In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Fortunately it was the only stiff climb of the day, and beyond the ridge the land again sloped down to the west, allowing us to ride with gathering momentum, faster and faster, towards the camping place the guides had recommended. They intended for us to stay at another location known for its mineral springs, but instead of the previous ugly sanatorium building we found an attractive open valley where a random scattering of gers had been erected near the watercourse by families and herdsmen who were treating the region as an agreeable summer grazing ground. Led by the Whistler, Paul and I rode down to a suitable spot where we could make camp. There we hobbled our horses and waited for Ariunbold to catch up. We were joined by Delger and the Doc, and could see Ariunbold a mile behind, as usual bringing up the rear. To our surprise he once again rode straight past, no more than a hundred yards away and ignoring us altogether. The Whistler, who had already unsaddled his horse, did not conceal his indignation at these bad manners. He refastened the girths, leaped in the saddle and rode furiously after Ariunbold. More accustomed to Ariunbold’s uncouth ways, Paul and I and the others remounted more slowly and followed. We were not surprised when we found Ariunbold sitting on a convenient rock half a mile further on. He had picked a much less suitable camping spot on rough ground and was waiting for Delger and Bayar to put up the tent for him while he went down to the river to wash. The Whistler was boiling with anger and I realised that it had taken Ariunbold less than a day to antagonise one of the two new guides.

  The rain had stopped and we were quietly sitting in the camp in the gathering darkness when a pair of strange horses appeared from nowhere and stampeded past the tents at full gallop. They were followed a moment later by two unknown Mongol riders who charged through the camp, hallooing wildly and weaving from side to side. As it was virtually dark, this was a thrilling display of horsemanship, as the two strangers hurdled ditches and dangerous rocks with insane bravado. It took a moment to realise that the two whooping riders were two-thirds drunk and worked up to a great pitch of excitement. They had scarcely vanished into the gloom when we again heard the drumming of hooves, and the runaway horses, who must have circled around, flashed through the camp once more. This time one of the chasers pulled up and shouted to Delger, who leapt to his feet, ran across to his lasso pole, picked it up and handed it to the rider, who snatched it from his grasp and went careering off once again. For another moment or two the pursuit continued crazily around our camp, and then the runaway horses ran off into the darkness still followed by their drunken herders at a gallop. Delger yelled something which must have been a request for the return of his lasso pole, only to be answered with a shout which was clearly an insult as the drunken stranger made off with the pole as a prize. The theft obviously transgressed some basic rule of behaviour among herdsmen because Delger responded as if he had been slapped across the face. Red with anger, he ran to the nearest of our horses, flung a saddle on its back, and in a moment was riding in pursuit of the thief. The Whistler also saddled a horse and galloped off behind him in support. What had been a quiet evening in camp had erupted into activity and now subsided back again into quiet as we waited for the riders to return.

  After two hours our two colleagues came back, carrying the lasso pole but still very miffed. There was a great deal of muttering and grumbling, but Paul and I considered the matter to have been resolved and had gone to sleep when, once again, there was a tremendous commotion. This time there were many voices, all quarrelling and spitting with anger. The arguments swung back and forth. Some of the voices were incoherent with rage, and then came the sound of deliberate blows. Someone was being given a heavy beating, and we could hear the thump of blows, followed by high-pitched wails of pain. The beating continued steadily for a while, and when it stopped the whimpering faded away as the sobbing victim left camp. Then there was silence.

  In the morning Doc tried to explain what had happened, though the story was still confused. Apparently Delger and the Whistler had found the missing lasso pole at a nearby group of gers but were told that the thief came from a different camp. There was already bad blood between the two camps, and allegations of slander and rumour-mongering were flung. Both groups then met at our camp to settle their differences. One group accused the other of being horse-thieves who were intending to steal our horses and to lay the blame on the other camp. Tempers had run high, and two of the younger Mongols had been set upon and beaten up.

  The whole affair seemed haphazard, impenetrable and unnecessarily brutal.

  11 - The Lamas of Mandal

  A thread of pitilessness runs throughout Mongol history. When Beatrix Bulstrode visited Urga’s gaol, she was shaken to discover that many of the prisoners in the dungeon were padlocked inside heavy wooden chests like iron-bound coffins, 4 1/2 feet long and 2 1/2 feet deep. A small hole in the side of the chest was the only means of ventilation. The hole was big enough for the prisoner to put out his manacled hands for food and, if his skull was narrow enough, to thrust out his head and look around. Descending into the gloom where these humans were kept in their boxes, she observed that:

  one’s eyes growing accustomed to the darkness - the only light that penetrates it is from the doors when they are opened - one became gradually aware of wild shaggy heads poking through the round holes in the coffins’ sides. I was standing, quite unconsciously, close to a coffin when, glancing down, I saw a terrible face, nothing more, almost touching the skirt of my riding coat. Beside one coffin was a pool of blood which told its own tale. Within it there was a poor devil coughing his lungs up.

  The majority of the prisoners, she was told by the warders, had never been brought to trial but were incarcerated for life on suspicion of being pro-Chinese.

  Under Genghis Khan’s direction this pitilessness had been an instrument of state policy, and he employed it with a ruthlessness that appalled even the most hardened contemporary observers. His Mongol troops were neither sadistic nor depraved, and there is no evidence that they enjoyed killing. But they were butchers, and they were prepared to put people to death on a massive scale and without remorse. It was an established custom that before Genghis Khan’s generals attacked a city, they offered to spare the lives of the inhabitants provided they surrendered without a fight. If, however, they resisted, they could expect no quarter. The Mongols kept their word. If the city agreed to these terms, it was thoroughly pillaged but the population was spared. If it put up a defence, the citizens were put to the sword en masse. The killing was comprehensive and business-like, and not done in blood lust or rage. The civilians were marshalled in batches for execution, as in a well-organised abattoir for humans.

  The annals of the countries attacked in this callously efficient way by Genghis Khan’s armies are full of horror stories of the Mongol invasions - whole areas depopulated, cities overthrown, sacred shrines defiled, precious works of art smashed. But the authors of these reports give no hint that the terrible Mongol conquerors relished the destruction for its own sake; they seem to take it for granted that the Mongols were insensible to the terrible tragedies they were causing. For its part the Mongols’ own saga, The Secret History of the Mongols, makes it clear the purpose of victory was to despoil the enemy and bring home in triumph his desirable women, horses, cattle and movable valuables, to enslave the able-bodied, and hunt down and kill the chief of the rival clan. Usually there was no lasting vendetta. Children of the rival clan might be adopted into the families of the victors, and it was quite normal to recruit the defeated clan as junior partners for the next raid which was to be further afield. Genghis Khan applied these same principles on a continental scale. When his army took the ancient and holy city of Bukhara, the Mongols looted its wealth as if it were a neighbouring nomad camp. They rode their horses into the courtyard of the great mosque, and drunken troopers dumped rare copies of the Koran on the ground so that they could use the wooden Koran cases as mangers for their horses, and obliged the terrified Muslim scholars to hold the animals while they fed. Within weeks t
hey were recruiting more Muslim allies to continue their campaign of destruction.

  One of the stranger twists to the Mongol story is that the damage to Islam fuelled a rumour that Genghis Khan was a long-awaited champion of Christendom. Rubruck and Carpini travelled to Mongolia half-hoping that they might find Prester John there, the paladin of Christianity. Prester John was a fantasy figure of the medieval imagination who had surfaced in the middle of the 12th century. He was said to be a descendent of the Magi, a pure and invincible priest-king who ruled over a distant Christian nation somewhere in the east and was capable of putting into the field a matchless host of warriors. The rumour was probably based on confused reports of a major battle fought in Central Asia near Samarkand between the Seljuk Turks and the army of the Kara khitai, a people who lived alongside the Mongols before the time of Genghis Khan. The Seljuk Turks, who were Muslim, lost the fight, and it was presumed in the West that the victors must therefore be Christians, though the Kara khitai were more likely to have been either heathen or Buddhist. In any event the Pope wrote a letter to the victorious ‘Prester John’ hoping to establish contact and asking for details of his version of Christianity. For the next 100 years the rumour of this distant Christian monarch persisted, and became particularly popular among the hard-pressed Crusaders in the Holy Land, fighting off the counter-attacks of the Muslims. Some-where beyond the hostile ring of their Islamic foes, it was said, was this potential Christian ally (Prester John, of course, was ageless). If only a messenger could get through to him, a great combined operation could be organised against the Muslims. With the rise of Genghis Khan and the resounding success of his army, reports of a new Central Asiatic super-power hostile to Islam began to filter through to the West, and the notion arose that this could only be the long-awaited Prester John, or possibly his grandson, King David.

  Carpini quickly realised that there had to be some mistake. The savage Mongols he met dragging their dark and ugly ancestor idols around the steppe in huge carts with axles as thick as ships’ masts could not possibly be the followers of the saintly priest-king. On the contrary, wrote Carpini, the ungodly Mongols must have chased the real Prester John out of Central Asia and into India, where he should now be looked for. But Rubruck, though he was sceptical, never entirely gave up hope. When he failed to find Prester John ruling in Karakorum, he set about trying to verify the rumour that the Great Khan had been baptised and was a secret Christian. So Rubruck went about Karakorum on the lookout for signs of Christians - a cross over a ger, the sound of church bells, a gesture of respect from a Mongol towards a Christian symbol.

  Rubruck was not entirely wide of the mark. As it happened, two of the Mongol tribes, the Keraits and the Naimans, had been deeply influenced by Nestorianism, a form of Christianity dating back to the 5th century which had been spread into central Asia by its missionaries based in Persia. Many leading Kerait families had been baptised, and one of the Great Khan’s chief wives was interested enough to attend Nestorian services held in a portable chapel. Probably under her influence, the Khakhan Möngke, third in succession to Genghis Khan and ruler of Karakorum when Rubruck was there, sent word one day that Rubruck should be brought before him and demonstrate his Christian rituals. Rubruck took along an illustrated copy of the Bible and a breviary, and recited a psalm and intoned a chant. Then he showed Möngke, whom he called Mangu, the pictures in the holy books. The Great Khan was interested in the pictures but no more, and his consort spoiled the solemnity of the occasion by drinking too much. She finished up befuddled and ‘climbed into her cart, to the chanting and wailing of the priests, and went on her way.’ Rubruck did not hear from her again on the subject of royal Christianity.

  If Rubruck had been less starry-eyed, he would have noticed that the Khakhan was a true Mongol pragmatist. Fundamentally Möngke believed in the power of the great ancestor Genghis Khan and the spirit world of the shamans. But that did not exclude the possibility that there might be some merit in other religions. So Möngke allowed Christians, (1) Buddhists and Muslims to practise and preach their faith openly at his court. Rubruck was very disappointed that the representatives of Christianity were so poorly prepared. The Nestorian priests, he complained, did not understand their own texts which were written in the Syriac language. Furthermore they were usurers, polygamists, simoniacs who demanded money for religious services, and they took to the bottle. Because their bishop arrived in such a remote location only about every fifty years, Rubruck claimed the bishop had the presumptuous custom of going round and anointing all the children, even down to the smallest baby, thereby guaranteeing a future supply of priests.

  Rubruck need not have been so reproving. The Nestorians understood that the Mongols were unlikely to be converted by moral example or illuminating sermons. The Mongols preferred to stay with their time-honoured customs. They consulted their shamans, whom Rubruck called ‘soothsayers’, on all immediate matters, such as the best spot to set up camp or when to go to war; they laid offerings in front of the images of their ancestors; and they practised the art of divination with the shoulder bones of sheep. These were scraped clean and placed in a fire, and a qualified shaman then read the future by interpreting the lines and cracks which appeared in the bone as a palmist reads the lines on a hand.

  I was unexpectedly reminded of Rubruck’s vain quest for Christianity in Mongolia as we approached Galuut. That day, 27 July, Doc informed us that we had entered the former territory of the Naiman Khans, the same people who had taken to Nestorianism. Several times in the afternoon we passed broad circles marked out in the grass with small rocks. They were the remnants of the royal pavilions which had once stood looking across the prairie of the western Hangay. And at the end of the day we rode past a large tomb of what must have been an important Naiman chief.

  Galuut itself beckoned us from a distance. Almost any permanent structure would have seemed enticing when there had been no building for more than 60 miles. But on closer inspection Galuut proved to be just another undistinguished somon centre, and as the Whistler and the Shy One were both eager to get home we did not bother to enter the settlement but halted about a mile short of the town so they could turn back with their horses. We had just waved goodbye to the two guides when a deputation came out of town to tell us that our remounts were to be collected not at Galuut, but 10 miles further on at the old monastic settlement of Mandal. So Paul, Doc and I hitched a ride in a municipal truck while Bayar, Ariunbold and Delger brought on the gift horses.

  Mandal gave us a bonus. We had spent the night at a disused camp of shepherds and were waiting for our remounts to show up when a young man rode into camp and shyly asked if we would like to see the holy sculptures. He turned out to be 16 years old and had decided to become a lama, now that the central government was allowing the church to practise openly. Already he had started his preliminary religious instruction, and in the autumn he would shave his head, put on his robe and enrol as a novitiate. We asked what his parents thought of the idea that he was entering the church, and he replied without hesitation - ‘It makes them happy.’ Our camp had been placed in the lee of a low cliff, and the young man and his younger brother now led Doc, Paul and myself along the base of the cliff. After about half a mile we came upon lines of Tibetan script carved into the contours of the living rock close to ground level. Our young guide told us they were religious texts sculpted by the former monks of Mandal, which had once boasted one of the finest lamaseries in Mongolia. The lines of writing continued sporadically until we reached the first of the sacred figures. It was a picture of the Buddha seated on a lotus, chiselled into the rock-face. There were traces of the original paint which had picked out the details in red, blue and brown. Further on a small stream ran along the foot of the cliff, and here were more pictures of the Buddha, and then a drawing of a Demon Defender riding a dragon lion, and finally the portrait of an Ayush Baksh or Woman Saint. We counted nine such rock-carvings but the lad told us there were a total of nineteen distributed along
the rock-face. The carvings did not look any older than 19th-century but they made up a fine devotional gallery where the vanished monks of Mandal had turned the vertical wall of rock into a lasting monument of their faith. Just before we turned to retrace our path, the young man pointed upward. Fifty feet up, a string of small white objects was draped around a rock which projected from the cliff wall. They were human bones, he said, the pieces of a lama’s skeleton which had been strung on a rope and hung like a necklace against the rock.

  By the time we got back to camp, the new relay of horses had arrived. They had been brought in by a large and openly curious band of local arats, and there was the usual bustle and chaos of making pack-ponies out of the half-wild animals. I was glad to see that, once again, the two men who would be our guides were very methodical and sensible about the loading, and I waited until they had assigned me a horse to ride. The owner of the animal they finally selected looked very worried. He thought his horse was too skittish and, like all Mongol herdsmen, he was convinced that all foreigners had never ridden before. I tried to reassure him that I ought to be able to manage his horse, but he hovered around looking very nervous. When I produced my saddle, he insisted that he should fit it. As usual, the foreign saddle attracted great interest, and all the arats clustered around and were looking on with great fascination when I produced the crupper strap and explained to the owner of the horse how the strap should be attached from the back of the saddle and around the root of the horse’s tail. The Mongol looked horrified. He had never seen a crupper strap in his life. I got Doc to explain that the strap was necessary to prevent the saddle shifting forward. Doc translated, then laughed. ‘He says that the strap is some sort of perversion, or it will damage his horse. He does not believe the horse will ever permit such a thing.’