The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

by John Man

  Not long after this, perhaps the following May, the Taychiuts paid a call. Against the odds, Temujin had survived, thanks to his mother. It was time to deal with him properly by kidnapping him, showing him off and executing him. When they came, the children escaped across the melting snow into a narrow valley, where they remained, trapped. ‘Send out Temujin!’ called the attackers. ‘We have no need for the rest of you!’ Instead, his two brothers and sister put him on a horse and sent him off alone into dense forest, where he hid for three days.

  At this point, trying to work his way out on foot, leading his horse, his saddle became loose and fell off. Looking at the straps, he couldn’t understand how this had happened, or – more significantly – why, for in cultures with a belief in spirit worlds, otherwise inexplicable events are often ascribed to other-worldly influences. So Temujin wonders, for the first time in The Secret History, whether he is under divine protection: ‘Is this a warning from Heaven?’ He’s not sure – with good reason, as it turns out – but is not going to take a risk. He turns back and hides for three more days. Then he tries again, only to be stopped by another odd occurrence: a white boulder the size of a tent tumbles in front of him, blocking his path. Again he wonders, ‘Is this a warning from Heaven?’ Again he retreats, for another three days, until hunger drives him out – right into the arms of the waiting Taychiut. If Heaven is protecting him (as suggested by the auspicious use of threes, and the triply auspicious nine, and the colour white) it has not yet become very effective.

  This episode and the adventure that follows are powerfully told in The Secret History; it makes a good story, it shows that Heaven is on his side, and it contains a number of insights into Temujin’s character. He himself must have told it many times, and approved its retelling as a way of showing his growing strength, maturity and Heaven-sent luck.

  For a week or two, Temujin was held prisoner by the Taychiut chief, Targutai,fn9 under whose orders he was passed from camp to camp as proof of his captor’s dominance. He was made to wear a heavy wooden collar, a portable pillory known as a cangue, fixed round his neck and wrists.

  His prospects could hardly have been worse, for humiliation would precede execution. In fact, character and chance were about to come to his aid. The previous night Temujin had been billeted with a man named Sorkan-shira, who was a member of one of the Taychiut’s subject clans, and not as loyal to its leader as he might have been. He allowed his two sons to loosen Temujin’s cangue in order to let him sleep more comfortably. Here was a tiny foundation for friendship, which could be built upon if and when the time came.

  The next night was the first full moon of summer, in mid-May – Red Circle Day, as the Mongols called it. The Taychiut had gathered for a celebration. Imagine the broad valley of the Onon, ice-free at last, scattered trees overlooked by still-snowy ridges, horses and sheep grazing the fresh pastures, dozens of round tents, smoke curling from the smoke-holes, horses tethered in lines outside each tent, hundreds of people from the surrounding encampments, an air of rejoicing. Among the crowds that afternoon is Temujin, in his cangue, guarded by a ‘weak young man’ holding the prisoner’s rope.

  After dark, the people head for their tents under the full moon. All is quiet. Temujin seizes the moment. He jerks the rope free, swings his wooden collar, clouts the guard on the head and flees into the woods. Behind him he hears a plaintive yell – ‘I let the prisoner escape!’ – and knows they will be after him. He runs to the river, staggers in and lies down, his head raised clear of the near-freezing water by the wooden cangue.

  His pursuers stick to the woods, but someone is on his way home downriver. It is Sorkan-shira, who spots Temujin. Astonished, he mutters that the Taychiut are jealous because there’s ‘fire in your eyes and light in your face . . . Lie just so; I shall not tell them.’ Wait until the coast is clear, he says, then go off to your mother’s.

  Temujin, though, has a better idea. He is in a dire state. His hands are fixed in the cumbersome cangue, which has rubbed his neck and wrists raw. He is in woollen clothes, in icy water. Flight would mean death by exposure, or recapture. So he totters after Sorkan-shira downstream, looking out for the tent where he passed the previous night, pausing now and then to listen for the slop-slop of paddles in leather buckets as women churn mare’s milk late into the night to make airag.

  He hears the noise, finds the tent and enters. At the sight of the shivering and dripping fugitive, Sorkan-shira is horrified, and urges Temujin to be off at once. His family though – his wife, two sons and daughter – are as sympathetic as before. They untie the cangue and burn it. They dry Temujin’s clothes, feed him and hide him in a cart of sheep’s wool. He sleeps.

  The next day is hot. The Taychiut continue their hunt, turning from the forest to the tents, and at last to Sorkan-shira’s. They poke about, looking under the beds, and then in the cart with its pile of wool. They are just on the point of revealing Temujin’s foot – a detail surely added by some bard to increase tension – when Sorkan-shira can stand it no longer.

  ‘In such heat,’ he says, ‘how could one stand it amidst the wool?’

  Feeling foolish, the searchers leave.

  Sorkan-shira sighs with relief, and tells Temujin to get out, giving him food and drink, a horse and a bow with two arrows. Temujin rides upstream and rejoins his family.

  The story portrays the experiences and reveals the reactions that form Temujin’s character. He knows what it is like to be poor and outcast. He knows the crucial importance of family. He sees when to act, and acts decisively, but he has steady nerves and knows how to contain himself. Crucially, he can spot a potential ally. All of this will be vital if he is to fulfil his fundamental need: security.

  The Secret History continues with another epic adventure. Temujin is gathering companions, as Toshiro Mifune does in The Seven Samurai (or Yul Brynner in the Hollywood version, The Magnificent Seven). A year passes. The family has herds, and nine horses, enough for their needs, but not enough to count as wealth. One day, when Temujin’s surviving half-brother, Belgutei, is out hunting marmots on the best horse, thieves steal the other eight. Temujin and the others can only watch in helpless rage. Towards evening, when Belgutei returns on the one remaining horse, Temujin, the eldest, gallops off, tracking the thieves across the grass for the next three days.

  On the fourth morning, he comes across a tent and a large herd of horses being tended by a teenager named Boorchu. Yes, he saw Temujin’s light-bay geldings being driven past earlier. Insisting that Temujin leave his own exhausted horse and take a new one, a black-backed grey, Boorchu shows Temujin the tracks, and takes a sudden decision. ‘Men’s troubles are the same for all,’ he says. ‘I will be your companion.’ He doesn’t bother to return to his tent to tell his father what is happening. Off they go together.

  Four days later, the two catch up with the robbers and their herds, and the missing horses. The two companions act instantly, riding into the herd, cutting out their own horses and galloping off. The thieves follow, but night falls and they give up.

  Another four days later, approaching Boorchu’s father’s camp, Temujin makes a generous gesture: ‘Friend, would I ever have got these horses back without you? Let’s share them.’ No, no, Boorchu replies. He wouldn’t think of it. His father is rich and Boorchu is an only son. He has all he needs. Besides, he acted in friendship. He couldn’t possibly take a reward, as if the horses were mere booty.

  Arriving back at Boorchu’s tent, there is an emotional reunion between son and father, who has been devastated by Boorchu’s disappearance and presumed death. Boorchu is unrepentant, typical of a teenage boy. He’s back, so what’s the problem? After the scolding and the tears of relief, father and son give Temujin food, and the father, Naku, seals the bond between the two boys: ‘You two young men, never abandon each other.’ Temujin will remember Boorchu’s selfless nobility, and Boorchu will later become one of the greatest of Mongol generals.

  There remained a promise to be ful
filled and a ready-made ally to be rediscovered. Temujin, now sixteen, returned to Dei’s tent to marry his betrothed, Börte, as arranged by his father some seven years previously. Börte was seventeen, quite ready for marriage, and her parents were delighted. After the marriage, Dei and his wife accompanied their daughter back to Temujin’s home, bearing a present for Hoelun – a sable gown. It must have been a magnificent object, jet black, sleek as oil, with sleeves long enough to cover the hands in cold weather and a hem reaching down to mid-calf. Hoelun would have been thrilled – except that her eldest, now master of the house, had seen a good use for it.

  He could already count on his own family, two ‘sworn brothers’ and another Mongol clan – Börte’s and Hoelun’s people, the Ongirad. He could do with more help, though, and knew where to find it – from his father’s blood-brother, Toghril, the Kerait leader, now master of a domain that stretched from central Mongolia to the Chinese border south of the Gobi.

  To back his plea, he offered the black sable gown. Toghril was delighted. ‘In return for the black sable coat,’ he said, ‘I will bring together for you your divided people.’

  A good move, because not long afterwards came the attack which forced Temujin to flee to the flanks of his sacred mountain.

  The raid comes soon after dawn, when Temujin’s family are camping in a broad valley near the headwaters of the Kherlen, the river that embraced their homeland. An old serving woman, Khoagchin, woken by the beat of galloping hooves, yells a warning. Temujin and his brothers leap on their horses and ride to safety on the flanks of the Mongols’ sacred mountain, Burkhan Khaldun.fn10

  Here’s a problem. Everyone today thinks they know this mountain. Its name is Khentii Khan – the King of the Khentii – and it is closely connected to Genghis in Mongol minds. Ordinary people, officials and most academics believe that this is the mountain where he roamed as a youngster, escaped his enemies, and is buried (a subject we will return to later). They believe it for many good reasons – because for centuries it has been the focus of Genghis-worship; because one third of the way up there was once a temple, the remains of which can still be found today; and because on the summit there are dozens of shrines. So every four years the government mounts an expedition to it, and up it. It is all very persuasive; except that there is no hard evidence that today’s Burkhan Khaldun is yesterday’s Burkhan Khaldun. Possibly the name referred to a complex of half a dozen peaks, or even to the whole mountainous region.fn11 Possibly each clan had its own sacred mountain. If so, no one knows which young Temujin’s was.

  In any event, Temujin escapes on to a Burkhan Khaldun, if not the Burkhan Khaldun. Hoelun snatches up her five-year-old daughter, Temulun, puts her in front of her on a horse, and gallops off with others, but ‘there was no horse left for Lady Börte’. The old servant pushes Börte into an enclosed ox-drawn carriage. She might have got away, but the rough ground snaps the cart’s wooden axle. The Merkit raiders gather again, wondering what’s in the cart. Young men dismount, open the door, and ‘sure enough they found a lady inside’. They haul Börte and the old woman up on to their horses’ rumps, and join in the search for Temujin on Burkhan Kaldun’s forbidding flanks, squelching through peat bogs and forests thick enough ‘to stop a well-fed snake’. For three days they circle the mountain, in vain. At last, they withdraw with their women captives. ‘We have had our revenge,’ they tell each other, and begin the week-long haul back home. Once there, Börte is handed over to a chief.

  Temujin does not act the hero in this incident, galloping to safety, leaving his young wife to be kidnapped. But by the time The Secret History was written the story was famous, and – we can assume – sanctioned by the hero himself. Everyone had the advantage of hindsight and knew that he was the leader-in-waiting, so his survival was paramount. Besides, the story needs her to be kidnapped, because the kidnapping provides a motivation for what is to come.

  Temujin is hiding out in thickets, sleeping rough. He has lost his beloved Börte. His friends will vanish if he is seen to be a loser. When it is safe for him to come out on the morning of the third day, Temujin re-emerges, and is overcome with gratitude for his survival. This is not the first time he has found shelter in the woods and defiles of Burkhan Khaldun. The Secret History breaks into verse to capture his feelings:

  Thanks to Burkhan Khaldun

  I escaped with my life, a louse’s life,

  Fearing for my life, my only life,

  I climbed the Khaldun

  On one horse, following elk tracks;

  A shelter of broken willow twigs

  I made my home.

  Thanks to Khaldun Burkhanfn12

  My life, a grasshopper’s life,

  Was indeed shielded!

  Though all high places are sacred, this mountain deserves special reverence. He vows he will honour it always by remembering it in his prayers every morning; and so will his children, and his children’s children. Then, in actions representing total submission to a higher power, he faces the rising sun, drapes his belt and hat – both symbols of power and authority – over his shoulders, beats his chest, makes a ninefold obeisance towards the sun and prepares a libation of airag, fermented mare’s milk.

  Temujin’s life was shielded – by what? There is only one possibility: by the power that he had been near while on the mountain, the Heaven of The Secret History’s opening lines. It is time to take a closer look at what this power was.

  ‘Heaven’ is the translation of the Mongol god, Tengri, who was also the god of several other Central Asian peoples, for belief in Tengri went back centuries before the Mongols arrived in Mongolia. Possibly the word derives from the same root as the Chinese for ‘Heaven’, tien, as in Tien Shan, the Heavenly Mountains, or Beijing’s Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. In any event, Tengri was used by the Xiongnu, who may or may not have been the Huns, and who ruled an empire that covered a good deal of east Asia from 200 BC to AD 200.fn13 Turkish tribes adopted the name, recording it in various spellings on numerous stone inscriptions in central Mongolia and then carrying it with them as they migrated westwards, until they converted to Islam. It was also inherited by the Mongols when they arrived in their homeland in the late first millennium (which, in the words of Igor de Rachewiltz, suggests that ‘the Turks played vis-à-vis the Mongols a role similar to that of Greece vis-à-vis Rome’fn14). Like the word ‘heaven’ in many languages, it refers both to the sky and its divine aspect: ‘the heavens opened’, ‘Heavens above!’ There is also a sense (possibly, though nothing in its etymology is certain) of a force, ‘the power that makes the sky turn’.fn15

  So far, Tengri looks like an equivalent of the Old Testament god, though the Jewish god often interfered in human affairs, guiding and punishing, while the ancient Turkish-Mongol one was impersonal, not involved in the petty feuds of the steppe. It was and is natural, therefore, for Muslims and Christians to equate Tengri with Allah and God. The term is also used to refer to Hindu gods and Buddhist spiritual entities. Like all the main monotheisms, Tengrism was rooted in beliefs in a universe of spirits. Tengri presided over numerous lesser tengris (ninety-nine of them in later Buddhist theology) and over the uncountable spirits of rocks, trees, rivers, springs, groves, storms and almost any natural manifestation you can think of. That’s why today, as you drive around Mongolia, you see on mounds and hills and ridge-tops stones piled into shrines (ovoos), on which lie offerings of bottles, blue silk and valueless banknotes.

  This brings us into the system known as animism, the belief not only in the existence of countless spirits, but also in the ability of certain people – shamans – to contact and control them, and use them to heal. There is something fundamental in these beliefs. Spirits and shamans are common to pre-literate, pre-urban cultures across the world, from Siberia (where the word ‘shaman’ comes from) to Africa, Australia and the Americas. There were many ways to contact the spirit world, through hallucinogens, drugs, trances, music, drumming, rituals and/or by climbing something that
approached the place where the spirits and/or the Great Spirit, Zeus, Allah, God or Tengri lived, like a tower or a mountain. This is why mountains sacred to prehistoric peoples have shrines on them; why they are hard but not too hard to climb; why cultures as separate as the Mayas, the Sumerians and the Egyptians built pyramids; and why religious buildings in many faiths have towers.

  So it is on a sacred mountain that Temujin has his first inkling of being under the protection of Heaven, the universe’s supreme power. It was the power that kept the stars turning, the power that all mankind sensed, and which therefore underlay all religions.

  As conquest followed conquest, Tengri underwent refinements, gradually strengthening to become what some scholars call an ideology, Tengrism. Possibly this happened under the influence of the great monotheisms of Islam and Christianity. Originally merely a spiritual version of the sky, Blue Heaven, Tengrism became both more universal and more involved with human affairs – Eternal Heaven. Eternal Heaven grants protection, good fortune and success. It is the source of strength, with the power to inspire the correct decision at times of crisis, and to impose its will. Later, when the empire was established and expanding, edicts usually began with an invocation: ‘By the power of Eternal Heaven . . .’ or ‘Relying on the strength of Eternal Heaven . . .’ The problem lay in deciding what was decreed and what wasn’t.

  Superficially, to claim Heaven’s backing looks like nothing more than a reflection of the Chinese imperial tradition of claiming to rule by the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. But perhaps there’s more to it. The Mandate of Heaven could, by definition, be granted by the gods to an emperor only retrospectively, after he or his dynasty had come to power. Before conquest or seizure of power, Heaven may be on your side, but you cannot know it for sure until you ascend the Dragon Throne. The corollary is that if you fail, Heaven withdraws its mandate; but you cannot know this until you fall from power. Young Temujin’s future followers believed that Heaven was on his side in advance of any success, not only when he was still a louse on the side of a mountain but back for centuries to the emergence of the Mongols.