Timur left thirty-six children, twenty-four of whom were sons, but he failed to nominate an heir. The prolonged succession struggle that followed his death – with all the competing claimants, many of them provincial governors, energetically capturing, murdering and maiming each other – undermined the last fragments of authority of the Durrani state Ahmad Shah had founded. Under Timur Shah’s eventual successor, Shah Zaman, the empire finally disintegrated.
