"In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, we have the terror spread by the infamous Timur the Lame, otherwise known as Tamerlane or the "bloody and insatiate Tamburlaine" of Marlowe's play... According to the "Zafer Nameh," our main source of information for Tamerlane's campaigns, written at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Tamerlane set forth to conquer India solely to make war on the enemies of the Muslim faith. He considered the Muslim rulers of northern India far too lenient toward pagans, that is to say, the Hindus. The "Zafer Nameh" tells us that "The Koran emphasizes that the highest dignity to which man may attain is to wage war in person upon the enemies of the Faith. This is why the great Tamerlane was always concerned to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire merit as from love of glory." Under the pretext that the hundred thousand Hindu prisoners at Delhi presented a grave risk to his army, Tamerlane ordered their execution in cold blood. He killed thousands, and had victory pillars built from the severed heads. On his way out of India, he sacked Miraj , pulled down the monuments, and flayed the Hindu inhabitants alive, "an act by which he fulfilled his vow to wage the Holy War," This strange champion of Islam, as Grousset calls him, plundered and massacred "through blindness or closemindedness to a certain set of cultural values.""