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Cold Slaughter. Mongol power reached its final surge at the close of the 14th century with Tamerlane. A man who was known as the "hurricane of annihilation," he combined a refined taste for the arts with an appetite for cold mass slaughter unequaled in history until the 20th century. Once he had 2,000 people walled up alive for resisting his army; another time, when a city rebelled against his brutal garrison, he had his army of 70,000 men bring him the heads of 70,000 civilians.
Historian Prawdin develops a careful contrast between Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Genghis Khan, he says, was a barbaric autocrat who had a political idea: to unite the nomadic tribes and establish their dominion in Asia. But Tamerlane enjoyed power and blood for their own sake. Historian Prawdin does not draw any parallels with modern history, but he suggests at least one general conclusion: once a Genghis Khan enslaves half a world, it is almost inevitable that a Tamerlane will come along to torture it.
* Speculatively, it was thought he might be a grandson of Prester John, the legendary ruler of a legendary Christian empire in the East, stories of whom took root in the European imagination during the Second Crusade (1147-1149) and continued to crop up for more than three centuries.