Egregious viceroys: the Uzbek impact on chess

The surprise winner of the most recent world rapid chess championships was the new 17-year-old superstar Nodirbek Abdusattorov from Uzbekistan. Far from being a flash in the pan, the Uzbek teenager then led his team to an equally astounding victory in the recently concluded Chennai Olympiad, or international team tournament. This impressive triumph took place ahead of the world’s best national squads. The two absent exceptions were China (still concerned about Covid) and Russia, rusticated (as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) by the pro-Putin President of the world chess federation, a seemingly intractable paradox which formed the topic of last week’s column.

Uzbekistan has scarcely figured previously in the annals of chess cartography, but in a sense (the footballing analogy) chess has now “come home”. During the Golden Age of Islam around a thousand years ago, the Uzbekistan region was the cradle of that great Moslem philosopher known in the West as Avicenna.

Avicenna (980-1037) was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived.  In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.

His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, theology, logic, mathematics and physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.

Several centuries later, Uzbekistan also produced the world conqueror Tamerlane, reputedly the inventor and passionate player of a form of enlarged chess to rival the Great or Grant Chess of the Iberian monarch Alfonso the Wise, covered in my column of June 26, 2021.

Both variants were characterised by the creation of exotic new pieces, such as giraffes, bulls, war engines, camels, lions, elephants and even sea monsters. However difficult it may have been to master Alfonso’s version, Tamburlaine’s invention seems even more fiendishly complex, as befits, perhaps, the megalomaniac mind set of an aspirant to world conquest.

Christopher Marlowe’s plays Tamburlaine the Great Parts I and II contain my favourite line in the whole of English literature: “Egregious viceroys of these Eastern parts”, the thunderous opening of the second play. Sadly these lines are, nowadays, largely either omitted or egregious is replaced by most noble, which loses a lot of the meaning.

According to The Oxford Companion to Chess (Hooper and Whyld, OUP, 1984), Timur, or Timur-Leng (Timur the lame) (1336-1405), known as Tamerlane, Mongol emperor who named one of his sons Shar-Rukh, meaning CHECK-ROOK. In his court was the Persian lawyer and historian Ala’addin at-TABRIZI (the Aladdin of children’s stories), known as Ali ash-Shatranji because of his skill at chess. Timur said he had no rival as a ruler, Ali ash-Shatranji, none as a chessplayer. Timur also played GREAT CHESS and ROUND CHESS.

Shah Rukh was born on 20 August 1377; the youngest of Timur‘s four sons. Rukh is also, as we have seen, the Persian term for the chess piece, which we know as a Rook. According to Ibn ‘Arabshah, Tamburlaine, who was a talented chess player, was, indeed, involved in a game when he received the news of Shah Rukh’s birth, using this chess piece as a name for the newborn child.  The legendary Aladdin of the pantomimes was also reputed to have originally been a legal scholar and expert chess player in the Timurid Court. Perhaps Tamburlaine even played against Aladdin at the expanded form of chess which Marlowe’s scourge of God invented. If so, no record has survived. Yet it is hard to suppress the thought that the spirit of the mighty warlord was smiling on the Uzbek team as they conquered the world, not on the battlefields of Asia, but on the chessboard.

Not many people, let alone rulers, are named after a chess piece. Youngest son of the Central Asian conqueror who founded the Timurid dynasty in 1370, Shah Rukh ruled over the eastern region of the empire conquered by his father, comprising most of  Persia and Transoxiana, the western territories having been lost to invaders after Tamburlaine’s death. Nevertheless, Shah Rukh’s empire remained both vast and united throughout his reign, and was recognised as a dominant power in Asia.

Shah Rukh was fortunate in controlling the chief trade routes between Asia and Europe, including the legendary Silk Road. As a result of his chess loving father’s legacy, Shah Rukh became immensely wealthy. He located his capital, not in Samarkand as his father had done, but in Herat, Afghanistan. Herat was to become the political centre of the Timurid Empire and the principal residence of his successors, though both cities benefited from the wealth, prestige and power of Shah Rukh’s court.

Shah Rukh was a significant patron of the arts and sciences, both of which flourished under his rule. He spent his reign focusing on stability, maintaining political and economic relations with neighbouring kingdoms, instead of obliterating them, as his warlike father might have done.  In the view of later historians, unlike his father, Shah Rukh ruled the Timurid empire, not as a Turco-Mongol warlord-conqueror, but as an Islamic sultan. In dynastic chronicles he is exalted as a man of great piety, diplomacy, and modesty—a model Islamic ruler.

So, in spite of its hitherto general invisibility as a chess force, Uzbekistan can boast a glorious past as a cauldron of the intellect. Also as the crucible of a form of chess, so complex that it would baffle most modern grandmasters of the orthodox game, and finally as the epicentre of a vast empire which rivalled that of Alexander the Great, Rome of the Caesars and Ghengis Khan, from whom Tamburlaine himself claimed direct lineal descent.

For our games this week, we turn to the great conquerors of the Chess Olympics, the Olympiad at Chennai in India. The sensational Uzbekistan team winners were led from the front by their first board hero, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and we feature two games: the first with white, Abdusattorov vs Sebenik and next with black, Dam Ziska vs Abdusattorov.

Raymond Keene ’ s latest book “ Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus ” , containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from   Blackwell ’ s .

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