The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China
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To cope with these challenges, herders, who have been developing their skills for over 2,000 years, are experts. The Mongolian ger (better known to westerners by the Turkish term yurt) is domed to shoulder strong winds, and thick woollen felt over wooden roof-spokes keeps out rain and snow. To stay warm and to cook, you burn dried dung. In winters gone by, without today’s iron stoves, you either coughed in a fog of smoke or opened the roof-flap and let in the cold. In summer, the smoke was a defence against the pestering flies. Gers and the carts that carry them, and the powerful little bows of wood and bone acted as reminders that these sailors on the ocean of grass needed their forest roots.
The trouble was not so much the climate, the need to keep moving to fresh pasture and the lack of luxuries, but the feuding. Clans and tribes had their traditional allies, but with wealth and power measured in herds and everyone on the move twice a year between summer and winter pastures, clan fought clan and vengeance followed injury down the generations. At best, young men had glorious assets: huge blue skies, horses galore, powerful bows, shoulder muscles like slabs of stone. But there were costs. A raid put an arrow in your back or left you wifeless, childless, motherless or horseless, facing winter with not a sheep to your unwritten name. Girls, as good in the wooden saddles as boys, grew up tough in mind and body, but were still in need of strong men.
The downside of steppe life was anarchy. Everyone knew this. All but the wildest wanted peace. The trouble was that every would-be leader wanted it on his own terms, without any of the give-and-take imposed by a central government. The only recourse was power, which was what the young Genghis lacked, but which he hoped for, because his great-grandfather had had it.
Earlier in the same century, when the old were young, a tribal chief named Kabul had crossed the Gobi, ridden through the mountain passes where the Great Wall now runs, down to the city now known as Beijing. In a film, this would be part of the back-story, sung by a bard, because by Genghis’s time everyone would know what happened. Kabul, Genghis’s great-grandfather, was the source of the very idea of national unity. He had united the Mongol tribes as their khan,fn2 and the emperor of the northern Chinese empire of Jin had invited him to Beijing in the hope of winning him over with silks and wine. Kabul was not to be won. He got drunk, had the temerity to tweak the emperor’s beard, and barely escaped with his life. Vengeance fell on Kabul’s heir – his cousin, Ambakai, captured and crucified on a frame known as a ‘wooden donkey’. His last message acted as a rallying-cry to his heirs: ‘Until the nails of your five fingers are ground down, until your ten fingers are worn away, strive to avenge me!’ Kutula, one of Kabul’s sons, responded, launching a series of raids, earning himself a reputation as a Mongol Hercules, with a voice like thunder and hands like bear paws. But his strength did not guarantee victory. In about 1160, the Mongols, as hard to unify as a herd of cats, fell back to raiding and revenge killing and wife-stealing.
Kabul’s grandson Yisugei dreamed of restoring unity, and so, unfortunately, did his cousins. The Mongols now consisted of some eighteen clans, two of whom claimed the khanship. To do so successfully, each needed the loyalty of all. This was the Catch 22 of steppe politics: leadership needed loyalty, which depended on wealth and power, to acquire which needed leadership.
To secure followers, Yisugei’s first task was to get a wife.
This story and many others are told in the epic known as The Secret History of the Mongols, our main source for the events that produced Yisugei’s son, the nation’s founder, the future Genghis Khan. It is not only the prime source; it is the only one in Mongolian, and it is crucial because the incidents it describes are selected for their importance in explaining the rise of its hero. This ‘foundation epic’ was written in a mixture of prose and poetry within two years of Genghis’s death in 1227,fn3 when the new nation’s leaders gathered to crown his heir, his third son, Ogedei. Memories were still fresh, and the best stories were already being turned into song by bards (though not the conquests, perhaps because bards did not accompany the armies; The Secret History is pretty hopeless on military matters). Its disparate elements include snatches of epic verse, paeans of praise, ancient precepts and elegies, none of which were secret, by the way: the epithet was applied by modern scholars because it was kept private by Genghis’s family. It contains many adventures – all the chaotic ebb and flow of the struggle for survival and dominance on the vast canvas of grassland and forest. At the time they happened, these events would have seemed of only local significance. But by the time The Secret History was written, everyone knew they were much more than that, because from the chaos had arisen a hero, a leader, a national founder, an emperor.
The Secret History has two agendas. The first is to turn the chaos into a coherent account of state-creation, with frequent identification of the year according to the widely used twelve-year cycle of animals common in east Asia (the History itself is dated the Year of the Rat, 1228), with the anonymous writerfn4 choosing those incidents that make sense of Genghis’s rise. For instance, it retells a clichéd incident in which a mother gathers her disputatious sons and has them break first one arrow then try to break a bundle, which they can’t do; moral – to survive and conquer, stick together! Secondly, the History tells us about the qualities that were essential for leadership: bravery, decisiveness, judgement, generosity of spirit, ruthlessness, a vision of what had to be achieved. There are many obscurities. But often the incidents – almost certainly those that had already been popularized by bards – have a dramatic intensity that makes them as good as treatments for movie scenes, complete with dialogue.
Yet it’s more than a narrative. It is also a political manifesto, showing how divine will has been at work to produce Genghis, back for twenty-three generations to animal ancestors, which were – as its opening lines state – a deer and a wolf, ‘born with his destiny ordained by Heaven Above’. It tells how this worked in practice. Twelve generations back, there was a woman, Alan the Fair, who bore two sons, then after the death of her husband became pregnant three more times. Her two older sons accuse her of impropriety. Not at all, she says: ‘a resplendent yellow man’ came into her tent through the smoke-hole or the gap at the top of the door and ‘his radiance penetrated my womb’, then ‘he crept out on a moonbeam or a ray of sun in the guise of a yellow dog’. It’s not quite a virgin birth, but at least an immaculate conception. Alan the Fair knows a messenger from Heaven when she sees one, because the bright yellow, or golden, light symbolizes supreme power and the dog is an oblique way of talking about a wolf, the Mongols’ totemic animal and a symbol of fierceness. ‘The sign is clear,’ she says. ‘They are the sons of Heaven’, destined to ‘become rulers of all’.
Twelve generations later Genghis appears, followed by his heirs and family – the Golden Clan as they called themselves. It was for them that The Secret History was written. That was why it was secret. It remained so because the original was lost. It was preserved only because the Mongols’ Chinese-speaking successors transliterated the Mongol into Chinese syllables as an aid to learning the language, but that version also vanished from the imperial archives. It was rediscovered in private hands in the late nineteenth century, and scholars set about the task of restoring the Mongolian text, back-transliterating it from the Chinese signs.
With the theme stated in the first few lines – a destiny ‘ordained by Heaven Above’ – many of the incidents incorporate a religious ideology, based on the Mongolian deity Blue Heaven. As time and The Secret History go on, we will learn more about this concept and its evolving complexities.
So here we have a document carefully constructed for its narrative power and ideology to present the past in a way that explains the present and foresees the future. It’s not exactly the most objective of historical sources. Historians are confronted with this problem all the time, but usually there are many alternative sources that allow scholars to work towards ‘objective’ truth, assuming there is such a thing. In this case, it is the f
irst and only written account in Mongolian, on which all later sources draw (though there are Chinese and Persian sources, which add details that both corroborate and conflict with the Mongolian). All we can do is make the best of it, admiring it as part history, part folklore and part hagiography, and being extremely careful about taking it at face value.
A chance meeting changed the course of Yisugei’s life, and that of world events. One day, according to The Secret History, he was out hawking on the banks of the River Onon when he came across a man riding beside a little black, two-wheeled cart pulled by a camel, a form of transport reserved for wealthy women. Perhaps Yisugei recognized him as Chiledu, the younger brother of the chief of a neighbouring tribe, the Merkits, who lived in the forests to the north-west, up towards Lake Baikal. A glimpse of the girl in the cart inspired him – she was a beauty. Moreover, her clothing showed she was of a clan traditionally linked to his by marriage. He fetched his two brothers, overtook the slow-moving procession, chased off the Merkits, grabbed the camel’s tether, and set off slowly across the grassland, with the young woman, Hoelun, bewailing her fate, throwing herself back and forth, plaits flying, in an agony of grief at the loss of her husband. Oh, shut up, said one of the men riding beside her. Forget him. He’s history. This was not quite true, as things turned out, for the incident provides crucial motivation for later events, but Hoelun accepted Yisugei as her new husband and protector. Six months later, after Yisugei returned from a raid, she greeted him with the news that she was pregnant.
Yisugei’s task now was to regain the authority once wielded by his grandfather, Kabul Khan. He needed help. One potential ally was a Turkish tribe, the Keraits,fn5 his neighbours to the west (remnants of a region-wide community of Turks who had migrated westwards, eventually reaching a new homeland, today’s Turkey).
The Keraits had been nominally Christian for almost two centuries. They owed their Christianity to a ‘heretical’ sect named after the fifth-century patriarch Nestorius, who was banished from Constantinople for asserting the equality of Christ’s two natures, god and man. This meant opposing the official cult of the Virgin as the Mother of God, which Nestorius said denied Christ’s humanity. His followers fled, and thrived, spreading eastwards to China and into Central Asia, where they converted several tribes, including the Keraits.fn6
The Keraits’ current leader, Toghril, had had a colourful career, having been abducted and ransomed twice in childhood, before slaying several uncles to secure the throne. When Toghril was forced to flee by a vengeful relative, Yisugei helped him regain the leadership. (The remains of his HQ – a mound, a few stones – can still be seen a short drive west from Ulaanbaatar.) Toghril and Yisugei became ‘sworn brothers’, an alliance which would later prove of peculiar importance in Genghis’s career.
Three months later, another raid, a victory, in Manchuria, home of the Mongols’ old rivals, the Tatars.fn7 Yisugei returned with a captive, a senior Tatar named Temujin. It was around this time, probably in 1162, that Hoelun’s baby was born, close to the River Onon, near a hill called Spleen Hillock.fn8 If later practices are anything to go by, Hoelun’s ger would have been off-limits to almost everyone, with a female shaman as midwife looking closely at the baby for some omen, for this was after all the great-grandchild of a khan. Lo and behold, a son, with a clot of blood ‘the size of a knuck-lebone’ in his right hand. Later, in folklore, this was seen as an omen of fierceness – but only because the baby turned out fiercely successful. Some babies wielding blood clots turn out gentle failures.
Following tradition, Yisugei named the boy after his captured foe, Temujin (who vanishes from the story, presumably killed or ransomed). So the future Genghis entered life with a Tatar name, quite a suitable one actually, because it derives from the Mongolian word for ‘iron’ and means ‘iron-man’ (i.e. blacksmith), not that the original Temujin was a smith any more than anyone named Smith is today. Anyway, his parents liked the connotations of iron – two later children bore names with the same root.
When the boy was eight, Yisugei set out to find a future wife for Temujin from Hoelun’s clan, the Ongirad, with whom the Mongols traditionally arranged marriages. They lived several hundred kilometres away to the east, on the grasslands that flow over today’s Chinese border. Near his destination, he came across an Ongirad couple who had a daughter, Börte, a year older than Temujin, and were keen for a match. The two fathers agreed, in a stock phrase, that both their children had fire in their eyes and light in their faces. To seal the bond and ensure mutual trust, Yisugei left his son with his future in-laws, Dei and Chotan. On leaving he told Dei to look after Temujin, and urged ‘Don’t let him be frightened by dogs!’ This may seem odd – the future ruler of all Eurasia afraid of dogs? – but dogs were bred big and fierce. Even today, when you approach a ger, you shout ‘Keep the dogs down!’ Genghis himself must have approved the anecdote as a nice human touch.
During the journey home Yisugei came across a group of Tatars feasting and, in accordance with the rules of hospitality on the steppe, he was offered food and drink. They must have recognized him, and seized the chance to take revenge for his previous attacks by mixing poison into his drink. By the time he reached home three days later, he was sick, and dying.
This is the real beginning of the story, because just before Yisugei died, he summoned Temujin home. Everything before is back-story, given significance only by what happened next. If Yisugei had not died, little Temujin would probably have been left with his prospective in-laws for years, would have married his intended, Börte, and lived happily ever after, or not, unknown to the outside world. His destiny would have been very different, and so would that of Mongolia, China and all Eurasia.
Hoelun was left without a protector, and with seven young children between three and nine, five of her own and two by a second wife, Suchigil. Their hopes for success in war, their insurance against catastrophe, had suddenly vanished. Another clan, the Taychiuts, direct descendants of Ambakai, whose khanship had ended on a ‘wooden donkey’, now bid for power. Seeing a chance to dispense with possible rivals – in particular Yisugei’s boy Temujin – they abandoned Hoelun, even spearing an old man who remonstrated with them. Hoelun was left without herds to almost certain death.
But she was a woman of spirit. She became a hunter-gatherer. The Secret History depicts her, skirts hoisted, noblewoman’s tall hat firmly on her head, grubbing with a sharpened stick for berries and roots: burnet, silverweed, garlic, onion, lily bulbs, leeks. Suchigil must have been doing much the same, but she plays no role in the story. The boys learned to make hooks from needles and use nets to catch ‘mean and paltry’ fish.
So for three or four crucial years, Temujin knew what it was like to be at the bottom of the heap, to be without the protective network of family, companions and close friends, without enough animals to provide meat, milk or felt for a new ger covering. He must have grown up feeling trapped in the brutal hand-to-mouth existence of down-and-out hunter-gatherers, longing for security, herds, and vengeance.
During this harsh time, Temujin found a best friend, a boy named Jamukha. At the age of ten, the two exchanged gifts. In winter, swaddled in furs against the cold, they played at dice with animal ankle-bones, as people still do today. In the spring, as the grass grew sweet through the melting snow, Jamukha made Temujin a whistling arrowhead in exchange for an arrow tipped with horn. Twice the boys swore they would be anda – blood-brothers.
This was a family under stress – two women raising seven children. It was hardly surprising if the two eldest boys, Temujin and his half-brother Bekter, felt a growing sense of rivalry. One autumn, when Temujin was thirteen, his two half-brothers stole a small fish and a bird Temujin and their brother Khasar had caught. When Temujin and Khasar complained to their mother about the thefts, Hoelun reproached them. How could they say such things at a time when ‘We have no friends but our shadows’? The two boys stormed out, seething. Then, bows at the ready, they crept up on Bekter, who was on a
rise watching over some light-bay geldings. Bekter yelled at them: We need to be together, taking revenge on our Taychiut kinsmen; why ‘regard me as a lash in the eye, a thorn in the mouth?’ Don’t touch Belgutei, he added, and sat cross-legged, as if calling his half-brother’s bluff.
Temujin and Khasar shot Bekter and killed him, in cold blood.
You have to ask: if The Secret History is about the rise of our hero, what is this foolish and cowardly act doing in there? The answer is that it is a lesson, spelled out by Hoelun. She is distraught, and delivers a scathing condemnation. ‘You who have destroyed life!’ she yells, and compares her sons to a roll-call of destructive beasts, ‘citing old sayings, quoting ancient words’. She goes on and on, in verse, which suggests it was well known and sanctioned by Genghis himself. It’s there to make two points. First, no leader should undermine the family network, the core to survival and future strength. Her children have disobeyed the ancient injunction taught by the tale of the unbreakable bundle of arrows: stick together. Second, listen to the women. They often know what’s right.