14 The Mongols

In the 13th century an obscure nomadic people from the steppes of northeastern Asia created the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen, stretching from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east, and taking in virtually all of Asia apart from India and the southeast of the continent.

These people were the Mongols, and under the leadership of Genghis Khan and his sons and grandsons they burst out of their homelands in Mongolia and wreaked havoc across much of the known world. In the process, they were responsible for slaughter on a scale undreamed of until the era of Hitler and Stalin.

The pagan Mongols were feared and detested by Christians and Muslims alike—and yet they showed respect and toleration for the religions of others, as long as they submitted to Mongol power. And while in the West the name Genghis Khan is synonymous with merciless brutality, in his native Mongolia, and among other Turkic peoples, he is hailed as a great hero—to this day, many male children in Turkey are given the name Genghis. Modern historians take the long view of Genghis, pointing out that, in creating his vast Eurasian empire, he enabled contacts between Europe and the much more technologically advanced civilization of China, to the immense enrichment of the former.

The horsemen from the steppes For millennia, the sedentary farming peoples of Europe, the Middle East and China had been subjected to waves of invasion by nomadic peoples from the remote grasslands at the heart of Asia. In the ancient world, the Greeks wrote of the Scythians and Sarmatians who lived to the north of the Black Sea, while in the 4th and 5th centuries AD the Huns swept through Europe, pushing the Germanic tribes across the frontiers of the Roman empire. At the same time, a related people, whom the Chinese called the Northern Wei, seized control of the fertile basin of the Yellow River (Huang He). Another group of nomads, the Magyars—the ancestors of modern Hungarians—were only stopped from sweeping across Europe by the German emperor, Otto I’s decisive victory over them at Lechfeld in 950.

“They are to bring the whole world into subjection to them.”

John of Plano Carpini, the pope’s envoy to the Mongols in the 1240s

These peoples, and the Mongols who followed them, were all magnificent riders. Their military tactics were highly mobile: they avoided traditional pitched battles, instead harrying the enemy with surprise attacks. They would then disappear into the immensities of the steppes, luring their opponents into following after them, usually with fatal consequences. Their traditional weapon was the bow, later joined by the lance, which became doubly effective with the appearance of the stirrup in the 5th century AD.

“The greatest joy is to conquer one’s enemies, to pursue them, to deprive them of their possessions, to reduce their families to tears, to ride on their horses, and to make love to their wives and daughters.”

Genghis Khan, attributed remark

Contemporary descriptions of Mongol armies on the move relate how both men and women were able to endure long stretches of riding in either great cold or extreme heat. They carried their yurts (round felt tents) on wagons, and survived almost exclusively on meat and milk. According to the 13th-century papal envoy, John of Plano Carpini, “They show considerable respect to each other and are very friendly together, and they willingly share their food, although there is little enough of it. They are also long-suffering …”

The descendants of Genghis Khan

In 2003 a group of geneticists published the results of a 10-year study of populations living in what had been the Mongol empire, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea. They found that 8 percent of men living in this region—some 16 million individuals, amounting to 0.5 percent of the entire male population of the world—shared nearly identical Y-chromosomes. This indicated that they were all descendants of just one man who lived around 1,000 years ago—and that this single man was an ancestor of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives. During the course of the Mongol conquests, the leaders would have had first choice of the most beautiful women, either as wives or concubines. It was recorded at the time that Genghis’s eldest son, Tushi, fathered forty sons, while his grandson Kublai Khan, who conquered China, had twenty-two legitimate sons, and added thirty new virgins to his harem each year.

Genghis Khan and his successors In the first decade of the 13th century, a Mongolian chieftain called Temujin (meaning “ironworker”) united all the tribes of Mongolia under his rule. At a great gathering in 1206 he adopted a new name, Genghis Khan, meaning “Lord of the Earth.” He then set about giving substance to this title, and by 1215 had conquered most of northern China. Four years later he turned westward and swept through Afghanistan and Iran. “As there is one sky,” he proclaimed, “so there should be one empire on earth.”

Genghis died in 1227, but his sons and grandsons carried on his work, crossing the Volga in 1238 and pushing into European Russia, subduing the Turks of Anatolia, and in 1258 destroying the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad. The Christians had hoped that the invaders from the east would become their allies in their campaign against the Muslims, but when in the 1240s the pope sent an envoy to the Mongols, he returned with a demand that all the princes of Europe submit to the Great Khan.

Mongol expansion in the Near East came to an abrupt halt in 1260, when they were decisively defeated at Ain Jalut by the Mamelukes of Egypt. The victors cut off the head of the Mongol commander and used it in a game of polo. But expansion continued in the east, where in the 1270s Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan overthrew the Song rulers of southern China and established his own imperial dynasty, the Yuan.

The sack of Baghdad

In 1258 Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu captured Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid caliphs, and put thousands of the inhabitants to the sword. The caliph himself was rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses, the Mongols believing that it would offend the earth to shed royal blood. The Grand Library was ransacked and its books hurled into the Tigris in such numbers that it was said that a man could ride on horseback across the river—which, in the words of one Arab historian, “ran black with the ink of scholars and red with the blood of martyrs.”

By 1300 the Mongol empire had split into a number of khanates, which gradually disintegrated over the following centuries. There was something of a revival in the later 14th century under a chieftain called Timur or Tamerlane, who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. He conducted a long campaign of destruction across the Middle East, central Asia and into India, but never consolidated his conquests into an empire. In 1526 a descendant of Timur, Babur of Kabul, invaded India and established an Islamic dynasty that was to rule the subcontinent for centuries, creating a magnificent culture marked by such monuments as the Taj Mahal. They called themselves “Moguls,” in recognition of their descent from the Mongols (see Precolonial India).

the condensed idea

The Mongols briefly created an empire extending from eastern Europe to the Pacific