ABSTRACT
THE storming and bloody career of T"m#r the Lame and the wide empire which he bequeathed to his successors might well have been calculated to furnish chroniclers with rich material for weaving the tapestry of marvellous and terrible tales; and chroniclers were not slow to exploit their opportunities of making history pay. We shall now consider some of the books written in the fifteenth century to glorify the new dynasty, books which
took their inspiration from the already famous work of Juvain" and Rash"d al-D"n All!h and would supply models for the later historians of Moghul India. But first it is necessary to recall in passing that the so-called Memoirs and Institutes of T"m#r, long supposed to have originated (in Chaghatay Turkish) from the emperor’s pen, are now
generally recognized for the impostures that they are. For what, for instance, is to be said
of an autobiography which concludes, ‘At night, on the 17th of the month of calling upon the name of God, I lost my senses, and resigned my pure soul to the Almighty and Holy Creator’? It is a pity, for the Memoirs at least make fascinating reading and are not unworthy of a conqueror.
