Timur (Tamerlane) appeared on the scene with the dream of restoring the great Mongol Empire. In the north he sacked and plundered Moscow in 1382. In 1398 he invaded India. In 1402 he defeated and captured the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid. All in all, he has left less to show for himself in Iran than his reputation would warrant - not even an orgy of destruction. Nor did Timur's successors leave any mark in Iran proper. They were for the most part absentee monarchs who preferred to reside to the northeast.
Shahrokh (1408-1447) removed his capital from Samarqand to Herat, which he did much to beautify; his wife, Gowhar Shad, was responsible for building the great mosque in the heart of the shrine at Mash had; his son, Ulugh Beg, was a renowned astronomer, a poet and a patron of literature. After the middle of the ISth century a state of chaos and confusion, perhaps more complete than ever before or since, was the order of the day.
At this point, Iranian history again takes a strange return. For out of this welter of disorder, following upon eight and a half centuries of alien rule there emerged a dynasty more truly national than any since the Sassanians, and certainly comparable to it in sDlendor and renown.