Interview With the Conqueror

What actually happened

The Muqaddimah's cycle, hungry outsiders with group solidarity conquer soft dynasties, then soften in three generations themselves, also contained a tax insight six centuries early: light assessments yield more revenue than crushing ones, because they leave something to grow. Now its author faced the theory's living specimen.

By his own autobiography, Ibn Khaldun was received with curiosity: Timur questioned him for weeks about North Africa's geography and rulers. The historian wrote him a report, and negotiated safe passage for himself and some companions while the city behind them burned.

The popular detail that he was lowered from the walls in a basket appears in the tradition but not securely in his own account; the episode flags it.

The longer arc

By 1401 Ibn Khaldun had already lived the volatile career his own theory described: born in Tunis in 1332, he served and was dismissed by a string of rulers across the Maghreb and Muslim Spain, once spending several years in a rural Algerian castle in enforced retreat, where he drafted the Muqaddimah in 1377. That withdrawal from active politics is what gave him the distance to write a general theory of dynastic rise and decay rather than another court chronicle written to flatter a patron.

After Damascus he returned to Cairo, where he had settled since 1382 and repeatedly held, then lost, the post of Maliki chief judge, six times in all, each tenure cut short by court intrigue or his own reforming zeal. He died there in March 1406, barely a month after his sixth and final appointment to the judgeship, at 73. Timur, the conqueror he had interviewed, died in 1405 while marching east to invade Ming China, so the historian who described empires burning out from within outlived, if only by months, the empire-builder he had studied at close range.