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

by John Man

  Kublai had a justification for war. He sent a demand, carried by Korean envoys, that the king of this ‘little country’ submit instantly. It caused outrage mixed with terror. After six months, the government ordered the envoys to leave with no answer at all. Nothing more was heard from Kublai for three years, his forces being engaged in the conquest of Song. It was not until September 1271 that another Korean envoy arrived, officially bearing a request to submit, unofficially warning the Japanese to prepare for an attack. Again, there was no official reply, but now vassals were ordered back to their fiefs, and constables and stewards set about strengthening the thirty decrepit coastal castles.

  So when in 1272 a Mongol ambassador landed, demanding that his letters be forwarded to the emperor at once, Japanese martial spirit had revived. The shogun, a feisty twenty-two-year-old called Tokimune, sent him packing – a gross insult to Kublai, and nothing less than an invitation to invade.

  In a Japanese view, Mongolian soldiers wear all-embracing cloaks of chainmail.

  Kublai was soon ready. In 1273, Xiangyang fell, releasing reserves for action elsewhere; Korea was at last at peace; and there were ships enough in Korean and Song harbours for the assault. In the autumn of 1274, some 300 warships and 400–500 smaller craft, with crews of 15,000 and a fighting force of up to 40,000, depending on which source you believe, left Masan on the south Korean coast to cross the 50 kilometres of sea to the islands of Tsushima, the historic stepping-stone from the mainland to Japan.

  On the shore, locals put up a spectacular but hopeless defence, which became the stuff of legend, full of Japanese chivalry and Mongol barbarism, of lone warriors issuing dignified challenges, of poisoned Mongol arrows flying like raindrops in spring, of the sea made crimson by blood, of the governor’s honourable suicide. Stories tell of 6,000 dead and the Mongols carrying 1,000 heads back to their ships to embark for the next stepping-stone, Iki, 50 kilometres away, which met a similar end.

  On Kyushu’s coast, warlords gathered their forces in castles and behind walls, pennants fluttering. Four days after the assault on Iki, the Mongol fleet anchored in the bay dominated by the town that was then called Hakata, now Fukuoka. Two headlands, reaching westwards as if to welcome ships from all mainland Asia, made this the natural invasion point. Unopposed at sea, Kublai’s forces made easy landings on the beaches. There the Japanese waited. As one Japanese account put it, the grandson of the Japanese general fired whistling arrows as the signal for action to start, ‘but the Mongols all laughed. Incessantly beating their drums and gongs, they drove the Japanese horses leaping mad with fear. Their mounts uncontrollable, none thought about facing the Mongols.’ Not for long: chivalric tradition dictated that Japanese warriors could not skulk like cowards behind walls, but should meet the enemy head on.

  Among them that day was a young warrior named Takezaki Suenaga, from Higo province, a gokenin (a direct vassal of the shogun, the military ruler) who later acquired enough wealth to commission a series of paintings that were then pasted together to form two scrolls illustrating this and the later invasion of 1281. The scrolls were probably created some twelve years after the Mongol defeat to record Suenaga’s role in the battle. The Invasion Scrolls passed through various hands, being dismantled, re-assembled and added to, but still providing a vivid portrayal of the invasion.fn1

  The section of the scroll depicting the 1274 invasion shows the young Suenaga, aged twenty-nine, sporting a trim moustache and goatee beard, advancing through pines with five followers. They carry very long bows (by Mongol standards), which they wield with great skill, firing at the gallop, quivers on their backs, protected from head to toe by armour of overlapping metal plates.

  Suenaga is a headstrong character, eager for action. A picture shows him thrown from his wounded horse, which spouts blood, while a Mongol shell explodes nearby. This shell has been the source of controversy. Though some scholars think the image is an eighteenth-century addition to increase the drama, others believe the content is authentic. Could it be that both ideas are correct? As we have seen, the Mongols had long known about explosives, having acquired them after they seized Beijing in 1215. So this could well have been Japan’s first experience of explosive weapons, delivered, presumably, by half a dozen men working a traction trebuchet on a ship’s prow.

  Suenaga, like any good samurai, is obsessed with individual glory, and not at all concerned at the lack of centralized command. Others acted in the same way. But individual bravery was not enough. The disjointed defence allowed some Mongols to break out and penetrate far enough inland to burn the nearby town of Hakata.

  As the day died, the Japanese took refuge away from the beach, barricading themselves into the local capital, Daizafu, 16 kilometres inland. Could the Mongols have dislodged them? We will never know, because a storm was brewing. Chinese–Mongol–Korean captains urged their troops back to the ships to ride out the bad weather at sea. The next day would surely allow another landing, another breakthrough, and victory.

  But in the worsening weather, a flotilla of 300 Japanese open boats crept up the coast towards the Mongol fleet, some bearing a dozen soldiers with bows and swords, some loaded with dry hay to act as fuel for fires. These little ships infiltrated the ranks of their massive targets, moving in close beneath the overarching hulls. As the wind picked up, many of Kublai’s ships were already on fire, and the Japanese rowers headed for the bays and beaches they knew so well.

  The dawn revealed sights both dire (for Mongols) and uplifting (for Japanese). Ships scattered by wind, hulks smouldering, the flotsam of a broken army left behind as the survivors limped for safety to Korea. Korean records claim that 13,000 were drowned.

  Kublai did not take defeat to heart. It had all been due to the weather, nothing to do with Japanese elan. Next time, surely the Mongols’ natural superiority would tell.

  Neither the Hojo shogun, Tokimune, nor the emperor in Kyoto had any doubts about the explanation for what had happened. As a Japanese courtier noted in his diary, the storm ‘must have arisen as a result of the protection of the gods. Most wonderful! We should praise the gods without ceasing.’

  But what of the future? The gods would only help those who helped themselves. Tokimune ordered Kyushu’s coastal provinces to build a wall, which was an original idea, for as a nation the Japanese had not previously built many military installations. The project did something to give Japan’s rival provincial rulers a common purpose, a stronger sense of nationhood.

  The spirit of resistance hardened. When more envoys came from Kublai in May 1275, they were taken to Kamakura and executed five months later.fn2 The shogun might as well have slapped Kublai’s face. Court and civil leaders economized, so that national wealth could be poured into defences – the wall and small, easily manoeuvrable boats that would run rings round the mighty Korean warships. Since the enemy would surely try to land in undefended spots, there would be a secondary line of defence, with troops guarding the coasts north and south.

  Next time – and undoubtedly there would be a next time – the Japanese would be ready.

  fn1 The story forms part of an extraordinary book by Thomas Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention (see Bibliography).

  fn2 The tomb of their unlucky leader, Du Shizong, is in a temple in Fujisawa, close to Kamakura.

  19

  CHALLENGE FROM THE HEARTLAND

  AS A GLANCE at the map tells you, China today stretches halfway across Asia. Its western limits are almost on the same longitude as India’s western edge. This is surprising, because it is far beyond the traditional Chinese heartland as defined by its old northern limits, the Great Wall. The Wall ends deep in Central Asia; but today’s border is as far again beyond. How come China is so big?

  The reason for China’s size, remember, is because Genghis and Kublai made it so. But this leads on to another problem: Kublai’s empire nominally stretched way beyond today’s borders. This suggests that the question should be entirely flipped: how come China is so smal
l? Why does it not reach even further into Central Asia?

  The answer is that Kublai was limited by the amount of force he could bring to bear on his independent-minded relatives. One reason for this was that they had ready access to horses, which made them as hard to catch as quicksilver. There was nothing much to be done about the more distant parts of the empire – the Il-Khanate in Persia, the Golden Horde of southern Russia – but Central Asia, though far from China’s heartland, was on Mongolia’s doorstep. In one sense, all of Kazakhstan and a good deal of the other ‘stans’ to the south were part of Genghis’s inheritance and therefore part of Kublai’s, and so might well have remained in the Chinese sphere. But in this direction Kublai reached his limit. He was now constrained by distance and by his troops’ inability to pin down his mercurial relatives.

  This takes us into a murky backwater of history – the rivalry between Kublai and a distant cousin – but it is important because the outcome explains much about the shape of China today. The opposition dictated how far Kublai could go. That he went no further presented an idea of China that endured through a time of retreat under the successor dynasty, the Manchus, when these remote regions were ruled again by Mongols as semi-independent Manchu vassals. It re-emerged in the eighteenth century as the ‘New Kingdom’ – Xinjiang – when the Manchus regained control, extending the borders once again to the limits defined by Kublai.

  This vast and varied region, from the deserts of Uzbekistan and the grasslands of southern Kazakhstan into the heights of the Tien Shan and the wastes of western China, had no political unity, and exported nothing but trouble. In part this was because it was increasingly Islamic, even in Kublai’s day; and in part because neither local rulers nor Chinese emperors could win total control.

  It was in Central Asia that Kublai’s real threat lay, because it came from his own family, from the descendants of Genghis’s chosen heir, Ogedei, whose line had been pushed aside by Tolui’s powerful widow in favour of her children. The relative in question was Khaidu, Ogedei’s grandson. This is his story. It is a peculiar one, in that it played out over Khaidu’s rather long life, and over a good deal of Kublai’s. For some forty years, the two ill-matched contestants engaged in a sort of long-distance boxing match, Khaidu the lightweight throwing punches from Inner Asia, occasionally attracting the gaze of his heavyweight opponent, who always had other claims to his attention.

  There was never a hope of Khaidu actually winning, but his successes highlight another theme, common to many great-power rulers: conquest (if it can be managed at all) is simple, however hard-fought; administration is complicated. Conquest unites subordinates in a great adventure; administration allows free play to character, ambition and the formation of rival groups. Things fall apart, especially at the edges, which in this case was an area some 3,000 kilometres from headquarters. It took as long for an official to reach Khaidu as it took an English official to reach America in the 1780s. By the time he got there, after a four-month journey, who knew what might have happened in the meantime?

  Born in about 1235, Khaidu had been too young to be caught up in the purges unleashed by Mönkhe against Ogedei’s line in 1251, but old enough to be given his own estate when Mönkhe made peace with the survivors the following year. At sixteen, Khaidu was master of a territory some 2,000 kilometres to the west of Karakorum, a land running down from the Tien Shan into desert, but divided by the lush valley of the Ili River, one of the main routes linking China and the west. This, Asia’s geographical dead centre, was his base, where he grew to manhood, far from the ever-more-Chinese world of Kublai. Here he started empire-building on his own account.

  The story does not come easily, because it means making sense of obscure events, teasing significance from odd references in shadowy sources about petty squabbles. Marco Polo faced the same problem, which he solved, as he often did, by riding roughshod over history and going for a good yarn. In this case it was not a bad idea, because the gossip he picked up captures something essential about Khaidu and the nature of his rebellion.

  Marco remembered Khaidu because of his daughter, Kutulun, another one of those formidable women who stamp their mark on Mongolia’s history. Kutulun was famous not for her political skills but for her fighting ability and independent spirit. ‘This damsel was very beautiful,’ Marco begins, as if opening a fairy tale,fn1 ‘but also so strong and brave that in all her father’s realm there was no man who could outdo her in feats of strength . . . so tall and muscular, so stout and shapely withal, that she was almost like a giantess.’ Khaidu doted on his Amazonian daughter and wanted to give her in marriage, but she always refused her suitors, saying she would only marry a man who could beat her in a wrestling match. Her rule was that a challenger had to put up 100 horses. After 100 bouts and 100 wins, Kutulun had 10,000 horses. Now, as in all good fairy tales, a noble prince appears, the son of a rich and powerful king, both father and son suspiciously anonymous. So confident is the prince that he puts up 1,000 horses. Khaidu, eager for a wealthy son-in-law, begs her to lose the fight on purpose. Never, she says. He’ll have to beat me fair and square. Everyone gathers to watch. They wrestle without either gaining an advantage, until suddenly Kutulun throws her opponent. Shamed, he departs, leaving his 1,000 horses behind. Her father swallows his anger at the loss of a good match and proudly takes her on campaigns. She proves a great warrior, sometimes dashing into the enemy ranks to seize some man ‘as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father’.

  Are we to believe this? Well, she existed – Rashid al-Din mentions her briefly. What is convincing is the light the story throws on Khaidu, the admirer of traditional pastoral-nomadic virtues – pride, bravery, strength, fighting spirit, independence. He was no lover of scholars or artists. As Morris Rossabi says, a man with such attitudes would naturally come into conflict with Kublai.

  By the early 1260s, the empire was no longer unified, but a great family estate being fought over by descendants. In Central Asia, three Mongol powers battled to increase their own shares: the Golden Horde in today’s southern Russia, the Il-Khans in Persia, and Chaghadai’s heirs in between the Aral Sea and western China.fn2 Into this free-for-all Khaidu was now elbowing himself, making space in the borderlands between Chaghadai’s lands, the Golden Horde and Kublai’s China. All, of course, acknowledged that they were family, created by Genghis. Each claimed he was best suited to wear Genghis’s mantle. Everything was under strain, pulled by forces over which successive claimants had little control. In the west, Islam drew Mongol rulers; some resisted, some converted, the converts looking to an old enemy, Egypt, for support. In the centre were some who held to traditional nomadic virtues, despising the very cities and cultures they relied upon for their incomes. In the east, Kublai ruled, the nominal overlord to some, to others a traitor for choosing to be so Chinese.

  Khaidu – intelligent, competent and cunning, in Rashid’s account – moved steadily into rebellion. In his twenties, he supported Ariq in opposition to Kublai and refused Kublai’s summons to his coronation in 1264. Soon after, all three Central Asian Mongol leaders died – Hulegu in Persia, Alghu in Chaghadai’s territory and Berke in the Golden Horde – leaving a power vacuum across all Central Asia. Khaidu grabbed more land, reaching west towards Persia and east into present-day China, relying on the Golden Horde’s new ruler as an ally. Kublai tried to bring order to his squabbling family by sending a representative, Barakh, who managed to seize control of Chaghadai’s estate. Barakh and Khaidu fought on the banks of the Syrdarya. Khaidu won a great victory, and then proposed peace in the name of Genghis.

  In 1269, there was a peace conference in Talas (today’s Taraz, on the border of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), to which the new rulers of all three established Inner Asian Mongol ‘nations’ came, with Khaidu making a fourth. Three of them – the Golden Horde leaders having no interest in this local matter – divided the whole disputed region between them, with Barakh and Khaidu, the dominant participants, somehow agreeing to s
hare the trade from Samarkand and Bukhara. The two confirmed their treaty with the great oath that made them anda – blood-brothers – and by ‘drinking gold’, as the saying went, which meant exchanging golden cups and toasting each other.

  A theme emerges from these events. Barakh, originally sent by Kublai, and the upstart Khaidu were operating as independent monarchs. No one checked back with their nominal overlord, Kublai, except, according to an unsourced quotation in the Yuan Shi, to send a rather rude message: ‘The old customs of our dynasty are not those of the Han laws.’ In other words, they were declaring themselves independent of Kublai, because he had turned from the ways of Genghis.

  It quickly emerged that the peace conference was a sham. No one trusted anyone else. Everyone prepared for more fighting. The Golden Horde ruler, Mönkhe Temur, stayed out of it, leaving the other three to scrap, in a vicious round of assaults, alliances and deceptions from which, in late summer 1271, Khaidu emerged as khan of a state 2,500 kilometres across, overlapping today’s southern Kazakhstan, most of Uzbekistan, and almost all of Kyrgyzstan. This area had no name; Marco Polo refers to it as ‘Great Turkey’, others call it Turkestan. Roughly speaking, it ran from the River Amudarya in the west into Xinjiang in the east, from Lake Balkhash in the north down to the Tien Shan – 1.25 million square kilometres in all, which is the size of France, Germany and Italy combined.

  This was no mean achievement. Khaidu had proved himself smart enough to exploit his opponents’ weaknesses and Kublai’s move into the Chinese heartland. He was a commander in the tradition of Genghis himself, tough, austere – he didn’t touch alcohol – tolerant of religions other than his own shamanism, and also careful to look after his economy. Through an efficient chancellor, he introduced his own currency (coins with a high silver content have been found in a dozen cities). He is even credited with building Andijan, which in the 1280s became a crossroads for trade in the rich Ferghana Valley. Traditionalist he may have been, but he also took after Genghis in his awareness of the need for administrative skills. He created regiments of cavalry, with a decimal command structure traditional among Mongol armies. In this way, he was able to incorporate many, and often rival, Mongol and Turkish tribes. The horsemen were reinforced by infantry and ‘naphtha-throwers’ – teams expert in the use of trebuchets and other siege engines. How strong were his armies? The sources toss around the figure of 100,000, probably an exaggeration, and anyway rather fewer than the armies mustered by Persia, the Golden Horde and Kublai’s China. What they lacked in quantity they made up for in quality. They were terrific at raids: quick advances, hard strikes, quick retreats.