by John Keegan
Thus ‘Han’ China, so called from the dynasty which had forcibly populated so much of its empire with ethnic Chinese, was in an unstable condition when Genghis Khan was given heaven’s assurance of victory in 1211. The Great Wall was in the hands of a non-Han people, the western flank was occupied by another barbarian group, while the Sung’s army was ‘overmanned and inefficient, although military expenditure absorbed most of the budget’ to pay mercenary wages, was short of horses and was deprived of the support of auxiliary barbarian contingents, since the dynasty no longer exerted influence on the steppe border.75 Yet these circumstances still do not explain how the Mongols overran so much of China so quickly, let alone their equally whirlwind victories in the west.
Much was undoubtedly due to the character of Genghis Khan himself and to the single-mindedness with which he enforced Mongol tribal customs and tribal prejudices against outsiders. Mongol sexual morality was strict: adultery was punished by the death of both parties, and the taking of captive women was also disfavoured. This code eliminated quarrels over wife-stealing so characteristic, and disruptive, of primitive societies.76 The Mongols, and Genghis Khan in particular, were nevertheless quick to take offence and brutal in taking revenge on outsiders; indeed, Genghis’s life is largely a history of revenge-taking, and Mongol warfare may be viewed as an extension of the primitive urge to vengeance on an enormous scale. Yet the Mongols were perfectly ready to enlist the expert help of outsiders and, indeed, to add foreign contingents to their army; necessarily so, since the size of the Mongol nucleus of the force with which they began the second phase of their conquest of northern China in 1216 has been estimated at only 23,000.77 The majority in the ‘Mongol’ armies that terrorised the West were Turks, while the Tartars (with whom the Mongols are so often confused, a confusion that ethnolinguists have difficulty in disentangling) were neighbours whom Genghis subjected.78
Much is made by students of Genghis of the sophistication of his military organisation: his offer to his followers of a ‘career open to talents’ and his logical division of the army into tens, hundreds and thousands — there were eventually to be ninety-five ‘thousands’ — which anticipated the modern Western system of subordinating sections to squadrons and squadrons to regiments.79 All this was no doubt significant; by disengaging appointment to command from considerations of heredity — except where his immediate family was concerned — and by making it dependent on performance, he was breaking with tribalism. These innovations, nevertheless, were internal to a tiny people, quite lacking in the numbers necessary to overwhelm populations hundreds of times larger. None of the horse peoples from the steppe ever exceeded a few hundred thousand, but the extent of their conquests do not bear comparison with those of the Mongols and it seems unlikely that, had they been better organised, they would have equalled them in warmaking. Other factors were at work.
These did not include a superior technology. The Mongols — like the Huns, the Turks and the Chinese aristocracies who preserved the love of the horse they had inherited from their steppe ancestors — knew no way of fighting but that which depended on the composite bow and a string of ponies; it has been suggested that their army included contingents of armoured cavalry, but this is most unlikely. Admittedly, the Mongols enlisted the help of foreigners who understood the techniques of siege warfare; nevertheless, siege engineering in the pre-gunpowder age was a laborious and time-consuming method of breaking into strongholds whose defenders were determined to resist. Since, despite speculation to the contrary, it is almost certain that the Mongols had not yet learned the use of gunpowder — if, indeed, anyone had at that period — and none the less overwhelmed a whole succession of fortified places in the East and West — Utrar in Transoxiana (1220), Balkh, Merv, Herat and Nishapur in Persia (1221), and Ning-hsia, the capital of the Western Hsia (1226) — we must conclude that the garrisons generally gave up without a struggle.80 It is significant that at the one place where the Mongols met resolute resistance, the Persian city of Gurganj, the siege lasted from October 1220 to April 1221, exactly the sort of delay that feudal warriors in the West would have anticipated in a similar action at that time.
What seems likely in the circumstances is that the word got about that the Mongols could not be beaten. We know that Bokhara and Samarkand capitulated at their very appearance; in Bokhara, Genghis, perhaps evoking the spectre of Attila, preached a sermon in the chief mosque describing himself as the ‘flail of God’. What made for this reputation of invincibility? The Mongols knew the use of the stirrup, which Attila’s Huns did not, but the stirrup had been in general use for 500 years. The Mongol horse had over time probably been bred to a higher standard than the Hun, and by improved horsemastership they could possibly maintain larger stocks, but these advantages would have been enjoyed also by the Turks. Genghis and his sons imposed a ferocious discipline on their tribesmen; the yasa, their code of law, laid down that booty was to be held collectively, and made it a capital offence for a warrior to abandon a comrade in battle, and these sanctions against personal enrichment and the habit of flight in the face of danger so characteristic of ‘primitive’ warfare may allow us to regard the Mongol cavalry swarm as an army, operating above the ‘military horizon’, and not just a war band.81 Nevertheless, the reasons for the fear in which they were quickly held still seem elusive.
Focus is supplied if we discard the notion that the Mongol invasions were a sort of military pandemic, erupting almost simultaneously throughout the whole area of affliction, and recognise that they developed sequentially from small beginnings and were conducted with ruthless skill. Vengeance has been suggested as the Mongols’ motive, and it is certainly true that their first successful campaign was against the Chin, who had insultingly demanded that Genghis should do them homage as a notional vassal, and their second against the Khwarazamians, who had treacherously killed envoys requesting rights to trade. Genghis did not attack without calculation, however; like Alexander the Great, he was a voracious consumer of intelligence about his intended victims and maintained a wide network of spies. He was also, like Alexander, a rational strategist. Before he set off to attack the Chin, he dismissed the option of a march across the Gobi Desert, the direct but difficult route, in favour of a roundabout approach through the Kansu corridor, the continuation of the Silk Road east of the Dzungarian gap which gives on to the end of the Great Wall. The need to fight and win an initial campaign against the Western Hsia he accepted as a necessary preliminary.
It may also have appeared desirable. It has been suggested that the Western Hsia, or Tanguts, were but one of a group of horse peoples all engaged in an undeclared, and to outside eyes unrecognised, struggle to recreate that unified steppe empire which the Turks had first brought into being in the sixth century. ‘When and how these attempts to recreate a unified steppe empire began are clouded in myth and legend, as well as by the subsequent embellishments by the Mongols themselves of [Genghis Khan’s] career.’82 The Mongols, by this interpretation, were drawn into this struggle and ended as the undisputed leaders of their language group: from that victory their subsequent history flowed. If we accept this version, and it is tempting to do so, it clears away the last and chief difficulty in understanding how the Mongols rose to world empire. They cease to appear as a people ‘remote from the centres of civilised life [and] almost untouched by cultural or religious influences from the cities of eastern and southern Asia’, and emerge instead as participants in a struggle that ran along the whole steppe horizon; the struggle was the medium through which, however indirectly, notions of military discipline and organisation from beyond the horizon transformed their methods of warmaking.83
Most of these must have been Turkish in origin, fed back in altered form from the Islamic Middle East and China. Over the centuries Sinicised or Islamicised Turks must have made their way back on to the steppe as successful veterans returning home, as failures or outcasts, as fugitives fleeing punishment, as escorts to merchants, or even as official emissa
ries. Old soldiers’ tales always find a ready audience and knowledge of foreign military expertise is a currency of universal value. The idea that the Mongols knew nothing of their enemies’ strengths before they set out, or that they learned nothing from them, cannot be entertained.
The most important of the strengths they may have learned was an abstract one: that infusion of warmaking by Islam with the force of an idea. It is significant that the Turks whom the Mongols are most likely to have known or heard of were Islam’s frontier warriors, the ghazis who taught the Koran with the sword. Genghis himself is said to have believed that his mission was divine, sanctioned and demanded by Heaven, to have taught his followers so, to have required the shamans to support his position and even to have preached a sort of primitive nationalism which held the Mongols to be a chosen race.84 Yet, more important still, he accepted none of Islam’s palliating morality. The tools of warmaking already at his disposal — the horse warrior’s mobility, the long-range lethality of the composite bow, the do-or-die ethos of the ghazi, the social élan of exclusive tribalism — were formidable enough. When to those ingredients was added a pitiless paganism, untroubled by any of the monotheistic or Buddhist concerns with mercy to strangers or with personal perfection, it is not surprising that Genghis and the Mongols acquired a reputation for invincibility. Their minds as well as their weapons were agents of terror, and the terror they spread remains a memory to this day.
THE DECLINE OF THE HORSE PEOPLES
Yet ultimately the besetting inability of horse peoples to translate initial conquest into permanent power overtook the Mongols as it had overtaken the Huns and the Buminid Turks. Genghis is credited with great administrative ability but it was extractive, not stabilising, designed to support the nomad way of life, not to change it. His system included no means for legitimising the rule of a single successor, even in the eyes of the Mongols themselves, let alone that of their subjects. Nomadic custom was for the ruler’s appanage — territory, followers, flocks — to be divided equally between his sons and, when Genghis died in 1227, that is what happened. His empire was shared out between the four sons of his chief wife, Börte. The youngest, according to custom, received the ancestral lands, while the conquered territories were shared between the others. Over the next generations the Mongol rulers of Russia went their own way but those of Central Asia and China were drawn into disputes over the succession that resulted in civil war among Genghis’s grandsons. It was resolved when Hülegü, ruler of Central Asia, agreed to support the claim of his brother Kubilai (Kubla Khan) to the title Genghis had held. That did not, however, restore unity in the Mongol heartland. Kubla Khan was already engaged in the war that would establish his branch as the Yuan dynasty of China, a struggle that eventually consumed all his energies and progressively detached the Mongols who followed him from their old steppe life. Hülegü, meanwhile, in pursuing the challenge for primacy in Central Asia, increasingly involved himself in the endemic warfare on the eastern border of the Islamic lands and so committed himself to an eventual campaign against the caliphate itself.
Though the Mongol empire’s disintegration can be seen with hindsight to have begun from the moment when Kubla Khan turned to China, its disintegration was not apparent at the time either to Islam or to the Christian West; both correctly identified the Mongols as a power still greatly to be reckoned with, yet from entirely opposed perspectives. Locked in their own struggle, a century and a half old, for possession of the Holy Land, news of the approach of Hülegü’s Mongol horde from Central Asia brought, respectively, fear and hope.
Hope was what the Crusaders of the Latin kingdoms of the East felt. The Crusades have been described as constituting no more than ‘a border problem’ for Islam, one among many, and it is true that the Crusaders had never succeeded in enlarging the foothold they had won at Jerusalem in 1099 to any extent. They had even lost Jerusalem to Saladin in the twelfth century, clinging on by their fingernails to a few enclaves along the Syrian coast in the aftermath of his counter-offensive. Yet the appeal of the Crusade had never died in the West. Constantly renewed, it had called forth five ‘official’ Crusades by the thirteenth century; numerous others had been aborted or else directed against enemies of the Church in other lands. It had led to the founding of powerful military orders of knights under religious vows, to the building of a system of strong castles for them to garrison on the Crusading kingdoms’ borders and to the dissemination and refinement of a code of ‘chivalry’ among the horse-riding knightly class throughout Christian Europe. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries chivalry had become unquestionably the most important element in the military culture of the West, at a time when the energies of the Western aristocracies were almost wholly directed to warmaking. The regular renewals of the call to go Crusading, to which kings lent as ready an ear as landless knights hoping to win fame and wealth in the East, therefore paid off. By the middle of the thirteenth century, when Hülegü’s Mongols stood poised to break out of Central Asia, Jerusalem had been recaptured and the integrity of the Latin kingdoms restored. Their fortunes seemed to have been revived and the original Crusading vision to stand in the ascendant again. Crusading hopes had been dashed so often, however, that no Crusader would confuse a temporary alleviation of difficulty with a permanent reversal of the balance of power. Power still rested with Islam, which had an apparently inexhaustible capacity to mobilise new offensive efforts from within its own spiritual and physical resources. In a one-front war, it enjoyed the advantages. Rumours of the approach of Hülegü’s Mongol horde from Central Asia, promising the opening of a second front against the Crusaders’ enemy, inevitably kindled expectations of a change of circumstances. To such effect, indeed, that the Crusaders leapt at a confusion of names of the mysterious horse peoples to invent a Christian king, Prester John, who was riding to their rescue from the interior of the steppe.85 Hülegü was not Prester John. The Crusaders were right, nevertheless, to perceive him as a threat to their enemies. Islam, which had felt a tremor of fear at news of his approach, was equally right to regard the Mongol advance as a menace. How greatly they were to be feared it had yet to learn.
Saladin’s success against the Crusaders in the twelfth century had shifted the effective centre of Islamic life to Egypt and Syria, where his descendants ruled as the Ayyubid dynasty. The legitimate Abbasid caliphate still had its seat at Baghdad, however, and it was that city that lay in the Mongols’ immediate path. At the outset, Hülegü’s approach in 1256 did not arouse alarm, since it seemed to be directed against the murderous sect of the Assassins; his destruction of their strongholds was widely welcomed and prompted the Christian Armenians to send a contingent to join his horde. In 1257, however, he entered Persia, which he quickly conquered, and by the end of the year stood poised to enter Mesopotamia. The Abbasid caliph, al-Muzt’asim, quaked before his coming but could not quite bring himself to submit to the unvarying Mongol demand: capitulation or extinction. In January 1258, Hülegü crossed the Tigris from Persia, brushed aside the Caliph’s army and captured Baghdad. Al-Muzt’asim was put to death by strangulation, a steppe practice that the Ottoman Turks would later institute as a succession procedure in their court life at Istanbul.86 Hülegü also had many of the Baghdad citizens massacred, though they had been guaranteed their lives, a breach with Mongol custom perhaps intended to transmit a shock wave ahead of him. The inhabitants of Aleppo in Syria, to which he next moved, were massacred also, but they had defended their city. The citizens of Damascus and many other Muslim places were more prudent and were spared. The spectacle of the collapse of Islamic power all about them encouraged the Crusaders to persist in their view that the Mongols aided their cause and even persuaded Bohemond, mightiest of Crusaders, to join their army for a while. When it pressed on into the Holy Land, however, they thought better and withdrew into their coastal forts. In the absence of Hülegü, who had been recalled to the steppe to take part in the selection of a Great Khan, they came to a hasty understanding
with the equally anxious Ayyubids of Egypt and agreed, despite their bitter memories of defeat by Saladin, to allow an Egyptian army to enter their territory, make camp near Acre and prepare to oppose the Mongols, now led by Hülegü’s subordinate, Kitbuga. While they waited, Baybars, the Egyptian commander, was actually received at the Crusading court.
Baybars was a Mameluke and a ferociously ambitious character, who had already asserted the power of the Mameluke institution in Egypt by murdering one sultan and replacing him with another. He may have had a hand in the decision taken to murder the Mongol envoys who had been sent by Kitbuga with the usual demand for submission. This act of defiance, particularly provocative in view of the Mongols’ known commitment to vengeance as a casus belli, ensured that battle would ensue. So it did; the Mongols advanced from their encampments in Syria into northern Palestine and on 3 September 1260, at Ain Jalut (the Spring of Goliath) north of Jerusalem, they and the Egyptian army, commanded by the sultan Qutuz and Baybars, clashed. In a single morning of fighting the Mongols were defeated, Kitbuga captured and killed and the survivors scattered, never to return.