Amir Timur, who would, over the course of his life, conquer enough territory to rival the empires of Ghenghis Khan and Alexander the Great, was born in Sharisabz in 1336. As a child, he was trying to steal a sheep when he was shot with an arrow and crippled, earning him the epithet “Timur the Lame,” and its bowdlerized European cousin, Tamerlane. But he didn’t let lameness stop him and went on to become a fearsome military leader, eventually defeating the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and the Sultanate of Delhi. A brilliant tactician, Timur thought of things like planting barley for his horses in the areas his planned to attack in two years’ time. And he didn’t forget about the finer arts either, bringing captured architects and artisans to work on his magnificent capital at Samarkand.

The often brutal conqueror, whose cumulative military campaigns killed about 5% of the world’s population, would eventually meet his own death on the way to invading China during an exceptionally cold winter. Freaky fact: it’s said that when Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov exhumed his tomb, an inscription inside the casket read: "Who ever opens my tomb, shall unleash an invader more terrible than I”; two days later, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the biggest military invasion ever, against the USSR.