Mu'izzu'd-Dín Kurt reigned for forty years, not in­gloriously, though not without occasional acts of barbarity Death of Malik Mu'izzu'd-Dín Kurt which were, unhappily, characteristic of that time, as when, after the capture of Bádghís, he erected, in the style later made familiar by Tímúr, two towers or minarets of the heads of his enemies. Finally he sickened and died in 771/1369-70, a date expressed in the following chronogram:

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He was buried at Herát by the side of the Ghúrí monarch Sulṭán Ghiyáthu'd-Dín Muḥammad Sám and of his own father Ghiyáthu'd-Dín Muḥammad-i-Kurt, and was suc­ceeded by his son Ghiyáthu'd-Dín Pír 'Alí.

It was about this time that the shadow of Tímúr (Tamerlane) began to fall over the land, but as usual his The irruption of Tímúr first advances were of a friendly character, and he gave his niece Sevinj Qutluq Ághá in marriage to Ghiyáthu'd-Dín Pír 'Alí's son Pír Muḥammad in or about the year 778/1376. Five years later, in the spring of A.D. 1381, early in his first Persian campaign, Tímúr occupied Herát, placed it and the adjacent territories under the control of his son Mírán-sháh, and carried off the Kurt ruler Ghiyáthu'd-Dín Pír 'Alí and his eldest son Pír Muḥammad to Samarqand, where he im- Extinction of the Kurt Dynasty by Tímúr prisoned them, while two other members of the family, Amír Ghúrí and Malik Muḥammad, were similarly imprisoned at Andakán. Soon afterwards, however, an abortive rebellion at Herát in A.D. 1389 furnished their captor with an excuse for putting them to death, and so ended the Kurt dynasty, a year after the extinction of their rivals the Sarbadárs.

Amongst the four dynasties whose history has been briefly sketched above was Persia for the most part divided Comparison of Tímúr with Chingíz Khán when, in the last quarter of the eighth century of the hijra and the fourteenth of the Christian era, Tímúr burst upon the land and ravaged it as Chingíz Khán had done some hundred and fifty years before. Between the two Central Asian conquerors there are many points of resemblance; both had to begin by con­solidating their power and destroying rivals amongst their own people; both had passed the age of forty when they embarked on their invasions of Persia; and both were re­sponsible for incalculable bloodshed and suffering. Two circumstances chiefly differentiate them, the fact that Chingíz Khán was a heathen while Tímúr was, in name at least, a Muhammadan; and the fact that, while Chingíz Khán was confronted with the great empire of the Khwárazmsháhs, Tímúr found Persia, as we have seen, parcelled out amongst a number of petty rulers whose dominions had no fixed frontiers, and who were constantly at war with one another and even with ambitious members of their own families. That Tímúr was a Muhammadan certainly tended to miti­gate in some measure, so far as Persia and other Muslim lands were concerned, a natural savagery not inferior to that of Chingíz, for he at least showed more respect for

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shrines and sacred edifices, and for men reputed holy or learned. Yet we must not be misled by panegyrists like Sharafu'd-Dín 'Alí Yazdí, author of the Ẓafar-náma (“Book of Victory”), * who wrote under the patronage and for the pleasure of the conqueror; though we need not, on the other hand, endorse all the abusive language employed by the Arabic writer Aḥmad ibn 'Arabsháh in his 'Ajá'ibu'l-Maqdúr fí akhbári Tímúr (“Marvels of Destiny in the History of Tímúr”), * where the conqueror is habitually described as “this traitor,” “this criminal,” “this mad dog,” and the like. But Sharafu'd-Dín's fulsome flattery is less tolerable than Ibn 'Arabsháh's abuse, for though he is unable to omit all mention of Tímúr's massacres and pyramids of skulls, he does not scruple to declare * that “his generous personality manifested the boundless grace of God, while the purest virtue and philanthropy were concealed in his light-seeking mind; and such acts of wrath and retribution as were ostensibly committed in the initial stages [of his conquests] by some of his world-endowed followers and partisans, as will be presently set forth, were prompted only by the exi­gencies of conquest and the necessities of world-empire.” As specimens of those acts mention may be made of his massacre of the people of Sístán in 785/1383-4, when he caused some two thousand prisoners to be built up in a wall; his cold-blooded slaughter of a hundred thousand captive Indians near Dihlí in 801 (December, 1398); his burying alive of four thousand Armenians in 803/1400-1, and the twenty towers of skulls erected by him at Aleppo and Damascus in the same year; and his massacre of 70,000 of the inhabitants of Iṣfahán in 789 (November, 1387), to quote only a few out of many similar instances of his callous indifference to bloodshed and human suffering. Sir John Malcolm's judgements of Tímúr will command the assent of all fair-minded students not blinded by a misplaced hero-worship of great conquerors, such as Alexander, Chingíz, Tímúr or Napoleon, who deemed no price of human suffering too great for the gratification of their ambitions. “Such a leader as Timour,” says Malcolm, in his excellent History of Persia, * “must have been idolized by his soldiers; and, with an army of six or seven hundred thousand men attached to his person, he was careless of the opinion of other classes in the community. The object of this monarch was fame as a conqueror; and a noble city was laid in ashes, or the inhabitants of a province massacred, on a cold calculation that a dreadful impression would be made which would facilitate the purposes of his ambition. He pretended to be very religious, was rigid in performing his sacred duties, and paid attention to pious men; who, in return for his favour, used to assure him that God had given the countries of other monarchs to his victorious sword. The parade which he made of these prophecies proves that he either believed in them, or that he thought they might produce an effect favourable to his designs.”

“From what has been said,” observes this judicious historian a little further on, * “we may pronounce that Timour, though one of the greatest of warriors, was one of the worst of monarchs. He was able, brave and generous; but ambitious, cruel and oppressive. He considered the happiness of every human being as a feather in the scale, when weighed against the advancement of what he deemed his personal glory; and that appears to have been measured by the number of kingdoms which he laid waste, and the people that he destroyed. The vast fabric of his power had no foundation, it was upheld by his individual fame; and the moment that he died, his empire dissolved. Some fragments of it were seized by his children: but it was in India alone that they retained dominion for any length of time. In that country we yet perceive a faint and expiring trace of the former splendour of the Moghul dynasty; a pageant, supported by the British nation, still sits upon a throne at Delhi; * and we view in him the gradual decline of human greatness, and wonder at the state to which a few centuries have reduced the lineal descendants of the great Timour.”