Conquest of the Khwarezmian Empire in Central Asia and Iran, showing routes of the Mongol invasion.
The conflict began in the context of trade. Bukhara and Samarkand, old centers of the Muslim intelligentsia, were also active commercial hubs, which attracted the attention of the Mongols. In 1218 Chinggis Khan sent a caravan of about 450 merchants carrying a vast quantity of gold, silver, silk, sables, skins, and other goods to Bukhara and Samarkand. But Muhammad’s governor in Otrar, the city nearest to the Mongol territories, stopped the caravan en route. As soon as the news reached Chinggis Khan, around July–August 1219, he dispatched an envoy to inform Muhammad that the caravan was being prevented from reaching its destination, in spite of the trade agreement between the two empires. Muhammad responded by accusing the merchants of spying; he ordered them killed and had their goods sold for his own benefit in the marketplaces of Bukhara and Samarkand.43 It was around that time that the Khwarezmian army launched its attack on Jochi’s camp.
Muhammad controlled the routes beyond Otrar to Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq, which meant the Mongols, so invested economically and politically in commercial exchanges, were now cut off from essential trade partners. Chinggis understood Muhammad’s obstruction of the Mongol traders as an act of war. And yet it would be unfair to suggest, as Muhammad’s contemporary critics did, that Muhammad was merely being provocative. For one thing, the accusation of spying probably was not wrong. The ortaq, Chinggis Khan’s licensed merchants, observered goings on and foreign courts and relayed what they learned back to the imperial center.
Of course, Muhammad had his own spies at work in Mongol camps, but even if the accusation of spying was a pretext to legitimize the economic isolation of the Mongols, there were nonetheless strategic reasons to push back against the Mongols, who were showing clear signs of aggression. Jochi had led several military missions on the fringes of Muhammad’s empire, and the competition over the Qara Khitai lands enraged Muhammad and his entourage. By 1218 Muhammad had ample evidence of the Mongols’ strength, based on the flow of Qara Khitai refugees into his territory. Indeed, Muhammad’s armies were brimming with people fleeing the Mongols, simultaneously strengthening Muhammad’s hand and inspiring concerns about what the Mongols were capable of. Qipchaq horsemen working for the Khwarezmians had also encountered the Mongols and could tell stories of their skill and bravery in combat.
Chinggis’s response to the murder of his merchants was a classic example of Mongol psychological warfare. The Mongol custom was to engage in ritualized exchanges with their adversaries before battle. Their diplomacy was terrifying and perverse, often involving contradictory messages offering enemies a last chance to surrender—an effort to provoke their anger and push them to behave offensively. Once offended, the Mongols felt they had the right to fight and kill. In the case of the Khwarezmians, Chinggis’s envoys carried a letter, saying, “You kill my men and my merchants and you take from them my property! Prepare for war, for I am coming against you with a host you cannot withstand.” His anger provoked, Muhammad had the chief Mongol ambassador killed and humiliated the ambassador’s companions by having their beards shaved. He sent the companions back to Chinggis Khan with the message, “I am coming to you, though you were at the end of the earth, to deliver punishment and to treat you as I treated your followers.”44
At this point Muhammad and his councilors understood that the Mongols were a force to be reckoned with, but they believed they were well positioned to do battle. Yet their first failures emerged in the course of preparations, as the lack of cohesion within the Khwarezmian Empire and its forces came to the fore. Muhammad’s advisors were at odds. One, the respected lawyer Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khīwaqī, urged that the provincial governors gather their scattered armies and the Muslim elite be requisitioned to provide troops and cash. The lawyer also advised that the shah’s army move immediately, faster than the Mongols, and wait for them on the banks of the Syr-Daria River, confronting the Mongols at their first major obstacle. But Muhammad’s emirs and court councilors had other plans. They thought that the Mongols would struggle to cross the big rivers and the narrow passes of the Tian Shan Mountains, which lay between the Mongols and Muhammad’s army. Rather than rush troops to the river, Khwarezmian commanders allowed the Mongols to cross the Syr-Daria and advance inland. These commanders figured that they could ambush the Mongols, who presumably did not know the landscape, in the mountain passes.45
It is impossible to say whether the outcome of the war would have been different had the commanders followed Muhammad and his advisor, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khīwaqī. But what is clear is that the Mongols knew what they were getting into as they penetrated the difficult topography of the region. What Muhammad did not appreciate was a distinctive feature of Mongol warfare: the systematic use of extreme advance troops. These horsemen carried light equipment and no heavy war engines. Their purpose was not to plunder or destroy fortifications and villages—though if they needed to attack a stronghold, they built siege weapons on the spot—but to pave the way for mass armies by scouting routes and gaining accurate information on the locals and the enemy. Sometimes they worked as an assassination unit, too. Jebe and Sübötei led the contingent, known as the Westward. Their first mission was to kill Muhammad.46
The Westward comprised anywhere from ten thousand to thirty thousand horsemen, according to various sources. Ibn al-Athīr reported that, while other Mongol armies were elsewhere, these scouts and fighters “travelled west of Khurasan” and “penetrated deep into our lands.”47 This reflected another distinguishing feature of Mongol warmaking. The Mongols were unparalleled masters of military coordination, able to deploy multiple large-scale operations simultaneously. Chinggis would dispatch several armies, each taking on different aspects of a larger strategy. Thus while Jebe and Sübötei were assigned to one force, Jochi could lead another. Jochi was ordered to penetrate the Tian Shan Mountains, seize control of the Khwarezm area, and then join his father’s army at Samarkand.48
Meanwhile the Westward relied on local guides to find their own path. They learned that the Amu-Daria River had a crossing point at the Five Waters, near the mouth of the River Vakhsh, exactly at the present-day border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The Mongols easily crossed at the Five Waters, despite finding no boats there. The troops were proficient at river crossings, much as they were used to traversing mountainous terrain and attacking fortified cities. Ibn al-Athīr recounted how
they made what resembled large troughs out of woods and covered them with cattle skins so that they would be impermeable to water. They placed their weapons and belongings in them and then urged their horses into the water and held on to their tails with those wooden troughs tied to their own bodies. Thus each horse dragged a man and each man dragged the trough that was full of his weapons and other things. All of them crossed over at one time and the first thing Khwārazm Shāh knew of them they were with him on the same ground.49
Once the Mongols had crossed the Amu-Daria, the Khwarezmians made no further attempts to stop their invasion. Muhammad realized that he could not defeat the Mongols in open battle and instead ordered his subjects and forces to hunker down. He withdrew to Khwarezm and Khorasan to gather more troops, and he instructed the people of Bukhara and Samarkand to barricade themselves and prepare for siege. But the few thousand mounted guards he left to defend the cities proved no match when the Mongol armies attacked in February and March 1220. The guards quickly abandoned their positions, the citizens surrendered, and Chinggis Khan forced the local merchants to return what they had stolen from his traders.50
Muhammad, constantly moving and hiding, dispatched troops to protect the other cities of the area—Otrar, Rayy, Qazwin, Marv, and Nishapur. But all eventually suffered the same fate as Bukhara and Samarkand. Every time a city put up real resistance, the Mongols destroyed their defenses, forcing the citizens to fill in moats and demolish battlements. Citizens were also ordered to provide lists of local elites, merchants, and craftsm
en; elites and merchants were forced to give up all they possessed, while craftsmen were considered useful and therefore sent east. The Mongols kept women, children, and workers for themselves, scattering and apportioning the captives among their many camps. By 1221 all the cities except the capital, Urgench, had fallen. Urgench, which was located in the heart of what used to be Muhammad’s empire, “was left standing in the middle like a tent with a broken rope,” according to Juvaynī.51
In cases in which the Mongols did not empty the cities they conquered, they left behind a handful of men under the command of an official known as a darughachi or basqaq. The warriors forced the citizens to provide them food, cloth, money, and labor. In the cities of Hamadan and Herat, the strategy proved disastrous, as the inhabitants soon killed the darughachi and the Mongols were forced to strike back. After the dust settled, the Mongols integrated surviving city dwellers into their armies and forced them to march as a massive infantry to impress their enemy.
Khusrau Anushirvan Orders the Execution of Mazdak and his Followers, c. 1300, from an Ilkhanid version of the Persian Book of Kings (Shahnama). Mongols punished disloyalty by publicly executing rebel leaders. (Pictures from History / Bridgeman Images)
This sort of display was an important Mongol tactic. Because Chinggis Khan’s armies were often outnumbered, captives could make their numbers look bigger. The Mongols paraded these deceptively large forces in order to encourage their enemies to surrender without a fight. The Mongols also would put captives on display outside the walls of besieged cities and sometimes abuse the prisoners in plain sight, demoralizing the population awaiting its fate. Mongol armies also used captives as human shields, placing the captives between themselves and their enemies.
In addition to plundering people, the Mongols took property from their victims, albeit under strict military discipline. These were not looting throngs but rather warriors under orders and on a mission. They took only what they could carry and burned what they could not. These were not personal trophies or booties; the spoils were sent to the Mongol camps, where they were distributed according to the tümen. The camps themselves were well run, primarily by women who followed the warriors, managing herds and other supplies. They Mongol armies seemed to be wholly self-sufficient, which left a deep impression on outside observers. “The Tatars do not need a supply of provisions and foodstuffs,” Ibn al-Athīr wrote, again conflating the Mongols with their erstwhile rivals, who were brought into the fold under Chinggis Khan. “Their sheep, cattle, horses, and other pack animals accompany them and they consume their flesh and nothing else. The animals they ride dig the earth with their hooves and eat the roots of plants, knowing nothing of barley. Thus, when they make a camp, they require nothing from without.” Observers of the Central Asian campaign witnessed the full capability of the Mongols, from their strategic and tactical acumen to their frightening mobility, strict discipline, and adaptability to new environments and changing weather conditions.52
As early as 1220 Chinggis Khan took control of the region between the Syr-Daria and the Amu-Daria rivers, amounting to almost the entirety of contemporary Uzbekistan. But Muhammad remained at large. The Westward tracked him across northern Iran, all the way to the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. He abandoned his retinue, baggage train, and family. Protected by a small elite guard, he changed his identity and disappeared. Rumors swirled that he was hiding in a castle on an island in the Caspian. Merchants and other witnesses reported that they had seen him in the Iranian cities of Hamadan and Rayy. The many contradictory stories that circulated about Muhammad betrayed the simple fact that no one knew where he was or whether he was alive. This again spoke to the great weakness of his regime: the lack of a communication system. People were left in the dark as to what was happening, and false and puzzling information about their missing ruler prevented his remaining loyalists from organizing. Ibn al-Athīr recorded that “Khorasan and eastern Iraq have become ‘a loose beast’ with no defender and no sultan to protect them, while the enemy prowls the country, taking or leaving what he wishes.”53
Reading Muhammad’s contemporary critics, one has the impression that the war was easy on the Mongols, that they suffered little and easily overcame a grossly unprepared, disjointed, and poorly led Khwarezmian army. But the truth is more complex. The war lasted two long years, from 1219 to 1221, during which several cities and fortresses were taken with enormous effort and at great cost. The siege of the fortress of Mansurkuh took the Mongols ten months and the capital, Urgench, was besieged for at least four months. As Ibn al-Athīr reported of Urgench, “the city became a deserted ruin” by the time it fell into Mongol hands. Recent scholarship suggests that Chinggis considered the siege of Urgench a failure, as the Mongols were supposed to take the city, not destroy it. A large number of Mongol warriors died during the siege from naptha bombs and stone projectiles and in hand-to-hand combat. The Mongols themselves estimated that they lost more than the city did—and the city was devastated. The challenge of the siege was no doubt exacerbated by leadership squabbles, as Chinggis’s sons did not all agree on strategy. Elsewhere, at Qazwin in 1220, inhabitants fiercely resisted the Mongols, taking countless Mongol warriors’ lives and as many as 40,000 Qazwinians. The Mongols would not have needed to take so many captives as new warriors had they not suffered serious casualties themselves. And the war was hardly an unalloyed political victory for Chinggis. Jebe’s victories gained him considerable wealth and prestige, which made him a threat to Chinggis. There is reason to believe that Chinggis sent Jebe after Muhammad in order to keep the general occupied, lest Jebe turn on his khan.54
That Chinggis emerged successful from his campaign against the Khwarezmians was due only in part to his own strength. He also benefited from Muhammad’s political and military mistakes and the lack of support for Muhammad from other parts of the Islamic world. A persistent rumor in the Islamic sources mentions that the Abbasid caliph, based in Baghdad, wrote to the Qara Khitai contingents in Muhammad’s armies, inciting them to abandon their sultan, even offering them money. The caliph’s rivalry with Muhammad evidently prevailed over considerations of a possible alliance between the two Muslim leaders.55
The Mongols also failed to completely destroy their Khwarezmian enemy, as Muhammad’s son Jalāl al-Dīn fled to India. The Mongols pursued him all the way to the outskirts of Lahore and then turned back. Jalāl al-Dīn settled in the Punjab, gathered forces, and turned the area of present-day Kabul into an armed borderland. It took the Mongols ten more years to annihilate Jalāl al-Dīn’s resistance and bring the era of the sultans of Khwarezm to an end. Even then, Jalāl al-Dīn’s loyal mounted guard, known as the Khwarezmiyya, fled to Iraq, Syria, and Egypt and entered the service of the local Ayyubids as mercenaries and elite mamluks, ready to resume the fight against the Mongols.56
Perhaps most significantly, the Central Asian campaign drove—or revealed—deep fissures within the Mongol ruling family, resulting in the removal of Chinggis’s favor from Jochi, his eldest son. Into the 1220s and throughout the Central Asian war, there had been no question that Jochi was Chinggis’s chief heir: the next khan of all the Mongols, if he lived long enough to accept his father’s throne. Indeed, the war should have solidified Jochi’s position. In Khwarezm, while his brothers Chagatay and Ögödei conducted secondary operations, Jochi’s army was independently carrying out the central mission. The mass army made a grueling trek down the Syr-Daria River, capturing town after town en route to the capital, Urgench. Jochi’s forces defeated the towns, preventing them from reinforcing the capital, then captured Urgench itself. It was also Jochi who led the subjugation of the Forest Peoples and the destruction of the Merkit in western Kazakhstan. He was making good on the promise his father had made: all these lands were granted to Jochi before they had even been conquered. And now it was Jochi doing the conquering. Each military victory bolstered his legitimacy as ruler of Siberia and Central Asia—in the opinions of the locals and, crucially, of fellow Mongols.
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