by Joshua Fogel
From the Black Forest by the shores of the Tula River to the Borjigin settlement in the foothills of Mount Burqan, they marched so slowly that it took three or four days to cover this short distance. Chinggis, though, was in no hurry. Time and again, he was urged by one or another of his commanders to have his palanquin move on farther east, but he did not respond.
“If I die, I shall rest here,” he replied on one such occasion. “Why do I need to rush while I am still living?”
After he had thus spoken, no one made any further suggestions of this sort.
Chinggis had not seen his wife, Börte. Insofar as she herself had not come to the Black Forest to greet him, Chinggis was not overly interested in continuing on to the camp by Mount Burqan to see her. Börte might have asked: “The entire army has returned, but why has only Jochi not done so as well?”
In this matter, Chinggis lacked the confidence that she would understand the words he would use. Even as truth, they would undoubtedly be unacceptable to her. Chinggis waited for Jochi at the settlement by the Tula River. Clearly, the fact that Jochi had not been selected as his successor was a concern for Börte, and the fact that Jochi alone had not returned would surely give her cause to believe that something untoward had arisen in the relationship between Chinggis and Jochi.
For his part Chinggis was not interested in quarreling any further with Börte. If possible, he would wait for Jochi without seeing her. He wished to avoid as best he could any ill feeling between himself and her. Messengers arrived in his camp from every direction on a daily basis. Although he hoped that each new one would be from Jochi, he was disappointed every time.
Although he was waiting for Jochi to make contact, there were limits. Ultimately, Chinggis had to make his triumphal return to the homeland of his people. When he broke camp by the banks of the Tula River, he announced that he had given up on Jochi’s return and would now advance with his palanquin to his home by Mount Burqan. With numerous Borjigin banners enveloping his retinue, a long array of his personal guard, foot soldiers, cavalry, and pure Borjigin officers and troops, the true descendants of the blue wolf, marched upstream following the course of the river.
In the afternoon of the third day, the form of a mountain so dear to his heart came in view: Mount Burqan, where the spirits of his people rested. That afternoon, the troops reached the upper reaches of the Kherlen River and continued farther against the course of the river. They reached the Borjigin camp at nightfall, when the western sky was burning bright crimson and the magnificent evening glow was visible in a corner of the sky. Börte, attended by countless ladies-in-waiting and personal guards, greeted Chinggis at the entrance to the settlement. She was now sixty-four years of age. Her legs had grown corpulent and made it difficult for her to walk. She actually was transported to the spot seated in a chair.
When he came before her, she stood up slowly from the chair. Her pure white hair, like a snow-capped peak, retained a distinctive brilliance, just as when she was young. Her facial expression remained unchanged. With the weight of the muscles in her relaxed face, it seemed to tremble a bit. Chinggis saw large ruby earrings dangling from Börte’s ears and a large jasper necklace around her neck. He only noticed the chair in which she was sitting when she stood up; it was inlaid all over with fine precious gems, stunningly radiant to the eye.
“Great khan,” said Börte, and nothing more. She relaxed after a difficult breath and then regulated her breathing in order to speak further:
“What a great day today is. It is both the day of the great khan’s victorious return home and the day on which news of the Mongol guest has become known.”
Börte still was referring to Jochi as the “Mongol guest,” as his name denoted in their language, and not as “your son.” Chinggis had no idea what she meant by news of Jochi arriving. He paid no attention to her now, though, as throngs of people from the settlement crowded around when he entered.
The following day, Chinggis hosted a dinner at his tent for Börte, Cha’adai, Ögedei, Tolui, and all their children. He had already met Tolui’s sons, Qubilai and Hülegü, but his now more than twenty grandchildren had grown so much he could hardly recognize them. On this occasion he tried to confirm with Börte her words from the previous day about Jochi.
Because of her breathlessness, Börte summed up briefly what she wanted to say. It had been reported to her a year or so earlier that Jochi had not returned to camp, and countless rumors were flying as to why. Although Börte was much pained by all this, the previous day a traveling merchant from Khorazm conveyed to her the news that Jochi was still alive and well and enjoying his hunting on the Kipchak plain.
When he heard this, Chinggis felt the blood draining from his head. If this rumor were true, he was thinking, then Jochi’s actions were impermissible. In solicitude to his aging wife, Chinggis did not allow the anger to show on his face, but when the dinner ended that evening, he immediately ordered one of his guards to find the traveling merchant whom Börte had met.
Several days later a middle-aged Persian was brought to Chinggis’s tent. When he met the man, Chinggis grilled him fiercely. He was able to learn that Jochi had established a position for himself as sovereign of the Kipchak plain, and while living as its ruler, he was hosting hunts and continuing to train his troops.
Chinggis was burning with anger such as he had never felt in his entire life, for numerous messengers had been sent, but Jochi had ignored them all; and Jochi had paid no attention to his orders as great khan. In consideration of Börte, Chinggis continued waiting daily for contact from Jochi. He was also indignant at having his paternal worry completely betrayed. Anyone at all who violated his orders had to be executed. The fate endured by many cities of Khorazm that harbored rebelliousness would have to be that of Jochi as well.
Within 10 days’ time, the Mongolian plateau was again seized with an uproarious atmosphere. Soldiers from all the settlements converged on the camp in the foothills of Mount Burqan. With 300,000 troops under them, Cha’adai and Ögedei were given command of a Kipchak expeditionary army.
When the force against Jochi set out, that alone did not calm Chinggis’s worries. Before long he mobilized troops a second time. He placed Tolui in command and joined the army himself. This second force, though, did not set off immediately, because Bo’orchu and Jelme opposed Chinggis’s mission against Jochi. But Chinggis would not be dissuaded from his plan. No one was able to placate the great khan’s anger. Because of Jochi, the Mongolian plateau was once again empty.
Chinggis had no intention of showing Jochi the least mercy. He and his entire military unit would have to be slaughtered and the Kipchak plain transformed into a desolate wilderness of rubble and stones. His anger would never subside until these tasks had been achieved. If he failed to act in this manner, then he would have failed to show proper authority over the numerous foreign peoples as well as the officers and men of his own Mongolian state. Chinggis did not see Börte. He left camp with Tolui and moved to a Kereyid settlement. Numerous men and horses had already taken the field in an area of the Black Forest by the banks of the Tula River.
Two or three days after Chinggis pitched camp in the Kereyid settlement, a dispatch courier arrived with news from the units under the command of Cha’adai and Ögedei. He was accompanied by another messenger from the Kipchak plain. Both men were wearing a black belt around their waist, a sign that they were in mourning. They were escorted into Chinggis’s tent.
—Prince Jochi has been in bed sick for the past three years, but in the eighth month of 1225 his illness took a serious turn, and he passed away in a settlement north of the Caspian Sea on the Kipchak plain. It was his dying will that in the coming spring his entire military force and his remains return to camp.
Once the messenger from the Kipchak plain conveyed this report, Chinggis just stared blankly at him. The messenger from Cha’adai and Ögedei, confirming the veracity of this communication, reported that Jochi had died after a long period of illness;
early in the fall of 1223, when they had rounded up the wild animals from the Kipchak area by the Syr Darya, Jochi was already ill and could not take part, but, conscious of Chinggis’s concerns, he had concealed his illness at the time.
Chinggis ordered the messengers to take a respite and then sealed himself up in his room by himself. He was profoundly irritated with his own gullibility for believing the groundless report of the traveling merchant. All alone, Chinggis was overcome by an intense fit of lamentation. He had been able to forbid himself from grieving at the deaths of Qulan and Jebe, but when he learned that Jochi had been so long bedridden with illness and then died far from home, Chinggis simply could no longer bear the sadness of his son’s death. Tears flowed from the large eyes with which he had overpowered everyone who faced him, fell to his pale cheeks covered with brown spots, and soaked the white whiskers covering his jaw. A low moan like that of a wild beast came from Chinggis’s throat in bits and snatches as he walked back and forth in his quarters.
Stopping himself from crying, Chinggis called out for a guard and ordered that no one was to approach his room. If someone were to see him there, he would be taken out and promptly executed. The guard accepted the order respectfully and departed. Once alone again, Chinggis burst into tears. As if rocked by a tidal wave, the old Mongol sovereign resigned himself to the great sorrow overpowering him.
Chinggis now knew. He had loved Jochi more than anyone else. Like Chinggis himself, Jochi was born of the womb of a ravaged mother, and he shared the fate of that young man to prove that he was a descendant of the Mongol blue wolf. Chinggis loved him more than anyone.
The next day Chinggis issued a proclamation announcing the death of Jochi:
—Prince Jochi died in a corner of the Kipchak plain. It was by the shores of the sea where in antiquity the blue wolf and the pale doe, ancestors of the Mongolian people and born by order of heaven, came. It is now called the Caspian Sea. Prince Jochi was courageous by nature. He faced many battles and was always a model for Mongol officers and troops alike. He attacked and conquered 90 citadels, 200 cities, and the state of Jin; he defeated Khorazm and established the Kipchak kingdom, becoming its first sovereign, north of the Aral, Caspian, and Black seas. May Jochi’s descendants long rule over the Kipchak kingdom. May the armies that followed him maintain the conquering exploits of their founder on the plain.
Using the expression “Kipchak kingdom” was the only reward Chinggis could give Jochi at this point. The edict was drafted by Yelü Chucai.
Chinggis then issued a proclamation to Börte expressing grief at the death of her son:
—Empress Börte, I offer my condolences on the death of Prince Jochi, the son you bore and nurtured. It is something you and I both shall mourn. Jochi was, just as his name indicates, a guest. He was a guest bequeathed to the Borjigin lineage from heaven. He has now returned to heaven.
Several days later Chinggis began to overcome his grief. When he regained his composure, he called a meeting with his officers to plan an attack on Xixia. He issued orders to all military units to mobilize for the invasion, and he instructed the units under the command of Cha’adai and Ögedei already on the field in Khorazm to advance immediately on Xixia.
The attack on Xixia was to be a decisive battle for three reasons. First, when the Mongols attempted to invade Khorazm, the Xixia king had refused to come to their aid, and punishment had not yet been administered; second, although the assault on the state of Jin after the death of Muqali was a task Chinggis felt he had to carry out, the thorough subjugation of Xixia took priority; and third, the blow Chinggis suffered from the death of Jochi could not be healed except through the launching of a great military campaign. Chinggis hoped to fill the remaining years of his life with the dust of battles attacking Xixia and Jin. He had not yet definitively proved to himself that he was a descendant of the Mongol blue wolf. Like Jochi and Jebe and, to be sure, Qulan, his life had to be enveloped by the battlefield. To that end, Chinggis had to make himself into the blue wolf itself.
As all Mongol military units were to join in the attack on Xixia, they broke camp by the Tula River in late 1225, only some ten days after the proclamation on Jochi’s death had been issued.
The first month of 1226 found the Mongol armies on the great wastelands of the Gobi Desert. It was still the mourning period for Prince Jochi, necessitating cancellation of new year’s festivities. The troops all prayed to the eastern sky, and that day they marched southward all day long through a cold, blowing wind mixed with sand. The march was more difficult than any the Mongol units had experienced before. From the middle of the month they were assaulted daily by a driving snow, and the number of men and horses felled or smitten by frostbite increased steadily.
In the middle of the second month of the year, the Mongol units finally reached Xixia territory. Chinggis waited for the arrival of the forces under Cha’adai and Ögedei. They merged and set off with a strategy to invade Xixia on all fronts. Fighting began immediately in an area of northern Xixia. From spring through summer, numerous northern cities, beginning with Heishuicheng, fell into Mongol hands one after the next.
Chinggis regrouped all of his units at the Hunchui Mountains, endured a period of ferocious heat, and then launched another campaign in the autumn. In short order, they attacked Ganzhou and Suzhou [not the homophonous city in the lower Yangzi River delta region] and then advanced to take Liangzhou and Lingzhou. In this campaign as earlier, Chinggis completely mopped up all those cities that opposed his forces. After Mongol units passed through such places, only corpses covering the emptied cities and fields remained behind.
In the second month of the following year, 1227, Mongol forces pressed in on the capital at Ningxia. Chinggis had one unit split off and surround the capital, and he himself led another to cross the Yellow River. Once they crossed the river, the movements of the Mongol unit were just like that of a band of devils. Coming and going like the wind, they sacked Jishizhou, Lintaofu, Taozhou, Hezhou, Xining, and Xindufu. They butchered the resident populations, destroyed the city walls, and burned down the cities.
In the fifth month of the year, Chinggis built his base camp at Longde to the west of Pingliangfu and sent emissaries to the court of the state of Jin, demanding its surrender. Having completed the subjugation of Xixia beyond the capital at Ningxia, he was now ready for the invasion of Jin at any moment. While in camp he received a delegation of surrender from Li Xian, ruler of Xixia, who was in Ningxia. Li Xian sought an extension of one month’s time to turn over his city to the Mongols, and Chinggis allowed it.
While awaiting the capitulation of Ningxia, Chinggis worked out the grand scheme for the invasion of Jin. He realized that he himself would now have to take up the task of subjugating Jin, which his late friend and colleague Muqali had sadly not lived to see through to fruition.
In the seventh month, Chinggis received in camp an emissary from the Jin emperor bearing items of tribute. Most extraordinary among these gifts was a great tub brimming with innumerable precious stones. Chinggis, though, was looking not for precious stones but for the Jin territory, which had once fallen under the hoofs of Mongol horses. Chinggis divided up most of the gems among his officers and threw the rest on the ground. For some reason, there appeared to be several thousand precious stones abandoned by Chinggis. What had at some point been only a few dozen stones in the tub now seemed virtually numberless, and they seemed to cover the entire area of the courtyard of the base camp.
Chinggis covered his eyes with his hands and after a moment pulled his hands away. The gems were still there spread over the earth. He summoned one of his guards and asked if gems were in fact covering the ground. The man quickly replied in the negative, and Chinggis then realized that he had fallen terribly ill. About a month earlier he had experienced a similar phenomenon on the Yellow River plain. At that time it wasn’t gems but human bones. The skeletons of twenty or thirty Xixia soldiers killed in the fighting the previous year appeared in Chinggis’s eye
s to be innumerable human bones covering the plain.
That night Chinggis called to his tent Ögedei and Tolui and told them that his remaining days were few. When he died, he instructed them, they should save the mourning period until the entire army returned home. That night Chinggis retired to his sick bed.
In a few days the illness took a sharp turn for the worse. In dim consciousness, Chinggis called out the name “Jochi,” his departed son.
When he realized that Jochi was already dead, he called out the name “Qulan,” his late beloved concubine.
When he realized that his beloved was lying in a box beneath a glacier that covered a ravine in the high mountains of the Hindukush, he called out the name “Muqali.”
Next, he called out the name “Jebe.” All the people he wanted to see were dead. Other than Qulan’s, all of their graves were unknown to him, and he could no longer picture them in his mind’s eye.
Finally, he called out the name “Tolui.” Tolui immediately replied, and at last Chinggis had come to the name of someone not dead.
“The best troops of Jin,” he told Tolui, “are massed at Tongguan. Tongguan has a line of mountains to its south and a large river to its north. You should be able to break through quickly. Once you have invaded Jin, go on and take the road toward the state of Song. Send troops to Tangzhou and Dengzhou in southern Henan province and attack the capital at Kaifeng all at once. It is a thousand li after you leave Tongguan, and you will have no reinforcements from there. Tolui, you must do as I say.”
Once he had conveyed to Tolui his dying will for the invasion of the state of Jin, he closed his eyes. A short while later, he said to no one in particular:
“If Xixia does not offer up their city by the promised deadline, move ahead with an all-out attack, kill the Xixia ruler, and massacre every one of Ningxia’s residents.”
Some thirty minutes later, Chinggis breathed his last.
The ruler of Xixia did in fact break his promise to Chinggis, and when the time for capitulation came, he did not relinquish the city of Ningxia. A huge Mongol army pressed in on the city, attacked from all four sides, and brought it down. Li Xian was brought out and put to death, as were the great majority of the residents. About a month later, all Mongol units massed on the banks of the Yellow River, abandoned the front, and returned to the Mongolian plateau. As had been decided earlier, Ögedei took control over the entire army. Chinggis’s death was known to only a small number of central commanders and was not revealed to the troops.