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

by John Man

  What it lacked in sophistication it made up in significance. It was a centre for gers by the hundred, wagons by the thousand and animals by the ten thousand. Rich Mongols, of which by now there were hundreds, had anything up to 200 ox-drawn wagons, which would be linked into huge trains of twenty or thirty, all strung together, lumbering slowly across the open steppe, driven by one woman in the lead wagon. No doubt a visitor would have seen one of those huge, four-wheeled, flatbed carts, 10 metres across, with axles like masts, drawn by twenty-two oxen, on which stood the imperial tent. No one knows how or where such a monstrosity was used, but it could in the 1230s have creaked its way back and forth between old Avraga and new Karakorum.

  So began a new chapter for Sorkaktani, as Tolui’s widow at the heart of an expanding empire. It was traditional in Mongol society for the widow of a wealthy man to administer her husband’s estates (by which was meant people, tribes, clans and families, not lands) until her eldest son was of an age to do so. As it happened, her eldest, Mönkhe, was already twenty-three, but still Ogedei gave Sorkaktani enduring authority to handle Tolui’s estates, with control over her family, an army of her own, a secretariat and the local population. In essence, Sorkaktani became the queen of Mongolia, though subject to her emperor.

  Fate had made her independent, and she, approaching fifty, was shrewd and ambitious enough to keep it. When Ogedei proposed that she marry his son (and her nephew) Guyuk – an offer that would have linked the two main family lines – she courteously declined, saying that her prime responsibility was to her sons. She never did remarry, using her independence to earn herself an unrivalled reputation for wisdom and firmness over the next fifteen years.

  Her good sense was apparent in the way she raised her four boys. She made sure they were well educated in traditional Mongol ways. But the empire was wide and had many faiths. She knew from her own experience – a Kerait and a Christian married to a Mongol shamanist – how important it was not to alienate allies and subjects. She even financed the building of mosques and madrassas – one being a madrassa in Bukhara, with 1,000 students – which, as Muslims noted, was a remarkable thing for a Christian queen to do. For her sons there were tutors in Buddhism, Nestorianism and Confucianism, and then wives who were chosen in Sorkaktani’s own image, of different religions, but assertive, intelligent, undogmatic, and highly independent, who preserved the tolerance that had been one of Genghis’s more surprising traits.

  fn1 Having been passed over as heir, he had been ordered to join in the Great Raid but vanished into the steppes, ‘hunting’ or ‘ill’ – no one knew what. Anyway, he was out of favour with Genghis and died sometime in 1225–7.

  fn2 Igor de Rachewiltz, Confucian Personalities.

  TERROR ON EUROPE’S EDGE

  LIKE MANY A dictator, Ogedei saw the benefits of foreign adventures. They give a sense of purpose, they unify, they guarantee income for the nation, leaders and ordinary soldiers. And in this case it would be fulfilling a destiny that he had just declared to be divinely ordained.

  In 1235, Ogedei held a grand assembly and ordered the western conquests to continue under the great Subedei, now aged fifty, with over thirty years of campaigning behind him. It was he who had opened the way into Russia in 1221–3, he who should have the job of finishing off the Bulgars who had forced him into ignominious retreat. With Subedei rode a contingent of princes, among them Genghis’s grandchildren: Batu (Jochi’s son), Guyuk (Ogedei’s), Mönkhe (Tolui’s) and his own son, Uriyang-khadai.

  There are no details at all of what was done to the Bulgars. Whatever it was, it did not take long. That, of course, was merely the beginning of something much bigger. In late 1237, the Mongols crossed the Volga. The Russian princes had learned nothing from the Battle of the Kalka River fourteen years before. Forests so dense that not even a serpent could penetrate, as one source put it, were no defence. The Mongols cut roads wide enough for three carts to pass abreast, and rolled forward with their siege engines. After one unidentified victory, the Mongols tallied the slain by cutting off the right ears of the dead, producing a harvest of (supposedly) 270,000 ears. Divided, cities tumbled like dominoes: Riazan, Moscow, Suzdal, Vladimir, Yaroslav, Tver. In early 1238, one Mongol army defeated Grand Duke Vladimir on the Siti River, while another headed for Novgorod.

  Europe had warning enough of impending catastrophe. A Hungarian friar, Julian, made two journeys to Batu’s camp in southern Russia in 1234–7, bringing back a letter from Batu to the Pope demanding instant capitulation: ‘I know that you are a rich and powerful king . . . [but] it would be better for you personally if you submitted to me of your own volition.’ In England, the chronicler Matthew Paris in St Albans recorded how ‘the detestable people of Satan, to wit, an infinite number of Tatars . . . poured forth like Devils loosed from Hell, or Tartarus’ – reflecting the enduring confusion in Europe between Tatars and ‘Tartars’. The Mongol advance on Novgorod even had consequences for some English, namely the fishing folk in Norfolk. Every spring, the merchants of Novgorod sailed north down their section of the ‘river-road’ that linked the Baltic to Byzantium and went across the North Sea to Yarmouth to buy herrings. In 1238 they stayed at home to guard their city, leaving the herrings to glut the Yarmouth quays. No European leader could claim ignorance of the menace.

  In the event, the spring thaw turned the flat lands around Novgorod to bogs, and the Mongols retired southwards for eighteen quiet months. In 1240, they turned instead on Kiev, the Russian capital, the mother-city of Slavs, the seat of Orthodoxy, with 400 churches gathered like a halo around the glory of St Sophia’s Cathedral. As a Russian chronicler put it: ‘Like dense clouds the Tatars [i.e. Mongols] pushed themselves forward towards Kiev, investing the city on all sides. The rattling of their innumerable carts, the bellowing of camels and cattle, the neighing of horses and the wild battle-cries were so overwhelming as to render inaudible conversation inside the city.’ Kiev burned, its princes fled – to Moscow, which from that time grew as Kiev declined.

  And now, at last, the grasslands of the Ukraine were open, with Hungary beyond. Well informed by spies and deserters, the Mongols knew what they faced – the countryside, the towns, the distances, the rivers, even the utter disarray of the opposition in Hungary and neighbouring Poland.

  To secure Hungary, Poland would first be neutralized, over winter, when rivers were highways of ice and the lowlands like concrete. In early 1241, Lublin, Sandomir, and Krakow died in flames. In Krakow, so it was said, a watchman in the tower of the new Mariacki Church, the church of St Mary, had been sounding the alarm on his horn when a Mongol arrow pierced him through the throat. Today, a recording of the mournful bugle call known as the hejna sounds every hour from St Mary’s, breaking off on the very note on which the watchman supposedly died. Tourists are told as fact that his death saved the city. Not so. On Palm Sunday, 24 March, according to local records, the Mongols set Krakow ablaze and ‘dragged away an uncounted mass of people’.

  On the River Oder, the citizens of Breslau set their own town on fire and retreated to an island in the river. From this quick and easy victory, the Mongols raced on 40 kilometres to Liegnitz (Legnica today, though historians still prefer the German form). Here, on the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, Duke Henry the Pious of Silesia confronted them, with an army of 100,000.fn1 In this newly Christianized frontier country, Poles, Germans and Czechs made up a mixed bag of local worthies, Hospitallers, Templars, Teutonic Knights keen to defend their possessions on the Baltic, rough-and-ready units of German and Czech settlers, and even a contingent of Silesian goldminers all gathered in support of the duke. A Czech army of 50,000 under their king, Wenceslas, was en route to join them, but still a few days’ march away as Henry headed south.

  On 9 April, 10 kilometres outside Liegnitz, he met the Mongols. His forces were superior in number only. In every other respect – weapons, tactics, strategy, morale, ruthlessness – the Mongols utterly outclassed the knights, with their heavy armour, cumbersome hors
es and squabbling leaders. The Mongols performed their old trick, creating a smokescreen with burning reeds, milling about as if in confusion, then pretending to flee. The Polish cavalry galloped in pursuit, until suddenly the Mongols vanished and arrows zipped in from both sides. Duke Henry fled, fell fom his horse, tottered onwards in his shell of armour, was overtaken, stripped, beheaded and cast aside. The Mongols paraded his head on a spear around the walls of Liegnitz to terrorize the inhabitants. Something like 40,000 died – a disaster that scarred the soul of eastern Europe from that day on. King Wenceslas and his 50,000 Czechs, still a day’s march away, turned for the safety of the Carpathians, leaving all southern Poland to the Mongols.

  To the south, Hungary awaited her nemesis. This was a country in chaos. Hordes of Polovtsy, displaced from the Russian steppes by the Mongol assault, demanded residence. Hungarian barons, who would rather die than surrender their hard-won independence, were at odds with their king, Bela IV. Bela welcomed the Polovtsy as a potential private army; the barons hated them. The Mongols seized their chance. The southern army, now in Galicia, divided into three. Two columns cut across the Carpathians in a pincer movement, while Subedei raced down the centre, so that all three columns would meet up near the Danube. It took just three days for the advance guard to cover 280 kilometres, through enemy country covered in snow. In early April, the three columns snapped together on the Danube, ready to attack the Hungarian capital, Esztergom.

  Bela had managed to raise an army at Pest, on the Danube’s east bank, not yet linked to Buda opposite. The usual chance to submit had been offered, and rejected.fn2 Batu and Subedei held back. They faced a strong army, backed by the Danube and a capital city, with its possible reinforcements. But Subedei was a genius, and part of his genius was that he fought only when certain of victory. So he withdrew his whole army towards the Tatra Mountains, a slow, skirmishing retreat for six days, luring Bela away from the river and from help.

  On 10 April, the Mongols backed across the River Sajo towards the gentle, vine-rich slopes of Tokaj, just up from the Sajo’s confluence with the Tisza. The Hungarians settled opposite on a plain named Mohi, making a fort by chaining their wagons into a circle, confident in their superior numbers.

  The Mongol generals saw the Hungarians ‘crammed together and shut in as if in a pen’ and knew what had to be done. Now, this was just one day after the Poles had been shattered at Liegnitz. Was this a coincidence? Surely not. The Mongols did not base victory on coincidences. It is fair to assume that the two armies knew all about each other, with messengers galloping across 450 kilometres of hostile territory – an achievement so astonishing that it beggars the imagination; yet so obvious and so routine for the Mongols that no one thought to record it; and so secret that no European sources mention it.

  So that night Subedei knew there would be no reinforcements for his enemy and plenty for him if needed. He ordered troops back across the river, while a second contingent seized the only bridge with catapults and gunpowder, the first recorded use of this devastating weapon in Europe. The Mongols crossed by means of what became known in the First World War as a rolling barrage, with artillery lobbing shells just ahead of the advancing troops.

  Ten kilometres downriver, Subedei himself led a second column over a pontoon of logs. By dawn both crossings were secure, and by 7 a.m. the Hungarians were driven back into their laager, now less of a defence than a trap. For the whole morning, arrows, rocks and fire took a terrible toll. At midday, the encircling Mongolians drew back, allowing an enticing gap through which the survivors fled, turning themselves from desperate defenders into easy game, stumbling across the spring bogs to ever more certain death. Some took refuge in a nearby church, only to perish when the flaming roof collapsed on them. Three archbishops, four bishops and two archdeacons died, and with them some 65,000 ordinary Hungarians, Germans – even French, according to the abbot of Marienberg.fn3

  Bela fled north, into mountain forests, then around in a circle that took him into Austria, and on south, through Croatia, where he found sanctuary on a succession of islands. In pursuit came Kadan, one of the heroes of Liegnitz, who thus brought Mongols to the shores of the Adriatic. Here he lost either track of or interest in his prey, and continued on southwards into Albania. After burning a few small towns, leaving ‘nobody to piss against a wall’ (as the cleric and chronicler Thomas of Split put it), he turned inland again. Bela went to ground on the island of Krk – Veglia, as its Venetian owners called it – to await better times.

  Meanwhile, another Mongol contingent had galloped west, burning, destroying, raping and killing in a campaign of deliberate terror rivalling their actions in Muslim lands. Their rationale was exactly the same: these Christians, like the Muslims, had dared resist, and had therefore doomed themselves to the vengeance of Eternal Heaven. In the Danube port of Pest, taken in three days, they burned the Dominican monastery, slew the 10,000 seeking refuge within it, and ‘heaped the bodies of the butchered multitudes on the river banks’ in order to terrify those on the opposite bank. The author of this vivid scene, Thomas of Split, said that some Mongols ‘skewered small children on their spears and carried them on their backs like fish on spits up and down the embankments’. For the summer of 1242, the Mongols briefly encouraged peasants to raise crops; but after the harvest the same peasants were slaughtered. There was no Chucai to suggest taxation rather than terror.

  Beyond Hungary, of course, there was another world, as rich as China. Batu had ordered scouting raids into Austria. One of these penetrated into the Vienna Woods, almost within sight of the city, where they were chased off by Austrian troops, who caught up with them near Wiener Neustadt (‘Vienna New Town’), 40 kilometres south of the capital. They captured eight of them, one of whom was found to be the interpreter Robert the Englishman, eager to cooperate to save himself from trial as a traitor. He failed, and ended in an unknown grave.

  In just four months, the Mongols had overrun seven nations and routed the forces of Central Europe. All Christendom trembled. ‘Hear, ye islands, and all ye people of Christianity, who profess our Lord’s Cross, howl in ashes and sackcloth, in fasting tears and mourning.’ So wrote the Landgrave of Thuringia to the Duke of Boulogne, urging united retaliation. But unity was not much in evidence. The Venetians, whose merchants had allied themselves to the Mongols in the Crimea, refused to send aid. Frederick, Holy Roman Emperor, took advantage of Bela’s collapse to extort bits of western Hungary from him on his flight through Austria. Pope Gregory’s main enemy was not the Mongols but the emperor, Frederick, who in despair begged Henry III of England for help, sending copies of his appeal all over Europe. Nobody took any notice. Proposals for crusades from both Pope Gregory and Frederick went unanswered.

  So it is as certain as anything can be that western Europe would have fallen prey to the Mongols if they had followed up their dreadful successes in Hungary and Poland. But the ‘if’ is a big one. It seems likely that they would never have tried it. Hungary and its grasslands had been the goal, because the Hungarian plain looked like a good source of grass, the fuel needed to power the Mongolian cavalry. But once they arrived, they found they had a problem.

  The average Mongolian horse needs about 4 hectares to feed itself year round.fn4 An army of 150,000 men, with their 600,000 horses, needed some 24,000 square kilometres if they were to remain permanently. In Mongolia, no problem. But Hungary’s Great Plain is a mere twentieth the size of Mongolia’s grasslands. Subedei would have very quickly realized that Hungary was not a base to expand from, or retreat into, or for raising reinforcements long term.

  Of course, there is no telling what ideology might have dictated: demands for submission to the Pope and every king, perhaps, with Mongol hordes streaming towards Rome and Paris. But the Mongols also had a more persuasive reason to leave.

  Ogedei had died the previous December. As we will see in a later chapter, disputes about the succession arose that put the fate of the whole empire in the balance. As Genghis’s gran
dson, ruler of his own portion of the empire, with a vast army, Batu could play a decisive role. In June 1242 he pulled out of Europe and returned to his home on the Volga. When Bela emerged from his Adriatic island later that summer, he found a wilderness of burned towns, decomposing bodies, a population reduced to cannibalism, and not a Mongol in sight, leaving Europe stunned by its inexplicable salvation.

  fn1 As ever, we must bear in mind that all figures are highly unreliable.

  fn2 Strangely, the Mongol envoy was the Hungarian-speaking Englishman Robert, first heard of as an interpreter with Muslim merchants in the Crimea; he will reappear shortly.

  fn3 The abbot was writing in Vienna in 1242 (cf. Strakosch-Grassmann, pp. 191–3). Marienberg, his twelfth-century Benedictine abbey, was then in Austria, and is today’s Monte Maria near Burgusio, in the Italian province of South Tyrol.

  fn4 In the UK, experts recommend about 1–1.5 hectares per horse. But on the grasslands of eastern Europe and Inner Asia, horses must endure harsh winters, which demand far more space.

  10

  THE FOUNDATIONS SECURED

  BACK IN MONGOLIA, Ogedei had drunk and hunted and wasted his way towards his grave. It was not that he was a bad man. He meant well, doing his best to win hearts and minds. But he allowed his administration to go to pieces – lavish gifts, expensive campaigns, ever higher taxes, and the consumption of far too much alcohol.

  Chucai had tried to guide him, but Mongol colleagues saw Chucai’s policies as a plot to fill the emperor’s coffers at the expense of their own. Ogedei didn’t help because, with this sudden influx of cash from Chucai’s reforms, he became doubly profligate, demanding money both for his military campaigns and to invest in Muslim businessmen, who promised high returns. Chucai’s work hit a dead end when Ogedei handed over tax collection in China to a Muslim ‘tax farmer’ called Abd el-Rahman. His cronies would buy the right to tax, with the result that they could impose whatever interest they wanted. They became the Mongols’ loan-sharks, charging up to 100 per cent per annum (Ogedei considerately banned higher rates). Thus was started a vicious circle of scams. The Muslim businessmen would lend Ogedei’s money at exorbitant rates of interest to the unfortunate peasants, who needed the loans to make good what had been lost in taxes. The result was predictable: people fled their homes to avoid the tax collectors and their strong-arm gangs. According to one estimate, 50 per cent of the population were either of no fixed abode or enslaved by Mongol officials.