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

by John Man

  fn3 If The Secret History was written later, this would have to be seen as a spin injected by the actual successor, Mönkhe.

  PART III

  KUBLAI

  11

  WESTWARDS AGAIN: CONQUEST AND DEFEAT

  PREPARING TO MOVE Westwards to seize all Islam and more in 1252, the Mongols knew what they were doing, because they had made a good start with Genghis over thirty years previously. Under its commander-in-chief, Hulegu, this was a formidable force, with fifteen commanders of 10,000-strong battalions, making some 100,000–150,000 men. Every man, as usual, had several horses, to provide remounts and meat. Among the best siege weapons that north China had to offer were 1,000 teams of experts in the use of traction trebuchets, which could lob rocks and ‘thunder-crash’ bombs 100 metres or more. Vanguards rode ahead to secure pastures. Herds of mares were gathered along the line of march to provide milk for airag. When the army finally struck westwards a year later, teams ranged ahead to repair bridges and build ferries.

  Many books suggest that a Mongol advance was a storm, a whirlwind, as if it were a new force of nature. In fact, this was as much a migration as a military invasion. The whole mass was self-supporting, which was possible because the way westwards was an irregular corridor of grass, right across to the Hungarian plain. Grass was fuel. As John Masson Smith has pointed out: ‘The far-flung campaigns of the Mongols and the extraordinary extent of their empire were to a considerable degree the products of this great logistical boon.’fn1

  What set this enterprise apart was that many of the men had their families along, and each family would also have had some thirty sheep on average. This was a nation on the move, occupiers and colonists, something over 250,000 people, with over a million horses and sheep, all widely dispersed to avoid overgrazing. Moving westwards a few kilometres a day, this was not so much a storm, more like a tide, a drifting horde some 12 kilometres across. Then think of the water needed, over 3 million gallons a day – easily supplied by a large river in flood, but what about when the grass runs out, the pastures dry up and rivers shrink? Eventually, the Mongols would discover that their reach had rather sharp ecological limits.

  Other than fulfilling Heaven’s command, Mönkhe had another motive for the invasion. There had been a rumour that a bunch of assassins were on their way from Persia. No one recorded finding the killers. But there was good reason to take the threat seriously, because these were not simply assassins, with a lower-case ‘a’; they were the original Assassins, capitalized, a long-established and notorious menace in the Islamic world who gave their name to the very idea of murder for political and religious ends.

  The story is rooted deep in Islamic sectarianism. From soon after the Prophet Mohammed’s death, Sunnis, who based their teachings on the deeds and sayings of the Prophet and his successors, rivalled the Shi’ites, the Shi’at Ali (Party of Ali), who claimed that political authority derived from Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali. The Shias in particular have spun off sect after sect, among them the Ismailis, who claimed that Ismail, the disinherited son of the Sixth Imam, represented the true line of authority from Mohammed. Responding to Sunni oppression, the Ismailis formed a network of underground cells and a sub-sub-sect which revered a murdered Egyptian prince, Nizar. In the second half of the eleventh century, the Nizari offshoot of the Ismaili offshoot of the Shi’ites took over a formidable castle, Alamut, high up in the Elburz Mountains south of the Caspian.

  Alamut was a fortress within a natural fortress, on a peak hundreds of feet above a single approach path, which itself could be entered only from either end of a narrow ravine. It was the perfect base from which the Nizari leader, Hasan, planned to impose a Nizari state. Other hilltop castles fell to Hasan, giving him an impregnable power-base from which to launch a malign campaign by extremists determined on murdering their way to dominance. The world soon knew Hasan’s young fanatics as Assassins, because some Arabic-speakers referred to the Nizaris as hashishiyya – hashish-users. But it was not so. Hashish was widely known, not a Nizari secret. More likely the term was an insult applied to this despised and feared group. Hasan’s victims mounted. Leaders across the Islamic world lived in terror. Terror spawned counter-terror. Nothing worked. The result: a live-and-let-live arrangement, with occasional assassinations and occasional unsuccessful reprisals. The Assassins were still there, in many different castles, when in 1219 the Mongols attacked neighbouring Khwarezm.

  But the Assassins lacked sound leadership. The recent imam, Ala ad-Din, still only in his thirties, was driven crazy by isolation, drink and the uncritical obedience of all around him, with the notable exception of his teenage son, Rukn ad-Din. Terrified of his father’s drunken moods, Rukn became convinced that the only hope of survival was to seize his inheritance. In November 1255, Ala went to a nearby valley, apparently to check on a flock of sheep. One night, an intruder severed his head with an axe. The probable murderer, who would presumably have implicated Rukn, was himself decapitated by an unidentified axeman before he could be questioned. Rukn ad-Din became the new and equally inadequate leader.

  After much prevarication, Rukn submitted to the Mongols in person without so much as a fight. Hulegu received him politely, for if he was treated well he would persuade others to give up and save the Mongols the trouble of attacking castle after castle. It worked: most Assassin castles, even Alamut, opened their gates.

  Now that Rukn ad-Din had served his purpose, he would not be allowed to survive, for the Assassins had either resisted or been too slow to capitulate. Some 12,000 of the Nizari elite were killed. Rukn signed his own death warrant by requesting to present himself to Mönkhe in Karakorum. He was guided all the way across Central Asia to Mönkhe, who told him to go home and destroy his castles. On the way, the Mongol escorts took Rukn and his party aside, put his companions to the sword and kicked him to pulp – he was, after all, still a leader, which conferred upon him the honour of a bloodless death.

  It was not quite the end of this strange sect. From 1103, the Assassins had an Arabic branch, fighting the Turks, the rulers of Egypt and the Crusaders (with whom on occasion they also collaborated). Their most redoubtable leader, Rashid al-Din Sinan, became known to Crusaders as ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’, a term later applied vaguely to any Assassin leader until their destruction. By 1273, the Syrian Assassins had been cowed by the sultan of Egypt, and assassinations finally ceased.

  That was the end of the Assassins, but not of the Nizaris. In Persia, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Nizari imam was appointed governor of Qum, with the new title of Agha Khan, which became hereditary from then on. The Agha Khan led his troops and family into Afghanistan, allied himself to the British and settled in Bombay, where he remained for the next thirty years, rebuilding his wealth and raising racehorses. The present imam, the Harvard-educated Agha Khan IV, ministers to a scattered community of some 15 million Nizaris through the Aga Khan Foundation in Switzerland and his headquarters near Paris; a surprising outcome for a sect whose extreme violence led to their near extinction.

  With that problem solved, the Mongols could turn to the rest of this part of the Islamic world, the Abbasid Caliphate, and its centre, Baghdad, with which they had unfinished business, having tried and failed to take it in 1238.

  In a sense, Hulegu had an easy target. The Abbasid Caliphate was already a spent force, divided against itself by innumerable sects and nationalities. Turks fought Persians, both fought Arabs. Syrians still resented the Abbasid conquest almost 500 years before, and yearned for a messiah to free them. To the east, the great Silk Road cities of Khwarezm – Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Merv – were in ruins from the Mongol assault of 1219–22. At the centre, the royal line of Abbasids was debilitated by luxury. Rather like the Roman empire falling to the barbarians, as Philip Hitti says in his History of the Arabs, ‘the sick man was already on his deathbed when the burglars burst open the doors’.

  In September 1257, Hulegu, advancing 400 kilometres from the Elburz Mountains, sent
a message to Baghdad telling the caliph, al-Musta’sim, to surrender and demolish the city’s outer walls as a sign of good faith. The caliph was a lacklustre character whose predecessors had been puppets dancing in the hands of their Turkish masters, the Seljuks, on their long migration from Inner Asia to Turkey. He could only hope that this menace would pass, as the Seljuk menace had. He was after all the spiritual head of all Islam; God was surely on his side. ‘O young man,’ he blustered, ‘do you not know that from the East to the Maghreb, all the worshippers of Allah, whether kings or beggars, are slaves to this court of mine?’ Empty words, as it turned out. Not even a beggar, let alone a king, came to help him.

  In November, the Mongol army, leaving their families and flocks behind, started their two-month advance on Baghdad from several hundred kilometres away. They came in three columns, from the north and east, while in the centre came Hulegu himself. Descending from the Iranian highlands along the Alwand River, he ordered his catapult teams to collect wagonloads of boulders as ammunition, since it was known that there were no stones around Baghdad. There was scant opposition. A Muslim force on low-lying ground near Ba’qubah, some 60 kilometres north-east of Baghdad, met with disaster when the Mongols opened irrigation channels, flooded them out, then moved in on the floundering foot-soldiers; 12,000 of them were killed as they tried to escape the muddy waters. Surrounding the city, the columns met at Ctesiphon, the long-abandoned ancient capital 30 kilometres south of Baghdad on the Tigris. They aimed to take the newer eastern section of the city, with its Abbasid palace, law college and 150-year-old walls, and then the two bridges that straddled the river on pontoons.

  Messages had been exchanged, with no dent in the caliph’s confidence. The House of Abbas had been in power for 500 years, he said, and was ‘too firm to quake at every passing breeze’. Hulegu should turn back now, and maybe the caliph would overlook his offence. Hulegu laughed when he heard this. ‘If Eternal Heaven is my friend, what do I have to fear from the caliph?’

  By 22 January, Baghdad was surrounded. With the Tigris blocked upstream by pontoons and downstream by a battalion of horsemen, escape was impossible. The assault began a week later. Rocks from the Mongol catapults – giant machines called counterweight trebuchets, which will play a major role in a later campaign – knocked chunks off the walls, littering their bases with rubble. To gain better vantage points, the Mongols gathered the rubble and built towers on to which they hauled their catapults, the better to aim at the buildings inside. Under a steady rain of arrows that forced the inhabitants under cover, boulders smashed roofs and pots of flaming naphtha set houses on fire. By 3 February, Mongol forces had seized the eastern walls.

  Panic reduced the caliph to mush. He sent envoys to sue for peace, among them the city’s Catholicos, the leader of its Christians, in the hope of appealing through Hulegu’s Nestorian wife, Toghus, a Kerait princess who was Toghril’s granddaughter and cousin of Hulegu’s mother Sorkaktani.fn2 His appeal was partly successful. In messages shot into the city attached to arrows, Hulegu promised that the qadis (judges), scholars and religious leaders, including Nestorians, would all be safe if they ceased resisting. A second embassy sued for peace, and a third, to no effect. The caliph’s vizier advised surrender.

  The caliph wavered, while the city’s morale collapsed. Thousands streamed out, hoping for mercy but, since there had been no surrender, all were killed, while those who remained hid in nooks and crannies. As another group of dignitaries were requesting amnesty, an arrow struck one of the Mongol commanders in the eye. Hulegu flew into a rage, had the dignitaries executed and ordered the city to be taken immediately.

  On 10 February, the caliph led an entourage of 300 officials and relatives to Hulegu’s camp to surrender. Hulegu greeted the caliph politely, and told him to order all the inhabitants to disarm and come out of the city, which they did; only to find themselves penned and slaughtered like sheep for having continued their resistance. Sources speak of 800,000 being killed. As ever, all figures should be treated with scepticism, but the Mongols, who were used to mass executions, were perfectly capable of such slaughter. No wonder Muslims today refer back to the fall of Baghdad as one of the greatest of crimes against their people and religion.

  Three days later, the Mongols poured into the city and set almost all of it on fire. The Nestorians, however, were spared, and even profited, thanks to Hulegu’s wife, Toghus. She was renowned both for her wisdom and her stout defence of her faith, the outward sign of which was the tent-church she transported wherever she went. So when she interceded for the Christians of Baghdad, Hulegu listened. While Baghdad burned around them, they found sanctuary with their patriarch in a Christian church.

  To crown his victory, Hulegu chose to conduct an exercise in humiliation. Taking over the caliph’s Octagon Palace, he threw a banquet to which he invited his prisoner.

  ‘You are the host, we are your guests,’ he taunted. ‘Bring whatever you have that is suitable for us.’

  The caliph, quivering with fear, volunteered to unlock his treasure rooms, and the attendants brought out 2,000 suits of clothes, 10,000 dinars in cash, jewel-encrusted bowls, and gems galore, all of which Hulegu shared among his commanders.

  Then he turned on the caliph. Now, he said, ‘tell my servants where your buried treasures are’.

  There was indeed a buried treasure, as perhaps Hulegu already knew: a pool full of gold ingots, which were dug out and distributed, as were the harem of 700 women and the 1,000 servants.

  Next day, all the possessions from the rest of the palace – royal art treasures collected over 525 years – were stacked in piles outside the gates. Some of the booty was sent back to Mönkhe in Mongolia. The rest, according to Rashid al-Din, joined loot from Alamut, other Assassins’ castles, Georgia, Armenia and Iran, all of it being taken to a fortress on Shahi Island in Lake Urmia, the salt lake in Iran’s north-western corner. Supposedly, it was buried on the island with Hulegu himself in 1265.fn3

  At last, the city foul with the stench of the dead, Hulegu ordered a halt to the killing and pillaging.

  There was only one more set of executions: the caliph himself and his remaining entourage, killed in a nearby village. Only the youngest son was spared. He was married off to a Mongol woman, by whom he had two sons. That was the end of the Abbasid line, the first time in history that all Islam had been left without a religious head.

  Now came the peace. Bodies were buried, markets restored, officials appointed, reconstruction begun, the rest of the country assaulted. Most towns opened their gates. Some did not, with the usual consequences: in Wasit, 15 kilometres to the south-east of Baghdad, according to one source 40,000 died. The whole region was Hulegu’s.

  As creator and head of a new dynasty, yet still deferring to his brother Mönkhe in Mongolia, Hulegu named himself the Il-Khan, the ‘subservient’ or ‘obedient’ khan, and it was as the Il-Khanate that Mongol rule in the world of Islam would be known until its end seventy-seven years later.

  After the fall of Baghdad, Hulegu ruled from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf.

  Beyond lay Syria, Egypt and who knew what else.

  Syria was a land divided, its coast being a medley of Crusader states, with an Arab dynasty ruling Aleppo and Damascus inland. The Christians quickly allied themselves to Hulegu, seeing his anti-Muslim campaign as an extension of their own crusades. Hulegu was as brutal as always to Muslims and, for the sake of his ageing Christian wife, magnanimous to his Christian allies. One petty emir ruling in Diyarbakir, in today’s south-east Turkey, made the mistake of crucifying a Christian priest travelling with a Mongol passport. As a curtain-raiser to the campaign westwards, the Mongols took his stronghold, captured him and subjected him to a death by a thousand cuts, slicing his flesh away and cramming the bits into his mouth, then cutting off his head, which became a sort of talisman as the campaign proper gathered pace. It moved across the Euphrates, bringing a six-day massacre to Aleppo in January 1260, the lands being granted to the Crusad
er king, Bohemund VI. Homs and Hama capitulated. Damascus was abandoned by its sultan, who fled to Egypt. Ked-bukha – one of the greatest generals, who was not a Mongol but a Naiman – personally beheaded its governor. Christians rejoiced, bells rang, wine flowed and a mosque was restored to Christian worship. Six centuries of Muslim domination seemed over. Then the Mongols turned southwards, to Nablus, whose garrison was exterminated for resisting, all the while making use of the good pastures on the Syrian borderlands.

  Now, at last, for Egypt. The Muslim leaders of Egypt were Turkish former-slaves-turned-rulers, the Mamluks (mamluk, ‘owned’), who had murdered their way to power only nine years before. There would be no surrender from them.

  At this point, news arrived of an event in Mongolia that changed everything. In August 1259 Mönkhe had died, in circumstances which will emerge in Chapter 14. A princely assembly was pending. Hulegu returned to his new home, Persia, with two thirds of his invasion force, leaving Ked-bukha in command of the remaining 20,000 men.

  The current Egyptian sultan, Qutuz, now did something that seemed foolish, but – since Qutuz had once been a Mongol captive and knew what he was doing – turned out to be extremely smart. When Hulegu sent envoys demanding surrender, Qutuz cut off their heads. To the Mongols, nothing could have been better designed to guarantee invasion.

  Qutuz’s action could have been a deliberate provocation, because he could well have known that he had a window of opportunity to beat a Mongol force reduced by Hulegu’s departure, and on the very edge of sustainability. In Syria, in May, the main rivers drop, the pastures wither. The Mongol horses could eat and drink only because two thirds of them had left for home. The Mongols were shortly to learn a fundamental truth about campaigning in these parts, a truth stated by John Masson Smith: ‘Any forces that were small enough to be concentrated amid adequate pasture and water were not large enough to take on the Mamluks.’ A wiser leader might have thought twice. But faced with the murder of their envoys, the Mongols had no option but to fight, which was (perhaps) exactly what Qutuz wanted.