The Timurid Invasion
The Timurids began another campaign in 1400 and defeated both the Kara Koyunlu and the Jalayirids. Qara Yusuf and Sultan Ahmad Jelair both fled and took refuge with the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I. In 1402 they returned together with an army. However, once they had retaken control of Baghdad they quarrelled, and Qara Yusuf expelled Ahmad from the city. Ahmad took refuge with the Mamelukes, but they imprisoned him out of fear of Timur. In 1403 the Timurids drove Qara Yusuf out of Baghdad again. He too sought asylum with the Mamelukes, and was imprisoned by them along with Ahmad. Together in prison, the two leaders renewed their friendship, making an agreement that Ahmad should keep Baghdad while Qara Yusuf would have Azerbaijan. When Timur died in 1405 the Mamelukes released them both.
Qara Yusuf, having returned from exile in Egypt, went back to Azerbaijan, defeated the Timurid Abu Bakr near Nakhichevan, and reoccupied Tabriz (1406). Abu Bakr and his father Miranshah tried to recapture Azerbaijan, but on April 20, 1408, Qara Yusuf inflicted a decisive defeat on them in which Miranshah was killed. This battle, one of the most important in the history of the Orient, nullified the results of Tamerlane's conquests in the West.
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“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)