by Amy Chua
By contrast, the Mongols were more religiously open than any other power in the world. Hulegu had Muslims and Christians of every sect in his army. One of his advisors was the brilliant Shiite astronomer Nasir ad-Din Tusi. Moreover, Hulegu's mother and two wives were Christian, making it easier for him to cultivate the Christians of the Middle East, many of whom hailed him as a savior. Hulegu marched on Baghdad in 1257. (He had left the steppe in 1253, but it took his men several years to overcome the hashish-smoking, fearless Order of the Assassins, a bizarre Muslim sect that controlled an extensive network of mountain fortresses stretching from Afghanistan to Syria.) On February 5, 1258, after a week of flooding and bombardment, they breached the eastern wall of Baghdad; the caliph capitulated days later. In falling to the Mongols, the Abbasid caliphate succumbed not to a nomadic horde but to the combined “human, financial, material, and technological resources of northern China, central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, and Iran.”32
Baghdad was sacked and looted; corpses piled up on the streets, producing a suffocating stench. Christians and Shiites were generally spared. Hulegu reportedly tried to force the caliph to eat pieces of his own gold. When that failed, Hulegu ordered the caliph and his male heirs rolled in carpets and stomped to death— a punishment apparently reserved for the very highborn.
By bringing down the caliphate, the Mongols had accomplished in two years what the Christian crusaders had not been able to do in two centuries. Baghdad's Christians celebrated by slaughtering Muslims and destroying mosques. Throughout the Middle East, Christians from Damascus to Aleppo hailed the Mongol advance with almost apocalyptic fervor. Above all, they prayed that the Mongols would liberate Jerusalem, and gleefully prepared to take vengeance on their former Muslim oppressors.33
For all their ruthlessness, there was no such religious venom or zealousness among the Mongols. On the contrary, back at Karako-rum, the Mongol court's approach to religion was more like that of an Ivy League university. According to William of Rubruck, a Franciscan monk who visited Karakorum in 1254, Grand Khan Mongke presided over elaborate religious debates in which everyone had an equal voice and the finding of common ground was encouraged. Rubruck himself was a rigid Catholic, intolerant even of other Christians. When Rubruck informed the Great Khan that he had come “to spread the word of God,” Mongke asked him to participate in a debate before three judges: a Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Christian. The debate was closely supervised, the most critical rule being that “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” The anthropologist Jack Weatherford vividly describes the events that followed:
In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions: the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck.
Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God's nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil…after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match.
…[A]s the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone too drunk to continue.34
Comic as they might seem in the twenty-first century, these debates were all the more remarkable given the contrasting treatment of religious dissent elsewhere in the thirteenth-century “civilized” world. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued his fateful bull ad exstir-panda, sanctioning the use of torture to root out heretics. Eager to comply, Dominican friars—“hounds of the Lord”—roamed from city to city, extracting confessions from suspects with ghoulish techniques. Across Europe, cross-bearing monarchs from Edward I to Frederick II took up the anti-Muslim sword; tongues were torn out and heads rolled in the name of Christ. In France, Rubruck's sponsor, Louis IX, was canonized for various acts of saintliness, including the burning of 12,000 handwritten Talmudic texts. “Soldiers of the Cross” unleashed their fury not only on Muslims but also on Orthodox Christians. In Constantinople, “Crusaders butchered everyone they met regardless of sex or age…Nuns, maidens, and matrons were abused and violated…Exquisite cruelties were inflicted on Orthodox priests.”35
The “barbarian” Mongols, meanwhile, were deeply cosmopolitan in their openness to different cultures. At Mongke's court, Rubruck met not only religious thinkers, merchants, and diplomatic envoys from many lands but superb craftsmen from Syria, Russia, Hungary, Germany, and France, including the master Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher. Though technically war captives, these artisans were treated with the greatest esteem. Assigned a team of fifty assistants, Boucher redecorated the Mongol capital in tony European style. To be sure, the Mongols were arrogant in their own way: Mongke, like Genghis Khan, believed that the Mongols were chosen by God and by nature—interchangeable in their view—to conquer the entire earth. But having little art, science, erudition, or administrative capability of their own, the Mongols, with seemingly no prejudice, simply took whatever was useful from the more civilized peoples they had conquered.
In the end, the Mongols did not take Jerusalem. On the contrary, the Mongol drive westward ended in 1260 in Palestine, at Ayn al-Jalut (Goliath's Well), where Hulegu's forces were defeated by the Egypt-based Mamluks. Not long before, Hulegu had received word of his brother Mongke's death. Hulegu, who himself had no ambition to be Great Khan, was apparently stricken with grief. Perhaps he sensed that Mongke's death also marked the end of the Mongol Empire's unity.36
THE MONGOL RULE OF CHINA
A few years before his death, Mongke, tired of his brother Khubi-lai's lack of progress and constant excuses, took the conquest of the Song dynasty China into his own hands, leaving the administration of the empire to his youngest brother, Arik Boke, in Karakorum. In May of 1258, employing the same tactics used by his grandfather, Genghis Khan, Mongke led his army across the Yellow River toward the heart of southern China. But the great Song—even in its twilight, the most formidable adversary the Mongols ever faced—battled back stubbornly. Mongke died almost two decades before the campaign was completed, probably from dysentery or cholera, in the province of Sichuan.
Mongke's death brought on a period of turbulent internecine warfare. Most dramatically, in 1260, Khubilai and Arik Boke each convened a khuriltai—Khubilai's in Xanadu, Arik Boke's in Karakorum—and had himself declared Great Khan. The struggle between them would permanently fracture the Mongol Empire.
Among his brothers, Khubilai was unquestionably the odd man out. The rest of his siblings clung to their steppe traditions. They were, above all, nomads and warriors, and like Genghis Khan they saw the luxuries of sedentary civilization as invidious temptations. By contrast, Khubilai preferred palaces and cities to the steppe. He loved comfort and feasting, and grew fat and gouty early on.
In the end, Khubilai triumphed over Arik Boke. His triumph was in part that of the farmer over the nomad. At the worst possible time for Arik Boke, Mongolia suffered a cold-induced famine that decimated much of the animal population on the steppe. With no food for his starving followers, Arik Boke found himself at the mercy of Khubilai, whose territory included agricultural lands and food supplies. In 1264, Arik Boke submitted to Khubilai, explaining his defeat with some telling words: “We were then, and you are today.” Khubilai forgave his brother (who conveniently died of poisoning two years later) but destroyed Karakorum. For the new Mongol capital he chose the site of the former Jurchen capital of Zhongdu—sacked by Genghis Khan in 1214—which later became Beijing.
The reality, however, was that the Mongol Empire
was now divided. The factions of the Mongol royal family that had wanted Arik Boke to be Great Khan refused to recognize Khubilai's legitimacy. Meanwhile, Hulegu and his descendants ruled the Arab and Persian lands, which became known as the Ilkhanate, while descendants of Genghis Khan's eldest son, Jochi, controlled Russia and eastern Europe, and also openly refused to recognize Khubilai as their Great Khan.37
But even without his family's full support, Khubilai accomplished what his famous grandfather had not been able to do: He conquered southern China and reunified the Middle Kingdom. In many ways, Khubilai's victory over the Song was less a military victory than the conquest of the proverbial hearts and minds of the Chinese people. In contrast to Genghis Khan's blitzkriegs, Khubilai's defeat of the Song occurred gradually, over almost forty years. Throughout this period, Khubilai worked patiently, through propaganda and shrewd public policies, to convince the Chinese that he, far more than the aloofly decadent Song leaders, embodied China's traditional virtues.
With each military victory over the Song, however small, Khubilai promoted the idea that the Mandate of Heaven had fallen to him. This was a hard case for a “barbarian” to make, but each year a growing number of Chinese peasants, students, soldiers, and even generals deserted to the Mongol side. More remarkable, the Mongols—famous for their cavalry—triumphed in naval warfare as well. Once again, Khubilai recruited experienced non-Mongols to build and man his fleet. He also secured the allegiance of powerful Chinese admirals, whose control of China's seaboard and internal waterways proved pivotal to the Mongol victory.38
Khubilai's reign (1260-94) was long and relatively peaceful. When Hangzhou, the magnificent Song capital, finally succumbed to Mongol forces in 1276, Khubilai found himself in control of China's greatest treasures, richest cities, and most flourishing ports—some 200,000 trading boats plied the Yangtze River alone each year—as well as a massive, meticulously trained navy. Moreover, China, now reunited, was far and away the most populous nation in the world, with an estimated 110 to 120 million subjects.
Although their empire was now fragmented, the descendants of Genghis Khan dominated virtually the entire civilized world. Khubilai alone ruled over more people than perhaps any previous sovereign in history. To govern his Chinese subjects, who were not only vastly more numerous but also vastly more cultured than the Mongols, Khubilai pursued a curious combination of ethnic policies. On one side, he adopted a number of seemingly intolerant policies. Most notably, Khubilai banned intermarriage between the Mongols and the Chinese and forbade the Chinese from learning the Mongol language or carrying arms. In addition, Khubilai abolished the Confucian examination system as a mechanism for staffing China's bureaucracy, and he generally refused to appoint Chinese to the country's highest government posts. (This was not a universal Mongol policy; in Persia, for example, Persians were allowed to occupy such posts.)
Different theories have been proposed to explain Khubilai's exclusionary policies. It might be thought that he was simply an anti-Chinese Mongol supremacist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Having spent virtually his entire life in the Middle Kingdom, Khubilai unabashedly admired the refinement of Chinese culture, the beauty of Chinese architecture, and the order of Chinese society. In striking contrast to his predecessors’ savage treatment of northern China, Khubilai destroyed almost nothing in southern China. On the contrary, he made a point of repairing temples, shrines, and other public buildings damaged by war. He surrounded himself with Chinese advisors and ruled with moderation and enlightenment. Khubilai's sympathetic approach to China angered many of his more traditional relatives, who, consistent with past Mongol practices, simply wanted to plunder and exploit China.
Moreover, Khubilai displayed what is arguably the ultimate form of ethnic tolerance. Not only did he refrain from imposing Mongol customs on the Chinese, but he embraced, at least on the surface, Chinese culture for himself, his court, and the ruling class. He adopted a Chinese title and posthumously assigned his ancestors Chinese names. He built a Chinese capital based on an ancient Chinese model, followed Chinese imperial rituals, and established a Chinese dynasty, known to this day as the Yuan, meaning “the origin” or “great beginnings.” He eagerly promoted Chinese art, music, and drama, laying the groundwork for what became the Peking Opera. Although he probably remained illiterate, Khubilai also allowed Chinese literature and scholarship to flourish, building Chinese schools and reviving the Hanlin Academy, traditionally reserved for the brightest scholars in the Middle Kingdom. According to the historian David Morgan, “for literary artists there may well have been greater freedom of expression [under the Mongols] than under some more ‘respectable’ dynasties.”39
Interestingly, having excluded the Chinese from the highest governmental posts, Khubilai filled these posts not with Mongols but principally with non-Chinese foreigners. Recognizing that the Mongols themselves lacked the experience and numbers necessary to govern a society as complex as China's, Khubilai recruited talented Uighurs, Khitans, Persians, central Asians, and Europeans as China's governors and top ministers. Thus, a (notoriously corrupt) native of Tashkent served as Khubilai's minister of finance for twenty years, and a Muslim father and son also from central Asia served as successive governors of the Yunnan Province. Even Marco Polo apparently served as a Yuan official, in the city of Yangzhou, near Nanjing. Marco Polo later boasted to his fellow Venetians that he had been Yangzhou's governor, but this was not true. More likely, he helped administer the government's salt monopoly—a position that just didn't have the same ring to it.
Below the highest, foreign-filled government posts, Chinese continued to occupy lower civil servant positions. Indeed, Khubilai kept much of the existing (and very effective) Chinese bureaucratic apparatus while creating new offices to address problems of special Mongol concern, such as the Section for Retrieving Lost Animals. Within each department, Khubilai systematically mixed Chinese and foreigners: Each office was staffed according to ethnic quotas, specifying the required number of northern Chinese, southern Chinese, and foreign bureaucrats. In at least some cases, Khubilai appointed two officers—one Chinese, one foreign—to the same important government post, requiring them to govern together.
In short, Khubilai's approach to governance reflected cosmopolitanism far more than intolerance. (He repeatedly sent envoys to the pope and the rulers of Europe, inviting them to send their best scholars, but the Europeans declined.) From this perspective, Khubilai's laws prohibiting the Chinese from marrying Mongols, learning the Mongol language, or occupying top government posts can be seen in a different light. Rather than driven by chauvinism, they were most likely political expedients designed to protect the tiny handful of ruling Mongols from being swallowed up or overthrown by the vast Chinese population. They may also have been, as some historians suggest, part of a larger strategy that allowed Khubilai to play different ethnic groups against one another.
In any event, the result of Khubilai's policies was a remarkable motley of different cultures, ethnicities, and religions. Within the walls of the imperial palace, the Mongol ruling family continued with their Mongol ways, speaking Mongolian, eating and drinking like Mongolians, and sleeping in gers on the palace floor. Outside the palace, the capital city—known as Dadu or “great capital” by the Chinese, and as Khan Balik or “city of the khan” by Europeans—overflowed with Arabs, Armenians, Tanguts, Turks, Tibetans, Persians, central Asians, and Europeans. These international sojourners filled every imaginable role: hawkers, physicians, prostitutes, chefs, hydraulic engineers, astrologers, sculptors, gatekeepers, scribes, translators, spiritual advisors, merchants, and traders.
Virtually every religion in the world was represented. On the thronging streets of Dadu, rabbis and Hindu sages mingled with their more numerous Buddhist, Muslim, Nestorian, and Catholic counterparts. Although Khubilai himself favored Buddhism, many in the royal family were Mass-attending Christians, while other Mongols in China continued to practice shamanism. Meanwhile, some of the Mon
gols’ most esteemed advisors were Taoists and Confucians.40
Although the Confucian-trained upper classes of southern China probably always found barbarian rule loathsome and humiliating, the Mongols brought to China a peace and political unity not seen since the overthrow of the Tang in 907. China's port cities became leading centers of import and export, Hangzhou specializing in sugar, Yangzhou in rice, and Zaytun (modern-day Quanzhou) in pearls and precious stones.
The new Grand Canal cut by the Mongols, stretching 1,100 miles from Hangzhou to modern Beijing, linked north and south China economically. Chinese commercial vessels called frequently at Vietnam, Malaysia, Java, Ceylon, and south India, usually returning with heaps of sugar, ivory, cinnamon, and cotton. International trade, both overland and maritime, between China and Mongol-dominated Persia, central Asia, and Europe boomed as never before. Throughout the Middle Kingdom, merchants of every religion and ethnicity made fortunes under the Pax Mongolica.41
Meanwhile, China's peasantry, the bulk of the country's population, probably experienced little change in their daily lives. They simply paid taxes to a different imperial family and continued to be exploited by their landlords. (To win their support, Khubilai left the estates of southern China's great landowners essentially intact.) On the other hand, if imperial records are to be believed, Khubilai created more than 21,000 public schools designed to promote universal education. In addition, peasants likely benefited from Khubilai's reform of the Chinese penal code, which had been exceptionally harsh under the Song. Khubilai granted amnesty to minor criminals who demonstrated remorse, and in other cases substituted fines for corporal punishment. While his European counterparts were ordering more and more people stretched on the rack or crushed with huge wheels, Khubilai opposed torture. He also disfavored the death penalty; during his rule, executions fell dramatically, to annual rates lower than those of modern China and the United States.42
