your bridge home
True Valor
Even the chronicle written to flatter him couldn't hide what he did at Delhi. What regional legend says happened to him on the way home is a different kind of story, one worth telling honestly as legend, not as the history it was never quite able to become.
The chronicle written to flatter him could not hide what he did. What the villages say happened afterwards is a different kind of story, and it should be told as what it is.
Timur crossed the Indus in the autumn of 1398.
His army was veterans who had already broken Baghdad, Isfahan and the steppe khanates.
His court's later justification was religious: that the Delhi Sultanate, though Muslim, was insufficiently rigorous, and too accommodating of the Hindu population it governed. That framing gave the campaign a licence his chroniclers were glad to record.
It is worth noticing what it also concedes.
That the ruler he came to punish was a Muslim sultan. And that the sultanate's fault, in this telling, was tolerance.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.