The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China
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There was more. Armies on the move had always lived off the land, by robbery and pillage. They could do nothing much with their victims, except send artisans back to HQ, kill the men, rape the women, enslave the children. They had little interest in prisoners, for prisoners would undermine the very flexibility that made conquest possible. But now prisoners had a triple use: as a slave-labour force of specialist artisans; as soldiers to man the army’s non-nomadic core; and as cannon fodder – a particularly nasty expedient in which civilians could be driven ahead of the army to fill in moats with their bodies, take the full force of the defences, and possibly blunt them as defenders held back from killing their own flesh and blood.
This was a juggernaut, which demanded the building of roads and bridges, self-sustaining and, with every city taken, growing in wealth, numbers, weapons and power. It would roll on explosively, driven by the agenda of its supreme commander: to redress wrongs, pay his troops and guarantee security. It was still the agenda of a nomad warrior. He could not have realized that he was embarking on something which would demand a far grander vision.
Against them, when the army arrived at the borders of Khwarezm, was ranged a potentially much greater force. But the sultan was unloved, and could not risk creating a unified command structure under a general who might simply turn against him. So when the Mongols surrounded Otrar, the sultan’s forces were scattered among the major cities. All of this Genghis knew from disaffected Muslim officials who came over to the Mongols. He exploited these divisions to the full, offering towns and fortresses the chance to surrender peacefully without any pillaging by the Mongol troops.
Centres of resistance were another matter. Otrar, whose governor had sparked this bloody war, received special attention, in an assault known in Kazakhstan as the Otrar Catastrophe. Genghis wanted the governor taken alive, to ensure him a gruesome death. The siege lasted for five months, until a senior commander tried to flee through a side-gate. His action hastened both his end and the city’s. The Mongols forced entry through the same gateway used by the fleeing commander. Their quarry, Inalchuk, barricaded himself in the inner sanctum with several hundred defenders. Since the Mongols had orders to take Inalchuk alive, there followed a slow, methodical attack that lasted another month. Realizing they were doomed, the defenders staged suicide assaults, fifty at a time, until finally Inalchuk and his few surviving bodyguards were trapped on upper floors, where they tore bricks from the walls to throw at their attackers. It ended with Inalchuk being led away in chains to a lingering and painful execution.
From a first look at Otrar today – a rough, bare platform of dusty earth, not a tower remaining, hardly a trace of a wall – you might assume that the Mongols destroyed the place. Not so. Why would they, when it was such an important link on the Silk Road, which was exactly what drew Genghis there in the first place? It was Inalchuk they wanted. With him dead, the town could live, which it did very well for another 500 years, as the archaeological finds reveal: several metres of ‘cultural layers’, and hundreds of artefacts – jewellery, bronze objects, glassware, ceramics, copper and silver coins – many of which were made in local workshops. It acquired a huge mosque and a 2-hectare suburb devoted to pottery. In brief, it became one of the major centres from which sprang modern Kazakh culture. What destroyed Otrar had nothing to do with Genghis. The region fell to non-Genghisid Mongols from western Mongolia in the first half of the eighteenth century, an invasion that cut the trade routes and killed many of the Silk Road cities. The people left. Wind, rain, snow and frost turned Otrar into the wreck it is today.
Meanwhile, Genghis had divided his army, sending Jochi northwards to sweep round in a vast pincer movement that would eventually snip off all Khwarezm’s northern regions. During January 1220, Genghis left a second force to mop up Otrar, while he himself led the other pincer-arm straight across the Kyzyl Kum Desert – a mere 450 kilometres of bitter, sand-and-tussock wilderness – towards Bukhara.
As the Mongol army approached Bukhara in February or March 1220, a 20,000-strong garrison made a pre-emptive attack and was overwhelmed on the banks of the Amu Darya. The remaining troops made a hasty retreat into the citadel, the Ark, while the townspeople, unwilling to be killed for the sake of a sultan they despised, opened the gates. Genghis rode in, through alleys lined with the wooden houses of the common people, past palaces of baked-earth brick, into the inner city, the Shahristan, and to the city’s largest building, its mosque; thus finding himself in the heart of a culture rich in ways he was just beginning to appreciate.
The civilization that lay at his feet was a glory comparable to China’s, though a newcomer by comparison. It had been founded over 500 years before, when Arabs, drawing inspiration from Islam’s founder, Mohammed, swept outwards over Persia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, Central Asia, even across the Straits of Gibraltar, until Arab armies briefly linked the Pyrenees and Kashgar in western China. For a while, this empire was unified by its new religion and Islam’s holy book, the Koran, as well as by a second doctrinal source, the sunnah, the deeds and sayings of both the Prophet and his successors.
But ruling an empire was very different from building it. Territories and sects took wealth and power for themselves. The Shi’ites claimed a right to rule based on ‘Shi’at Ali’, the Party of Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law. Another faction, favouring the claims of Mohammed’s uncle, Abbas, arose on the empire’s fringes, notably in Iraq. Under the Abbasids, the empire’s centre of gravity jumped again, eastwards this time, to Baghdad. By 1000 the Islamic world, created as one imperial river by the Arabs, had divided into a delta of five major streams and dozens of minor ones. At the imperial heart, local rulers turned the Abbasid domains into a shifting kaleidoscope of petty dynasts. But unity of a sort endured. All Islam worshipped the same god, honoured the same prophet, shared Arabic as a lingua franca, shared trade, inherited the same astonishingly rich intellectual mantle.
Fuelled by staggering wealth from its conquests, medieval Islam hungered for learning and inspired brilliant scholarship (the idea that Europe would ever amount to anything would have struck Islamic scholars as bizarre). Paper displaced papyrus, bookshops thrived, libraries graced the homes of the rich. Since Arabic was the language of divine revelation, the written word was venerated and calligraphy became an art form. Medieval Islam, assured of its superiority, was innovative, curious and surprisingly tolerant. The Arabs, looking back to the Greeks for the foundations of science and philosophy, translated Greek classics en masse. Many other languages and creeds – Persian, Sanskrit and Syriac, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism – also formed part of this rich amalgam.
The arts flourished. Urbanized literati patronized the ornate and elegant creations of poets. Though Islam discouraged (and later banned) human likenesses in art, there was nothing to inhibit design and architecture. Wonderful domed mosques arose, pre-dating Italian Renaissance domes by centuries. Potters, though failing to match Chinese porcelain, created lustrous, beautifully decorated glazes. Stuccoed and frescoed palaces set an ornate style emulated throughout Islam.
Science, too, blossomed. Arabic numerals, derived from Indian ones, provided a far more powerful mathematical tool than any previous system, as Europe later discovered. Though Arab scientists remained convinced that gold could be produced by the transformation of metals, their rigorous search for the ‘philosopher’s stone’ that would cause this to happen created the bridge between alchemy (al-kimiya, ‘trans mutation’) and modern chemistry. Muslim travellers wrote reports of China, Europe and much of Africa. European languages, enriched by translations from Arabic into Latin, still contain many other tributes to Arab scientific predominance: zero, algebra, star names (such as Betelgeuse), zenith, nadir, azimuth.
Among the great centres, Baghdad was the greatest. Straddling the Tigris, it was planned as a perfect circle: a triple rampart guarded by 360 towers. The Round City, as it was known, became a magnet for traders, scholars and artists from as far afield as Spain a
nd northern India, growing to become one of the largest cities in the world, equalling Constantinople – about the same size as Paris at the end of the nineteenth century – with wealth to match. Porcelain came from China; silk, musk and ivory from east Africa; spices and pearls from Malaya; Russian slaves, wax and furs.
For four centuries the ancient oasis cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Merv and Gurganj, the eastern outposts of Islam, were worthy if lesser counterparts to Baghdad. The four cities were all on rivers running from the Pamirs into the wastes of the Kyzyl Kum, all sustained by intricate canal systems and underground channels (qanat), all walled against enemies and the encroaching sand. They had long been the rich bulwarks of the provinces of Khurasan and Transoxiana (the land beyond the River Oxus, today’s Amu Darya). All were trade emporia linking east and west. Watermelons packed in snow were couriered to Baghdad. Paper from Samarkand was in demand all over the Muslim world. Caravans the size of small armies ranged back and forth to eastern Europe.
Bukhara, Khwarezm’s capital, with a population of 300,000, almost rivalled Baghdad itself. Its scholars and poets, writing in both Arabic and Persian, made it the ‘dome of Islam in the east’, in a common epithet. Its royal library, with 45,000 volumes, had a suite of rooms each devoted to a different discipline. Perhaps the greatest of the great scholars was the philosopher-physician ibn-Sina, known in Europe by the Spanish version of his name, Avicenna (980–1037), who was born not far from the spot where Genghis now stood, in front of the town’s mosque. He poured out over 200 books, most famously his medical encyclopedia, Canons of Medicine, which when translated into Latin became Europe’s pre-eminent medical textbook for five centuries.
All of this came briefly under threat when the Turks arrived, part of a westward drift of Turkish tribes that had been going on for centuries. But Islamic civilization endured because, as they settled, the Turks converted to Sunni Islam, and acquired Muslim names and titles. In the early thirteenth century Khwarezm, under its uninspiring leadership, had inherited these religious, artistic and intellectual traditions, of which Genghis knew little; and its wealth, of which he had heard much.
Juvaini records what happened next in vivid detail. Genghis asks if the mosque is the palace. No, he is told, it is the house of God. Dismounting, he goes to the pulpit and climbs two or three steps, and exclaims infamous words: ‘The countryside is empty of fodder; fill our horses’ bellies.’
While the horrified imams and other notables held the Mongols’ horses, troops emptied grain stores, tossing Korans from their wooden cases to make feeding troughs.
After a couple of hours, the contingents began to return to their camps outside the walls to prepare for the assault on the citadel; the Korans were torn and trampled beneath the horses’ hooves. Some historians have seen this as deliberate desecration, inspired by Genghis himself. But that doesn’t fit. He had already humbled Buddhists and Confucians. Now it was the turn of Muslims. But there was no ideology at work. Juvaini himself makes no judgement on the trampled Korans. It was just that Genghis and his unheeding troops focused on the practical concerns of nomads and warriors. He wasn’t against Islam. It was just that he didn’t care about it one way or the other.
Yet there was a lesson in this casual exercise of dominance, and Genghis saw it instantly. Here was yet more evidence that he was right to believe in Heaven’s backing, and he was keen that his enemies should understand, and comply. On his departure, he went into the musalla, a courtyard for prayers during festivals held outside the city walls. Here he decided to give a speech to a carefully selected audience.fn3 First, he told the assembled citizens to select the wealthiest and most eminent among them, and 280 men gathered inside the musalla’s simple walls. Juvaini is explicit about the number: 190 were residents, 90 merchants from other cities. Genghis mounted the pulpit and gave them his explanation for his rise and their fall:
O people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
These are famous words, often repeated, widely accepted as true. But are they? Juvaini’s agenda was to please his Mongol masters and justify their success by emphasizing the sins of the Muslims. As the eminent Mongolian historian Shagdaryn Bira puts it, ‘Juvaini finds in Genghis Khan and his deeds . . . a genuine confirmation of the prophecies of almighty Allah, who, as he writes, once said, “Those are my horsemen; through them shall I avenge me on those who rebelled against me.” ’ Bira concludes that for Juvaini ‘The guilty parties were not the initiators of aggression, but its victims.’fn4
For the next few days, with the sultan’s soldiers and their families penned in the citadel and the townspeople cowed in their houses, the rich and their escorts filed out of the city to Genghis’s tent, where they handed over their wealth – cash, jewellery, clothing, fabrics.
Two matters remained: the capture of the citadel and the disposal of the population. First, the Ark, which the soldiers were using as a base for night attacks. To clear the ground for the assault, the surrounding wooden houses were burned. Now the catapults and great siege bows could be wheeled into position. Below the walls, locals were driven forward beneath bombardments of flaming naphtha to fill in the moat. For days the battle raged, until the Ark was battered and burned into submission, and its defenders lay dead, killed in action or executed, including all males ‘who stood higher than the butt of a whip’. The surviving citizens were herded together to be distributed, the young men into military service, women into slavery with their children, the blacksmiths, carpenters and gold-workers to teams of Mongol artisans.
Then the Mongol juggernaut rolled on eastwards towards Samarkand, the new capital. It was defended by between 40,000 and 110,000 troops (the sources vary hugely) sheltering inside a moat, and city walls, and a citadel, all hastily strengthened in the weeks since the siege of Otrar began. The defences included a brigade of twenty elephants, presumably brought by some enterprising merchant from India. Driving crowds of prisoners, the Mongols set up camp right around the town. In one engagement, the defenders sent out their elephants, which panicked, turned and trampled their own men before escaping on to the open plain. Again, it was Muhammad’s hopeless leadership that did for the city. He fled, urging everyone along his route to get out, because resistance was useless. The merchant princes and clerics of Samarkand, unprepared to risk death for such a man, sued for peace and received similar treatment to the inhabitants of Bukhara, with Mongol commanders and their families taking their pick of possessions, women and artisans.
Khwarezm’s coup de grâce would, of course, include the capture or death of the fleeing Muhammad, a task given to Jebe and Subedei, who hounded him across present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran. Desperately searching for a place of safety, with the Mongols one day’s gallop behind him, he arrived at the shores of the Caspian, where local emirs advised him to hole up on a small island. Leaving his treasures to be seized, he and a small retinue rowed to the island, where he died of shock and despair. His dreadful mother had followed in his footsteps, ending up in a fortress just south of the Caspian, to be starved out by her pursuers and carted off to many years of abysmal captivity in Mongolia.
Meanwhile, the Mongol pincers closed on the remaining great city, Gurganj, or Urgench as it later became (and still is). From the north, in late 1220, came Genghis’s son Jochi, now conqueror of half a dozen lesser towns. From the south-east came Jochi’s brothers Chaghadai and Ogedei, reinforced by Boorchu with Genghis’s personal corps. Together, there could have been 100,000; not enough, however, to cow the inhabitants, who settled in for a battle that lasted five months. This was the Mongols’ hardest fight. Here, on the flood plain of the Amu Darya, there were no stones for the catapults, so the Mongols logged mulberry trees to make ammunition. Prisoners, as usual, were forced to fill in the moat
s and then undermine the walls. With the walls down, the Mongols had to fight for the city street by street, razing houses as they went by lobbing flaming naphtha into them. When this proved too slow, they tried to flood the city by diverting the river, an attempt that ended in disaster when the locals surprised and killed 3,000 Mongols working on the dam. By the time victory came in early 1221, the invaders were in no mood for mercy. Citizens with any skill – 100,000 of them – were led away as captives, the rest slaughtered. Juvaini speaks of 50,000 soldiers killing twenty-four men each. That makes 1.2 million.
Finally, with the whole empire almost his, Genghis designated Tolui, his youngest son, to mop up in the western regions, beyond the Amu Darya. It took him just three months to deal with the three main cities of Merv, Nishapur and Herat. Nishapur fell in April, its people killed, the town razed and ploughed over. Herat wisely surrendered, and its inhabitants were spared, except for its 12,000-strong garrison. It is Merv that deserves attention.
In the early thirteenth century, this oasis city was the pearl of Central Asia, a city of mosques and mansions, of walls within walls, of mud-brick suburbs covering 100 square kilometres, all sustained by cool water flowing through tunnels from a dam across the River Murgab. Its ten libraries contained 150,000 volumes, the greatest collection in Central Asia. Today, Old Merv is a shadow. If you stand on one of the little mounds near its centre, you are surrounded by dusty ridges and mounds of rubble by the acre. The only resurrection here occurred 20 miles away to the west, where new Merv – Mary – casts its industrial pall into the sky. Old Merv is the very image of desolation.
Much of this is down to wind and rain, but the process started in January 1221, when the Mongols arrived outside the city walls. It was the city’s commander, a puffed-up aristocrat named Mujir al-Mulk, who condemned it. When 800 Mongols probed Merv’s defences, they were chased off, but sixty of them were captured and executed, which, when Genghis and Tolui heard of it, ensured a terrible fate.