Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  The experience had a larger impact on Europe than it did on the Muslim world. Muslim fortifications changed how Europeans built castles. Exposure to Islamic medical care transformed the medieval hospitalia from hospice to hospital. Returning knights brought back a taste for Muslim luxuries. The Venetian merchants who had provided transportation for the Crusades established small enclaves in Muslims cities and became the newest players in the East-West trade routes. Over time, the Venetians would import not only silk and spices, but knowledge: Arabic numerals, navigation techniques, and the technologies for creating fine textiles, hard soap, paper, pottery, and glass.

  CENTURIES OF CLASHES BETWEEN Europe’s Christian conquerors and Palestine’s defending Muslims spilled more than blood. The Crusades brought Europeans back into contact with the rest of the world. New ideas flowed between east and west for the first time in centuries. Some were large, like Arabic science, numbers, algebra, and spherical geometry. Others were smaller, like chess, hot baths, and the fork. (Chess was the only one to catch on quickly.)

  The West was forever changed by its military, commercial, and cultural contacts with the East during the Middle Ages. The shared human enterprise of learning moved from one culture to another as Arabic learning fueled the birth of the European Renaissance. The Crusades sowed the seeds for future wars over the Holy Lands.

  More immediately, though, history introduced a new, unfamiliar conqueror from the steppes of Central Asia. For the Mongol warriors who were about to swarm centers of civilization across Eurasia, religion and learning took a backseat to pure might. Under Genghis Khan, human ingenuity was applied to the tools and methods of conquest—creating human slaughter on an unprecedented scale.

  5

  PLAGUE

  Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan created the largest empire ever conquered by one man.

  THE TWELFTH CENTURY IS COMING TO A CLOSE. AS A NEW CENTURY LOOMS JUST AHEAD, THE EAST AND WEST ARE MORE CONNECTED THAN AT ANY PREVIOUS TIME IN HISTORY.

  Ideas flow from one continent to the other. Trade between Europe and Asia flourishes, even in the midst of wars both civil and religious.

  Meanwhile, an extraordinary young man has risen up through Mongol society. Using a combination of brilliantly calculated strategy, ruthlessness, and charisma, he has pulled together warring tribes and created a confederation of armed horsemen. Now, this “universal leader” emerges from the Central Asian steppes. Leading his army of nomads, he creates the first Eurasian empire.

  The life of Genghis Khan, born Temujin, is an example of survival of the fittest in human form—one exceptional person triumphing against hostile natural and human forces to move mankind into a new age. The earth has become hotter. Khan responds by taking his people and livestock into greener pastures to the east. Then, combining nomadic war skills with technology borrowed from sedentary cultures, he crafts a new style of warfare, turning the small Mongol horses into the ultimate weapons of war. Soon his realm—the Mongol Empire—includes every acre and person from China to the Mediterranean Sea. It is the largest empire ever conquered by a single man—and will survive his death by 150 years and live on for another five centuries in empires created by his descendants.

  map of the Mongol territory when Genghis Khan came to power

  Under Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongol Empire links the conquered territories to great effect. The Mongolian Peace allows a new freedom of trade from east to west and back again. Goods, merchants, and ideas travel more freely than ever. Unfortunately, so do rats and fleas.

  By now, man assumes he has dominion over all other creatures. But for the generations immediately following Genghis Khan, that assumption will be shaken when a barely visible enemy takes a free ride on the Mongols’ cross-continental highways and sea lanes and brings about the near annihilation of the known world. Disease will sweep from Asia into the Middle East and Europe. It is the Black Death, and it will kill nearly half of the human population. Mankind has reached one of its darkest hours.

  Meanwhile, isolated from this apocalypse, new civilizations rise in the Americas—continents not yet known to Europe that hold the key to civilization’s future.

  Mongolian felt-walled yurts have changed little from the time of Genghis Khan.

  1206 CE. THE MONGOL LEADER Temujin pitched his camp at the headwaters of the Onon River, near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun in Mongolia’s Khentii region. There he called for a kurultai: a gathering of the tribes. At forty, he was the most powerful leader in the vast, treeless steppes (semiarid grasslands) of his homeland. His authority reached from the Gobi Desert to the Arctic tundra, from the forests of Manchuria to the Altai Mountains in western China. He had earned his power in battle and killed the blood brother of his youth to defend it. But victory on the battlefield wasn’t enough to make him khan—or ruler—of all the “people of the felt walls.” He had to be publicly chosen by the kurultai. The tribes would vote with their feet. Those who acknowledged him as their ruler would come at his invitation. Those who rejected his rule, and his protection, would not send a representative.

  Tribe after tribe arrived in response to Temujin’s call, the largest kurultai in Mongol history. Soon a temporary city of felt huts, called yurts, surrounded Temujin’s campsite, stretching for miles in all directions. Vast herds of animals grazed nearby to provide milk and meat for the crowds. Young men competed in the traditional Mongol sports of wrestling, horse racing, and archery during the day and got drunk at night on koumiss, a powerful beverage made from fermented mare’s milk. Shamans drummed. Musicians crooned, the deep reverberation of Mongolian throat singing filled the night.

  After days of celebration, the tribes installed Temujin as their ruler. Hundreds of thousands of Mongols watched as Temujin was led to a black felt carpet that his followers had spread on the ground. A spokesman for the tribes pronounced him their leader, giving him a new name—Genghis Khan, “Universal Ruler.” His followers then lifted him up on his carpet and carried him to his throne, where the leaders of all the tribes and clans swore their loyalty to him.

  His mother had named him Temujin. He was the son of the chieftain of a small clan, the Borjigin, which survived its relationship to a larger clan, the Tayichigud, like a jackal scavenging from a lion’s leftovers. When Temujin was nine, his father was poisoned in an intertribal feud. Without a leader who could fight and hunt for the group, the larger clan had little use for Temujin’s clan and abandoned them to fend for themselves. For several years, Temujin, his father’s wives, and his siblings lived on small game, such as marmots and field mice, and on the few plants they could forage from the harsh landscape of the steppes.

  Genghis Khan battling with the Khitai and Jurje tribes

  In the meantime, the leader of the Tayichigud feared the boy Temujin would grow up and take revenge against the tribe that had turned his family into outcasts. When Temujin committed the unthinkable crime of murdering his older half brother, the official head of the exiled family, the Tayichigud leader used it as an excuse to hunt down and capture the adolescent. The boy was locked into a cangue, a device similar to a yoke or pillory, allowing him to walk but making it impossible to use his hands. With help from a family of war captives, Temujin escaped from captivity. When he returned to his own family, he discovered that his escape had made him a hero among the lower-class members of the Mongol tribes.

  GENGHIS KHAN AND

  GLOBAL WARMING

  We often forget how the climate can shape human history.

  Genghis Khan’s rise to power took place at the end of a period of relative warmth known as the Medieval Warming Period.

  For several centuries, from roughly 800 to 1200 CE, Europeans enjoyed mild winters, long summers, and good harvests. With the luxury of more stable food supplies, Europeans took the first steps out of the Dark Ages, rebuilding trade routes first within Europe and then with Asia. At the northernmost edge of Europe, the Norse took advantage of favorable ice conditions to travel to Iceland, Greenland,
and across the northern Atlantic.

  Warm centuries in Europe brought problems in other regions. Higher temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns created unpredictable climate swings. Extended periods of drought contributed to the end of the Chaco Canyon culture in New Mexico and Angkor Wat in modern Cambodia, and weakened the Mayan states of Central America. In Mongolia, the Medieval Warming Period meant a hotter, drier climate and reduced grazing land for Mongol horses, prompting Genghis Khan to mobilize his armies to the east to conquer more fertile lands. In this case, global warming actually helped contribute to the expansion of the empire.

  Today the Medieval Warming Period is a hot button in global warming discussions. People who don’t believe humans have caused global warming point to the medieval experience as an example of a natural rise in temperature with positive effects that was followed by the cooler conditions of the Little Ice Age. In fact, the Medieval Warming Period was several degrees cooler than the recorded mean temperature since 1971.

  Over the next two decades, Temujin attracted a small group of followers drawn from several different tribes and clans. This band of devotees became a pseudoclan based on ability and loyalty rather than family relationships. Temujin also made two important allies. He entered into a blood-brother relationship with the ambitious, young Jamukha, a member of a distantly related Mongol clan of higher status than Temujin’s Borjigin. He then offered allegiance to a man named Toghrul, a powerful Mongol leader who had been the blood brother to Temujin’s father. Toghrul accepted him as a sort of stepson.

  Over time Temujin earned a reputation as a skilled war leader. With each success in the field, more tribes acknowledged him as their ruler. He began to systematically eliminate all rivals, including Toghrul and Jamukha. As his following grew, he reorganized Mongol society from tribes into units of a thousand people. By the time the tribes proclaimed him the Universal Ruler, Temujin—now Genghis Khan—had transformed the tribes into what he called the Great Mongol Nation. Under his leadership, the Mongol nation would grow into an empire.

  Having unified Mongolia, Genghis Khan turned toward China, which had a long history of conflict with the Mongol tribes. Like the Xiongnu and other steppe tribes, Mongols had raided the Chinese border for centuries. Previously, the Chinese had dealt with the nomad tribes by manipulating tribal divisions. Now the Mongol tribes were united. China was not.

  GLOBAL TEMPERATURES

  When Genghis Khan first set his sights on China, it was divided into a number of kingdoms that often fought among themselves. Three were larger and more important than the rest: the Tangut and Jin dynasties in the north, themselves descendants of Central Asian nomadic tribes and the Sung dynasty in the south.

  Genghis Khan defeated the Tangut in 1211, leaving the dynasty in control of their own lands in exchange for tribute and their oath of loyalty as vassals of the Mongols. He then marched against the Jin. Mongol forces besieged the Jin capital of Zhongdu (modern Beijing) in 1215. Zhongdu’s ruler, Xuanzong, known to his subjects as the Golden King, only lasted a week before reluctantly surrendering at the urging of his councilors. Genghis Khan offered the same treaty terms to the Jin ruler that he had offered to the Tangut. The Golden King paid the Mongols a handsome tribute of silks, gold, silver, three thousand horses, and five hundred slaves. He became a vassal of Genghis Khan and gave the Mongol one of his daughters as a wife.

  The Mongol forces withdrew, leaving the countryside around Zhongdu untouched. As soon as the Mongols were gone, Xuanzong broke the terms of his treaty, fleeing south with his family, his leading generals, and his courtiers.

  Though tired of the dirt of city life and longing for the open grasslands of the steppes, Genghis Khan reversed course and marched his army, fifty thousand strong, back into China. The leader of the Great Mongol Nation could not tolerate betrayal by a newly conquered underling, not if his empire was to keep growing—and become the largest in world history.

  The Mongols eventually took Zhongdu with the help of Genghis Khan’s new Chinese allies, including some of the Jin forces left behind to guard the city. The terms of surrender given to Zhongdu’s surviving leaders were brutal. The Mongols got to engage in a twenty-day pillaging. To pay their army, the Mongol leaders permitted the looting of conquered peoples. When this looting period was up, they torched the city. As a final punishment, the Mongols trampled the surrounding fields, turning plowed farmland into pasturage for their livestock.

  MONGOL SIEGE

  ON AN OPPRESSIVELY HOT SEPTEMBER DAY IN 1214, Zhongdu’s 350,000 inhabitants are in a frenzied panic, running through the streets, balancing small children and prized possessions—gold, silver, porcelain—in their bare arms. Word has spread that Genghis Khan and his armies are returning. Because of the treachery of their Golden King, the people in this walled city know that Genghis Khan will show them no mercy. The sight of their own Chinese soldiers marching in formation toward the city’s barricades does nothing to reassure them.

  Where can they go for safety? Unfortunately, there is nowhere for them to hide from the barbarians rapidly approaching their gates. Better for them to be on the move, they decide, than to wait at home for an inevitably brutal end at the hands of the dreaded Mongols.

  One teenage girl knows exactly where she is headed as she breaks away from the sea of people running in every direction through the streets of Zhongdu. Reaching an unguarded section of stone wall, she stops to look around before beginning her ascent. Finally, at the top, the girl grows dizzy as she peers at the ground on the other side of the wall, and the three moats ringing its eighteen-mile length.

  When she looks up, the girl sees an even more ominous sight: a long cloud of dust rising from the horizon. She is sure it is the advancing Mongol army on horseback. Seeing the enemy in the near distance makes the girl even more determined to complete the task that brought her here.

  A little farther down from where she crouches, two Chinese soldiers take their positions in one of nine hundred guard towers atop the wall. As they prepare their bows and arrows for the Mongol onslaught, the soldiers fail to notice the girl stand up and move her toes to the wall’s edge. Nor do they see her leap forward into the air. Only after her body thuds to the ground do the two men turn and look down. They point at her body but do not scramble down to see if the girl has survived. They know she will not be the last Chinese girl or woman to jump today.

  Some sixty thousand young women throw themselves from the bastion of the fortress that day. Meanwhile, the same fear that causes young girls to leap to their deaths is driving Chinese farmers who live outside the walled city to do as they’re ordered. The Mongols force them to push a wheeled battering ram into the Zhongdu city gates. They use other Chinese prisoners as human shields against the defending Chinese army, whose arrows fly through the air en masse, only to kill their own people. Still, the Chinese forces will manage to resist the Mongol takeover for ten long months of siege and starvation before they are finally forced to surrender in June 1215.

  Leaving his generals to finish the subjugation of China, Genghis Khan left China and marched his 150,000 warriors more than a thousand miles to the west to defeat the Turkish state of Khwarazm, which had rejected his overtures of peace. In a campaign considered savage even for these brutal times, Mongol horsemen crushed a Turkish force that outnumbered them two to one and sent its leader Muhammad II fleeing for his life.

  Genghis Khan pursued the Khwarezmid forces into Afghanistan and Persia, defeating all who opposed him. The Mongols sacked cities, killing everything down to the cats and dogs. They burned fields and destroyed crops. In Persia, they destroyed the qanat, the underground canal systems that irrigated the fields, transforming what is now western Iran and northern Afghanistan from a fertile region into the desert it is today.

  In the West, Genghis Khan is remembered primarily for the ferocity of his campaign against Khwarazm. Among the Mongols he was known as a liberal ruler and administrator. He was magnanimous to those who surrendered; he slaughte
red those who did not. He ordered a scribe to create a written language from the spoken Mongolian tongue. Once a written language was in place, he created a sweeping law code known as the Great Yasa. His legal code made no distinction between conqueror and conquered. He rebuilt selected cities among those he destroyed in the course of conquest, and took care to restore a subjugated region’s economy on a sound footing.

  Genghis Khan’s greatest accomplishment was the Mongolian Peace. For the first time ever, the trade routes from China through Central Asia to the West were under the control of one power. Genghis Khan and his successors actively promoted trade. Like the Persians before them, they built shelters every twenty to thirty miles along the major highways. These shelters served as relay stations that provided fresh horses to imperial messengers and as rest stops for traveling merchants. They provided provisions, guides through difficult terrain, and armed protection to merchant caravans. The level of service the shelters provided to a traveler was tied to a graded system of passports called piazzas. Each piazza was a gold, silver or wooden tablet that allowed its holder to travel throughout the empire under Mongol protection.

  With travelers assured of protection, transportation, and accommodations, Asia’s highways were safer than they had ever been. The number of caravans increased. For the first time merchants were able to travel from east to west and back again.