As this collection of tales makes plain, ceaseless conflict shaped Mongol life—at first among siblings, and later among tribes—until Genghis Khan beat his rivals into submission and unified the realm. The Secret History tells of a symbolic battle among Temüjin, as the young Genghis Khan was known, and his half brothers over a “small fish,” a mere minnow. Their “noble mother” ordered, “Desist. Why do you, older and younger brothers, behave in such a way toward one another?…Why do you not work together? You must cease to behave in such a way.”
Temüjin and Qasar, his brother and ally, complained, “Only yesterday we shot down a lark with a horn-tipped arrow and they snatched it away from us. Now they have done the same again. How can we live together?” With that, the boys stomped out of the ger, mounted their horses, and went to avenge the theft, shooting arrows at the brothers who had tormented them. But when they returned, they confronted something far worse: their enraged mother. “You destroyers!” she cried, comparing them to wild animals:
Like the qasar [wild] dog gnawing on its own afterbirth,
like a panther attacking on a rocking mountain,
like a lion unable to control its anger,…
like a gerfalcon attacking its own shadow,…
like a male camel biting the heel of its young,…
thus you have destroyed!
Apart from our shadows, we have no friends.
Apart from our tails, we have no fat.
This last line referred both to the fat-tailed sheep on which they lived, and, by extension, to their kin. Thanks to the harsh discipline administered by his formidable mother, Temüjin eventually learned the lesson of cooperation and emerged as Genghis Khan, who transcended the internecine quarrels that marked Mongol history, and the Mongol psyche, to bring about a heavily guarded peace and stability.
THE MONGOLS believed that Genghis had come to them from the sky, and that after his death he returned to his home in the firmament. But his earthly dynasty continued after him. His grandson Kublai was born in relative obscurity, a circumstance that may have kept him out of harm’s way, and he advanced not because he was the chosen successor to Genghis but because he was cunning and resourceful enough to maneuver his way to the pinnacle of the Mongol hierarchy. No rival posed a greater threat to Kublai than a young khan called Kaidu. Although the two were cousins, Kaidu “never had peace with the Great Khan,” Marco says, and that is an understatement. The reason was simple enough: “Kaidu always demanded of the Great Khan that he wished his share of the conquest they have made.” Kublai replied that he would agree, if Kaidu promised to “go to his court and to his council every time that he should send to see him.” Kaidu refused “because he was afraid that he [Kublai] would have him killed.”
Matters came to a head in 1266, when Kaidu attacked two of Kublai’s barons, Kibai and Kaban, who had converted to Christianity. The opponents fought a tremendous contest involving 200,000 horsemen, with Kaidu emerging as the victor. “He grew in bombast and pride thereby,” Marco says.
Several years later, Kaidu mounted a direct challenge to Kublai, riding with tens of thousands of horsemen to the Mongol capital of Karakorum, where a battle took shape, according to Mongol custom: “When the two sides were on the field drawn up and ready, then they were only waiting till they should hear the drums begin to sound loudly, one on each side.” Once the drums sounded, “then they would sing and play their instruments of two strings very sweetly, and make great sport, waiting always for the battle.”
The opposing sides let loose a hail of arrows, and when they drew closer, pummeled each other with clubs. Marco heard reports from those who had been there that “it was one of the most cruel and evil battles that ever was between Tartars…. The noise of people was so great there and the clash of swords and of the clubs that one did not hear God for the thundering of it.” The battle amounted to a tragic waste of life, “for many men died thereby and many ladies were widows thereby and many children were orphans thereby and many other ladies were forever thereby in mourning and in tears—these were the mothers and the sweethearts of men who died there.”
By the first light of dawn, a weary Kaidu surveyed the bloodied battlefield. Spies brought him troubling news: Kublai Khan was already sending a fresh army “to take and assail him.” Kaidu gathered the exhausted remnants of his forces. “They mounted on horseback and set themselves on the way to return to their country,” recounts Marco. Learning of the retreat, Kublai Khan “let them go quietly.” Kaidu’s army did not stop retreating until it reached Central Asia.
Later, Kublai Khan raged and insisted he would have put the rebellious Kaidu “to an evil death”—wrapped in a carpet and trampled by horses—had they not been blood relatives.
MARCO CASTS the Mongol conquests not as the merciless slaughter of thousands but as a fairy tale about the spontaneous emergence of the Mongol presence from the windswept Steppe: “When Genghis Khan saw that he had so great a multitude of most valiant people, he, being of great heart, wished to come out from those deserts and wild places and arrayed his people with bows and with pikes and with their other arms…. I tell you that so great was the fame of his justice and kindness that wherever he went everyone came to submit himself, and happy was he who was able to be in his favor, so that in very little time they conquered eight provinces.”
In Marco’s telling, Genghis Khan’s conquests were marvels of peaceful subjugation: “When he had gained and taken the provinces and cities and villages by force, he let no one be killed or spoiled after the victory; and he put governors in them of such justice that he did them no harm nor took away from them their things.” Moreover, Marco claims, “These people who were conquered, when they saw that he saved and guarded them against all men and that they had taken no harm from him, and they saw the good rule and kindliness of this lord, they went too gladly with him and were loyal to him.” In this skewed version, their allegiance inspired Genghis to greater feats. “And when Genghis Khan had gathered so great a multitude of people that they covered the world, and saw that they all obeyed him faithfully and followed him, seeing that fortune so favored him, he proposed to himself to attempt greater things: he said to them that he wished to conquer a great part of the world. And the Tartars answered that it pleased them well, and they would follow him gladly wherever he should go.”
MARCO’S PORTRAYAL of Genghis Khan’s glorious rise omits disturbing details of the Mongol leader’s murderous thirst for power in favor of an epic, and unreal, battle between the Mongol warrior and the Christian leader of the East, Prester John. (“Prester” is an archaic word meaning “presbyter,” or priest.) But Genghis’s great rival Prester John did not exist, despite the European conviction that he dwelled in Asia, or perhaps Africa, ruling a magical and wealthy Christian outpost. In fact, the tenacious myth of Prester John originated in the fertile imagination of monks, who composed a letter purportedly written by him and directed toward the forces of Christianity in the West. It contained much to gladden the hearts of Europeans living in fear of the Mongols, including a vow to “take Genghis in person and put him to an evil death.”
Marco himself remained silent on the subject of Prester John’s existence. He did not claim, as he often did of others, to have personal knowledge of the Christian leader. But that gap in his knowledge did not stop him from narrating a mythic battle between the forces of the East and the West—led by Genghis Khan and Prester John. Prester John loses his life in this battle, a development that Marco seems to savor rather than lament—further evidence that the Venetian had come to identify with the Mongols. Which Marco was the real one: the devout Christian on a papal mission, who dismissed all non-Christians as idolaters and worse? The enthusiastic admirer of the Mongols? Each represented a facet of his sensibility. For Marco, Christianity represented the established order, reassuring but also confining; the Mongols, in contrast, signified boldness, magic, and grandeur. For the young traveler, they embodied an intoxicating way of life and belief.
True, Marco was expressing himself in the medieval tradition of the panegyric, or formal compliment; hyperbole was expected—indeed, required. Yet he could be acid when he wished, even when discussing the high and mighty, from the relative security of a Genoese prison. Rhetoric aside, it is apparent that the prospect of meeting this grand personage could only have filled him with a sense of excitement and high purpose. Everything the Polo company left behind in the West dwindled in importance before the majesty and color of Kublai Khan and his nomadic subjects, who had conquered China against all odds.
“AND SINCE we have begun to speak about the Tartars for you,” says Marco, bursting with enthusiasm, “I will tell you many things of them.” He begins by describing—quite accurately—the basics of their nomadic existence, a way of life akin to that of the Indians of North America, with whom they may have shared ancestry: “The Tartars commonly feed many flocks of cows, mares, and sheep, for which reason they never stay in one place, but retire to live in the winter in plains and in hot places where they have grass in plenty and good pasture for their beasts; and in the summer they move themselves over to live in cold places in the mountains and in valleys where they find water and woods and good pasture for keeping their beasts; and also for this cause, where the place is cold flies are not found nor gnats and suchlike creatures that annoy them and their beasts.”
Marco takes his European readers inside the ger, the portable structure in which the Mongols dwelled: “They have their small houses like tents of rods of wood and cover them with felt; and they are round; and they always carry them on four-wheeled wagons wherever they go. For they have the wooden rods tied so well and orderly that they can fit them together like a pack and spread them, take them up, put them down, and carry them wherever they please. And every time they stretch and set up their house the door always opens toward midday.” These structures constituted, in effect, a portable village, and Marco marvels at the Mongols’ life on the fly: “They have beside this very beautiful carts with only two wheels covered with black felt that is so good and so well-prepared that if it rained all day water would soak nothing that was inside the cart. They have them brought and drawn by horses and by oxen and sometimes by good camels. On these carts they carry their wives and their children and all the things and food that they need. In this way, they go wherever they wish to go, and thus they carry everything that they need.”
Once he grew accustomed to life in a ger, Marco noticed an unusual domestic arrangement. “The ladies buy and sell and do all the work that is needed for their lords and family and for themselves,” he comments approvingly. “They are not burdensome for their husbands, and the reason is that they make much gain by their own work.” The more he observed Mongol women at work, the more he admired their diligence and contribution to family life. They are, he says, “very provident in managing the family and are very careful in preparing food, and do all the other duties of the house with great diligence, so the husbands leave the care of the house to their wives, for they trouble themselves with nothing at all but hunting and feats of battle and hawking and falcons, like gentlemen.”
Marco was instinctively drawn to the Mongols’ method of hunting, designed both to find food and to afford sport on the limitless Steppe. “They have the best falcons in the world”—another slap at Europe, where falconry was recognized as the sport of the aristocracy and falcons were a source of pride to the nobility able to afford them—“and likewise dogs”—all of which allowed the Mongols an abundant supply of food. Marco’s inventory of the Mongols’ foods seems calculated to inspire envy in his European readers, who often hovered on the brink of famine: “They feed on flesh and on milk and on game, and also they eat little animals like rabbits, which are called ‘Pharaoh’s rats’”—in reality, these were a species of rodent akin to the prairie dog. “They eat even the flesh of the horses and of dogs and of mares and oxen and camels, provided that they are fat, and gladly drink camel’s and mare’s milk.” Koumiss, the sour fermented beverage made from mare’s milk, was a staple of the Mongol diet, and a bond between all warriors. Drinking it practically defined the Mongol way of life.
Koumiss is of ancient origin. Writing in the fifth century BC, Herodotus states it was known to the ancient Scythians, nomadic precursors to the Mongols, and it may have derived from the name of another ancient Asian tribe, the Kumanes. The action of two organisms, a yeast and a fungus, converted the carbohydrates in mare’s milk into lactic acid and alcohol.
Marco came to enjoy this beverage, or at least tolerate it. At one point, he declares that the koumiss produced by one Mongol family tasted like white wine. He had no choice but to acquire a taste for it, because the Mongols drank little else; even in winter, when milk was scarce, they combined sour curd with hot water, beat the mixture, and imbibed it.
LIFE AMONG THE MONGOLS, for all its hardships, eventually won Marco’s qualified admiration. Unlike the bawdy wives of Kamul, the Mongol women remained faithful to their husbands. “For nothing in the world would one touch the wife of another,” he proclaims, “for if it happened, they would hold it for an evil thing and exceedingly vile.” He proceeds to extol Mongol marital harmony: “The loyalty of husbands towards the wives is a wonderful thing, and a very noble thing the virtue of those women who if they are ten, or twenty, a peace and inestimable unity is among them.” Instead of bickering, the women busied themselves with “selling and buying,…the life of the house and the care of the family and of the children”—all of which won young Marco’s ringing (and, to Christian ears, stinging) endorsement. “In my judgment they are the women who most in the world deserve to be commended by all for their very great virtue.”
Of course, the underpinning of this remarkable domestic concord was more complicated than Marco’s account initially suggests. The women, he eventually reveals, certainly deserved their “praise for virtue and chastity because the men are allowed to be able to take as many wives as they please, to the very great confusion of Christian women. For when one man has only one wife, in which marriages there ought to be a most singular faith and chastity, or [else] confusion of so great a sacrament of marriage, I am ashamed when I look at the unfaithfulness of the Christian women, [and call] those happy who being a hundred wives to one husband, keep [their virtue] to their own most worthy praise, to the very great shame of all the other women in the world.”
Having performed his investigation, he offers a careful description of the Mongol formula for marital success: “Each [man] can take as many wives as he likes, up to a hundred if he has the power to maintain them; and the men give dowries to the wives and to the mother of their wife to obtain them, nor does the wife give anything to the man for dowry. But you may know too that they always hold the first of their wives for more genuine and for better than the others, and likewise the children who are born of her. And they have more sons than all the other people in the world because they have so many wives, and it is a marvel how many children each man has.” The polygamy extended to relatives. As Marco explains, “They take their cousins for wife and, what is more, if the father dies, his eldest son takes to wife the wife of the father, if she is not his mother, and all the women who are left by the father except his mother and sisters. He takes also the wife of his own brother if he dies. And when they take a wife they make very great weddings and a great gathering of people.”
MONGOLIAN MARITAL and reproductive habits left a lasting mark. Juvaini, the Persian historian, noted: “Of the issue of the race and lineage of Genghis Khan, there are now living in the comfort of wealth and affluence more than
20,000. More than this I will not say…lest the readers of this history should accuse the writer of exaggeration and hyperbole and ask how from the loins of one man there could spring in so short a time so great a progeny.”
According to contemporary genetic researchers, Juvaini did not exaggerate. One in twelve Asian men—that is, one in every two hundred men worldwide—carries a Y chromosome originating in Mongolia at the time of Genghis Khan. Geneticists believe that Genghis Khan’s soldiers spread that chromosome as they raped and pillaged their way across Asia, replacing the DNA of the men they slaughtered with their own, by way of the children they sired. Some scientists have suggested that the Y chromosome persisting to this day came from Genghis Khan himself. (When a sperm’s DNA joins with that of an egg, the Y chromosome exchanges almost no genetic material with its partner, the X chromosome, and remains largely free of mutations.) A group of Oxford University researchers evaluated genetic markers in men across Asia; 8 percent of those studied were virtually identical, meaning that the individuals were closely related, even though they lived thousands of miles apart. The geneticists concluded that the 8 percent were direct descendants of Genghis Khan. When the results of the study were published, the popular press, echoing Juvaini, took to calling Genghis Khan the greatest—or, to be more accurate, most prolific—lover in history.
MARCO POLO became so enamored of the Mongols that he described their shamanistic beliefs with genuine appreciation rather than the disdain he reserved for most unfamiliar religious practices. He begins reassuringly: “They say that there is the high, sublime, and heavenly God of whom every day with censer and incense they ask nothing else but good understanding and health.” He concedes that they worshipped idols, but says they devoted special attention to one god in particular, whom they called Natigai, a “god of the land who protects and cares for their wives and their sons and their corn.”
Laurence Bergreen Page 12