In 1791, a conspiracy against Timur’s life was hatched in Peshawar and nearly succeeded. The welter of killings which Timur embarked on to destroy the conspirators, and the cold-blooded way he violated an oath to capture one of the ringleaders, cast a cloud over his final years. He died two years later in the spring of 1793, on his way from Peshawar to Kabul, probably from poison: as the historian Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad put it, ‘The wine server of fate served him the fatal cup.’
