1405
Timur Dies at Otrar
Seventy years old and marching on China with two hundred thousand men, the conqueror caught fever in a Kazakh steppe fort and died before crossing the Syr Darya. Ming intelligence had been frantic; now the empire simply exhaled. His body was carried home to the jade tomb of the Gur-e-Amir.
Zheng He's First Treasure Voyage Departs
Sixty-three nine-masted junks, some four hundred feet long, sailed from Suzhou carrying twenty-seven thousand men, giraffes-to-be, and enough silk to dress a continent. The Muslim eunuch admiral bore the Yongle Emperor's summons to every port of the Indian Ocean. China's navy was, briefly, the largest ever built. The fleet visited Champa, Java, Sumatra, and Sri Lanka, establishing the tributary diplomacy that defined all seven voyages.
Shah Rukh Inherits the Timurid Throne
Timur's youngest son, a poet and bibliophile who preferred Herat's gardens to the saddle, took what remained of his father's empire and turned it inward. Under him the Timurid Renaissance bloomed: manuscripts illuminated in lapis, mosques sheathed in turquoise, a court where calligraphy mattered more than conquest. His wife Goharshad commissioned the magnificent mosque complex at Herat that still bears her name today.
Ma Huan Joins Zheng He's Fleet
A Chinese Muslim scholar signed on as translator for the third treasure voyage. His later book, the Yingya Shenglan, described everything from Calicut's spice markets to the brothels of Mogadishu. It is the closest thing we have to a ship's purser's diary from the age of Chinese global reach. His meticulous observations provide the only surviving Chinese-language account of the medieval Indian Ocean world at its commercial peak.