Empire of Timur (Tamerlane) and his heirs, 1370–1507 — the last great conquest-state of the steppe tradition, ruled from Samarkand. Timur built by massacre, leaving towers of skulls in cities that resisted. Yet the dynasty turned its plunder into a remarkable cultural flourishing: the Timurid Renaissance of Samarkand and Herat produced astronomer-king Ulugh Beg and brought the Persian miniature to one of its high points. Driven from Central Asia by the Uzbeks around 1500, the dynasty survived through Babur, who carried the inheritance to India and founded the Mughal Empire.
Timur the Lame built beauty on a mountain of skulls. From Samarkand he cut an empire across Central Asia and Persia in a storm of massacre — and then the dynasty he founded turned the plunder into one of the most brilliant cultural ages the Islamic world has known. The conqueror and the patron of genius were the same family, and often the same man.