Tamerlane

Tamerlane
Swords of Islam, Conqueror of the world
Justin Marozzi
2004, Da Capo Press

Tamerlane (1336-1405) belongs to the league of Alexander and Genghis Khan.

13th century belonged to Genghis Khan and his offsprints. 14th century was a different picture. Black death was devastating the world. Ming dynasty overthrew (1368) Mogols' Yuan dynasty in China. Genghis's successors were losing their grip on central Asia.

Tamerlane started his career as nobody. His right arm and right leg were injured and thus gained the name, Temur The Lame.

Balkh was the first city he conquered (1370). He married the widow of his former colleague turned enemy, a princess from the line of Genghis Khan. After that, he became Temur Gurgan, son-in-law of the Great Khan. In a world still influenced by Genghis's Khan's legacy, that marriage actually gave him some legitimacy.

After 1370, his world conquering career really took off. At first, he took the Sufi dynasty of Khorezm (1372-1373). Then he helped Tokhtamish, a prince of the Genghisid line, to be the Khan of the White Horde (1378) and later Khan of the Golden Horde (1380). In the campaign between 1381-1384, he took Herat and Kandahar (modern Afghanistan). Later on, he targeted Georgia and Persia (1386-1388). Between 1391 and 1395, he defeated Tokhtamish's Golden Horde eliminated the threat from North. In 1398 to 1399, he took Delhi and brought Samakand many war elephants. His career reached the its Zenith in the seven year campaign. Damascus, Baghdad, even the Crusader's Smyrna were taken by his invincible army. He even captured the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I the Thunderbolt in a battle near modern day Ankara in 1402. (Note Bayazid actually snapped the last Crusade and surrounded Constantinople for quite a while.)
Temur's last target was Beijing, the capital of then Ming dynasty. He died on the way.

Tamerlane's conquering was full of atrocity, not only towards Christens but also towards fellow Muslims. Maybe he killed more people than those died of Black death. His cruelty was beyond imagination. Skull pyramids, skull minarets were his signature.

With the robbed treasures and captured slaves, Temur did build two great cities: Samakand as his political capital and Bukhara as his religious capital. He respected Islam scholars and promoted Islam.

Temur wasn't that successful in building a dynasty. His empire was basically melting away not long after his death (the Moghul dynasty was founded by his offspring). Himself also faded into some kind of obscurity.

The author traveled a lot in the area of Temur's empire and provides a lot of descriptions/photographs of the cities and historical architectures.

On the other side, there wasn't much description on the battles and on Temur's generals. Which is quite disappointing especially when one compares Temur with Genghis Khan. Maybe it is because Temur was always the dominating figure and he actually fought quite a lot in the front line. Maybe it is just because there wasn't much history records.

A book fills my knowledge of 14th century.

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

The Moral Consequence of Economic Growth
Benjamin M. Friedman

Economic growth, technology progress brings the positive changes in society: open, mobile, generous, tolerant and democratic.

The book elaborated various ideas about economic growth and social progress. At the time of Adam Smith, the early thinkers understood the role of specialization (division of labor) in economic growth. Specialization alone actually made workers quite mechanical and partially resulted in the abhor labor conditions in the early stage of industrialization. Romanticism thinkers turned nostalgia. Marxism believed that the solution is communism. However, over the years, waves of technology innovations, which in turn requires skilled and thus higher paid labor, ultimated moved the society forward economically, politically as well as morally.

The book explains the relationship between economic growth and social progress from human nature point of view. There are always two benchmarks influencing people's decisions: comparing his current life with his previous life and comparing his life with his neighbours' life. When one's economic life stagnates or deteriorate, he tends to react very strongly out of fear that his neighbor might get ahead of him. That's the reason why both individual people and the society tends to be less tolerant towards immigrants, less generous towards the unfortunate in hard times. On the other side, when economy is doing well and people's life standard are improving, people could be open and tolerant and thus the society also moves forward.

The author checked his theory against the history of America, Briton, France and Germany. Laws protecting labors, promoting education, protecting environment, enlarging voting population happened in good times, while populist, KKK, Nazi, etc, happened in bad times. Although there are some exceptions, notably the America in Great Depression era, overall, social progress normally goes along with economic development. In developing counties, economic growth promotes stability while coups, political assassination tends to occur when the economy stagnates.

The Kuznet's curve mentioned in the book is quite interesting. In the early stage of economic development, such as industrialization of a agrarian society, the income inequality increases. However, when the economy develops further, the income inequality actually becomes smaller. In the environment aspects, same thing also happens. The early development put a lot of burden on the environment. Later on, people will treat environment more gently and try to make the development environmentally sustainable.

The ultimate force behind progress is technological innovation and productivity growth, which comes from investment, both in physical capital and human capital. Educating ourselves and our children is of most importance.

A great book. Highly recommended.