Timur's campaigns between 1370 and his death in 1405 produced a series of city massacres that are among the best-known of the period. At Isfahan in 1387, after the killing of his tax collectors, his troops are reported by the Persian sources to have killed some seventy thousand people and to have built towers of skulls. At Delhi in December 1398 he sacked the city for several days after, according to his own memoirs and the Zafarnama tradition, ordering the execution of about a hundred thousand prisoners taken before the battle. At Baghdad in 1401 the Persian sources report ninety thousand heads built into towers. Every one of these figures comes from a chronicle tradition — much of it commissioned by Timur himself, for whom the reputation for terror was an instrument of war — and the round numbers are conventional. The other consistent feature of the campaigns, the systematic deportation of craftsmen to Samarkand, is corroborated independently by Clavijo's embassy account.
Timur (Tamerlane), ruling from Samarkand, campaigned across Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, India and the Levant, storming cities, massacring populations and deporting craftsmen to his capital
The often-repeated claim that Timur's wars killed 17 million people, about 5 per cent of a world population then around 350-375 million, traces to a nineteenth-century estimate and has no documentary basis. Individual sieges are better attested - the tower of skulls at Isfahan in 1387, put by chroniclers at 70,000, and the sack of Delhi in 1398 - but they come from court histories with their own reasons to exaggerate. There is no reconstructible population for the whole set of territories he campaigned in over 1370-1405.
The range is an aggregation of the individual figures the chronicle tradition gives for the major massacres — about 70,000 at Isfahan in 1387, about 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398, about 90,000 at Baghdad in 1401, with others at Sabzavar, Tikrit and Aleppo — treated as an order of magnitude rather than a count. Those figures are conventional round numbers from sources partly written under Timur's patronage. The often-quoted total of 17 million has no basis.
The city massacres, the execution of prisoners before Delhi and the deportation of craftsmen to Samarkand are documented in the Zafarnama tradition, in Timur's own memoirs and, for the deported craftsmen, independently by Ruy González de Clavijo's embassy account of 1404.
Uzbekistan, India, Iraq