The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Like Alexander, Genghis Khan invoked the animus of fear to aid his conquests. Indeed, he consciously cultivated fear. The Mongols’ tactics were designed to terrorize the population into submission.

  When he did not massacre the entire population of a conquered place, Genghis Khan would execute the fighting men, after emptying the city so his people could loot it more efficiently. He would allot a portion of the vanquished men to each of his commanders of a thousand for killing. The bones of the dead would be heaped up to frighten travelers, as attested to in another contemporary chronicle by a witness who rode past such a macabre hill: “We supposed that that white eminence was perhaps a hill of snow, but the people of that part replied, ‘The whole of it is the bones of men slain.’ [Further on,] the ground became so greasy and dark from human fat that it was necessary for us to advance another three stages on that same road until we came to dry ground again.”13 Three full days wading through human blood.

  Craftsmen, who might be valuable in equipping the Mongol army, were shared out among its divisions. The Mongols organized most of the other civilian males into “levies,” whose duty was to take the lead in assaulting the next city.14

  It was this kind of army, ghoulishly swelled with conscripted local folk, that took the glorious city of Samarqand. “So many men, both Mongols and levies, were assembled together that their numbers exceeded those of the sand of the desert or drops of rain.”15 Petrified Samarqand swung open its gates, and “the Mongols then entered and that day busied themselves with the destruction of the town and its outworks.” Barely glancing up as night fell, the Mongols “lit torches and continued their work until the walls were level with the streets and there was everywhere free passage for horse and foot.”16

  Even before this graphic demonstration of what the Mongols were capable of, their enemy, the ruler of eastern Persia, was terrified. “The control of firmness having slipped from his hands and the attraction of constancy having been replaced by that of flight,”17 Sultan Muhammad Khwarazmshah had left about a hundred thousand men to garrison doomed Samarqand, and had run away.

  The Mongol pursuit of this Muhammad Khwarazmshah to the shores of the Caspian Sea was remarkably similar to Alexander’s pursuit of Darius III to the shores of that same sea. The principal difference being that the Mongols chased Sultan Muhammad westward to the Caspian, whereas fleeing Darius had led Alexander’s army to the east.

  Like Darius III, Muhammad Khwarazmshah is mostly remembered for his fear. The Persian chronicles practically wring their hands at it. Juvayni writes that fear had gained such a hold on the sultan that all he wished for was a hole in the ground to hide in. According to another local historian named Juzjani, who fought the Mongols himself for several years in the mountains north of Kandahar, “Fear and dread of them took possession of Sultan Muhammad’s heart and mind…. This was one of the causes of the miseries and troubles which befell the people of Islam.”18

  Abandoning treasure and “veiled womenfolk”19 in his final breakneck flight, just like Darius, he made for the mountains south of the Caspian Sea—on foot, according to one account. Then he rode in a boat to one of the tiny islands that dust the coast—and died there, maybe of an ulcer.20

  So far so good.

  But in all the history books I had photocopied to bone up on this background, I had not found a single reference to Kandahar. I tried looking in the indexes under the initial Q, the way the Persians say it. Nothing.

  This time, I resorted to a shortcut. I started asking people. I penned a letter to the illustrious C. E. Bosworth in England. “I can find no mention of Genghis Khan ever being anywhere near Kandahar,” came his answer in the post. My college Arabic teacher, who is also an expert in Persian and Turkish, was my next target. Offhand, he could not think of any references to Kandahar until Babur’s time, 1500. The author of one of the books I had just read kindly trawled the Mongol sources for me, with no more success.

  This was fun. I felt like a member of a scholarly community. Everyone wanted to help. But still, nothing on the Mongols in Kandahar. It was ridiculous. The Mongols had swept across an entire continent but had left no trace in Kandahar? Kandahar was the single house left standing on the metaphorical beach after the tidal wave had ripped past? That could not be possible. And so I sent off to UNESCO for Juvayni, to see if my obsessiveness could extract something from his account.

  And I found it. An epic story, a story of a fantastic victory against the invincible Mongols, a victory that was brought to naught by the Afghans’ fatal flaw: yaghestan.

  The Mongols’ manhunt, like Alexander’s after the murder of Darius, did not end at the ignominious death of Sultan Muhammad. The sultan was survived by a rather more distinguished son, whose name is one of the few that even Mongol historians bothered to record: Sultan Jalal ad-Din. For several more years, Jalal ad-Din made the Mongols chase him.

  Young Jalal ad-Din outshone his father even while he was alive. When Sultan Muhammad was paralyzed in one of his worst fits of dithering and asked his nobles what to do, the prince spoke up: “My advice is that we should, as much as possible, gather the armies together and advance against them. And if the Sultan have no heart for this, let him proceed to Iraq and hand over the armies to me, so that I may…join battle, and smite them like a stone against a clay pitcher.”21 Even if he lost, the young prince argued, at least he would have saved the honor of the Khwarazmshahi house.22

  But his father would not hear sense. With a filial devotion rare in those days, the disappointed Jalal ad-Din attended his father all the way to his death by the Caspian Sea. Then the new young sultan rushed back to the lands his father had awarded him five years earlier: the future Afghanistan. Jalal ad-Din was going to rally his subjects to fight against the Mongols.

  But the yaghestan principle was operating in that unruly land. And this time, as events were to prove disastrously, it was not at all adapted to the occasion.

  For decades the Khwarazmshahs had been duking it out with a line of local rulers based north of Kandahar and east of Herat who made their rude capital in the mountains of that region near modern Urozgan known as Ghor. These Ghurids spoke a weird dialect, very different from the Persian around them. It could possibly have been Pashtu.23 In 1205 the line petered out. By 1215 Sultan Muhammad Khwarazmshah was in possession of their land and gave it to his son Jalal ad-Din.

  When the Mongols appeared before Samarqand just five years later, the scars of this long rivalry between the two competing dynasties were still painful to the touch.

  Jalal ad-Din appointed a cousin of his as governor of Herat. And while he was busy with his father on the Caspian Sea, this cousin moved to rally resistance to the Mongols. With a great army, he set out from Herat for the town of Ghazni in the way you still have to go: not as the crow flies, over the trackless mountains of Ghor, but by the longer, easier route, down and around via Kandahar.

  These days, there is a second gate on the east side of town, where caparisoned trucks wait in line to pay their tolls. They have come down the seamed cement road from Herat. Some will drive on out to Pakistan, but many will round Kandahar and head back upward to Ghazni and Kabul. When these car-killing highways were finally about to be repaved in 2003, the project was dubbed the Ring Road.

  Cousin Khan Malik24 of Herat passed through Kandahar along this route and arrived with his cavalry outside Ghazni. He politely sent ahead and asked the governor there (whose name was Muhammad Donkeyskin) to assign some pastureland for his army’s horses. For, he wrote, they should join forces, what with the Mongols abroad. But Donkeyskin was a member of the Ghurid house, and Cousin Khan Malik was a Khwarazmshahi. The old rivalry still smoldered. “We cannot live together,” Donkeyskin snapped. “The Sultan has assigned fiefs and pasturage to everybody. Let each remain in his own place and see what happens.”25Yaghestan was operating full tilt.

  At such insubordination, Khan Malik’s allies in the town murdered Donkeyskin. They did the deed in a garden where they had invi
ted him to enjoy a meal. Cushions would have been laid out on rich carpets under fruit trees, as I have often sat drinking tea and eating almonds in Kandahar. Perhaps musicians played for the guests, as they did for the mythical king Jamshid when he arrived in Zabulistan. Perhaps Donkeyskin’s blood mixed with the ruby syrup of pomegranate seeds that flavored the rich dishes of meat.

  In any case, Khan Malik entered Ghazni and arrayed his forces around the city. The assassination was no doubt necessary, but it piled fresh blood feud on top of the yaghestan principle as the Muslims prepared to confront the unbeatable Mongols.

  The Mongols were also after Cousin Khan Malik by this time. Genghis Khan had sent out a hunting party. Just missing him in Herat, the several thousand mounted archers pushed on through Kandahar toward Ghazni.

  Interestingly, in neither the principle Persian sources nor the Mongol ones is there any record of a fight at Kandahar during these various comings and goings. It seems the town was serving its age-old purpose: as a road. I wonder if its people then, as now, collected tolls.

  Who these people were, exactly, is not so easy to determine, for the chronicles only mention important characters, making human history into a kind of soap opera, concerned exclusively with the humors and doings of the great, as though all the world were their living room. But it is likely that the people of Kandahar at that point were what contemporary records refer to as Tajiks. The word did not carry the specific connotation it does today, of kinship with the people of Tajikistan. Back then the label was much looser, meaning local Persian-speaking settled folk. They probably cultivated almond and pomegranate trees as Kandaharis do today, and trained the spring shoots of their vines along the baked-mud walls they mounded up to support them. Kandahar has been famous for its grapes for millennia.

  Waiting for Jalal ad-Din to join him in Ghazni, Cousin Khan Malik raised a good-sized army, according to the Persian version of events. Scouts for the Mongol troop galloped up to the city walls on his heels, took a look, and…turned around and fled. It was a genuine retreat, not one of those patented feigned ones. Khan Malik sallied forth from Ghazni and beat the Mongol contingent all the way down to Kandahar. Then he turned back for Ghazni while the Mongols drifted up via Herat to rejoin the bulk of their army bivouacked with Genghis Khan in the north.

  And so Kandahar bore witness to that very rare thing: a Mongol defeat.26

  I found another version of this story later. It was in a biography of Jalal ad-Din written by his own court secretary. I had to call that one up from my library’s “depository,” a grim warehouse located across town from the main building. The back cover of the book was virgin. No one had ever checked it out. The text is, surprisingly, in Arabic, not Persian. This meant that—with some work—I could read it myself. I secured a dictionary, and started laboring through the text, coaxing my creaky Arabic into gear.

  According to this rendition, the Mongols were besieging Kandahar after all. There it was, right on the page, the name of the town spelled with a Q, not the Pashtu K. I wondered why it had taken such a hunt to find this out. Jalal ad-Din was on his way from his father’s grave to Ghazni, and he met up with Khan Malik right outside Kandahar. According to Jalal ad-Din’s secretary:

  The two joined together, and decided to attack the Tatars, who were besieging the fortress of Kandahar. And the two pounced on them. And the Enemies of God were downcast. They did not understand how the princes had managed to lie in wait for them, and how the troops of horsemen had closed in on them from all sides. They had counted on [their enemies, like] doe gazelles, running away, unable to withstand them. They had assumed the sharp ends of their enemies’ spears would be idle and ineffectual. Until, when they saw [the lance points] thirsting to slaughter them, parched for [the blood of] their chests, they leaped astride their horses’ backs in flight. None escaped except an insignificant number, who informed Genghis Khan of what had befallen his soldiers.27

  Now that was really a story—an actual pitched battle, Mongols against Muslims, and the Mongols lost. If real, such a defeat would have been severe humiliation for the Mongols; it would have meant their spell was broken. And, according to this source, it happened right there in Kandahar.

  The various accounts agree on the next scene in the drama: Jalal ad-Din and Cousin Khan Malik, rallying the anti-Mongol forces in Ghazni to stand against the main body of the Mongol troops. The two princes were lionized. They represented the people’s very last hope against the destruction of their civilization. A vast host flocked to their standards, with “bands of soldiers and tribesmen approaching from every side.”28 Jalal ad-Din had been sending letters out right and left, calling fighters in to join.29

  The historian Juvayni waxes poetic to capture the moment, quoting liberally from that Persian epic poem, the Shahnama. Juzjani, who was nearby at the time, is less flowery: “Numerous troops joined them, consisting of Turkmen, Ghuris, Tajiks [local Persians], Khalaj [perhaps the ancestors of the Ghiljais], and Ghuz, and a great army collected.”30 Jalal ad-Din’s secretary estimates the total number at 60,000.

  The troops would have been spread out across Ghazni’s broad valley, washing themselves and watering their horses in the icy river, in the shadow of the chain of mountains that parallels the road, painted a white perfect beyond description by a recent fall of snow. I have seen those mountains once that way. Each contingent would have camped apart under its own commander, but exchanges and sales—of weapons, leather straps, beasts of burden—must have had the men eyeing each other cannily and arguing in a practiced theater.

  As they welcomed their arriving comrades and waited for more, they may have let off steam with a bout of that famous warlike Afghan version of polo, or whiled away more peaceful hours playing chess. Most of the fighters would have spoken Persian, but many spoke Turkish. Sunset prayers must have been a moving sight, with several tens of thousands of mismatched toughs bowing in unison over their shawls, as the sun buried itself behind the mountains.

  Jalal ad-Din took this force north, doing what no one else in those parts had ever dreamed of: He turned the tables. He went hunting for Genghis Khan.

  The only record the Mongols kept about these years is The Secret History. Of the battle that followed, north of Kabul, it notes laconically: “Jalaldin Soltan and Qan Melik moved against Chinggis Qa’an. Shigi Qutuqu went as vanguard before Chinggis Qa’an. Jalaldin Soltan and Qan Melik fought with Shigi Qutuqu. They defeated Shigi Qutuqu.31

  Juvayni’s proud retelling is rather more vivid:

  Repeated reinforcements were sent from the center and left wing until they drove the Mongol army back to their base. In all these charges many were killed on either side, there was much hand-to-hand fighting and unending recourse to both guile and force and none would show his back to the foe. Finally, when the bowl of the horizon was red with the blood of sunset glow, either side encamped at its base; and the Mongols ordered every horseman to set up an image on his spare horse.

  This ruse was designed to trick the Muslims into thinking the Mongol army had been vastly reinforced.32 But Jalal ad-Din was not intimidated. The next day he joined battle again. The Mongols charged his left wing, but the Muslims staved them off. Some Ghurids under a commander named Ighraq mounted the successful defense.

  Ighraq’s men held firm and let fly with their bows, and held the Mongols in check. And when the Mongols withdrew from that attack and made for their base, the Sultan commanded the drums to be beaten, and the whole army mounted horse and made a general charge and put the Mongol army to flight.33

  The battle was a rout. Jalal ad-Din had cleaned up the Mongols.

  It was yaghestan that defeated Jalal ad-Din.

  After their victory, the Muslims gleefully set to looting the Mongols’ camp. “A quarrel arose respecting the booty,” Juzjani notes. As usual, Juvayni provides the telling details. The fight was over a horse, he says, one of the Mongols’ indefatigable ponies. A commander hit Ighraq over the head with a whip—Ighraq, who had brilliantly held
the left wing against the Mongol assault. Unsure how to handle the dissention in his disparate troop, Sultan Jalal ad-Din meted out no punishment. Ighraq stormed off, withdrawing his men from the Muslim army.34

  Wait a second. I interrupted my reading of the tale. This was sounding familiar; I couldn’t quite tell how. I searched back, finally spooling up from my memory a line from an ancient poem.

  Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles

  murderous, doomed, that cost the Greeks loss on bitter loss,

  hurling down to the house of Death so many sturdy souls…

  Among the Gods, who brought this quarrel on?35

  Again, I realized, the parallel is Greek. From Homer’s Iliad.

  The fabled quarrel between Achilles and his king Agamemnon beneath the walls of Troy was over booty too, a girl, Achilles’ rightful share. Agamemnon would not give her up. Furious, Achilles withdrew to his tent, pulling his troops out of the war and almost dooming the Greeks.

  A closer look at the events helps explain his behavior, and sheds some light on the even darker fate of the unhappy Muslims so many centuries later. The principle at stake in both cases is honor, a taproot of both societies.

  Greek officers, writes Jonathan Shay in his stunning analysis of post-traumatic stress disorder, Achilles in Vietnam, went into battle in pursuit of honor. “Honor,” Shay points out, “was embodied in its valuable tokens,” such as Achilles’girl Briseis or that sturdy Mongol horse that Ighraq wanted so badly. It was for honor that men would risk their lives, Shay argues, and “the material goods that symbolized honor were not per se what made them face ‘a thousand shapes of death.’ It is easy for us to caricature ancient warriors as simple brigands or booty-hunters motivated by greed, but this is almost certainly a misunderstanding.”36