In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  The Naadam archers are the last survivors of the deadly Mongol mounted bowmen who revolutionised the medieval battlefield just as English longbowmen were to overturn the dominance of the heavily armoured Western knight. Where the English long bow had a range of 250 yards, the double-curved Mongol war-bow of sinew and wood sent its arrows even further, and in battle the Mongol horse-archer opened fire at a range that shocked his opponents. In Liddell Hart’s opinion, the Mongols added to their advantage by inventing the technique of ‘rolling fire’, softening up the opposition with a forward barrage of arrows and, later, adding mobile catapults and artillery to their onslaught. Under this hail of projectiles their enemies fell ‘like the leaves in autumn’ without even getting to grips with the Mongol army, according to one awed European chronicler. Every trooper had two bows, one for long-range and one for short-range work, and was sent into battle with a minimum of sixty arrows which included a fearsome range of special arrows - armour-piercing arrows, fire arrows which laid down smokescreens, even whistling arrows whose tones, combined with the signals from black and white flags, were used to control the manoeuvres of the squadrons. This more than anything terrified the opposition. The Mongol cavalry wheeled and turned, fell back and advanced in perfect unison and total silence, until the heavily armed strike force of lancers on their leather-plated chargers delivered the crushing blow.

  But the most obvious reason for Mongol military success under Genghis Khan was their superior horsemanship. Even now no other nation on earth is so dependent on the horse, nor so accustomed to its management. Herdsmen still teach their children to ride at the same time as they learn to walk, and although the horse races at Naadams were previously ridden by arats on unbroken horses, now the jockeys are children seldom more than 12 years old. The Mongols take it for granted that every Mongol child can ride, and so the purpose of a race must be to test the horse, not the jockey. I went out into the grassland south of Ulaan Baatar to watch the extraordinary sight of at least 200 children, girls as well as boys, many wearing gaily coloured cloth hats like the paper hats from Christmas crackers, assemble at the start of the race. The army had been called in to help. A long line of soldiers held the bridles until the signal sounded, and then the entire mob of excited horses suddenly surged forward in an uncontrolled charge with the rumble of unshod hooves underscoring the high-pitched yelps of excited children screaming their mounts onward. By Western standards the races are marathons. They can vary from 9 miles for 2-year-old horses, to over 17 miles for adult animals. During my visit a 4-year-old jockey won a major race, and he was riding bareback.

  7 - Leaving Erdenzu

  On the whole, our trial ride in the Hentei had been very promising. Paul and I agreed that it had been a spectacular experience to ride with arats like Dampildorj and see for ourselves the stunning scenery of the Hentei wilderness as it emerged from six months of winter refrigeration. The lifestyle of the flamboyantly dressed herdsmen, the obos, the unaffected and sincere ceremony in honour of Genghis Khan on the summit of Burkhan Khaldun, even the off-putting diet, all had been exotic and memorable. On a technical level I could see the reasons for the lack of expedition organisation and the slack planning which had meant that we proceeded in fits and starts, ran out of food, and never seemed quite sure what would happen in the next twenty-four hours. In Mongolia it was difficult, if not impossible, to lay in extra stores or find good-quality tents and kit, and the system of central state organisation was so cumbersome that everything you tried to arrange in advance happened in slow motion. Yet in the long run these deficiencies did not matter. Certainly they had not deterred the Hentei trial ride, and we had achieved our objective with some panache. Gerel, who had been in charge, had proved himself to be every bit as good a field man as I had hoped, and Bayar, cheerful and competent, was a real gem. The vet and the pony-tailed doctor, as Ariunbold and Gerel had seen for themselves, were not suitable team members, and would be let go. But it was Ariunbold himself, as far as I was concerned, who was still the enigma. He was a prime mover in the highly ambitious project to ride to France, which he and Gerel had set their hearts on, yet he had seemed always to be slightly out of step with the other members of the group as we rode to Burkhan Khaldun. He was immediately to the fore when it came to officiating at horse-giving ceremonies or making speeches to the local commune officials. But he was not a leader when it came to making practical decisions. Gerel had done that unhesitatingly, while Ariunbold remained detached yet trying to make it clear that he too was in authority. I was uneasy about Ariunbold’s behaviour.

  One lesson from the trial ride did worry me: neither Gerel nor Ariunbold showed any real appreciation of the variety of conditions they would encounter if their proposed expedition left Mongolia. Yet they were convinced that what was the right thing to do inside Mongolia was also the correct method when they left the country, whatever the circumstances. I found it a disturbing mixture of inflexibility and chauvinism. Sometimes their obstinacy showed up in relatively minor practical matters. For example, I advised that the expedition horses would need to wear shoes if they were to travel really long distances. But neither Gerel nor Ariunbold would hear of it. Mongol horses did not have to wear shoes, they told me flatly. In fact I later observed that this was not the case - cattle drovers in the west of Mongolia, whom Gerel and Ariunbold had never seen, did shoe their horses because they rode 300 or 400 miles on cattle drives, taking steers to be sold to meat-packers in the Soviet Union. But this was not how Gerel and Ariunbold approached the question. They knew what was best because this was - or so they thought - the traditional Mongol way. By extension, their intransigence spilled over into a tendency to see their proposed expedition as a Mongol venture which would somehow bestow a privilege on the people they encountered. Several times I tried to explain to them how they would need to rely on the help of a whole army of different nationalities and cultures - Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians and so forth - if they rode towards Europe. The only way to succeed was to welcome local peoples fully to the expedition, integrate as much as possible, and make the ride truly international. But once again I encountered an adverse current. This was to be a Mongol expedition celebrating historic Mongol achievements, and the people they encountered should appreciate the unique contact offered to them. Gerel was sure that art galleries in the West would want to buy his sculptures; Ariunbold was confident that journals and magazines would queue up asking him to write about his experiences; and Bayar had visions of making an award-winning documentary film. It was fruitless to warn them that the world outside Mongolia might not place the same high value on their efforts. Looking ahead, I saw the danger that my Mongol colleagues would fall victim to their own feeling of self-importance.

  The main part of our trans-Mongolian ride began six weeks after the Hentei journey. This time it was Ariunbold’s turn to be in charge. During the interval I had gleaned a little more about his background. By Mongolian standards Ariunbold had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He had been a child during the last years of Choybalsan’s dictatorship and lived most of his life under the regime of his hardline successor, Tsedenbal, who had a Russian wife and fostered a personality cult. Ariunbold was rumoured to be part Russian himself, and certainly his family was very well regarded in Party circles. In a rigidly communist society this meant that the boy had received every advantage. After secondary school Ariunbold had been selected for a coveted place at the training centre for bright young stars from the Soviet satellite countries - the Higher Party School in Leningrad. There he studied Party theory and government, acquired his very polished and professional style, and perfected a command of Russian which he spoke virtually without any trace of a foreign accent. On his return to Ulaan Baatar he had been rewarded with the most coveted position for a young man in the Mongolian official hierarchy - he was appointed secretary to the Chairman of the Praesidium, Tsedenbal himself. Young, good-looking, and with impeccable credentials, Ariunbold was poised to climb to the very highest rung
s of the Party apparatus. Yet something had gone wrong, and there were rumours: that he was lazy and shallow, and a womaniser. His subsequent career, as much of it as came out in casual conversation, seemed to confirm these reports. He had never fulfilled his early potential. He lost his job as secretary to Tsedenbal and was sent abroad, to work as a diplomat in the Mongolian embassy in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, and then further demoted to being a journalist. In Bulgaria, it was alleged, his philandering had been a severe embarrassment. When he was recalled to Ulaan Baatar his wife, a musician, stayed behind in Sofia. It was obvious to me that as secretary to the Mongolian National Committee to the UNESCO Silk Roads Project, Ariunbold had been in an ideal position to intercept any state patronage for the venture and make sure that he was selected to lead the preliminary sector within Mongolia. Reluctantly I also had to admit the possibility that he regarded the expedition as his chance to reverse the downward spiral of his career. In an unguarded moment he let slip that he intended to use it to his personal advantage as a way of gaining publicity in Mongolia and then to enter politics.

  His approach to organising the new phase of the expedition was dismaying. He disappeared from Ulaan Baatar for weeks at a time, and made no contact with either Gerel or Bayar, who did not know where to find him. He also failed to make sure that the new equipment required for the ride was ready. It was obvious that a new tent was needed to replace the tattered wreck that had been used in the Hentei. Ariunbold boasted that he had obtained some special lightweight cloth from a Japanese television company and would arrange to have the new tent made by seamstresses. But then he vanished before the tent was finished, and when he returned he ordered the trio of cheerful Mongol seamstresses to devote their energies to sewing fancy costumes for the Mongol team members. Paul and I went to the apartment where they were doing the stitching. What we found was not encouraging. Ariunbold, who had not been seen for weeks, put in an appearance in order to try on his costume, and primped and preened in front of the mirror so that it was all too obvious that the glamour rather than the substance of the project was his interest. Three special saddles had also been ordered. They would be replicas of medieval Mongol saddles. But I was depressed to observe that Ariunbold selfishly made sure that his own saddle would be ready on time. He did not seem to care that the saddles for his Mongol companions were still pieces of wood and leather only a day before the expedition was due to leave Ulaan Baater. I said nothing because I did not feel it was my place to intervene in what was still a Mongol-organised venture inside Mongolia, and the day was rapidly approaching when we should all go to the starting point of the main ride - the former imperial capital at Karakorum.

  Karakorum lies at what is virtually the centre of Greater Mongolia. If one were to draw a series of lines diametrically across the main area of Mongol-speaking peoples, they would converge in the hilly countryside of the upper Orhon river, not far from the site of present-day Karakorum. This pivotal position is the reason why for centuries Karakorum was the notional, if not always real, hub of the Mongol empire. Genghis Khan himself never had time to establish his capital there because his headquarters remained mobile, still shifting with the seasonal migration patterns and moving from place to place in response to the foreign campaigns he was fighting. But his grand camp must have been set up regularly in the vicinity of Karakorum, and by the time his son Ögodei became Khakhan in 1229 (there was a two-year interregnum between Genghis Khan’s death and Ögodei’s formal enthronement as Great Khan) it had been decided to build some permanent structures there so that the imperial caravan had somewhere to halt, conduct business and - not least - entertain visiting ambassadors and tribal leaders who rode in from the far-flung provinces. It was to the area of Karakorum that Carpini’s guides hastily brought their elderly, overweight and half-martyred Franciscan charge to be at hand for the enthronement of Ögodei’s successor Güyük. And here in 1254 came the man who next described the Mongol empire for Europeans: Carpini’s fellow Franciscan, William of Rubruck, whom we shall shortly meet. Even when Genghis Khan’s famous grandson, Kubilai Khan, became Khakhan in 1259 and preferred to maintain his capital in China, Karakorum remained nominally the focus of the Mongol empire, and centre of the homeland to which all Mongols were attached emotionally at that time and ever since.

  Three weeks before the official start of the main sector of the expedition in July, Paul and I had been to Karakorum to reconnoitre. The town itself was an example of the small drab Mongolian country town which we would see several times in the next few weeks. There were one or two ugly concrete municipal offices set beside the central square, an antiquated coal-fired electricity power station with its rusty metal chimney held up by guy wires, a fuel dump on the outskirts for passing jeeps and trucks, and several hundred gers laid out in town blocks separated by unmade and potholed side-roads. Each block was surrounded by rickety wooden palings because a bureaucratic regulation required that unless a ger was enclosed by a fence, it could not have a house number and therefore postal and other services would not be provided. Presumably this rule had been thought up by someone in central government as yet another attempt to restrict the nomadic inclination of the population, which sat uneasily with socialist doctrine.

  Less than a mile from the edge of town stood the oldest and once the grandest Buddhist monastery in all Mongolia, the huge lamasery of Erdenzu. In its heyday it had housed 10,000 lamas who worshipped at no fewer than sixty temples enclosed within the imposing outer wall. No other building better symbolised the former glory and recent misdirection of Mongolian life.

  When the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party took power in 1921, they inherited a country that had evolved into one of the strangest societies on earth. It was a grotesque church-state run to seed. In a land where there were only a half a dozen settled towns, there were 700 large monasteries and at least 1000 smaller ones. The king of this bizarre country was also its high priest. Further, he was a Living Buddha and outranked only by the ‘Two Jewels’ of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas of Tibet. That this priest-king suffered from syphilis, was going blind so that he hid his tortured eyes behind smoked glasses, and was a sexual deviant was of no particular consequence. It is estimated that four out of every ten male Mongols was a lama or a serf of the church, and the piety of the ordinary Mongols was so deep-rooted and absolute that their Lord, the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, (his full title was Venerable Incarnation of Jebstundamba, Sainted and Brightest Emperor, to which he added the reign title ‘Exalted by All’) or Exalted Revelation, was revered as the spiritual and effective leader of the country despite the fact that he enjoyed exchanging clothes and playing role-reversal games with one of his male servants, was paralytically drunk for weeks at a time, and had as his second consort or ‘the Holy Goddess’, the former wife of a wrestler, who was notorious for her sexual capers with other lamas, including her hairdresser, in a so-called ‘oracle tent’.

  Unsurprisingly, the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu’s first predecessor at seven times removed had claimed to be a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. The first Exalted Revelation had filled a power vacuum left when the last emperor of the united Mongols, a much diminished version of the Great Khan, had been driven from the country by rival factions in the mid-16th century and the Mongol homelands had degenerated for the next 100 years into little more than a cockpit for squabbling warlords. By then the huge Mongol world empire established by Genghis Khan and his immediate heirs must have seemed like a fantasy. In 1638 the Chinese had expelled the Mongol dynasty, the Yuan, which the Golden Family under Kubilai Khan had imposed on them in Peking. Twenty years ago Chinese armies had marched into the Mongol homeland, burned Karakorum and crushed the Mongol tribes. In his flight the last Mongolian emperor tried to make off with the relics from the Genghis Khan shrine in the Ordos, hoping that their possession would guarantee his return. He died in mysterious circumstances and the relics were replaced, but the Chinese made it a matter of policy that never again would Mongolia be able to threa
ten them with a resurrection of the Oceanic Ruler. They successfully reduced the chiefs of Mongolia into the role of Chinese vassals, obliging them to pay annual tribute, to accept Chinese governors and high officials and to journey periodically to China to pledge allegiance. (1) Mongolia was treated as China’s empty backyard, a vast zone deliberately neglected on the principle that the least development was in the best Chinese interests.

  According to one theory, the Chinese introduced Tibetan lamaism to Mongolia in order to sap the fighting spirit of the Mongols. But in fact lamaism dated a long way back in Mongolian history, and Carpini’s successor, William of Rubruck, found a lamasery already established at Karakorum. Brother William went to Mongolia with the approval of Louis IX of France, who wanted him to serve as his unofficial messenger, (2) though personally Rubruck was rather more interested in finding a group of Germans who had been taken prisoner by the Mongols as he hoped to administer to their spiritual needs. In Karakorum Rubruck spent a good deal of his time poking around the lama temples and the tents of the shamans and asking questions about their religious beliefs. He was very irritated that the lamas frequently observed a rule of silence and refused to respond to his badgering, but nevertheless he supplied Europe with its first meaningful description of Buddhism. ‘All their priests’, he wrote in the report of the trip which he prepared for King Louis:

  shave their heads all over and their beards, and they wear saffron garments and observe chastity from the time they shave their heads. They live together, one or two hundred in one community. When they go into their temple, they bring two benches, and they sit on the floor facing each other, choir to choir, holding their books in their hands and these from time to time they put down on the benches .... They have also in their hands wherever they go, a string of one or two hundred beads just as we carry our rosaries, and they always say these words ‘On man baccam’, that is ‘Oh God, Thou knowest.’ (Rubruck’s rendering of Om mani padme hum - Hail to the jewel in the lotus. - The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, translated by Peter Jackson, Hakluyt Society, 1990.)