Silk Road: Samarkand: These Guys Need a Union

I’m due to be at Samarkand from today through next Monday. Tamerlane built a great mosque here, in honor of his chief wife, or of her mother (account differ). Tamerlane got his first look at the mosque as it neared completion in 1404, on his arrival home from a five-year campaign. He wasn’t happy: the portal was too law, dwarfed by the portal of the madrassah across the street. Bad things happened to the chiefs of construction. Tamerlane himself now took charge of the project. The chronicler Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo reports:

He would stay there the best part of the day during the work. He would arrange for much meat to be cooked and brought, and then he would order them to throw portions of the same down to the workmen in the foundations, as though one should cast bones to dogs, in a pit, and a wonder to all he with his own hands did this. Thus he urged on their labour; and at times would have coins thrown down to the masons when especially they worked to his satisfaction.

—Quoted in Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane 226-7(2004)