The Moroccan province was also the birthplace in 1304 of Ibn Battuta, the Islamic scholar who became the greatest traveller the world had yet seen. The extent of his travels, by camel, horse and boat continues to astonish to this day.
According to his verified account, his voyages would range east around India as far as China, south beyond Timbuktu, along the coast of East Africa beyond Zanzibar, and north around the Black Sea and the Caspian. In other words, Ibn Battuta travelled the length and breadth of the known world – or the extent of the world that was known to Arab traders. And this is the point. Before being a religious and military leader, Muhammad had been a trader. And after the early conquests, the Arab Muslims merely continued in this trading tradition, both by land, and especially by sea.
The most far-flung points that Ibn Battuta reached were already part of the Muslim world. For instance, Muslim traders first reached China as early as the seventh century, with the religion soon establishing itself amongst the local people. Similarly, the Berber traders crossing the Sahara from North Africa first brought Islam to sub-Saharan Africa in the ninth century, when with the aid of missionaries it soon began to supplant the local African religions in Mali and a wide swathe of territory reaching from Senegal to the Sudan.
During the period when Ibn Battuta was travelling the world, Christian forces continued pressing further and further south through Al-Andalus. The last Arabic stronghold to fall was the Emirate of Granada in 1492. But this was far from the end of Islamic power in Europe. In a counterbalancing movement, the Ottoman Caliphate had prevailed in Anatolia, finally conquering Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, before pressing on into the Balkans. But the story of this great empire is yet to come.
Page of Arabic script from the Abbasid era.
Sequence
As we have seen, by now the earliest centres of civilisation in Asia and North Africa – Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River – had spread across their separate regions and gone on to become linked to each other through trade routes. In the era prior to this, they had developed largely in isolation. Yet around the fifth century BC, these entirely separate civilisations had reached a surprisingly similar stage of human evolution. They had each produced an exceptional figure of such stature that he would transform the intellectual development of his peoples for centuries, even millennia to come.
China had produced Confucius, whose ideas would continue to play a formative role in Chinese thought right down to the present. His teachings had emphasised self-development with the aim of improvement. India had produced Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, whose emphasis had been on spiritual development in order to overcome the wicked illusions of this world. And Ancient Greece had produced Socrates, who had instructed his followers to question themselves in order to know themselves. Quite separately, it seems, each of these branches of humanity had in its own way evolved a means to individuality.
This leads to the interesting question: was such selfunderstanding a necessary stage through which human evolution was bound to pass? Indeed, was this part of our common humanity? This is difficult to answer, for the simple reason that not all civilisations would sustain the means for such an attainment to flourish. Self-reflection was a luxury for the few, at the best of times. During more harsh periods, it would seem to be all but eradicated, in the cause of a powerful collectivism that claimed an overwhelming benefit for the common good. We have seen how an idea, or a new religion, can galvanise a people. Not for nothing does the word religion come from the Latin re ligare, ‘the thing which binds us’.
The next empire we encounter will have a similarly powerful driving force, harking back to an almost pre-invidualistic collectivism. In so doing, we return to the empire that overran Baghdad in 1258, putting an end to the glories of the Abbasid Caliphate.
12 This may appear not to be the case when the two empires are compared on modern maps. Such maps are made according to Mercator’s projection, which exaggerates the area of the regions further from the equator. In actuality, Greenland is the same size as modern-day Algeria, whereas on Mercator’s projection Greenland appears as large as the entire continent of Africa, i.e. fourteen times larger than it is in reality.
13 Odo’s origins are obscure. Some claim he may have been of Roman lineage, others have suggested he was a Hun or a Visigoth.
14 By this stage many of those fighting for the Umayyads were Shiites. To this day, the Shiites retain their favour for the White Flag, whereas Sunni Muslims swear allegiance to the Black Flag, said to have been the one favoured by Muhammad.
4
The Mongol Empire
Just as the Huns, the Goths and the Vandals had driven all before them some eight centuries previously, so would the Mongols prove an irresistible force as they spread out from their homeland across the Eurasian land mass.
In migrant tribes of hunter-gatherers, living off the land through which they passed, every man was a warrior. Such migrations could support roaming bands of a few hundred people at most. The next stage of human development involved shepherds. In such societies too, every man was a warrior; but as the warriors brought their sustenance with them in herds, they could move in larger groups. This was how Muhammad could gather 10,000 men for his march on Mecca.
The third stage of development involved settled pastoral people. Such societies were more sophisticated. The surplus of their produce could support leisure and culture – as well as a standing army. Yet ironically, these cultured societies were no match for the migrations of what were essentially barbarian tribesmen, as the Romans discovered. And now, almost a millennium later, the peoples of the Eastern and the Western worlds would be forced to learn this lesson anew – as the Mongol hordes poured out from their eastern fastness across two continents.15
No great empire is fundamentally unique – but the Mongol Empire would contain sufficient anomalies to set it apart from almost all other empires, both before and since, great and small. Its history, even its very existence, is beset with contradictions. This would be the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen, stretching from the Pacific to the eastern borders of Germany, yet it would prove the most short-lived great empire in history. It would be an empire that tolerated all religions – from Islam to Christianity and Buddhism, from Shamanism to Judaism and Taoism. Yet it would also forbid many of these religions from carrying out their most sacred practices.
For instance, followers of Islam were forbidden to slaughter meat in the halal manner; likewise, Jews were forbidden to eat kosher and practise circumcision. All citizens of the Mongol Empire had to follow ‘the Mongol method of eating’. Similarly, the Mongol edicts against polluting water, which precluded the washing of clothes, or even bodies, particularly during summer, hardly endeared them to religions that held a strong connection between purity and godliness, with an abhorrence of the unclean.
Other similar contradictions abounded. Despite the vast area of its conquests, the Mongol Empire would leave scattered ruins and no great buildings; the only magnificent monument that the Mongols caused to be created was the Great Wall of China, which had been intended to keep the Mongols out. This was an empire notorious for the vast slaughter it inflicted on its enemies; yet it would leave behind in Europe a legacy that caused an even greater death toll, in the form of the Black Death.
Even its emperors present us with a conundrum. Its first emperor, Genghis Khan, would go down in history as probably the most bloodthirsty conqueror of all time, an often genocidal invader who swept into oblivion those in his path. Yet the last ruler of the Mongol Empire is remembered in the romantic imagination of the West for his fabulous capital, Xanadu. This would be described by the contemporary English traveller, Samuel Purchas:
In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meadowes, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the midde
st thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure which may be moved from place to place.16
Now all that remains of Xanadu are ruins circumscribed by a grassy mound where the city walls once stood. Yet Kublai Khan was to be no Ozymandias. In later life he would leave Xanadu and set up his capital in Khanbaliq (Mongolian: ‘The City of the Leader’) on the site of what is now the capital city of China: namely, Beijing. Many centuries have come and gone, yet this city and its great monuments have yet to lie in shattered remnants amidst the lone and level sands.
To the north of China, beyond the famously treacherous shifting singing sands of the Gobi desert, and hemmed in by mountains to the north and the west, lie the vast grassy steppes of the landlocked territory known as Mongolia. This plateau is around 5,000 feet above sea level, and stretches some 1,500 miles from east to west, and more than 500 miles from north to south. It has been occupied by nomadic tribesmen since time immemorial. (Historians estimate this as being since around 2000 BC.) The origin myths of these people were entirely vocal, and over the centuries they have become muddled with Buddhist and Shamanistic folklore from surrounding peoples. But one thing remained certain, these tribal nomads regarded the wolf as their legendary ancestor, and they strove to emulate his qualities: cunning, ferocity and the strength of the pack.17
The Mongols may have identified themselves with the wolf, but the one animal these tribesmen cherished above all others was the horse. Mongolian horses were (and remain to this day) a sturdy, stocky breed of amazing endurance. Wandering free, they subsist on grass alone, and are able to withstand the extremes of temperature that characterise this otherwise empty region. In summer, the heat rises to over 30°C, in winter it falls to – -40°C.
The nomadic Mongol tribes developed an intense and symbiotic relationship with their herds of horses, which provided them with their every need. Horse meat was food, the long tails and manes of these animals could be woven into ropes, their skin could be used to reinforce the felt of the tent-like ger against the piercing cold wind, their dung provided fuel. And their mares provided milk. Boiled and dried into chunks, this could be stored and carried. Fermented it provided acidic-tasting alcoholic kumis. Productive mares could be milked up to six times a day. And in times of extremity, especially when engaged in warfare, the tribesmen learned to slit a vein in their horse’s neck, providing a small cup of blood, which would keep them alive.
Though the horses roamed free, they were trained to respond to their master’s call, or whistle, like dogs. When the tribesmen were pursuing an enemy, they would bring along anything up to half a dozen horses each, so that they always had a fresh mount. Although the horses only weighed around 500 lbs, they could carry loads well in excess of their bodyweight. When ridden, they could gallop over six miles without a break. In the frigid cold of a winter’s night, a Mongol would snuggle up against his horse for warmth. When they reached water, the rider would kneel down beside his mount to drink. Yet although a Mongol tribesman could always distinguish each of his collection of horses by its skin markings, he never gave them names. It was almost as if his horses were part of him, and needed no alien designation.
As the population on the steppe multiplied, the various Mongol tribes began to fight over territory. These tough, warlike people, with their pony-sized steeds, soon became fearsome warriors. The saddles on which they rode had short stirrups, so that the rider could guide his horse with his legs, enabling him to use his arms to fire lethal metal-tipped arrows from his short bow with great accuracy. Tied to the saddle behind him was an array of weapons, which might include a scimitar, daggers, and a mace or a hatchet, as well as a leather bottle of milk. For armour, he wore cured horse-skin studded with metal.
Over the centuries a body of strict rules grew up concerning the treatment of horses, and woe betide any who broke them. This was exemplified in Genghis Khan’s order: ‘Seize and beat any man who breaks them . . . Any man . . . who ignores this decree, cut off his head where he stands.’
The man we know as Genghis Khan was born in a remote north-east corner of the Mongolian plateau, where the Siberian winds blow in from the mountains to the north. According to a local legend, seemingly undiluted by later folklore, these Mongols originated from the forests on the slopes of the mountains when the Blue-Grey Wolf mated with the Beautiful Red Doe, who gave birth by the shore of a large lake to the first of the Mongols, Bataciqan. The large lake is assumed to be Lake Baikal, in modern-day Russia. Some time after this, Bataciqan’s descendants left the forests for the steppe, where they settled along the Onon River.
The Mongols saw themselves as different from the neighbouring Tartar and Turkic tribesmen, claiming descent through the ancient Huns, who founded their first empire in the region during the third century. (Hun is the Mongolian for ‘human being’.) It was these Huns who in the fourth and fifth centuries migrated west across Asia and into Europe, where they dispersed the Germanic tribes, the Vandals and the Goths, causing the movement of peoples that brought down the Roman Empire and ushered in the so-called Dark Ages.
Life on the steppe was hard for the Mongols. The chill Siberian winds brought intermittent rainfall. This froze on the mountainside in winter, melting in summer to flow down into blue lakes which spilled into rivers, bringing water to the vast parched grasslands that stretched to the empty horizon. Sometimes there would be no rainfall for years on end, with the sky remaining like a vast blue dome over the landscape. The endless blue sky, which spread from horizon to horizon in all directions, was worshipped as the One True God by these people. It was He who brought the clouds bearing rain.
Modern climatologists have discovered that some time after the birth of Genghis Khan, climate change began to moderate the weather of the region for several decades. This brought warmer temperatures and more rainfall. As a result, there was a widespread increase in grass. Herds of horses and other livestock were able to multiply, as did the tribesmen. The inevitable result was increasing tension between the nomadic tribesmen over large expanses of coveted land with no natural barriers. Without warning, tribesmen attacked the isolated ger of rival tribes, carrying off young women and boys into slavery. Outnumbered, the menfolk fled, carrying off their finest horses and wives in order to warn their allies, so that they could return to fight another day. Revenge was a constant driving force.
Into this world in 1162 was born a child named Temujin (who would only later assume the name Genghis Khan). Temujin was the son of Yesugei, a leader of the important Borjigin clan, which lived close to the site of modern Ulaanbaatar. Temujin’s early life was hard and brutal. When he was just nine, his father was poisoned, and his tribe cast out his mother Hoelun and all the family children. The oldest of these was Bekter, who was not directly related to any of them, being a son from Hoelun’s murdered husband’s previous marriage. Forced to scavenge for a living on the barren steppe, the close-knit family group hunted and foraged to stay alive, catching fish in the Onon River before it froze over for the winter.
An intense rivalry grew up between Bekter and Temujin, which came to a head when Temujin learned that Bektar intended to take Hoelun as his wife. Whereupon, Temujin stalked Bekter and slew him with an arrow. Bektar’s last words to his brother are said to have been: ‘Now you have no companion other than your shadow.’ As far as can be gathered, Temujin was probably not yet even a teenager.
At this point it is worth pausing to examine how we have come to know these events in such detail. The story of Genghis Khan’s life is recorded at some length in The Secret History of the Mongols, the bible of the Mongol people. This was written in the vertical lines of original Mongol script by an anonymous scribe some years after Temujin’s death. The Secret History of the Mongols remained unknown to the West until a Chinese version was discovered by the nineteenth-century Russian monk, Pyotor Kafarov, during his travels in China. However, a faithful translation from the reconstructed Mongol text would not be made until as late as 1941 by the German sinologist, Erich Haenisch.
; The work’s flavour is biblical, and the accuracy of its text is of a similar order. In other words, it remains sacred to its people; yet apart from its mythological opening, it would seem to be a quasi-accurate narrative, this being confirmed by contemporary hearsay accounts passed down in stories.
The ancient Mongol language would remain purely verbal until Genghis Khan ordered the adoption of the script used by the Uighur Turks. These were the occupants of the large Xinjiang region of north-west China, which lies to the west of modern Mongolia, separated by the Gobi Desert. In the original Uighur script, and its Mongol variant, the letters of each word are written from top to bottom, i.e. vertically, in lines of words. These complete lines are then read in sequence from left to right.
The anonymous author of The Secret History of the Mongols indicates that it was finished in ‘The Year of the Mouse’. The Mongols copied the Chinese calendar, which is based on a twelve-year cycle, with each year named after a different animal. Scholars scrutinising the events mentioned in the text have come to the conclusion that The Secret History was written in 1228, 1240 or perhaps even 1252.
We can now return to the adolescent fratricide, Temujin. When he arrived back at the family encampment, he encountered his mother Hoelun. With a mother’s acumen, she realised at once what he had done. Immediately she flew into a rage, screaming at her son the very same words that the dying Bektar had uttered to him: ‘Now you have no companion other than your shadow.’ The psychology bred in Temujin by the simplicity and savagery of this almost primeval world can barely be imagined. Europe may have been a thousand miles distant, but it might as well have been a thousand years away.
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