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

by John Man

  The army was not large, some 7,000 men, each with his bow, arrows and knife, each in his toughened leather armour, each with several remounts. As often, they were vastly outnumbered. They faced an army of 12,000, and a city whose normal population was about 70,000 swollen to over ten times that figure by refugees from the surrounding villages. They all knew their fate. They bolted the doors and waited, hypnotized by fear.

  For six days, the Mongol commander patrolled the walls. Seeing no alternative, Mujir al-Mulk sued for peace. The Mongols demanded 200 of the wealthiest and most influential citizens, who were duly delivered and interrogated about their wealth. Then the Mongols entered the city, unopposed, set upon vengeance. For four days, they drove the docile crowds out on to the plain, taking care to separate out 400 craftsmen and a crowd of children to act as slaves.

  Then the killing started. The place was ransacked, the buildings mined, the books burned or buried. Merv died in days, and lost almost everything and almost everyone. As Juvaini records, the Mongols ordered that, apart from the 400 captured artisans, ‘the whole population, including the women and children should be killed, and no one, whether man or woman be spared. The people of Merv were then distributed among the soldiers and levies and, in short, to each man was allotted the execution of three or four hundred persons.’

  After the Mongols departed came the reckoning, conducted by an eminent cleric. ‘He now together with some other persons passed 13 days and nights in counting the people slain within the town. Taking into account only those that were plain to see and leaving aside those that had been killed in holes and cavities and in the villages and deserts, they arrived at a figure of more than one million three hundred thousand.’

  One million three hundred thousand? In addition to the 1.2 million supposedly killed in Urgench? It sounds simply incredible. But we know from the last century’s horrors that mass slaughter comes easily to those with the will, leadership and technology. In the Armenian massacres of 1915, Turks killed 60 per cent of the Armenian population (1.4 million out of 2.1 million); the Holocaust saw 6 million slain; in the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia in the mid-1970s, 1.7 million (out of about 8 million) died; 800,000 were killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (out of a total population of 5.8 million).

  Juvaini’s figure actually understates: 7,000 x 300 makes 2,100,000. So 1.3 million is more than possible, and in far less time than in any of the foregoing examples. The Rwandan genocide took just three months, which UN Ambassador Samantha Power called ‘the most rapid genocide the world has ever known’.fn5 But for a Mongol, an unresisting prisoner would have been as easy to despatch as a sheep, and had far less value. It takes only seconds to slit a throat. For 7,000 men, the slaughter of a million would have been an easy two hours’ work.

  This was undoubtedly a holocaust on an unprecedented scale. Technically, it was possible for the Mongols to have killed many millions in the two-year course of the invasion. Gibbon concludes, naming French sources:fn6 ‘The exact account which was taken of the slain amounted to 4,347,000.’

  But are these figures accurate?

  It’s instructive to look at the fate of Merv as recorded by Juvaini after the massacre. One million three hundred thousand was – supposedly – everyone. That was in February 1221. Yet in November of the same year, rumours of resistance sparked a rebellion. The Mongol commander, Barmas, ordered the artisans and skilled workers into a camp outside the walls, tried to summon the notables, failed, ‘slew numbers of people whom he found at the gate’, and took many more off to Bukhara. Rebels and pro-Mongol forces struggled for dominance. When one rebel came, ‘the common people revolted and went over to him’, and he in his turn undertook agricultural schemes and dam-building. Shigi himself arrived to quell the revolt, for ‘strangers from all parts, attracted by its abundance of wealth, had risen from their corners and turned their faces towards Merv’, joined by the townspeople. The new siege ended: ‘putting camel-halters on believers [the Mongols] led them off in strings of ten and twenty and cast them into a trough of blood [i.e. executed them]; in this way they martyred 100,000 persons’. A local governor had the sneaky idea of calling survivors to prayer, ‘and all that came out of the holes, were seized, imprisoned, being finally cast down from the roof. In this manner many more people perished’ until ‘in the whole town there remained not four persons alive’. Rebellion followed massacre, massacre followed rebellion, with always more people to kill, always an economy worth robbing.

  How to resolve these discrepancies? There was no census, and all numbers are little more than guesses. But here’s a thought. In the early twentieth century the area covered by Khwarezm – roughly Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, eastern Iran and western Afghanistan – held about 3 million people in all, against a current population of the whole region of about 30 million. So if Juvaini is correct, assuming numbers were then much the same as they were a century ago, the Mongols killed the whole population of their new domain.

  But obviously they didn’t. Even in the most extreme cases, the cities went on operating, with rebellions crushed, armies raised, taxes paid and reconstruction undertaken. So the assumptions must be wrong. More work is needed. Perhaps all we can do is assume a higher level of population and a lower level of death – something like 25 per cent of 5 million, a level that would allow a crushed and brutalized society to continue life, of a sort, and recover with the passing of the years.

  That still leaves 1.25 million deaths in two years.

  Which is still one of the biggest mass killings in absolute terms in history.

  That suggests a comparison with the Holocaust itself, for there are some terrible similarities in the attitude of Tolui’s Mongols and the Nazi perpetrators of the Final Solution. The Mongols were, one and all, master-slaughterers, of sheep, of people, as proficient as those managing gas chambers and ovens. But the comparison is not exact. The Holocaust was the consequence of state policy, carried through by thousands over several years, with no purpose other than to fulfil Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsession. The Khwarezmian massacres were all one-off applications of a decision to use terror for strategic purposes; not genocide, the killing of a people, but the killing of towns – a tactic that deserves its own term: urbicide. It wasn’t personal or obsessive. It was dispassionate, cold-blooded murder, with one purpose: to win as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

  That was not quite the end. Muhammad’s son, Jalal ad-Din, was very different from his father. He rallied the surviving forces and retreated southwards, into present-day Afghanistan, pursued by Genghis. At Parvan, just north of Kabul, he inflicted the first defeat the Mongols had suffered in this campaign. (The Mongol general, by the way, was Genghis’s adopted son and possible author of The Secret History, Shigi. Genghis was understanding. Shigi had never experienced fate’s cruel knocks, he said. This was a salutary lesson for him.) Jalal, trying to preserve a core of resistance, fought on, even as he retreated another 400 kilometres, through the Hindu Kush and down via the Khyber Pass to northern India’s stifling plains, until he was trapped between the Indus and the advancing Mongols. It was the end for his army, but not for Jalal, who forced his horse into the water and reached safety on the far bank. Marvelling at his courage, Genghis let him go. Jalal lived to fight again, though to no great effect, writing himself into legend as a hero. Rumours of him continued for years. No one knows how he died.

  Genghis did not follow up his victory by advancing into India. He had more immediate claims on his attention: Western Xia, the rebellious vassals who had dared defy him before the campaign began. But first he took time to give further thought to his destiny.

  fn1 Mostly under the direction of Karl Baipakov, Institute of Archaeology, Almaty.

  fn2 The water level has now stabilized, and may soon be rising, thanks to conservation work.

  fn3 Many writers have transposed the event to the mosque, perhaps because it adds to the drama.

  fn4 Mongolian Historical Writing, pp. 87–8 (see Bibliography).
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  fn5 New York Review of Books, 6 January 2003.

  fn6 Pétit de la Croix, Vie de Gengiscan, and Antoine Gaubil, Histoire de Gentchiscan.

  THE GREAT RAID

  AT THE FAR Western end of the Mongol advance, extraordinary events had been unfolding which demand that we wind the clock back six months, to the spring of 1221. With the Khwarezmian empire almost conquered, Subedei, Jebe and their victorious troops on the shores of the Caspian stared around for some new challenge. What and who lay beyond? Whatever and whoever, they were all part of Genghis’s ‘golden halter’ and should be informed of their duties: immediate submission and the rendering of tribute. Genghis agreed. He himself was just off to chase Jalal ad-Din southwards, and Tolui was about to give Merv his close attention. Genghis could spare Subedei for a year or two. No one was better qualified than the forty-five-year-old veteran of China, Manchuria, Khara Khitai and Khwarezm. He and Jebe could meet up with Jochi, and the three of them could ride around the Caspian and see what they could pick up in vassals, loot and information.

  Thus was born one of the most astonishing adventures in military history – a 7,500-kilometre gallop through southern Russia which for the first time brought the Mongols into contact with mainstream Christianity.

  The first kingdom in the line of march was Georgia, Christian for almost 1,000 years, independent for 100. It was at this moment at the height of its power and prestige, thanks to the country’s heroine-queen, Tamara. Georgians look back to Tamara’s reign (1184–1213) as a Golden Age, a renaissance of literature, architecture, scholarship and art, funded by trade linking Europe, Russia and Khwarezm.

  In fact, it was in that very year, 1221, that Christian Europe had its first rumour of what was happening in Central Asia. Christianity needed help. For the past three years, the French and German armies of the Fifth Crusade had been trying to conquer Egypt and had been cut to pieces by the Saracens. The Pope had turned to the Georgians, while other Christian leaders looked further east, from which, as if by a miracle, help was apparently on its way in the form of King David of India, the grandson of that legendary Christian king Prester John, a name he might also have taken for himself. David/Prester John, a Nestorian Christian, had already allegedly defeated the hordes of Islam and was on his way to rescue Christian Europe. This nonsense conflated several facts: there had been a Nestorian king (Toghril); and there had been victories over Islamic powers (by Genghis).

  Then came confusing and contradictory news from Georgia. The Mongols were first believed to be of Christian origin, because their falcon flag was mistaken for a cross. Disillusion followed swiftly. Random as a whirlwind, the Mongols rode almost to Tbilisi, cut the flower of Georgian knighthood to bits, vanished back briefly into northern Iran, swung north again, shattered the Georgian army for a second time, killing the king, Giorgi the Resplendent, and then moved on, through the Caucasus, leaving the Georgians wondering why they had been spared a further onslaught. Giorgi’s heir, his sister Rusudan, wrote a stunned apology to the Pope. ‘A savage people of Tartars, hellish of aspect, as voracious as wolves, have invaded my country,’ she wrote. ‘Alas, we are no longer in a position to take up the Cross.’

  On the lowlands north of the Caucasus, in present-day Chechnya, the Mongols came up against another, greater enemy. Though they had no political unity, these nomadic Turkish tribes – known to the Russians as Polovtsy, to Turks as Kipchaks, and to Europeans as Kumans, all with various spellings – dominated the grasslands north of the Black Sea, across the Don, to the borderlands of the Russian state and its capital, Kiev. The Polovtsy were more than a match for the Mongols, with a flexible mix of heavy-duty war machines and horse-archers. Besides, they were on their home ground and had more warriors. Jebe and Subedei turned to duplicity. They sent an envoy to the Polovtsy with herds laden with treasures picked up in Georgia. The Polovtsy departed with their windfall overnight. The Mongols, unburdened by carts, treasure or war machines, caught up with the laden Polovtsy, defeated them, and snatched their treasures back again. The survivors fled on into Russia, leaving the Mongols in charge of the steppe north of the Crimea.

  Now Jebe and Subedei divided their forces. While Jebe secured a new base on the banks of the Dnieper – probing Russia, interrogating prisoners, gaining information of all lands further west – Subedei headed south into the Crimea, where, for the first time, Mongols met Europeans. These Europeans were from an empire of a different sort, the merchant empire of Venice. Their enclave, which spanned the entry to the Sea of Azov, was one of two in the Crimea, with two Genoese outposts nearby. The Venetian merchantmen at once saw the potential of the new arrivals. They were rich, with silvered saddles and harnesses, and silks beneath their chainmail; they had a virtual army of interpreters; they had a corps of eager Muslim merchants; they even had with them an Englishman, who is worth a long footnote.fn1 And the Venetians, with their sailing ships and trade contacts, had access to a new world of goods. A deal was done. Subedei burned the Genoans out, gave the Venetians a monopoly of the Black Sea trade, and in spring 1223 headed back to join Jebe for a renewed advance into what is now southern Russia.

  The Polovotsian khan Köten had secured his position by becoming an ally, indeed the son-in-law, of a local Russian warlord, Mstislav Mstislavich the Daring. Princes of other Russian provinces came on side, from Volynia, Kursk, Kiev, Chernigov, Suzdal, Rostov, all massing on the Dnieper’s west bank that spring.

  Confronted by this immense force, the Mongols hesitated. Word came that Jochi, working his way westwards north of the Caspian, had been ordered to join them; but Jochi was keen to retain his independence, and anyway was ill. In his continued absence, Subedei and Jebe sent a peace delegation to the Russian princes. The princes rejected the proposal, accused the Mongols of being spies and killed them, an affront that of course demanded vengeance.

  The Russian force slowly gathered on the banks of the Dnieper where it spreads out below rapids (now drowned behind a hydroelectric dam). It amounted to some 80,000 men: the mounted archers of the Polovtsy, Galician foot-soldiers arriving by boat, heavily armoured Russian cavalrymen with their conical helmets and iron face-masks, long-swords, maces and iconic banners. They outnumbered the Mongols, but were, at heart, disparate forces used to fighting European-style, with setpiece engagements backed by castles. Compare this to the rigid discipline of the 20,000–25,000 Mongols, their speed in the field and their unity of purpose, secured by a messenger service that was in constant touch with Genghis’s headquarters. Moreover, they were now superbly armed, not only with their own bows, but with Muslim swords of Damascene steel.

  For the Russians lined up on the west bank of the Dnieper, their first sight of the Mongols inspired nothing but disdain. Groups of Mongols, armed only with bows and sabres, loosed off a few shots and then fled across the open steppe when a detachment of Russian cavalry crossed the river. The main army hastened to cross, using a bridge of boats. Still the Mongols retreated, abandoning their herds and local prisoners, which the advancing army swept up in its triumphant progress.

  For nine days, the Mongols fled ever deeper into the grasslands, the Russians ever more confident of victory, the Polovtsy delighted to get their lands back. On 31 May, the Russians reached a little river, the Kalka, flowing over steppe-land to the Sea of Azov, 40 kilometres to the south. First across were the Polovtsy, for they equalled the Mongols in speed. Behind came the Russian cavalry, and then the foot-soldiers, with the carts and heavy gear left on the far bank of the little defile. Soon, the army was like a smear of water being dragged into a line of droplets.

  Now the Mongols attacked, in an utterly unconventional way, heavier cavalry routing the lightly armed Polovtsian archers, the horsemen then assaulting the Russian cavalry, moving in with their lances, spears and lightweight swords, until both advance forces were in chaotic flight, sweeping through their rearguards, pressing the lot into the shallow river valley. Six princes and seventy nobles soon lay dead. Across the river, the stolid Kievans jus
t had time to begin a slow retreat with the wagons, as the other forces galloped and ran for their lives across the steppe, until they were cut down.

  Eventually, the surviving leaders, including Prince Mstislav Romanovich of Kiev, surrendered, on the understanding that no blood would be shed. Subedei and Jebe had no intention of forgoing vengeance, but they kept their promise with a slow and bloodless execution, to send a grim warning to the waiting west. The captives were tied up and became the foundation for a heavy wooden platform, on which Subedei, Jebe and their officers feasted, while Prince Mstislav and his allies suffocated beneath them.

  At this moment, in early June, Jochi, who had lingered north of the Caspian, was on his way with reinforcements. After one brief foray across the Dnieper, Subedei and Jebe turned back towards the Volga, where the two forces met. Working their way upriver for 700 kilometres, they came up against the Bulgars, a group who had settled on the Volga in the eighth century, whose relatives later gave their name to Bulgaria. The clash proved a near disaster. The sources give no details, but the Bulgars proved too tough, and the Mongols, having suffered their first and only defeat, backed off – though the memory of the humiliation would remain until revenge became possible fifteen years later.

  The Great Raid, as it deserves to be called, and its crucial encounter on the Kalka River had extraordinary consequences. As the Mongols rode back to rejoin Genghis on the Irtish River, they brought with them excellent knowledge of the land, its resources and the opposition. They knew that the Russians, lacking a unified command, could be picked off province by province, city by city. And beyond, as they now knew from Polovtsy prisoners, was enough grassland to sustain any Mongol army driving westwards. With proper planning, Genghis could pursue his manifest destiny by creating a third focal point for his nomad empire. In the centre, his homeland; in the far east, the rich cities of China; in the far west, new objectives: the rich plains of southern Russia, and beyond them – Hungary.