A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Genghis

  A slight boy with reddish hair, almost naked and clutching a bow, was inching his way on his belly towards a small deer. He slipped out an arrow with a curious hole in its point and sent it flying. The cunningly designed arrow made a distinctive whine, causing the deer to look up, startled – at exactly the right moment to take the arrowhead through its throat. The boy, a fatherless and banished nomad, was living in the forest with his mother. Fearless and brutal, he was also exceptionally clever, with a talent for seeing into others’ minds. He would soon kill one of his half-brothers in an argument about hunting. Though this happened in one of the most remote corners of the inhabited earth, a place of never-ending green plains, no buildings, and a vast sky, this boy would shake and reshape half the world. His name was Temujin. He would be known as Genghis Khan.

  It is rare enough to be able to link, with one individual, history-shaping events across more than a single country. It is unique to be able to do it across such a range of countries as Genghis’s career would touch. But without this fatherless boy who grew up living wild, it is most unlikely that the Mongol explosion would have happened with quite the force and direction it did. We know a surprising amount about Genghis’s origins because, just a year after his death, the first Mongolian book – using a language his illiterate nomads had adopted and adapted – was written about his rise. It is called The Secret History of the Mongols and was composed, it says, ‘at the time of the Great Assembly [which happened in Central Mongolia in 1228] in the Year of the Rat and the Month of the Roebuck, when the palaces were being set up at Seven Hills’.25

  ‘Pastoralism’ is the historians’ dull word for the undull life of herders and nomads who for thousands of years moved through the vast green and brown oceans of the steppes and plains. These people lived in those large parts of the earth that were neither mountain nor desert, but not suitable for agriculture either. They were more than hunter-gatherers, though they did hunt and they did gather; they stand to one side of the easy, straight-line version of human development that moves from hunter-gathering to agriculture and thus to towns.

  The people of the Asian steppes were the first, some six thousand years ago, to tame horses, initially so that they could eat them. (Across the other great steppe-like territory, the plains of America, where horses originated, they had been hunted to extinction early in the human story; so that nothing quite like the Asian herder culture developed among native Americans.) By about four thousand years ago the Asian steppe people were riding horses. This allowed them to move huge distances with their other animals, sheep, goats, cows, camels and yaks, to exploit the grasslands, carrying their homes – wood-and-felt tents – with them on carts. They never stopped anywhere long enough to become farmers, so they built no villages of stone or wood, and they never made a town. In many ways they have stepped lightly across the earth’s surface, leaving behind very little compared with the rest of mankind.

  Apart from the Mongols’ own book, written history has given nomads a bad reputation. This is unsurprising: history was recorded by settled people, who feared nomads – and often rightly so. Whenever overpopulation or hunger on the steppe grasslands provoked a migration, these highly mobile people would end up raiding or invading the settled world.

  The most famous early examples are the Huns, who by defeating Germanic tribes began ‘the great migration’ that destroyed the Western Roman Empire. By the time the Huns came riding in, they were feared as a bestial ‘other’, the antithesis of all that human settlement and civilization had achieved. Writing in the 550s, a Gothic chronicler called Jordanes said the Huns had been formed by the sexual union of witches and unclean spirits, who ‘begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps . . . a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech . . . they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’. In China, where the attacks came from the Xiongnu, who may have been the same people as the Huns, they felt the same way, calling them wolves, flocks of marauding birds and ‘furious slaves’.

  But the nomadic invaders might leave behind more than carcasses and burning crops. In 2003 researchers published a paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggesting that the genetic material of a single male from around nine hundred years ago was shared by one in two hundred of all men alive, some sixteen million men scattered across Eurasia.26 It is hardly unknown for powerful rulers to leave behind a substantial genetic spoor; examples can be found from Ireland to Africa. This, however, was on a different scale. The researchers concluded that the likeliest explanation was that the super-successful progenitor was Genghis Khan. The clusters of Y-chromosome markers fitted too well with the timing and spread of his Mongol empire to suggest any other explanation. The great invader took women from his vanquished foes wherever he went, never mind his legitimate children and the children of his concubines. However remarkable this may be, it is only one expression of the potency of this illiterate child of the steppes.

  The Mongols, having swept up the other nomadic tribes of the area, would rule China as the Yuan dynasty. They would annihilate some of the most advanced Muslim cities and societies of central Asia. They would subdue the Rus, taking almost every major town and reducing its princes to tax-paying subordinates. They would enter Europe as far as Hungary, smashing Germany’s Teutonic knights and reaching the outskirts of Vienna, spreading waves of panic and terror that have reverberated down through time. In just twenty-five years Genghis Khan conquered more of the earth’s surface than the Romans managed in four centuries, creating (however briefly) the biggest land empire in history. China would never be the same again, influenced as it was by the reign of the great Kublai Khan, whose first capital of Shangdu (spelt by the poet Coleridge as ‘Xanadu’) so captivated Marco Polo. Kublai then moved to what would become Beijing and completely recast it, becoming the first emperor to rule China from that city.27 Later, the Mongols, or Mughals, would turn south into India too.

  The Chinese eventually absorbed their new Mongol rulers, and the Yuan dynasty did not last very long by Chinese standards, though they reunified China. But the Mongol arrival in Russia had a huge effect on that country’s development – its words, its names, its clothing, its food, its tax system and its propensity to throw up ‘Asiatic’ rulers. Among Mongol-descended Russians were the novelist Turgenev, the poet Anna Akhmatova and the composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Among the nomad tribes of the ‘Golden Horde’ were the Kalmyks. Lenin was a Kalmyk, as his Mongolian-shaped face shows.28 In India, the great Babur, the first Mughal emperor, was descended from Genghis Khan; so without Genghis, no great Mughal flowering, no Taj Mahal, and no Pakistan.

  But even with that record – establishing a military empire that changed the course of Chinese, Persian, Indian and Russian history – there is yet more to be said for Genghis as a unique shaper of world events. For despite their extreme brutality – of which more later – the Mongol hordes created a single space that linked east and west, China and the Mediterranean, as never before. Once the Mongol empire was established, Genghis and his successors provided a safe and well run route for silk, silver and other goods to pass between the emerging civilizations of Europe and China. The historian Ian Morris goes further. Because, he argues, the Mongols so devastated the great Muslim cities and cultures of Baghdad, Merv, Samarkand and Bukhara (which before the Mongols arrived were beautiful, advanced and teeming centres of culture and learning), they allowed the Mediterranean to leap ahead: ‘Because they did not sack Cairo, it remained the West’s biggest and richest city, and because they did not invade Western Europe, Venice and Genoa remained the West’s greatest commercial centres. Development tumbled in the old Muslim core . . . by the 1270s, when Marco Polo set off for China, the Western core had shifted decisively into the Mediterranean lands that the Mongols had spared.’29

  Genghis was born to a Mongol chieftain but given a name b
elonging to one of the rival tribes, the Tatars, because his father had just returned home with a Tatar captive. So the boy was called Temujin. He was probably born in 1162, into a world of interminable rivalries between tribes and of frequent wars with the Chinese to the south. He was said to be afraid of dogs; at eight he was betrothed and taken, as was the custom, to the girl’s clan. But on his way home again his father was poisoned by hostile Tatars. Temujin boldly tried to claim leadership, as his father’s successor, but the Mongol tribe were not about to be told what to do by a nine-year-old boy. They cast the family off. Temujin, his widowed mother Hoelun and six other young children, two of them half-brothers, were left homeless. They lived by foraging in the forest, gathering wild onions, seeds and herbs, eating the carcasses of dead animals and hunting small game. In a telling story, it is said that his mother gave Temujin and his brothers an arrow each and told them to break it. They did. Then she tied five arrows into a bundle and told them to break that. They could not. From unity, strength – a potent message for a banished boy.

  At ten, it’s said, Temujin killed one of his half-brothers. Later, when captured by enemies of his father, he managed to escape despite being shackled in a huge wooden collar. This was (and is) the Wild East, and Temujin’s story resounds with further tales of horse thieves and famous feats until at last he rises in his clan, by force of personality, to a position of leadership. When he marries the young girl he had originally been betrothed to, and she is kidnapped (and probably raped), he and a childhood friend gather thousands of supporters and win her back – Temujin’s first military victory. He and the bride, Borte, would stay close throughout their lives, despite his concubines and slave girls.

  So far, this is the exhilarating but small-time story of a local warlord on the rise. But Temujin had just begun.

  The people of the Mongolian steppe were divided into rival groups, including Tatars, Uyghurs and Keraits, as well as Mongols. There is a clear parallel here with the development of lineage groups among the native American people of the Atlantic seaboard – hugely extended families, connected through cousinhood, and then further extended by alliance. Genghis Khan’s achievement was to find a way to meld the steppe tribes into a single people as they lived, rode and fought together – a bundle of arrows, not just one. He did this first by making shrewd alliances. By 1190 he had united all the Mongols, no small feat. Next, he turned his attention to the rival tribes, offering those he had defeated a share in future war spoils; and he also offered them brotherhood rather than exile or disgrace, thereby converting traditional enemies into new recruits.

  Even so, a long and complicated steppe war followed, during which Temujin was nearly defeated, nearly shot dead with an arrow, and suffered reverses as well as victories. But his power steadily spread. One sorrow on the way was that a childhood friend with whom he had made a vow of everlasting blood-brotherhood had become a key rival. Defeated, the friend refused to join Temujin. He said, according to the Secret History, ‘I would be the louse in your collar, I would become the splinter in your coat-lining.’ Temujin, about to become Genghis Khan, the great ruler, sadly acceded to his request and granted him death by strangulation. By 1206, Genghis had subdued and united the steppe peoples and was ready to amaze the world.

  As a military leader, he relied not simply on awesome brutality towards those who refused to surrender. He also brought in a new system of law (and later, writing), and was quick to learn from others. He used networks of spies, Chinese siege machines and huge mechanical bows, and even gunpowder-based bombs in ways the nomads never had before. His first victims were the Tangut, or western Xia (or sometimes, ‘White Mongol’), a people whose empire was about twice the size of France and sat on the northern border of China proper, a sophisticated and advanced culture with good printing technology and a fine tradition of painting. Genghis more or less wiped it off the face of the map in what one of his modern biographers suggests may be ‘the first ever recorded example of attempted genocide’.30

  He moved on to destroy the military power of the much bigger Chinese Jin dynasty, seizing the city that is today Beijing and forcing the Jin to retreat south, where Genghis’s successors would eventually hunt them down and end their dynasty entirely. His next victim was a khanate to the west of China, followed by the huge Khwarezmid empire with its gorgeous fortified trading cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Urgench and Merv, already mentioned. These became scenes of some of the most horrific massacres in history. With a force of more than a hundred thousand men, each with two or three horses in tow, and now carrying a long train of Chinese siege engines and slaves, Genghis and his generals rumbled across the mountains to these oasis citadels, which boasted underground canals and glittering domes and had grown rich on silk and slaves. And there he unleashed hell.

  It has been estimated that his armies killed 1.25 million people, over two years, out of the Khwarezmid empire’s total population of around three million. This, as the historian John Man puts it, makes it perhaps the biggest proportional mass killing in history, ‘an equivalent of the 25–30 per cent population cut meted out by Europe’s greatest catastrophe, the Black Death’. The killings were done in batches after the cities had been taken, by soldiers working methodically, with swords and axes, through the old and the young, fighters and non-fighters. Pyramids of skulls were left in the sand, and lagoons of blood. All manner of special cruelties were reserved for those who had resisted particularly bravely. Samarkand, which surrendered pretty promptly, still lost three-quarters of its people.

  After this, Genghis’s armies divided. He turned south into Afghanistan and northern India, while his generals turned further north into the Christian kingdom of Georgia, destroying in 1221 the golden age it had enjoyed under its famous queen Tamara; and then further north still, towards Russia and Bulgaria. Major battles ensued, then a notable defeat of the Russian princes – after which they were crushed to death under a platform on which the Mongol generals were feasting. This probing attack revealed to the Mongols that there was plenty of rich grassland to allow them to drive much deeper into Europe. Under the rule of Genghis Khan’s son, they would be back.

  On their return they destroyed the first great Kiev-based Russian Christian civilization, shattering its towns and scattering its people, so that when Russia began to re-emerge as a Slavic state it would be situated much further north, in Moscow and Novgorod, giving Russia even today a different character. Everywhere, the Mongols brought terror; everywhere, slaughter. From China to Europe they were soon being described in ways that echo the terrified and disgusted reactions to the Huns, seven hundred years earlier. The English chronicler Matthew Paris wrote that the Mongols were ‘inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after drinking blood and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings’.

  In his later years Genghis Khan showed increasing interest in spiritual matters, summoning a Dao sage from central China to instruct him in longevity and good living. It sounds unlikely, and may have been more about prolonging his life than any real interest in ethics: if so the sage failed to help, because Genghis died in his early sixties after defeating the Xia again – they had failed to support him in his central Asian campaign, and paid the price. He died with his eyes set on new victories in China.

  There are numerous stories about his death, variously ascribed to illness, a fall from his horse or even murder by a concubine who had hidden a pair of pliers inside herself and partially castrated him. He was buried in secret, and although another story relates that everyone involved was then killed to protect the sanctity of his resting place, this is probably as apocryphal as the pliers. Today, archaeologists believe they are homing in on the valleys where Genghis was buried, and it is quite possible that modern Mongolia will be the site of a spectacular discovery within a few years.

  Genghis Khan’s successors spread the Mongol empire to its furthest extent, taking all of China and Korea and, in the West, defeating the Pol
es and the Hungarians, whose army included French and Germans too. The same methods of slaughter so well known in Asia were repeated in Europe. The Mongols were by now using gunpowder and bombs fired by catapult, which horrified and perplexed the backward Europeans. They could almost certainly have overrun Germany, France and Italy had they chosen to, but internal fissures were beginning to break up their empire and the Mongol armies turned back. By now they had, however, taken effective control of Russia, requiring the princes and cities still standing to pay regular tribute.

  It is true that Mongol power brought a period of peace to central Asia, allowing merchants and explorers to travel safely from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Genghis, himself illiterate, oversaw the establishment of Mongol literacy. He showed complete religious tolerance, allowing Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others to worship as they wished. Yet his was the peace that follows devastation and the tolerance of the all-conquering and irreligious. The smooth path now ready for Marco Polo and others had been achieved at the price of destroying the great Islamic civilization of central Asia, as well as many Chinese and European centres. Though they now had their own capital – Karakorum, a poor place, by all accounts – the Mongols were uninterested in building anything more than pyramids of skulls (and they were certainly proficient at that). They left no interesting thought or literature beyond their own history, created little of beauty; and across much of the world that they conquered they did little with their winnings.