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Feature Article - Six centuries of diplomacy between Uzbekistan and Europe
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Uzbekistan residents will be surprised to hear that this Madrid is in Samarkand, the heart of Asia, just North of the city. Look it up in a map of Samarkand zoom in to Level 1 of: In 1404, just over six hundred years ago, Tamerlane, the great builder of Samarkand, asked the only European Ambassador who visited him where was he born. Clavijo answered that he was from a modest little village in Castile called Madrid over a century and a half before it became capital of Spain. So Tamerlane announced “well, in your honor I'm going to found a city called Madrid”, and so it came to be. Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo was indeed the first Ambassador of Europe to Asia, a Madrilène at the Court of the Great Tamerlane. All previous travelers Guillaume de Rubruck, Marco Polo,…-were what I call “the four Ms”, merchants, missionaries, messengers, or mercenaries in Spanish I add an extra M - maleantes, crooks. But indeed the first Ambassador, with that title, was Clavijo, and he was accompanied by Mohammed El-Kesh, the first Ambassador of Asia to Europe, who was returning from his own Embassy to Segovia. The motive for these Embassies was the same one that took Averell Harriman and Churchill to Moscow to see Stalin, or Francois I to ally himself with Suleiman “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
This Castilian Embassy returned to Segovia in early 1403 with Tamerlane's Ambassador, but unfortunately El-Kesh didn't leave us a written chronicle of his trip, which would have been a true Lettres Persanes. They were received in full splendor by Henry III at the Alcazar of Segovia. Two months later, King Henry sent Clavijo, who was his Chamberlain, as Ambassador to Tamerlane, accompanied by a dozen counselors and soldiers and El-Kesh. Clavijo narrates his three-year trip in an extraordinary book, in its English version “Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timur, at Samarkand, A.D. 1403-6”. The book is of great historical, diplomatic, literary, artistic, religious, geographic, ethnographic and even adventure interest. The extraordinary descriptions of Samarkand in its full glory are the only ones written by a Westerner, and are the basis for the legendary reputation of the city. The meticulousness of the descriptions are worthy of a notary Clavijo narrates what he sees with great precision, but when he is not an actual witness of a story, he always qualifies it with “it is said that...” Ultimately, Clavijo's mission was to secure Tamerlane's commitment to a pincer movement around the Turkish Empire. But, although Tamerlane had received Clavijo with great respect and as the most important of all the Ambassadors, he had his mind on another target: China, whose Emperor was demanding with insolence his tribute, unpaid for seven years. After three months in Samarkand, Clavijo was asked to return, and Tamerlane departed to conquer China but only two months later he died in Otrar on the Syr Darya river. Tamerlane's death triggered a bloody struggle for power among his family and counselors, and Clavijo was arrested in Tabriz for no reason by Tamerlane's grandson. After five months of house arrest, he was finally released and returned to Alcala de Henares in Spain, but earlier he had visited the Pope in Savona, a sign that as a plenipotentiary, nearly three years after his departure, he was confident that he still enjoyed the full trust of his king. Clavijo's Embassy might not have reached its ultimate objective of securing a permanent pincer around the Ottoman Empire, and indeed half a century later, in 1453, Constantinople was to fall. Tamerlane's successors had become too weak to represent an Eastern threat to the Turks, and that same year the exhausted English and French had fought the last battle of the One Hundred Years War. But the Nicopolis and Angora battles had represented a sufficient diversion to crush the Turks' initial offensive against Europe. Two centuries later a similar and equally spectacular exchange of Embassies took place for the same reasons Don Juan de Persia, originally called Uruch Bech, went from Isfahan to Valladolid via the Arctic Ocean (!) and Garcia de Silva y Figueroa went from Madrid to Isfahan via Goa. Both Embassies are well documented in extraordinary Chronicles, and, as Clavijo's, they are equally ignored in Spain even though de Silva had discovered and described Persepolis, and Don Juan of Persia was received magnificently by Boris Godunov in Moscow, Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, Frenco de Medici in Florence, the Pope in Rome, and numerous Dukes and Counts along the way. The Spanish adventures in Continental Asia did not finish there - from Rabbi Benjamin de Tudela who ca. 1170 reached Samarkand and Bukhara first European in Central Asia? - to Antonio de Monserrate, the first European in Kabul since Alexander and author of the first map of the Himalayas, to Blas Ruiz, conqueror of Pnom Penh, to Ali Bey (Domingo Badia's alias), first European in Mecca, to Pedro Cubero, first world circumambulator in solitary all wrote splendidly detailed chronicles in Spanish, and equally ignored in their home country, Spain's historical presence in Central Asia was more important than the Spaniards themselves think. During President Karimov's State visit to Madrid in 2003, the six-century relationship between the two countries was duly remembered on several occasions. The 600th anniversary of Clavijo's Embassy in 2004-2006 was commemorated in Tashkent, Samarkand, Madrid, and Alcala with a series of events, conferences, roundtables, music festivals, representation of Clavijo's arrival to Tamerlane's court, and even the inauguration of the Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo Avenue which leads to the Gur Emir.
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[Ed.Note] Uzbekistan has been admitted into the world community and is an active member of many international organizations. Currently Uzbekistan has diplomatic relations with 111 countries. Embassies and missions of 42 countries are located in Uzbekistan, and embassies of Uzbekistan are working in 40 countries of the world.
At the end of the 14th century the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power, built up over the previous ninety years. France and England were in the middle of the One Hundred Years War, and Spain, itself pulling out of a devastating dynastic civil war, was battling the Moors in Andalusia. At the battle of Nicopolis, in today's Bulgaria, in 1396, the Turkish Sultan Bayazed demolished the Christian defenses in what is known as the last battle of the Crusades. The Franks, name by which the French and German, non-Latin, non-Byzantine Christians are known to this day in some Central Asian countries (Ferengi), were massacred. Constantinople was then left alone and defenseless, surrounded by the Turks, and all Christian Europe awaited its inevitable fall within a short period of time.
Palazuelos and Sotomayor thus turned up at the Plain of Angora (today's Ankara) and witnessed what up until then was the largest battle in History, in July 1402, between Bayazed and Tamerlane. They presented their credentials to the victor, Tamerlane, and invited him to meet with King Henry. The old Emir, who after his seven-year campaign wished to return to Samarkand, sent instead to Spain his Councilor El-Kesh, and further sent along three Greco-Hungarian princesses, Angelina of Greece, Catalina, and Maria, who had been living in Bayazed's harem since their capture in Nicopolis six years earlier.
Happy ending: Angelina, Catalina, and Maria married Contreras, Governor of Segovia, Palazuelos and Sotomayor, and lived happily thereafter, with their direct descendants having attended some of our anniversary functions in Madrid. 