Surprisingly, we know of no dynastic chronicles or official histories written for the khans of the Horde.19 This is a significant departure from other Chinggisid courts, where khans commissioned a great deal of literature celebrating their own deeds. Juvaynī and Rashīd al-Dīn, to name only the most famous writer-secretaries, produced major histories for the great khan and the Ilkhanids. In the absence of official written narratives, histories of the Horde’s rulers and begs circulated orally and were eventually put to paper in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These sources are historiographically important, providing a perspective on the Jochid khans after their power had waned. The khans often appear weaker than their own contemporaries portrayed them, as unable to rule without the advice of the begs and the guidance of the Sufi shaykhs, who became folk heroes as the Horde embraced Islam.20
From all these sources, as well as secondary writings by scholars across the years, emerges a nuanced portrait of a Mongol regime very different from the one that endures in the popular imagination. In the chapters that follow, readers will encounter the beauties and complexities of nomadic life in the steppe. These pages are brimming with remarkable personalities and events. I detail the pains and triumphs of war, the fascinating details of medieval Eurasian societies, the skill and creativity with which nomads negotiated changing human and natural environments, and the sophisticated practices and theories of governance on which the Horde relied.
Throughout it all, three themes arise. First, nomads were expert administrators who did not need to rely on their sedentary subjects to forge an empire, because the nomads possessed governing institutions of their own—institutions that persisted in modified forms long after the Mongol Empire and the Horde dissipated. Second, though it is common to think of medieval peoples—and nomads especially—as bound by unchanging tradition, the Horde was a product of continuous evolution. The Horde was indeed steeped in the imperial traditions of the steppe nomads, but it adapted and departed from these traditions when faced with challenges that demanded novel solutions. What we must recognize is that change was not a repudiation of nomadic character; dynamism is inherent in mobile ways of life and rule. This points to an important conclusion: Mongol imperial successes came not in spite of nomadism but because of it.
The final theme binding the various strands of the book is that the Horde changed the world. Mongol rule transformed, and Mongol rule was itself transformative. In Eastern Europe, it was Jochid vassals who unified disparate Slavic peoples into their recognizable modern forms—Bulgarians and Romanians, for instance. Many peoples of Russia and Central Asia as we know them today still look to the Horde as their national taproot. The Horde’s commercial network was, for centuries, the foundation of economic fortunes in the Mediterranean and the key avenue of transmission between Europe and Asia. The Horde introduced the vitality and ingenuity of nomads into the lives of sedentary peoples, with lasting consequences.
1
The Resilience of the Felt-Walled Tents
In summer 1219 Mongol armies were gathering in the Altai Mountains, near the source of the Irtysh River. By this time Chinggis Khan had been fighting for decades and he knew the upcoming Central Asian campaign would be one of his toughest. He had asked his four sons to join him, so that his people would see their ruling family was strong and united. Chinggis also sent for Master Qiu Chuji, the most respected Taoist leader of northern China. The seventy-one-year-old Qiu Chuji was highly influential, and his flock was growing as people looked to his guidance amid war and famine. Until this point Qiu Chuji had refused to work with the Mongols, just as he had refused to serve the Chinese emperors, but Chinggis hoped Qiu Chuji would change his mind. For Chinggis, Taoist support would be priceless, helping the Mongols pacify northern China while they were busy conquering Central Asia. But there was another reason, too, that Chinggis requested the master’s presence. The khan was now in his late fifties, while the typical warrior barely reached his forties. Chinggis could no longer take each year for granted, and he hoped to learn from Qiu Chuji the secret of longevity.1
Qiu Chuji accepted the invitation because, in his words, “it was the will of Heaven.” Perhaps he also thought he might gain something from a relationship with Chinggis. The old master set out westward, taking nearly two years to reach the Khan at his camp south of the Hindu-Kush Mountains, in the last days of April 1222. At their first meeting, the conqueror asked the monk, “Have you a medicine of immortality?” Qiu Chuji replied, “There are means for preserving life, but not medicines for immortality.” Satisfied with Qiu Chuji’s honesty, Chinggis gave him the appellation shinsen, the immortal, and ordered Qiu Chuji’s tents pitched just east of his own. Such proximity was a marker of honor and trust. The Taoist master spent more than a year in Chinggis Khan’s camp and in Samarkand, which the Mongols had taken in 1220. In several conversations, Qiu Chuji explained the doctrine of the Tao and advised Chinggis Khan to avoid cruelty and sensuality and warned him not to go hunting anymore.2
Qiu Chuji could not give Chinggis immortality, but the old monk did provide the backing the Mongols wanted. Chinggis sought conquest, not destruction; Qiu Chuji helped Chinggis secure the surrender of the northern Chinese and their acceptance of the Mongol order. An able administrator, Qiu Chuji knew the Mongols would provide better government to the region. Chinggis repaid the esteem, making Qiu Chuji his emissary: Qiu Chuji was granted supreme jurisdiction over the Taoists, and his followers were made tarkhans of the Mongols—honored persons exempted from military conscription and taxes. Qiu Chuji and his followers recited scriptures on Chinggis’s behalf and prayed for his longevity. In 1224, on the way back to northern China, the monk stopped in Zhongdu, where he ordered his new headquarters built. That same year, he sent his followers throughout the region to take control of temples and summon the Buddhist and Taoist clergies to submit to the Mongol Empire.
Three years later, both Qiu Chuji and Chinggis Khan died. Firsthand accounts suggested that the conqueror had been wounded during a hunt and succumbed to his injuries. The Taoists, Buddhists, and others whom Chinggis had made tarkhans kept their special status under Mongol rule; in return, they would forever worship Chinggis Khan, his descendants, and their descendants.
We have too readily accepted the stereotype of supremely violent Mongols who conquered much of Eurasia with stunning ease. The unstoppable nomads featured in textbooks, films, and TV shows appeal to us because they are both dramatic and reassuringly familiar. But this vision of an empire of the sword is false. It omits Qiu Chuji and all the others who respected the Mongols’ political acumen. The vision of bloodthirsy marauders leaves no place for acknowledging Mongol state-building, rendering the regime of Chinggis and his descendents a historical anomaly: an empire lacking all ambition. To understand what Chinggis Khan really wanted and to make sense of how his Mongols came to dominate Eurasia, we need to move beyond such simplifications and retell the story from the Mongols’ perspective. We need to tell a story not just of warfare but also of politics: agile diplomacy, economic cooptation, religious appeals, administrative development, migration, assimilation, and so on. The Mongols had a unique political economy based on long-distance trade, circulation rather than accumulation of goods, sharing across social strata, and systems of hierarchy derived from the deep well of steppe history. This system both affirmed and flowed from the cosmology that the nomads credited for their power. The Mongols sought to build durable regimes on the basis of their nomadic cosmology and traditions, and in this effort, they were remarkably successful.
The twelfth-century East Asian steppe, showing locations of the major nomadic powers and the Orkhon Valley, the spiritual and political center of the steppe world and the region that would become the Mongol imperial heartland.
Life in the Steppe
The steppe was a continent of diversities, geographically and culturally. The Felt-Walled Tents—a generic name the Mongols used to refer to themselves and fellow nomadic groups—were not all identical, but they shared a numb
er of economic strategies and social institutions. Most centrally, the nomads shared a common political culture. Their world was a network of oboqs, groups whose members claimed a single, often legendary, ancestry. The members of a given oboq had a common surname and together worshiped their dead, but they did not necessarily live close to each other. Nor did an oboq necessarily claim unity; subgroups followed their own leaders. Unity within and among oboqs could, however, arise. To bolster their strength, oboqs coalesced into larger political communities under powerful leaders—khans and their supporters. When oboqs merged, they chose a new collective name for their group: a group that went to war together, made trade alliances, arranged political marriages, shared and celebrated their ancestors collectively, and meted out justice. The fortunes of this larger coalition depended on the khan’s ability to maximize the number and loyalty of his following. In the twelfth century, the most prominent Felt-Walled Tents were Tatar, Merkit, Kereit, Naiman, and Mongol. Each protected its own territory.3
The vast majority of pastoral nomads followed no religious dogma, but they had a common spiritual framework based on venerating and controlling the spirits of the dead and appeasing the spirits of nature. Rituals included sacrifices of horses and sheep, which were fed to the life-size stone statues erected to ancestors. The living poured meat, fermented milk, and fat into the mouths of the statues, or smeared their stone faces with grease. Among all the steppe nomads, regardless of family or oboq, the concept of Tengri held a central cosmological position. Tengri was the sky. It was also God, and everything that stood out for its size. As the eleventh-century Muslim scholar Mahmūd al-Kāshgarī put it, “Tängri means God; the infidels”—that is, the nomads—“call heaven tängri and likewise everything that impresses them, e.g. a high mountain or a large tree. They worship such things and they call a wise man tängrikän.” Tengri was associated with sülde, the vital force that gave warriors majesty, male strength, and good fortune. Sülde, Tengri, the imminent presence of the dead, and the broader cosmology of which they were elements shaped social relations across the steppe, from the Tatars in the east to the Naiman in the west. It was the veneration of their common ancestors that bound oboq members together; exclusion from these collective rituals meant banishment from social life.4
Across nomadic communities of the steppe region, oboq members further identified themselves through their uruq: their personal male lineages. Yet all lineages were not created equal, so common herdsmen tried to associate themselves with more prestigious lineages through alliances. However, even if commoners became kin with nobility, their birth rank remained conspicuous. Steppe-dwellers were divided not only into nobles and commoners but also between longtime members of high-status uruqs and newcomers.5
The Mongol oboqs were divided between Niru’un and Dürlükin. The Niru’un comprised more than twenty oboqs that came from a single legendary ancestress, Alan Gho’a. She had three sons who were born when she was a widow; she claimed that they were the sons of heaven, destined to rule over the commoners. Bodonchar, the youngest, became the founder of Chinggis Khan’s lineage, called the Kiyad-Borjigid. The Niru’un supplied the Mongol leadership class. Following a strict requirement that they marry outside their oboq, the Niru’un married among the fifteen or so oboqs of the Dürlükin. The Dürlükin were commoners, denied any official political role. But while they were politically dependent—they could not rule—they were economically independent. Described as bo’ol, free men, they gained materially from their allegiance to, and protection by, a strong leader. Highly mobile, bo’ol could also break their bonds of allegiance, leaving a chief as quickly as they had gathered to support him. This social and political flexibility created instability, but leaders could also sturn the bo’ol into a massive, if temporary, military force. One such leader, Qabul Khan, a descendant of Alan Gho’a through her son Bodonchar, managed to unify the Mongol oboqs in the mid-twelfth century. Soon after, however, the Tatars—allied with the Jin, who ruled northern China—killed Qabul Khan’s successor and destroyed the unified Mongol army.6
One of the Mongol chiefs who had succeeded Qabul Khan was Yesügei Ba’atur, a Kiyad-Borjigid from the region of the Burqan-Qaldun Mountain, the source of the Onon, Tula, and Kerulen rivers. Possibly a grandson of Qabul Khan himself, Yesügei Ba’atur was the father of Chinggis Khan. Chinggis Khan was born with the name Temüjin, after a Tatar man captured by his father on the day of the birth, around the year 1160. For Temüjin, carrying the name of the defeated was an auspicious sign. In the steppe world, to vanquish one’s enemies meant taking everything they had: warriors, women, children, goods, herds, names. The name of Temüjin signaled the strength of the boy’s family and the success, at least for one day, of Yesügei Ba’atur’s battle to reassert the old supremacy of Qabul Khan.
When Temüjin was a boy, the center of the steppe world was the Orkhon Valley, the old imperial site of the Türks. The valley was dominated by the Kereit. To the west, on the upper Irtysh River, lay Naiman territory. The Kereit and Naiman, not the Mongols, were masters of the steppe. The Kereit and Naiman elites spoke Turkic and had partially converted to Christianity under the influence of the Nestorian Church. In an effort to outdo each other, To’oril of the Kereit and Tayang Qan of the Naiman accumulated men, weapons, alliances, and prestige. Yesügei Ba’atur sided with the Kereit. Later Chinggis Khan would subdue the Kereit and the Naiman in the course of a protracted effort to defeat all challengers among the steppe peoples.7
But long before that, when Temüjin was around nine years old, his father was killed by Tatars. As Temüjin was too young to succeed his father, the Tayichi’ut took the Mongol leadership and threatened the boy’s life. The Tayichi’ut were powerful Niru’un who had ruled the Mongols after Qabul Khan’s death. Mongols who had been under Yesügei Ba’atur’s authority abandoned their deceased leader’s family to follow the Tayichi’ut, leaving Temüjin’s mother and her children to fend for themselves. They were excluded from the collective sacrifices to the ancestors.8 The swift fall of Temüjin’s family demonstrated how rapidly allegiances among steppe societies could shift. Alliance might arise through anda, sworn brotherhood, or kuda anda, the bond of marriage, but these alliances were fluid. More durable was the duty of vengeance; blood feuds spanned generations. Temüjin built his reputation on his determination to avenge his father and to restore the Mongols to the stature they had commanded under Qabul Khan.9
The Rise of Temüjin
Because marriage was a source of alliance, the choice of a spouse was political. When powerful families were involved, the ramifications could be significant. Such was the case when Yesügei Ba’atur, shortly before his death, decided to marry young Temüjin to the daughter of a Qonggirad chief, a girl named Börte. Men—and boys—of the Mongol oboqs of the Onon Valley typically married Olqunu’ud women. This unusual alliance with the Qonggirad chief Dei Sechen would bring more prestige to Yesügei Ba’atur. The Qonggirad were Dürlükin, but they were among the wealthiest Mongol oboqs. Pledging Temüjin to Börte was bound to exacerbate tensions with the Merkit, who were Qonggirad allies by marriage. Competition between the Mongols and Merkit was already high, in part because Yesügei Ba’atur had captured his wife, Temüjin’s mother, from her Merkit husband. In addition the Merkit were allied with the Naiman, while the Mongols allied with the Naiman’s rivals, the Kereit. The new marriage alliance of the Mongols and the Qonggirad was a direct threat to the Merkit.
Temüjin’s adolescence is poorly documented. We only know that he was imprisoned by the Tayichi’ut, escaped from them, and began to forge small-scale alliances. During these tough times, his courage, endurance, and prestigious ancestry gained him the support of a number of Mongol warriors. Around 1180, when Temüjin was about twenty years old, he had enough stature to claim Börte as his bride and brought her back to his camp. Soon after, however, the Merkit retaliated by raiding his camp and kidnapping Börte. But now Temüjin could call on allies. Supported by Jamuqa, his anda, and by To’oril, th
e Kereit leader and former ally of Yesügei Ba’atur, Temüjin responded by organizing a military campaign into Merkit territory. After the campaign, Temüjin negotiated for the release of Börte and was eventually able to retrieve her.10
Temüjin’s political success against the Merkit earned him higher standing. He won further backing from the Kereit and the support of the Jin, with whom the Mongols had had diplomatic and trade relations at least since the time of Qabul Khan. Jin foreign policy was fundamentally to use one group of nomads against against another; the Jin had supported the Tatars against the Mongols and now they hoped to control the Tatars through the Mongols. In 1196, with powerful allies on his side, Temüjin went to war against the Tatars, longstanding rivals. It took six years to subjugate the Tatars, but no sooner had Temüjin defeated his enemy than he also needed to reject the allies who helped him to victory. The son of the Kereit leader To’oril began to fear Temüjin’s rise. When Temüjin required a Kereit princess as a bride for his eldest son Jochi, it became clear that Temüjin hoped to usurp the Kereit throne. To prevent this, To’oril’s son attacked the Mongols and defeated them on the battlefield. Temüjin swore to his warriors that he would strike back. In 1203 he turned against To’oril’s army and soundly defeated the Kereit. Such was the world of ever-shifting steppe alliances.
Temüjin’s goal was not to eliminate the Kereit but to incorporate their power into his own and succeed them. Temüjin seized To’oril’s golden tent and tableware, both symbols of Kereit sovereignty, and distributed them among the Mongols as spoils of war. The appropriation of the Kereit’s symbols and position signaled the scope of Temüjin’s ambitions. For centuries before the Kereit made the Orkhon Valley their headquarters, it had been a land of kings. Early occupants had included the Xiongnu, leaders of a powerful nomadic empire from the second century BCE until the late first century CE. From the sixth to the eighth century CE, the valley had been the heartland of the Gök-Türks (Eastern Türks), before the Uighurs conquered it. After displacing the Kereit and claiming the Orkhon Valley, Temüjin could feel justified in declaring, “I have attained the high throne.”
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