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

by John Man

The clinching argument is a geological one. Go back 13,000 years. The mountain is covered by ice, the last of three glacial advances that have gripped Mongolia over the past 50,000 years. The previous two advances have ground the mountain lower, smoothing its slopes, leaving a core of granite sticking up from the summit, 100 metres across at its base, with buttresses rising to a high point of 50 metres. The volume of the column is much the same as the cairn today, but in a different form. The icy shell begins to melt, breaking the granite pinnacle into boulders, stones and pebbles. As it collapses, spilling ice and water on every side, it drops the rocky detritus to form a neat dome, much as it is today, except that winter ice and summer rains continue to eat away at the cairn, breaking the rocks and carrying them downhill in slow-motion streams. The rocks out on the plateau, the rocks down on the mountainside below, the rocks forming the ‘graves’ – they all come from the same source, the bare and broken mountain top.

  Men could have built it up. But they didn’t. Ice broke it down.

  Obviously, if the cairn on top was natural, the grave wasn’t up there. And, when I eventually had my two roof tiles dated, they suggested that the worship of this mountain developed much later. In May 2013, one of them was subjected to a process known as thermoluminescence analysis, which roughly identifies the date at which the tile was fired. Doreen Stoneham of Oxford Authentication reported that it was roughly 450 years old, with a large area of error. ‘The most likely age lies in an envelope of 300 to 600 years, i.e. AD 1400–1700.’ In short, too late to be anything to do with Kamala, who built his temple around 1300.

  Which merely adds another possibility to the mystery. This mountain had been the focus of veneration for centuries. For how long, and why? It was (and remains) a predominantly Buddhist veneration. Buddhism spread from Tibet into Mongolia from the late sixteenth century onwards. Following Tibetan practice, top-level priests were designated ‘incarnate lamas’ or ‘living Buddhas’, deities who appear in the flesh for the benefit of humans. In the mid-seventeenth century, Mongolian Buddhism came to be dominated by a line of senior Mongolian ‘incarnate lamas’, the first being Zanabazar, a prince’s son who was enthroned as an incarnation at the age of four in 1639. In about 1700, Zanabazar’s mobile monastery of tents formed the heart of what became Ulaanbaatar. But for about fifty years previously, the tent-monastery had moved from place to place, often in the Khentii Mountains. Zanabazar would naturally have honoured Khentii Khan. So perhaps the temple was Zanabazar’s. Perhaps, if Khentii Khan and Burkhan Khaldun are one and the same, it was the coming of Buddhism that inspired the change of the mountain’s name to Khentii Khan, allowing the term Burkhan Khaldun to slip away into folklore and history.

  The mystery of Genghis’s tomb remains, which should be no great surprise. If, as masters of half Eurasia, the khan’s family wished their hero’s grave to be kept secret, chances are they could arrange it.fn5

  fn1 Pelliot analysed all this in his Notes on Marco Polo, Vol. 1, pp. 330 ff (see Bibliography).

  fn2 The Mongol–East German connection has an odd origin. In the 1920s, when newly independent and Communist Mongolia started to look outwards, the government sent fifty children to be educated in Berlin. Back home, these children became a little elite, with great influence. After the Second World War, when East Germany became part of the Communist world, the link came into its own.

  fn3 My main source for these paragraphs is Peter Williams and Michael Smith, The Frozen Earth: Fundamentals of Geocryology (see Bibliography).

  fn4 My own rough calculation in The Terracotta Army.

  fn5 The latest search for the grave was carried out in 2009–12 by Albert Lin, at the University of California, San Diego. Lin, supported by National Geographic, used remote-sensing technology – satellite imagery, ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry and electro-magnetometry, 3D data visualization – and ‘crowd-sourcing’, which meant 112,000 volunteers searching 95,000 pictures online to identify likely grave-sites. The project found much of interest, but as this book went to press had published nothing on the subject of Genghis’s tomb.

  25

  WHAT THE MONGOLS DID FOR US

  IN MARCH 2003 an extraordinary article appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics. A group of twenty-three geneticists working in Oxford University had been studying the DNA from some 2,000 men across Eurasia. To their surprise, they found a pattern common to several dozen of their sample men, irrespective of where they came from. The same genetic pattern, with slight local variations, ran through sixteen population groups scattered across the whole territory, from the Caspian to the Pacific. If the proportion of men with this pattern (8 per cent of the sixteen groups) is extrapolated across the entire population of that area, the startling conclusion is that 16 million men are in effect part of one vast family.

  How are we to explain this? The data came from a study of Y-chromosomes, which men possess and women do not. Each man has a pattern on his Y-chromosome that is his unique signature, but the signatures have similarities which allow geneticists to spot family relationships, which can be traced back through time and space, pinpointing their ‘most recent common ancestor’. Working with thirty-four generations and allowing thirty years for a generation, the team placed the common ancestor about 1,000 years ago, in Mongolia.

  This suggested a startling hypothesis: that one man living in Mongolia in the ninth to twelfth centuries had scattered his genetic material across half of Eurasia, with the result that it is now shared by one in 200 of all men living today.

  Chris Tyler-Smith, then at Oxford’s Department of Biochemistry, described what happened next:

  ‘We knew there was something extraordinary in the data as soon as Tatiana [Zerjal, the DPhil student doing the analysis] drew the first network. The star-cluster stood out because of the high frequency, large numbers of neighbours, and distribution in many populations. We had never seen such a thing before. You can tell at a glance it represents a single extended family.

  ‘Tatiana immediately said: “Genghis Khan!”

  ‘At first it seemed like a joke, but as we accumulated more data and did the calculations to determine the most likely time and place of origin, this turned out to be the best explanation.’

  Proof came when the researchers placed the sixteen selected groups on a map of Genghis’s empire. The two made a perfect fit. Actually, one group, the Hazaras of Afghanistan, lay just outside the borders – but that fitted too, because Genghis was in Afghanistan for a year or so in 1223–4 before retreating back to Central Asia.

  Quite possibly the common ancestor of these 16 million males was not directly related to Genghis. But in any event, it was Genghis who was responsible for scattering this genetic signature across northern China and Central Asia between 1209 and his death in 1227. Beautiful women were part of the booty in warfare, and it was a leader’s right to be given them by subordinate officers. In theory, all booty belonged to Genghis, who was a stickler for asserting his right and then displaying his generosity by allocating the booty, in this case the women. Whoever possessed this gene, he or they (for it may have been a set of brothers or cousins), must have been travelling with the army across Eurasia, fathering children along the way. Let us say that our man produces two sons. The consequences of doubling the number of male descendants every generation for over thirty generations are so dramatic that the calculation escapes from the real world before its conclusion. After five generations – by about 1350 – one man has a trivial 320 male descendants; but another five generations later, in 1450–1500, he has 10,000; after twenty generations he has 10 million; and after thirty, impossible billions.

  To find 16 million descendants today, then, is perfectly possible. It is tempting to credit our man with terrific reproductive capacity – Genghis himself, perhaps, as numerous news stories proclaimed. In fact, these particular genes do not influence either looks or behaviour; all they do is determine sex. So there must have been some other factor at work to ensure the spread of t
he gene. As the authors state, it can only be sheer political power with a vast geographical reach. ‘Our findings demonstrate a novel form of selection in human populations on the basis of social prestige.’ Sociologists and gossip columnists know about the sexual success of alpha males, but this is the first time it has been seen in action in evolutionary terms. Genghis may not have spread the gene himself; but he certainly created the conditions for it.

  The paper caused quite a stir at the time. Its findings have since been replicated by Russian scientistsfn1 and inspired much related research, attracting some 250 citations in other scientific papers. A word of warning, though. The original conclusion was that Genghis provided the means of spreading the gene. But Genghis is such a force in history that the message has become distorted. The title of the Russian paper says the star-cluster is ‘attributed to Genghis Khan’s descendants’, as if he were the common ancestor. Same thing with many websites: ‘Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover’ (National Geographic), ‘1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan’ (Discover).

  It’s not Genghis’s own DNA that explains matters. It’s the behaviour of his people. It is fashionable to seek a genetic explanation of behaviour. Here, though, it’s the other way around. It’s the behaviour that lies behind the genetics, behaviour unleashed by the world-changing character that emerged on the Mongolian grasslands some eight and a half centuries ago.

  Given that empires change civilizations, what other effects of Genghis’s empire remain today?

  Rather fewer than you might think. Size matters, but it is not everything.

  In Europe, the Romans left vast amounts of hardware – roads, buildings, aqueducts, stadia – but they also rewrote Europe’s software: language, art, literature, law, almost every aspect of culture you can think of, affecting the inner and outer lives of all its many peoples.

  The Mongols left – well, not much. True, they lasted for only a fraction of the time of the Romans: 150 years against over 1,000. But length of time does not equate with cultural impact. Alexander flashed across the skies of history like a comet, but he left a lasting light. The British were in India for 200 years and the cultures are still interfused. Why? Because the Romans, the Greeks and the British had something to say, quite apart from their military successes. The Mongols didn’t. Yes, Yuan China was famed for its ceramics, art, drama, poetry and much else, as was Persia. But this was creativity despite Mongol rule, not because of it; and it was not Mongol culture, but Chinese and Persian. Where there were no locals to create, as in the Golden Horde, very little of value was created. As Thomas Allsen puts it, ‘they were, in sum, agents not donors’.fn2

  Compare them with those other great conquerors, the Arabs. There are interesting parallels between the Arabs of the sixth century and the Mongols of the twelfth: a mass of feuding tribes, wealthy neighbours, access to major religions, great leaders, explosions outwards in a series of epic and successful conquests. But with very different consequences. Islam is with us still, in strength and great cultural depth; not so Mongolian religion – Tengrism – or its culture.

  The main difference lies in their ideologies. Islam expanded in conjunction with the new religion, while the Mongols were inspired by conquest alone, with religion coming along behind to act as a justification. In Islam, faith bred conquests; for the Mongols, conquests bred faith.

  It might have worked. But Tengrism – the notion that heaven gave the world to the Mongols – has a serious deficiency. It totally lacks any ethical and moral content. Tengri was not presented as the creator of the universe, or as humanity’s ultimate judge. No Mongol would tremble at the possibility of standing before Tengri to account for his or her actions in life. Nor did the concept offer anything to oppressed subjects. Genghis created unity by destroying the upper segments of Mongol tribal organization, and channelling loyalty to himself and his Golden Clan. This was not a religion well suited to the long-term government of other cultures. Tengrism did not seek converts.

  What a difference from Islam, which claims, like Christianity, to offer guidance for all mankind, victors and conquered alike, creating the umma, a community of believers. In theory, no one is excluded from Islam on the basis of ethnicity or social background. Iranians, Turks, Malaysians, Indonesians, Chinese, converts of many races and cultures – all form part of the umma.

  If Mongols wished to govern their urbanized subjects long-term, they really had no option but to adapt – as in China, where Kublai brought in Buddhism to justify the idea of world rule – or adopt the religion of their subjects, most notably Islam. In the Golden Horde, despite keeping a distance between themselves and Russian culture, some Mongols converted to Russian Orthodoxy. If they had stayed in Hungary, they would probably have become Catholics.

  The result of this difference was Muslim intolerance and Mongol tolerance, of a sort. Muslims dismiss other religions, since they are by definition untrue, while asserting the truth of their own. The Mongols, on the other hand, were happy to allow any set of beliefs as long as those who professed them acknowledged the Mongols as world-rulers, in waiting if not yet in practice. Their brutality in the Muslim world was not anti-Muslim – it was just anti those who disputed Mongol rule. The khans favoured religions entirely indiscriminately, depending on political need. For instance, Kublai asked the Polos to bring Christian priests, not because he wanted to turn Christian but because he wanted to counterbalance the bitter rivalry between Buddhists and Daoists.

  With the same pragmatism, the Mongols did not insist on dogma, other than the supremacy of Genghis. There were no subtleties to be explained, no great truths to be proclaimed, other than Genghis’s divinely ordained rule. For this we should be grateful. Imagine what horrors the Mongols might have let loose if they had been set on killing all those who refused to accept their beliefs. As it was, all they demanded was compliance. That’s why they left hardly a physical or intellectual trace: no buildings, no philosophies, no universities, no moral guidance, no literature for the subject peoples.

  Yet there are wisps of evidence, like the remnants of a supernova that recall the great explosion. It was an explosion of people: at first Mongol armies, then the non-Mongol troops blotted up by the Mongols, and finally, as if in a series of reverberations, massive transfers of captives. For almost two centuries, Eurasia became a sort of ethnic blender, mixing people and peoples as never before. Each campaign was like a slow-motion explosion, scattering, obliterating and transferring tribes, ethnicities and populations. The Tanguts were almost annihilated; Chinese were taken west, Muslims and Tibetans east. Kazakhs and Uzbeks emerged for the first time, with consequences for the future Soviet Union and for today’s Central Asia.

  At its highest levels, the empire became a United Nations of intellectuals, administrators, soldiers and artisans of twenty-two nationalities, cultures and religions other than Mongols and Chinese.fn3 Traditionally, the Mongols, like all the other nomadic groups, had captured, adopted, married and enslaved captives, but this was something new. As warriors and herders, they had been generalists who could turn their hand to anything; now, to run an empire, they needed specialists by the thousand. It all goes back to Genghis. Remember the Naiman scribe Tatar-tonga and his Uighur script? The Khitan administrator Yelu Chucai? Another example: after the conquest of Khwarezm, Genghis chose the Muslims Mahmud Yalavach and his son Masud Beg to help administer north China because they ‘were adept in the laws and customs of cities’, as The Secret History says. Genghis’s heirs followed suit. The friar William of Rubruck (in north-eastern France), newly arrived at Mönkhe’s court in Karakorum, met a French goldsmith called William (Guillaume) Boucher, who had been captured in Hungary. He had devised a bizarre silver ‘tree’, which is worth a small digression. It consisted of four pipes, from each of which came a different drink – wine, mare’s milk, mead and rice wine. The pipes, which had snakes (or perhaps dragons) twined around them, sprang from model lions. The whole thing was capped by an angel holding a trumpet in its articulated h
and and arm. It must have been life-size, because underneath was hidden a man who, when the right moment came, blew into a tube leading to the angel, which would raise the trumpet to its lips and emit a blast, at which waiters offstage would pump their individual drinks into the four pipes. The idea possibly came from devices worked by water and compressed air in European and Byzantine courts, but one thing is certain: it was totally, eccentrically un-Mongol, a statement of a new multicultural identity. An early fourteenth-century Chinese writer, Cheng Zhu-fu, gloried in Mongol internationalism: ‘Our Dynasty, with supernatural military power, and benevolent leniency, has brought order to the Four Seas. Loyal, virtuous, brave and talented men from a multitude of places and myriad countries all willingly enter the emperor’s service.’

  As the Persian author Rashid al-Din put it in his Collected Chronicles, ‘Today, thanks to God and in consequence of him, the extremities of the inhabited earth are under the dominion of the house of Chinggis Qan and philosophers, astronomers, scholars and historians from North and South China, India, Kashmir, Tibet, [the lands] of the Uighurs, other Turkic tribes, the Arabs and Franks, [all] belonging to [different] religions and sects, are united in large numbers in the service of majestic heaven.’

  Rashid and his work are perfect expressions of Mongol internationalism. Born Jewish, he converted to Islam, rose in the service of the Il-Khans and was commissioned to write a history by Ghazan (1294–1304), a fifth-generation descendant of Genghis. He then extended it to cover the whole known world and its civilizations. Researching what became the first world history, he interviewed a huge range of scholars – Chinese, Kashmiri, Uighur, Mongolian, Hebrew, Arabic, Tibetan and European – to produce three atlas-sized volumes in both Arabic and Persian. Working with a team of researchers and co-writers, Rashid used written sources as well as his informants, including a collection of books and scrolls concerning early Mongol history that were concealed from outsiders by their royal owners and have now vanished. He was author and general editor of a project that combined the work of government ministry, university department and publishing house. One of his colleagues, an influential Yuan scholar-administrator named Bolad, had his own sub-committee of researchers. The project made Rashid rich: he supposedly received a million dinars from Ghazan’s successor (about 5 per cent of the government’s annual revenue) and became a patron of many artists. But the Chronicles was not his life’s work. Besides being a top Il-Khan minister, he created what was in effect his own university in Tabriz, wrote several volumes on Islamic theology and an instruction manual on agriculture that reveals a detailed knowledge of Chinese techniques for raising, among other things, fruit trees, cereals, vegetables, mulberries and silkworms.