Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  Whereas traditional steppe leaders had always surrounded themselves with their closest relatives, Temujin selected his lieutenants and advisors on the basis of talent and proven loyalty. Many of Temujin's closest confidants and highest-ranking generals—for example, Boorchu, who commanded a tumen in the Altai Mountains, and Subodei, who eventually conquered Poland and Hungary—were not related to him at all. Conversely, Temujin had no problem excluding from his inner circle “blood” relations whom he did not trust. Indeed, in glaring violation of Mongol tradition, none of Temujin's uncles, brothers, or nephews was initially given a top military post. Because of Temujin's emphasis on merit rather than kinship, camel boys and cowherds became generals. So many Tatars rose to prominence in the Mongol Empire that over the centuries the names “Tatar” and “Mongol” sometimes became synonymous.

  Temujin's judgment in selecting his generals was unerring and surprisingly subtle. He valued not just courage but cunning and patience. The brave but foolhardy were not allowed to lead others, but instead were assigned to the important task of protecting the military supplies. Reportedly, Temujin once refused to promote a warrior, offering the following explanation:

  No man is more valiant than Yessoutai; no one has rarer gifts. But, as the longest marches do not tire him, as he feels neither hunger nor thirst, he believes that his officers and soldiers do not suffer from such things. That is why he is not fitted for high command. A general should think of hunger and thirst, so he may understand the suffering of those under him, and he should husband the strength of his men and beasts.10

  In 1203, Temujin took the audacious step of requesting a marriage between his eldest son, Jochi, and Ong Khan's daughter. Ong Khan and Temujin had been allies for more than two decades. Under Ong Khan's overlordship, Temujin had conquered most of the steppe peoples, with the exception of the powerful Naiman confederation in the west. Nevertheless, despite Temujin's reputation as the greatest military commander on the steppe, Ong Khan saw Temujin and his family as unworthy of the aristocratic Kereyids. Ong Khan was also likely manipulated by rivals of Temujin, who were jealous of his influence over the aging Kereyid ruler. In any event, according to Marco Polo, writing a century later, Ong Khan's reaction was, essentially, “Is not [he] ashamed to seek my daughter in marriage? Does he not know that he is my vassal and my thrall? Go back to him and tell him that I would sooner commit my daughter to flames than give her to him as his wife.”

  Shortly afterward, however, he sent another message to Temujin, saying that he had changed his mind and would approve the marriage after all. En route to the ceremony, Temujin learned that the wedding was a ploy and that Ong Khan had ordered his army to ambush Temujin's camp and slay him in his tent. Far outnumbered, Temujin ordered the warriors with him to disperse. He and his closest officers fled for their lives, arriving eventually at the shores of Lake Baljuna. What happened next has become legendary in Mongol lore.

  A wild horse appeared from nowhere. The men, on the verge of starvation, took this as a sign of divine intervention and slaughtered and skinned the horse. Relying on an ancient cooking technique,

  they cut up the meat and made a large bag from the horsehide into which they put the meat and some water. They gathered dried dung to make a fire, but they could not put the hide kettle directly on the fire. Instead, they heated rocks in the fire until glowing hot, then they dropped the hot rocks into the mixture of meat and water…After a few hours, the starving men feasted on boiled horseflesh.

  The companions then swore eternal allegiance to one another and to Temujin as their leader. Strikingly, these men, although just twenty in number, hailed from nine different tribes and included Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims, as well as animists like Temujin, who worshipped the Eternal Blue Sky and the God Mountain of Burkhan Khaldun. This multiethnic, multicreedal oath of brotherhood would come to symbolize the new form of society that Temujin, as Genghis Khan, would soon create.”

  First, however, Temujin had to defeat Ong Khan. From Lake Baljuna, Temujin sent word throughout the steppe of his plan for counterattack. Over the next few days, his army reassembled in its units of tens and hundreds all across the steppe. A few warriors rode ahead to station fresh teams of horses at crucial points. Temujin and his reorganized army then raced back toward Ong Khan's territory.

  In the end, it was Temujin who ambushed the Kereyid leaders. Temujin and his men descended on the Kereyids as they celebrated—quite drunkenly—their perceived victory over him. After three days of hard battle, Temujin triumphed. Ong Khan fled with his court, while much of his army deserted to Temujin's side. As was always Temujin's policy, he accepted Ong Khan's followers as long as they had not committed any previous act of treachery against their former leader. Essentially folding the powerful Kereyid forces into his own, Temujin went on to conquer the Naimans, the last great steppe confederation not yet under his control. By 1204, Temujin had defeated every tribe on the steppe. His territory extended from the Gobi Desert to Manchuria to the Arctic tundra. Much of this land, however, was sparsely populated. It included perhaps twenty million animals but probably only around a million people.

  In 1206, to legitimize his rule, Temujin convened a great meeting, or khuriltai, of representatives from every part of the steppe. In a massive open-air ceremony that included days of solemnity alternating with days of festivities, sports, and music, hundreds of thousands saw Temujin installed as Genghis Khan—originally Chinggis Khan, from the Mongolian chin, meaning “strong, firm, unshakable, and fearless”—ruler of all the tribes. The official name he chose for his new empire was the Great Mongol Nation, but he made a point of calling his followers the People of the Felt Walls, referring to the material out of which all the nomads made their tents. Out of the many warring tribes, clans, and lineages of the steppe, Genghis Khan had created a “people.”12

  Once in power, Genghis Khan took a number of steps, some quite radical, to maintain unity in his new empire. He prohibited the stealing of animals and the kidnapping of women, two age-old sources of strife on the steppe. Punishments were severe: Any man who stole a horse or steer, for example, was “cut into two parts.” Also condemned to death were adulteresses, spies, sorcerers, and “men given to infamous vices.” More remarkably, Genghis Khan decreed absolute freedom of worship for everyone, whether they were Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, or shamanists. All religious leaders, monks, “criers of mosques,” and “persons who are dedicated to religious practice” were exempted from taxation and public service. He himself remained an animist, worshipping the spiritual forces of nature.13

  At the same time, Genghis Khan continued to annex different tribes and ethnicities, such as the Koreans and the forest tribes of Siberia, into the Great Mongol Nation. To overcome ethnic divisions, Genghis Khan absorbed their warriors into his army and arranged marriages between his own children and those of the submitting tribal leaders. He also recruited the most able of their men, bringing to the Mongols talents and skills they had never before possessed. This is how the Mongols acquired writing.

  Tradition has it that when Genghis Khan conquered the Naimans in 1204, he was amazed to discover that their khan kept a Uighur scribe who memorialized his official pronouncements. The Uighur people, closely related to the Mongols, had obtained their script from Christian missionaries; the script was based on the Syriac alphabet and originally flowed horizontally, from right to left. Genghis Khan took the Naiman's Uighur scribe into his entourage. More important, he ordered the creation of a new writing system, essentially adapting the Uighur script to the Mongolian language. The new Uighur-Mongolian script was almost exactly like the old Uighur script, except that it flowed vertically, from top to bottom, the way Chinese characters do. Over the years, Genghis Khan continued to recruit and rely on Uighur scribes to facilitate communication throughout the empire.14

  By 1206, the man who started off as Temujin—an outcast who supposedly feared dogs and cried easily as a boy—was at the age of forty-four ruler of all the st
eppe. But Genghis Khan was still just an emperor of nomads. He had yet to take on the civilized world.

  CONQUERING EASTWARD

  In the early thirteenth century, China was divided and decaying— “like an aged woman, sunk in meditation, clad perhaps in too elaborate garments, surrounded by many children, little heeded.” But compared to the steppe, China was still magnificent, rich with pagodas and pleasure lakes, silver dragons with turquoise eyes, carved jade, ivory chess pieces, phoenix-eared vases. Whereas Genghis Khan's subjects were hunters or herders, China's population included mandarins and scholars, poets and calligraphers, bridge builders, beggars, bronze-casters, dukes, princes, and of course the emperor.15

  At that point, however, China had more than one emperor. Northern China was dominated by the kingdom of the Jurchens, themselves originally a “barbarian” forest-dwelling people from Manchuria. From their capital, Zhongdu, now Beijing, the Jurchen emperor ruled more than 50 million subjects. Southern China was dominated by the even larger, more powerful Song dynasty, based in Hangzhou, where the Chinese Son of Heaven ruled some 60 million people. Both the Jurchen and Song emperors had far more military manpower than Genghis Khan, not to mention moats and walls protecting the major cities, massive fortifications, and sophisticated weaponry. Neither ruler paid much attention to the Mongol nomads—they were too busy warring with each other.

  In 1210, a young, newly ascended Jurchen emperor sent a delegation to the Mongol steppe. The envoys demanded tribute and a display of submission from Genghis Khan, who, after all, was listed on the official rolls as “Commander Against Rebels” and a subject of the Jurchen emperor. Instead of kowtowing, Genghis Khan reportedly spat on the ground, called the Jurchen ruler an “imbecile,” then mounted his horse and rode away. Such defiance by the Mongol leader was equivalent to a declaration of war.

  Historians suspect that Genghis Khan wanted to invade the Jurchen kingdom anyway in order to seize control of the rich supply of trade goods that flowed through their territory. And Genghis Khan was no doubt emboldened by his recent subjugation of the Tanguts, who, while much less formidable than their Jurchen neighbors, also had walled fortifications. Genghis Khan had defeated the Tanguts despite a self-inflicted catastrophe. In an attempt to flood the Tangut capital, the Mongols diverted a section of the Yellow River, but, lacking in engineering skills, they flooded their own camp instead. Nevertheless, Genghis Khan managed to secure an alliance with the Tangut king, who provided him with famous Tangut camels (as reserves for the Mongol cavalry) as well as his daughter's hand in marriage.16

  Meanwhile, the Jurchen emperor, although infuriated by Genghis Khan's insolence, apparently belittled the idea of a Mongol threat. “Our empire is like the sea; yours is but a handful of sand,” he is said to have boasted. “How can we fear you?” His confidence was understandable. The massive city walls of the Jur-chens seemed impregnable, particularly given the Mongols’ primitive weapons. The Jurchen warriors also outnumbered the Mongol army by a ratio of more than two to one.

  But Genghis Khan was, by all accounts, a brilliant commander. The Mongol military differed starkly from traditional armies. It consisted entirely of horsemen; the absence of foot soldiers gave the Mongol forces not only much greater mobility but a decisive ability to strike suddenly. Genghis Khan's men were hardy, disciplined, and resourceful. Marco Polo claimed that they could go for ten days without stopping to make a fire, surviving on dried meat and dried milk mixed with water. When nothing else was available, “they opened a vein in a horse, drank a small quantity of blood and closed the vein.” Sometimes the warriors got fresh meat, either by slaughtering some of the reserve animals that always accompanied them or by hunting and looting.17

  In the end, Genghis Khan defeated the Jurchens through trickery, psychological warfare, and, perhaps most important, by ruthlessly using the Jurchens’ own population and technology against them. Before taking on the great Jurchen cities, the Mongols typically attacked the surrounding villages first, setting them on fire. The terrified peasants fled toward the cities for refuge, clogging the roads and cutting off the Jurchen supply convoys. The sudden influx of more than a million refugees overcrowded the walled cities, producing havoc and disease. Food supplies were quickly exhausted. As starvation set in, looting, rebellion, and cannibalism broke out. In one instance, Jurchen soldiers ended up slaughtering 30,000 of their own villagers. Meanwhile, outside the city walls, the Mongols conscripted thousands of peasants, who were forced to labor under the command of Mongol soldiers, hauling water, digging ditches, and maneuvering enormous wooden and stone battering rams. Often displaying utter disregard for their captives’ lives, the Mongols also used them as human shields. When these human shields died, the Mongols would use their corpses as moat-fill.

  At the same time, Genghis Khan eagerly recruited men with skills and technological expertise the Mongols themselves lacked. After every battle, the Mongols carefully examined their captives and impressed any engineers found. At the same time, they offered generous rewards to engineers who voluntarily defected. In these ways, Genghis Khan brought into his service numerous Chinese engineers who knew how to construct powerful siege engines— portable towers, arrow-spraying ballistas, flame-hurling catapults, fire lances, trebuchets, explosives—that could bring down seemingly inviolable walled cities. These weapons became part of the Mongol arsenal, and the Chinese engineers who designed them were incorporated into the Mongol army. With each new victory, the Mongol war machinery grew more sophisticated and deadlier.18

  Even so, conquering the heavily garrisoned Jurchen kingdom was no small feat. To make matters worse, northern China's hot, muggy summers were almost unbearable for the Mongols, who repeatedly fell ill in the densely populated urban areas. It took Genghis Khan's men many campaigns over a period of three years before they finally, in 1214, surrounded the imperial city of Zhongdu. Rather than fight the Mongols, the besieged Jurchen emperor agreed to a settlement proposed by Genghis Khan. In exchange for the Mongols’ withdrawing, the Jurchens would acknowledge the supreme rule of Genghis Khan. As “gifts” of appeasement, the Jurchen emperor presented Genghis Khan with large quantities of gold, silver, and silk, three thousand horses, five hundred youths, five hundred slave girls, and the hand of a Jurchen princess in marriage.19

  Genghis Khan kept his end of the bargain. He and his men headed back to the Mongolian steppe. As with the Uighur, Tangut, and Khitan kingdoms, he left the Jurchens with great autonomy, as long as they acknowledged their vassal status and continued to pay tribute. The truth was that the Mongols had neither the interest nor the wherewithal to govern the sedentary civilizations they had conquered. However, shortly after the Mongols withdrew, the Jurchen emperor fled south and set up a new court in the city of Kaifeng. Genghis Khan viewed this as an act of betrayal and immediately returned to China. This time, he had Zhongdu sacked, razed, burned, and plundered mercilessly. According to one contemporaneous source, “The bones of the slaughtered rose mountain-high, the earth was fat with human fat and the rotting corpses gave rise to a plague.” According to another, “[S]ixty thousand Chinese maidens flung themselves down from the city walls…rather than fall into the hands of the Mongol soldiery.”20

  The conquest of northern China, finally completed in 1215, proved immensely lucrative for the Mongols. Genghis Khan's men returned to the steppe, their crude carts overflowing with some of the most exquisite artisanship then in existence: silk robes alive with embroidered gold peonies, jade bulls and bodhisattvas, celadon vases, lacquered furniture, tapestries, board games, hand-painted marionettes, and headdresses inlaid with coral, emeralds, diamonds, and lapis lazuli. To store these exotic goods, Genghis Khan ordered for the first time the construction of a few buildings on the Mongolian steppe. Although the complex was called the Yellow Palace, it served principally as a warehouse. Genghis Khan and his followers continued to live in their portable felt gers.

  But the real bounty took the form of human capital. Along with engineers, Genghi
s Khan brought back from northern China entire regiments of soldiers and officers, many of whom had deserted to the Mongols: acrobats, jugglers, contortionists, musicians, singers, and dancers, as well as skilled workers of every kind, including tailors, pharmacists, translators, potters, jewelers, astrologers, painters, smiths, and doctors. Despite—or perhaps because of—his own illiteracy, Genghis Khan specifically recruited scholars of all ethnicities, like the erudite, polyglot Yelu Chucai, a member of the Khitan royal family, who would advise Genghis Khan wisely and loyally to the end.

  Religious tolerance continued to be a hallmark of Genghis Khan's rule. It turned out to be a powerful tool of empire building as well. For example, not long after Genghis Khan returned to the steppe from China, Muslim envoys arrived from the central Asian city of Balasagun in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. The envoys explained that the Muslims of Balasagun were suffering harsh religious persecution under their Christian khan Guchlug, who had prohibited the Muslim call to prayer and the public worship of Islam. They sought protection from the great Mongol Khan, and he was happy to oblige. The Mongol army invaded Balasagun, beheading Guchlug and incorporating his territory into the Mongol Empire. Shortly afterward, Genghis Khan proclaimed freedom of worship throughout Guchlug's lands. Thus it was that the man whom Europe later called the Scourge of God came to be known in the East, from Tibet to the Aral Sea, as a defender of religions—and even, according to the medieval Persian chronicler Juvaini, “one of the mercies of the Lord and one of the bounties of divine grace.”21

  CONQUERING WESTWARD

  Perhaps Genghis Khan, who now controlled the entire Silk Road between China and Arabia, was sated with war. Perhaps, as historians often suggest, at nearly sixty he had accumulated enough bounty and wanted to live the rest of his life in tranquility on the steppe. Whatever the reason, in 1219 Genghis Khan proposed a peaceful trading relationship with the Muslim sultan Muhammad II of Khwarizm.