Genghis Khan did not get a chance to enjoy his empire. In 1226, at age sixty-four, he led his soldiers once again toward China, where the Tangut had risen in rebellion. Early in his march to the east, he fell from his horse and suffered serious internal injuries. His doctors and his generals begged the elderly ruler to stop and rest. Growing steadily weaker, Genghis Khan refused to turn back. In August 1227, the Mongol ruler died as he had begun, in a nomad’s felt yurt.
HORSES AND OTHER WEAPONS OF WAR
Humans have always used their ingenuity to find more deadly ways of waging war. Like other great conquerors, Genghis Khan pushed the limits of available technology to create armed horsemen who were more powerful than either man or horse would be alone.
The Mongols fought on horseback using a double recurve composite bow made of several different types of wood, animal horn, and sinew, held together with strong glue made from boiled fish bladders. The famous English longbow, from the same period, could shoot an arrow an impressive 750 feet; the Mongol bow could shoot an arrow 1,050 feet. Their horses were strong and fast, but small enough that a Mongol warrior could grip his horse with his legs, hang over one side, and fire his arrows beneath the horse’s belly. Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who saw Mongol forces in action, said, “Their horses are so well-broken-in to quick-change movements, that upon the signal given, they instantly turn in every direction; and by these rapid maneuvers many victories have been obtained.”
Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols adapted weapons from other cultures with whom they came in contact, creating a flexible arsenal unmatched by their contemporaries. Instead of carrying siege engines with them, they carried something much more powerful—engineers who could create siege engines on the spot. In addition to hurling rocks and fire, the way besieging armies had done for centuries, the Mongols’ siege engines also threw pots of burning liquids, exploding devices, and incendiary materials. They created immense crossbows mounted on wheels and portable towers with retractable ladders from which they could shoot down on defenders of the walls. When confronted by a moated city, they pushed prisoners of war forward to fill the moat, creating living ramps for their siege engines.
Conflict often pushes mankind to make the next leap in innovation. At the end of World War II, America also created new technologies that raised the stakes of war. By pooling the knowledge of the world’s leading physicists, America tapped the power of one of the primordial elements that have existed on earth unchanged since the Big Bang: uranium. Scientists used radioactive uranium to break apart the nucleus of the atom, producing an explosion of electromagnetic and kinetic energy capable of unimaginable destruction. Taming the atom was the closest we have yet come to re-creating our own cosmic birth in the Big Bang.
TRADITIONAL ENGLISH LONGBOW
The traditional English longbow, made from a single piece of wood, revolutionized
warfare in Europe. It had a maximum range of around 250 meters. Because of it’s
length it was practical only for use by foot soldiers.
MONGOLIAN COMPOSITE BOW
GENGHIS THE GREAT?
“Ruthless conqueror, responsible for the deaths of thousands.” The phrase could describe Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte as easily as it does Genghis Khan. But Alexander the Great is hailed as one of the greatest generals of all time. Depending on your national alliance, Napoleon Bonaparte is either the beloved Little Corporal or the Monster of Corsica, but no one doubts he was a military genius. Genghis Khan, on the other hand, is often depicted as a bloodthirsty barbarian.
When you look at the details, how do these three great conquerors of history stack up?
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(356–323 BCE)
BORN: Son and heir of the king of Macedonia
EDUCATED: Tutored by Aristotle
COMES TO POWER: Inherited the throne at age 20
SIZE OF ARMY: 32,000 men
AREA CONQUERED: 2 million square miles
DIED: Age 33, after a drunken orgy
LEGACY: Alexander’s sons were murdered and his empire divided among his generals.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
(1769–1821 CE)
BORN: Son of a Corsican lawyer, who claimed to be descended from Tuscan nobility
EDUCATED: Five years at the French military college at Brienne
COMES TO POWER: Coup d’état
SIZE OF ARMY: 600,000 men
AREA CONQUERED: 720,000 square miles
DIED: Age 52, in exile on Elba Island. Possibly poisoned
LEGACY: Napoleon’s empire was dismantled at the Congress of Vienna. His nephew used Bonaparte’s prestige to become Emperor Napoleon III.
GENGHIS KHAN
(1162–1227 CE)
BORN: Orphaned son of a tribal chieftain
EDUCATED: Illiterate
COMES TO POWER: Acclaimed the Universal Ruler by the combined Mongol tribes after twenty years of making and breaking alliances
SIZE OF ARMY: 110,000 mounted horsemen
AREA CONQUERED: Between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles, the largest empire ever conquered by a single man
DIED: Age 65, surrounded by family and soldiers, on his way to new conquests in China
LEGACY: His descendants ruled his empire for 150 years.
At the time of Genghis Khan’s death, his rule stretched from Beijing to the Aral Sea, the largest empire ever conquered by a single commander. His final command to his sons and generals was to keep his death a secret and continue the campaign against the Tangut.
ON APRIL 8, 1241, A NEW GENERATION of Mongols was traveling towards Europe. A hastily assembled army of twenty-five thousand soldiers—Teutonic Knights, German gold miners, Templars, Hospitallers, and Polish levies of foot soldiers and cavalry—waited for them at Liegnitz in modern Poland. The European troops were battle hardened. They outnumbered the approaching force by some five thousand men. But still they trembled. For two months now, the Mongol horsemen had ravaged the Polish countryside, fighting with a speed and ferocity that bewildered the European troops.
The Mongol commander, Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu, was aware that King Wenceslas of Bohemia was only a day’s march away with reinforcements. The European commander, Duke Henry II of Silesia, was not. Batu decided to strike before the reinforcements arrived.
The Mongols rode forward. To European eyes, their small, sturdy horses looked like something a child would ride, compared to the horses of the Polish cavalry. Cheered, the Polish cavalry advanced, only to be driven back by volleys of arrows from the powerful Mongol bows. Seeing what he thought was a small army, Duke Henry II ordered his own cavalry and the Teutonic Knights to attack. To their surprise, the Mongols retreated. When the Europeans pursued them, the Mongols broke formation, seeming to flee in disarray. Henry and the remaining knights followed, leaving the infantry behind in their eagerness to take part in the destruction of the fearsome barbarians.
Suddenly, more Mongol cavalry appeared, flanking the attacking knights and separating them from the infantry. The Mongols carried smoking pots that obscured the field with dense clouds. With the knights trapped between two wings of Mongols, the nomads attacked them with a shower of arrows. As bewildered and wounded knights rode out of the smoke, the Mongols to their rear turned and attacked the infantry. Duke Henry was killed in the rout.
At the time of Genghis Khan’s death, his rule stretched from Beijing to the Aral Sea, the largest empire ever conquered by a single commander.
By day’s end, bodies of fallen soldiers were strewn across the battlefield. The duke’s head was impaled on a Mongol lance and displayed to the surviving soldiers, a familiar tactic. A conquering European general might well do the same to the fallen commander. As shuddering Europeans watched, Mongol soldiers cut an ear off of each fallen enemy soldier, a practical if gruesome way to count the dead. It had been a bloody battle. His troops presented Batu with nine sacks of the grisly trophies.
BEFORE HE DIED, GENGHIS KHAN chose
his third son, Ögedei, to be the next Great Khan. With Mongol chieftains scattered across Western Asia and northern China, it took two years to assemble the kurultai needed to acknowledge him as ruler. Ögedei was known to drink too much koumiss, and some of the chieftains raised questions about whether he was fit to rule. But when the time came to vote, the transfer of power went smoothly. The Mongol tribes accepted Ögedei as their ruler.
Ögedei was as ambitious as his father. He believed that the primary Mongolian god, Eternal Blue Sky, had selected the Mongol tribes to rule the earth. To fulfill that destiny, he sent his nephew Batu and the respected general Subutai on a campaign to the west. Batu’s troops quickly conquered Kiev and Moscow, then swept into southeastern Europe, the legend of their fierceness preceding them. A group of eastern European dukes and princes formed a coalition to meet the threat. The heavily armored European knights were no match for the mobile nomads. The Mongols destroyed the allied forces at Liegnitz on April 8, 1241. Three days later, Subutai defeated the Hungarian army. The road to Vienna lay open. Batu and Subutai crossed the Danube and advanced on Vienna in mid-December. There seemed to be little hope for Europe.
Suddenly, the Mongol troops retreated without even sending a messenger to the city leaders, asking them to surrender. Europeans thought they had been saved by a miracle. In fact, the Mongols had received news that Ögedei had died, and the kurultai had once more been called to elect a new ruler.
Mongol Empire at the time of Genghis Khan’s death
Japanese monk Nichiren summoning the divine Shinpu wind to destroy the Mongol-Chinese fleet attacking Japan in the thirteenth century
THE DIVINE WIND
In the fall of 1274, Kublai Khan sent a force of forty thousand troops on nine hundred ships to conquer Japan. When they landed in November, the samurai came out prepared to battle the Mongols one on one. Dueling was not part of the Mongol military style. The Mongols fought as a unit, slaughtering the samurai. The Japanese retreated inland. Instead of following them, the Mongols withdrew to their ships. In the night, a fierce storm hit, capsizing much of the fleet and killing more than a quarter of the attackers. Kublai Khan’s forces withdrew but did not give up.
In 1281, Kublai Khan assembled a much larger force—140,000 men and more than four thousand ships. The Japanese held their attackers on a narrow strip of beach for fifty-three days. Then a major typhoon struck. The storm raged for two days, smashing the Mongol fleet against the rocks. Few of the ships survived; two-thirds of the Mongol force died. The Mongols retreated again.
Kublai Khan died before he could organize a third invasion fleet.
The Japanese believed the gods had protected them and dubbed the typhoons that saved them kamikazes, or divine winds.
Japan remained unconquered until the end of World War II.
Unlike his father, Ögedei had not chosen a successor. His death triggered a series of succession struggles between Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons. In 1251, ten years after Ögedei’s death, Genghis Khan’s grandson Möngke became the Great Khan.
Soon after taking power, Möngke headed to China to continue the conquest of the Sung dynasty, which Ögedei had begun. He sent his brother Hulagu to solidify Mongol rule in Persia and expand the empire into modern Iraq. Hulagu’s forces laid siege to Baghdad in 1258. The city’s defenses crumbled within a week, bringing the Abbasid Caliphate to an end. Under Möngke, the Mongol empire reached its greatest expanse, covering China, most of Russia, Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq.
In 1259, the death of a Great Khan once again brought an end to Mongol military campaigns and unleashed bitter succession struggles. The assembly of Mongol chieftains was unable to agree on the next Great Khan. Rival factions elected two of Möngke’s brothers and refused to compromise. The result was a bloody civil war.
It was 1264 before Genghis Khan’s ablest grandson, Kublai, succeeded his older brother Möngke as the ruler of the Mongols. Some members of the royal family refused to acknowledge him as the Great Khan; others gave him only symbolic recognition. During his reign, multiple power centers formed throughout the Mongol Empire as Genghis Khan’s other grandsons began to treat the regions under their control as semi-independent kingdoms. Kublai himself focused on China, to the detriment of the rest of the empire. He proclaimed himself the emperor of China, taking the reign name Zhenghong, or “Central Rule,” a Chinese approximation of Genghis Khan. He unified China for the first time since the Han dynasty and founded the Yuan dynasty, which would rule China for ninety years.
MARCO POLO
In 1271 CE Italian merchants Niccolò and Maffeo Polo set out on a voyage from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan in China. The Polo brothers had been guests of the Chinese court before and were eager to return. Niccolò’s seventeen-year-old son, Marco, traveled with them on the four-year voyage across the Near East and Central Asia.
The young Venetian quickly became a favorite of Kublai Khan. During his time at the Mongol court, Marco traveled with diplomatic missions to Persia, India, and Southeast Asia. He served on the emperor’s council. He even held the position of tax collector in the city of Yangzhou for three years. He never learned Chinese, but neither did most of the Mongols in the Great Khan’s court. Like them, Marco became fluent in the languages of the Mongolian ruling classes: Persian and Mongolian.
Seventeen years after they arrived, the Polos left China, escorting a Mongolian princess who was to marry the Khan of Persia. They sailed to Persia by way of Sumatra and South India, then traveled overland to Constantinople. They finally reached Venice in 1295, carrying a fortune in precious stones.
Marco Polo would probably never have written his account of their travels if he hadn’t volunteered to command a galley in the ongoing war between Venice and Genoa. Captured during a skirmish, he spent a year in prison at Genoa, where he amused his fellow prisoners with stories of his travels. His audience included a writer of romance tales, who urged Marco to write down the story of his travels. Popularly known at the time as, Marco Polo’s travels was a fourteenth-century best seller.
No Great Khan took Kublai Khan’s place at his death. Instead the Mongol Empire was divided into four independent khanates: the Great Khan, which ruled over East Asia; the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia; the Il-Khanate of Persia; and the Kipchak Khanate in southern Russia, known in the West as the Golden Horde.
A descendent of Genghis Khan still ruled in Bukhara when the Soviets took the city in 1920.
In the thirteen century, the world was more stable than it had been for centuries. Trade was flourishing. Empires were growing. Technology was advancing.
No one could have imagined that an invisible enemy would come close to destroying humankind and the civilizations of Eurasia: an emeny that traveled on the trade routes that mankind had created, causing devastation greater than any conquering army had ever inflicted.
IN 1346, MONGOL FORCES UNDER the command of Janibeg, the Khan of the Golden Horde, besieged the Genovese trading city of Caffa in the Crimea. The Italian merchants had built the city as a trading post for their sale of Russian slaves to Egypt. Sometimes the Mongol rulers cooperated with the Italian slave traders; sometimes they tried to suppress the trade and expel the Genovese. Janibeg was trying to close the post. Then the plague broke out among his Mongol troops, killing more men than did the Genovese defenders of Caffa.
They fell by the dozens, dying so quickly they could not be buried. The Mongols were forced to withdraw. But in a final act of aggression, the Mongols loaded their catapults with the bodies of their own plague victims and flung them into the city—in a bid to have the Italians share their sufferings.
Marco Polo’s Travels
BIOWARFARE
The Mongols were not the only people to use biological warfare against an enemy.
The practice of using infectious bacteriological agents as tactical or strategic weapons of war appears again and again in human history. In the eighteenth century, British officers tried to spread smallpox to indigenous
tribes who resisted their spread into new territories in North America. The Japanese used plague and cholera against the Chinese in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Nazis and Soviets were also known to have tested and used biological weapons.
The United States joined the international treaty against the offensive use of biological or chemical weapons in 1975. Today, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, more than ten countries are suspected to have continuing offensive biological warfare programs, including Russia, Israel, China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Offensive biological warfare programs in Iraq were dismantled after the first Gulf War (1990-1991). Libya dismantled and disavowed its biological warfare program in 2003. The fate of the old Soviet biological warfare program, including stockpiles of weaponized smallpox and anthrax, remains undocumented.
Siege machines such as the trebuchet could be used to launch plague-infested corpses into castles being attacked.
U.S. military personnel training for potential biological warfare.
The Genovese threw the Mongol bodies into the sea as quickly as they came over the wall, but it made no difference. The besieged city’s close quarters provided perfect conditions for the disease to spread. The plague spread through Caffa as rapidly as it had through the Mongol military camp. Panicked Italian merchants abandoned the city, carrying infected rats aboard with them
The Black Death didn’t start at Caffa. The first known plague epidemic hit China in 1331, killing 90 percent of the population of Hopei (Hebei) province. The disease traveled from China along the trade routes, black rats infested with disease-laden fleas traveling with caravans in grain wagons and bundles of trade goods.
Mankind Page 14
