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

by John Man

  To finish Rashid’s story: genius, power, wealth and hard work do not guarantee peace and happiness. He was accused by a jealous rival of being part of a plot to kill the khan, Oljeitu. He said he had done nothing but prescribe a medicine to help cure the khan. This was taken as an admission of guilt. He was beheaded and his head ‘carried about the town for several days with cries of “This is the head of the Jew who abused the name of God!”’fn4

  Amidst the flow of information and people, doctors were particularly in demand. Chinese medical works were translated into Persian and Arabic.fn5 As William of Rubruck says of the northern Chinese doctors he saw at Karakorum: ‘Their physicians are very well versed in the efficacy of herbs and can diagnose shrewdly with the pulse. But they do not employ urine samples, not knowing anything about urine.’ They appealed because they had more complex systems and a longer tradition, not that they were better, since all medical treatments were, by modern standards, hopeless. They favoured mercury, for instance, because it was supposedly an elixir of life, despite the fact that it kills you.

  Astronomers, too, were much admired, because they were, in today’s terms, astrologers, credited with being able to predict the future. That was one reason why Genghis admired Yelu Chucai – ‘on the eve of each military operation, [the emperor], without fail, ordered his excellency to foretell its good or bad fortune.’ Several famous Chinese astronomers went, or were taken, from China to Iran, because Hulegu ‘was infatuated with astronomy’ – or rather astrology. When he crushed the Assassins, from their stronghold of Alamut emerged the greatest scholar of the age, Nasir al-Din Tusi, who had been captured by the Assassins. Inspired by him, Hulegu built an observatory at Maragheh, near Tabriz. With a library of 40,000 books, 100 students and astronomers from both China and Byzantium, it remained in operation for some fifty years. Its major achievement was to merge the calendars of all the main cultures of the day and region: Greek, Arab, Jewish, Christian, Persian and Chinese. Kublai did something similar in Beijing, where a Muslim observatory ran for almost a century.

  But what, in the end, was the lasting cultural impact of all these exchanges? Once again, not much. The potential was huge, the cross-fertilization enormously stimulating, the technical achievements astonishing; yet there were no fundamental advances to be credited to specifically Mongol influence. Despite the accuracy of the observations in astronomy in both the Il-Khanate and China, no Copernicus came forward to explain the movements of the planets, no Galileo presented Kublai with a telescope. Despite a wealth of opportunity, no great leap forward followed.

  But the exchange of people did achieve one huge leap backwards. Consider for a moment the marmots of Mongolia. These creatures, common on the Central Asian grasslands, are charming to look at and make an excellent stew, but are generally better avoided because they are favoured by fleas, which can harbour a virulent bacillus that kills both fleas and marmots. In the right circumstances, when marmots are few, the fleas may spread to other species – rabbits, rats and eventually humans. Once in the bloodstream, the bacillus causes a reaction that has a fatality rate of 90 per cent or over. It strikes the lungs, the blood and finally the lymph glands. These glands, unable to drain off the poison, balloon into hard, dark, nut-sized swellings known as ‘buboes’, to which the affliction owes its name – the bubonic plague, better known as the Black Death.

  Sometime in the 1340s, the marmots of Mongolia suffered a decline. The bacillus, Yersinia pestis, sought other hosts and found them conveniently commuting along the pony-express routes created by the Mongols in their explosive conquests over the preceding 150 years. A few years later, the fleas and their nasty little parasites reached the Crimea. There the local Mongols were besieging the ancient port of Feodosiya, which Italian merchants from Genoa had taken over in the previous century as a ‘factory’, or trading station, renaming it Kaffa. Stricken by the plague, the Mongols withdrew, with a parting shot. In December 1347 they catapulted the plague-ridden bodies of their own dead over the walls to infest the Italians. The next ship heading back to the Mediterranean carried the plague, in its rats, in its flea-ridden materials and in its crew. From Italy and southern France the plague spread north at an average rate of 15 kilometres a week, visiting upon Europe its greatest catastrophe ever. In three years something like 25 million people died, perhaps more. A papal inquiry put the figure at 40 million. This represented a third of Europe’s population. In some places the death toll may have topped 60 per cent. The devastation was almost universal, and the effects scarred cities, cultures and minds for generations.

  Given the potential, given the exchange of skills and information, what more might have been achieved? One thing, certainly, would have transformed our world in astonishing ways.

  The question is this: why didn’t the Mongols invent printing with movable type, as Gutenberg did a century and a half later? Kublai almost had it in his hands, for he had access to most of the elements that inspired Gutenberg: need, the right script, technical ability.

  There was certainly no shortage of books or paper or printing. China had had paper since the second century AD. There were books by the million, and had been for 500 years. The eastern method of printing was to cut text or a picture in reverse into wood, and this block, when covered with ink, was used to print on paper. The technology was basic, effective and technically easy, but with fundamental inefficiencies. It took days to make a block, pages could be printed only one at a time, and the information could be used only in that form: the block. Every new page demanded a new block. Discarded blocks of out-of-print books clogged the yards of printing-works until they became firewood.

  The solution was obvious. If each character had its own block, you could make up any text you liked, and re-use the characters after printing. No need to carve every page, no need for the millions of discarded blocks. China had the know-how. The invention of printing with movable type is attributed to a certain Bi Sheng (Pi Sheng) in the eleventh century. His idea was to cut his characters in wet clay, in reverse, and bake them. To print, he selected his characters, put them in a frame, inked them, and took a rubbing with cloth or paper. The technique worked, the technology improved. The first people to use movable metal type were the Koreans, in a fifty-volume Prescribed Ritual Texts of the Past and Present, printed in 1234. The Mongols had first invaded Korea in 1216, with much back-and-forth over the next fifty years. It was Kublai who finally made Korea a vassal of the Mongol empire in 1270. Which means that possibly Kublai personally, certainly his scientific advisers, knew about printing with movable metal type.

  They also knew the problems of doing this with Chinese. It was even more trouble than block-printing. The business of choosing the correct character from at least 8,000 offered no advantage in design and not much in speed. Besides, it was an implied threat to two ancient skills, calligraphy and block-carving. True, there were those who remained intrigued by the idea. In 1297, Wang Zhen, a magistrate from Dongping in Shandong province, made 30,000 wooden characters set out in two revolving round tables, which gave easier access to the type.fn6 Later, Chinese governments produced some astonishing publications with movable type – like a 1726 encyclopaedia of 5,000 volumes that used 250,000 characters – but for day-to-day use this method of printing remained no more than a technological oddity.

  Yet Kublai had the answer, right there, in front of his face. It existed in the form of the alphabetical script adopted from the Uighurs on his grandfather’s instigation. It existed again in the alphabetical script devised by Phags-pa. The genius of the alphabet, any alphabet, is that it is based on a few dozen symbols, which roughly represent the whole range of linguistic sounds. Its fuzziness and simplicity gives it a massive advantage over scripts based on syllables (which is why Chinese keypads are in pinyin, the Latinized form of their script).

  So Kublai had at his disposal several of the major elements that in Gutenberg’s hands almost two centuries later helped the Renaissance on its way. Out went scribes and their beauti
ful, slow ways; in came the printing press and a slew of advances, all feeding on each other: mass markets, universal literacy, cheap books, and scholars exchanging information and standing on each other’s shoulders. In 1454, Gutenberg and his team perfected a whole new technology and printed 180 copies of his famous 42-line Bible. By 1500, 250 printing operations across Europe were producing 2,000 titles – over 200,000 books – per year. In 1518–25, Germany alone printed a million books each year – and one third of them were by Martin Luther, whose anti-papal 95 Theses kickstarted the Reformation and who has therefore, with some justification, been blamed and praised for causing the greatest split in the Christian church. From the Renaissance and the Reformation sprang a new Europe, a Europe that seized the world, dominated trade, founded nations, discovered new lands – precisely what Genghis and Kublai intended for their empire.

  It could have happened. Kublai and his extremely bright advisers might have taken the next steps, which were to turn Phags-pa’s script into metal type, set it in frames and start printing. There was even a good financial reason to do this. Kublai could have printed vast amounts of paper money, with complex designs and several colours to prevent counterfeiting.

  Why didn’t it happen?

  Several vital elements were missing. One was the right sort of paper. In China, paper was soft and absorbent as toilet paper, ideal for scribes working with brushes and for block-printing. In Europe, scribes working with quills needed a much firmer, non-absorbent surface, which was the sort of paper Gutenberg needed to produce crisp, tiny lettering. Secondly, China did not have olives or grapes that needed to be squashed with heavy-duty presses, the devices that Gutenberg adapted to make the printing press. And thirdly, someone would have needed to come up with Gutenberg’s astonishing invention, the hand-mould, which could produce several hundred new lead types per day. This device, which now exists only in museums, was fundamental in printing for the next 500 years.

  These are technical problems, which Kublai’s people might have solved if they had set their minds to the task. But there is a final, and perhaps fundamentally crucial, reason why there was no Yuan printing revolution. The purpose of printing is the transmission of information, and it seems that the Mongols had no information they wished to transmit; in fact, the opposite – they had a lot of information they wanted to keep secret. Deep down, what Kublai had created was Mongolia Inc., a vast corporate entity dedicated to creating wealth and power for itself, with no end goal save its own eternal survival. There was no great truth to be promulgated, no great literature to be captured in book form and made public. All the Mongols could do was to oversee – encourage is too strong a word – the transmission of the art and literature of their subjects, principally the Chinese and Persians and Arabs. In the end, they had nothing much to say on their own account.

  Yet, of course, their conquests changed the world. Of all the changes that flowed from the empire, the most intriguing is their role in the event that changed that world yet again: Europe’s rediscovery of America. By joining dots, a trail can be made connecting Genghis to Columbus.

  The first big dot is Marco Polo. His father and uncle had preceded him, but they would never have written up their experience. It was Marco and his Travels that form the starting point of a very extended process. He left China in 1291, taking four years to reach Venice. Kublai died in 1294. Marco’s book was written in 1299.

  Sixty-nine years later, the Mongols were thrown out of China and foreigners were left dealing with the Ming for the next 250 years – a dynasty that was the very opposite of the Yuan: shut off, introverted, utterly convinced that foreigners had nothing to offer. Across Central Asia, ex-Mongol sub-empires collapsed and vanished. Islam divided east from west. Old links broke, memories faded, few could testify to the truth of Marco’s book, and more doubted it. For two generations, the Travels became a book of unbelievable marvels, its factual basis lying in a semi-fossilized state.

  Its resurrection as a guide to the real world was due to two factors. The first was the revival of learning in the first half of the fifteenth century. The church kickstarted the process, because Rome had an urgent desire to unite a Christendom long divided into west and east, Roman and Orthodox. In 1439–43 a General Council in Florence brought hundreds of scholars together, including an astrologer and physician named Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. Also at the conference was one of the most brilliant men of his age, Nicholas of Cusa, who owned a copy of Marco’s book. A few years later, he became a mentor to a Portuguese cleric named Fernão Martins, a future canon of Lisbon and adviser to Portugal’s King Afonso V, just at the time that Portugal’s explorers were seeking sea routes to the east. Note the dots in our trail: a freemasonry of scholars, an interest in Marco Polo’s story, links with an expansionist Portugal.

  At virtually the same time, 130 years after Marco’s death, the door to the Silk Road network of transcontinental routes to the east was slammed and locked. The Turks, who had been moving west from Central Asia for 1,000 years, seized Constantinople. All the lands that had once owed allegiance of some sort to the Great Khan – where once a virgin carrying gold, or at least a man with the right credentials, could be helped from camp to camp and city to city in safety – fell to the Muslims.

  So Europe’s merchants turned to the sea routes, along which flowed silks, precious stones and spices, brought by Chinese junks to Malaysia and Arab ships to India and the Middle East. But this was a galling arrangement. Eastern pepper, for instance, underwent a fiftyfold increase in price on its journey to Europe’s kitchens. Obviously the thing to do was for European merchants to fetch these goods themselves, and cut out the middlemen. Hence the race in the late fifteenth century to discover and sail round southern Africa; and hence Columbus’s big idea – to reach the East by sailing round the world the other way, westwards, to contact the land of the Great Khan, as described by Marco.

  It all depended on Marco’s reliability. Some were beginning to take him seriously. One was a monk named Mauro, who would anyway have been familiar with Marco’s reputation for truthfulness, since both were Venetians. In 1459, at the request of Afonso V, Mauro completed a world map that was the first to include details from Marco: the Yangtze and the Yellow River, many cities with a host of names familiar from Marco’s book, even the first mention of Japan in a western map.

  Columbus’s direct inspiration seems to have been a letter and a map sent in 1474 by the Florentine astrologer Toscanelli to the Portuguese cleric Fernão Martins, who was eager for information about the world beyond Africa. In the letter Toscanelli, drawing on Marco, refers to the Great Khan, unaware that the Mongol khans had been expelled over a century before. It was as if the closure of the overland route had frozen the idea of China in European minds, immortalizing the Great Khan. Toscanelli estimates the distance westwards over the sea to China: 6,500 miles. In fact, the distance from Portugal to China is more than twice that.

  Columbus knew Toscanelli’s conclusions. His diary quotes from the letter,fn7 speaking about ‘a prince who is called Grand Khan’. His Big Idea – to sail west to get to the East – was in the air.

  But that idea did not convince Afonso. He had invested too heavily in exploration round Africa to backtrack. In 1488, when the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz made it around the southern tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean, the way eastwards opened and Afonso’s heir, John, decided against Columbus’s trans-Atlantic venture.

  Columbus, his hopes dashed, stormed off to Castile and presented his idea to the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. His timing was good: Spain was newly unified, and its two rulers ambitious for more power and influence. Seeing the Portuguese investment about to pay off, they felt under pressure to compete. The best way was to gamble on Columbus.

  Of course, the Big Idea turned out to be both wrong and, by pure luck, also right beyond imagining because, luckily, America was in the way and Columbus’s journey rather short, just five weeks. It still did not occur to him that he had s
tumbled on a new world. He thought one West Indian island had to be Japan. As he recorded in his diary, ‘I have already decided to go to the mainland and . . . to give your Highness’s letters to the Great Khan.’ A few days later he was in Cuba and, despite the rather obvious lack of cities, thought it was China, referring to the ‘city of Cathay’ (which, given that Cathay was a kingdom not a city, suggests he had not yet read Marco’s book).

  Someone from Europe would have stumbled on America sooner or later, of course. But without Genghis, Kublai and the empire, who would have thought of heading west? And when? Almost certainly not Columbus, and not in 1492.

  fn1 S. Abilev et al., ‘The Y-chromosome C3* star-cluster attributed to Genghis Khan’s descendants is present at high frequency in the Kerey clan from Kazakhstan’, Human Biology, February 2012; 84 (1):79–89.

  fn2 Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, p.191 (see Bibliography).