In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  The environment has locked him in a world that is almost unimaginable for most outsiders. Charles Bawden cites the memoirs of a government official, Tales of an Old Secretary, published in Ulaan Baatar in 1956, which recount how as a young arat, he was caught in a dzud, the Mongol word for a natural calamity such as the late-season blizzard which freezes to death the emaciated cattle. The lad was 13 years old and had been sent out to watch over the family’s horse-herd when it began to snow. Soon the snowflakes were falling so heavily that:

  it was just like the depth of night. I groped around as if I were blind, unable to see the head of my mount, let alone the horses I was guarding ... Frozen ice tinkled on the body of my mount. He couldn’t keep from shivering, and made off neighing in some direction. Snow and ice were clinging to my outer clothing and I couldn’t even manage to knock it off. My mouth and nose were stiff with cold, and my hands and feet were nearly dropping off. Though I had on my furry goatskin overcoat I couldn’t keep warm. It was all I could do to think of surviving, and I settled down in a sheltered hollow wondering if I would ever outlive the blizzard and see my dear mother again. I shivered and shook ...

  The young man survived, but he never forgot his childhood sufferings. Neither did Choybalsan, the country’s malevolent dictator, whose family was so destitute that his mother placed him as a child in a lamasery where Choybalsan was so badly treated that he ran away and preferred to be a waif in the dingy streets of Urga.

  I had never doubted that I would still find the horse-handling skills that had made the Mongol cavalry the finest in the medieval world. The arat is a master of horsemanship, but in a style that would shock or mystify the Western purist. He has a rough-and-ready way with his horses because he lives with them constantly, drinks their milk, depends upon them for his transport. Simply put, the average scrawny Mongol horse is an integral part of his life, and there is no room for sentiment, any more than a dairy farmer would cherish his milch cows. Of course, the fastest and bravest riding horses are valued. The champion long-distance runners of Naadam are pampered and admired, and even the ordinary entrant in a Naadam race has its tail plaited and its forelock done up in a Mohican topknot that gives it a jaunty and surprised air. A 16th-century Chinese author, Hsiao Ta-heng, wrote how the Mongols ‘love good horses more than they love other animals. If they see a good horse they will gladly give three or four other horses for it. If they can obtain it, they will caress it.’ (1) But for the famed Mongol horses time has stood still or, like the modern culture of the people, even gone backwards. The Naadam champions would not shine in international long-distance competition. Other breeds have long ago been developed for more stamina or speed. Only in their hardiness are the Mongol horses still special. They survive where others would die and, like the Mongol traditions in Inner Mongolia, that quality has persisted from necessity and neglect, not from deliberate policy. When the great horse-herds were privately owned, there was more interest in breeding and improvement. With communal ownership, the sense of striving was lost. Significantly, it is now proposed that each herdsman should be allowed to own more private horses; seventy-five head of stock per family has been proposed, and a Mongol Horse Society has been founded to improve and promote the breed.

  There were two puzzles for which I could find no explanation. How was it, I often wondered, that a people who were so addicted to alcohol should have achieved so much? In the heyday of their success the Mongols were renowned for their drunkenness. Karakorum seemed to swim in an alcoholic haze. After the famous theological debate between the lamas and Nestorians Rubruck observed how the priests of both persuasions sat down together for a heavy drinking session which lasted the rest of the day, and he emerged from his final interview with the Great Khan Möngke suspicious that the supreme ruler of the Mongols was drunk throughout the meeting. Yet despite this constant toping the medieval Mongol machine continued to function, whereas today it is all too clear that alcoholism is a major problem among the country folk and in the city.

  The second puzzle was where and when the Mongol character lost direction. Margaash is the Mongol word for tomorrow, and has earned the same connotation as ‘mañana’. Complaints of margaashism are a commonplace in Soviet reports of the difficulties of working in modern Mongolia, and yet an outstanding feature of the Mongol empire was the promptness and efficiency of the Mongols themselves. Their army went to war on the very day that a military campaign had been planned six months earlier. A post-horse system with a million remounts could not have been run unless all the chores had been done on time.

  The only possible answer to these puzzles seems to lie, yet again, with the extraordinary domineering figure of Genghis Khan himself. The character, toughness and horsemanship of his people are not enough to explain the phenomenon of the Mongol empire. Nor can the success of Mongol arms be ascribed to the weakness of her neighbours. China and the great empire of Kwarezm were formidable opponents. The brilliance of Genghis Khan is the only explanation for so much that happened in the imperial heyday, and his genius goes much further than mere military skill. In many ways he remains an enigma, despite the invaluable insight from The Secret History of the Mongols. He must have been one of the world’s great natural leaders. He was 42 when he was recognised as the leader of the ‘people who live in felt tents’. His childhood was so beset with troubles, and the opportunities for advancement so slight, that it took him half his adult life to stitch together an alliance of what would have seemed very insignificant tribes. Yet nearly everything flowed from the decisions he made at that time as an obscure tribal leader: the men he picked to serve him, the military system he inaugurated with its royal bodyguard and a professional horse army, the personal awe that he acquired. On that foundation he built a world empire that took only twenty years to achieve.

  His military talent is manifest. Of his campaign against the Kwarezm Shah, Liddell Hart summarised that ‘in these harmoniously executed operations we see each of the principles of war - direction, mobility, security, concentration, and surprise - woven into a Nemesis-like web in which are trapped the doomed armies of the Shah’. In civil matters it was Genghis Khan’s direct descendants, particularly his sons Ögodei and Möngke who built up the structures of the huge Mongol world empire. But they took their direction from the principles laid down by their extraordinary father, whose sayings - apocryphal or otherwise - were faithfully combined into a collection of biligs or aphorisms summarising the wisdom of the Great Mongol. To the very end, those maxims were still being invoked by regimes that endured for 150 years in China, almost the same length of time in Persia, and in one form or another for three centuries on the steppes of Russia. It was an extraordinary homage from a small nation.

  Already when Rubruck was in Karakorum, Genghis Khan was treated as a god. The Franciscan friar thought it a blasphemy that the letter he was told to carry back to King Louis of France from Möngke should begin with the phrase: ‘This is the order of the everlasting God. In Heaven there is only one God; on earth there is only one lord, Genghis Khan. This is the word of the son of God.’ Seven and a half centuries later that divine aura still clings to the memory of the Father of the Nation and illuminates a modern cult worship. In the summer of our trans-Mongolian ride a great conference was called to ponder the subtleties of The Secret History of the Mongols. To the learned professors and eminent Mongolists who assembled in Ulaan Baatar from Japan, China, the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe, it was a chance to exchange ideas on the intricacies of language, folklore, provenance and interpretation. But to many ordinary Mongols it was something more. They saw it as international recognition of their long-neglected hero, his proper reinstatement in history. As part of the conference ceremonies, a stone pillar was to be erected at the spot where the unknown scribe who wrote The Secret History had penned the final lines. Some of the artists who had ridden with us in the Hentei had been carving the stone shaft that would be unveiled on that day. So excited was the public response to the occasion t
hat the government had to forbid people travelling to the site unless they had special permission. Thousands evaded the prohibition. The crowds which assembled at the pillar exceeded even those of the great Birthday Party in Ulaan Baatar. They circled the stone in an hysterical mass, moving clockwise as around a sacred obo. Next morning they came singly or in twos and threes to pray openly to the graven image on the column.

  So perhaps the real question has yet to be faced: what will happen if the genuine tomb of Genghis Khan is ever found? How will the Mongols then react? Already the archaeological search by the Mongol-Japanese expedition treads delicately. They have promised not to disturb the soil, only to survey the surface. But what will happen if their array of sensors and probes locates the underground chamber which reason tells them holds the corpse of Genghis Khan? Will the Mongols allow a god to be disinterred? If so, it will certainly be only Mongols who will be allowed to disturb the tomb. Or will today’s Mongols respect the wishes of the Great Ancestor and let him rest on the slopes of Burkhan Khaldun, the Mountain of the Shaman Spirit, as he had wished?

  Chapter Notes

  1 - In the Year of the Horse

  1. Mongol names, ancient as well as modern, have confusingly different spellings in both their traditional and their modernised versions, even in Mongolia itself. To muddy the water still further, outside Mongolia the name of the Great Mongol is sometimes spelled according to how his name was first reported. The accepted English version, which I use throughout as it is so well known, is derived from the early French transliteration of his name in the Persian sources which were studied by the pioneer Western historians of the Mongol empire. Presumably Chinggis Khan will become the eventual international spelling.

  2 - Heartland

  1. In The Modern History of Mongolia he writes that ‘there can be fewer blanker pages in the history of the civilised world than the story of Mongolia in the 19th century’.

  2. Carpini set out in 1245 on the instructions of Pope Innocent IV, ostensibly to carry a message to the Mongol Emperor. In fact his real task was to spy. He was gathering intelligence material about Mongol political and military intentions. He and his companions, two Czechs and Pole, all Franciscans, got back safely two years later and Carpini made what amounted to a lecture tour across northern Europe, warning of the dangers of a Mongol invasion.

  3. In The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, edited by Christopher Dawson, Sheen and Ward, 1955.

  4. Mongolia, the Tangut Country, and the Solitudes of Northern Tibet, translated by E. M. Morgan, 1876.

  5. Some idea of her forthright character can be gleaned from the fact that on her first trip she travelled alone and on her second her companion was a Mr Edward Gull of the Chinese Maritime Customs, whom she described as ‘a peppery little man’. She married him.

  3 - The Secret History

  1. The Mongols have had a mania for trying out different scripts, perhaps a sign of their position on a cultural crossroads. At various times the country has known ten different scripts based on Tibetan, Near Eastern and Russian originals.

  2. The History and the Life of Chinggis Khan, translated by Urgunge Onon, E. J. Brill, 1990.

  3. Two Venetians, Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, who travelled overland to the court of Kubilai Khan, Genghis’s grandson, were issued with a gold paiza to help them get back home. When they made a second trip to see Kubilai, still using the passport, they took along with them Nicolo’s son - Marco.

  7 - Leaving Erdenzu

  1. One Mongolian prince took with him to Peking six camel-loads of ice, presumably to cool his food and drink. Such ostentation must have delighted his Chinese hosts, as it further impoverished the ordinary Mongols who had to pay for this degree of extravagance.

  2. He travelled with a fellow Franciscan, Bartholomew of Cremona. We hear little about him except how he complained that at times he was so hungry that he felt he had never eaten in his life. When the time finally came to go home, Bartholomew could not face the rigours of the return journey to Europe and preferred to stay on in Karakorum.

  11 - The Lamas of Mandal

  1. There were some very odd religious hangers-on at court, including a fake Armenian priest called Sergius who claimed he had come from Jerusalem at God’s command to convert the Mongols. Segius was ‘swarthy and lank’, wore a haircloth tunic over an iron girdle, and, making claims to medical skill, doctored his patient, the French goldsmith who made the drinks dispenser, with a rhubarb stew. The victim barely survived.

  12 – The Sage

  1. It would not regain its former magnificence for another 180 years until, ironically, it achieved the status of Golden Samarkand under the warlord Tamerlane, Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine the Great,’ who consciously copied Genghis Khan and claimed a common ancestor. He even married into the ‘Golden Family’ so he could call himself ‘son-in-law’.

  16 – The Eternal Icon

  1. Cited in C. R. Bawden’s The Modern History of Mongolia, Kegan Paul International, London and New York 1968, and derived from Henry Serruys Pei-lou foung-su, Les Coutumes des Esclaves Septentrionaux in Monumenta Serica, 10 (1945).

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to express my gratitude to those who made possible my travels in Mongolia. At the head of the list comes Deputy Foreign Minister H. Olzvoi (now Mongolian Ambassador in Beijing). As Chairman of the Mongolian National Committee for the Silk Roads Project he smoothed my path and offered help whenever it was needed. His colleague, Ambassador Ishetsogian Ochirbal and his staff at the London embassy, set me on the right track, and from the UNESCO headquarters in Paris came the enthusiastic support of Doudou Diene, Eiji Hattori and their office for the Integral Study of the Silk Roads.

  Sirin Akiner of the School of African and Oriental Studies was generous in providing contacts throughout Central Asia. Nicolas Wolfers, Group Adviser to the International Department of the Midland Bank thoughtfully put me in touch with another banker, Dugersurengiin Sukherdene, then with the Mongolian State Bank, who helped with my initial arrangements in Ulaan Baatar. His sister Ho’elun acted as interpreter. Hamish Hamilton of Buffalo gave me warm clothing and sleeping bags suitable for Mongolia in early May, and the firm of Timberland kindly provided boots and jackets.

  In Moscow help came from the Mongolian Embassy, particularly from the jovial Cultural Counsellor Buandelgereen Borhondoi, and I could not have managed without the interpreting skills of Tanya Rachmanova.

  The roll call of those who gave assistance in Mongolia includes: Academician Bira; Chulunny Ganbold of the Friendship Societies; Mr Davaa of the Mongolian Horse Association; Mr Chimidorj, Mr Ganbat and Mr Gansukh from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Bumbyn Ganbaatar, Damdinsuren Yundendorj, sound recordist Tserendjav and Mrs Ishkhand all of Mongolian TV Film Studio who helped with the documentary filming. And then, of course, there were the dozens of arats who acted as guides and mentors during the ride. To them, in particular, I would like to say thank you very much indeed for revealing the altan ov, their ‘golden heritage’.

  The family of Doc Boshigt is owed a very special mention for the generous and open hospitality they extended to me and Paul Harris in Ulaan Baatar. And to David Allen of DHL I would like to say how very grateful I am for his imaginative and generous financial donation based on the link between the worldwide operations of the DHL company and the remarkable achievements of the medieval Mongol courier network.

  Two of the leading western authorities on Mongol imperial history, Dr Peter Jackson and Dr David Morgan, were kind enough to read through my text and alert me to the worst of my errors. Those mistakes which remain are my own fault, though it is reassuring to learn that I am not alone in proposing that the Mongols were responsible for bringing the Black Death, to Europe.

  Tim Severin County Cork Ireland

  Photographs

  Setting out from Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire.

  Master
herdsman Dampildorj chats with fellow arats.

  Scraping a charred sheep’s head for breakfast - our start to the day, along with weak tea.

  Sacred obo at the foot of the mountain of the shaman spirit, revered by Genghis Khan.

  Bringing half wild horses to the spring festival.

  Led by a novitiate monk, the expedition enters Erdenzu monastery.

  Valley at Dzag, horse herders’ paradise in the brief, lush Mongolian summer.

  Samga, the Tuva shamaness and her daughter.

  Camran, our host, in his fox-fur lined Kazakh hat proudly displays his hunting eagle.

  Gable End of the World, the high Altai mountains in August.

  Tim Severin with arat, Mongolian herdsman.