Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent the years around 1400 destroying three of the great cities of the Islamic world: Delhi, Aleppo, and Damascus, with Baghdad still to come. This episode follows his army south across the Indus into the Sultanate of Delhi, where a hundred and twenty armored war elephants met a line of burning camels, and follows it west again into Syria, where a besieged Damascus produced one of the strangest documents to survive the whole century.

That document is the eyewitness account of Ibn Khaldun, the sixty-eight-year-old judge and historian lowered over the wall of Damascus by rope to negotiate with Timur in person. What Ibn Khaldun recorded, weeks of real conversation, an argument over the historian al-Tabari, a gift of a Qur'an and a mule, a shared plate of rishta, sits alongside the mass killing of Delhi's captives, the burning of worshippers inside the Great Mosque of Damascus, and the deportation of entire skilled populations to Samarkand. The episode holds both accounts at once, including the testimony of Ibn Arabshah, an eleven-year-old boy taken captive from Damascus who grew up to write the most hostile biography of Timur on record.

Sources include Ibn Khaldun's own autobiography (translated by Walter Fischel and by Mohamad Ballan), Ibn Arabshah's 'Aja'ib al-Maqdur, Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi's Zafarnama, al-Maqrizi, the modern scholarship of Beatrice Forbes Manz, and the surviving elegy of the Damascene poet al-Ghuzuli.

Content Warning: this episode includes detailed descriptions of mass killing, sexual violence, and the burning of civilians inside a place of worship.

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