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

by John Man

  The numbers – almost certainly exaggerated by Islamic writers, but appallingly high nevertheless – suggest the release of some terrible racial or religious hatred. Yet it was not like that; there was no crusading ambition to assert the grand truths of shamanism over other beliefs, no determination to annihilate lesser breeds. Yes, of course, the Mongols would be the masters. But everyone else was welcome to serve, once they acknowledged Mongol superiority. The overriding consideration was conquest, because, for whatever obscure reason, that was the destiny imposed on Genghis by Heaven. Destruction was a matter of strategy. Cities, regions, kingdoms and empires tumbled for no other purpose than to make way for the next victory. Deaths were entirely incidental.

  The first link in this chain of events had been forged years before when the scion of the Naiman ruling house, Kuchlug, had escaped westwards, at the head of his few surviving troops. He had ended up in another vast realm, obscured from modern eyes by its remoteness in time and space. Yet Kuchlug and his new base play a vital role in this story, because they drew Genghis into the world of Islam.

  To understand what happened, we have to go back a century. In 1124, the Jurchen, in establishing the Jin empire, chased out the former rulers, the Khitan. Two hundred top Khitans fled westwards for 2,500 kilometres, beyond the deserts of Xinjiang and over the Tien Shan mountains, far beyond the reach of the new rulers of north China. Here, a decade later, in an anarchic section of Inner Asia inhabited by a mixture of mainly Turkic and Islamic peoples, they carved out a realm of grass, mountain and desert the size of western Europe. It covered present-day Kyrgyzstan, part of present-day western China, southern Kazakhstan and Tadjikistan. The kingdom was known as Khara Khitai – Black Cathay – after its Khitan founders.

  When, seventy years later, Kuchlug arrived, he was welcomed by the current ruler, securing his position by marrying his daughter. Then, in the words of the historian Juvaini, he ‘leaped forth like an arrow from a strong bow’ to seize power. His treachery won him few friends. And he made things worse: at the behest of his new wife, he turned Buddhist and violently anti-Islamic, thus alienating his new subjects. When the imam of Khotan in southern Xinjiang reviled him, Kuchlug had him crucified on the door of his own madrassa. In Genghis’s eyes, this unstable fanatic would one day wish to avenge his father and grandfather. For the sake of the future security of the Mongol nation, he had to be eliminated.

  Genghis entrusted the task to Jebe. Geography was the greatest challenge: a 2,600-kilometre march, first across Mongolia’s grasslands, a climb over the 3,000-metre Altai Mountains, and then through the rugged heights of the Tien Shan to Issyk Kul, the world’s second largest alpine lake. Some 80 kilometres from Issyk Kul’s western end lay Kuchlug’s capital, Balasagun.

  Militarily, success came easily, as Genghis had foreseen. At the Mongols’ approach, Kuchlug fled south to the Silk Route emporium of Kashgar, on the western edge of the Takla Makan Desert. When Jebe went in pursuit, he banned pillaging, which meant that Kashgar’s Uighur inhabitants were happy to see him. Kuchlug fled again, over the desert towards the Pamirs, perhaps aiming for what is now Pakistan. Being ‘chased like a mad dog’ by the Mongols, as Juvaini relates, Kuchlug and his followers were cornered by hunters, who handed him over. The Mongols paid the hunters, cut off Kuchlug’s head and paraded it through the cities of their new domains.

  The Mongol campaign brought them into contact with Kuchlug’s Islamic neighbour, a kingdom straddling much of present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and overlapping into Iran and Afghanistan. It was known as Khwarezm (as it is in one common transliteration; there are half a dozen), after its core province. This unruly region on Islam’s eastern borderlands had been taken from its nominal overlord, the caliph in Baghdad, half a century before. It controlled the great Silk Road emporia – Samarkand, Bukhara, Urgench, Khojend, Merv, Nishapur – as well as the traditional frontier river, the Syrdarya, and the region beyond, which reached for almost 500 barren kilometres over the Kyzyl Kum Desert to the Amudarya (the ancient Oxus). It was a confused and brutal time: Samarkand alone endured seventy attacks by Khara Khitai forces, almost one a year. Under this pressure, in about 1210 Khwarezm’s shah, Muhammad, had concluded a brief alliance with Kuchlug, with the result that when Kuchlug seized power in Khara Khitai, Muhammad emerged as ‘a second Alexander’ in Khwarezm, thus starting a train of events that led to the next stage in Genghis’s journey towards a trans-continental empire.

  The key to what follows was the character of Muhammad. No one has a good word to say of the man who brought to his people and his religion their greatest disaster. His mother, Terken, who ran her own court, also bears a good deal of the blame. It was perhaps on her initiative that he, a volatile and insecure Turk, had tried to impose his will on his mainly Iranian people by imprisoning several chiefs. Ten thousand died when Muhammad seized Samarkand. According to Juvaini, he was a notorious libertine, ‘constantly satisfying his desires in the company of fair songstresses and in continual drinking of purple wine’. This may be a libel, because Juvaini, writing for his Mongol overlords, was eager to explain the Mongol invasion as a punishment for Muslim sins; but there’s no doubting Muhammad’s failures as a leader.

  Genghis had no interest in embroiling himself in this mess, claiming that all he wanted was a trade link. Three merchants from Bukhara had arrived in Mongolia, eager to exploit the route that had suddenly opened up with the Mongol advances into north China. In response, Genghis sent a trade delegation to Muhammad, with gifts including walrus and narwhal tusks, jade, musk and a nugget of Chinese gold as big as a camel’s hump. They also bore a message of supposed goodwill, saying Genghis would place Muhammad ‘on a level with the dearest of his sons’. Muhammad feared the worst. He had just heard of Genghis’s seizure of Beijing, complete with skeletal remains, which stymied his own ambitions to expand into China. Now here was Genghis asserting fatherly dominance, as if he, the shah, was nothing more than a vassal. The leader of the trade delegation, a local Muslim, tried to reassure Muhammad that Genghis’s forces were outnumbered by the shah’s. But the damage was done.

  So when in 1218 Genghis followed up with a huge trade delegation of 100 (as The Secret History records), or more (according to other sources), suspicion turned to hostility, mixed perhaps with greed. The delegation – 500 camels carrying gold, silver, beaver skins and sables – chose to head for Otrar, in the south of today’s Kazakhstan, because the town was right on the border and because it was rich, having been a thriving link on the east–west trade route later known as the Silk Road for over 1,000 years. It was rich, too, in its own farmland, the fertile flood plain created by the Syrdarya and a tributary, the Arys, as they wound their way from the Tien Shan to the Aral Sea. In a sense, the floods made the city. To rise above the annual flood of meltwater rushing from the Tien Shan, locals had always built themselves mounds of earth to live on. Known as tobes, there were some 200 of them, some big enough only for a family, many village-sized, and a few evolving into towns. The most imposing was Otrar, an artificial plateau with 15-metre bulwarks covered in earth-brick walls, four gates, a moat and a suburban halo, which had a wall of its own.

  Some of this is visible today, thanks to forty years of archaeological work,fn1 which has revealed layer upon cultural layer, houses upon earthen houses, all the way down, and back, to 100 BC. Now, the rivers have been sucked almost dry by the irrigation of cotton-fields, turning the Aral Sea into salt-puddles,fn2 the once-fertile plains into semi-desert and their canals into dried-up ditches. At the time the Mongols arrived, the town had one of the finest libraries in the Muslim world, bath-houses to rival Rome’s, 70,000 households, honeycombs of two- and three-room houses, communities of artisans, even a system of public toilets.

  Sophisticated, rich – but precariously placed. Once a proudly independent city-state, Otrar had been turned by Muhammad’s expansion into a border town between Khwarezm and Khara Khitai eight years previously. Muhammad’s governor was the other villain in thi
s story, usually known by his nickname, Inalchuk (‘Little Lord’).

  No sooner had the delegation arrived than there followed the event that, in Juvaini’s words, ‘laid waste a whole world’, and poured forth rivers of blood. Inalchuk arrested the whole delegation and reported what he had done to his boss, the shah. Then, ‘without thinking or reflecting, the Sultan at once gave orders for that party of Muslims [Genghis’s merchants in Otrar] . . . to be put to death’, and their goods to be seized. Inalchuk killed the whole delegation – all of them Muslim except for the leader.

  Why? Did Inalchuk think that Genghis’s people were all spies? Were the two of them greedy and/or paranoid? No one knows.

  At first, Genghis refused to be provoked. He sent three envoys, who gave Muhammad a chance to make amends. Instead, Muhammad killed the envoys, or – according to another account – only the top man, the other two being freed with their beards cut off.

  To kill a single envoy would have been enough for war, let alone 100 or more. When the news reached Genghis, Juvaini describes him flying into a whirlwind of rage. There is more than a personal insult involved, more than a diplomatic outrage. ‘How can my “golden halter” be broken?’ demands Genghis, meaning that Muhammad has broken the bonds of allegiance. It seems that by now, in 1218, he took it for granted that all leaders were bound to acknowledge him as overlord. He ‘went alone to the summit of a hill’ – surely his sacred mountain, Burkhan Kaldun – ‘bared his head, turned his face towards the earth and for three days and nights offered up prayer, saying: “I am not the author of this trouble; grant me strength to exact vengeance.” ’

  This marked a new phase in Genghis’s career. Up to this point, tradition had ruled. His predecessors had aspired to unite tribes and invade north China. In Genghis’s case this had also meant dealing with Western Xia. But no nomad chief would have dared invade an empire so far from home, let alone one that was the dominant power of Inner Asia. But he had no choice. He had been humiliated and directly challenged. As The Secret History says, he had to attack Khwarezm ‘to take revenge, to requite the wrong’.

  His decision inspired a discussion among his family on the subject of succession. The problem was posed by Yisui, one of his wives, of whom there were now several. In words placed in Yisui’s mouth by The Secret History,

  When your body, like a great old tree,

  Will fall down,

  To whom will you bequeath your people

  Genghis saw the point: ‘Yisui’s words are more right than right.’ He opened the problem to all four of his sons, in public. The mantle might have fallen naturally to Jochi, the eldest; but Jochi could have been fathered by a Merkit when his mother was a captive. The suggestion started a heated argument.

  Chaghadai, the second son, burst out: ‘How can we let ourselves be ruled by this bastard?’

  Jochi seized his brother by the collar. ‘I have never been told by my father the khan that I was different from my brothers. How can you discriminate against me? In what skill are you better than I? Only in your obstinacy!’

  Boorchu and Mukhali held them apart, while a senior adviser calmed things by recalling the dangers surmounted by Genghis to found the nation: when he had only his spit to drink, he struggled on until the sweat of his brow soaked his feet. And what about their mother? She went hungry for you, and hauled you up by the necks to make you the equal of others.

  Chaghadai accepted the rebuke. OK, he would work with Jochi, he said, and suggested the third son, Ogedei, as a compromise. Genghis further defused the tension. Mother Earth was wide and her rivers many; each would get his own portion of the estate. Tolui, the youngest, said he would stand by his elder brother with advice.

  What had Ogedei to say? Ogedei knew he was not the obvious choice. But he mumbled, ‘I will certainly try according to my ability.’ Not much of a speech, but enough. The heir was chosen, the clan and nation still united, with the decision being confirmed in writing. It was a tribute to Genghis’s openness – transparency, as we would now call it – his willingness to face a difficult decision, and his growing sophistication in government.

  The political foundations were laid for expansion westwards.

  Genghis, taking personal charge of a campaign that needed meticulous planning, sought all the help he could get.

  Help, in particular, with something no Mongol leader had ever tackled before: the administration of conquered territory. It must already have struck Genghis as foolish to undertake the same conquest over and over again, as he had in China, where some cities had been besieged and taken three times. A few of the Mongol princes had a rudimentary idea of administration, having learned the Uighur script adopted a few years previously. But there was as yet no bureaucracy. He would need one, if he did not wish to repeat the pattern of the Chinese campaigns.

  He, or someone, recalled one of the prisoners taken in Beijing three years before, when his adopted relative Shigi had made an inventory of the imperial treasure and any notable captives. Among the Jin officials one had stood out, literally – a very tall young man of twenty-five with a beard reaching to his waist and a magnificent, sonorous voice. He was a Khitan, one of the people who, as the Liao, had once ruled in north-east China and been displaced by the Jin. His name was Chucai, and his family, the Yelu, was one of the most eminent in the Liao empire. His father worked for the Jin, becoming rich and influential. Chucai, born with every advantage, was a brilliant student, poet and, at the time Genghis invaded, a provincial vice-prefect. Recalled to the capital, he served throughout the siege. The sack of Beijing was a horrific experience. To make sense of it, he went into retreat for three years, and emerged strengthened in his belief that truth and virtue were best served by combining the doctrines of the Three Sages, Confucius, Buddha and Laozi (Lao-tsu), the founder of Daoism. Now he found himself summoned to Genghis, who needed someone to set up and run an imperial bureaucracy. It was an honour; and Chucai was expected to show due humility for his release from his previous masters.

  In an exchange that became famous, Genghis addressed him: ‘The Liao and the Jin have been enemies for generations. I have avenged you.’

  Chucai replied calmly: ‘My father and grandfather both served the Jin respectfully. How can I, as a subject and a son, be so insincere at heart as to regard my sovereign and my father as enemies?’

  Genghis was impressed, and offered this self-possessed and clever young man the job. And Long Beard, as Genghis called him, saw that conquest was proof that Heaven’s Mandate had settled upon Genghis. From now on, Chucai would play an important role in moulding the character of the khan and his empire.

  It was probably Chucai’s influence, therefore, that guided Genghis towards spirituality, or at least a display of it. In 1219, just before the invasion of Khwarezm, Genghis commissioned a stela, whose engraved words embody feelings typical of a Daoist philosopher, as they might be adopted by a nomadic sage:

  Heaven has wearied of the sentiments of arrogance and luxury carried to their extreme in China. As for me, I live in the wild regions of the North, where covetousness cannot arise. I return to simplicity, I turn again to purity, I observe moderation. In the clothes I wear or the meats I eat, I have the same rags and the same food as the cowherd or the groom in the stables. I have for the common people the solicitude I would have for a little child, and the soldiers I treat as my brothers. Present at 100 battles, I have ever ridden personally in the forefront. In the space of seven years I have accomplished a great work, and in the six directions of space all is subject to a single law.

  A return to simplicity? Not quite yet. First there was a campaign to be planned and fought.

  Genghis sent out requests for troops to his vassals, including Western Xia. He had conquered the region; he had received tribute; its Buddhist king, the Burkhan, the Holy One, had promised aid when necessary. Genghis sent off his request to the king: Remember your promise? ‘You said that you would be my right wing.’

  What Genghis received, however, wa
s a slap in the face as sharp as the one from Khwarezm’s sultan, Muhammad. The slap came not directly from Western Xia’s ruler, but from his military commander, or gambu, the power behind the throne, Asha. It must have seemed to Asha that he had been presented with a terrific opportunity to regain Western Xia’s independence. The Mongols had yet to crush north China, and were now facing another war. Surely no power on earth could fight a war on two such widely separated fronts. Asha pre-empted his king with a contemptuous rejection: ‘Since Genghis Khan’s forces are incapable of subjugating others, why did he go as far as becoming khan?’

  The Chinese triple-bow crossbow, which had to be primed with a two-man winch, was used to defend cities by shooting fire-arrows at siege towers. It was one of the many weapons that fell into the hands of the Mongols after they took Beijing in 1215.

  When the reply came, Genghis could do nothing to express his anger as he wished. His first task was to march against Muhammad. But then, ‘if I am protected by Eternal Heaven’, there would be a reckoning indeed.

  In 1219, Genghis led his army westwards, blotting up minor tribes along the way. This was a different sort of army from the one that had swept into Western Xia and northern China. With something like 100,000–150,000 soldiers, each with two or three horses, it retained the fast-moving, hard-riding flexibility of long-established nomadic armies, but with a hard new core. The sieges of Chinese cities had provided the best in siege technology and expertise: battering rams, scaling ladders, four-wheeled mobile shields, trebuchets with fire- and smoke-bombs, flamethrowing tubes, and the huge double- and triple-bowed siege bows, which could fire arrows like small telegraph poles.