The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

by John Man

  Genghis would have to assert himself. What drove him to act was a fight between Kököchü and Genghis’s brother, Khasar, in which Khasar was beaten up and humiliated. At first Genghis upbraided his brother for his weakness. Then Kököchü raised the stakes by saying that Heaven had told him Khasar would rival Genghis, at which Genghis arrested Khasar, tied him up and started to interrogate him. His mother, Hoelun, was furious, ‘so angered that she was unable to contain her fury’ – which, as we know from the time Genghis killed Bekter, could be formidable. How could Genghis treat Khasar like this, she raged, he who had been raised on the same milk as Genghis? ‘She sat cross-legged, took out both her breasts, laid them over her knees and said, “Have you seen them? They are the breasts that suckled you.” ’ The Secret History quotes Genghis as if he himself is telling the story, emphasizing the authority and wisdom of the women in his life: ‘I was afraid of mother getting so angry and really became frightened.’

  Eventually, he was reconciled to his brother. But the split seemed to encourage Kököchü to make trouble by enticing some of Genghis’s followers. Another of Genghis’s brothers, Temüge, was threatened and made to kneel before Kököchü. He reports the incident to Genghis, with dramatic results. Börte sits up in bed, ‘covering her breasts with the blanket’, and breaks in, weeping: ‘What kind of behaviour is this?’ Something has to be done, and Genghis tells his brother he can take whatever action he wants.fn2

  As it happens, Kököchü is on his way, with his father and six brothers. Temüge briefs three sturdy helpers, who stand outside the tent. When the eight enter, Temüge grabs Kököchü by the collar and challenges him to a wrestling match. Genghis tells them to fight outside – where, as arranged, the three strong men seize Kököchü, drag him away and break his back. Temüge goes back into the tent and announces the murder in an oddly indirect way: ‘He was not willing to wrestle and lay down pretending that he could not get up. Not much of a companion, is he!’ But Kököchü’s father and six brothers understand. There is almost a riot. Genghis shoulders his way outside, to the safety of his guards.

  Later, he makes arrangements to dispose of the body, which is placed in a tent and simply vanishes. Genghis puts an outrageous spin on these events. Since Kököchü had laid hands on Genghis’s brothers and spread baseless slanders, ‘he was no longer loved by Heaven, and his life, together with his body, has been taken away’.

  Thus ended a conflict between the old shamanist traditions and the new regime. Genghis, as ruthless and devious when necessary as many another dictator, had an old but dangerous family friend murdered, made himself into Heaven’s only representative, united church and state, and became the unchallenged ruler of his new nation.

  With Western Xia as a compliant ally, Genghis could turn to the conquest of Jin. It looked doable. The new Jin emperor, Wei, ruled an insecure state in which his 3 million Jurchen dominated 40 million Chinese peasants made restless by famine and economic collapse. Several top officials had defected to Genghis with valuable information. A border tribe, the Önggüds, who straddled the transition zone between herders and farmers, had offered unimpeded passage to the Mongols. Information on Jin defences also flowed from Muslim merchants, grateful for the security provided by Genghis’s expanding empire. You may ask: What of the Great Wall? Yes, there had been a wall, or several walls, built across north China to keep out the ‘northern barbarians’ from the time of the First Emperor in 210 BC. But the Great Wall as we know it today dates from the fifteenth century. The Mongols faced only several border ‘walls’, which were nothing but low ridges, easily ridden over.

  Still, the attack would not be easy. From a population ten times that of the Mongols, the Jin emperor could command cavalry and infantry numbering several hundred thousand, and his cities were well fortified. Two immense fortresses guarded the approaches to Beijing, which was virtually impregnable to a direct assault.

  Genghis’s invasion was meticulous in planning, and audacious in execution. In spring 1211, the Mongols gathered in the valleys south of the Khentii and advanced across the Gobi in three parallel columns, well spread in order not to drain the scattered waterholes. This was a huge operation by any standards: imagine something like 100,000 warriors with 300,000 horses, strung out in perhaps 10–20 groups of 5,000–10,000, each with camel-drawn carts, and all linked by fast-moving messengers as the army crossed 800 kilometres of gravel plain. Yet all sources ignore it, quite rightly, because nothing went wrong. The crossing had been done before by both nomadic armies and Chinese, and would be done again.

  As the Mongol army spilled into Jin in the summer of 1211, Genghis took the city of Fuchou (today’s Zhangbei), where he set up camp to allow the horses to regain their strength. A few kilometres away, the Jin commander, ‘an irascible ruffian named Hushahu’,fn3 was guarding the mouth of the defile known as Yehuling (Wild Fox Ridge), which leads from the high grasslands down to present-day Zhangjiakou. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to move. Hushahu had a chance of launching a surprise attack when the Mongols were busy looting. Instead, perhaps to win time, he sent for a Khitan officer, Ming-an, and gave him a foolish order: ‘You have often been sent to the north, you are familiar with Genghis Khan; go and enquire of him why he is warring against us; ask what grudge he bears the Jin, and if he fails to give you a bold answer, upbraid him.’ Ming-an promptly defected, with vital information about the disposition of the Jin army. The defile they were holding ended in a pass called Young Badger’s Mouth,fn4 though the name later dropped from use. Squashed into the pass with no room to manoeuvre, the tight-packed cavalry was overwhelmed by arrows and a Mongol charge. The Jin horsemen turned, and trampled their own infantry. Bodies ‘piled like rotten logs’, as The Secret History says, lay scattered for 30 kilometres along the valley that drops to Zhangjiakou. The Mongols would always consider the Battle of Young Badger’s Mouth one of their greatest victories.

  Follow-on skirmishes drove the Jin generals fleeing back to Beijing and captured several major cities and fortresses. Beijing held out, isolated, leaving the Mongols free to roam and loot at will. Genghis headed southwards for another 300 kilometres to the Yellow River.

  Meanwhile, the western column had secured the land along the Yellow River, while in the east one of his star generals, Jebe, struck 300 kilometres into Manchuria, crossing the frozen Liao River to attack today’s Shenyang, the old Manchurian capital of Mukden, Jin’s second city after Beijing. It proved impregnable by direct assault, so Jebe did what Mongols often did. He pretended to flee, leaving baggage scattered as if in panic. When Jin scouts confirmed that the Mongols were 150 kilometres away, the delighted citizens started celebrations for the New Year of 1212 by gathering up their unexpected windfall, which lured them ever further from the city. The Mongols sprang: after a non-stop 24-hour ride, they found the city open and the inhabitants partying. Surprise was total. They plucked Shenyang like a ripe plum.

  Content with his victories, Genghis withdrew northwards to the borderlands between grass and Gobi. Victory to him and his troops still meant no more than booty, and destruction, and prestige. He was still little more than a gang leader, with no interest in occupation and administration. But he had entered, unawares, upon a new sort of warfare – the taking of cities – which would turn him into another sort of leader altogether.

  In the autumn of 1212, the Mongols came back for more loot, and would have driven on to the capital, if Genghis had not been wounded by an arrow and ordered a withdrawal. He returned the following summer, retaking towns along the route, with renewed attacks on the Wild Fox Ridge and its two massive fortresses. Records speak of the ground being strewn with caltrops – devices with four spikes intended to pierce horses’ feet – but two of Genghis’s greatest generals, Jebe and Subedei, rode along the mountain crests to seize the fort at the far end of the pass. This time, the road to Beijing was open.

  Jin was an empire under apocalyptic strains. Thousands of soldiers died in battle, and with the Mongols sei
zing food wherever they went, civilians starved. Beijing sank into political turmoil. The erratic general Hushahu, a favourite of Emperor Wei, had been pardoned for losing so disastrously at Young Badger’s Mouth, and had shown his disdain for the Mongol threat by organizing hunts outside the capital with his own private army. As the Mongols approached, he realized that such panache was likely to prove suicidal. But he had no intention of placing himself in the unreliable hands of his emperor. He staged a coup, slew the 500 soldiers guarding the Forbidden City, murdered the emperor, placed his own uncle on the throne and proclaimed himself regent, celebrating these astonishing acts with a banquet attended by the capital’s most famous and beautiful courtesans.

  When two months later the Mongol army surrounded the city, Hushahu despatched some 6,000 men to oppose them, threatening death for the commander, Gaoqi, should he fail; which he did. To avoid the fate he knew awaited him, Gaoqi turned assassin. He rode back at full tilt ahead of the bad news, presumably with a small band of men, cornered his commander, and beheaded him. Still carrying the head, Gaoqi ran to the new emperor, Xuanzong, and confessed all. Whether out of relief at his own escape or terror at the gruesome sight, the emperor instantly made Gaoqi vice-commander of the empire.

  Not that there was much of an empire. With the emperor pinned in his capital and most towns frozen by fear, Genghis sent off all but a small force to ravage the country and seize cities. This was still a nomad army, without heavy-duty siege gear, but Genghis was learning. Corralling prisoners by the thousand, the Mongols forced them to head assaults. The besieged, often recognizing relatives in the seething masses below their walls, could not bear to attack their own, and capitulated. Thus an army of 100,000, divided into three columns, rode south and west to the Yellow River and eastwards to the Pacific, blotting up towns by the dozen across an area the size of Germany. ‘Everywhere north of the Yellow River,’ wrote the Chinese biographer of the great Mongol general Mukhali, ‘there could be seen dust and smoke, and the sound of drums rose to Heaven.’

  But Beijing still held out. A century before, it had been turned into a very tough nut, even for a regular army. Outside the walls were four fortress-villages, each with its own granary and arsenal, each linked to the capital by a tunnel. Three moats fed from Kunming Lake protected the walls themselves, which formed a rectangle some 15 kilometres around and some 15 metres thick at the base. A crenellated parapet rose 12 metres above the ground, with thirteen gates and a guard tower every 15 metres – over 900 of them in all.

  Inside these formidable defences, the inhabitants deployed equally formidable weapons. Double- and triple-bow crossbows could fire 3-metre arrows a kilometre. Artillery was in the form of catapults known as traction trebuchets. All of these weapons could be adapted to fire a weird variety of incendiary devices, for these were the early days of gunpowder. Fire-arrows from siege bows and fireballs from trebuchets were used to set alight scaling ladders and assault towers. Naphtha could be tossed in pots or thrown in bottles, like Molotov cocktails. Another means of defence was to use distilled petroleum, known as Greek fire in the West, to make crude but effective flamethrowers. To take and hold cities, the Mongols would have to capture and master these weapons.

  The siege that followed lasted a year, into the spring of 1214. It was a hard winter for the Mongols, who are said to have suffered an epidemic of some kind. But by the spring those within the walls were far worse off. Genghis offered to withdraw in exchange for the right concessions. The emperor agreed to hand over a princess, 500 boys and girls, 3,000 horses, and an astonishing 10,000 bolts of silk (which, if rolled out, would stretch to about 90 kilometres). Promising to retreat in peace, Genghis ordered his booty-laden troops back northwards to the welcoming grasslands.

  The emperor had learned a bitter lesson. Beijing, surrounded by devastation, threatened by nomads now familiar with siege warfare, could never again be considered invulnerable. There could be safety only beyond the true geographical frontier between him and the nomads: the Yellow River. He decided to move his capital way south, to the ancient Chinese capital of Kaifeng.

  This was an immense undertaking. Sources mention 3,000 camels laden with treasure and 30,000 cartloads of documents and royal possessions, trailing 600 kilometres southwards for two months, all in pursuit of security beyond the Yellow River. It achieved the exact opposite. Some 2,000 of the imperial army were Khitans, from Manchuria, who did not like the idea of moving even further from their ancestral home into the Chinese heartland. Fifty kilometres out of Beijing, they mutinied, galloped back, set up their tents, and sent a message of submission to Genghis.

  The Mongol army was camped some 400 kilometres to the north, at a lake in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Genghis was aghast at the news. A Chinese source records his words: ‘The Jin Emperor mistrusts my word! He has used the peace to deceive me!’ It would also have struck him that he had been granted a terrific opportunity: Beijing abandoned by its emperor, and mutinous troops ready to fight for the Mongols. But he had to act instantly. A new capital in Kaifeng could be a base for a future Jin offensive, and much, much harder to subdue. By September, the Mongols were back at the walls of Beijing.

  There was no attempt at assault. As autumn turned to winter, the Mongol army just sat tight. In the spring, the emperor in Kaifeng sent two relief columns. The Mongols smashed both, seizing 1,000 cartloads of food. More of Beijing’s outlying towns fell into Mongol hands. Beijing began to starve. The living took to eating the dead, leaders argued, the city’s civilian commander committed suicide, the military commander sneaked away (he reached Kaifeng, where he was executed for treachery). In June 1215, the leaderless and starving citizens opened the gates in surrender.

  Genghis, meanwhile, had decamped to the edge of the grasslands, 150 kilometres north, and was on his way back to the Kherlen, near Avraga. Without his restraining influence, the Mongols ran wild. They ransacked the city and killed thousands. A palace went up in flames and part of the city burned for a month.

  A few months later, an ambassador from Genghis’s next opponent, the shah of Khwarezm, came to find out if it was really true that such a great and well-defended city had fallen to a mere nomad. The evidence was all too apparent. He reported that the bones of the slaughtered formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat, and that some of his entourage had died from the diseases spread by rotting bodies.

  Now the Mongols were masters of all north-east China, reducing the Jin empire by a third, and cutting it in half, leaving two rumps, south of the Yellow River and Manchuria. In the newly conquered territories, the few towns still holding out surrendered. Surviving garrisons revolted against their former masters and declared for the new ones. A million fled south, through devastation and famine. The Jin heartland collapsed into chaos.

  Genghis was not yet content, for the Jin emperor in Kaifeng refused a final submission. A knock-out blow was needed, actually a double blow – the total reduction of Jin power in Manchuria and a final assault on Kaifeng.

  Manchuria was a rural backwater of farmers, herders and hunters, in which the strongest Khitan leader, Liuke, had declared allegiance to Genghis in 1212 and made himself warlord of most of Manchuria, master of 600,000 families. The rest of the region had long sent young men off to the Jin army. Manchuria would be a walkover.

  So it proved, when Mukhali and Genghis’s brother Khasar swept across all Manchuria in 1214–16. Mukhali was already one of Genghis’s greatest generals, having been with him for fifteen years, and he would become the anchorman in the long struggle to subdue north China. A small force raced to the end of the Liaodong peninsula, reaching the Pacific by autumn 1216, leaving another column to pursue several thousand Khitan insurgents across the Yalu River into Korea. A brash Mongol emissary journeyed on to the Korean court in Kaesong, coming away with gifts that included 100,000 sheets of paper: it seems that Genghis wished to keep his newly literate officials well supplied with stationery.

  When news of these conquests
reached Genghis, he demanded and received 30,000 troops from his new vassal, Western Xia, and despatched a force into the Ordos, heading south along the Yellow River, in a drive to take Kaifeng from the rear. In an immense, yearlong campaign, an army of 60,000 advanced 1,000 kilometres against vastly superior forces, through territory bristling with strongholds, to the very outskirts of Kaifeng. They fought half a dozen major battles, most of them in winter, before finally retreating when Jin defences proved too much. The war would go on, though complete victory would take almost twenty years.

  It would have come a lot quicker if events far to the west had not claimed Genghis’s attention, and opened another chapter in the history of Mongol conquests.

  fn1 The work continues as part of the International Dunhuang Project, which links researchers and institutes in the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Sweden, Japan, Korea and China (www.idp.bl.uk).

  fn2 This was a well-known story. Juvaini has similar details. It seems that he and the author of The Secret History used the same sources, perhaps written, probably oral.

  fn3 The words are from Mote, Imperial China, p. 244 (see Bibliography).

  fn4 Huan Er Zui (). Today the defile and pass are hidden by a new highway, which skirts the twisting old road with tunnels and cuttings.

  THE GATES OF HELL

  THE CONQUESTS HAVE already involved two distinct cultures, taking us from the Mongolian grasslands to the urbanized wealth of Western Xia and north China. So far, the effects have been bloody, though not entirely unprecedented. Now the story is about to involve a third culture, Islam, with a human and cultural impact utterly new in world history. Deaths in China must have been in the tens of thousands. Events now about to unfold multiply that figure at least tenfold.