The darkest period of a country’s annals is often illumined by the light of a better time to come. Transoxiana, torn by civil war, and a prey to the worst form of tyranny, that of a horde of greedy and imperious nobles, sighed not in vain for a deliverer. Rarely in history do we find a state of society readier to deliver itself into the hands of a man of destiny than was the shattered empire of the Chaghatāy Khāns in the middle of the fifteenth century.[401]
The early biographers[402] of him whom his contemporaries styled Tīmūr Leng, the “Lame Tīmūr,”[403] delighted to give him a common ancestry with Chingiz Khān, and traced his descent from a vezīr in the service of Chaghatāy named Karāchār Nuyān, whose genealogy merges with that of the earlier conqueror. This, however, is a long-exploded myth; for Tīmūr was certainly a Turk by descent, and belonged to one of the numerous tribes which participated in the Mongol occupation of Central Asia, and, after the downfall of Amīr Kazghan, gained the mastery over all Transoxiana and Turkestān.[404] Tīmūr was the son of Amīr Turghāy, who had preceded Hāji Birlās in the government of the province of Kesh and its dependencies.[405] He was born in the town of Kesh, now called Shahr-i-Sabz, the Green City, in the year A.H. 736 (1333). According to his autobiography, he became conscious of his own powers at an early age, and distinguished himself alike in council and in the hunting-field.
When Hāji Birlās reached the Oxus in his flight from the army of Tūghluk Tīmūr Khān, the young Tīmūr,[406] who had accompanied him, requested leave to return to his native city and seek an audience of the Khān, in order to intercede for his suffering fellow-townsmen. Having obtained the required permission, he hastened to the camp of the allied Amīrs, whom he so favourably impressed by his earnestness and eloquence that they not only desisted from their hostile intentions, but conferred upon him the government of his native city. Tīmūr took leave of the Amīrs of Jatah, and entered upon the administration of his state and the levy of troops in the country between Kesh and the Oxus. Meanwhile the Amīrs quarrelled, withdrew their troops from Transoxiana, and returned to headquarters in Kāshghar.