Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, take place throughout Asia Minor and the Middle East over multiple decades in the 14th century. The play opens in the Persian royal court at Persepolis, where the oafish king Mycetes laments the growing threat of a charismatic Scythian shepherd named Tamburlaine, who is amassing an army in the east. The scene shifts to Scythia, where Tamburlaine speaks boldly of his unstoppable course towards world domination, predestined by the stars that presided over his birth. He has captured Zenocrate, the beautiful daughter of the Soldan of Egypt, betrothed to the King of Arabia. She laments her captivity, but Tamburlaine insists on wooing and winning her heart without resorting to compulsion. Mycetes’s envoy to Tamburlaine, the commander Theridamas, is enthralled by the powerful Scythian when he meets him and switches his allegiance. Mycetes’s treacherous brother Cosroe already has plans to usurp his incompetent brother’s throne, and he uses this moment to enlist Tamburlaine’s support. Tamburlaine’s forces soon rout Mycetes’s and win Cosroe the Persian crown, but Tamburlaine, with the support of his loyal henchmen Usumcasane and Techelles, swiftly decides to betray Cosroe and take the crown for himself.
Tamburlaine’s easy defeat of Cosroe sets off an uninterrupted string of further conquests. The mighty Turkish emperor Bajazeth is dismissive of the upstart Tamburlaine—until Tamburlaine’s forces utterly rout his own. Tamburlaine imprisons Bajazeth and his wife Zabina to use as his footstools and be kept in a cage and fed with scraps. At this point, Tamburlaine’s bombastic ambitions for world domination start to look more and more within reach. During his meteoric ascent, Zenocrate has fallen deeply in love with him. However, Tamburlaine’s warpath has taken him to Damascus, where Zenocrate’s kinsmen live, and her pleas for pity on them fail to sway Tamburlaine from his established siege custom: raising white flags on the first day to show that he will accept loot alone if the city surrenders, red flags on the second day to indicate that only fighting-age males will be slain, and black on the third day—promising to slaughter everyone within. Naturally, the pigheaded Governor of Damascus refuses to surrender until the black flags have been raised. Realizing his mistake, he sends a host of vestal virgins to beg Tamburlaine for mercy, but he cannot be swayed, and the girls are the first to be slaughtered as his army sacks the city. The sight of this horror drives Zenocrate to paroxysms; she bemoans the brutality of Tamburlaine, whom she nevertheless loves. Zenocrate’s distress prompts Tamburlaine to a rare moment of solitary self-reflection, as he ponders the power of beauty. Bajazeth and Zabina despair of ever escaping their captivity and kill themselves by running headlong at the bars of Bajazeth’s cage. This sight distresses Zenocrate further, but even still her love for Tamburlaine is overpowering.
Meanwhile, the Soldan and the King of Arabia, enraged over what they see as the kidnapping of Zenocrate, have amassed an army to fight Tamburlaine and take revenge on him. Before they battle, Tamburlaine follows Theridamas’s advice and promises to spare the Soldan, Zenocrate’s father, for her sake. As predicted, Tamburlaine destroys their forces and the King of Arabia is fatally wounded, though he shares a tender moment of reunion with Zenocrate as he dies. She is ecstatic to see that Tamburlaine has spared her defeated father the Soldan, who grants Tamburlaine her hand in marriage. Tamburlaine calls a momentary halt to his conquests as he makes plans to bury the King of Arabia and wed Zenocrate.
Part Two opens many years later, when the Natolian king Orcanes and his eastern allies have come to confront King Sigismund of Hungary. The threat of Tamburlaine’s army currently marching north from Egypt dissuades Orcanes from attacking Sigismund’s Christian forces, and instead the two kings swear a truce on Christ’s name. Sigismund and his allies quickly renege on this agreement and attack Orcanes’s forces while they’re distracted, but they fail miserably and are destroyed. Meanwhile, Bajazeth’s son Callapine escapes from imprisonment in Tamburlaine’s camp and returns east. Here Orcanes hails him as the returned arch-leader and swears his army’s allegiance to Callapine’s quest for revenge on Tamburlaine.
In his camp, Tamburlaine eagerly prepares for battle, but he worries that his grown sons are not warlike, especially the lazy and cowardly Calyphas. Zenocrate assures him that they are. Soon, however, Zenocrate falls ill and dies, driving Tamburlaine to extremes of grief and rage, which he channels into the destruction of various towns. He finally confronts and defeats Orcanes and the Turk forces in battle, in which his sons Amyras and Celebinus perform valiantly. Calyphas, however, had sat out the battle gambling in his tent, and Tamburlaine is so enraged that he fatally stabs him.
Tamburlaine yokes the Turkish kings by the mouth like horses to pull his chariot. Unappeasable in his wrath, he marches on and savagely captures Babylon, ordering everyone alive within to be killed. In his passion, Tamburlaine commands the Koran and other holy books to be burnt, daring Mahomet to challenge his own power. Suddenly he is taken ill. As Callapine’s forces are nearby, Tamburlaine strives to fight a last battle but cannot garner the strength. Dying, surrounded by his men, Tamburlaine laments the lands he did not have the chance to conquer and bestows his crown on Amyras, telling him to carry on his conquest.
