Timur's Plague Towers: The Siege of Damascus

Tamerlane: The Conqueror Who Tried to Rebuild the Mongol Legacy — Fexingo History · Sep 30, 2026 · 11m · transcript

In this episode, we turn our attention to the summer of 1400, when Timur laid siege to the wealthy city of Damascus. While previous episodes have touched on his brutality, this conversation focuses on a specific and horrifying innovation: the use of plague-infected corpses as biological warfare. We explore how Timur’s engineers constructed massive towers filled with rotting bodies of victims from the Black Death, positioning them to launch these deadly projectiles into the city walls. The narrative examines the account of Ibn Khaldun, the renowned historian who was trapped inside Damascus…