26.1 Central America
BY THE TWELFTH CENTURY, myths and rituals had begun to illuminate the Mesoamerican world. But South America remained largely voiceless. The ruins left behind suggest that large empires were much more common here than in the equally silent lands of North America; for centuries, these empires rose, flourished, and fell without leaving words behind them.
They left us puzzles instead.
26.2 South America
The Andes Mountains march along the western coast of the entire continent: a range over four thousand miles long (the longest in the world), three hundred miles wide, its highest peak soaring up to nearly twenty-three thousand feet.* South of the equator, the mountains create a rain shadow: a stretch of desert blocked by the peaks from moisture-bearing winds. The winds, hitting the mountains first, drop all of their water; by the time they flow over the summits and down to the desert, they are entirely dry. The Atacama Desert, on the South American coast, gets less than an inch of precipitation per year.4 On its driest sands, rain falls perhaps once every forty or fifty years.
But in scattered places across the desert, underground rivers rise abruptly to the surface. Around the oases created by this subterranean water, the Nazca people lived.
They left pottery and ruins behind them: no chronicles, no legends, no lists of kings. Instead, they created enormous patterns on the dry ground by sweeping stones and debris away from the desert floor to reveal the lighter sands beneath. The lines of lighter ground form enormous spirals, grids, and figures of animals: a spider, a bird in flight, a fish, a monkey. The pictures are enormous: a hummingbird 305 feet long, a parrot whose head is nearly 70 feet across, a 150-foot spider. The outsider, standing in the desert, would see only a random path stretching to the horizon. The Nazca initiate saw instead the tip of a bird’s wing, the end of a lizard’s tail, the hand of a dancing man. Only from very high up can we see what the Nazca line drawers held in their minds.5
26.1 Nazca lines: Spider.
Credit: © Charles and Josette Lenars / Corbis
26.2 Nazca lines: Dancing hands.
Credit: © Kevin Schafer / Corbis
No single explanation accounts for the Nazca lines. The archaeologist Maria Reiche, who first mapped out the figures in the 1940s, believed that the lines charted astronomical movements, but many of the lines can’t be associated with any known movement of the stars. Some of the drawings, but not all, seem to mark out underground water flow. Possibly the paths were used for sacred walking rituals, a practice carried on in later Andean cultures—but there is no way to know whether the rituals existed this early. The only certain conclusion is that the Nazca people carved themselves into the landscape of their home. In the words of the art historian George Kubler, the lines “inscribe human meaning upon the hostile wastes of nature.” The lines carry a story; we may never know what the meaning of the story is.6
A little farther to the north, in slightly more hospitable surroundings, the Moche people constructed mud-brick buildings instead of desert patterns. In the northern valley that served as the center of a growing empire, the Moche built two gigantic hill complexes of temples, palaces, courtyards, administrative buildings, and cities of the dead: the Place of the Sun, the Huaca del Sol, and the Place of the Moon, the Huaca de la Luna. Their craftsmen produced 143 million adobe bricks for these buildings, each stamped with the symbol of its maker.7
As the Moche conquered their way into the surrounding hills and valleys, they built a grid of wide, well-designed roads and put into place a sophisticated system of communication: relay runners traveled the roads, carrying messages marked with cryptic symbols on lima beans. At its height, the Place of the Sun and the Place of the Moon lorded it over fifteen thousand square miles of territory. Vast irrigation canals, some running nearly a hundred miles through the Moche state, provided the growing villages with water. Figurines and paintings preserve the likenesses of the Moche kings and noblemen, but we know no names.8
By the twelfth century, both the Moche and the Nazca were long gone. The Nazca were brought low by a drought that probably dried up even the underground rivers of the Atacama Desert, at least for a time. The uninhabitable desert preserved the mysterious Nazca glyphs in the sand for centuries. In the rain shadow, no water fell to wash the lines away.
Farther to the north, the Moche suffered from the double blows of alternating drought and flood. The ruins in their valley reveal that crop-killing dryness alternated with torrential downpours caused by more and more frequent El Niño events: warm currents that raise the surface temperature along the coast and produce strong, disruptive thunderstorms. Floods and mudslides ravaged the Moche valley. Winds and tides drove coastal dunes farther and farther inland, spreading sterile sand across fertile fields.9
At the height of the floods and storms, the Moche tried to appease whatever deities governed the sky and winds. Three children, sacrificed together, are buried in a ceremonial plaza at the Place of the Moon, at the edge of a drastic mudslide. More sacrificial victims, buried in at least two different ceremonies, lie above and beside them. But the bloodshed did not stop the violent weather, or halt the slow and eventual collapse of the Moche empire. The sands covered the cities on the outskirts. The irrigation canals, blocked by mud and cracked by earthquakes, were abandoned; and, like the Nazca, the Moche faded away.10
The peoples who succeeded them, some time later, were known as the Chimu. They built their towns partly on top of Moche ruins and did not try to spread their empire over nearly as great an area. The smaller kingdom survived into the fifteenth century, long enough to leave an oral history behind it; later Spanish historians, recording the stories they had heard from the conquered Chimu, tell of a bearded man named Tacaynamo who arrived on the South American coast from the sea. He beached his balsa wood raft and settled in the old Moche land. His son and his grandson conquered more and more of the nearby river valleys and established a royal dynasty.11
By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Chimu capital, Chan Chan, covered some nine square miles and was home to perhaps thirty thousand people. This was a fairly sparse population, for such a large city (the ancient Central American city of Teotihuacan had occupied about the same area and had over two hundred thousand inhabitants), and ruins suggest that Chan Chan was more a center for pilgrimage than an actual living city.12
The Chimu were still flourishing when, right around the year 1200, an unimportant tribe called the Inca settled on their southern border. They began to build tiny scattered villages on the rocky sides of the central Andes. Even the most prosperous of these villages, known as Cuzco, was a shabby agricultural outpost, occupied by llama herders and farmers scratching out a living in cold high-altitude fields.13
Later, the Inca would claim that their first king began to rule in Cuzco at this time. His name in legend was Manco Capac; he was the oldest of eight siblings who (in the way of mythical founders) “had no father or mother.” Instead, the eight brothers and sisters emerged from a hill covered with gold, and immediately embarked on conquest: “Let us seek out fertile lands,” they said to each other, “and where we find them, let us subjugate the people who are there, and take their lands, and wage war on all those who do not receive us as lords.”14
The truth behind the story lies in the Inca will to conquer: they had taken the site of Cuzco away from its original inhabitants. The conquest had also been savage: Manco Capac and his family tore the unfortunate villagers into pieces, ate their hearts and lungs, ripped pregnant women open. The natives of the Cuzco valley, the stories conclude, “were utterly destroyed.”15
For the next two centuries, the Inca would remain in the valley they had conquered. But the seizing of Cuzco was only the first act in their history. The second act would more than match the first for bloodshed.
* * *
*See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 574–582.
*Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Andes, has an elevation of 22,841 feet. It is
the second-highest mountain among the “Seven Summits,” the nickname for the highest elevations on the seven continents; among the Seven Summits, only Everest (29,029 feet) is higher. Over a hundred peaks in the Himalaya range are taller than Aconcagua, but the Andean mountain is the highest summit outside Asia.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Mongol School of Warfare
Between 1201 and 1215,
Genghis Khan learns how to fight the civilized world
SINCE 1165, the Jin in the north of China and the Song in the south had kept a fragile peace. But now, a first whisper of unease came from the lands to the north.
Ranging across the flat northern grasslands known as steppes were a loosely related set of tribes known collectively as “Mongols.” They had already migrated southward from the taiga, the cold northern pine forests; according to their own chronicles, the thirteenth-century The Secret History of the Mongols, they had descended from the union of a forest doe with a predatory blue-grey wolf. Every Mongol tribe had its own khan to lead it, and the khans and tribes struggled with each other for power. But within each tribe, clans and their chiefs fought constantly among themselves for horses, wives, loot, and the chance to rise to leadership of the tribe.1
Temujin, son of the chief of the Borjigid clan, was born near the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun in 1167; The Secret History says that the newborn was “clutching in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knucklebone.” At the age of nine, he was betrothed to the ten-year-old daughter of a clan leader from another tribe, and was sent (as was traditional) to live with the bride’s family. Days later, his father died, and Temujin ran away from his prospective father-in-law and returned home.2
This was the beginning of a fraught adolescence. Temujin and his family were driven from their home by another clan, the Taichi’ut, who hoped to gain the khanship of their tribe; the exiles spent the next years scrounging for food in the cold wastes of the Khentil mountain range. Temujin was later captured by the Taichi’ut clan chief and escaped, still wearing the wooden collar used to confine him. By the time he turned sixteen, he was an adult with fully fledged instincts for survival.3
Now old enough to be considered the head of his clan, Temujin revisited the home of his betrothed bride, Borte, and insisted that her father honor the arrangement. He then approached the khan of the nearby Kerait tribe and negotiated an alliance. The khan, an experienced middle-aged soldier named Toghrul, had been a friend of Temujin’s dead father; but he was more impressed with the gifts Temujin brought than with the obligations of that old attachment.
Almost immediately, Temujin was forced to call on both of his new allies for help. Another three-tribe coalition, known collectively as the Merkit, invaded his camp while he was away and kidnapped Borte.
Kidnapping was the second most popular way for a Mongol to get a wife; Temujin’s own mother had been kidnapped, decades before, from a Merkit tribesman, and the raid was both revenge and an attempt to check Temjuin’s growing power. It backfired. Temujin, Toghrul, and Temujin’s childhood friend Jamuqa joined forces (perhaps ten thousand horsemen, converging on the Merkit camp) and wiped the Merkit out. The Secret History celebrates the victory with song:
. . . [W]e tore their livers to pieces.
We emptied their beds
And we exterminated their relatives;
The women of theirs who remained,
We surely took captive!
Thus we destroyed the Merkit people.4
(Borte was rescued as well, an event that gets much less space in The Secret History than the victory in battle.)
A series of other victories followed. Temujin’s star was rising, and by 1200 or so he expected to be elected Great Khan, the warleader of the entire Mongol confederation. Instead, in 1201—the Year of the Hen in the Mongol calendar—his opponents banded together to throw their weight behind Jamuqa.
This was the end of the friendship between the two men. As children, they had sworn a blood-brothers oath of loyalty; now they were enemies. Between 1201 and 1204, the Mongol tribes divided into two factions behind the two leaders.
But through a combination of persuasion and conquest, Temujin’s following swelled while Jamuqa’s shrank away. When Temujin’s old ally Toghrul hesitated, unsure which man to join, Temujin attacked the Kerait tribe and forced it to submit. Toghrul fled westward, into the territory of the Naiman tribe, where he was accidentally killed by a border guard. Outnumbered and outmanned, Jamuqa followed him.
In 1204, Temujin pursued his old friend into Naiman territory and wiped out the men who had given Jamuqa shelter: “[He] utterly defeated and conquered the people of the Naiman tribe on the southern slopes of the Altai,” says The Secret History. Jamuqa escaped into the mountains and lived there as an outcast until he was finally taken prisoner by Temujin’s men.
Brought before Temujin, he asked one last favor from his childhood companion: “Let me die swiftly,” he said, “and your heart will be at rest. And . . . let them kill me without shedding blood.” To die without bloodshed was the privilege of an honorable warrior, and Temujin granted the request. As Jamuqa left his presence, two guards broke the prisoner’s back.5
Now Temujin was without rival; all he had to do was return to the Mongol heartland, to the foot of Burkhan Khaldun, and claim the title Great Khan. But before he turned back east, he sent his lieutenant, Ilah Ahai, on an exploratory raid into the nearby kingdom of the Western Xia.*
27.1 The Advance of the Mongols
Like the Jin, the people of the Western Xia had once been nomads who aspired to be like the Song. While the Jin and Song battled, the Western Xia king Li Renxiao had been building schools for Confucian learning, endowing Buddhist temples, putting into place a Song-style examination system for civil servants. Under his rule, Western Xia merchants used iron coins to trade with both Jin and Song. He supervised the editing and revision of hundreds of volumes of Buddhist treatises in Tangut, the native language of the Xia. He ordered the Western Xia law codes collected into twenty volumes, written in the distinctive Tangut script (modeled on Chinese characters).6 In 1190, just before Li Renxiao’s death, his court scholars assembled a Tangut-Chinese dictionary (A Timely Gem), containing the earliest complete bilingual glossary in the world.*
Li Renxiao himself died in 1193, aged seventy; his son Weiming Chunyou now sat on the throne. He paid little attention to the Mongol raid into his territory. For his part, Ahai returned to Temujin with camels and livestock, and with reports that the Xia had fortified cities.
The Mongols had no experience fighting against cities. Temujin took note of the richness of the Western Xia land, but then turned away and returned to his homeland. There, in 1206, all of the Mongol tribes gathered together to acknowledge him as their khan. Jamuqa had held the title Great Khan, Gur Khan; to set his rival apart, the Mongols hailed him as Genghis Khan.
There is still no firm agreement as to what Genghis means: something like “Khan of All Oceans,” which is to say, Universal Khan. It was an invented title, a brand new label for a man who did not fit the Mongol mold. Already, Genghis Khan was evolving an idea of what a khan could be: much more than the leader of nomadic raiding parties. He had organized his personal bodyguard into ranks and offices; it was now ten thousand men strong and would become the center of his empire, traveling with him wherever he went as a nomadic center of government, the “state on horseback.” He had taken prisoner, in his wars against the Naimans, an educated man kidnapped by the Naimans themselves from the Turks; after a long conversation with this scholar, Genghis Khan ordered him to create an alphabet capable of reducing the Mongolian language to writing. This script would be used for the first Mongol state records, the first Mongol book of legal decisions.7
The Mongols were surrounded by undefeated peoples on three of the four points of the compass: Goryeo to the east, the Jin to the south, and the Xia to the west. Of the three, the Western Xia were the most vulnerable. They were less powerful than the Jin, reach
ed across open land rather than a mountainous peninsula neck.
Weiming Chunyou had just been displaced on the throne by his more aggressive cousin Li Anchaun. When the Mongol invasion began in 1209, Li Anchaun assembled a sizable army to meet it and set up a defensive front at a mountain pass north of the Xia capital Chung-hsing. For a time, the Mongols were halted. Only when they resorted to their traditional mode of fighting—pretending to withdraw, drawing the Western Xia forces out of their entrenched position to follow, and then closing around them to fight in the open—were they able to drive the Xia army away from the pass. But their next task was equally unfamiliar: to lay siege to the fortified city of Chung-hsing itself.
Faced with this novel problem, Genghis Khan came up with an original solution. He ordered his soldiers to dam the nearby branch of the Yellow river, hoping to flood the capital out.
Seeing the dam take shape outside his walls, Li Anchaun sent a desperate appeal to the Jin for help. But the newly crowned Jin emperor, Weishaowang, was fighting off challenges to his legitimacy, and he shrugged off the request: “It is advantageous to my state if its enemies attack each other,” he told his councillors. “What grounds do we have for concern?”8
Genghis Khan’s experiment didn’t work; the inexpertly built dam broke and flooded the Mongol camp instead. But with no reinforcements coming from the Jin, Li Anchaun decided to make peace with the enemy. He bought Genghis Khan off with tribute and a royal marriage to one of his daughters.9
Genghis Khan accepted the truce—for the moment—and immediately turned to attack the Jin. He had learned from the unsuccessful campaign. He always learned.
It took the Mongols four years to battle their way to the northern capital of Zhongdu; four years of raids and retreats, advances and reorganizations, short rations and costly battles: hard lessons in how to conduct a war with a settled people. But the Mongol soldiers were accustomed to desperate discomfort. They had always lived on the move; they had never been at peace. The expertise gained in each sally, each siege, figured in the next battle plan. By 1214, Genghis Khan knew how to besiege a walled city, how to withstand an attack of heavily armed infantry, how to drive an entrenched force backward.
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 20