At the age of twenty-two Tamerlane was sent at the head of a thousand horse to invade Khorasan, but it was not the first time he had been in the field, and he was subsequently employed in fighting for his own throne after his father’s death. In 1369 he had conquered his opponents, and he mounted the throne at Samarkand. It would be monotonous and vain to recapitulate the history of the incessant wars which Tamerlane waged during the next thirty years in order to extend his dominions in Central Asia, but it was when he was over sixty years of age that he undertook the greatest of his expeditions, the conquest of India (as it has been erroneously called). He ravaged the north and sacked its principal city, Delhi, returning to Samarkand with great spoil. Clavigo, the historian, says that he brought back ninety captured elephants to carry stone for the building of a new mosque at Samarkand. It was Baber, his descendant of the fifth generation, who founded the Mongol Empire in India in 1525, more than a century and a quarter later than Tamerlane. During this campaign Tamerlane became embarrassed by the number of his Hindu prisoners, no less than 100,000 at a single time, so his counsellors urged him to have them slain. The historian remarks: “He listened to this considerate and wise advice, and gave orders to that effect”; so that they were all slain “with the sword of holy war.” In order to accomplish the frightful task the soldiery was not sufficient, and “one of the chief ecclesiastics, who in all his life had never even slaughtered a sheep, put fifteen Hindus to the sword.” (Holden’s “Mogul Emperors of Hindustan,” p. 27.) On another occasion he slew no less than 70,000, and had the heads piled into a pyramid and plastered over with mud. In this gruesome conception he was following the example of his ancestor Genghiz Khan, who had devised the idea of having the thousands of corpses which were slain on various occasions built into architectural designs. At the taking of Bagdad the number of slaughtered enemies was 80,000.