Tamerlane's Captive Mongol Chroniclers: The Two Histories of an Empire

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how Tamerlane's legacy was written — and rewritten — by the chroniclers he captured. After conquering cities like Damascus and Baghdad, the conqueror brought historians and scribes to Samarkand, commissioning competing accounts of his reign. The two most famous are Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama, a panegyric that glorifies Timur as a divinely appointed ruler, and Ahmad ibn Arabshah's Aja'ib al-Maqdur, a scathing critique written decades later from Mamluk exile. We discuss how these texts were shaped by court politics, the Yassa, and the Chagatai identity, and what they reveal about Tamerlane's self-image as a descendant of Chinggis Khan. We also touch on lesser-known sources like the memoirs attributed to Timur himself (the Malfuzat) and the challenges of reconstructing history from biased narratives. How do we separate the conqueror from the myth when his story was written by prisoners? #Tamerlane #Timurid #Zafarnama #AjaibalMaqdur #SharafalDinAliYazdi #IbnArabshah #MongolHistory #CentralAsia #Samarkand #MedievalHistory #Historiography #Mamluk #Chagatai #Yassa #SahibiQiran #Malfuzat #History #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo