On the other side of the world. Western civilisation had begun to stir once more, with a mature medieval culture beginning to emerge. Great gothic cathedrals were being built at Reims and Chartres, universities were already well established at places such as Oxford, Bologna and Paris. Meanwhile in the Arab Empire, amidst great cities such as Baghdad and Cordoba, the mosques and bazaars were thronged with populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. And to the south of Mongolia, in nearby China, behind the protection of the Great Wall, the Jin dynasty under the Emperor Shizong was entering a period of peace and prosperity. This was a time of scholars and poets, wood blocks printing the texts of Confucius, and artists painting the birds and landscapes of the Chinese countryside.
Meanwhile in 1177, when Temujin was fifteen, he was taken captive by marauding tribesmen, who led him off to slavery in a cangue. This consisted of two large, heavy flat pieces of wood, carved so that they could be clapped closed around the prisoner’s neck; the weight of the wood was a painful burden, and its size meant the prisoner was unable to feed himself with his hands, leaving him utterly dependent on his master. Miraculously, Temujin managed to persuade one of the tribesmen to help him escape. During this, and his consequent adventures, Temujin appears to have exhibited a winning charisma, inducing people to help him, and then to join up with him.
Prior to the death of Temujin’s father, he had arranged for his son to be betrothed to a girl called Börte, in order to form an alliance with another powerful Mongol clan. Temujin now travelled to the Onggirat tribe to claim his bride. No sooner had he married Börte than she was kidnapped by neighbouring tribesmen. Temujin immediately led a campaign to avenge this crime, and soon retook his wife. Tales of Temujin’s escape from slavery, and his bold rescue of Börte, earned him a high reputation for bravery and leadership. He soon rose up the tribal hierarchy, becoming a tribal chief.
By means of tactical alliances and tribal warfare, Temujin eventually established himself as leader of all the Mongol tribes. By 1206 he had become ruler of all the neighbouring tribes, including the Turkic Tatars and Uighurs. A gathering of the tribes – a khuriltai – was held, and Temujin was acknowledged as ‘Genghis Khan’ (‘leader of all the people living in felt tents’). This unprepossessing title would soon strike fear into the hearts of all who heard it.
Genghis Khan was now undisputed ruler of the entire plateau ‘from the Gobi [desert] in the south to the Arctic tundra in the north, from the Manchurian forests in the east to the Altai Mountains of the west’. Realising that this Mongol alliance would soon fall apart if it was not united and put to some use, in 1209 Genghis Khan launched a series of raids into nearby foreign territories. In 1211, spurred on by the sheer exultation of victory, Genghis Khan and his burgeoning army of horsemen rode south into northern China. The success of his furious but disciplined primitive army was beyond belief. Within the next few years, Genghis Khan had overthrown the Jin Dynasty. As he later explained: Heaven had grown weary of the excessive pride and luxury of the Chinese.
I am from the barbaric north. I wear the same clothing and eat the same food as the cow-herds and horse-herders. We make the same sacrifice and share the same riches. I look upon the nation as a newborn child and I care for my soldiers as if they were my sons.
Prior to this, Genghis Khan went on, he had merely been interested in plunder. But now he had ridden south and succeeded in something that no one else had ever achieved in history. He had defeated the Chinese. And from them his army had learned how to use siege engines, catapults and even gunpowder. Genghis Khan now turned his eyes to the west and prepared to launch an attack upon kingdoms and empires, with long histories and fabled cities the like of which neither he nor his men had even dreamt existed. From now on, he vowed, he would unite the whole world in one empire.
Which brings us to the question of sideways history. Normally history is conceived as running in a linear trajectory. This may be seen as a vertical time-line on a graph. Sideways history may be seen as a horizontal line, taking account of various stages of history running in parallel. This is best illustrated by the twentieth-century economist, Milton Friedman, who observed that when he was living in San Francisco, he found himself living amidst almost the entire history of economics in its various stages of development. Around him he saw a great variety of immigrant communities and different classes: Chinatown, the Italian district, and many other social groups, each making use of their own cultural form of economic life. There was barter economy, credit economy, deferred debt economy, capital economy, and even the simple quasi-socialist communal economy practised by religious communities. Economics, in all its history, was alive and thriving around him.
Much the same can be said of the empires and countries occupying the Eurasian landmass in the early thirteenth century. In the east there was the highly stratified Chinese Empire. From the Near East to Spain was the Abbasid Caliphate, an essentially religious society, which still tolerated a degree of secular thinking in the form of science and philosophy. In Russia and Eastern Europe, tyrannies of primitive serfdom flourished. Meanwhile in Western Europe a variety of social administrations had sprung up. These ranged from democracy (Florence) to absolute monarchy (France), along with oligarchy (Venice); whilst in England there was a kingdom on the verge of the Magna Carta, which would grant citizens inalienable rights.
Almost all of these societies were evolving – more or less slowly – as they sought to absorb the political, social, economic and scientific advances that were stirring into life. Progress and survival would soon be the order of the day. All this begs a number of basic questions. What precisely is social progress? Who should benefit from it? And what is its aim? Indeed, does it even have an ultimate end: a utopia? These difficult questions remain without a final answer to this day, when it appears that liberal social democracy and economic advance are far from being the inevitable course of future civilisation.
Such questions will begin to arise of their own accord as we examine the empires that come into being in more progressive times. And as we shall see, any attempt to find even a provisional answer to them is not easy. Such questions continue to nag at our empire-building impulse.
However, it would seem that one thing can be stated for certain: the spread of the Mongol Empire across Eurasia did not result in what anyone would see as progress. Or did it? History moves in mysterious ways, its blunders to perform. Despite the massive destruction involved in the Mongol invasion, some have seen this ‘clearing of the ground’ as a necessary prelude, sweeping away the social, political and cultural rigidities, which prepared the way for the more adaptable, more progressive civilisation to come. But first we must see what this freeing up of history involved.
In 1211 the Mongol invasion, led by Genghis Khan, swept westwards like fire burning through a map, and with similar results. They rode for thousands of miles through southern Siberia, across the Turkic lands, and then on to the Khwarazmian Empire. This empire of five million people occupied greater Persia and western Afghanistan, as far north as the Aral Sea. Its territory included historic cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara, which had grown rich from the Silk Route trade between China and Europe. Yet this large and sophisticated empire fell within two years to Genghis Khan’s army.
How on earth did Genghis Khan and his army of primitive horsemen achieve all this, and with such speed? There was no doubting the efficiency and ferocity of his fighting men, organised in tumen – units of 10,000 men galloping behind their black horsehair tug banner. But how did Genghis Khan manage to instil discipline amongst such fiercely independent horsemen? How did he make them follow his pre-arranged tactics and commands?
The life of the Chinese military theoretician Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War around 500 BC, offers a clue here. Sun Tzu was ordered to appear before his leader, who had read his book and wished to test its author’s theory on how to manage soldiers. Could it even be applied to women, for instance? Of course, replied Sun Tzu. Whereupon he divided
the leader’s 180 concubines into two companies, each armed with spears, selecting a leader for each company. He then attempted to drill the two groups, passing on orders to their leaders. But all of the young women simply burst out laughing.
Sun Tzu explained to his leader: ‘If words of command are not clear and thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame.’ He ordered the leader of each group to be beheaded, replacing them with a different leader. When the next orders were given to the leaders and passed on to the two groups, both groups carried out their orders with alacrity and great efficiency. Although Genghis Khan certainly never read Sun Tzu, his method of instilling discipline amongst his men was remarkably similar.18
As for the rest, Genghis Khan knew the speed, endurance and ruthlessness of his horsemen, and employed his lightning tactics accordingly. A typical move was for him to use heavy firepower to blast a passage through the enemy lines for his cavalry units, which were then deployed with maximum efficiency, piercing the enemy line and then fanning out behind their rear, cutting their supply lines and instilling panic, which caused the enemy to flee in all directions. Communication between separate units was maintained by the use of flags. Indeed, it is to the Mongols that we owe the art of semaphore.
The lasting effect of these tactics can be seen in the fact that the German Second World War Panzer General, Heinz Guderian, the master of Blitzkrieg, identified the inspiration of his tactics as Genghis Khan. Though the ruthlessness with which Genghis Khan followed through on his tactics is another matter. According to Khan’s biographer Jack Weatherford: ‘The objective of such tactics was simple and always the same: to frighten the enemy into surrendering before an actual battle began.’ Any who then resisted could expect the very worst. After taking Samarkand, Genghis Khan ordered the entire population to be assembled in the plain outside the city walls. Here they were systematically butchered, their severed heads arranged in pyramids.
In Bukhara, as his Mongol soldiers burnt the city to the ground, Genghis Khan addressed the wailing remnant population in the main mosque, announcing that he was the ‘flail of God’ sent to punish them for their sins. When the Khan’s Mongol army took Gurganj, the capital of the Khwarazmian Empire, the thirteenth-century Persian scholar, Juvayni, recorded that Genghis Khan’s 50,000 Mongol soldiers were commanded by their leader to kill twenty-four citizens each. As there were not enough citizens to meet this command, and the soldiers well understood the punishment for not fulfilling their leader’s orders to the letter, the ensuing swift and competitive slaughter of several hundred thousand people resulted in what has been called ‘the bloodiest massacre in human history’.
An enigmatic, somewhat bland portrait of Genghis Khan in his later years conveys little of the sheer terror his presence could inspire. It was drawn around forty-five years after his death, but the artist consulted with men who had known Genghis Khan closely during his lifetime. Originally black and white, it was softened by colour during the following century.
Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan now returned to Mongolia, but despatched two of his most trusted generals, Chepe and Subutai, north with 20,000 horsemen. This army swept up through the Caucasus and into Russia. Here they were confronted by an army of 80,000 men, which they annihilated. Instead of occupying this territory, they then withdrew: Genghis Khan had ordered that this was to be merely a ‘reconnaissance mission’.
Such exemplary slaughter brings us to the deeper problem of morality, and questions concerning the ethics of conquest and empire. Indeed, is there any such thing as morality involved in the imperial enterprise? The usual justification for such conquest is the spreading of progressive civilisation. Beneath this lie even more fundamental questions concerning the ethics of empire, and the morality of progressive civilisation itself. Is there such a thing as either? And if so, why should we regard such things as universal? Are all human beings equal? Should they all be treated in the same fashion? Should they all be subjected to the same universal laws? If so, what is the ultimate moral law?
Over the centuries, and over its extensive reach and influence, the Western tradition has come up with surprisingly similar answers. The biblical Book of Leviticus, written around 1400 BC, stated: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ (Freud would declare this: ‘The commandment which is impossible to fulfil.’) Despite this, similar injunctions would appear in Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and indeed most of the world’s major religions. One and a half millennia after Leviticus, Jesus Christ would exhort his followers: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Six centuries later, Muhammad would pronounce: ‘As you would have people do to you, do to them.’
Over a millennium after this, Europe’s leading philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, would recognise that such an injunction did not necessarily involve a belief in God. Yet his analysis of ethics led him to a remarkably similar conclusion to all those previous theisms, when he declared the fundamental principle of morality to be: ‘Treat others as you would wish to be treated.’ It would take another 300 years before modern thinkers recognised that such a sentiment was inadequate. As Freud understood, it is psychologically impossible to maintain such a stance on a permanent basis. This was simply not how we actually lived or behaved in a social setting: our moral thinking did not work like this.
The Lebanese-American thinker, Nassim Taleb, has transmogrified this basic principle of morality into a maxim that more closely reflects our moral needs, ethical thinking and behaviour: ‘Do not to others what you don’t want them to do to you.’ The inapposite double negative may make it less easily comprehensible. (Is it simply a sleight of hand reversal, or turning inside out, of the Leviticus-Christ-Kant maxim? Examine it carefully: it is not.)19 This would seem closer to a basic instruction for the guidance of our actual moral behaviour. Not so much love thy neighbour, as proceed with due care . . .
It is not difficult to see Genghis Khan adhering to this maxim. For a boy whose father had been murdered, whose step-brother had plotted to marry his mother, and who had been taken into slavery, enduring the pain and humiliation of the cangue, he can have been under few illusions about what others wanted to do to him. And he had certainly chosen to act accordingly, pyramids of skulls and all. In fact, the question of morality and empire remains open, leaving us with little but clichés. Might is right; history is written by the victors; and so forth. Only the hindsight of historians begins to add any perspective to such views. But this comes later. Where empires are concerned, the certainty of the present often prevails with much the same conviction as that held by Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan would die at the age of sixty-five in 1227, ironically from injuries sustained from falling off his horse while crossing the Gobi Desert. Genghis Khan’s grave has yet to be found. According to legend, a river was diverted over his burial place, so that it would never be discovered. Such a ritual harks back to the beginnings of historical time: both Gilgamesh and Attila the Hun are said to have been buried in the same way.
Even before Genghis Khan’s deaths a khuriltai had been called to decide who amongst his sons should be his successor. This had broken up in acrimony. Following his death, the empsire was divided into several khanates governed by his sons. However, his third son, Ögedei, would eventually be recognised as the second ‘Great Khan’ of the Mongol Empire.
Ögedei was renowned for his love of alcohol, and on his installation as Khan he became so drunk that he ‘threw open his father’s treasury and riotously distributed all the riches stored there’.
Despite such an inauspicious start, Ögedei would prove a more than competent ruler. He was not inclined to lead the Mongol armies on campaigns and preferred to remain in his capital Karakorum, overseeing the campaigns and organising the administration. The gathering of taxes throughout the empire was modelled on the Chinese system, with the monies being collected by local ‘tax farmers’. Likewise, paper money was circulated, backed by silver. (At the time, paper itself remained a novelty in Europe, let alone pape
r money.)
The problem of communications throughout the vast empire had already been solved by Genghis Khan, who instituted a network of relay stations. As the Mongol army moved at speed, its communications system had to be even faster. Messengers riding on relays of horses could cover more than 150 miles a day over almost any terrain. (Such speeds and efficiency would not be matched for over 600 years, until the advent of the Trans-American Pony Express.)
Although Ögedei did not lead his men into battle, the empire continued to expand under his reign, pushing far into Europe. In 1241, the Mongols won the Battle of Legnica in Poland, and western Europe lay at their feet. News then spread throughout the empire of Ögedei’s death, and the commanders rode back as fast as they could to take part in the khuriltai to elect a new leader. By such chance was Europe saved from a Mongol invasion.
An uncannily similar situation would arise in 1258, after the Mongols had overrun the Abbasid capital, Baghdad. Egypt and the remnants of the entire Abbasid Empire lay at their feet. Then news came through that the fourth Great Khan, Möngke Khan, had died, and the leaders once more galloped off east for the khuriltai, leaving behind an ill-organised Mongol army. In 1260 this was defeated in Palestine by the Mamlukes at the Battle of Ain Jalut. Egypt, North Africa and Al-Andalus were spared the Mongol onslaught.
In that same year, Kublai Khan became the fifth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. During his reign, the empire definitively split into four separate khanates. Instead of attempting to reunite the empire, Kublai Khan turned his attentions south to China, moving his capital to Khanbaliq (Beijing), with the intention of forming an entirely new empire.
Sequence
The three khanates to the west of Kublai Khan’s realm were the Golden Horde (occupying the territory north of the Black Sea and the Caspian, extending north and east into what is now Russia and Kazakhstan), the Chagatai Khanate (Afghanistan and north-east central Asia south of the Golden Horde), and the Ilkhanate (Greater Persia and west into Anatolia). All of these would convert to Islam (hence Il-Khanate), while Kublai Khan’s realm adopted Buddhism. The Golden Horde would eventually give way to Russia, but not before it had dealt a blow which turned the course of European history.
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