In the spring of 1214, Genghis Khan reached Zhongdu and laid siege to the capital. The Jin emperor retreated quickly to his southern headquarters, the old Song capital of Kaifeng, leaving a governor in charge of Zhongdu. This was not a popular move, and a scattering of the Jin troops, disgusted by what they saw as a cowardly retreat, deserted the Jin cause and went over to the enemy, bringing with them yet more knowledge in how to conduct a war against an empire.
The siege went on for more than a year. The people of Zhongdu began to starve. They ate horses, dogs, trash; eventually, the corpses of the dead. In the summer of 1215, the desperate governor took poison, and the city’s defenses collapsed.
The Mongol besiegers broke into Zhongdu and spread through its streets, murdering, looting, and burning. This is what they would have done to another conquered tribe; but Zhongdu was magnitudes larger, with more plunder and victims than they had ever seen before.
They had become skilled conductors of war, but they had no experience as victors over a sedentary people, and they destroyed Zhongdu. Much of the city burned. Thousands were killed, their corpses piled in huge heaps outside the walls. The contemporary history Tabakat-i-Nisiri says,
When a few years later Baha ad-Din, leader of a mission from Sultan Muhammad of Khwarazm, approached the capital he saw a white hill and in answer to his query was told by the guide that it consisted of bones of the massacred inhabitants. At another place the earth was, for a long stretch of road, greasy from human fat.10
The northern lands of the Jin had played host to the Mongol school of warfare, and in the process had been laid waste.
* * *
*The Western Xia are also known as the Xi Xia (Pinyin) or Hsi Hsia (Wade-Giles); they are often called the Tangut, after the dominant ethnic group within the kingdom.
*To be precise, the “earliest bilingual glossary with both source and target language explanations in the world.” See Heming Yong and Jing Peng, Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911 (2008), pp. 377–378.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
John Softsword
Between 1203 and 1213,
John of England loses his Frankish lands
and makes too many enemies
THE LIONHEART WAS DEAD, and his brother John sat on the English throne.
The years since his coronation had not been good ones. As soon as John inherited the rule of England, Philip ceased to be his ally. Philip’s intention had always been to reduce the power of the English crown; John, the thorn in Richard’s side, was a welcome friend to the French king, but King John of England was his enemy.
John’s older brother Geoffrey, dying before his father in 1186, had left only two daughters; but his wife Constance had given birth to a son named Arthur seven months later. As soon as Richard was dead, Philip insisted that Arthur, not John, was rightfully king of England. He welcomed Constance and the twelve-year-old Arthur to his court in Paris. The dukes of Anjou, Maine, and Tours—all English-held lands—joined him in rejecting John’s claims.1
Three years of struggle followed. There were multiple battles, complicated negotiations, and at least two temporary truces. John used every weapon at his disposal, including marriage; he had divorced his first wife for failure to bear him an heir in 1199, and in 1200 he set his sights on the young daughter of the Count of Angoulême. Isabella of Angoulême—perhaps twelve or even younger—was already betrothed to the son of the Count of Marche, a marriage that would have created a strong, French-loyal enclave right in the middle of the land John wanted for himself. “Seeing that John, king of England, had a fancy for her,” says Roger of Hoveden, “her father . . . gave her in marriage to John, king of England.” This earned John the fury of the Count of Marche, but prevented the count’s son from gaining Angoulême for himself.2
Nothing worked. By April of 1203, John had lost almost every English possession in Western Francia. And then, at the very end of July, he had a piece of luck.
In Poitiers, John’s men took nearly two hundred French knights captive. Among them was Arthur himself. This was a blow to Philip’s cause; Roger of Wendover says that, getting word of the capture, he retreated “in vexation” back to Paris. But John had a talent for turning gold into mud. He sent Arthur to Rouen, with orders that he be guarded. “But shortly afterwards,” Roger of Wendover adds, “the said Arthur suddenly disappeared. . . . John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand; for which reason many turned their affections from the king from that time forward . . . and entertained the deepest enmity against him.”3
Nothing was ever known for sure about the boy’s death. Certainly Philip, who had used Arthur against John just as he had used John against Richard, made no effort to find him. But the disappearance, joined with John’s complete inability either to finish the sieges he had begun or to relieve castles under French attack, spelled disaster for the English king. His English allies were losing enthusiasm both for the fight and for their king, and Gervase of Canterbury tells us that the French had begun to call him, mockingly, Johannem Mollegladium: John Softsword.4
Late in 1203, John deserted Normandy—his last remaining possession in Western Francia—and retreated back across the English Channel. Richard had recovered almost all of the lands in Western Francia that had belonged to his father; John had lost them again.5
FOR THE NEXT EIGHT YEARS, the French and English kings circled each other in a hostile holding pattern.
John, left only with England, Ireland, and his mother’s ancestral lands in the Duchy of Aquitaine, devoted himself to refilling his war-depleted treasury. At his coronation, he had accepted numerous bribes and payments from men who already held royal office and hoped to keep it under the new regime. The royal financial records known as the Chancellor’s Roll document scores of “presents” to the king, not only from officials but from towns and cities as well, accompanied with messages hoping for “goodwill,” “peace,” and “loving treatment.”6
And he had taken full advantage of the royal custom, ongoing since the days of Henry, of collecting a fee called scutage from the English barons. Instead of going to war, a baron could buy the right to stay at home with a cash payment. Since John’s reign had begun with war, he had already leveled a demand of scutage every single year since 1199.7
Neither of these methods had created much goodwill towards John, and the heavy scutage in particular had set his barons on edge. With the war over, he dared not continue to collect the fees. Instead, early in 1207 he called the bishops and abbots of England to a council in London and informed them that all of the priests and parsons in England would be required to pay taxes on the revenue from all church-held land. The bishops and abbots refused, indignantly: “The English Church,” they announced, “could by no means submit to a demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.”8
28.1 John’s Losses and Philip’s Gains
Undaunted, John used the consecration of the new Archbishop of Canterbury in June as an excuse to seize church property. Pope Innocent III had chosen, to fill the empty post, the English churchman Stephen Langton, who had been teaching in Paris for years and had just been made a cardinal in Rome. Innocent had not asked for John’s approval, and John flew into a convenient rage: He knew nothing of Langton, he told the pope, except that the man had “dwelt much among his enemies,” and he was incensed that Innocent had not bothered to ask for his consent to the appointment. “He added,” says Roger of Wendover, “that he would stand up for the rights of his crown, if necessary, even to death.” He then refused to allow Langton to enter England, and confiscated all of Canterbury’s estates—and their revenue—for himself.9
Innocent at once put the entire country under interdict, which did not bother John in the slightest. Instead, he confiscated more church property, under the excuse that the clergy who held them only did so on condition that they perform their job, which they obviously could not do under current conditions.10
The interdict dragged on, a
nd the people of England suffered. “All church services ceased,” writes Roger of Wendover; “. . . the bodies of the dead too were carried out of cities and towns, and buried in roads and ditches without prayers or the attendance of priests.”11
Meanwhile, John went on refilling the royal coffers. His ongoing quarrel with Philip gave him another way to raise revenue: confiscation of the lands of those English nobles he suspected of divided loyalties. One such was Simon de Montfort, who inherited the English title Earl of Leicester from his uncle, but who was himself born near Paris, son of the Count of Montfort-l’Amaury. Under the excuse that de Montfort was bound to be a vassal of the king of France, John allowed him to inherit the title, but in late 1207, took the lands for himself; and de Montfort joined the growing rank of Englishmen who hated their king.
Over the next five years, John socked away an astonishing amount of tax money, confiscated treasure, and church funds. In 1210, he followed Philip’s example and ordered all the Jews in England imprisoned, “in order to do [his] will with their money.” Those who resisted were brutalized; a rabbi in Bristol, refusing to pay up, had one tooth knocked out by John’s men every morning for a week before he gave up and agreed to hand over his savings. “The corn of the clergy was every where locked up . . . for the benefit of the revenue,” Roger of Wendover tells us, and everywhere barons were forced to pay the king fines for trespasses as small as putting a fish weir into a river without John’s express permission. Resentment built, and built, and built. By 1213, it had hit a fever height and the king knew it.
He did not reform his financial policies, though. Instead, he “began to suspect everyone,” says the contemporary Barnwell Chronicle, “and went everywhere armed, with armed men.”12
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sundiata of the Mali
Between 1203 and 1240,
the clans of the Malinke fight over Ghana’s land,
and the slave trade north grows
GHANA HAD FALLEN: first to Almoravid invasion and then to the rebellion of the Sosso, a once-subject clan in the south. Around 1203, just a few years after claiming the kingship of the Sosso clan itself, the clan chief Sumanguru overran the capital city of Kumbi-Saleh. The last remnants of Ghanan power fell into his hands; the entire country was his.
This must have been a great military campaign, but the warriors who fought with Sumanguru did not, like the chroniclers of the West, record its battles. All that we know of Sumanguru comes from the Epic of Sundiata, a tale told orally, for centuries, by professional bards known as griots. “He was skilled in warfare,” the tale tells us,
His father was a jinn,
His mother was a human being. . . .
The authority of kingship was given to him;
His power as a king was great;
He used to make hats out of human skin,
He used to make sandals out of human skin.1
This is not a flattering depiction, but at the very least we can gather that Sumanguru was no more or less ruthless than Simon de Montfort, far to his north, or Genghis Khan, directing his operations far to the east.
The heartland of Ghana was much-coveted ground: watered by both rivers and sweet wells, says the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, with fish, elephants, giraffes, rice, and sorghum in abundance; so full of gold, writes the thirteenth-century cosmologist al-Qazwini, that it “grows in the sand of this country as carrots do in our land, and the people come out at sunrise to pluck the gold.” Sumanguru did not hold his conquests easily. Not long after his destruction of the old Ghana government, he faced a challenge to his authority from another clan in the Malinke tribe; the Keita, to his southeast.2
The Keita, unlike the Sosso, were Muslim. They had traded up the Niger river valley, through the central trade route that led to Tunis, for generations, and Islamic beliefs had filtered back down to them along with the northern goods. They were also disinclined to submit to Sumanguru. Under their king Nare Fa Maghan, the Keita fought back. Before Nare Fa Maghan’s death, sometime around 1217, Sumanguru’s armies sacked the capital city of the Keita nine separate times. Each time, the Keita regathered themselves and again rebelled.3
When Nare Fa Maghan died, his oldest son inherited the rule of the Keita. Instead of continuing to fight, he decided to make peace with the aggressive enemy. Peace meant submission, but the new king was willing to pay the price; in addition, he handed over his sister in marriage to Sumanguru. For a time, the Sosso controlled almost all of the old Ghana territory.4
But the Keita remained restless, and it soon became apparent that the marriage treaty had been a ruse.
In the Epic of Sundiata, Sumanguru’s bride tries to wheedle out of him, on their wedding night, the secret of his invulnerability on the battlefield: “What is it that can kill you?” she says, before she allows him to lay a hand on her. “If you do not tell me, you will not know me as a wife.” (At this, Sumanguru’s mother—unexpectedly close to hand—remarks, “Why would you spill your secrets to a one-night woman?” Soothing the old lady, Sumanguru promises to tell his new wife the secret once his mother is safely asleep.)
The secret, it turns out, is witchcraft; Sumanguru is a practitioner of the dark arts. Once she has learned this, the princess tells her groom that she’s having her period and can’t sleep with him after all; and the next morning she escapes home to tell her brothers her discovery. Armed with the materials for a hastily assembled spell against the sorcerer, her brother Sundiata—younger brother of the king—sets off to destroy Sumanguru.5
The Epic of Sundiata, told for hundreds of years before it was first written down early in the twentieth century, reflects the hostility of the Islamic Keita towards the non-Muslim Sosso. Sumanguru remained an implacable enemy of Islam, refusing to allow his people to observe its practices, executing Muslims who fell into his hands. But there was another edge to the hatred between the two clans as well. Sumanguru also resented the thriving trade in African slaves that the Keita carried on, selling their captives north to Muslim traders. No abolitionist, Sumanguru was prone to turn his own captives into slaves; but he fought against the custom of selling them into Islamic lands and drove Muslim merchants from every territory he conquered.6
This did not improve his popularity, and Sundiata had little trouble gathering allies to fight against the autocratic ruler. “All the rebellious kings of the savanna country had gathered [with him],” the Epic tells us. “On all sides, villages opened their gates to Sundiata. In all these villages Sundiata recruited soldiers.” A long and catastrophic civil war began. By 1230, Sundiata had inherited his brother’s royal title of king; by 1235, his allies had driven Sumanguru’s army backwards to his capital city; and by 1240, Sumanguru had fled, his empire in fragments, and his palace burned to the ground by Sundiata’s men.
The short-lived Sosso kingdom collapsed. “After the destruction of Sumanguru’s capital,” the Epic concludes, “the world knew no other master but Sundiata.” Sundiata seized control of the old Ghana lands, claimed Kumbi-Saleh as his own, and established his own empire; it became known as Mali.7
29.1 Sosso and Mali
In the Epic of Sundiata, the king of the Keita is an Islamic hero, victor in the war against the animistic and violent Sumanguru: “In the same way as light precedes the sun,” it explains, “so the glory of Sundiata, overleaping the mountains, shed itself on all the Niger plain.” He was proclaimed “King of Kings” by the Malinke, and over the next two decades followed Sumanguru’s example, conquering the outlying territories until Mali stretched past Ghana’s old boundaries to unite a new expanse of western African land.
But along with Sundiata’s triumph came a renewal of the slave trade. Before Sumanguru, Kumbi-Saleh had hosted a thriving slave market; now, under the rule of Sundiata, the markets revived and grew larger and busier. Slave traders came down the central trade route to Sundiata’s new capital city, Niani; and Mali grew richer and richer.8
Chapter Thirty
The Jokyu War
&n
bsp; Between 1203 and 1242,
the emperor challenges the shogunate,
and the shogunate triumphs
IN 1203, the new shogun of Japan found himself under house arrest. He was twenty-one, and had been shogun for less than four years.
The shogunate itself was only eleven years old. It had been the masterwork of his father, Yoritomo; and at Yoritomo’s death, in 1199, it was still a complicated and delicately balanced creation. Kamakura, the eastern city that served as the shogunate’s headquarters, was filled with samurai who had a shot at real political power for the first time. Samurai had wielded plenty of clout in Japan over the previous century, but they had always done so in the service of someone else: a government minister, a clan leader, an ambitious official. Samurai swords could determine the outcome of a war, but the samurai themselves had never ascended high enough in the Japanese bureaucratic hierarchy to decree what issues were worth fighting over.1
Yoritomo, himself a soldier, had spent much of his life in exile, far from the courts of influence. He had been an outcast with no political pull, and so he had forged a new path back into the center of the official hierarchy. At the beginning of his rebellion, he had promised the samurai in the east that if they swore an oath of allegiance to him, he would guarantee them the estates, the titles, and the offices that none of them yet owned.2
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 21