Tamerlan's cage

Probably the name of Timur I Lang of the Barlas tribe won't ring a bell with you.

Well, it was the real name of Tamerlan, sovereign of the Mongols. He was born in 1336 near Samarqand, in the region of today's Uzbekhistan, but there is no proof that he was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. According to the historian Arabshah, Tamerlan was an imaginative and enthusiastic chess player.

Timur means "iron", but his nickname was "I Lang" which signifies "limping", because he suffered from an infirmity due to a war wound.

He was an exceptional war strategist, conquering parts of Turkey, China, Persia as well as India.

He owned a cage, gone down in history as "Tamerlan's Cage", with multiple uses: as a stool, as a support to climb on a horse or to hold captive a prisoner.

As far as chess was concerned, he played with the strongest players of his time, and it is said that he could play four blind games and at the same time talk to the spectators of his exibitions. Among his opponents was Ali Shatranj, better known as Aladdin, the owner of the alleged magic lamp.

Tamerlan's outstanding creativeness lead him to invent the cylindrical chessboard, with columns joined to its extremes, and also attempted to enlarge the board to 11x11, inserting new pieces in various ways.

He died of pneumonia during his invasion of China in 1405.

Tamerlan's cage inspired some chess players to create problems with the theme of smothered mate; the most famous one was composed by Karl Jaenisch (see the diagram below):

It seems that Tamerlan's horrendous practice of locking up hapless prisoners in a cage must have struck in a particular way the resourcefulness of subsequent chess scholars. Fortunately, their activity has been restrained to an interesting but innocuous mental game on a chess board...