Treasures of the Great Silk Road

by Edgar Knobloch

  The nomadic tribes who lived in the vast steppe area north and north-east of the Gobi desert were a mixture of Turkish, Mongol and Tungus elements. In the twelfth century a slow consolidation process began among them and, somewhat later, the Mongols emerged as a dominating force under their leader, Temuchin, who later became known as Chingiz-Khan. A member of a clan whose pastures were between the rivers Onon and Kerulen, Chingiz-Khan gradually succeeded in subduing other Mongol clans and neighbouring tribes and was able in 1206 to convene a grand assembly, or kuriltay, of all Turco-Mongols, at which he was proclaimed emperor, or Great Khan (kha-khan). (See p.28.) Mongolia thus effectively unified, Chingiz-Khan proceeded immediately to conquer western China, then ruled by the Tanguts. In several campaigns he devastated the country, but he was not able at the time to capture the fortified towns, although he tried, for instance, to divert the Yellow River to flood the town of Ning-hia. Nevertheless, the Tangut king became his vassal, and he turned against the Kin Empire of northern China. The war started in 1211, lasted, with short intervals, until the death of Chingiz-Khan in 1227, and was ended by his successor in 1234. In 1215, Beijing was captured, sacked and burnt down, but the Chinese continued to fight.

  In 1218, Chingiz-Khan sent Jebe Noyon, one of his best generals, west against the empire of the Kara-Khitai. In an extremely efficient and disciplined campaign, Jebe took Semirechiye and East Turkestan, and Chingiz-Khan thus became an immediate neighbour of the Khorezmshah. At first, Chingiz-Khan tried to establish commercial and political contacts with the Khorezmians. In the same year, 1218, a caravan consisting entirely of Muslim merchants with a Mongol envoy arrived at Otrar, the Khorezmian border town on the Syr Darya. The Governor of Otrar suspected, rightly or wrongly, that they were spies and put them all to death. Chingiz-Khan claimed indemnity and, receiving none, prepared for war. The Mongol army that collected on the upper Irtysh in the summer of 1219 consisted of between 150,000 and 200,000 men, many fewer than the Khorezmian forces, but with superior discipline and a more coherent and efficient leadership.7

  The two rivals were of a completely different character. Chingiz-Khan was balanced, cautious, methodical and persevering, while Muhammad was inconsistent, irascible, proud and had little organisational ability. In fact, the first defeat changed this heroic knight into a helpless creature, almost a coward. Of the two, it was the nomad barbarian who had the abilities of a statesman, while the Iranised Turk, emperor of Islam and king of sedentary lands, possessed only the qualities of a knight errant.8 The Khorezmshah adopted a defensive strategy based on his many fortified towns on the Syr Darya and in Transoxania. He thus divided his forces and, although numerically superior, they were inferior to the Mongols in each combat. Chingiz-Khan left one division to besiege Otrar, commanded by his sons Chagatay and Ogoday, while another under his eldest son Jochi descended along the river, took all the cities in the delta and on the Aral Sea, and finally attacked Khorezm itself. Yet another detachment went upstream to besiege Khodzhend. Chingiz-Khan himself, accompanied by his youngest son Toloy (Tuli), crossed the river with the main army and suddenly, in February 1220, appeared before Bukhara. The garrison tried to break out, but was largely destroyed, and the city then capitulated. The citadel, where the rest of the garrison sought refuge, was taken by assault and the city was then methodically sacked; but there were no executions, apart from some priests who tried to resist the desecration of the holy places.

  From Bukhara, Chingiz-Khan proceeded to Samarkand, where he was met by Chagatay and Ogoday, who had meanwhile captured Otrar. The fate of Bukhara was repeated, but this time all inhabitants had to leave the city, and many of them were slaughtered. All who were thought useful, like craftsmen, were deported to Mongolia. The entire Turkish garrison was massacred in spite of the spontaneous capitulation, but this time the priests were spared. When those who were spared were allowed to return there were barely enough of them to occupy a single district.

  The strongest resistance was met at the capital, Gurganj (Urgench), which was not taken until April 1221. All inhabitants except some craftsmen were killed and the city was destroyed by flooding when the Mongols broke the dam on the Amu Darya. Meanwhile Muhammad abandoned all further attempts at fighting and fled westwards, duly followed by a Mongol detachment commanded by Jebe and Subotay, Chingiz-Khan’s best generals. During the entire chase through Khorassan, Persia and Azerbaidzhan, the Mongols met no resistance, and the defenceless population was massacred without pity. At last Muhammad found refuge on an island in the Caspian, where he died of exhaustion in December 1220. Jebe and Subotay continued their raid across Georgia and the Caucasus into Russia where they defeated the army of the Russian princes, on the River Kalka.

  In the spring of 1221, Chingiz-Khan crossed the Amu Darya and began the conquest of Khorassan and Afghanistan. In this campaign the cities of Balkh, Merv and Nishapur were completely destroyed and depopulated.

  Muhammad’s son Jalal ad-Din alone resisted the Mongols. This valiant prince fled first to Ghazna, gathered an army, and fought the Mongols in the mountain passes of Afghanistan. Following the capture of Ghazna, he made his next stand on the River Indus. Jalal ad-Din escaped capture only by jumping into the river on horseback and fully armed. He then fought the Mongols heroically but unsuccessfully for almost ten years in southern Persia, Iraq and Azerbaidzhan. He was killed in 1231 by a Kurdish assassin.

  In 1222, Chingiz-Khan left Afghanistan, crossed the Amu Darya back into Transoxania, and began his return journey into Mongolia, arriving in the spring of 1225, almost in his seventieth year. His last campaign was directed against the Tangut kingdom of Si-Hia, but he died in August 1227, before the end of the campaign.

  Chingiz-Khan’s eldest son, Jochi, had died six months before, thus avoiding a serious breach with his father. Jochi’s son Batu inherited his ulus (territorial appanage), the western part of the empire, comprising the steppes north of the Aral Sea and west of the River Irtysh, which later was to become the state of the Golden Horde. The ulus of Chingiz-Khan’s second son, Chagatay, consisted of the former empire of the Kara-Khitai from the Tarim basin in the east to Bukhara and the Amu Darya in the west. In it, Transoxania, with its sedentary population, was considered inferior to the steppe region on Semirechiye, which the Mongols naturally preferred. Big cities like Bukhara, Samarkand and Kashgar were administered by direct representatives of the khan. The heart of the Mongol territories, the region of Onon and Kerulen, became by tradition the appanage of the youngest son, Toloy, while the heir of Chingiz-Khan, his third son Ogoday, received the central-west region, east of Lake Balkash, southern Siberia and western Mongolia.

  Ogoday was confirmed as Great Khan by a kuriltay in 1229. (See p.26.) It was during his reign that the Mongols began their second wave of expansion with the final conquest of the Kin Empire of northern China, occupation of Korea, and a war against the Sung Empire of southern China that was to last twenty-five years. In the west, most of Persia had gone back to Jalal ad-Din in an unexpected revival of the Khorezmian Empire, and Ogoday was thus faced with the task of reconquering it. A relatively small detachment of some 30,000 men was sufficient to accomplish it and, after the death of Jalal ad-Din in 1231, the Mongols remained masters of that country. From there they proceeded into Georgia, thence into Armenia, later attacking the Seljuk sultanate in Asia Minor. This brought them right to the borders of the Byzantine Empire.

  Meanwhile, a nomadic tribe, the Kumans, who fled before the Mongols from the Russian steppes, were given asylum by the Hungarian king, Bela, and allowed to settle in the Danubian plain. The Mongols, however, claimed that the Kumans were their subjects and set out to bring them back and to punish King Bela. This was the beginning of a major campaign in 1239–41, led by Khan Batu, in which Kievan Russia was conquered and the Polish and German knights were defeated in Silesia. The Mongols then crossed the Carpathians and defeated the Hungarians on the River Sayo, while King Bela had to seek refuge on one of the Dalmatian islands. Split and Vienna were within rea
ch when, quite suddenly, Ogoday died in faraway Mongolia and all Mongol commanders were summoned back for a kuriltay to elect a new khan.

  Christian civilisation thus narrowly escaped annihilation. European monarchs gradually recovered from the shock, and within a few years dispatched several missions to the Mongols to obtain information about these ‘infernal invaders’. By far the most important is the report by the papal envoy John de Piano (or Plano) Carpini, Historia Mongalorum. Between 1245 and 1247 he travelled to Karakorum and was present at the election and enthronement of Ogoday’s son, Guyuk, as Great Khan. Another report of importance is that of a Franciscan monk of Flemish origin, William of Rubruck, who travelled to the same place ten years later on behalf of the French king, Saint Louis. He was well received by Great Khan Mangu (Mongke), who succeeded Guyuk in 1248. Each of those remarkable travellers chose a different route, but neither travelled through Transoxania. Carpini went from Lyons to Kiev and from there to the lower Volga, across the Kipchak steppe to the River Talas, and via the Tien-Shan passes to Mongolia. Rubruck started his journey from a Genoese colony in the Crimea and joined the same route as Carpini on the lower Volga. He returned along the western coast of the Caspian, through Transcaucasia and eastern Turkey to Syria.

  Guyuk Khan died under mysterious circumstances in 1248. The accession of Mangu, the son of Toloy, was possibly something of a family coup, by which the members of the Ogoday clan were deprived of power and all male descendants of Ogoday were killed. For this Mangu relied heavily on the sympathy, if not active help, of Batu, who, as the eldest member of the clan of Jochi, enjoyed considerable authority. Under Mangu, Batu was in fact an independent ruler in his western ulus, and it is in this area that we must seek the origins of the later state or khanate of the Golden Horde.

  To Persia Mangu dispatched his brother Hulagu to replace the military governors. Hulagu, who arrived in 1256, first exterminated the dreaded sect of the Assassins and thus pacified the country. He then carried the conquest further west, attacking what remained of the caliphate of Baghdad. The city was sacked and destroyed in 1258, and the last caliph killed, and the Mongols, after the fall of Aleppo, Damascus and other Syrian cities, turned their attack on Egypt. This presented extreme difficulty and the Mamluk sultans succeeded in pushing the Mongols back, and reconquered Syria.

  In Transoxania and Semirechiye the ruling house of Chagatay was far too weak and divided to achieve any such independence as their cousins on the Volga. In the fighting that broke out between the Chagatayids and the Jochids, the latter lost Khorezm, which once again became part of Transoxania. But the geographical character of the region favoured decentralised rule, and each oasis was soon governed by a semi-independent princeling nominally subject to the khan who in turn recognised the sovereignty of the Great Khan in Karakorum.

  It was in the East that the Mongol expansion still continued. Khubilay, Mangu’s younger brother who became Great Khan in 1260, continued the war against the Sungs, whom he finally defeated in 1279. Engaged in a protracted struggle against a pretender from the Ogoday clan, the khan transferred his capital to Beijing. A new city was built there for him, called Khanbaligh (Khan’s City), where Khubilay later received Marco Polo. Two expeditions by Khubilay against Japan failed, but in the south the Mongols entered Burma, conquered Indo-China, and even penetrated as far as Java. The descendants of Khubilay, the Chinese Mongols of the Yuan dynasty, ruled China for 100 years, to be succeeded in 1370 by the Ming dynasty.

  Returning to Transoxania, we find the nomad overlords camping with their herds outside the cities and in the steppes, and collecting tribute from the sedentary peasants, craftsmen and merchants. A long period of peace and security under Mongol domination soon brought a revival of trade. The ancient caravan routes were used again, cities and villages were resettled, wells and caravanserais in the deserts were rebuilt. The Muslim advisers to the khan retained the Persian system of administration and taxation, and the country, in spite of the terrible massacres and continuing heavy taxes, once again became generally more prosperous. Some of the oases, however, never revived. This was due mainly to diversions of the trade routes and also to the state of the irrigation network. In places now bypassed by the trade, there was neither manpower nor money enough to maintain the canals. On the other hand, where the dykes had been completely destroyed and the land was allowed to lie fallow for too long, the soil was likely to become so salty and so covered by sand that recultivation would become impossible; this, in turn, could be a reason why the trade sought a different route.

  The revival, of course, was anything but a quick process. For example, in the 1330s, Ibn Battuta found Balkh, destroyed by Chingiz-Khan, still an utter ruin and uninhabited. When another traveller, Clavijo, passed through in 1404, it was again ‘a very large city’. Merv, the ‘Pearl of the East’ of pre-Mongol time, never regained its importance. Here, typically, the great trade route was diverted: the caravans were taking a more southerly course across the fringes of the Kara Kum desert, and the small town of Mary in present-day Turkmenistan is hardly reminiscent of the former splendours of Merv.

  In the mid-fourteenth century, Samarkand was probably the busiest and most important city in Transoxania. The route across the Kara Kum via Merv being cut, the caravans were either diverted south of Samarkand to Termez and Balkh, or west from Bukhara to Gurganj and on to the lower Volga. This latter route, however, was overshadowed in Mongol times by the so-called northern route, which led from the River Talas to Tashkent and Otrar and then followed the Syr Darya down to the delta and continued east of the Aral Sea to Gurganj. For some time this route carried the main East–West traffic, and in consequence the oases on the lower Zarafshan, like Bukhara, were reduced to a secondary role. The redirection of this traffic and of the caravan-trade back to Samarkand and Bukhara was perhaps the main reason for Timur’s repeated campaigns against Khorezm, and for his systematic destruction of Gurganj.

  Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, became ruler of Samarkand and of the whole Mawarannahr (Transoxania) in 1370 after a victory over his former friend and ally Emir Husayn. He was born in 1336 in the small town of Kesh in the Kashka Darya valley south of Samarkand. His father was a minor chief of the Turkicised Mongol clan, the Barlas, who came to Transoxania with the Chagatayids. (See 1.)

  The original Chagatay ulus was by then split between Semirechiye, or the region of the Talas and the Ili – to be known as Moghulistan – which was in the hands of the descendants of Chagatay, and Transoxania, which was more than anything else a loose grouping of semi-independent fiefs ruled by various clans and families, partly Turkish and partly Mongol, few of whom could claim any Chingizkhanid descent. The rulers of Semirechiye considered themselves legitimate heirs of Chagatay and repeatedly invaded Transoxania in an attempt to reunite the ulus. Husayn, who ruled Balkh, and Timur, who married his sister, together defended the country against such raids. To match the claims of legitimacy, they themselves appointed a puppet khan of the Chagatayid family, and ruled in his name. Their association came to an end when Timur besieged Husayn in Balkh, defeated him, and thus became the sole master of Transoxania. In the thirty years of continuous campaigning that followed, Timur succeeded in eliminating virtually every rival, real or potential. Moghulistan and Khorezm were the first targets. Khorassan and Persia, with all lands once ruled by Hulag, followed. The Volga state of the Golden Horde, ruled by Timur’s arch-enemy, Tokhtamish, was defeated in two campaigns and became so weak as never to recover. Timur’s army came within a stone’s throw of Moscow, and his victories over Tokhtamish made it possible for the Russian principalities to reassert themselves, and, later, to unite and throw off the Mogol yoke.

  Economically, the Volga region ceased to be a major trade centre, and this, together with the destruction of Khorezm, helped Timur accomplish his aim to bring all the lucrative East–West trade back to Transoxania. A campaign to India, which extended his possessions to the Ganges, added to Timur’s grand design and made Samarkand an imperial city
and a major cultural and trade centre. Having acquired the lands of the Persian Mongols as far as Syria, Mesopotamia and Azerbaidzhan, Timur found himself a direct neighbour of the Turkish sultanate in Asia Minor, now in the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The power of these Turks was rapidly growing. They had already established a considerable hold in the Balkan peninsula, defeated the Serbs in 1388 and the Crusaders in 1396, and were threatening the very existence of Constantinople. The emergence of a rival on their eastern flank provided a welcome relief for the hard-pressed Byzantine Empire. European diplomacy was quick to respond. After the first contacts made by the Genoese and Venetian merchants and the Greek Emperor of Trebizond, the King of Castile sent two embassies to Timur. The first was present when Timur crushed and took prisoner the Turkish sultan Bayezid the Thunderbolt, at Angora in 1402. The second, led by Ruy González de Clavijo, followed the victorious army to Samarkand, where they witnessed not only the monumental celebrations of victory, but also the preparations for the last campaign, against the Ming Emperor of China. In February 1405, at the very beginning of the campaign, the Conqueror died, aged 70.

  Almost immediately after his death, the enormous, unconsolidated empire collapsed. Warring factions formed around Timur’s sons and relatives fought each other for power, while governors of distant provinces were quick to proclaim themselves independent. Within a few years the empire shrank to its very core: Khorassan and Afghanistan were ruled from Herat by Timur’s youngest (fourth) son, Shah Rukh. In Transoxania, Shah Rukh’s son Mirza Ulugh-beg, residing in Samarkand, ruled as his viceroy, with some other fiefs in the hands of other members of the family. The long reign of Shah Rukh and Ulugh-beg (1407–47 and 1449 respectively) was a period of stability and prosperity. However, with the assassination of Ulugh-beg in 1449 by his own son, the process of disintegration continued. In the second half of the century, the western territories gradually fell into the hands of the Turkmen tribes, the White Sheep and the Black Sheep Tartars, while in the east the nomad Uzbek khans were able to arbitrate between the Timurid princelings.