Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God, must die.

The line comes from Christopher Marlowe’s two-part Elizabethan tragedy about the Central Asian conqueror Timur (“Tamburlaine”). It is spoken in Part Two, late in the play, when the seemingly invincible warlord—who has styled himself “the Scourge of God,” an instrument of divine punishment—faces the limits of human power. After a career of relentless conquest and self-mythologizing, Tamburlaine is struck by mortal illness. The moment functions as a dramatic turning point: the conqueror who has defied kings, empires, and even religious authority must confront death, undercutting the grandiose rhetoric of boundless ambition that drives the drama.

The sentence compresses the play’s central irony: a man who claims quasi-divine status and world-historical inevitability is still subject to mortality. “Scourge of God” evokes medieval providential history, where conquerors are framed as God’s punishments; Marlowe lets Tamburlaine appropriate that title as self-justification and propaganda. The blunt necessity—“must die”—reasserts a moral and metaphysical boundary that conquest cannot cross. In performance, the line often lands as a memento mori that punctures Tamburlaine’s towering will, suggesting that the ultimate check on imperial ambition is not another army but the inescapable fact of human finitude.