Timur returned to his capital of Samarkand in Transoxiana in May, 1399.  His army, besides other things which they brought from India, had an immense number of men, women, and children, whom they had reduced to slavery, and driven along like flocks of sheep to forage for their subsistence in the countries through which they passed, or perish.  After the murder on the banks of the Jumna of part of the multitude they had collected before taking the capital, amounting to one hundred thousand men, Timur was obliged to assign one-tenth of his army to guard what were left, the women and children.  ’After the murder in the capital of Delhi,’ says the historian, an eye-witness, ’there were some soldiers who had a hundred and fifty slaves, men, women, and children, whom they drove out of the city before them; and some soldiers’ boys had twenty slaves to their own share.’  On reaching Samarkand, they employed these slaves as best they could; and Timur employed his, the masons, in raising his great church from the quarries of the neighbouring hills.[50]

In October following, Timur led this army of demons over the rich and polished countries of Syria, Anatolia, and Georgia, levelling all the cities, towns, and villages, and massacring the inhabitants without any regard to age or sex, with the same amiable view of correcting the notions of people regarding his creed, propitiating the Deity, and rewarding his soldiers.  He sent to the Christian inhabitants of Smyrna, then one of the first commercial cities in the world, to request that they would at once embrace Muhammadanism, in the beauties of which the general and his soldiers had orders generously and diligently to instruct them.  They refused, and Timur repaired immediately to the spot, that he might ’share in the merit of sending their souls to the abyss of hell’.  Bajazet, the Turkish emperor of Anatolia, had recently terminated an unavailing siege of seven years.  Timur took the city in fourteen days, December, 1402;[51] had every man, woman, and child that he found in it murdered; and caused some of the heads of the Christians to be thrown by his balistas or catapultas into the ships that had come from different European nations to their succour.  All other Christian communities found within the wide range of this dreadful tempest were swept off in the same manner, nor did Muhammadan communities fare better.  After the taking of Baghdad, every Tartar soldier was ordered to cut off and bring away the head of one or more prisoners, because some of the Tartar soldiers had been killed in the attack; ’and they spared’, says the historian, ’neither old men of fourscore, nor young children of eight years of age; no quarter was given either to rich or poor, and the number of dead was so great that they could not be counted; towers were made of their heads to serve as an example to posterity.’  Ninety thousand were murdered in cold blood, and one hundred and twenty pyramids were made of the heads for trophies.  Damascus, Nice, Aleppo, Sebaste,[52] and all the other rich and populous cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Georgia, then the most civilized region of the world, shared in the same fate; all were reduced to ruins, and their people, without regard to religion, age, or sex, barbarously and brutally murdered.