part is further safeguarded against this suspicion by the wholly satisfactory
sentiments on Christians which Tamburlaine (surely rather unexpectedly ?)
utters in III. iii. 47 seq. and his constant references to Jove and the
spirit world, not as his rivals or equals, but as tutelary deities : I. ii. 177-80,
III. iii. 156-8, IV. ii. 8-1 1.
1 Part I, I. ii. 156.
2 Two arresting passages in this part, besides that already quoted,
might well have provoked Greene's epithet ; Tamburlaine 's outburst at
the death of Zenocrate in which he calls upon Theridamas to ' batter the
shining palace of the sun ' and fetch her back to earth again (II. iv. 102-111)
and that at the approach of his own death when he frantically calls upon
his captains to follow him to the ' slaughter of the Gods ' (V. iii. 46-50).
^ F. C. Danchin, Etudes critiques sur Christophe Marlowe. — En marge
de la seconde partie de Tamburlaine. Revue Germanique, Janvier-Fevrier,
1912.
* II Tamburlaine, III. ii. 62-90.
^ The Practise of Fortification : Wherein is shewed the manner of
fortifying in all sorts of scituations, with the considerations to be used
in delining, and making of royal Frontiers, Skonces, and renforcing of ould
walled Townes. Compiled in a most easie, and compendious method, by
Paule, Ive. Gent. Imprinted at London by Thomas Orwin, for Thomas
Man, and Toby Cooke. 1589.
^ For an account of this in its relation to Marlowe's play generally, see
post, p. 45 and note.
INTRODUCTION 9
the two works M. Danchin argues that we must transfer
the oblique reference of Perimedes in 1588 from Part II
of Tamburlaine to Part I, to allow of pushing forward the
writing of Tamburlaine II to a period subsequent to the
publication of Ive's volume. In the absence of any entry
of Ive's book in the Stationers' Register (I have been unable
to trace it there) we could of course only follow the indica-
tion of the title-page and say generally that this would
demand a date not earlier than the beginning of 1589 for
the composition of the second part of our play. The reper-
cussion of this upon the date of the first part is of fairly
definite nature, for Marlowe's own prologue, taken in con-
junction with the internal evidence of the two parts, has
always been held to imply that the second followed the first
after a relatively short interval. If we accepted this conclu-
sion then, we should be forced to push forward both dates
from 1587-8 to 1588-9.
M. Danchin has himself pointed out the grounds upon
which the argument for the earlier date may still be main-
tained. Marlowe could, of course, have inserted the passage
in question at a later date and after the appearance of
Ive's book (though precisely why he should have done so
is a little hard to see ; it is the kind of passage that is far
more likely to be excised in the playhouse than added there)
or he could have seen Paul Ive's book in MS. some time
before publication. In view of the frequency with which
Elizabethan MS. were handed about before publication
this would seem, in the absence of any evidence to the
contrary, to be an extremely likely contingency. But
M. Danchin generously places at his opponents' disposal
some further facts which serve to strengthen the possibility,
for he shows us that Paul Ive was a Kentishman who
dedicated his work to Sir Francis Walsingham which might
mean that he had for some time been connected with the
Walsingham family,^ with one branch of which, that of
* See M. Danchin's article, p. 33.
10 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
Thomas Walsingham of Scadbury in Kent, Marlowe is
known to have been on terms of intimacy.^ Did all these
suppositions hold, indeed, it would point to Marlowe's
having every opportunity for seeing the work of Ive before
it went into print.
But even were this chain of postulates not provable,
there would still remain the possibility of Marlowe having
read the MS. by some other means, and it would be equally
hard to accept that part of M. Danchin's argument which
bears upon the date, to reject thereby the strong association
with Part II, suggested by Greene's reference and to push
both parts of Tamburlaine on to a date a year later than
that which has been hitherto accepted.^
1 See Vol. I of this series, The Life of Marlowe.
^ The two main branches of M. Danchin's argument have been touched
here ; the first that Tamburlaine II has a passage clearly borrowed from
a book whose title-page beafs the date 1589, the second that Greene's
reference might equally well apply to the first part as to the second of the
play. It would, of course, help to undermine the first of these could we
find the passages in question either in an earlier sixteenth-century military
text-book or in an earlier edition of Ive's work itself. In strict justice
I must admit that I have looked in vain through such of the literature in
question as was available, and am compelled to accept 1589 as the earliest
date for the publication of Ive's passages on fortification. The second
side of the argument is, of course, less a matter of fact than of opinion,
and M. Danchin's comments here seem to me slightly less defensible.
' D 'autre pas, a notre avis du moins, les Elisabethains ne devaient point
accuser Tamburlaine d'atheisme pour s'etre raille de Mahomet, d'autant
mieux qu'a la fin de son apostrophe au Dieu des musulmans, Tambur-
laine dit a ses soldats d 'adorer " le Dieu qui siege au Ciel " ; " car il est
seul Dieu et personne que lui n'est Dieu." Enfin, au XVI^ siecle, en
Angleterre, athee voulait surtout dire non anglican, heterodoxe, et le mot
s'appliquerait fort bien a de nombreux passages de Tamburlaine /.' It
might, perhaps, be suggested here that, although the highly suggestive
passage beginning ' seek out another Godhead to adore ' does indeed follow
immediately upon the terrible denunciation of Mahomet, it is not the part
of the speech which leaves the strongest impression upon the mind at a
first or general reading or hearing. The impression left is that of ' daring ',
a daring precisely akin to that which sought to ' Batter the shining palace
of the sun ' or ' Set black streamers on the firmament ' and is without
precise counterpart in the earlier part. The argument from the Eliza-
bethan view of atheism is also, I think, double-edged, for it may equally
be urged that one of the peculiar characteristics of the second part of
Taw&wr^aweis that the bitter, ironical and almost Lucretian denunciations
of religion begin there to break through the veils of Mahometan and
classical theology and myth with which Marlowe had, in the first part,
screened his expression and to assert themselves with a rancour and a
vigour which makes it impossible to remain blind to their objective.
INTRODUCTION 11
III
AUTHORSHIP OF THE PLAY
This play is assigned to Marlowe mainly on the evidence
of its style and thought, supported by three or four facts
which point more or less directly to his authorship ; his
name does not appear upon the title-page of any of the
four extant editions. Critics such as Dyce and Bullen had
no hesitation in attributing the play to Marlowe, whether
believing the external evidence to be of value in support-
ing the testimony of the play itself or dismissing it as
inconclusive and relying entirely upon aesthetic judgment.
In point of fact, the evidence from outside sources is some-
what oblique. The most suggestive of these is Hey wood's
well-known reference in his Cock-pit prologue to the Jew
of Malta (1633), where, speaking of the actor AUeyn and of
Marlowe, he says :
' But by the best of Poets * in that age *Marlo.
* The Malta Jew had being, and was made ;
' And He, then by the best of Actors * play'd : , *Allin.
' In Hero and Leander, one did gaine
' A lasting memorie : in Tamherlaine,
' This Jew, with others many : th' other wan
' The Attribute of peerelesse, being a man
' Whom we may ranke with (doing no one wrong)
' Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue,
' So could he speake, so vary ; . . .'
Controversy has turned upon the question whether * Tam-
berlaine ' here belongs to the list of Marlowe's achievements
or to those of Alleyn, which may or may not be here intended
to be co-extensive. Robinson, the otherwise somewhat un-
critical editor of the 1826 edition, followed by J. Broughton
(who finally decided against Marlowe's authorship), were
the first to point out in print ^ that the punctuation
1 Malone's MS. note on the same point in his copy of Langbaine's
Account (endorsed Feb. 25, 181 1) had, of course, preceded these.
12 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
alone decided which way the passage should be inter-
preted.^
As Robinson says and as Br ought on agrees, ' the words
. . . may with equal if not greater propriety, be read in
this way :
' In " Hero and Leander " one did gain
'A lasting memory: in " Tamburlaine,"
'This "Jew", with others many, th' other wan
'The attribute of peerless.' ^
This, of course, would attach the latter part of the state-
ment strictly to Alleyn, telling us nothing either way about
Marlowe's authorship of Tamburlaine.
In support of the conclusion that Marlowe is here intended
as the author of Tamburlaine there are references or state-
ments extending to the end of the seventeenth century and
suggesting a strongly surviving tradition that it was so. It
is only fair to admit that there are also certain allusions
which deny this or can be interpreted to point to another
author, but to an impartial critic they do not rival those
that associate Marlowe more or less directly with the play.
Earliest of these comes the oft-quoted reference in Greene's
epistle ' to the gentlemen readers ' which precedes his
Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588). This does not, it is true,
directly declare Marlowe the author of Tamburlaine, but
the implication is difficult to escape from :
' I keepe my old course, to palter up some thing in Prose,
using mine old poesie still, Omne tulit punctum, although
latelye two Gentlemen Poets, made two mad men of Rome
beate it out of their paper bucklers : and had it in derision,
for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in
tragicall buskins, everie worde filling the mouth like the
Faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that
^ See the series of articles on Marlowe in the Gentleman'' s Magazine,
1830 (especially that in the supplementary issue to June 1830), and his
MS. notes in his copy of Robinson's edition (now in the British Museum
Library) .
2 Broughton, quoting Robinson, Gentleman's Magazine, 1830 (Jan.-
June, p. 596).
INTRODUCTION 13
Atheist Tamhurlan, or blaspheming with the mad preest
of the Sonne : but let me rather openly pocket up the Asse
at Diogenes hand : then wantonlye set out such impious
instances of intollerable poetrie, such mad and scoffing
poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlins race,
if there be anye in England that set the end of scollarisme
in an English blanck verse, I thinke ... it is the humor
of a novice that tickles them with selfe-love.' ^
To pass to the end of the next century brings us to the
first two definite statements of Marlowe's authorship, those
of Anthony Wood and Gerard Langbaine, both of which
correct specifically the mistake made by Phillips in assign-
ing it, in his Theatrum Poetarum, to Thomas Newton. Wood
does not enter the play under Marlowe's name in the Athenae
Oxonienses (1691), but when he comes to Newton, remarks
that he * was author, as a certain writer saith, of two
tragedies, viz. of the first and second parts of Tamerline
the great Scythian Emperor, but false. For in Tho. Newton's
time the said two parts were performed by Christop. Mario,
sometimes a student in Cambridge ; afterwards, first an
actor on the stage, then, (as Shakespeare, whose contem-
porary he was) a maker of plays, though inferior both in
fancy and merit '. * Langbaine is equally clear. In the
Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) he says :
' I know not how Mr. Philips came to ascribe Tamburlaine
the Great to this Author (i.e. Newton) ; for tho' Marloe's
Name be not printed in the Title-page, yet both in Mr.
Kirkman's and my former Catalogue printed in 1680, his
Name is prefix'd.'
Meanwhile, as has been said, within the century after
Marlowe's death there are a number of allusions that have
provoked doubt as to the authorship of Tamburlaine and
at least two definite statements that show profound ignor-
ance of the play and its author. The earliest of these is
^ Perimedes the Blacksmith . . . sig. A3-A3V (1588).
^Ath. Ox. (ed. 1815), Vol. II. col. 7.
14 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
that allusion in the Black Book by T. M., 1604, which led
Farmer,^ and Malone in accordance with him, to attribute
the play to Nashe. ' The spindle-shanke Spyders which
showd like great Leachers with little legges, went stalking
over his' (Thomas Nashe's) 'head, as if they had bene con-
ning of Tamhurlayne.' Farmer and Malone both assumed
that this pointed to Nashe as the author but, as Dyce ^
suggested later, the emphasis lies upon the description
of the stalk of the spider — like that of an actor practising
the part of Tamburlaine.
The second seventeenth-century allusion that seems to
point to another author, apparently led so serious a scholar
as Malone to a fantastic attribution of the play, this time
to Nicholas Breton.^ It occurs in Sir John Suckling's The
Goblins (Act IV, Sc. i.) and is part of a conversation between
a poet and the band of thieves who have carried him off.
In reply to a question from the poet as to whether Mendoza
or Spenser is to be found there, the thief replies :
' No, none of these :
' They are by themselves in some other place ;
' But here's he that writ Tamerlane.
Poet. ' I beseech you bring me to him,
* There's something in his Scene
' Betwixt the Empresses a little high and clowdie,
' I would resolve my selfe.
1 Th. ' You shall Sir.
' Let me see — the Author of the hold Beauchams,
' And England s Joy.
Poet. ' The last was a well writ piece, I assure you,
' A Brittane I take it ; and Shakespeares very way :
' I desire to see the man.'
^ See MS. note by Malone in his copy of Langbaine's Account (p. 344), in
the Bodleian.
2 The Works of Christopher Marlowe, 1858, p. xv.
^ ' Langbaine's assertion that Haywood attributes Tamburlaine to
Marlowe in his prologue to the " Jew of Malta " is founded in a mistake and
a false punctuation. Hey wood only asserts that Alley n was famous in
the part of Tamburlaine, not that Marlowe wrote the play. Tamburlaine,
I now believe, was written by Nich. Breton, the author of the " Three
Bold Beauchamps " and " England's Joy." ' MS. note Feb. 28, 181 1, in
Malone 's ' Langbaine '.
INTRODUCTION 15
At first glance this might seem to suggest that one author
is referred to in both of the speeches of the thief, but it is
even more likely that he breaks off from his discussion of
one item on his list to pass on to mention the next.
One downright error, which there is no mistaking, is that
of Edward Phillips, already referred to in connection with
Wood's and Langbaine's testimony, by which the play
Tamburlaine is entered under the name of Th. Newton :
' Thomas Newton, the Author of three Tragedies ; Thebais,
the first and second parts of Tamerlane, the Great Scythian
Emperour.' ^
Equally eloquent of the ignorance or indifference to the
authorship of this play in the Restoration period is the
profession of C. Saunders when, in 1681, he published his
own Tamerlane the Great, that he never met any other play
by that name though he had indeed been told ' there is a
Cock-Pit Play, going under the name of the Scythian Shep-
herd or Tamherlain the Great, which how good it is, anyone
may Judge by its obscurity, being a thing, not a Bookseller
in London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it
formerly, cou'd call to Remembrance, so far, that I believe
that whoever was the Author, he might e'en keep it to himself
secure from invasion, or Plagiary '.^
But in the eighteenth century a revival of Marlowe
scholarship began and the sound tradition of Wood and
Langbaine touching the authorship of Tamburlaine prevailed.
Bishop Tanner, writing in 1745,^ lists Tamburlaine among
Marlowe's plays, and the end of the century and opening
years of the next saw it so included in the majority of
literary histories.* Lamb's Specimens in 1808 similarly
^ Theairum Poetarum, 1675 {The Modern Poets, p. 182).
2 Tamerlane the Great. A Tragedy. As it is Acted by their Majesties
Servants at the Theatre Royal. By C. Sa.unders, Gent. London, 1681
(Preface, sig. ay.)
^ Bihliotheca Britannico-Hibernica : sive de Scriptoribus, qui in Anglia,
Scotia et Hibernia ad scbcuU xvii. initium floruerunt. . . . Auctore . . .
Thoma Tannero . . . MDCCXLVIII, p. 512.
* This period includes the researches of Ritson, Reed, Steevens, Malone,
Broughton, Collier, Fleay and Hallam, and the critical commentaries of
Hazlitt, Lamb and Leigh Hunt.
16 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
heralded a long series of editions of Marlowe's works, all of
which accepted Tamburlaine}
It will be observed, then, that the evidence for Marlowe's
authorship rests on a strong though intermittently expressed
tradition taken in conjunction with one interpretation of
Heywood's reference and, it may be added, with the fact
that both parts of the play were produced by the Admiral's
Company, with which Marlowe is known to have been
associated. No other author is consistently indicated even
by the apparent evidence to the contrary and there is no
early tradition in favour of any other. The only doubts
of any moment are those raised in the minds of Broughton,
Farmer and Malone by what are now regarded as mis-
interpretations of a few passages. No critic of sound judg-
ment, from the time of Dyce onwards, has seriously doubted
Marlowe's authorship, though none have been able to express
their belief in terms of categorical proof. It is enough that
the play contains the quintessence of Marlowe's early poetry
and the germ of his later thought.
In the first section of his monograph on The Reputation of
Christopher Marlowe (1922), to which the preceding section
is much indebted. Professor Brooke has enumerated some
fifty or more early references to Tamburlaine.^ Numerous
as they are up to the time of the closing of the theatres,
they unfortunately never afford a clue to the authorship,
in fact, as the author says, ' none appears to be extant
which proves with absolute certainty that the speaker
knew who wrote the play '. These references demonstrate
the wide and long-continued popularity or notoriety of the
play and reveal in detail the fluctuations of opinion from
century to century,^ while the evidence which has been
1 For a list of these, see Appendix B.
^ The monograph covers the whole period of Marlowe criticism and
allusion, from contemporary references to the main contributions of
twentieth-century scholarship up to the date of publication.
^ The pre-Commonwealth writers whose allusions to Tamburlaine are
here quoted or mentioned total more than two dozen . The names include
those of Greene, Nashe, Peele, Lodge, Dekker, Hall, Rowlands, Drayton,
Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Day,
INTRODUCTION 17
adduced for or against Marlowe's authorship is set forth
clearly in the same author's Marlowe Canon, pp. 386-390
(1922).
IV
SOURCES OF THE PLAY
There is a peculiar fascination in attempting to trace
Marlowe's study of the great Mongolian Khan Timur, for
he drew upon sources which were themselves eked out with
rumours and presented a picture as remote from the original
as Marlowe's own, by its imaginative insight, was removed
again from theirs. The modern student of the life of Timiir
finds, not unnaturally, that the farther east he goes in
search of records, the more reliable the records tend to
become and that the later the date of a publication, the
farther east it is likely, on the whole, to carry him.^ For
the eastern sources of information were slow in reaching
Europe ; none, with the exception of the Turkish material
drawn upon by Leunclavius and the French version of the
histories of Haytoun the Armenian, were translated into
European tongues before the year 1600, ^ and the relatively
reliable writings of the three fifteenth-century Byzantine
historians, Ducas, Phrantzes and Chalcondylas,^ seem not
to have been used by most of those who had purveyed the
story to north-west Europe by the year 1587-8. Equally
Chettle, Heywood, Massinger, Habington, Stirling, Cooke, Sharpham,
Harvey, Taylor, Brathwaite, Suckling and Cowley. In the majority of
these allusions the name ' Tamburlaine ' appears, in others the reference
is unmistakable.
^ The main eastern sources for the life of Timur began to be available
in European tongues about the middle of the seventeenth century. For
these and for the works of the other writers mentioned in this section,
see Appendix E.IV.
2 The claim of Jean de Bee that he translated his Histoire du Grand
Empereur Tamerlanes (1595) from •' des Monumens antiques des Arabes '
has long been discredited, or, at best, questioned.
* And this in spite of the fact that Chalcondy las 's Greek manuscript was
translated into Latin and published in 1556 : Laonici Chalcocondylae
Atheniensis, de origine et rebus gestis Turcorum Lihri Decern, etc. Basle,
2
18 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
disregarded were, apparently, the Latin memoirs of the
travellers Carpini and Rubruquis, the Spanish report of
Clavijo and the German narrative of Schiltberger.^ All
that were easily available were a large number of recensions
in Latin or Italian by Italian historians (some translated
into English), the similar Spanish summary of Pedro Mexia,
to which may be added the translation from Turkish sources
by Gaudius, used, as has already been mentioned, by
Leunclavius, and the French translation of Haytoun's
work, all but the last two begetting in their turn a series
of descendants.
It seems unlikely, therefore, that Marlowe would have
read some of the accounts which modern scholars value
most highly, such as (to instance the most notable) the
report of the embassy of Gonzalez de Clavijo to the court
of Timur in 1403-4 or of Schiltberger's service under Bajazet
and Timur from 1396 to 1405. We do not find in the pages
of Marlowe's play the portrait of the Mongolian conqueror
which we can now draw from contemporary, or nearly
contemporary testimony, though that curious penetration
into the reality behind the written word, which distinguishes
Marlowe's avid search for knowledge, sometimes leads him
into felicity of interpretation startling to the modern scholar
who knows how misleading were most of his sources. The
likeness and the unlikeness, then, of these two figures, of
Timiir Khan and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, lays an irresis-
tible problem before us : how was this other glittering
figure, so unlike in all detail, so like in a few essential
qualities of the spirit, derived from the Mongolian despot ?
By what means did the story reach Marlowe and by what
process of reduction and perversion did chance select the
group of facts which, transmuted, form the basis of this
play ? It is well to look first at the original Timiir.
The Historical Timiir. Timur Khan (1336-1405) belonged
by race to the group of western Tartars who fell apart
1 See Appendix E.IV, under Carpini, Rubruquis, etc.
INTRODUCTION 19
from the main body when the great Empire founded by
Jenghiz and brought to its full flower by Kublai dis-
integrated after his death. Timur seems to have possessed
some of the qualities of both the great Khans of the earlier
empire, the ferocity, tenacity, courage and military genius
of Jenghiz, the love of splendour and the capacity for
government in time of peace which were a part, though
only a part, of the noble and gracious character of Kublai.
After a youth of struggles with rival leaders and Mongolian
tribes in the neighbourhood of Samarqand, he had, by the
year 1369, consolidated a kingdom for himself in the territory
east of the Caspian Sea. With this as a base he proceeded
to the conquest of northern India and thence to that of
Anatolia (roughly the modern Asia Minor) and Persia.
In the year 1402 he met and overthrew Bajazet, the head
of the Turkish Empire, at Ancora in Bithynia and was
proceeding against the southern Chinese Empire when he
died in 1405. His character, as it is revealed by the Arab,
Persian and Syrian historians and by the records of Clavijo
and Schiltberger, was a strange mixture of oriental pro-
fusion and subtlety with barbarian crudity.
He inherited, as a member of a military caste, the tradition
of the great line of Tartar Khans, with their genius for
tactics and military discipline. This capacity was developed
throughout his youth and middle-age by the incessant
wars with western and central Asiatic tribes by which he
fought his way to sovereignty. He had courage and tenacity
unsurpassed even among Mongols and the power of binding
to him, by his generosity, his severe yet even justice and
his charm, the men of highest ability whom his watchful
and sympathetic judgment unfailingly discerned. National
temperament and the hard battle of the first half of his
life combined to make him ruthless. He slaughtered, where
necessary, in cold blood and upon a scale horrifying to
western notions. Yet his empire, when it was established,
was orderly and peaceful ; roads, bridges, communications
20 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
were in perfect order ; justice was fairly administered,
probably in fear and trembling, by his magistrates ; learning
was reverenced and encouraged ; religious toleration was
extended to all forms of monotheism ; art and trade grew
and developed. Samarqand, to which were transported the
finest craftsmen and the greatest sages from the conquered
cities of Asia, grew prosperous too in its own right by virtue
of his organization. All that it is possible to imagine
achieved by one man he achieved ; he failed only to give
to his Empire the stability derived from slow growth and
to provide for himself a worthy successor ; two things
beyond even the might of Jenghiz or of Kublai.
The picture of his capital, Samarqand, in Clavijo's narra-
tive, equals in its colour and beauty Marco Polo's earlier
pictures of the Court of Kublai ; a city with fair and
open streets, rich with trade and crafts, lying in a fertile
land from which waggons of wheat and barley and fruit,
horses and herds of fat -tailed sheep poured daily in ; with
far-stretching suburbs of houses and palaces surrounded
by orchards and gardens and, far out into the plain, the
villages and settlements of the captives of war that he had
gathered from every nation he had subdued. The gates
of the palaces were glorious with blue and golden enamel,
the hangings of woven silk, gold-embroidered and decorated
with jewelled plaques and silk tassels ; the tents, in which
the Tartars still for the greater part lived, were of richly
coloured silks fur-lined ; huge erections three lances high
that looked from a distance like the castles of Europe.
Merchants from all lands poured in to this city with leather
and fur from Russia, with the matchless silks of China,
with rubies from the north ; the perfumes of India scented
its streets. Such splendour was there, says Clavijo, as could
not have been seen in Cairo itself. From every land that
he had conquered Timiir had brought the masters of its most
famous crafts, all to the enriching of this city of Samarqand,
the treasury of the eastern world. And in the midst of this
INTRODUCTION 21
sat the old, blind Khan, dressed in his Chinese silks and his
jewels, leaning upon his mattresses of karcob, cloth of gold,
attended by his nine wives in fantastic magnificence of
costume that beggars description ; drinking from morning
till sundown and often till the next morning cosmos or
soured mare's milk, and the wine which was the test of
Tartar manhood ; eating roasted horse- and sheep-flesh
dragged into the presence in huge leather troughs to be
distributed there into golden vessels incrusted with jewels ;
rousing himself to issue some merciless autocratic command
or deliver a deserved death sentence, to greet his ambassadors
with the patronizing magnificence of a child or to rebuke
them with the insolence of a megalomaniac, scanning greedily
the while the ambassadorial gifts to which he pretended a
supreme indifference ; matching his wits against the for-
eigners and the few of his own people who dared encounter
him. Such was the man who had dared everything possible
to his imagination and had never faltered ; who had en-
dured desert and mountain warfare, victory and defeat,
from boyhood to the age of seventy years ; who had raised
up this golden city in Tartary and had stripped the ancient
cities of Persia and Anatolia ; who had slaughtered a million
people in Baghdad and built their heads into a pyramid
for his own memorial, yet had spared the libraries, mosques
and hospitals there and sent its scholars in custody to
Samarqand. Such was ' the sweet fruition of an earthly
crown ' upon the brows of the great Khan Timur. But
through Clavijo's narrative we see an old age autocratic
rather than degenerate and catch glimpses of the youth
that lay behind, when, as became a conqueror of true
Mongol breed, he had combined ferocious and tenacious
courage with quick, impenetrable, subtle wits, so that he
passed over the face of Asia like a consuming fire or a
whirlwind, driven by fanatical lust for dominion, leaving
behind him desolation and wilderness where had been
fertile plains and ancient civilizations deep-rooted in their
22 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
hitherto impregnable cities. To his later and alien historians
he is a scourge and an abomination, yet even they pause
perforce in their denunciations to pay half-unconscious and
unwilling homage to the distant image of that flaming will
and illimitable aspiration.
It is hard for us to-day, even with the inheritance of
three centuries of dominion in the east, to understand the
strange balance of heroic virtues and savagery, of ungoverned
passions and supreme military discipline, of opulence and
austerity, of cruelty and the love^,Oii„art and philosophjL,
,jffihich made up the temperament of Timur and in less degree
of his Tartar nobles. It was harder for the Englishman of
the sixteenth century who, though his knowledge of the
near east seems in general to have surpassed ours, had far
less opportunity of studying even at second hand the
characters and customs of any of the races of central Asia.
It was not easy even for the Latin peoples of that time,
with their close trade relations with the Levant and with
western Asia to assess this new, raw civilization that had
sprung up in the plains of western Tartary on the ruins
of the empire of Kublai. Alone the Byzantines and those
few chroniclers who worked in close contact with the Turkish
empire or had penetrated beyond the Caspian Sea had the
necessary background of general knowledge. The story as
it comes west takes on a western interpretation ; motives,
customs, speech and processes of the mind are all inevit-
ably translated into a western form and made the subject
of reflexions and deductions prompted by Christian habits
of thought. Marco Polo, Carpini, Rubruquis, Clavijo and
Schiltberger, the men who had crossed the eastern borders
and testified either admiringly or in censure to the world
that lay behind the Caspian mountains, seem to have
dropped out of account with the serious historians in the
passing of a century or more ^ and the western world, more
1 Here again, partial exception must be made in the case of Haytoun,
the Armenian traveller, whose history of the eastern kingdoms found its
INTRODUCTION 23
interested in 1580 in the immediate doings of the Turks
and in near-eastern poUtics, was content to receive the
story of the Mongols from universal or general histories,
themselves derived from rumour, from conjecture and from
reports at second and at third hand.
The Byzantine Accounts of Timur. The earliest historical
accounts of the career of Timur which could have in-
fluenced, even indirectly, the opinions of Englishmen of
the sixteenth century, are those of the Byzantines, Ducas,
Phrantzes and Chalcondylas, and the first two remained
relatively inaccessible in Greek manuscripts until the seven-
teenth century ; if the Italian historians were indebted to
them, the debt is not conspicuous. All three are primarily
concerned with the fate of Constantinople, and the supreme
event of the opening years of the fifteenth century is the
aversion of Bajazet's siege of that city by Timur 's attack
upon him. But all three find time for voluminous com-
ments upon subordinate events, customs and persons, and
Chalcondylas turns from his narrative to give a long account
of the early life of Timur. Their outlook, however, is
Byzantine ; there is little to choose between the tyranny
of Bajazet and the tyranny of Timur ; ^ the clash between
the two Asiatic powers was a happy effect of Providence
that preserved Constantinople from the Moslem rule for
another fifty years. Phrantzes tells us that Timiir spared
his fellow Mahometans after the battle of Ancora,^ Ducas
that he treated Bajazet with courtesy and relative con-
siderateness.^ All agree as to the courage of Bajazet,*
way into French about the year 1501. Marlowe's acquaintance with this
volume seems, however, to have been exceptional and Haytoun's account
is not drawn upon by the European historians.
1 This is confirmed by Schiltberger's account in which also there is
little to choose between the methods of his two masters; Bajazet's
slaughter of the prisoners at Nicopolis rivalling Timur 's similar feats.
2 As do also the more favourable of the eastern biographies of Timur.
3 This agrees with the version of Kwand Amir in the H aheeh-us- Siyar .
* This, again, the eastern biographers admit without question. Ba-
jazet loses much of his dignity in the hands of the European historians,
but it is Marlowe himself who, to enhance the glory of Tamburlaine,
first strips him of his valour.
24 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
but Phrantzes and Chalcondylas emphasize the royalty of
his nature and his proud repudiation of Timur the shepherd,
even while a prisoner in the Scythian camp. Phrantzes*
record of the dialogue is poignant ; his sympathy is, perhaps
strangely, with the Turkish emperor whose spirit is un-
bowed by calamity being ' Descended of so many royal
kings' : ''Olda xaXcog^ dia ro sivai oe aygoixov ZxvOrjv xal ei
aarifjiov ysvovg, on at ^aaiXixal jtOQaaxeval ovx dgsaoval goi^
Slot I ovdenors ravra etiqetiov gov iyoj yag (hg vidg rov
^Ajuovgdrrj xal syyovog rov ^Oqxdvov nal diGsyyovog rov
'OrOjudvov Hal rqiGeyyovog rov ^ EgroygovXr}^ xat ravra xal
nXeiova jiqstzov juoI sGn noieiv xal exeiv.^ ^ The words of
Ducas have most feeling when he speaks of the waste and
desolation that lay behind the Scythian armies : ' 'E^£q%o-
[xevov Se djto noXeoyg eig nohv djiievai, rrjv KaTaXeXeifjiiJiEvrjV elg
roGov dfpiEGav sQr]iuov, on ovrs Kvvog vlayr] ro naqdjiav rjxovEro^
ovSe OQVidog rjjUEQOv xoxxvG/udg^ ovdi: naidiov xXavd [avqig fiogJ ^
But it is Chalcondylas who spends most time upon the story
of Timur's career, who devotes the whole of the third book
of his history to the life of Timur and who gives us, at
the close of the second book, a picture of Timur's relations
with his wife and his respect and affection for her.^ Accord-
ing to Chalcondylas, the only one of the Byzantines with
whom there is any reason for thinking Marlowe was
acquainted, Timur was of low birth, grew to be a robber
1 It is Phrantzes, incidentally, who is responsible for the story of Baja-
zet's imprisonment in the iron cage, that story which laid so fast a hold
upon the imaginations of the European historians. The growth of this
episode in the later versions is a striking example of the effect of ignorance
of Tartar life upon the growth of the Timur saga. Nothing was more
natural than that a prisoner (who had already tried to escape) should be
confined, during the long waggon treks of the Tartar army, in some kind
of litter. It is even suggested that Phrantzes has misunderstood the
Turkish word ' kafes ' (which may mean a litter or a cage) and has set on
foot an entirely mythological episode. For a full discussion of the legend
and its origins, see J. v. Hammer-Purgstall : Geschichte des Osmanischen
Reiches, Vol. I (Bk. VIIL), pp. 317-23.
2 The eastern authorities, even the hostile Arabshah, seem to accept
the consequences of Timur's career without comment and without regret.
^ Jean du Bee also emphasizes this relationship ; but it is difficult to
say from what source his material is derived. The authentic oriental
sources all either emphasize or imply it.
INTRODUCTION 25
(his lameness was the result of an accident during a robbery)
and was an unscrupulous, fraudulent barbarian who sacked
and pillaged until at last the King of the Massegetes made
him general of his forces. In his name, Timur besieged
Babylon and at his death took possession of the kingdom,
stormed Samarqand, and invaded Hyrcania, Arabia and
other districts, fighting the while from time to time with
other Tartar tribes.^ Chalcondylas has some sound know-
ledge of Tartar life and customs and the short passage he
introduces on their food, clothes, arms and military tactics
tallies precisely with the accounts of Clavijo. Needless to
say his material was hardly ever reproduced in detail by
the later European historians. Timiir, he goes on to tell us,
besieged Damascus and took it with a siege engine, marched
upon Bajazet outside Constantinople, sacking Sebastia upon
the way and turning his cavalry upon the women and chil-
dren to massacre them.^ Bajazet met him at Angora in
Phrygia {Ovyxqa) with a much smaller army that was
exhausted by forced marches ; he was defeated and taken
prisoner, as was also his wife, the daughter of Eleazar, Prince
of the Bulgars, and his sons. Bajazet, after an interesting
dialogue in which his princely indignation outran a due sense
of his situation, was sent in chains round the camp and so
to prison, while his wife was forced to wait upon the Scythian
leaders at supper.^ Timur took Bajazet with him on his
Indian campaign which followed immediately and Bajazet
1 This is approximately the version of Arabshah, but the eastern sources
generally call him the son of a king or Tartar noble and of the house of
Jenghiz. Their versions of his expeditions, sieges and wars generally
agree with these, though they are more detailed and numerous. The
order of his conquests varies, too, even from one eastern source to another.
2 This episode, which appears in a specialized form in the Italian his-
torians, and finds its place in Marlowe's account of the fate of the virgins
of Damascus, has a counterpart in Arabshah 's description of the taking
of Ispahan. It is confirmed by Schiltberger's description of the destruc-
tion of the children of Ispahan by the same method. It seems in the highest
degree improbable that Schiltberger, a man who had been a slave most
of his life, and was apparently illiterate, could have known the account
of his contemporary, Chalcondylas.
3 For the later versions of this part of the story and their relations to
Chalcondylas 's account, see Appendix D.3 (and notes).
26 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
died on the way.^ In his later years Timur fell into debauch-
ery and luxury ^ and his empire, utterly unconsolidated,
melted away after his death.
It is easy to see in this the germ of the story which reached
Marlowe mainly through Perondinus, Pedro Mexia, Primau-
daye and Bizarus (though it suffered many changes by the
way). In the Byzantine versions of the tale the figure of
Timur is still that of a Tartar Khan, though, as they are
mainly concerned with his career from the sixty-fifth year
of his life, he is a man educated by action and experience,
civilized by a lifetime of responsibility and unremitting
activity of mind. When we leave the Byzantines we leave
the last of his western historians capable of interpreting
him in terms of Tartar thought and life ; henceforth in
Europe, he is either portrayed as a monster or forcibly
explained in terms of European characteristics and traditions.
Early Sixteenth-Century European Accounts. In the six-
teenth century the career of Timur was summarized in a
large number of universal histories, geographies or collec-
tions of tales and reflections, all of which tend to reproduce
each other and to present a similar nucleus of mingled fact
and fiction, borrowing little from the contemporary travellers
already referred to and not much more from the Byzantines
except that irreducible minimum of fact which persists
through all the sources. Oriental and European. To name
all of these would be tedious ; among the chief writers
before Pedro Mexia are Mathias Palmerius (Palmieri), the
Florentine historian who continued the Chronicon of Eusebius
down to 1449,^ Bartholomaeus Sacchi de Platina, the Vatican
Librarian in whose life of Pope Boniface IX there is an
account of Timiir, Baptist e Fulgosi (Fregoso) the Genoese,
1 Ducas reports a rumour that Bajazet poisoned himself (Migne, p.
847) and Phrantzes says that he was killed after eight months' imprison-
ment.
2 Chalcondylas seems to be the only early historian who dwells upon
this, though Haytoun, Leunclavius and Podesta all present Turkish
modifications of the same report.
3 See Appendix E for fuller references to this and the following works.
INTRODUCTION 27
in whose De Dictis Factisque memorabilia (1518), both Timur
and the Scythians in general find a place, Andrea Cambinus,
the Florentine, whose Lihro . . . delta origine de Turchi
(1529) was represented for Englishmen by John Shute's
translation of 1562, Pope Pius II in whose Asiae Europaeque
Elegantissima descriptio (1534) the story is summed up in
one of its most representative forms ; Johann Cuspinian's
De TwcoYum Origine (1541) and Paulo Giovio's Commentarii
delle cose de Turchi (1591), translated into English by Peter
Ashton in 1546, conclude the list.
An exception must be made in the case of one work, the
report of the travels of Haytoun the Armenian which was
published in a French translation about 1501 under the title
Les fleurs des hystoires de la terre Dorient, etc.^ The version
of Timur's career and personality included in these histories
(Part V. chap, vii.) was not absorbed into the main stream
of recension and compilation, but it is possible that Marlowe
had read it or become in some way acquainted with its
contents,^ though in the main structure of his story he
followed the mid-sixteenth- century European accounts.
Haytoun's Timur is an Oriental and his career is more nearly
that of the eastern biographers than any other European
account until we reach Leunclavius (whom it is unlikely
that Marlowe had the chance of studying before he wrote
his play). He tells us that Timur's early wars were against
other Tartar tribes in central Asia ; he quotes examples of
his cunning and his astuteness in outwitting his powerful
adversaries that recall the character Arabshah gives the
Tartar leader ; most notable of all, he reveals in Timur
that blending of sensualism and cruelty with military genius,
religious fervour, courtesy to his friends and strangers and
love of beautiful craftsmanship, which only a man who had
some knowledge of Oriental character could have produced.
^ See Appendix E.
2 1 am indebted to Miss Seaton for first drawing my attention to the
possible relationship of Tamhurlaine and Haytoun 's histories. See also
her 2LXt\Q\Q Fresh Sources for Marlowe {Review of English Studies, Oct. 1929),
passim.
28 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
The other writers of the first half of the century content
themselves with reporting the main episodes of what became
the accepted version of Timur's career.
But each adds something to the saga, with the possible
exception of Platina. Palmieri tells us that Tamburlaine,
having taken Bajazet captive, led him with him on his
travels, bound with golden chains. The golden chains —
that somewhat pointless and surely inefficient accessory —
were adopted by Cuspinian and by Giovio, passing on to the
later Granucci, Ashton and Newton ; Marlowe disdained
them. Fregoso seems to have either tapped fresh sources
or to have had a lively imagination. He describes Tambur-
laine as a Scythian shepherd who gathered together his
fellow-shepherds, making them swear to follow him as their
leader wherever he went. They accepted this as a jest,
but he, turning jest to earnest, set forth upon a career of
kingship.^ The Persian king, hearing of his activities, sent
a leader with i,ooo horse against him, who was won over
by the persuasions of the Scythian and joined with him.^
A quarrel arose between the king of Persia and his brother
in which Tamburlaine intervened, as he does in Marlowe's
play, first to set the usurper on the throne, then, after he
had himself been made general of the army, to dethrone
the second king and seize the crown of Persia.
Cambinus adds to this growing saga one or two highly
coloured details. According to him, Tamburlaine not
only led Bajazet about in chains (the material is not
specified) wherever he went, but had him tied under the
table at meals like a dog and used him as a horse-block
' faciendoselo inclinare davanti lo usava in luogo di scanno '.
1 This version of his first attempt at leadership is followed by Mexia,
Perondinus and Primaudaye, as, indeed, is much of Fregoso's narrative.
There is a trace of it in one of the episodes described by Arabshah and in
Haytoun's account, but not in the other Eastern accounts.
2 This story, taken over by Marlowe, is reproduced by Mexia, Perondinus,
Primaudaye and Bizarus as are also the following events which led to Tam-
burlaine's possession of the Persian throne. Marlowe could have drawn
them from any of the five authors.
INTRODUCTION 29
Both the dog and the horse-block, though unknown to
Oriental authorities, were eagerly seized upon, the first by
Cuspinian, Mexia, Perondinus and Ashton, who added them
in a marginal note to his translation of Giovio, the second
by Cuspinian, Mexia, Perondinus, Ashton again, Curio and
Granucci. Marlowe was unfortunately swept into this tide
of witnesses. It is Cambinus, too, who reports the mar-
vellous siege engine with which Tamburlaine took Damascus,
the story of the trick he played to obtain the wealth of the
town of Capha, the three tents, white, red and black, which
revealed to a beleaguered city the mood of the Tartar con-
queror, the story (seldom or never after this omitted) of the
city which disregarded the warning of the tents and, on
the fatal third day, sent out the women and children in
white clothing with olive branches to plead for mercy.
(Their fate was precisely that of the Damascan virgins in
Marlowe's play and seems, if Schiltberger is to be trusted,
to have a germ of historical truth. )^ Almost equally popular
is Cambinus's story of the friend of Tamburlaine '(often
this is a Genoese merchant) who dared to rebuke him for
this brutality, to whom Tamburlaine replied with burning
eyes that he was the wrath of God and punishment of the
world, after which, says Fortescue, ' This merchuant . . .
sodenly retired.' ^
Pope Pius II reproduced this version, on the whole with
remarkable fidelity. But he did one notable service to
later romancers by telling us that Tamburlaine kept Bajazet
in an iron cage. Whether this was drawn from his own
imagination or from a knowledge of Phrantzes' account, it
was instantly adopted by succeeding historians. The
material may or may not be described, but the cage is
invariable.^
Cuspinian adds nothing of his own (he adopts of course
^ See previous note, p. 25.
"^ For Fortescue's account of this episode, see Appendix C.
^ See, for a full discussion of this myth and its development, J. von
Hammer- Purgstall : Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches (Pesth. 1827),
Vol. I, Book VIII.
30 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
the dog, the horse-block and the cage) and Giovio does Httle
mote. Thus, by the year before Mexia's book was written,
the Tamburlaine myth had drawn to itself so many strange
accretions as to be hardly germane to the versions of
Timur's contemporaries in Asia and not closely akin even
to those of the Byzantines.
Pedro Mexia. Pedro Mexia was a Sevillian and student
of Salamanca, a mathematician, cosmographer and his-
torian. His Silva de varia lection, first published in 1542,
is a characteristic collection of narrations and reflexions
upon history, geography and civilization, dear to the hearts
of his European contemporaries. The twenty-eighth
chapter of the second book is a leisurely story of some
length, gathering together nearly all the deeds or experi-
ences attributed to Tamburlaine by the Italian historians.
Indeed, of the episodes that have already been described,
none are omitted by Mexia except those peculiar to the
Byzantines and the taking of the town of Capha. As is
perhaps inevitable from such promiscuous gleaning as this,
the result is hardly homogeneous. Mexia carefully enumer-
ates Tamburlaine's characteristics, but he never succeeds in
giving him a character. His different sources refuse to
mingle and make him contradict himself. His imagination
is stirred by the greatness of Tamburlaine and not a little
moved by the strange oblivion which has overtaken that
greatness ; he dwells on his courage, his valour, his passion
and his dreams of conquest. Yet in a little while he de-
scribes the murder of the women and children sent out from
the besieged city, the frivolous brutality of Tamburlaine's
treatment of Bajazet, and he can only shake his head and
suppose him the scourge of God sent for the punishment of
the world. But if the figure that Mexia thus puts together
with painful joinery is discontinuous and unreal, the story
has yet a certain coherence. To Mexia it is but a series
of appeals to reflexion upon the vicissitudes of life and
the mutability of fortune :
INTRODUCTION 31
' Upon thy glade day have in thy minde
The unwar wo or harm that comth bihinde.'
He is ever at our elbow ready with a gentle reminder that
the sad fate of Bajazet and the oblivion settling upon
Timur's name should put us upon thinking how transitory
and unreal are these triumphs of the world. * Cierto es
grande documento y exemplo para tener en poco los
grandes poderes y mandos deste mundo. pues aunReytan
grande, tan temido . . . y obedescido de todos, y a la noche
se viesseesclavo. . . .' ^ This rings true ; it is Mexia's own
interpretation of the tale ; not in Tartary, not in Anatolia,
but in that half-Christian Europe where the mind turns
now to this world, now to the next, where the falls of
princes leave an echo strange and sad, yet stirring wonder
and deep surmise : ' A king so great, so feared . . . and
that night a slave.' ^
Petrus Perondinus. The next version of the story of
Tamburlaine which has considerable importance is that
of Petrus Perondinus, the Magni Tamerlanis Scythiarum
Imperatoris Vita published at Florence in 1553. This
must have offered Marlowe what Mexia's story lacked, a
clear and consistent picture of the central figure. From
the pages of Perondinus's packed and pregnant Latin, the
figure of Tamburlaine emerges insatiable, irresistible, ruth-
less, destructive, but instinct with power. There is no
need for Perondinus to assure us how great he would appear
if only we had the records of his life faithfully laid up ; he
touches, apparently, some sources unknown to Mexia,^ but
by virtue of his own power of fusing them together, rather
than by virtue of their guidance, he has drawn an unfor-
gettable picture of the conqueror ' thirsting with sovereignty
and love of arms ' (insatiabili siti), pushing north to the
uttermost confines of ice and snow, ' ultra Imaum perpetuis
^ Ed. 1550. Fol. Ixxviii verso.
2 This has the very note of a later Enghsh historian, Sir Walter Ralegh
the friend of Marlowe. (See note to I. IV. ii. i.)
^ See note to I. II. i. 27-8.
32 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
fere nivibus object! \^ and south to the sweltering plains of
Babylon, where he left desolation and burning for the
ancient Persian glory ; unchecked by obstacles, untouched
by pity, led by fortunate stars and confident in their leading.
Even the foolish embroidery which the chroniclers had
added to the tale of Bajazet is included without staying
the effect ; it is no more than a casual and grim relaxation
of this Scourge of the world, himself scourged by his
insatiable lust for dominion. And a darker tone is given
to his character even in its mirth than the earlier Italian
writers had dreamed, by his treatment of the captive Turkish
Empress, the final misery that drove Bajazet to suicide.
The impression left by Perondinus is a clear one. He was
concerned mainly, as was Marlowe after him, with the
mind of the Tartar Khan, with his passions and his merciless
desire, inexplicable though they often seem. For this
reason Perondinus's life is the first account of Tamburlaine
since those of the Byzantine chroniclers which has dignity and
impressiveness and is hard to lay down. And beneath it all,
by some strange mutation of the imagination such as Marlowe
himself might have appreciated, he perceives only a bar-
barian of genius, a barbarian with no traditions to build
upon, who ravages, burns, pillages and destroys and then,
unable to rest, can conceive of nothing but more destruc-
tion, or, at best, the retreat of a robber with his spoil into
his fastness of Samarqand. Perondinus follows the trail
of destruction unsparingly yet with a solemn evenness of
tone that is the more impressive for the absence of those
comments that gave Mexia's work its air of meditative,
pious resignation.
Later Sixteenth-Century Accounts of Tamburlaine. Of the
later versions of the life of Tamburlaine, of those, that is,
written after Mexia and before Marlowe's play, we can
pass over the majority as typical recensions. There is a
full but not original account in Richier's De Rebus Tur-
^ Perondinus Cao. IV.
INTRODUCTION 33
carum (1540-3) and a briefer one in Muenster's Cosmographia
(1544) and Sagundinus's Re Rebus Turcicis Lihri tres, revised
by Ramus (1553). There are also Shute's translation of
Cambinus (Two very notable commentaries . . . 1562), which
reproduces its original faithfully, Nicolao Granucci's La
Vita del Tamburlano, 1569), which is full but has no notable
qualities, and Curio's Sarracenicae Historiae (1567), trans-
lated by Newton as A Notable History of the Saracens
(1575).^ The history of the German Philippus Lonicerus
(Chronicorum Turcicorum Tomus Primus . . . etc., 1556)
demands more attention, as it would appear from recent
researches ^ that Marlowe had read it attentively and
drew upon it, not always in connection with the life of
Tamburlaine, but remembering details that appear in
various parts of his play.^ In his description of Tambur-
laine Lonicerus reproduces, often verbatim, the versions of
Perondinus and other earlier chroniclers, but Callimachus's
account of the battle of Varna makes the later edition
(1578) of interest in connection with the second part of
Marlowe's play.* In the same way, Marlowe appears to
have read the Cosmographie Universelle of Fran9ois de
Belief orest,^ though here again his borrowings can be traced
chiefly in the second play. Petrus Bizarus, in his Persicarum
rerum historia (1583), gives the same composite account
as many of the compilers of the second half of the century,
drawing liberally upon Perondinus, often quoting verbatim
and often mingling phrases from the Magni Tamerlanis . . .
Vita with descriptions which go back as far as Chalcondylas.
He reproduces, what is rather less usual, Perondinus's
version of Persian politics in the period immediately pre-
ceding Tamburlaine's kingship.^ Another compiler, an
1 For the passages in Newton's version which refer to Tamburlaine,
see Appendix D.
2 See Fresh Sources for Marlowe, by Ethel Seaton, Review of English
Studies, Oct., 1929.
^ See note to II. II. iii. 20. ^ See Introduction, post, pp. 41-3.
^ See Fresh Sources for Marlowe, pp. 394-8 and Introduction, post, pp,
44. 45 note. 6 See Introduction, ante, p. 28 and note.
3
34 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
immediate successor to Bizarus, Pierre de la Primaudaye,
whose book, originally published in 1577, was translated
into English in 1586 {The French Academy . . . By Peter
de la Primaudaye . . . translated into English by T.B.), also
follows Perondinus both in this and in other details in his
brief summary of the career and character of Tamburlaine.^
Too late presumably for Marlowe to have seen them, but
of some general interest because of the light they throw
on knowledge more or less generally diffused at the time,
are Leunclavius's Latin translation of his fellow-country-
man Gaudius' German version of some invaluable Turkish
materials (Annales Sultanorum Othmanidorum, 1588), the
first of the Oriental versions of the story to enter Europe,
and his Supplements and Pandects. In 1595 Jean du Bee
wrote his Historic du Grand Empereur Tamerlanes ... * tiree
des monuments antiques des Arabes ', (which Arabs or what
ancient records it remains impossible to say). The trans-
lation of this pseudo-oriental version (1597) was of great
service to Knolles {The Generall Historic of the Turkes,
1603) and to Purchas {Purchas his Pilgrimes, 1625), t)^^
Purchas, it must be acknowledged, had the wit to wonder
whether Alhacon's version cited by Jean du Bee is always
to be taken literally. In the seventeenth century the
increase in the number of authentic and reliable reports
was considerable, but our present purpose is rather with
the unauthentic and unreliable sixteenth-century saga upon
which Marlowe drew for the career and character of his
Tamburlaine.
Marlowe's Sources. In the list of some forty authors
in whose writings Marlowe could have found some account
of the career of Timiir, there are very few of whom we are
prepared to say with certainty ' Marlowe has read this ',
only two or three of which we would say * Marlowe read this
and was moved by it ', while there are a certain number
1 For the references to Tamburlaine, which are brief, but definitely
reminiscent of Perondinus, see chap. xliv. Of Fortune (p. 475, ed. 1586)
and chap, xxiii. Of Glory (p. 253).
INTRODUCTION 35
which, though far more tensely charged with life than the
imitative general historians, are obviously so alien to
Marlowe's purpose and mood that we can say with certainty
* These he did not consider '.
It is, then, with the first two groups that we are con-
cerned. There is a long list of authors from any one of
whom, or from a combination of two or three of whom,
Marlowe could have drawn nearly all the episodes in the first
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