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

by John Man

  Both Jebe and Jelme would become two of the khan’s greatest generals.

  After the battle, the Taychiut chief who had held Temujin captive – Targutai – was himself captured by a man of a subordinate clan and his two sons. The three shoved him on his back in a cart and then, while the father of the two young men sat on his captive’s paunch, they set off to give themselves up with their prize. On the way, however, they recalled Temujin’s uncompromising views on loyalty and began to wonder if they were doing the right thing. They had, after all, sworn to serve the man who was now their prisoner. Rather than reveal themselves as traitors to Temujin, they let their captive go, and presented themselves to Temujin. It was a good move. Even though Temujin would have sent Targutai to a terrible death, he placed loyalty to a leader above his own desire for revenge. ‘You were unable to forsake your rightful khan. Your heart was right,’ he told the three men, and took them into his service. (Targutai got his come-uppance anyway. He was killed later by one of Sorkan-shira’s sons.)

  At one point, in the summer of 1203, Genghis was again down, and nearly out. With a mere 2,600 men, he retreated along the Khalkha River to the shores of an unidentified lake (or possibly a river) called Baljuna.

  What followed assumed huge significance, not because it marked Genghis’s nadir in military terms, but because it was a turning point in terms of leadership. According to several Chinese sources, Genghis endured extreme deprivation with nineteen loyal commanders, who, in a ritual that bound them to Genghis and to each other, all drank the muddy waters of Lake Baljuna. As one account puts it:

  Upon arrival at the Baljuna, the provisions were used up. It happened that a wild horse came northward. Khasar brought it down. From its skin they made a kettle; with a stone they got fire, and from the river, water. They boiled the flesh of the horse and ate it. Genghis Khan, raising his hand toward the sky, swore thus: ‘If I finish the Great Work, then I shall share with you men for better or for worse; if I break my word, then let me be as this water.’ Among the officers and men, there was none who was not moved to tears.

  This was the moment at which a leader willing to share suffering, defeat and death with his companions forged a bond like no other. And who were these Baljunans, as they became known? Not an inward-looking cosa nostra of top Mongolians. Almost half of them were outsiders who might just as easily have been Genghis’s enemies, a mix of clans, races and religions – three Christian Keraits, a Merkit (shamanistic), two Khitans (possibly Buddhists) and three Muslims, who would have been traders, not herders, and one of whom was a descendant of the Prophet. This was the proto-government of a proto-nation.fn1

  Despite its significance, the incident is mentioned only obliquely in The Secret History. Genghis sets up camp on Lake Baljuna, but there’s no ‘covenant’. Clearly, the omission was deliberate. Yet it’s a great story, and well known, as proved by the many references in Chinese sources. Surely it would not have been ignored by the Mongolian storytellers; surely Genghis would not have disapproved. That leaves only one likely explanation: the author deliberately left it out. His motive? The mixed ethnicity of the Baljunans gives us a probable clue. It looks as if the author, writing for Genghis’s family, wished to downplay the role of non-family, non-Mongol members.

  From Baljuna, where Genghis and his loyal band regain their strength over the summer of 1203, Genghis sends a long and moving message to Toghril, his old ally, in effect suggesting national unity. It seizes the moral high ground. Khan, my father, he asks in sorrow, why turn against me? Don’t you recall how we swore allegiance? Were we not like oxen together on a two-shaft cart, like the wheels on a two-wheeled cart? Did not Yisugei, my father, come to your help? Were you not sworn brothers? And more of the same, all designed to wrack Toghril’s soul while Genghis regains his strength and awaits the arrival of reinforcements from his wife’s people, the Ongirat, and other local clans.

  He was right to wait. In his absence, Toghril’s alliance fell apart. Jamukha, always impatient with Toghril’s rule, planned his assassination. Toghril discovered the plot. The plotters fled to join the Naimans, a powerful, independent khanate that dominated the far west of present-day Mongolia. Genghis fell upon the hapless Toghril, and after a three-day battle was victorious. Toghril and his son also sought refuge with the Naimans. There Toghril was killed by a guard who refused to believe the refugee was the great khan of the Keraits. His son was killed later in the depths of Central Asia.

  Now it was the turn of the Naimans, who were sheltering Jamukha. In mid-May 1204, Genghis began his march up the Kherlen towards the Khentii range, where the Naimans, under the leadership of their chief, Tayang, were camped. By the time they encountered the enemy, an overwhelmingly superior force, the Mongol horses were exhausted. A commander suggested making camp to regain strength, and at the same time scare the opposition by having each man light five fires. It worked. That night Naiman guards, posted on the heights ahead, reported to Tayang that the Mongols ‘had more fires than the stars’.

  Tayang became twitchy and suggested withdrawal to fight another day. Now for the first time we hear of Tayang’s fiery son, Kuchlug, who would have none of it, saying that his father was as useless as a tethered calf or ‘a pregnant woman who doesn’t go beyond her pissing place’. Driven into a rage, Tayang gave the order to fight.

  And now The Secret History starts to revel in the coming victory with a poetic flow of metaphors. When Tayang asks why his men are fleeing, Jamukha reminds him of Genghis’s ‘four hounds’, the generals Jebe, Jelme, Subedei and Kublai, who were raised on human flesh. With foreheads of hardened copper and chisels for snouts,

  They advance feeding on dew

  And riding on the wind.

  And who is that over there? Tayang asks.

  The one whose body is stitched with cast copper and wrought iron? replies Jamukha. That is Genghis, my sworn brother. And see Khasar, Genghis’s brother? He eats three-year-old bulls. He can swallow a man whole, quiver and all, without it even touching the sides of his throat. He can shoot straight through ten or twenty people, even if they are on the other side of a mountain.

  In short, Tayang was doomed, Genghis victorious, and Kuchlug fled to the west, where he would build a new life for himself and play a significant role in Genghis’s future. Jamukha also fled, into the mountains of the far north-west with five other survivors, seeking the help of the Merkits, the people who had captured Börte twenty years before. A final campaign ended with the Merkits’ defeat and Jamukha captured, betrayed by companions.

  According to The Secret History, Genghis executed Jamukha’s companions for their treachery: ‘How can we let men live who have raised their hands against their rightful lord?’ He then gave Jamukha an opportunity to recant, looking for a chance to show mercy. But Jamukha accepts his fate. ‘O my sworn friend,’ he says,

  I would be a louse in your collar, I would be a thorn in the inner lapel of your coat. Let me die swiftly, let them kill me without shedding blood. When I lie dead, my bones buried in a high place, for ever and ever I will protect you and be a blessing to the offspring of your offspring.

  This is The Secret History’s spin on events, rounding off a classic tale of two sworn friends who fell out. Jamukha emerges as a man who went astray, but in the end regains the nobility that justifies Genghis’s earlier trust. And Genghis is the generous leader, who would never willingly abandon the bonds of blood-brotherhood. Jamukha condemns himself, and is granted a princely – namely, bloodless – death.

  Genghis was now absolute master of all the tribes of Mongolia, the man who had ‘unified the people of the felt-walled tents’. At a national assembly, a khuriltai,fn2 he was proclaimed leader of the newly united nation.

  Where this happened is, of course, as disputed as everything else to do with Genghis. But one place makes sense, because it is almost exactly where baby Genghis may have come into the world, just beside the River Onon, at the junction with its winding tributary, the Khorkh. Now the wooden shack
s of Binder ramble across the plain’s northern end, but 800 years ago it was a huge open pasture running between river and hills, with Spleen Hillock rising gently from its centre. The place was marked by a wooden pillar by an octogenarian geographer named Bazargur, who had made it his business to commemorate all sites connected with Genghis, and a former prime minister and local businessman had built a fenced area that included a solid, 3-metre stupa with a portrait of Genghis and the self-confident statement: ‘In 1206 Genghis Khan convened the Great Meeting here and proclaimed the Mongol nation.’ Others had seen, and believed, for there were old joss-sticks in the brazier and little gifts – vodka bottles, small-denomination notes – on the stupa. Who, seeing these memorials, would doubt they were close to the spirit of their hero and the roots of their nation?

  This was the moment his loyal companions had been working, fighting and waiting for. Rewards came in plenty, as The Secret History records at length, reviewing the adventures and campaigns that had brought them all to this point. Those who stood by him – eighty-eight of them are named – became commanders of one or more ‘thousands’, making ninety-five ‘thousands’ in all. Those especially favoured would be forgiven for up to nine crimes. The names mount in a litany of praise. Old companions and their sons as generals, royal aides, quiver-bearers, day-guards and night-guards.

  The appointments marked something new in nomadic imperial administrations. In the past, unity had always been undermined by tribal rivalries. Genghis’s own childhood had been blighted by them, and his slow rise to power constantly threatened by them. Now came a revolution, with appointments made not on the basis of inherited position within a tribal hierarchy, but of services rendered.

  Genghis’s new society needed new rules, and new ways of administration. In particular, it needed written administration. Genghis had foreseen the need for this as his conquests grew, for one of those captured from the Naiman was a Uighur named Tatar-Tonga, who had been Tayang’s chief administrator. Two years before, after the defeat of Tayang, he had been found wandering the battlefield, holding the state seal, looking for his lord and master. The Uighurs, once masters of Mongolia, had been driven out in the ninth century, had settled in what is now Xinjiang, north-western China, and had adopted a script from further west along the Silk Road. Many of their scribes had become, in effect, freelance secretaries. Now Genghis ordered Tatar-Tonga to adapt the script for Mongolian and teach it to the princes.fn3

  To oversee the embryonic chancellery, Genghis required someone closer to him than a captured functionary. The choice fell upon a young man called Shigi, who had been seized from the Tatars several years previously and adopted by Genghis’s family, either by his mother or his wife, no one knows which. In any event, he was now a trusted family member. ‘While I am setting in order the entire nation under the protection of Eternal Heaven, you have become my seeing eyes, my hearing ears,’ Genghis told Shigi. ‘Divide up the people of the felt-walled tents . . . punish those who deserve to be punished’, and record the division of possessions, the laws and the judgements ‘on white paper in a blue book’. This would be a permanent record for future generations, and anyone who tried to change it would be punished. Shigi’s Blue Book became famous as the ‘Great Yasa’, or jasagh (transliterations vary of the Mongol word for government or legal code, which sounds like dzassag). Scholars often refer to this as a grand body of law, a sort of Mongolian Code Napoléon. In fact, no one knows what it was. The book vanished, which is odd if it really was a written code of law. Possibly it was just a collection of off-the-cuff rulings, regulations and decrees – precedents from which laws might have been derived in time, but weren’t.fn4

  The previous paragraph mentions another novelty, hinting at Genghis’s growing confidence in his destiny. Traditionally, the Mongols honoured the Blue Heaven. This is the moment when we are told that Genghis is under the protection of Eternal Heaven. It seems that the khan and his followers had begun to see faith as justified, dreams becoming reality. A clan’s brief success, achieved with the fickle backing of the Blue Heaven, might last for a season; the founding of a nation suggested the support of something rather more enduring; and what could be a better help in achieving empire than an eternal deity?

  Genghis’s revolution penetrated right the way through society. Out went tribal regiments; in came regiments that owed loyalty to their commanders. True, some regiments remained tribal; but only if loyalty was assured. Switching regiments became a capital offence; and commanders who failed to measure up could be fired. The whole military and social structure was underpinned by Genghis’s decision to form his own elite bodyguard of 10,000, with special privileges. This was a masterstroke, for the corps included the sons of the regimental commanders, who had a rank equal to that of their fathers; except that in the event of a dispute, the son would be preferred above the father. Very clever. Before a commander entertained thoughts of disloyalty, he would recall that his son was a hostage to the khan, and that treachery would have to involve the two of them. Personal loyalty and blood ties superseded tribal bonds, weaving a new and enduring social texture, devoted to one purpose: conquest.

  And conquest was vital, for this was not a money economy. Troops could not be paid, except in kind. Power itself bought nothing. Once the conquered tribes had been absorbed – the elite killed or ransomed, ordinary men allocated to regiments, young women distributed, the children taken as slaves, the silks, goblets, saddles, bows, horses and herds all shared out – the warriors would look at their leader with new expectations. Old ways had been broken, new ones forged – to be served how, exactly? Only by looking to the ultimate source of wealth: the settled lands to the south, beyond the Gobi.

  Genghis’s strategy brings us to Avraga, the forward base from which he could look south, the place where The Secret History would be written in the year or two after his death.fn5 The first time I went there, it was nothing but a few enigmatic bumps in an immense landscape of flowing grass. That I learned anything at all about it was the result of a remarkable stroke of luck. On my second visit I arrived with four adventure tourists one evening in the late summer of 2009, to find a new museum, a big fence around the site, and signs of much archaeology.

  By chance, our timing was perfect. A group of archaeologists were winding up their day’s work, shouldering spades and wheeling barrows towards us. A Japanese man with professorial glasses and a wispy beard shook my hand as if he were Livingstone meeting Stanley, and said, in good English: ‘My name is Shiraishi.’ Seeing my blank look, he added: ‘I am your editor.’

  It was an astonishing coincidence. Noriyuki Shiraishi, Professor of Archaeology at Niigata University, had added a long note to the Japanese version of my biography of Genghis, counteracting some of my naïve judgements. I had no idea that he was also head of the archaeological work done at Avraga over the previous nine years. It was he who was responsible for the museum and the protective fence, and he, in all the world, who was the best person to reveal what Avraga was about.

  The site, 1,200 by 500 metres, consisted of houses cheek by jowl along a single street, running parallel with a rampart about 250 metres to the north. Street and rampart bracketed the main stonewall structure, which was some 11 metres across, with a little 3-by-3-metre niche. Not an impressive building by the standards of town-dwellers; but Mongols hardly ever built houses, so this one was of some significance, not because of its size but because of its purpose. In the floor of the building were four stones that had been the bases of pillars. These had supported a huge square tent, 17 metres across and probably some 9 metres high, assuming standard proportions. As Shiraishi says in the papers recording his work, Chinese sources mentioned Genghis’s ‘Great [or Main] Palace-Tent’, but no one knew what or where it was. Shiraishi is sure he has found it: ‘There is no doubt that Platform No. 1 [the main building] is the remains of this palace’ – built (probably, possibly, maybe, perhaps) on Genghis’s orders immediately after unification in 1206.

  A word abou
t the palace-tent. It is an ord in modern Mongolian, and something similar in Turkish. English-speakers should know about this because, by extension, it also means the territory and the people ruled from it. The semi-desert region of Inner Mongolia, once Mongol, now part of China, is called Ordos, the plural of ord, after the many palace-tents that used to be there. Spellings varied. Outsiders sometimes put an ‘h’ at the beginning, giving the English horde and equivalents in many other languages. So anyone speaking of barbarian ‘hordes’ is voicing a direct, if unconscious, linguistic link across Asia and back in time to Genghis.

  The discoveries by Shiraishi and his team of Japanese and Mongolian archaeologists have revealed much more about Genghis’s palace-tent and its surroundings. The remains are on several levels, the first dating back to the early thirteenth century. This, the original palace-tent, was surrounded by a scattering of offices, houses and a temple or two. Then, after about 1230, came a new palace-tent replacing the first one, built by Genghis’s heir, Ogedei, shortly after his enthronement in 1229. Ogedei, following his father’s orders, moved 380 kilometres westwards to the new and much larger capital of Karakorum in 1235. His palace there had the same proportions as the one at Avraga and, according to the Chinese official history of the Yuan dynasty, he used the same architect, Liu Ming.