Latest / Tamerlane: The Conqueror Who Tried to Rebuild the Mongol Legacy — Fexingo History / Tamerlane's Captive Engineers Building the Siege Engines of an Empire
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, after all our episodes on Tamerlane's campaigns — Ankara, Delhi, the steppe wars — one thing we haven't really dug into is how he actually took cities. Not just the strategy, but the machines. Luna: The siege engines, right? I know he used trebuchets. Lucas: Exactly. The Persian term is manjaniq — a massive stone-throwing trebuchet. But Tamerlane didn't just have them; he had whole teams of captive engineers from Persia, Syria, and elsewhere, and he treated them as valuable assets. When he sacked a city, he'd spare the engineers and deport them to Samarkand. Luna: So he was building a knowledge base, not just looting. Lucas: Precisely. The Zafarnama — that's Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi's biography — describes how after the fall of Aleppo in 1400, Tamerlane's men rounded up the craftsmen who built the city's siege weapons and sent them east. Same thing at Damascus the next year. He wanted the best engineers in his service, not dead. Luna: How big were these machines? Lucas: The largest manjaniq could hurl a stone weighing over a hundred kilograms — that's about two hundred twenty pounds — and smash through mud-brick walls. At the siege of Balkh in 1370, which was one of his early big victories, his engineers built trebuchets on site using timber from the Hindu Kush foothills. They'd dismantle them and carry them on camelback to the next target. Luna: Camelback? That's incredible logistics. Lucas: It was. The Timurid army had a dedicated train of engineers and carpenters — they were part of a tumen, a division of roughly ten thousand men. Ibn Arabshah, the Syrian historian who hated Tamerlane, still admitted that his siegecraft was terrifyingly efficient. He wrote that Tamerlane could reduce a fortress in days that would have taken other armies months. Luna: I wonder if the engineers ever tried to sabotage him. Lucas: Probably some did, but you'd have to be brave. Tamerlane had a policy: if a city surrendered, the engineers were taken alive and well-treated. If it resisted and he had to storm it, he'd execute the garrison but spare the skilled workers. That created an incentive to surrender — your engineers got a better deal if they came quietly. Luna: So it was a kind of early brain drain, but with siege engines. Lucas: Exactly. And not just trebuchets. They also used battering rams, siege towers, and even incendiaries — naphtha-based fire pots that were launched from smaller manjaniq. At the siege of Sistan in 1383, he ordered his engineers to fill pots with naphtha and set them alight mid-flight. The city's roofs caught fire, and the defenders panicked. Luna: That's like medieval napalm. Lucas: Very similar. The recipe came from Persian and Byzantine traditions, but Tamerlane's engineers refined it. They'd mix naphtha with sulfur and quicklime — when the pot shattered, the quicklime ignited on contact with water or air. It was brutal, but effective. Luna: And all of this was happening in the fourteenth century, before gunpowder became widespread. Lucas: Right. Gunpowder weapons were just starting to appear in Europe and China, but Tamerlane's sieges were still won with mechanical artillery. His engineers were masters of torsion and counterweight mechanics. They understood leverage and trajectory in a way that most armies didn't. Luna: You know, it's funny — we talk about Tamerlane's cruelty a lot, but his investment in engineers shows a different side. Lucas: Absolutely. He was ruthless, but he was also a builder. He wanted his capital Samarkand to be the greatest city on earth, and to do that he needed the best minds. The same engineers who built his siege weapons also built the Bibi-Khanym mosque and the shah i zinda complex. They were, in a way, the backbone of his empire. Luna: Speaking of which — if listeners are finding these deep dives into Tamerlane's empire useful, the way we keep the show ad-free is through listener support. You can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, it really helps us keep doing the research and bringing these stories to you. Every bit goes straight into the show. Luna: Alright, back to the siege engines. Lucas, you mentioned that the engineers were deported to Samarkand. What happened to them there? Lucas: They were put to work immediately. Tamerlane had a dedicated quarter in Samarkand — near the Registan — where foreign artisans lived and worked. The engineers would train local apprentices, and within a generation, the Timurids had their own native corps of siege engineers. By the time of his grandson Ulugh Beg, Samarkand was producing its own weapons and scientific instruments. Luna: So the knowledge transfer was real. Lucas: It was. And it wasn't just practical — they also built astronomical instruments. But that's another episode. For the siegecraft, the key legacy is that Tamerlane's methods influenced later gunpowder sieges. The Ottomans and Mughals both used similar tactics — massed artillery, but also careful engineering of siege lines and mining. Tamerlane's manjaniq were the ancestors of the giant bombards that broke Constantinople. Luna: I've heard that Tamerlane himself sometimes designed engines. Lucas: That's a claim in the Zafarnama — that he came up with innovations for the trebuchet's counterweight system. I'm skeptical, because Yazdi was writing propaganda. But it's plausible he had input. He was deeply involved in military planning, and his campaigns show a keen eye for terrain and logistics. At the siege of Tabriz in 1392, for example, he ordered his engineers to build a fortified camp with towers that could launch projectiles into the city. That kind of tactical flexibility suggests he understood the technology. Luna: So he was a hands-on commander, even with the engineering. Lucas: Very much so. He'd personally inspect the siege lines and give orders to the engineers. If a machine wasn't working, he'd demand a fix on the spot. His reputation for impatience meant engineers worked fast — and sometimes made mistakes. At the siege of Khwarezm in 1379, a manjaniq collapsed during testing, killing several operators. Tamerlane had the engineer executed and replaced him with a Persian captive. Luna: Harsh, but it gets results. Lucas: It did. The Timurid siege train became legendary. When Ruy González de Clavijo, the Spanish envoy, visited Samarkand in 1404, he reported seeing massive trebuchets stored in arsenals, along with spare parts and teams of engineers drilling. Tamerlane was planning his invasion of China, and he intended to bring his siege engines across the Tien Shan. Luna: That invasion never happened, though. Lucas: No, he died in 1405 on the march. But the infrastructure was there. The engineers were ready. In a way, his death probably saved the Ming dynasty from a very nasty siege campaign. The Yongle Emperor had fortifications along the border, but nothing that could withstand Timurid siegecraft. Luna: So the engineers were a key part of why Tamerlane was so feared. Lucas: Absolutely. A lot of medieval warfare was about who could break walls first. Tamerlane's engineers gave him that ability almost anywhere, in any terrain. They were as important as his cavalry — maybe more so, because a walled city could stop a horse army cold. But with a manjaniq, no wall was safe.