for they knew nothing of the manners, the arts, or the language of those among whom they were thrown; and as Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Georgia, Circassia, and Russia, had been, or were being, desolated by the army of this Tartar chief, they passed into Egypt and Bulgaria, whence they spread over all other countries. Scattered over the face of these countries, they found small parties of vagrants who were from the same regions as themselves, who spoke the same language, and who had in all probability been drawn away by the same means of armies returning from the invasion of India. Chingīz Khān invaded India two centuries before; his descendant, Tarmah Shirīn, invaded India in 1303, and must have taken back with him multitudes of captives. The unhappy prisoners of Tīmūr the Lame gathered round these nuclei as the only people who could understand or sympathize with them. From his sixth expedition into India Mahmūd is said to have carried back with him to Ghaznī two hundred thousand Hindoo captives in a state of slavery, A.D. 1011. From his seventh expedition in 1017, his army of one hundred and forty thousand fighting men returned 'laden with Hindoo captives, who became so cheap, that a Hindoo slave was valued at less than two rupees'. Mahmūd made several expeditions to the west immediately after his return from India, in the same manner as Tīmūr did after him, and he may in the same manner have scattered his Indian captives. They adopted the habits of their new friends, which are indeed those of all the vagrant tribes of India, and they have continued to preserve them to the present day. I have compared their vocabularies with those of India, and find so many of the words the same that I think a native of India would, even in the present day, be able without much difficulty to make himself understood by a gang of gipsies in any part of Europe.[56]

A good Christian may not be able exactly to understand the nature of the merit which Tamerlane expected to acquire from sending so many unoffending Chinese to the abyss of hell. According to the Muhammadan creed, God has vowed 'to fill hell chock full of men and genii'. Hence his reasons for hardening their hearts against that faith in the Korān which might send them to heaven, and which would, they think, necessarily follow an impartial examination of the evidence of its divinity and certainty. Tīmūr thought, no doubt, that it would be very meritorious on his part to assist God in this his labour of filling the great abyss by throwing into it all the existing population of China: while he spread over their land in pastoral tribes the goodly seed of Muhammadanism, which would give him a rich supply of recruits for paradise.

The following dialogue took place one day between me and the 'muftī', or head Muhammadan law officer, of one of our regulation courts.[57]