Blood and Guts on Stage
Tamburlaine
In 1405, the bloody Central Asian conqueror, Timur, died in route to starting a military campaign against the Ming dynasty in China. In 1587, Christopher Marlowe from the obscure island nation of England wrote a two-part play about Timur, which he called Tamburlaine. Marlowe lived a short life, born in 1564 and dying in 1593. He died after being stabbed in the eye during a fight. He was only 29.
I mentioned in my last post that reading about Timur lead me down a rabbit hole. This was what I was meant. I wasn’t expecting to dive into Elizabethan literature when I started researching Timur. Yet, here I am.
The play is a mixture of fact and fiction. Think of Shakespeare’s various history plays—we accept that they aren’t meant to be actual history. Partly playwrights get facts wrong because their sources weren’t good, but playwrights clearly also just made shit up that fit the play better. (We got more accurate over time—consider popular contemporary history plays like Inglorious Basterds.) Europeans knew a little about China and the Mongols—Marco Polo’s book about his travels was published in 1300. The Venetians and Genoese had contacts with the Muslim world, and there were even European Arabists in the middle ages. Timur became known to the European world as the man who took on the Ottomans, Europe’s most feared enemy at the time. Given this, Europeans were fascinated by him and sent letters and ambassadors to Timur’s capitol, Samarkand in the early 1400s.
After Timur died, several biographies were written in Persian or Arabic. Zafarnama by Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi was commissioned by Timur’s grandson, Ibrahim Sultan in 1425. A very complete biography of Timur was written by a man named Ahmad Ibn Arabshah in 1435 (it was translated into Latin in 1636). The great North African historian Ibn Khaldun wrote an account of his own meeting with Timur in his autobiographical section of Kitāb al-‘Ibar. The earliest book I could find about Timur is Embassy to Tamerlane by Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, written in 1406. He was a Castilian ambassador to Samarkand.
Beyond the various books, word of Timur reached Europeans via traders, diplomatic letters, and from Christians who fought against Timur, like Stefan Lazarević, a Serbian prince who was a vassal of the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid I, and fought at the battle of Ankara in 1402. That battle is an important event in Tamburlaine part 1. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is really two plays, part 1 and part 2. One can relate some of what happens in part 1 to Timur’s campaign against the Ottomans and Mamluks, so at least some of that history is semi-accurate. Marlowe gets names and locations wrong. though. For example, a prince of “Persia” is named Cosroe. “Cosroe” (usually written as “Khosrow” nowadays) was a name of many Persian rulers over the millennia. But not during Timur’s time. Marlowe seems just to want a Persian name with a high lineage for one of his Persian noble characters.
Tamburlaine part 1 begins with a prologue, but I don’t know if it was meant to be recited before the audience.
From jiggling veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear of the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
Tamburlaine at the start of the play is not yet a successful warlord, but a “Scythian shepherd”. This clearly refers to the origin of Timur’s limp except that Timur wasn’t a shepherd—he was a sheep rustler. He was lamed by the angry shepherd whose sheep he was stealing. Marlowe is using exotic Eastern places ahistorically—mixing ancient history and his contemporary world freely. Marlowe and the most educated amongst his audience presumably knew their Herodotus, from whom they have heard of the terrifying nomadic warriors, the Scythians. There is a family relationship between nomadic Scythian warriors and nomadic Mongol-Turkic warriors. If these people from the Pontic Steppe in the 5th century BCE were transported to 14th century CE Transoxiana, they could be Timur’s warriors. And the Scythians were enemies of the settled, city-dwelling Persians, just as Timur was.
The play opens in Persepolis, which was the capital of the ancient Achaemenid empire (the earliest historical Persia), uninhabited since 330 BCE. Mycetes, the king of Persia, is having a war council, deciding how to deal with the “Scythian shepherd.” Mycetes addresses Theridamus, one of his lords:
Thou shalt be the leader of this thousand horse,
Whose foaming gall with rage and high disdain
Have sworn the death of wicked Tamburlaine.
Go frowning forth, but come thou smiling home,
As did Sir Paris with the Grecian dame:
I love the imperfect rhyme of “high disdain” “Tamburlaine” and “Grecian dame”.
Tamburlaine in Scythia has captured the Soldan of Egypt’s daughter, Zenocrate. Tamburlaine falls in love with her, and she with him, even though she is betrothed to the King of Arabia. (Perversely this love comes after Tamburlaine raped her.) Her servant points out how weird it is to love such a violent man.
Who, when he shall embrace you in his arms,
Will tell how many thousand men he slew;
(I will. It was seventeen thousand thousand, more or less.)
Tamburlaine fights a battle against Persia and wins because some of the Persian soldiers under Mycetes’ brother Cosroe switch sides mid-battle. (Weirdly enough, the last-minute betrayal of part of your enemy’s army was an actual stratagem employed by Timur in the Battle of Ankara in 1402.) Cosroe was foolish to switch sides—he believed Tamburlaine would give him the Persian throne in exchange for his betrayal. If you plan to get ahead through treachery, you may become its victim. Tamburlaine takes the crown for himself. Cosroe calls him “treacherous and false” and “bloody and insatiate Tamburlaine!” By the end of this scene, Tamburlaine murders him. Tamburlaine exults in slaughter. “I that am termed the scourge and wrath of God, The only fear and terror of the world.” (part 1, act 3, scene 3)
Once Tamburlaine has settled Persia’s hash, he must fight the Turks and their leader Bajazeth (Beyazid I in real life). Marlowe invokes a historical fact—that Bajazeth was besieging Constantinople when Tamburlaine arrived in Anatolia. Bajazeth comes together with his allies, the kings of Fez, Morocco, and Argier (an old form of Algiers)—Marlowe didn’t really care if the geography made sense. Bajazeth taunts Tamburlaine, saying “And by the holy Alcoran I swear, he shall be made a chaste and lustless eunich.” This taunt reflects an actual insult that Beyazid made to Timur in a diplomatic letter, in which he suggested that if Timur was too afraid to fight, his wives would divorce him
Tamburlaine succeeds in his battle against the Turks, and he takes Bajazeth and his wife, Zabina, prisoner. Tamburlaine keeps him in an iron cage on wheels, which can be wheeled into the court for mockery purposes. One of the ways he humiliates him is by forcing Zabina to act as his servant. Another is that he uses Bajazeth as “the footstool of great Tamburlaine.” (part 1, act IV, scene II)
Tamburlaine turns his attention to Damascus, where the Soldan of Egypt is. The Soldan of Egypt withdraws, leaving Damascus to its fate. (This reflects actual events.) The governor of the city decides to try to spark Tamburlaine’s mercy by placing helpless virgins in Tamburlaine’s path. Tamburlaine threatens them with death, but they aren’t killed on stage. They are led offstage and then Tamburlaine asks one of his men, Techelles, “What, have your horsemen shown the virgins death?”
Techelles responds with gruesome details, “They have, my lord, and on Damascus’ walls / have hoisted up their slaughter’d carcasses.”
Zenocrate convinces Tamburlaine to spare her father’s life, and the pair are married. Meanwhile, Zabina and Bajazeth commit suicide, Bajazeth by bashing his head against the iron bars of his cage—the stage direction reads “(He brains himself against the cage.)” Zabina enters and finds his body and kills herself in the same way. (The mass violence typically takes place off-stage in Tamburlaine, but individual deaths are acted out. Given the bloodiness of the play, my assumption is that if the Elizabethan stage manager could figure out how to enact battle scenes and massacres on stage, he would have.)
Tamburlaine part one follows the historical outlines of Timur’s actions in a very loose way. Conquering Persia is a little like conquering Khwarezm, followed by his campaigns in Anatolia, where he did capture Bayezid I, culminating with his siege on Damascus. (In reality, Timur conquered Damascus shortly before capturing Beyazid I.) And Beyazid did in fact die in Timur’s captivity.
In part two, Marlowe seems to no longer have any sources to draw from, so he makes shit up. After all, Timur captured Beyazid I in 1403 and died two years later. He didn’t have enough life left for a “part two.” In part 2, Marlowe sets up a rematch against the Turks—Tamburlaine must now face Callipine, the son of Bajazeth, who gathers together a rebellious group of Tamburlaine’s vassals to face the conqueror in battle. Tamburlaine has made allies with some Christians from Europe: Danes, Muffs, Rutters, Almains, Sclavonians, and Hungarians. I have no idea who the Muffs or Rutters are. Tamburlaine’s wife, Zenocrate, dies of illness. In a rage of grief, Tamburlaine burns down the city here she died. “This cursed town will I consume with fire./Because this place bereft me of my love.” (part 2, act II, scene III)
Callipine’s armies lose and Tamburlane, to humiliate the kings he conquered, has them draw his chariot (which must have been an entertaining spectacle to see in a Elizabethan theater—the stage directions are hilariously specific: “Enter TAMBURLAINE, drawn in his chariot by the KINGS OF TREBIZOND and SORIA, with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, and in his right hand a whip with which he scourgeth them.” ). Tamburlaine’s son, Calyphas, refuses to fight. Tamburlaine slays him in anger. To be a son of Tamburlaine, you must have a willingness and desire to murder your enemies.
Finally, Tamburlaine defeats Babylon in a very brutal way (after executing the governor, he instructs his man Techelles to commit genocide: “Techelles, drown them all, man, woman, and child;/Leave not a Babylonian in the town.”) Tamburlaine proclaims the futility of worshiping god. He says,
In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet:
My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell,
Slew all his priest, his kinsmen, and his friends,
And yet I live untouched by Mahomet.
There is a God, full of revenging wrath,
From whom the thunder and lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him I will obey,
So, Casane, fling them in the fire.—
These are copies of the Koran and other holy books. (I assume that Marlowe knew that “Mahomet” was a man and not god of the Muslims. Was he just mocking Muslims, or was he assuming that his audience was a bunch of ignorant rubes who feared “Muslims” and “Mahomet”, and didn’t know who the fuck “Allah” was?)
Then, when Tamburlaine returns to Persia, he falls ill. Tamburlaine dies, attended by his physician and three vassals. As Tamburlaine dies, he addresses the hearse of Zenocrate and says,
My body feels, my soul doth weep to see
Your sweet desires depriv’d my company,
For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die.
Marlowe decided to portray Tamburlaine as a pagan, perhaps Hellenic tragic hero. (Timur was a Muslim.) Babylon had ceased to be an occupied city hundreds of years before Timur was born, but Marlowe knew his audience. Babylon, Persia and Scythia are more familiar than Baghdad, Khwarezm and the Golden Horde to groundlings brought up on the Bible and the Greek classics.
Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine around the same time William Shakespeare began producing plays. My knowledge of Shakespeare doesn’t go far beyond high school, but it is obvious that he is a deeper writer than Marlowe—Shakespeare’s characters are more complex than Marlowe’s, certainly, but the thing that struck me most forcefully is how much simpler Marlowe’s language is. Marlowe wasn’t recreating the English language from scratch in the way that Shakespeare was. I think some combination of these two things are why we read and perform Shakespeare pretty frequently in the 400 years since his death, whereas we rarely see Marlowe being performed. Indeed, prior to reading Tamburlaine parts 1 and 2, I mainly knew of Marlowe as the playwright whose 1594 play, Doctor Faustus, was the principal influence of Goethe’s Faust.
As I mentioned in the first part of this Timurid excursion, Timur and his army conquered Damascus and among the slaves he took back to Samarkand was an 11-year-old boy named Abu Muhammad Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Ibrahim (medieval Arabic names were very long!). We usually call him Ahmad Ibn Arabshah today. Before Timur sacked Damascus, Ibn Arabshah studied the Koran from a tutor. He doesn’t seem to have been a slave in Samarkand. He spent eight years there; in his fourth year in Samarkand, Timur died. After Timur died, there was an instant brain-drain from Samarkand, but Ibn Arabshah stuck it out for another four years, getting about the best education a scholar could get in that moment during the brief “Timurid Renaissance.” In Samarkand, Ibn Arabshah, a native Arab speaker, learned to speak Persian and to read the Mongol language. He studied law in Astrakhan (in the realm of the Golden Horde) for four years. He ended up a secretary to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed I in Edirne, the capitol of the Ottoman empire. They hadn’t conquered Constantinople yet. This may be a link to Marlowe.
In 1422, Ibn Arabshah returned to Damascus for the first time since he had been captured. He stayed there until the end of his life, occasionally traveling to Cairo. R.D. McChesney writes that Ibn Arabshah’s biography of Timur was written while he was in Damascus. The edition of Ibn Arabshah’s biography of Timur that I read was basically a reprint of a translation from 1936 by J.H. Sanders, an amateur Arabist in the Indian Civil Service. Spelling of names and places has evolved since Sanders—when quoting Ibn Arabshah, I’ll maintain Sander’s spellings.
Ibn Arabshah’s Aja'ib al-Maqdur fi Nawa'ib al-Taymur (“The Wonders of Destiny of the Ravages of Timur” or as Sanders translates the title, The Life of the Great Amir. “Amir” being one of those English transliterations of a Arabic word that is now spelled differently—“emir”) is a long and detailed biography—the first work of medieval Arabic literature I have ever read. It is readable, but some aspects are difficult for a 21st century English-speaking American. Ibn Arabshah’s frequent use of poetry takes some getting used to. Imagine reading, say, The Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, and in the middle of a section on Gettysburg, there is a two page poem on the subject—repeating information you just read. Ibn Arabshah often describes things in somewhat poetic, allusive ways.
Because Timur was still a fresh memory as he was compiling it, he had the opportunity to get statements from witnesses, which is a plus for a historical document. But he is personally very angry at Timur, which you generally don’t want in your histories. But Ibn Arabshah’s anger towards Timur is more than justified.
As I read Tamburlaine, I was curious about how Marlowe found out about Timur. As I mentioned, word about the defeat of Bayezid I seems to have reached Europe in real time. According to Wikipedia (I shame myself by typing those words), Marlowe’s sources for Timur’s life come from some Spanish and French historians (possibly Embassy to Tamurlane by Ruy González de Clavijo). It couldn’t have come from Ibn Arabshah’s biography because this biography wasn’t translated in Europe until 1636, long after Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine.
This struck me as obviously correct. The dates don’t match up. That said, Ibn Arabshah’s biography had been around for a long time before Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine. This prompted some spasmodic Googling on my part, and I located a Masters thesis online from 2011 entitled “Ibn Arabshah: The Unacknowledged Debt of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine” by Ahlam M. Alruwaili, who is now a professor at King Saud University.
So how does Alruwaili make his case? He describes incidents that are in the play that Ibn Aranshah described in his biography that would have been difficult if not impossible for Marlowe to source from any other known source. Then he proposes how this knowledge might have disseminated through Europe from the lingering remnant of the Byzantine Empire. In short, he doesn’t prove that Marlowe was influenced by Ibn Arabshah, but suggests that somehow Marlowe heard about incidents from Timur’s life that Ibn Arabshah wrote about that he would have had a hard time learning about anywhere else.
One of the episodes that feels made up as we read Tamburlaine is the imprisoning of Bajazeth in an iron cage. It feels like Marlowe wanted to show Bajazeth’s humiliation in a way that even the people in the worst seats in the theater wouldn’t be able to mistake. But this episode turns out to have been true. Ibn Arabshah records Beyazid’s humiliation at the hands of Timur. Ibn Arabshah writes that Bayezid I “had been shut in an iron cage” and that when Timur was having a public banquet, he brought out Beyazid and Timur ordered him to “be of good courage and put aside fear.” Then Beyazid saw that the “cupbearers were his consorts and that all of them were his wives and concubines.” Except for the cage being on wheels, Marlowe’s version of perfectly matches Ibn Arabshah’s.
The other incident that Alruwali compares is the slaughter of the virgins in Damascus from Tamburlaine part 1, Act V, and the murder of “infants” in Isfahan in 1387. The deaths aren’t identical (Timur and his army trample the infants to death in Isfahan, while the virgins of Damascus are killed with swords off-stage). It’s not a one-to-one match, but the kind of atrocity is the same. But where the two incidents match are in the rationale of the governor of Damascus and the leading citizens of Isfahan.
When the inhabitants of Isfahan killed Timur’s tax collectors, they knew Timur would punish them. They asked one of Timur’s emirs what they should do, and he replied “Collect some infants on the hills, that he [Timur] may be a little softened by the sight of them—as by chance may happen.” As Timur approached, the townspeople begged him, “They are innocent babes and a company needing pity and inviolable [. . .] they beseech pity through your royal mercy and their own weakness, and pray you because of their worthlessness, feebleness, bereavement, poverty and distress to pity their worthlessness and spare the remnant.”
The governor of Damascus and the virgins themselves make very similar pleas in Tamburlaine.
Therefore, for these our harmless virgins’ sakes,
Whose honours and lives rely on him,
Let us have hope that their unsported prayers,
Their blubber’d cheeks, and hearty humble moans,
Will melt his fury into some remorse,
And use us like a loving conqueror.
(part 1, act V, scene 1)
Alruwali explains how Ibn Arabshah’s details from Timur’s life could have been transmitted before the translation of his biography of Timur into Latin in 1636, more than forty years after Marlowe’s death. Ibn Arabshah worked for the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet I. Mehmet I had won the Ottoman civil war that followed Beyazid I’s defeat by Timur. While Mehmet I ruled the Ottomans, the last fragment of the Byzantine Empire was ruled by Manual II Palaiologos. The two rulers were initially friendly, and when two medieval rulers who live right next to each other are friendly, their secretaries by necessity become friendly. In this case, the secretaries were Ibn Arabshah and a man named George Sphrantzes. Sphrantzes wrote a history of the Palaiologos family called Chronicles. Alruwali suggests that Sphrantzes got the details mentioned above from Ibn Arabshah. Therefore it wasn’t from a written source, but through a continent-spanning game of telephone that Marlowe was able to get these details. It's a believable theory, but without more documentation of Sphrantzes and Ibn Arabshah’s communications, it seems speculative. I would call it somewhat plausible.
I have never seen Tamburlaine, either on stage or in a filmed version. The photos illustrating this post are all from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2018 production of Tamburlaine. The photos are by Ellie Kurttz (I confess that they are used without permission.) When I was in high school, I read Goethe’s Faust. I loved it and have reread it several times, but I’ve never seen it performed. Now I have to add Tamburlaine to the list of plays I’ve read but would like to see performed. Even a movie would be worth it, but IMDB list no filmed version of the play.
About a hundred years after Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine, European music decided that literature shouldn’t have all the fun. Europeans began writing operas. One of my favorite composers Antonio Vivaldi took a break from writing a new kind of song called the “concerto” to write an opera about Tamerlane. This charming baroque opera is called Bajazet, although it is sometimes called Il Tamerlano. This fact that it doesn’t have a single agreed-upon name should let you know that it is not part of the standard opera canon. Understandable—it is clearly a minor work. The performance below is a 2006 performance of Bajazet in Yokohama.
I think this will be my last post about Timur. That particular historical rabbit hole is now leading me in different directions. Goodbye Timur—as a person, you sucked. But as a historical figure, you are fascinating.
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