Editor's letter: Tamerlan Tsarnaev

last updated 8 January 2015

Nomen est omen, the Romans used to say—a name is a destiny. It’s a contestable notion, of course; even the idea of destiny leaves me uncertain. But just consider what you are saddled with when you’re named after a ruthless warrior thought to have been responsible for 17 million deaths. The Central Asian warlord Tamerlane, or Timur the Lame, was the cruel master of a 14th-century empire that stretched from India in the east to the Caucasus and Syria in the west. His armies, primed for pillage, left Delhi, Damascus, and Baghdad in ruins, adding to the glory of his own capital, the Silk Road city of Samarkand. His acts of atrocity were so over the top—pyramids of human heads in conquered Persian cities, prisoners walled in alive so their screams would cow others into submission—that they remain the stuff of macabre legend. “Tamerlane used terror as a central aspect of his military strategy,” said his biographer Justin Marozzi, “and it worked.”

We may never know what, if anything, all that meant to his namesake Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose body today lies unclaimed in a Boston morgue. Plenty of men are named Alexander without entertaining thoughts of world domination. I know a Hungarian named Attila and a German named Adolf (he goes by Adi); neither has ever shown the slightest tendency toward megalomania. No doubt, the emerging picture of the older Tsarnaev brother (see The main stories, In-depth briefing, and The last word) includes ample evidence of cruelty, even before he engineered senseless violence at the Boston Marathon. But he grasped for terror without his forebear’s tactical brilliance, and it didn’t work. His sorry act leaves no legacy beyond the pain of the victims.