For Timur, bloodshed was not just a canny battle strategy. He seemed to relish it for its own sake. It was he (not Chengez) who took pleasure in piling up pyramids of severed heads outside the gates of cities he had plundered. It was he, too, who executed captives by dropping them, still living, into tall, windowless towers until he had filled the towers to the brim. Timur banged and slaughtered his way to Asia Minor and then banged and slaughtered his way back again to India, where he left so many corpses rotting on the roads to Delhi that he made the whole region uninhabitable for months.
