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

by John Man

  One justification for this alleged act was that it kept the secret of Genghis’s death. But the argument is nonsensical. A secret was certainly to be kept, but it defies belief that killing people would preserve secrecy. Perhaps Chinese and Tanguts were dispensable. But what happened in Mongolia? Are we to assume that the guards killed their own people? On the steppe, everyone knows everyone else. On a clear day you can see for ever. Nothing would be more obvious than a cortège, and nothing would better advertise the fact that the cortège had something to hide than a mass of murders. Who would stay around to be caught? How could the guards guarantee to capture and kill every eyewitness? And the bodies: they could not be left to mystify and terrify the next passers-by. A royal cortège would not load itself with corpses.

  The best way to preserve secrecy is to travel fast, travel small and not advertise the fact that you have something to hide.

  The route of the cortège is unknown, of course. There is a clue in an incident related by the seventeenth-century historian Sagang Sechen, in which the wagon sinks up to its axles in mud, and a Mongol general sings to his holy lord, lion among men, born by the will of Eternal Heaven, about how everything he holds dear lies ahead of him. Palaces, queens, children, people, nobles, subjects, water, comrades-in-arms, place of birth – ‘they are all there, my lord!’ And lo – for this dirge, one of the most emotional of Mongol poems, is quasi-Biblical in its style – the Lord heard, and granted his blessing, and the groaning wagon moved, and the people rejoiced and accompanied the khan’s body onwards to the great homeland.

  Tradition holds that this incident happened, if it happened at all, in the Mona or Muna Mountains, today’s Yin Mountains that hem the Yellow River’s great bend north of the Ordos. To the west, between mountains and desert, is a low-lying area where marshes and meandering side-streams make a sort of mid-river delta, just the sort of ground in which a two-wheeled covered wagon might stick.

  If it did, then the cortège would probably have been heading east, to the route covered so many times by Genghis in his campaigns against Jin. This eastern route, where the gravel plains of the Gobi give way to grassland, had become a sort of royal road. Today, part of it is crossed by the railway line that runs up to the Mongol capital, Ulaanbaatar, from the border crossing points of Erenhot (Erlian in Chinese) and Zamyn Uud (‘Door of the Road’).

  A funeral cortège following this route would head almost due north for three days, until, on grassland now, it crossed the shallow and firm-bedded Kherlen to old Avraga. Nearby is a burial ground, so perhaps he lies here. But a more likely spot was ahead, upriver, in the Khentii, in a place for which many are still looking.

  fn1 Actually where and when he had his accident is not clear. Some say it was a, or the, cause of his death. But he remained campaigning almost to the last.

  fn2 The details of this campaign are much disputed. The Secret History is even worse than usual as a source, and other sources conflict.

  fn3 Then Lingzhou, it was known to the Mongols as Turemgii – The Aggressive [City].

  fn4 Xu Cheng and Yu Jun, ‘Genghis Khan’s Palace in the Liupan Shan’, Journal of Ningxia University, Yinchuan, 1993/3.

  fn5 The Secret History says Lingwu, near Yinchuan, but its account is confusing, and Lingwu is 200 kilometres from where Genghis was taken ill.

  fn6 Almost, but not quite. Later, sixteen Tanguts were among the 150-odd overseers (darugachi) who served the Yuan dynasty, and several small Tangut communities survived in other parts of China.

  fn7 ‘A drunkard is like one who is blind, deaf and insane,’ he is supposed to have said.

  PART II

  TRANSITION

  THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE EMPIRE

  ONE THING YOU notice in Mongolia: the women command attention. In the countryside, crones with walnut faces skewer you with direct, self-confident eyes, while outside tough, red-cheeked girls ride like master-horsemen. In Ulaanbaatar, the capital, you cannot walk across the main square without passing a beauty radiating self-assurance. For centuries Mongolia’s nomadic, herding traditions ensured that women matched men in self-reliance. They rode, they ruled, they fought. In 1220, one of Genghis’s daughters, whose husband had just been killed by an arrow, led the final assault on the Persian town of Nishapur. Widows of the well-off could take over their late husband’s estates, which made some of them rich, powerful and fiercely independent. The world’s greatest land empire, the very image of masculine dominance, owed much to extraordinary women, like Genghis’s mother, and his first wife, and the daughter-in-law who is the focus of this section.

  Her name was Sorkaktani, and she should be better known, because she was the most remarkable woman of her age. For twenty-five years, as a succession of storms threatened to destroy Genghis’s creation, she piloted her family through to calmer waters. Reports by outsiders all concurred. ‘Among the Tartars this lady is the most renowned, with the exception of the emperor’s mother,’ wrote one of the Pope’s envoys, John of Plano Carpini. ‘Extremely intelligent and able,’ said Rashid al-Din, going on to praise her ‘great ability, perfect wisdom and shrewdness’. ‘All the princes marvelled at her power of administration,’ said a Hebrew physician, Bar Hebraeus, and added a verse quotation: ‘If I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to men.’

  Remarkable, too, in what she made of her four sons. One ruled Persia, one was a notorious rebel trying to impose himself from his base in Central Asia, and two became khans of the whole expanding empire. More than that – her second son, Kublai, was the one who gave modern China its identity. Genghis started the empire; Kublai brought it to its greatest extent; but without Sorkaktani to link the two, without her ambition, foresight, good sense, and a couple of interventions at crucial moments, Genghis’s empire might have fallen apart.

  And she was not even a Mongol. She was Kerait, the Turkish-speaking group that dominated central Mongolia when Genghis was born. The Kerait king, Toghril, blood-brother to Genghis’s father, was Sorkaktani’s uncle. Her father was Toghril’s younger brother, Jakha, whose story reflects the complexities and dangers of shifting alliances among steppe tribes of Inner Asia. He was raised among the Tangut people of Western Xia, where he rose to the rank of commander – gambu in Tangut, which became part of his name, Jakha Gambu. When the Keraits were beaten, Genghis merged the tribes with marriages. Jakha had two daughters. The elder, Ibaqa, Genghis took as one of his five wives (he later handed her on to one of his generals, but allowed her to retain the status of queen). The younger one, Sorkaktani, then about twenty, he gave to his youngest son, Tolui, then twelve or thirteen. This was in 1203. The first of their four sons arrived six years later. At the time, no one would have guessed that the sons of Genghis’s youngest would amount to anything much. Sorkaktani had to wait twenty-five years for the world to turn in her favour.

  Her first lucky break came when Genghis died in 1227. Genghis had decreed that his third son, Ogedei, would be his heir as emperor, with all four sons exercising personal authority over their own areas, allocated as tradition demanded. Jochi, the eldest, was granted the most distant section, beyond the Aral Sea. But Jochi was dead by then,fn1 so his estates were further divided between two of his sons. Central Asia, from the Aral Sea to Tibet, went to Chaghadai. Tolui, the youngest, as tradition demanded, inherited the lands of his father’s ‘hearth’, which in this case meant the whole of Mongolia. This gave him a power-base that would eventually fall to Sorkaktani, but there was no reason yet for Sorkaktani to dream of glory for her sons, principally because Genghis’s heir, Ogedei, took the reins of power with overwhelming authority.

  He saw what Genghis had seen: that an empire needed a capital, a replacement for the old Mongol base of Avraga on the Kherlen River. For a clan, Avraga was a perfect HQ, near the safety offered by mountains, with a clear run over grasslands and desert to China, the source of trade and booty. Ogedei started his reign with a huge gathering in Avraga in 122
8–9, where probably (possibly, perhaps) he sponsored the collection of the tales and information that went into The Secret History, but already Avraga was the past. For a nation and empire, the future lay further west, in the valley of the Orkhon River, where previous Turkish empires had ruled. Turks called it Khara Khorum, ‘Black Boulder’. Genghis had chosen it as his new capital in 1220, but had done nothing about it. Ogedei fulfilled his father’s dream, starting to turn Karakorum into a permanent settlement in 1235.

  But first he needed sound government. In this his main guide was Genghis’s Khitan adviser, Yelu Chucai. In 1229, Ogedei made him the provisional head of the new Branch Secretariat – in effect, governor – for those parts of north China that had already been conquered, the first civilian official with such wide responsibilities.

  What to do with this new estate? The place was devastated, on a scale hardly comprehensible today. Mongol princes had torn communities apart for slaves, the temples were crowded with escaped prisoners, deserters and refugees. Several at the new court suggested that the simplest solution, in these chaotic circumstances, was genocide. What use were farmers? Their work was pointless, they owned nothing of worth, and they were a source of opposition. They were of less value than cattle and horses. Let them be replaced by cattle and horses. Why not kill the lot and turn the land to pasture? It wouldn’t take long for 10,000 warriors to slaughter 1,000 people each.

  It was Yelu Chucai who stopped this lunatic talk. His life’s work was to help Heaven along in its choice of rulers by transforming barbarity and ignorance into virtue and wisdom. A shattered north China was prime raw material. He sought to apply Confucius’s rules for good government while at the same time promoting Buddhism to cultivate the mind, his ultimate goal being the creation of a society that transcended Confucianism, rather as idealistic Communists foresaw a society that would evolve through Socialism to perfect Communism.fn2 His people, acting as scribes, interpreters, envoys, astrologers and tax experts, had proved increasingly vital in governing what had been won. He had been on hand in several cities to save libraries, treasures and scholars.

  Now he seized the moment. Well aware that Mongols had no use for Chinese civilization unless it offered material gain, he pointed out that if the peasants prospered, they could be taxed and thus contribute to the economy. To this end, he drew up a plan for renewal and government such as China, let alone Mongolia, had never seen before. First, civil authority should be separated from the military, with its self-seeking and arbitrary brutalities. Jin would be divided into ten districts, each with its own tax-collection office, a land tax for peasants, a poll tax for city-dwellers, all to be paid in silk, silver or grain, all flowing to the government. The Daoist priesthood, puffed up in wealth and numbers by Genghis’s personal tax exemptions, was corralled by taxes on temple businesses and by laws against further appropriations of Buddhist temples.

  To all this, Mongol military leaders objected bitterly. But Chucai, with Ogedei’s backing, held firm, and in 1231 his first taxes came in, right on budget, to the value of 10,000 ingots of silver. Ogedei made Chucai head of his government’s Chinese department on the spot. And administration demanded educated people. In 1233, Chucai rescued from captivity scores of scholars and other notables. He set up a government publishing house and a college for the sons of Chinese and Mongolian officials, to build the next generation of scholars and administrators. He arranged for former Jin officials who had been enslaved to take qualifying examinations for the civil service: 4,000 entered; 1,000 regained their freedom.

  Clearly, Ogedei was eager to pursue his father’s vision. But he needed to build a better, more inspiring justification than conquest. His coronation in 1229 was a turning point. Genghis had laid the foundations for ever-wider empire, and Ogedei planned to build on that foundation, with a renewed advance westwards, an invasion of Korea, and the final conquest of north China. More than conquests, however, it was Ogedei who imposed meaning on them with a new ideology. It was he who decreed that Heaven had given the world to the Mongols. The idea – suggested by previous victories, proved by future ones – was already firmly in place when an ambassador from the Song court, Peng Daya, visited the Mongol court in 1232 and observed: ‘Their constant expression is “Relying on the strength of Eternal Heaven and the Good Fortune of the Emperor”.’ The same formula would be used whenever Ogedei and his heirs wanted to assert their authority, in any of the languages and scripts used by them. It is used thirteen times in The Secret History; in a famous letter sent by Guyuk to Pope Innocent IV: ‘By the strength of Heaven, from the going up of the sun to its going down, He has delivered all the lands to us’; and in the opening invocation on the slab-like gold or silver passports which allowed travellers and messengers to use the empire-wide pony express. A grand aim needed a grand title. Ogedei had declared himself not khan, but ‘khagan’, reviving an ancient Turkish term usually translated as ‘Great Khan’. From then on, all the Mongol rulers were khagans, as was Genghis retroactively, with khan being applied to their juniors (a distinction lost in modern Mongolian, in which the medial ‘g’ has fallen from use). As de Rachewiltz puts it, all of this signalled ‘the real transformation of a tribal federation into a conquering state with a new administration and an incredibly efficient system of communication, combined with a revitalized and much strengthened military organization’. In short, he argues, it was Ogedei who was ‘the real founder of the Mongol empire’.

  Now he had to turn his claim into reality. Top of the agenda were the unconquered bits of north China. The advance was in three wings, under the greatest of Mongol generals, Subedei; Ogedei himself; and Tolui. An army assaulted the formidable fortress of Tongguan, which blocked a ravine leading to the Yellow River almost 400 kilometres upstream from the Jin capital, Kaifeng. The attack failed. So, as Genghis had advised on his deathbed, the Mongols skirted the fortress to lay siege to Kaifeng. This was another epic siege, lasting a year, against a city of well over a million. The Mongols held their ground in the face of ‘thunder-crash bombs’, which could be heard 50 kilometres away, and which were lowered or dropped into the Mongol trenches, ‘with the result that . . . the attacking soldiers were all blown to bits, not even a trace being left behind’. Starvation, plague, cannibalism and rebellion finally forced surrender. Again there was talk of mass executions; again Yelu Chucai’s passionate protests averted them, leaving the starving inhabitants to scatter into the ruined countryside. The emperor, Aizong, fled south, determined to fight again, but as the Mongol grip tightened, his hopes died, and in February 1234 he hanged himself to avoid capture. Twenty-one years after Genghis’s first invasion, all north China was in Mongol hands.

  A few months into the siege, Tolui died. This was Sorkaktani’s next stroke of good fortune, not that she would have seen it that way at the time. The Secret History tells of his death in a well-spun account intended to dramatize the loyalty of a younger brother towards his elder, of a general towards his emperor. Ogedei, who had returned to Mongolia with Tolui, leaving the campaign in Subedei’s hands, falls ill. Land and water spirits rage within him – probably the result of a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Shamans go into a huddle to divine the cause. After examining the entrails of slaughtered animals, they state that a sacrifice is needed. But no sooner have the shamans gathered captives, gold, silver, cattle and food for the offering than Ogedei becomes worse. A question arises: could a member of the khan’s family take on Ogedei’s illness? Tolui volunteers, for otherwise the people will be left orphans and the Jin will rejoice. He has to drink an alcoholic potion of some kind. He agrees: ‘Shamans, cast your spells and make your incantations!’ What he does not know is that Ogedei is not simply suffering an illness but death-pangs. Tolui drinks. The potion works fast. He just has time to consign his family to Ogedei’s care before words fail him. ‘I have said all I have to say,’ he slurs. ‘I have become drunk.’ On that he passes out, never to regain consciousness. The magic works: he dies, Ogedei lives, for another ten years, e
ternally grateful to Tolui and his widow, Sorkaktani.

  A nineteenth-century reconstruction of an aristocrat’s travelling tent, as described by the French monk William of Rubruck in 1246: ‘I myself once measured a breadth of twenty feet between the wheel-tracks of a wagon, and . . . I have counted 22 oxen to one wagon.’ These vast vehicles soon fell out of fashion, perhaps because Kublai’s court was in China, which lacked Mongolia’s oceanic grasslands.

  From 1235, Karakorum rose from the steppe. Mongolians had no experience of cities, so the architects and builders were Chinese. Earthen walls with four gates surrounded a small town, which included a palace with wooden floors, wooden pillars, a tiled roof and nearby cellars for the storage of treasures. Attached were private apartments, while in front stood a giant stone tortoise bearing an engraved pillar, like those that commonly guard Chinese temples – the very tortoise, perhaps, that still holds a lonely vigil beside Karakorum’s replacement, the sixteenth-century monastery of Erdeni Zuu. Inside the palace a central aisle led to steps, at the top of which stood Ogedei’s throne. Soon, one third of the town was taken up with government departments controlling sacrifices, shamans, merchants, the postal-relay system, treasuries and arsenals. But even when Muslim merchants and Chinese craftsmen began to crowd inside the walls, it wasn’t much of a town. William of Rubruck, the French missionary who was there in 1254, said it was less fine than the town of St Denis north of Paris and that St Denis’s basilica – the first Gothic cathedral, built in the mid-twelfth century and still a glory today – was worth ten of Karakorum’s palace (a little unfair, considering that Christianity had a 1,000-year head start).