Temur the Lame, historical Tamerlane, appears as a character in Book One (Awake to Emptiness) of The Years of Rice and Salt.

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur
Timur among his other names[1], commonly called Tamerlane[2], was a 14th century Turco-Mongol[3] conqueror of much of western and Central Asia, and founder of the Timurid Empire and Timurid dynasty (1370–1405) in Central Asia, which survived until 1857 as the Mughal dynasty of India.[4][5]
Timur belonged to a family of Turkicized Barlas clan of Mongol origin. He was Turkic in identity and language,and he aspired to restore the Mongol Empire. He was also steeped in Persian culture[15] and in most of the territories which he incorporated.
Timur was a military genius and his troops were essentially Turkic-speaking.[17][18] He wielded absolute power, yet never called himself more than an emir, and eventually ruled in the name of tamed Chingizid Khans, who were little more than political prisoners. His heaviest blow was against the Mongol Golden Horde, which never recovered from his campaign against Tokhtamysh. Despite wanting to restore the Mongol Empire, Timur was more at home in a city than on a steppe as evidenced by his funding of construction in Samarkand. He thought of himself as a ghazi, but his biggest wars were against Muslim states.[19]
He died during a campaign against the Ming Dynasty, yet records indicate that for part of his life he was a surreptitious Ming vassal, and even his son Shah Rukh visited China in 1420.[20] He ruled over an empire that, in modern times, extends from southeastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, through Central Asia encompassing part of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, North-Western India, and even approaching Kashgar in China. Northern Iraq remained predominantly Assyrian Christian until the destructions of Timur.[21][22][23] When Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. In the city of Isfahan, he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded,[24][25] and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside of Aleppo.[26] Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,[27] and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad.[23][28] As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests.[29] Timur was a military genius but sometimes lacking in political sense. he tended not to leave a government apparatus behind in lands he conquered, and was often faced with the need to conquer such lands again after inevitable rebellions.

References

Robinson references Temur the Lame in Book One on pages 3,6-9,18-19
Robinson references Temur the Lame in order to use an actual historical reference to begin his alternative history. Robinson has Temur the Lame go west instead of east in his military conquest in order to examine the alternative historical perspective of what would have happened if the Black Plague wiped out most of the world and the Chinese and Muslims left a lasting impact on the world instead of western Christianity. Temur's army goes west instead of east as they did in actual history and find that everyone is dead. They go back and tell Temur who is upset that he can't conquer the west since everyone is dead and he and the rest of his empire quickly perish and one of the survivors Bold travels west in search of any living inhabitants and winds up seeing the Chinese and their impressive empire and sets the stage for the dominance of the east on world culture, and historical events in Robinson's alternative view of history.