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

by John Man

  To understand the Mongol sub-empire in Russia, the Golden Horde, we must go back to before Genghis’s death. His first-born, Jochi, had been a problem. He was, probably, a ‘Merkit bastard’, his mother having been held captive by the Merkits until rescued by Genghis. Accepted by Genghis, he had overseen the conquest of Siberian forest tribes, and also fought in China and the Islamic world. But his possible illegitimacy rankled, his brothers distrusted him and his father doubted his abilities. The two grew apart. Yet his inheritance would have been vast: all the land westwards from Lake Balkhash over the Urals, across Russia to the Danube; and from the Caspian northwards to Moscow, and beyond. ‘Would have been’, because he died in 1225, and his huge inheritance fell to Batu, the second of his fourteen sons.

  So eleven years later it was Batu, serving Ogedei, who was the supposed mastermind behind the renewed assault on Russia. He was no military genius, made some major errors and was widely reviled – not, however, by Mönkhe, who, with Batu’s support and much intrigue, became khan of khans. Batu therefore became Mönkhe’s and then Kublai’s man in the far west, in effect emperor of the ulus later called the Golden Horde.

  It’s worth recalling the size his estate. It covered most of today’s Kazahkstan, almost half of Russia, and all of Ukraine and Belarus – almost as big as the United States or China, making his realm in size a western equivalent to Kublai’s own Yuan empire. A great deal of it was steppe, ideal for nomads, unfortunately for the local tribes, who were driven out or enslaved. Batu and his thirteen brothers divided the depopulated steppe into vertical strips and migrated between summer and winter pastures, in epic commutes. William of Rubruck, who came via Batu’s son Sartaq in 1253 on his way to Mongolia, wrote: ‘His camp struck us as extremely large, since he has six wives, and his eldest son, who is with him, two or three; and to each woman belong a large dwelling and possibly two hundred wagons.’

  As the mention of the ‘dwelling’ suggests, the Mongols of the Golden Horde also built. Batu had founded a capital, Sarai, when he left Hungary in June 1242. A century later, Sarai was a substantial city of walled enclosures and earth-brick houses.fn4 When the Moroccan traveller and writer ibn Battuta went there in the 1330s, he recorded thirteen mosques and a dozen different cultures, with each ethnic group having its own quarter.fn5

  Jochi’s line also had other rights and possessions in the Middle East and China, for neither Persia nor China were handed out to Genghis’s heirs as unified fiefs until Mönkhe allotted China to Kublai and Iran to Hulegu in 1251. But all of this was liable to change. For instance, Mönkhe gave the Caucasus to Batu’s brother Berke, and when Hulegu advanced westwards to complete the conquest of Islam he encroached on Batu’s domains. Every campaign opened a fresh dispute. Berke became the first Mongol to convert to Islam and condemned his cousin’s destruction of Baghdad, a split that intensified when Batu died and Berke inherited the whole vast estate. A Muslim now ruled the west, while a traditional Mongol ruled Persia, with an undefined frontier between them. War was virtually certain.

  In 1262, a year after the Egyptian army had mauled the Mongols at Ayn Jalut, Berke invaded Persia, stalled – and then, of all things, allied himself with Egypt before his death in 1265. That alliance brought Chaghadai’s ulus into action, making a brief three-way civil war. From then on, the Golden Horde was in a permanent state of war with the Il-Khans in Persia, Chaghadai’s realm, and at times Khaidu, while on occasion reaching out to Kublai for support (a link that brought an admixture of Buddhism to the Horde).

  Then there was Russia. Batu required all Russian rulers to ‘go to the Horde’ and obtain permission to rule. A few even went all the way to Mongolia for confirmation. Russians recall the two centuries of rule by the Golden Horde as the ‘Tartar [or Tatar] Yoke’. In fact, it was less of a yoke, more of an accommodation, achieved in 1251 when Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod, decided to fight the Lithuanians, the Germans and the Swedes, and submit to the Mongols. With occasional uprisings and feuds, the Russians and Mongols cooperated. ‘Scratch a Russian,’ runs a common proverb, ‘and you find a Tartar.’ Russian cities had Mongol supervisors. Russian nobles lived in the Horde’s capital, Sarai; many of them took Mongol wives; some became officers in the Mongol army; there was even a Russian unit in Beijing.

  Actually, the Mongols in the west were now virtually ex-Mongols. By the late fourteenth century, the khans were divided against each other, west (roughly today’s Ukraine and southern Russia) versus east (the east being most of today’s Kazakhstan), princes of the Right Hand versus those of the Left, Golden Horde versus Blue (or White), each having its own history of rivalries and alliances, and its own subdivisions into tribes, clans and nationalities. When the Horde broke into half a dozen separate khanates in the fifteenth century, local leaders still claimed Genghis as an ancestor and went on doing so for another two centuries

  Why did they last so long, when other Mongol sub-empires collapsed after less than a century? The answer seems to be that in all other cases the Mongols were interfused with their subject populations. They were, to use David Morgan’s word, contaminated by them. Not so the Golden Horde, whose people remained semi-nomadic, preserving their lifestyle and army apart from the Russians from whom they drew their wealth, until in 1783 a resurgent Russia under Catherine the Great annexed the Crimea and its Tartar – more correctly, Tatar – remnants.

  In Persia, Mongol rule sucked blood from stones. The Il-Khans (subordinate khans), as they called themselves, enslaved, plundered and taxed to the limit, exacting a land tax, tithes, a poll tax and a tax on all commercial transactions, including prostitution. Beyond the ravaged countryside and its bitter peasantry, trade favoured the cities, allowing the Mongols to amass enough wealth to keep a precarious hold, even as they lost contact with their roots.

  Oppressive rule started with Hulegu himself, who remained a shamanist, if anything, because his funeral in 1265 included human sacrifices. Three heirs favoured Buddhism, until a great-grandson turned Muslim and razed all Buddhist buildings (though two rock-cut Buddhist cave systems survive). Eastern Christian sects also flourished, principally Nestorians, so much so that for a brief moment it seemed to a few that Persia – perhaps all Islam – would adopt Christianity, thanks to the Mongols.

  This is how it happened.

  In 1286, the new Il-Khan, Arghun, found himself needing support against Egyptians and other Muslims, and came up with an extraordinary idea. He wanted to approach Europe to suggest another crusade, Christians and Mongols together. Considering the horror caused in Europe by the Mongol advance only forty years before, this sounds totally bizarre; but there had been some cooperation between Mongols and Christian crusaders twenty years earlier. In exchange for Europe’s help, Arghun offered to deliver Jerusalem to them. To set the scheme in motion, he needed a sophisticated, well-travelled, multilingual envoy, and it happened that there was just the man on hand, thanks to Kublai.

  His name was Rabban Sauma, an Önggüd – a Turkish group living in western China who had converted to Nestorianism. Sauma, together with a young protégé called Markos, had gained Kublai’s support to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a decision that launched them on a remarkable journey across the whole of Eurasia. Sauma knew Turkish, Chinese and probably Mongol from childhood. Now he knew Persian as well.

  Arghun gave Sauma letters to the Pope, the Byzantine emperor, and the French and English kings. In 1287, he and three companions left for the Black Sea, where they took a ship to Constantinople, where he met the Emperor Andronicus, and then to Naples and Rome, only to discover that the old Pope was dead and a new one not yet chosen. He was greeted instead by cardinals, who did not seem to realize their guest was a heretic. On the matter of a crusade, they could not commit in the absence of a new Pope. So he travelled on to Paris, where France’s ambitious teenage king, Philip the Fair, gave him a great reception and a comfortable house. Sauma put his case. Philip seemed to be impressed. If Mongols were ready to help retake Jerusalem, what could C
hristians do but respond? In fact, he was eager to make a display of strength for reasons of his own – to gain control over English domains in France, to assert French claims to Flanders, to keep the Vatican from siphoning off funds from French church properties.

  Assuming Philip was now a fully paid-up member of the Mongol–European Alliance, Sauma moved on to Edward I of England, who fortunately was in his French colony, Aquitaine. Sauma reached Bordeaux in October 1287 and was at once invited to see the king. After presenting Arghun’s gifts of jewels and silk, he put forward the idea of a crusade. Edward loved it. He himself had vowed to take up the Cross that spring. It fitted his plans precisely. Sauma surely believed he had two thirds of his task done.

  Everything now depended on Rome, for without the Pope there could be no crusade. Still, however, there was no Pope. Winter was closing in. Sauma headed south, to the mildness of Genoa, a garden paradise as he called it, where he could eat grapes year round. After three months of growing frustration came the news: Habemus papam, Jerome of Ascoli, enthroned as Nicholas IV on 1 March 1288.

  An invitation followed, and an audience, with a fine speech from Sauma, the delivery of Arghun’s gifts and a generous response from Nicholas. Sauma celebrated Mass and received communion from the Pope himself, before a huge crowd, on Palm Sunday, with further celebrations on Passover (Maundy Thursday), Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Day.

  Finally, it was time to leave. Nicholas handed Sauma a few assorted relics and a letter for Arghun, which at last came to the point. Jesus had given authority to Peter, and thus to all succeeding Popes. Arghun should recognize the true faith. As for a crusade, well, let Arghun convert, accept papal authority, and God would give him the strength to seize Jerusalem and become a champion of Christianity. In brief: no deal.

  Back in Persia, Arghun was sidetracked by challenges from the Golden Horde and rebellious Muslims. He died in 1291, along with his dreams of further conquests. By then, it was too late anyway. That same year the Egyptian Mamluks took Acre, the last Christian outpost in the Middle East, and the crusading era came to an end.

  What if Nicholas had backed the alliance? The papacy, France, England and the Mongols would have fought in defence of the crusaders holding their castles in Syria, possibly with some strange consequences. Islam pushed out of the Middle East. Jerusalem delivered to the Pope, under an English–French–Italian–Mongol administration. Arghun a Christian convert. Christianity taking a leap into Central Asia. And all because Kublai had decided that Sauma had a role to play in his plans, and because his great-nephew was ruling Persia.

  Meanwhile, the Persian coffers were empty. The population had been squeezed dry. For the Il-Khans, failure to drive the Egyptian Mamluks out of Syria in 1304 marked the end of expansion, with Egypt and the Mediterranean forever beyond reach. In 1307 a Mongol embassy reached Edward II in England, but it was the last effort at self-promotion.

  Mongol rule ended not in violence, but in nothing but impotence. The last Il-Khan, Abu Sa’id, succeeded in 1316 aged only eleven, and ruled for nineteen peaceful years before Mongol rule expired. As Morgan puts it, ‘Abu Sa’id, despite unremitting effort, left no son by any of his numerous wives.’ There was no one to take power. Rivals sponsored implausible rulers, warlords grabbed themselves petty kingdoms, and the Il-Khans simply vanished, leaving chaos, until the arrival of the next would-be Genghis, Timur, better known to English-speakers as Tamburlaine, two generations later.

  In Central Asia, Chaghadai’s estate – his ulus, or country – was really no country at all, never being a single entity, neither in terms of geography nor government. It was basically the old Khara Khitai empire, blotted up by Genghis in 1218, plus a bit more to the west – a vague expanse running from the Aral Sea across to central Xinjiang. It included much of today’s Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, northern Afghanistan, south-east Kazakhstan and a good deal of the deserts of north-west China. That’s over 2 million square kilometres, about the size of western Europe, though it’s hard to tell, because at either end were two of the most desolate places on earth, the Kyzyl Kum and Takla Makan deserts. Its unmapped borders – with Kublai’s China, Persia, the Golden Horde and India – shifted with the ebb and flow of inter-family rivalries.

  Across its centre ran important trade routes, linking great cities – Samarkand, Bukhara, Kashgar – but there was no established capital, no traditional administration to inherit, no cohesion, and in terms of history no clear storyline. Khans came and went, at the whim of the successive overlords – Mönkhe, Kublai and subsequent Great Khans. Initially, the administration of the cities was in the hands of a Muslim named Mahmud, known as Yalavach (‘the Messenger’) and his son Masud Beg, but both also served in China and both were briefly expelled by local khans. The rulers remained nomads, sometimes happy to plunder their own Turkish subjects and their cities for cash. Some became Muslims, some Buddhist, and some neither. They built hardly anything. The few records are by outsiders. In the east, Khaidu was carving out his own ulus, now allying himself with Chaghadai’s successors, now fighting with them.fn6 It’s not that nothing is known. But to list who did what, when and to whom would be fruitless for all but specialists, because it led nowhere. No theme or personality emerges to compel our attention. Constrained by rival Mongol empires east and west, Chaghadai’s heirs looked south to Afghanistan and India, invading them several times, but even these adventures left no lasting mark.

  The Chaghadai ulus died as it lived, in obscurity, in the 1340s. Ravaged by the Black Death, it was divided between rival emirs and khans who were not of Chaghadai’s line. Happily for historians, this mess was the raw material from which Timur would mould a proper empire, complete with a court, buildings, scholarship and bloody victories, thus briefly assuming the mantle of Genghis Khan in a way that Genghis’s son Chaghadai had not.

  Across the former empire, there remained the memories of a golden age, of the glory that had been, of the giants who had lived in those days. And the magic lasted, drifting across Eurasia and down the centuries. Every ruler wanted his handful of Genghis’s magic dust. Long after Russian victory over the Golden Horde in 1480, members of the Golden Kin commanded noble status, right into the nineteenth century. The dreadful Timur claimed to be a Genghisid, though he wasn’t. He justified himself as a sort of reincarnation of Genghis – modest roots, heavenly favours, brutal conquests and so on. It was this false claim that explains why Timur’s descendant, Babur, called himself ‘Mughal’ when he seized power in India in the early sixteenth century, establishing a dynasty that ended when the British shuffled the last Mughal off the throne in 1857. His name, by the way, was Bahadur, a distant echo of the Mongol baatar, hero, the second element in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar (Red Hero). Even today, we remember: a ‘mogul’, originally a wealthy Indian, then a wealthy Anglo-Indian, is now a tycoon.

  And so, against a slow but steady dissipation, the wisps of the great explosion preserved the evidence of their origins. Genghis remained a monster to his victims. In his heartland, though, his reputation, like the ember of a supernova, burned sharp and bright, and still does, with implications for the future which we will get to later.

  fn1 I once photographed the results, a collection of beheaded stone statues that had been dug up in the 1990s and have now been taken into storage.

  fn2 These details are from Wu Han’s biography of Zhu, translated in Mote’s Imperial China, pp. 541–8.

  fn3 If there is any truth in the long lament ascribed to him by the Mongol prince Sagang, writing 300 years later. ‘My most variously adorned Daidu [Beijing]!’ he begins. ‘My glorious, cool summer retreat, Xanadu! Its yellowing plains, the source of pleasures for my divine ancestors! My errors are to blame for the loss of my empire!’

  fn4 Now reconstructed as a film set near its original site, 100 kilometres north of Astrakhan on the lower Volga.

  fn5 This is known as Old Sarai, because in the mid-fourteenth century it was superseded by another Sarai – ‘New�
� Sarai – which lasted for fifty years until sacked by Timur (Tamburlaine).

  fn6 From about 1270, he dominated a good part of Chaghadai’s ulus and their histories overlap.

  24

  GRAVE-HUNTING ON THE SACRED MOUNTAIN

  GENGHIS’S TOMB IS like the Loch Ness Monster: the more you look, the more it isn’t there. The only certainty is that very little is certain. It is said by many that ‘they’ know the real location, and have always known. In the 1970s, the nation’s most eminent academic, Professor Byambin Rinchen, told Igor de Rachewiltz ‘that the area had been positively identified before 1970’. The historian Badamdash told me: ‘The grave is in the foothills of Burkhan Khaldun. It is a state secret.’ But what is the nature of this state secret? Who are ‘they’?

  I went to see one of Mongolia’s most respected historians, Dalai, who lived in one of the grim apartment blocks that arose in Ulaanbaatar after the Second World War. He was in his seventies, but looked older, an image of ageless wisdom. History, his life’s work, was written on his lined face, sounded through his powerful bass voice, was apparent in shelf upon shelf of books in old Mongol, Cyrillic Mongol, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean and English. There was Owen Lattimore’s Mongol Journeys – Lattimore, doyen of Mongolists and an inspiration to me in my student days. I asked to look at it. The dedication startled me: ‘To Dalai. In token of 10 years of friendship. Owen.’

  He pointed to a dusty corner: ‘I have Lattimore’s camera. He left it here in case he should return. And his projector. And a suit of his clothes.’ Lattimore died in 1989, at the age of eighty-nine, and had not been in Mongolia since the 1970s. The camera, projector and suit had been sitting there for some thirty years, awaiting a collection that never came.

  When I asked about the grave, Dalai said, ‘Many people are now searching for Genghis’s grave. But I have never tried to find it. My heart would not let me. I recall Genghis’s orders: “Don’t touch my burial ground!” Since then, no one has touched it. It is a holy place, and should not be touched.’