On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  7 The expedition was officially said to be a scientific expedition to the Aral Sea. The mission of rescuing slaves, however, was also a cover for the real intention, which was to conquer Khiva.

  8 I will always remember one morning after a long night ride when we had been forced to divert from the river course. Upon discovering a shallow, spring-fed puddle barely a centimetre deep, Harvette had moved in slowly, dipped her long arched neck, and brought her lips ever so carefully to the surface, whereupon she began to suck in the water without stirring up any visible sediment. When the horses came galloping impatiently over, Taskonir stomped about, turning the puddle into a mud bath before the others were able to drink.

  CHAPTER 15: THE OIL ROAD

  1 Some commentators, such as Lutz Kleveman in his book The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, suggest that by 2020 Kazakhstan could rival Saudi Arabia, exporting as much as 10 million barrels of oil a day.

  2 Lutz Kleveman in The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia alleges that $120 million of this was discovered in accounts under the names of Nazarbayev’s children and relatives. Soon after these revelations Nazarbayev had the parliament pass a law making him immune from prosecution for anything he may have done in office.

  3 At the time of my journey there were several known incidents of rioting and violence. Weeks prior to my arrival in Kulsary there was a riot between Turkish and Kazakh employees at Tengiz. In December 2011, at least fourteen people were known to be killed when oil workers of the Ozenmunaigas company—based farther south in the town of Zhanaozen—went on strike due to unpaid hazard pay, rioted, and were fired upon by police.

  4 In Kazakh, kok means “green,” but it is also a word used to describe the color of a gray horse.

  5 My visa eventually came through successfully, but not before I was taken in by police in the town of Ganushkino, who threatened to hold me until I could produce my passport. In the end I was rescued by a local former politician who agreed to be my guarantor.

  6 They were Karakalpaks—a Turkic people closely related to Kazakhs who were nowadays a minority in their own semi-autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan.

  7 Kyl means “horse” and terlek means “summer deel” or, in old-fashioned language, can apparently also mean “underwear.”

  8 After her operation, Kathrin had also proposed visiting me in Almaty, but I had jettisoned the idea because I knew I would be occupied with the visa and other tasks.

  9 Tengiz-Chevroil is the name of the company run by Chevron together with the Kazakh government to exploit the Tengiz oil deposits.

  CHAPTER 16: LOST HORDES IN EUROPE

  1 It is also acknowledged by historians that the majority of the Kalmyks who remained behind were of the Durvud tribe, and they had elected to stay there.

  2 In the fifteenth century, the Oirats had usurped the Genghisid Mongols (also known as the Eastern Mongols) and gone on to found the empire of Zhungaria, which at its peak stretched from Lake Baikal in the northeast to Lake Balkhash in the west and the Great Wall of China in the south.

  3 The Kalmyk khanate held sway from the Zhem, across the northern shores of the Caspian Sea, to the Terek River in what is present-day southern Russia.

  4 In one campaign in 1711 the Kalmyks attacked the Nogais, who, since being pushed out of the Lower Volga, had moved west to the Kuban steppe and become vassals of the Ottomans. In four days of fighting it is believed the Kalmyks caused the deaths of almost 40,000 and wiped out the entire male population of the Kuban Nogais. They also took 22,000 people captive—the majority of whom were women and children—and stole 190,000 horses and 220,000 sheep.

  5 It is so called because of the lack of snow cover on this steppe in the winter.

  6 This particular Chechen farmer, whom I did not meet, was said to have lost two houses, a truck, and a semi trailer in the recent riots.

  7 This works out to about 150,000–200,000 individuals.

  8 I later met a Kalmyk man who told stories about his time as a teenager helping to herd Kalmyk livestock to the eastern banks of the Volga in an attempt to stop them from falling into the hands of the Nazis. “They were never returned to us after the war,” he said sadly. “Probably those Kazakhs still have them.”

  CHAPTER 17: COSSACK BORDERLANDS

  1 Kurgans are found across Central Asia, Siberia, and eastern Europe. They were common among many nomad societies on the steppe, including that of the Scythians. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is derived from a Tatar term meaning “fortress.”

  2 The capital of the Golden Horde, Sarai, was established on the Volga River. The Pontic-Caspian steppe, where vast numbers of horses could be kept in close proximity to Russia, enabled the Mongols and their successors to preserve their military superiority over their vassals.

  3 Nothing further is known of Jebe, and it is assumed he died soon after arrival back in Central Asia, but the young Subodei would go on for another twenty-five years, long after Genghis had died, expanding the Mongol Empire to its zenith and again wreaking devastation on the princedoms of Russia.

  4 A decade after Russia defeated the largest Cossack army, the Zaporizhian Sich, the Cossack army was reinstated to help efforts in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1787–92. Russia later granted Cossacks the lands of the Kuban for their contribution. Twenty-five thousand Cossack soldiers moved to the Kuban, founding the Kuban Cossack society that still lives there today.

  5 In one case the entire populations of three Kuban towns, totaling 45,600 people, were deported. Later, as more than 3 million tonnes of wheat were kept in government storehouses, up to 4.5 million peasants across the Ukraine and Kuban starved to death.

  6 Home-distilled vodka in Russian is known as samogon, but Cossacks use the Ukrainian variation of the word, samohon (Kuban Cossacks generally speak a dialect closer to Ukrainian than Russian). The large bottles they serve with corncob corks are known additionally as suliya. Ordinary vodka in Cossack dialect is also known by the Ukrainian term, horilka.

  CHAPTER 19: WHERE TWO WORLDS MEET

  1 For me, the most intriguing symbol of the unique cultural dualism of Panticapaeum was an excavated tomb that lay in the hills overlooking Kerch. The so-called Tsar’s Kurgan or Royal Kurgan, a 22 m earth-covered dome, appeared from the exterior like a typical Scythian burial mound—the kind I’d seen regularly elsewhere. Yet the excavated opening revealed an arrowhead-shaped tunnel and a chamber constructed with impressively hand-hewn sandstone blocks that bore the hallmarks of the ancient Greek. The tomb was not of a nomad but of a Bosphorian king.

  2 The Crimean khanate was founded in 1430 by Batu Khan’s brother’s descendant, Hajji Giray.

  3 After conquering Baghdad in 1258, Hulegu Khan (Genghis Khan’s grandson), of the Ilkhanate declared war on Egypt. Mongol advances were halted by the Mamluks, however, who defeated them in the Battle of Ain Jalut. It was the first of several major battles with the Mamluks, including the First and Second Battles of Homs.

  4 It is also true that Mongol aristocracies assimilated with the culture of their subjects—at the turn of the fourteenth century, for example, the Golden Horde officially converted to Islam, breaking the tradition of Mongol rulers adhering to shamanism.

  5 After weeks of protests and blockades it was reported that the NATO ship sailed home without unloading. The day after my trip to the city, the front page of the newspaper had two headline stories: “Australian Reaches Crimea from Mongolia by Horse” and “Crimeans Say No to NATO.”

  6 Sourced from Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia 500 BC to 1700 AD (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 205.

  CHAPTER 20: THE RETURN OF THE CRIMEAN TATARS

  1 Translated from an original Crimean verse by Rustem Ali. Sourced from Edward A. Allworth, The Tatars of Crimea: Return to the Homeland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 5.

  2 From here on I will use Tatars and Crimean Tatars interchangeably, although Crimean Tatars are a distinct people fr
om other Tatars, such as the Kazan or Volga Tatars.

  3 There was wide agreement among historians that the real reason for Stalin’s decision to exile the Tatars had been his fear of their historical alliance with the Turks.

  CHAPTER 21: CROSSROADS

  1 Contemporary historians, such as Charles J. Halperin, argue that even after throwing off the so-called Tatar yoke, Russia inherited Mongol military and economic models that helped enable the Muscovite state to unite the northeastern Slavs.

  2 His most spoken-about experiences were during a year at Mankato University in Minnesota, where he studied for his master’s degree.

  3 Text messages could be sent to my phone via an email address.

  CHAPTER 22: TAKING THE REINS

  1 When reports of famine reached the West and relief supplies were sent to the border, they were turned back, and Moscow announced that there was no famine.

  2 In November 2006, the same month that my father died, the Ukrainian president brought to power through the Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko, had finally pushed through a decree that the famine had been genocide. At the time of this writing, however, Yushchenko’s archenemy, pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych, is in power and has reversed this decree, recognizing the Holodomor only as a human tragedy.

  3 Such were the high emotions surrounding Bandera that one of Yushchenko’s last acts as president in January 2010 was to posthumously award Bandera status as a “Hero of Ukraine.” Months later Yanukovych had the award overturned. At the time of writing, the award has been officially annulled, although Stepan’s grandson, who received it on his behalf, has not been asked to return it.

  CHAPTER 23: AMONG THE HUTSULS

  1 In times gone by, Hoverla had even been a site of religious sacrifice—the higher the Hutsul climbed to carry out the sacrifice, the more respect they would have from the community. There was one legend I heard about a man who had carried a white bull on his back all the way to the top to be slaughtered.

  2 According to tradition, this unique horn was always made from a pine or spruce tree that had been struck by lightning, and it was bound by birch bark collected from trees growing beneath waterfalls. The trembita—which is quite unlike the better-known alpenhorn of the European Alps—was then used to send signals across the high slopes for everything from weddings to communication between herders.

  3 Although Genghis Khan had died fourteen years earlier, his son Ogodei, together with Genghis’s loyal general Subodei, had resolved to carry out Genghis’s wish for world domination.

  4 Later on I was approached frequently by villagers who asked how much I was selling brinza for—they assumed that I was a shepherd bringing it down from the polonina.

  CHAPTER 24: THE END OF THE WORLD

  1 Batu was the second son of Jochi, who was himself Genghis Khan’s eldest son. Batu became khan of the Golden Horde.

  2 The Kipchaks were known as Cumans in Latin and Polovtsy in Russian. For the remainder of this chapter, I will use the term Cumans, since this is historically how the Europeans referred to them. Those Cumans who survived the onslaught and accepted Mongolian suzerainty became central to Batu Khan’s Golden Horde (also known as the Kipchak Khanate).

  3 This is an excerpt from the letter delivered from Batu Khan to King Bela IV. The original is believed to have been in Mongolian, but this is part of one of many different versions—all subtly different—translated from Latin. Gabriel Ronay, in The Tartar Khan’s Englishman, even suggests that it was possibly the Mongol’s mysterious English diplomat who penned the letter. The translation version I have used here is sourced from Leo De Hartog, Genghis Khan, Conqueror of the World. Folio Edition. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 176. (Note however, Hartog did not include the last line that I have here: “So how do you escape my hands.”)

  4 Many of these elite soldiers had fought against the Seljuks during the Crusades and were part of military orders including the Knights Templar, the Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, the Teutonic Knights, and the Brothers of the Sword.

  5 Sourced from Gabriel Ronay, The Tartar Khan’s Englishman (London: Cassell, 1978), 11.

  6 It is also said that divisions between Batu and other family members influenced the decision to abandon plans for Europe. Additionally, the retreat may be partially explained by the fact that although the Hungarian plain was well suited for horses, it wasn’t large enough to support the sheer number of Mongol mounts. This, some historians suggest, would have forced the army to eventually return to the more familiar steppe of the former Cumanian territories anyway.

  7 In the centuries following the arrival of the Magyars in Hungary there was a belief that somewhere between the Volga and the Urals existed an ancient “greater Hungary.” In 1236, a Dominican friar, Julian, claimed to have reached it and met people who spoke fluent Hungarian. The following year he once more set out east but on arrival in Suzdal in Russia was told that the eastern Hungarian nation had been wiped out by the Mongols. The existence of this nation remains a mystery.

  8 In his remarkable book The Centaur Legacy, Bjarke Rinke writes that the “neuro-physiological merging of horse and man” resulted in a “super predator equipped with the ambition of man and the speed of the horse.” Bjarke Rink, The Centaur Legacy: How Equine Speed and Human Intelligence Shaped the Course of History (Zurich: Long Riders Guild Press, 2004), 29.

  9 In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), Jarred Diamond points out that “the most direct contribution of plant and animal domestication to wars of conquest was from Eurasia’s horses, whose military role made them the jeeps and Sherman tanks of ancient warfare” (91).

  In relation to the Spanish conquest of South America, he also writes of the “tremendous advantage that Spaniards gained from their horses.” Reminiscent of the advantage that the nomads of the steppe had over the armies from sedentary Europe the “shock of a horse’s charge, its maneuverability, the speed of attack that it permitted and the raised and protected platform that it provided left foot soldiers nearly helpless in the open” (76).

  A Note on the Author

  Tim Cope, F.R.G.S., is an adventurer, author, film-maker and motivational speaker with a special interest in Central Asia and the states of the former Soviet Union. He has studied as a wilderness guide in the Finnish and Russian subarctic, ridden a bicycle across Russia to China and rowed a boat along the Yenisey River through Siberia to the Arctic Ocean. He is the author of Off the Rails: Moscow to Beijing on Recumbent Bikes and is the creator of several documentary films, including the award-winning series ‘The Trail of Genghis Khan’, which covers the journey of this book. He lives in Victoria, Australia.

  www.timcopejourneys.com

  By the Same Author

  Off the Rails: Moscow to Beijing on Recumbent Bikes

  (with Chris Hatherly)

  First published in Great Britain in 2013

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2013 by Tim Cope

  Cartography by Will Pringle

  All photographs copyright © the Tim Cope collection unless otherwise credited

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