by John Man
It took little imagination to see the Russian and Hungarian grasslands as the new Mongolia, Europe as another China, ripe for the plucking.
fn1 The unnamed Englishman was almost certainly Robert, of unknown origins, who had been the chaplain of Robert Fitzwalter, leader of the Barons’ Rebellion against King John in 1215, which ended with the signing of Magna Carta. Banished from England, Robert the ex-chaplain fled to the Holy Land, where he gambled his wealth away, but discovered a gift for language. This brought him to the attention of Muslim merchants acting as intelligence-gatherers for the Mongols. The Mongols took him to Batu’s HQ on the Volga. He would be with them for twenty years, as Gabriel Ronay brilliantly relates (see Bibliography).
EMPEROR AND SAGE
BUT WHAT WAS the meaning of it all? Obviously, events proved that Genghis was destined for conquests way beyond his Mongolian homeland. But what was the nature of the Power that had elevated him, and through him his nation? How puzzling to be snatched from obscurity, protected, and rewarded with unprecedented conquests, and then granted no insight into the underlying nature of the universe.
Religious speculation was in the air he had breathed from childhood, when shamanism and Nestorian Christianity were rivals among Mongol and Turkish groups. As a young man, he knew that other rulers made similar claims of divine backing. The Chinese emperor ruled by the Mandate of Heaven; the king of Western Xia was a Burkhan, a Holy One, a Living Buddha. Everywhere he saw monuments to faith – the pagodas and royal tombs of Yinchuan, the temples of Datong and Beijing. Now, from the reports of Subedei and Jebe, he heard of the Christian cathedrals of Georgia. Perhaps all these faiths – shamanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity – might be groping towards the same obscure godhead. This is one conclusion to be drawn from an edict in which he ordered that all religions were to be granted equal respect, a law that underlay one of the most remarkable qualities of the Mongol emperors from the time of Genghis onwards: their religious toleration.
Gibbon, writing in the late eighteenth century in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was much struck by Genghis’s ‘enlightened’ attitude:
It is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our wonder and applause. The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy [at which point he adds a footnote: ‘A singular conformity may be found between the religious laws of Zingis Khan and Mr Locke’], and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.
But things are not so simple. Gibbon and Locke, both Enlightenment figures, saw Genghis as a primitive precursor of their own views, tolerating other religions despite their differences from Christianity. In fact Genghis tolerated them for practical reasons. Shamanism was not antagonistic to other religions. It was just that religious oppression alienated people. Better to keep new subjects on side if possible. And were not religions, at heart, all worshipping the same god? Genghis accepted any priest of any religion, happily granting them privileges and exemption from taxes, as long as they accepted Mongol sovereignty and prayed for him.
An example: when in 1214 he first heard of the Buddhist priest Haiyun, later tutor to his grandson Kublai, he instructed the shaven-headed teenager to grow his hair and adopt a Mongol hairstyle. Haiyun objected that if he did he could no longer be a monk. Genghis backtracked and allowed all Buddhist monks to keep their heads shaven. When in 1219 the great general Mukhali again brought Haiyun to Genghis’s attention, this time with his master, Genghis decreed: ‘They truly are men who pray to Heaven. I should like to support them with clothes and food and make them chiefs. I am planning on gathering many of this kind of people.’
An awareness of the influence wielded by religions also seems to have woken in Genghis other rather less spiritual thoughts. If religion could support empires and monuments, what power could he wield if he could get access to the ultimate Truth? Perhaps deeper knowledge would secure him (a) influence over religious groups and their followers; and (b) an ability to prolong his life.
Genghis had with him two men who were better qualified than most to encourage such speculation. One was the Khitan Yelu Chucai, ‘Long Beard’, who had endured the siege of Beijing and then sought enlightenment in a Buddhist retreat before joining Genghis in 1218. The other was his Chinese minister, Liu Wen, also renowned for his skills as a herbalist and in whittling bone into whistling arrowheads.
It was from these two, while he was gathering his forces for the invasion of Khwarezm – and incidentally commissioning the stela in which he proclaimed his simplicity and purity – that Genghis first heard of a Daoist sect known as Quanzhen (‘Complete Perfection’), and its eminent head, the sage Changchun.
The Complete Perfection sect, rooted in a combination of high-mindedness and eccentricity, was founded by Wang Zhe, nicknamed Wang the Madman, to whom the doctrine was revealed in 1159 by two mysterious strangers when he was out walking. It was, in essence, a form of Daoism, which had evolved over 1,700 years from the teachings of the semi-legendary Laozi (Lao-tsu). Daoists believe that life is best lived in finding and following the Way – the Dao – by which they mean understanding the original purity of people and things; knowing their destiny as decreed by Heaven; and then regaining purity by fulfilling that destiny. After years of isolation and self-imposed suffering, Wang founded a sect to promote his syncretic teachings – the Three Doctrines, which united China’s three main religions, Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, with Daoism as the fundamental faith. He was well-versed in Dao’s huge body of alchemical literature, and the belief that certain substances – jade, pearl, mother-of-pearl, cinnabar, gold – could be used to make a life-prolonging elixir. The idea of a longer life, together with the sect’s philanthropic principles, won converts among the common people. One of Wang’s disciples was a teenager who won wide acclaim for his prodigious memory and elegant verses. When Wang died in 1170, the twenty-two-year-old, now styling himself Changchun (‘Everlasting Spring’), took on his mantle.
Such a man would have been of interest to Genghis and some of his officials for several reasons. Chucai’s agenda included educating Genghis in spirituality. Politically, Genghis would have seen the sense in co-opting a man with such a benign influence over his restless Chinese subjects. But it was alchemy’s practical application that clinched matters. Perhaps what he heard about Changchun was true – that he was 300 years old and could teach others the secret of his long life. From the heart of Central Asia, Genghis sent orders to fetch Changchun, now seventy-one.
To his temple 500 kilometres from Beijing, in Laizhou, on the Shandong peninsula, came a delegation led by Liu Wen, accompanied by twenty Mongols. Liu Wen had been in central Mongolia when he received Genghis’s order. It had taken seven months to cross the grasslands, the Gobi and the war-torn countryside of north China. His orders, he told Changchun, were ‘whether it takes months or years, on no account to return without you’.
Clearly, it was the will of Heaven. Changchun prepared for a journey that would cover 10,000 kilometres and take almost four years. A record of his journey was made by a disciple, Li Chih-ch’ang (Li Zhichang), beautifully translated by the orientalist Arthur Waley in The Travels of an Alchemist, from which the quotes in this chapter come. It provides a unique survey of Inner Asia at a crucial moment. Never before had it been possible for anyone, let alone an ageing monk, to travel from the Pacific to the heart of Islam while under the protection of a single authority. The ‘Mongol Peace’ would eventually make it possible for several western travellers to cross Eurasia from west to east, the most famous being Marco Polo. But the first to make the crossing came in the other direction, at the behest of Genghis himself.
A few days later, with nineteen followers and a mounted escort of fifteen, Changchun set out for wherever Genghis might be in however many months it would take to get there – Afghanistan, in two years’ time, as it turned out.
In the thi
rd week of May 1222, with early summer beginning to warm the Afghan highlands, the monk and the khan met at last, speaking through an interpreter. The two old men were almost equals, each a master in his own domain, each recognizing the other’s hard-won authority. After the pleasantries, Genghis came right to the point:
‘Adept, what Medicine of Long Life have you brought me from afar?’
The Master did not miss a beat.
‘I have means of protecting life,’ he said, ‘but no elixir that will prolong it.’
Genghis swallowed his disappointment. Tents were set up, questions asked about what to call his guest (Genghis settled on ‘Holy Immortal’). Now for the main purpose of the trip, as conceived by Chucai and adopted by Changchun himself. The Holy Immortal would give the ruler of Asia’s heartland a tutorial on good living and good ruling. But these regions were still not properly tamed. Genghis still had to deal with bandits in the mountains, a task that would take a month or so. The Master said that in that case it would be best to return to Samarkand, only a three-week journey there and back, nothing to one who had already travelled 10,000 li.fn1
In September came the return trip into Afghanistan, by which time Genghis was about to set off for home. On the way, the two old men had several chats, culminating in a discourse by Changchun on the Dao, the Way that underpins all things in Heaven and Earth. Genghis had the Master’s words recorded in Mongol and dated 20 November 1222. ‘Most men only know the greatness of Heaven,’ explained the Master, with A-hai, Samarkand’s governor, acting as interpreter. ‘They do not understand the greatness of Dao.’ When Man was first born, he shone with a holy radiance but, agitated by sensuality and emotional attachment, his life essence became unbalanced. Those who study Dao seek to regain that balance by asceticism and meditation. In this lay the true elixir of long life. The khan should curb his appetites, live without desire, reject luscious tastes and abstain from lust. Try sleeping alone for a month, he advised. Banish base sexual impulses.
During the return journey, with Genghis and the Master travelling a little apart to avoid the din of an army on the move, the lessons continued, with a few more raps over the knuckles. ‘It is said that of the 3,000 sins the worst is ill-treatment of one’s father and mother. Now in this respect I believe your subjects to be gravely at fault, and it would be well if Your Majesty could use his influence to reform them.’
The khan was pleased: ‘Holy Immortal, your words are exceedingly true. Such is indeed my own belief.’ Then to his ministers and officers he said: ‘Heaven sent this Holy Immortal to tell me these things. Do you engrave them upon your hearts.’ But they didn’t. Changchun is not mentioned in The Secret History, perhaps because there were no bards present to turn the occasion into a story, more likely because the history was written to promote Genghis’s family, and foreigners get short shrift.
Now the Master begged to be allowed to return home. In a final interview came the reward for which he and his followers must have been hoping. Genghis ordered that Changchun’s whole organization should be free from tax, setting in train a minor revolution that would serve both of them.
As soon as Changchun arrived home in 1224, Buddhism retreated in the face of a new, centralized and highly ambitious form of Daoism. The Master, eager to put Genghis’s edict into effect, urged his followers to accept Mongol rule with equanimity. Tax relief had a wonderful effect on recruitment. From being a small sect, dominated by its parent and rival, Buddhism, Daoism boomed, its growing bands of disciples taking over decaying Buddhist temples and building new ones. In 1227, Changchun was made head of the whole expanding, tax-exempt Daoist movement, in effect becoming a sort of Daoist pope.
But he knew his time was near. On 22 August, six months short of his eightieth birthday, the Master wrote a poem on the fleeting nature of life and its enduring essence:
The transient foam comes and vanishes;
but the stream goes on untroubled.
‘He then went up to the Pao-hsuan hall and returned to Purity.’ By a strange coincidence, it was the very month and year in which his greatest pupil also died; but that is a story for another chapter.
fn1 A li is about half a kilometre. But 10,000 (wan) was the equivalent of ‘a lot’. Traditionally, the Great Wall is wan li long.
DEATH AND SECRECY
GENGHIS COULD AT last turn to Western Xia, the Tangut kingdom that had refused him reinforcements five years previously – an unforgivable insult, a direct contradiction to Heaven’s will, and a threat to the empire’s future. Western Xia was the key to Inner Asia, and thus the key to future expansion in China. Western Xia had to be destroyed.
But he faced a strategist’s nightmare. Four powers were now battling for supremacy in Inner Asia: the Mongols, Western Xia, the Jin in northern China (still only partially defeated by the Mongols) and the Song in the south. While the main Mongol force had been crushing Khwarezm, these four – Mongols, Xia, Jin and Song – had been fighting, making peace, allying and re-allying, without resolution. The next stage in this struggle came to a head in 1227, the crucial year of two turning points which occurred almost simultaneously – the death of Genghis and the final solution to the problem of Western Xia.
Western Xia had a new young ruler, Li Dewang, who was not the man to steer his state back to its former pre-Mongol stability. Perhaps guessing what was coming, he signed a peace treaty with his rivals and neighbours the Jin, who needed a respite from conflict on three fronts. Genghis’s war machine shifted gear to prevent the two allied enemies joining forces. In the autumn of 1225 Genghis advanced south, across the Gobi and through the Three Beauties ranges. Here, as active as ever at about sixty-three, he went hunting wild asses and fell, sustaining an injury that demanded rest.fn1
That night, Genghis developed a fever. Plans had to change. Leaders met and talked. Tolun, who was one of the chamberlains who had administered Genghis’s household since the invasion of China thirteen years before, advised withdrawing. Genghis refused: it would look like cowardice. Better to stay and play for time, sending a message hinting that it was still not too late for the Tanguts to make peace if they wanted it.
But the acerbic Tangut commander-in-chief, Asha, was set on war, sending a message which said, in effect, ‘Bring it on! Come to my encampment in the Alashan!’ Genghis, still recovering from his fever, was incensed. The arrogance of it! The Tanguts were meant to be vassals! Now this – insult upon insult. ‘This is enough!’ he said. ‘Even if we die, let us challenge their boasts!’ There could be no mistake this time. There was more than imperial strategy at stake. This was personal. And, of course, Heaven was with him in his righteous anger. ‘Eternal Heaven, you be the judge!’ he said, and prepared to advance.
Asha’s challenge implied the strategy that he expected the Mongols to follow: a fast sweep in from the north across the Gobi, and a good clean fight in the Xia backyard, where the Tanguts could draw on their two main cities, Yinchuan and Wuwei, for reserves. Genghis, therefore, would do the exact opposite – on his own terms, in his own time, which was not yet, because winter was upon them.
In spring the forces regathered. Genghis was well enough to lead his army, not to the Alashan, but across 160 kilometres of sand and gravel to Western Xia’s northern stronghold, the city the Mongols knew as Khara Khot, the Black City. This had been a fortress for over 1,000 years. It guarded a grim landscape of gravel and sand, but it was a thriving outpost on the Etsin River, as the Mongols called it (the Ruo Shui today), which flowed northwards through the desert from the soft, green foothills of the Qilian Shan, the Snowy Mountains, 300 kilometres to the south.fn2
The Mongol army was now adept at siege warfare. Khara Khot didn’t stand a chance. Its seizure was the first step in a round-about approach to ensure that Xia would have no reserves when the showdown came. And if Asha dared send a force across 500 kilometres of desert from Yinchuan, his troops would arrive exhausted, at the limit of their supply lines, and utterly unfit for battle. The Tanguts, heirs to a re
fined and urbanized culture, preferred to place their faith in the strong walls of their capital. No army swept westwards.
This was a policy that suited the Mongols perfectly. Once one city had fallen, the Mongols would as usual be able to draw on prisoners, defectors, supplies and weapons to take the next one, by negotiation if possible, by force if necessary. As in Khwarezm, this was no Blitzkrieg, but a steady advance that fuelled itself, with the momentum of a slow-motion avalanche.
Two months later and 300 kilometres further south, where the Etsin runs in from the Qilian Shan, Genghis could afford to divide his growing army. Subedei headed west to oversee the assault on the most distant cities, while the main force struck east towards the heart of Western Xia.
To the east, 160 kilometres away, lay the Silk Road city of Zhangye, an oasis town famed then and now for its Buddhist temple, with its 34-metre-long reclining Buddha. Genghis had been here before, briefly, in 1205. At that time a young Tangut boy, the son of the city’s commander, had been captured and adopted (one source calls him Genghis’s ‘fifth son’). The boy had acquired a Mongol name – Tsagaan (White) – risen through the ranks, and now commanded Genghis’s personal guard. Tsagaan’s father, however, was still the city’s commander. Tsagaan shot over the walls an arrow carrying a message to his father, requesting a meeting. His father agreed. Representatives were talking terms when the Tangut second-in-command discovered what was afoot, staged a coup, killed Tsagaan’s father, and rejected the very idea of submission. Furious, Genghis threatened to bury the whole population alive. But when the town fell, Tsagaan interceded to save the inhabitants – all except the thirty-five who had killed his father.