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When Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492,
he was heading for Cathay, the land of the Great Khan.
DAVID MORGAN
IN 1332, CONFUSION, ALARM, and pain ran amok in the pleasure palaces of Xanadu, the Mongol summer capital of Shangdu. The royal family remained there well past the end of summer, and despite efforts to keep the crisis secret, it became apparent that the Mongol rulers were in a turmoil so deep that it threatened continuation of the dynasty. The surviving information offers muddled accounts of what was happening, but it appears that the office of the Great Khan bounced from brother to brother and from father to son in a flurry of assassinations, disappearances, and inexplicable deaths. From 1328 to 1332, at least four members of the Golden Family occupied the throne, and one, the seven-year-old Rinchinbal Khan, had it for only two months in 1332. Fear gripped everyone. In the household, everyone from the young to the old, from the lowest servant to the Great Khan, seemed in danger of dying a horrible death.
Nearly as much turmoil and confusion churned outside the capital as inside, but it was neither foreign invaders nor rebels that threatened the society. The fear arose from something far more sinister and mysterious, but with quite visible effects everywhere—the plague. A person could appear healthy in the morning, but suddenly break into hot fever that rapidly gave way to chills accompanied by both vomiting and diarrhea. The bodies of individuals who had only a short time earlier appeared active and robust suddenly and inexplicably broke down and began to dissolve before the horrified family observers. Blood began to ooze beneath the skin, which discolored the skin, lumps formed and oozed blood and pus in the groin. The lumps, subsequently called buboes from the Greek word for groin, then formed in the armpit and neck, and from them came the medical term for the disease: bubonic plague. When the lumps grew too large, they burst open. The lack of oxygen moving into the body and the dried blood beneath the skin made the person appear to turn black; from this dramatic symptom, the disease became known as the Black Death. After only a few agonizing days of tortured pain, the person usually died. In some victims, the disease attacked the lungs rather than the lymph nodes, and as the air in the lungs turned bloody and frothy, they drowned. As they died, they infected those around them by violent coughing, sneezing, and gasping.
According to the most plausible, but not completely verifiable, accounts, the disease originated in the south of China, and Mongol warriors brought it north with them. The plague bacterium lives in fleas, which traveled on rats transported in shipments of food or other tribute taken from the south. Although the fleas do not normally infect humans and the smell of horses repels them, they can live in sacks of grain, human clothing, and other places in the vicinity of humans while awaiting their chance to jump on them. Once the infected fleas arrived in the Gobi, they easily found hospitable new homes in marmot burrows and the extensive rodent colonies, where they have lived ever since. On the open steppe of Mongolia, the plague remained just as virulent, but it posed less danger in the sparsely inhabited environment. Even today, it kills a handful of victims every year in the summer, but the small population living among so many horses and the lack of fleas in the Mongol dwellings tend to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic. By contrast, in the densely inhabited urban areas of China, and later in other urban areas, the disease found its perfect environment in the rat populations that had lived in close proximity with humans for so long that no one suspected them as sources for the disease.
In 1331, chroniclers recorded that 90 percent of the people of Hopei Province died. By 1351, China had reportedly lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population to the plague. The country had included some 123 million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but by the end of the fourteenth century the population dropped to as low as 65 million.
China functioned as the manufacturing center of the Mongol World System, and as the goods poured out of China, the disease followed, seemingly spreading in all directions at once. Archaeological evidence of graves near trading posts indicates that by 1338 the plague crossed from China over the Tian Shan Mountains and wiped out a Christian trading community near lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan. The plague was an epidemic of commerce. The same Mongol roads and caravans that knitted together the Eurasian world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries moved more than mere silk and spices. The roads and way stations set up by the Mongols for merchants also served as the inadvertent transfer points for the fleas and, thereby, for the disease itself. With the luxurious fabrics, exotic flavors, and opulent jewels, the caravans brought the fleas that spread the plague from one camp to another, one village to another, one city to another, and one continent to another. If plague destroyed only a single, crucial station in a mountain pass or blocked one route through the desert, it potentially isolated a large region within the vast empire.
Plague reached the capital of the Golden Horde at Sarai on the lower Volga in 1345. At this time, Yanibeg, the Kipchak khan, was preparing to lay siege to the Crimean port of Kaffa (modern-day Feodosija in Ukraine), a trading post established by merchants from Genoa primarily for the export of Russian slaves to Egypt. The Mongols had sometimes cooperated with the Italian slave merchants and at other times tried to suppress their trade. The Mongol authorities had closed the trading post and expelled the Genovese on several occasions, but each time they would eventually relent and allow them to return. To protect themselves from further Mongol threats and to safeguard their transit in slaves, the Genoese built a strong protective wall around their city and a second inner wall to protect the heart of the trading post.
When plague broke out in the Mongol army, it forced Yanibeg to lift the siege and retreat, but the disease readily spread from the Mongol camp to the adjacent port. According to a single European report, Yanibeg had the bodies of plague victims catapulted over the walls and into the city, and though the Genovese tried to dispose of the bodies by throwing them in the sea, the disease erupted. Though often repeated, the story was not based on eyewitness accounts; the only known source for it comes from the papers of a lawyer, Gabriele de Mussis, who worked near Genoa in the town of Piacenza. He claimed, in turn, to have heard the story from some sailors. Since the dead bodies could not breathe on their intended targets and spread the disease in the common manner, they would have needed to carry living fleas to infect the city. The story seems doubtful, not because the Mongols were unwilling to spread the disease in that manner, but because it probably would not have been a strategy likely to succeed.
With or without human intention, the disease was already spreading and would continue to do so. When the Genovese and other refugees fled the port by boat, they took the disease with them to Constantinople, from where it easily spread to Cairo in Egypt and to Messina in Sicily. If the city was the ideal home for the plague, the closed environment of the ship was the ideal incubator, a place where humans, rats, and fleas could mix intimately without the noxious presence of horses or fire, the two things that fleas most avoid. Freed from the comparatively slow movement on the trading route, where the disease had to wait for precisely the right cart or cargo of goods, the plague spread with the speed of the wind in the sails. In 1348, it ravaged the cities of Italy, and by June of that year entered England. By the winter of 1350, the plague had crossed the North Atlantic from the Faeroe Islands on through Iceland and reached Greenland. It may have killed 60 percent of the settlers of Iceland, and the plague was probably the single most important factor in the final extinction of the struggling Viking colony in Greenland.
In the sixty years from 1340 until 1400, according to some estimates, the population of Africa declined from 80 million to 68 million inhabitants, and Asia from 238 million to 201 million. The total world population—including the Americas, where the plague did not strike for another two centuries—fell from approximately 450 million to between 350 and 375 million inhabitants, a net loss of at least 75 million, or more than a million people a year for the remainder of the fourteenth century. As more evidence accumulates, scholarly research continues to push the losses higher. The population of Europe declined from around 75 million to 52 million. With a death toll of around 25 million the loss in the European continent alone was roughly the same as the total worldwide toll of AIDS in the twentieth century. For Europe in the fourteenth century, however, the figure represented between a third and one-half of the total population. By comparison, in the tremendous destruction of World War II in Europe, Great Britain lost less than 1 percent of its population, and France, the scene of much fighting, lost 1.5 percent of its population. German losses reached 9.1 percent. Widespread famine pushed the World War II death rates in Poland and Ukraine toward 19 percent, but even these remained well below the rates for the plague in the fourteenth century.
The plague left some areas completely depopulated, while a few cities survived virtually unscathed. One of the few effective measures was taken by the city of Milan. As soon as plague broke out in a house, officials raced to seal up the entire house with everyone—sick and well, friends and servants—sealed inside. Other cities tried less effective means, such as the ringing of bells or the banning of the ringing of bells. Whether it erupted in a particular community or not, the epidemic permanently changed life in every region of the continent. The plague effectively destroyed the social order that had dominated Europe since the fall of Rome, leaving the continent in dangerous disorder. The disease brought down urban dwellers more readily and thereby destroyed the educated class and the skilled craftsmen. Inside and outside the cities, the closed and polluted environments of monasteries and convents provided an ideal opportunity for the disease to kill everyone, a tragedy from which European monasticism in particular, and the Roman Catholic church in general, never recovered. Dense villages faced a similar danger, as did the residents cooped up inside castles and manorial estates.
The social impact of the plague was best recorded in Florence, where it erupted in 1348, in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio, one of many to lose numerous family members and close friends. In his Decameron, ten young noble ladies and ten men flee the plague and find refuge in a country estate, passing the time by telling tales. In the world described by Boccaccio, husband deserted wife, mother abandoned child just to escape the plague. So many died that priests had no time to offer services and diggers could not accommodate the bodies, which were then tossed into group graves or left for dogs and pigs to eat. The “venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved.” Officials were “unable to execute any office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.”
Without understanding the disease’s true cause or methods of transmission, people still quickly recognized its close association with commerce and the movement of people in and out of cities. The writings of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and others of the time show the two primary reactions to the disease were to abandon the city, if possible, or at least to close the city to outsiders. Either response immediately halted trade, communication, and transportation. Local authorities throughout Europe enacted plague laws to limit its spread and control popular reaction. In 1348, the small city of Pistoia in Tuscany barred entry of people from infected areas, banned the importation of any type of used textiles, and forbade the sale of fruit or the slaughtering of animals that might cause the smell of death, which they suspected as contributing to the spread of the disease. Similarly, they forbade the tanning trade, and without it the commerce in leather goods ceased. Citizens returning from other places could only bring a small amount of baggage equivalent to about thirty pounds. No one could send a gift to the home of a person who had died of the plague or go there to visit, and no one was allowed to buy new clothing.
Diplomatic delegations and letters ceased to flow. Without the Mongol transportation system, the Catholic church lost touch with its missions in China. Frightened people everywhere blamed foreigners for bringing the disease, further threatening international commerce. In Europe, the Christians once again turned on the Jews, who had a close association with commerce and with the east, from whence the plague came. Some Jews were shut up in their homes and burned; others were taken out and tortured on the rack until they confessed their crimes. Despite a papal bull from Pope Clement VI in July 1348 protecting the Jews and ordering the Christians to stop their persecutions, the campaign against them escalated. On Valentine’s Day in 1349, the authorities of Strasbourg herded two thousand Jews to the Jewish cemetery outside of the city to begin a mass burning. Some Jews were allowed to save themselves by confessing their crimes and converting to Christianity, and some children were forcefully converted. More than a thousand perished over the six days that it took to burn them all, and the city outlawed the presence of any Jew in the city. City after city picked up the practice of publicly burning Jews to thwart the epidemic. According to the boasts of one chronicler, between November 1348 and September 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria had been burned. In the Christian parts of Spain, the people initiated similar persecutions against the resident Muslim minority, driving many of them to seek refuge in Granada and Morocco.
The plague not only isolated Europe, but it also cut off the Mongols in Persia and Russia from China and Mongolia. The Mongol rulers in Persia could no longer procure the goods from the lands and workshops they owned in China. The Golden Family in China could not get its goods from Russia or Persia. With each group cut off from the other, the interlocking system of ownership collapsed. The plague had devastated the country, demoralized the living, and, by cutting off trade and tribute, deprived the Mongol Golden Family of its primary source of support. For nearly a century, the Mongols had exploited their mutual material interests to overcome the political fault lines dividing them. Even while sacrificing political unity, they had maintained a unified cultural and commercial empire. With the onslaught of plague, the center could not hold, and the complex system collapsed. The Mongol Empire depended on the quick and constant movement of people, goods, and information throughout its massive empire. Without those connections, there was no empire.
As foreign conquerors, the Mongols had been tolerated by their subjects, who often outnumbered the Mongols by as much as a thousand to one, because they continued to produce a tremendous flow of trade goods long after the strength of their army had dissipated. In the plague’s aftermath, with neither trade nor the likelihood of military reinforcement from other Mongols, each branch of the Golden Family of Genghis Khan had to fend for itself in an increasingly volatile environment that might easily turn hostile. Deprived of their two advantages of military strength and commercial lucre, the Mongols in Russia, central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East searched for new modes of power and legitimacy by intermarrying with their subjects and consciously becoming more like them in language, religion, and culture. Mongol authorities purged the remaining elements of shamanism, Buddhism, and Christianity from their families and strengthened their commitment to Islam, which was the primary religion of their subjects, or, in the case of the Golden Horde in Russia, the religion of the Turkic army that helped keep the family in power.
As the different members of the Mongol royal family aligned themselves with particular religious factions within their subject populations, the rifts between the royal lineages increased. When the Golden Horde in Russia became Muslim, before their cousins in Iraq and Iran converted, they allied themselves with Egypt against the Mongol Ilkhanate. Then, when the Mongol rulers of the Ilkhanate converted to Islam, they moved back and forth between Sunni and Shiite versions as it suited the political moment. During the reign of Oljeitu, the most committed of the Shiites, a severe persecution of minority groups such as Buddhists and Jews was unleashed. The universal principles of Genghis Khan’s empire disappeared like ashes in the wind.
By becoming Muslims, the Mongols in the Middle East seemed to have been following the example of Khubilai Khan, who had made himself powerful in China by appearing to be Chinese. Yet Khubilai Khan’s successors in China failed to follow, or probably even to understand, the cunning genius of his method. Rather than becoming more Chinese, the Mongol authorities increased repression and isolated themselves. During this chaotic time, some Mongol members of the royal court reported dreams in which Genghis Khan appeared to demand a variety of stringent new measures to further repress the Chinese. Officials in the court decided that they had allotted the Chinese too much freedom and that the Mongols had allowed themselves to become too acculturated to Chinese life. Rather than further integrating into Chinese culture, they intensified their foreign identity and further separated themselves from Chinese language, religion, culture, and intermarriage. In the mounting paranoia, Mongol authorities ordered the confiscation not only of all weapons from the Chinese people, but their iron agricultural tools as well, and limited the use of knives. They forbade the Chinese to use horses, and in fear of secret messages being passed, they stopped performances of Chinese opera and the traditional storytelling and other public and private gatherings. In the face of such extreme measures, the Chinese subjects, in turn, became increasingly discontented and still more mistrustful and fearful of their Mongol rulers. Rumors circulated regarding the mass extermination of Chinese children by the Mongols or of plans to kill everyone bearing specific Chinese family names.
In their new effort to be as un-Chinese as possible, the Mongols dropped the traditional evenhanded approach to diverse religion and granted ever more favor and power to Buddhism, particularly to its Tibetan variation, which contrasted most strongly with the Confucian ideals of the Chinese. Unable to criticize their Mongol rulers directly, the Chinese people turned much of their hatred toward the foreigners who helped the Mongols administer their empire. The Tibetan Buddhist monks in particular became the object of hatred, since local people along the newly opened Mongol route to Tibet carried the obligation not merely of feeding, housing, and transporting the monks, but of carrying their goods for them as well. The monks, often armed, acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them. The Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs strongly defended the monks at court and imposed a host of special rights for them. At one point the bureau tried to enforce laws that stipulated that anyone who hit a monk would have his hand cut off, or that anyone who insulted or defamed a monk, if convicted, could have his tongue cut out. The Mongol officials eventually overturned these laws as incompatible with Mongol rule, which forbade the use of body mutilation as a punishment.
Increasingly isolated from their subjects and unable to take effective action against the progress of the plague, the Mongol khans of China took refuge in the spirituality of the Tibetan monks, who encouraged them to turn away from the outside world of illusory problems of society and to perform acts that would help their own individual soul. The monks persuaded the Mongol royal family that each deed of freeing a prisoner would gain them spiritual merit for an improved station in their next life, and monks soon turned the process into a thriving business. In one of the bizarre ceremonies, a monk at the court rode through the palace gates on a yellow ox while wearing the gown of the Mongol Empress, and then he released the prisoners the way one might release a cage of birds.
The Tibetan clergy encouraged new forms of religious practice in their Tantric rites that proclaimed the path of enlightenment via sexual acts. This movement not only produced a vigorous display of sexual art, but it also encouraged the royal family to engage in elaborate sexual dances and rituals that centered on the eager participation of the Great Khan himself under the watchful eye of the lamas. The rumors of debauchery and the secrecy of the rituals increased paranoia and distrust among the Chinese, who suspected the Tibetan lamas of practicing human sacrifices at court to prolong the life of the khan and to preserve his faltering regime.
While the Mongol rulers of China concentrated on expressing their spirituality and sexuality, the society out beyond the walls of their Forbidden City in the capital collapsed. In perhaps the most telling symptom, Mongol authorities lost control of the monetary system they had so laboriously and meticulously created. The principles by which the economy utilized paper currency had proven more complex and unpredictable than realized by the officials, and the system gradually spiraled out of control. At the least sign of weakness in the Mongol administration, confidence in the paper currency dropped and caused it to fall in value while pushing up the value of copper and silver. Inflation grew so fiercely that by 1356 the paper currency had effectively become worthless.
In Persia and China, the collapse came quickly—in 1335 and 1368, respectively. The Mongols of the Persian Ilkhanate disappeared, either killed or absorbed into the much larger population of their former subjects. In China, the Great Khan Togoon Tumur and some sixty thousand Mongols managed to escape the Ming rebels, but they left behind approximately four hundred thousand who were captured and killed or absorbed by the Chinese. Those that managed to return to Mongolia resumed their nomadic way of pastoralism, almost as if the entire Chinese episode from 1211 until 1368 had been merely an extended stay at their southern summer camp. The Golden Horde of Russia broke into smaller hordes that declined steadily in power through four long centuries. During such an extended interaction, the Mongols and their Turkic allies amalgamated with each other into several different ethnic groups of Turco-Mongols that maintained a separate identity from one another as well as from the larger Slavic society.
After the overthrow of Mongol rule, the triumphant Ming rulers issued edicts forbidding the Chinese from wearing Mongol dress, giving their children Mongol names, and following other foreign habits. In an effort to revitalize the Chinese principles of government and social life, the Ming rulers systematically rejected many of the Mongol policies and institutions. They expelled the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders whom the Mongols had encouraged to settle in China, and in a major blow to the commercial system of the Mongols, Ming authorities abolished the failing paper money entirely and returned to metal. They rejected the Tibetan Lamaist Buddhism that the Mongols had sponsored, and replaced it with traditional Taoist and Confucian thought and traditions. After an abortive effort to revitalize the Mongol trade system, the new rulers burned their ocean vessels, banned foreign travel for Chinese, and spent a large portion of the gross national product on building massive new walls to lock foreigners out and the Chinese in. In so doing, the new Chinese authorities stranded thousands of their citizens living in the ports of Southeast Asia.
In the effort to remove themselves from the danger of a new Mongol invasion, the Ming initially moved the capital south to Nanjing, a more Chinese venue, but in the attitudes and actions of the majority of people, the rule of unified China was so closely associated with their northern capital that the Ming had to return their court to the old Mongol capital of Khanbalik. The Ming sought to remake the city, remove the Mongol appearance, and build a new Forbidden City in their own style. With short exceptions, the capital has remained there with changing names, and Beijing still serves as capital for China, which occupies roughly the same national borders that it did under the Mongols.
In one country after another, indigenous rebellions expelled the Mongols and local elites took the reins of government. While Korea, Russia, and China returned to the hands of native dynasties, the Muslim territories experienced a more complex transition from Mongol rule. Instead of returning to the control of Arabs who had been the traders, the intermediaries, the bankers, the shippers, and the caravan drivers who connected Asia and Europe, a new cultural hybrid emerged that combined a Turco-Mongol military system with the legal institutions of Islam and the ancient cultural traditions of Persia. The eastern part of the Muslim world had found a new cultural freedom in which they could still be Muslims but without the domination of Arabs, whom they never allowed to regain power. New dynasties, such as the Ottoman of Turkey, the Safavid of Persia, and the Moghul of India, sometimes called Gunpowder Empires, relied primarily on the vast innovations in Mongol weaponry, a military organization based on both a cavalry and an armed infantry, and the use of firearms, to fight foreign enemies and, perhaps more important, to maintain domestic power over their ethnically varied subjects.
Despite the plague and collapse of the commercial system, revolts, and the subsequent dismemberment of the Mongol Empire, even the rebels seemed reluctant to let the old empire go completely. The new rulers hung on to the trappings and illusions of the old system to legitimize their own new rule. The facade of the Mongol Empire continued standing long after the internal structure had collapsed and the Mongols were all gone.
Following their purge of Mongol influence in public life, the Ming rulers went to great effort searching for the official seal of the Mongols, and they preserved the use of the Mongol language in diplomacy as a way of maintaining continuity with the past. As late as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Chinese court sent its letters in the Mongol language. In turn, the Manchu, who overthrew the Ming in 1644, strategically intermarried with the descendants of Genghis Khan so that they could claim legitimacy as his heirs in blood as well as in spirit.
At the heart of central Asia, the descendants of Genghis Khan continued in power in the area known as Moghulistan, the Persian name for the Mongol territory. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol holdings in central Asia had fallen under the control of Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane, a Turkic warrior who claimed, with flimsy evidence, descent from Genghis Khan. He sought to revive the Mongol Empire, and he conquered much of its former territory from India to the Mediterranean. In an effort to closely associate himself with Genghis Khan, Timur sponsored a variety of books that linked them. To ensure that his lineage would acquire the blood of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, his family intermarried with some of Genghis Khan’s true descendants. Despite all that Emir Timur sought to do in restoring the Mongol Empire, he did not follow the ways of Genghis Khan. He slaughtered without reason and seemed to find a perverse but persistent pleasure in torturing and humiliating his prisoners. When he seized the sultan of the Ottoman kingdom of Turkey, he forced him to watch as his wives and daughters served Timur naked at dinner and, in some reports, satisfied his sexual demands. It was said that Timur harnessed the sultan like an animal and made him pull the royal chariot, and then exhibited him in a cage.
Because Timur claimed to be a Mongol, and was legitimately a son-in-law to the dynasty of Genghis Khan, his deeds became inextricably intertwined with those of the original Mongols in the minds of the people who had been conquered by both. One Mongol was hard to distinguish from another. When Timur delighted in public torture or piled up pyramids of heads outside his conquered cities, it was assumed that he was carrying on the traditions of his Mongol people. The practices of Timur were anachronistically assigned back to Genghis Khan.
The descendants of Timur became known in history as the Moghuls of India. Babur, the founder of the new dynasty in 1519, was thirteen generations descended from Genghis Khan’s second son, Chaghatai. The Moghul Empire reached its zenith under Babur’s grandson Akbar, who ruled from 1556 until 1608. He had Genghis Khan’s genius for administration as well as his appreciation of trade. He abolished the hated jizya tax, the tax on non-Muslims. Akbar organized his cavalry along the traditional Mongol units of ten (up to five thousand) and instituted a civil service based on merit. Just as the Mongols made China into the most productive manufacturing and trading center of their era, the Moghuls made India into the world’s greatest manufacturing and trading nation and—contrary to both Muslim and Hindu traditions—raised the status of women. He continued the universalist attitude toward religion and tried to amalgamate all religion into one Divine Faith, Din-i-Illah, with one God in Heaven and one emperor on earth.
With so many empires striving to maintain the illusion of the Mongol Empire in everything from politics to art, public opinion seemed obstinately unwilling to believe that it no longer existed. Nowhere was the belief in the empire longer lasting or more important than in Europe, where, in 1492, more than a century after the last khan ruled over China, Christopher Columbus convinced the monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand that he could reestablish sea contact and revive the lost commerce with the Mongol court of the Great Khan. With the breakup of the Mongol communication system, the Europeans had not heard about the fall of the empire and the overthrow of the Great Khan. Columbus, therefore, insisted that although the Muslims barred the land route from Europe to the Mongol court, he could sail west from Europe across the World Ocean and arrive in the land described by Marco Polo.
Columbus embarked on his voyage to find the Mongols while carrying with him a printed copy of Marco Polo’s travels, into which he had jotted copious notes and observations for his planned arrival at their court. For Columbus, Marco Polo was not merely an inspiration but also a practical guide. When he reached Cuba after visiting several smaller islands, Columbus believed that he was on the edge of the Great Khan’s realm and would soon find the Mongol kingdom of Cathay. Columbus remained convinced that the lands of the khan lay only a little farther to the north within what we today recognize as the mainland of the United States. Since he had not found the land of the Great Khan of the Mongols, he decided that the people he met must be the southern neighbors of the Mongols in India, and thus Columbus called the native people of the Americas Indians, the name by which they have been known ever since.
Whereas the Renaissance writers and explorers treated Genghis Khan and the Mongols with open adulation, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe produced a growing anti-Asian spirit that often focused on the Mongols, in particular, as the symbol of everything evil or defective in that massive continent. As early as 1748, the French philosopher Montesquieu set the tone in his treatise The Spirit of the Laws, holding the Asians in haughty contempt and blaming much of their detestable qualities on the Mongols, whom he labeled “the most singular people on earth.” He described them as both servile slaves and cruel masters. He attributed to them all the major attacks on civilization from ancient Greece to Persia: “They have destroyed Asia, from India even to the Mediterranean; and all the country which forms the east of Persia they have rendered a desert.” Montesquieu glorified the tribal origins of Europeans as the harbingers of democracy while he condemned the tribal people of Asia: “The Tartars who destroyed the Grecian Empire established in the conquered countries slavery and despotic power: the Goths, after subduing the Roman Empire, founded monarchy and liberty.” Based on this history, he summarily dismissed all of Asian civilization: “There reigns in Asia a servile spirit, which they have never been able to shake off, and it is impossible to find in all the histories of that country a single passage which discovers a freedom of spirit; we shall never see anything there but the excess of slavery.”
Genghis Khan became the central figure of attack. Voltaire adapted a Mongol dynasty play, The Orphan of Chao, by Chi Chün-hsiang, to fit his personal political and social agenda by portraying Genghis Khan, whom Voltaire used as a substitute for the French king, as an ignorant and cruel villain. The Orphan of China, as he renamed it, debuted on the Paris stage in 1755 while Voltaire enjoyed a safe exile in Switzerland. “I have confined my plan to the grand epoch of Genghis Khan,” he explained. “I have endeavored to describe the manners of the Tartars and Chinese: the most interesting events are nothing when they do not paint the manners; and this painting, which is one of the greatest secrets of the art, is no more than an idle amusement, when it does not tend to inspire notions of honor and virtue.” Voltaire described Genghis Khan as “The king of kings, the fiery Genghis Khan/Who lays the fertile fields of Asia waste.” He called him “a wild Scythian soldier bred to arms/And practiced in the trade of blood.” In Voltaire’s revisionist history, the Mongol warriors were no more than the “wild sons of rapine, who live in tents, in chariots, and in fields.” They “detest our arts, our customs, and our laws; and therefore mean to change them all; to make this splendid seat of empire one vast desert, like their own.”
Genghis Khan’s only redeeming quality, in Voltaire’s play, was that he reluctantly recognized the moral superiority of the better educated. “The more I see,” Voltaire quoted Genghis Khan as saying, “the more I must admire this wondrous people, great in arts and arms, in learning and in manners great; their kings on wisdom’s basis founded all their power.” Genghis Khan ended the play with a question: “. . . what have I gained by all my victories, by all my guilty laurels stained with blood?” To which Voltaire answered: “. . . the tears, the sighs, the curses of mankind.” With these words, Voltaire himself began the modern cursing of the Mongols.
Despite all the negative images of Genghis Khan, Voltaire’s real target was the French king, whom he was too afraid to criticize directly. Instead, he projected his France, with the Mongols representing all that was wicked. Other writers quickly copied the method of holding up the Mongols as symbols for world evils, and the Mongols became the victims of an extended literary and scientific assault. The new critique appeared obliquely in the work of Italian poet and playwright Giovanni Casti, who spent much time in the Hapsburg court and later in the court of Catherine the Great of Russia. Unwilling to openly criticize the monarchs who supported him, he used the image of the Mongols as his foil in Poema Tartaro and in the 1778 opera Kublai, the Great Khan of the Tartars, for which Antonio Salieri, the rival of Wolfgang Mozart at the Hapsburg court, composed the music. Recognizing the potentially dangerous ideas in the play, the Holy Roman Emperor suppressed the opera in fear that it might encourage revolutionaries.
The most pernicious rationale for Asian inferiority did not emerge from the philosophers and artists in Europe, however, as much as from the scientists, the new breed of intellectuals spawned by the Enlightenment. In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist, the Compte de Buffon, compiled the first encyclopedia of natural history in which he offered a scientific description of the main human groups, of which the Mongol ranked as the most important in Asia. His descriptions seemed like a return to the hysterical writings of Matthew Paris and Thomas of Spalato, more than five hundred years earlier. “The lips are large and thick, with transverse fissures,” Buffon wrote. “The tongue is long, thick, and is much roughened. The nose is small. The skin has a slight dirty-yellow tinge, and is deficient in elasticity, giving the appearance of being too large for the body.” He proclaimed the Tartar women “as deformed as the men.” Their culture seemed as ugly to him as their faces: “The majority of these tribes are alike strangers to religion, morality, and decency. They are robbers by profession.” Translated from French into all the major European languages, his work became one of the classic sources of information during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
European scientists sought to classify everything from the breeds of dogs and horses to the types of roses and dandelions. German zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor of medicine at Göttingen University from 1776 until 1835, created zoological classifications for human beings based on comparative anatomy, particularly on skin pigmentation, hair and eye color, skull type, and facial features such as size and form of the nose, cheeks, and lips. According to his study, humans divided naturally into three primary races corresponding to Africa, Asia, and Europe, and to two less important subcategories of American and Malay. On the theory that Asians originated in Mongolia, he classified all of them under the rubric Mongols. European scientists rapidly accepted his theory, making it scientific gospel.
The categories, of course, also implied an evolutionary ranking of the different races as articulated by Scottish scientist Robert Chambers in his bestselling book of 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. “The leading characters,” he explained, “of the various races of mankind, are simply representatives of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type.” By comparison to the white race, the “Mongolian is an arrested infant newly born.”
Soon it became clear to these theorists that the Mongoloid race exhibited a close relationship to the orangutan, the Asian ape. The similarity showed not only in facial traits but in postures. Asians, like orangutans, sat with folded legs in the “Mongolian” or “Buddha” position. The category of Mongoloid expanded steadily to include all American Indians and Eskimos, as well as “the northern Chinese, the southern Chinese, the Tibetans, the tribal peoples of southern China, the Mongols, some of the Turks, and the Tungus, Koreans, Japanese, and Paleo-Asiatic peoples.”
Once in place and widely accepted in Western science, the system of Mongoloid classification inspired new applications. Based on the physical description of some retarded children as marked by Asian facial features, it became apparent to the scientists of the era that they must also belong to the Mongoloid race. The first recorded link between retarded children and the “Mongoloid race” occurred in the 1844 study by Robert Chambers, who associated the malady with incest: “Parents too nearly related tend to produce offspring of the Mongolian type—that is, persons who in maturity still are a kind of children.” In 1867, Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, Medical Superintendent of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey, England, formalized the new system of categories in “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots” in the British Journal of Mental Science. In addition to incest and other forms of deviant behavior posited as the cause of the Mongoloid condition, medical doctors also suggested dietary deficiencies, maternal anxiety, excessive use of perfume, paternal alcoholism, and two-headed sperm.
In the search for a more directly historical explanation for why these children bore Asian physical characteristics, scientists found a precise biological connection by looking back at the Mongol invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century. According to their new explanation, through the ages, marauding tribes of Huns, Avars, and Mongols had left their genetic impact on Europe when they supposedly raped the white women. The descendants of these genes occasionally erupted in the modern era, when apparently “normal” European women gave birth to a child that was a throwback to the Mongols. Dr. Down’s son refined his father’s theory by revealing that in his research as a medical doctor, he found that these imbeciles derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more “pre-human, rather than human.”
In a popular 1924 book, The Mongol in Our Midst, British physician Francis G. Crookshank easily moved back and forth between Mongoloids as a race and as a mental category in what he delineated as the “Mongolian stigmata,” including small earlobes, protruding anuses, and small genitals among both males and females. The obvious conclusion of this linking of retarded children with another race was that these children do not belong in the communities, or even the families, into which they were born. As Crookshank explained, these individuals “are a race apart. For better or for worse, they are not quite as are other men and women around them. They are indeed ‘Mongol expatriates.’ ” Because these children belonged to a different race from the parents, so doctors and officials reasoned, they should be removed. The retarded child was only the extreme example of a wider occurring phenomenon of “Atavistic Mongolism (or Orangism).” According to this theory, the Occidental Mongols bore responsibility not merely for retardation but for much of the crime and feeblemindedness found in the West. According to this theory, Jews, in particular, sustained much of the Mongol influence because they had interbred with Khazars and other steppe tribes, and then brought that degraded genetic influence with them throughout Europe.
In evolutionary theories of race and retardation, the scientific community supplied hard and supposedly dispassionate evidence of what political demagogues and newspaper editors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called the Yellow Peril. Because many East Asian nations proved reluctant to accept Western colonization, the colonial Europeans heaped increasing invectives on them. Although the fear of the Yellow Peril applied to any group such as Filipinos and Koreans, it focused on the two major dangers of China and Japan. As Japan industrialized and built a large army, and as China continued to rebuff colonization or coerced conversion to Christianity, the Asians became enemies in the public perceptions of the West.
Throughout the nineteenth century, fear of Asians mounted in Europe; it can be clearly seen in a poem that Russian symbolist poet Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev wrote in 1894, entitled simply “Pan Mongolism.” The threat of China and Japan to the values of modern civilization were, in his eyes comparable to the era of Genghis Khan when “from the East an unknown and alien people” attacked and destroyed civilization. The same thing was happening again today: “A swarm of waking tribes prepares for new attacks. From the Altai to Malaysian shores/the leaders of Eastern isles/have gathered a host of regiments/by China’s defeated walls./Countless as locusts/and as ravenous,/shielded by an unearthly power/the tribes move north.” Soon “your tattered banners” will be “passed like toys among yellow children,” he warns his readers. “Pan Mongolism! The name is monstrous.”
In the intervening years since the Renaissance and the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan had been degraded to the lowest level of human history. In its newfound colonial power and its self-imposed mission to rule the world, modern Europe had no room for Asian conquerors. Christian colonialists and Communist commissars alike sought to rescue the Asians from the horrible legacy of barbarian dictatorship and bloodthirsty savagery imposed upon them by Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes. The focus on the Mongols as the source of Asian problems, and therefore the rationale for European conquest of them from Japan to India, developed as an integral theme in the ideology of European conquest and colonization. The supposed horrors of Genghis Khan and the Mongols became part of the excuse for rule by the more civilized English, Russian, and French colonialists.
In direct opposition to the European scientists and politicians, the victims of this ideology, Asian intellectuals and activists, found a new hero in Genghis Khan. Across Asia, from India to Japan, the new generation of twentieth-century Asians, wishing to free themselves from European domination, found inspiration in Genghis Khan and the Mongols as the greatest Asian conquerors in history and a vivid counter to the doctrines of European superiority. In part because the Europeans, including the Russians, had so vehemently attacked and thoroughly discredited the memory of Genghis Khan and his role in world history, an increasingly large cadre of Asian political activists turned to his memory for guidance and as a way to rebuke the powers and values of the West.
One of the first to reevaluate Genghis Khan was an unlikely candidate: peace advocate Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Indian independence. As he sat isolated in a prison cell on New Year’s Day, 1931, he received word that British colonial authorities had just arrested his wife and incarcerated her in another prison, and that according to the newspapers, she had been mistreated. Knowing that their thirteen-year-old daughter Indira, who would herself grow up to become the prime minister of India, would be quite afraid and depressed, particularly since she could see her parents only once in two weeks, Nehru began writing a series of long letters to explain history to her as an antidote to what she had learned in colonial schools. Over the next three years, he wrote these letters of four or five pages almost daily; in them, he attempted, despite his Western education, to understand the place of his country of India and his continent of Asia in world history. It was his way to “dream of the past, and find our way to make the future greater than the past.” As he wrote to her in the first letter, “It would be foolish not to recognize the greatness of Europe. But it would be equally foolish to forget the greatness of Asia.”
One of his intellectual tasks as an Asian man and scholar was struggling to understand the historical role of Genghis Khan, whom the West had used in building its harsh images of Asia. By contrast, Nehru depicted Genghis Khan as a part of an ancient struggle of Asian people against European domination. In reference to the sudden appearance of the Mongols on the world scene, he wrote that “one can well imagine what the amazement of the Eurasian world must have been at this volcanic eruption. It almost seemed like a great natural calamity, like an earthquake, before which man can do little. Strong men and women they were, these nomads from Mongolia, used to hardship and living in tents on the wide steppes of northern Asia. But their strength and hard training might not have availed them much if they had not produced a chief who was a most remarkable man.” Nehru then described Genghis Khan as “a cautious and careful middle-aged man, and every big thing he did was preceded by thought and preparation.”
Nehru realized that although the Mongols did not live in cities, they nevertheless had created a remarkable civilization. “They did not know, of course, many of the city arts, but they had developed a way of life suitable to their world, and they created an intricate organization.” Nehru recognized that though they were small in numbers they “won great victories on the field of battle” because “of their discipline and organization. And above all it was due to the brilliant captainship of Chengiz.” Echoing the description of Chaucer, Nehru concluded that “Chengiz is, without doubt, the greatest military genius and leader in history.” In direct comparison with the greatest European conquerors, he wrote, “Alexander and Caesar seem petty before him.” Yet despite all the military prowess, he wanted friendly relations with the world: “His idea was to combine civilization with nomadic life. But this was not, and is not, possible.” The Mongol Khan believed in “the unchangeable law for ever and ever, and no one could disobey it. Even the emperor was subject to it.” Nehru then offered a personal insight: “I have given you more details and information about Chengiz Khan than was perhaps necessary. But the man fascinates me.”
As the West’s fear of the Yellow Peril grew, Asians increasingly examined the concept of Pan Mongolism as a viable path to creating a common identity for themselves. If they could all unite the way the Mongol Empire had once been, then together they could much better fight off the growing power of the Western nations. The theory offered a way for the Asians to transcend nationalist loyalties and work together in their shared quest. In Inner Mongolia, the new spirit led to the temporary creation of a calendar based on the year 1206, when Genghis Khan created the Mongol nation, as Year 1. Under the new Mongol calendar, 1937 became the Genghis Khan Year 731.
Particularly in Japan, which increasingly saw itself as the leader of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century but also needed to distinguish itself from Europe, Pan Mongolism exerted an increasing allure. In the scramble to become the leader of the new Asia, the image of Genghis Khan became a valuable prize. Whoever could claim control of his body, his shrine, or his homeland had a stronger claim for control over his heritage and therefore over the lands he had once ruled. Some Japanese scholars circulated the story that Genghis Khan had actually been a samurai warrior who had fled his homeland after a power struggle and found refuge among the steppe nomads, whom he then led on a conquest of the world.
In the years leading up to World War II, Genghis Khan ironically took on a new importance as a topic not only of propaganda and ideology, but also of practical military application. The Soviets, the Japanese, and the Germans all pushed to decipher, translate, and interpret the newly availableSecret History in the hope that it might provide a useful key to unlocking the Mongol military tactics that allowed them to prevail over China and Russia.
The twentieth-century development of the tank allowed cavalry and artillery to again be combined in one military unit in a way that had not been practical since the Mongol mounted archers. The military minds of all countries looked to these earlier Mongol models for clues of how to fight in the modern era of tank warfare. The Germans found the most effective application in their strategy of the blitzkrieg, which followed the Mongol’s sudden appearance with a highly mobile army that raced across the landscape and kept the enemy surprised and disoriented. In their effort to more precisely understand the Mongol tactics, they began a translation of the Secret History into German. Erich Haenisch, professor of sociology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, prepared a German translation. Haenisch traveled to Mongolia to search for an original Mongol-language version of the Secret History, but he failed to find it. From the Chinese-Mongol text, he managed to make his translation and dictionary. War shortages in Germany delayed the printing until 1941, when a small edition was printed; but even then, difficulties in transportation delayed distribution. The boxes of books remained in Leipzig until 1943, when they went up in flames during an Allied bombing raid. The secrets of the history remained secret from the Nazis.
While the German military pursued its studies of the Mongols, the Soviets had been doing the same. In Stalin’s obsession to understand the two Asian conquerors, Genghis Khan and Timur, he had the body of Timur exhumed, and he sent several unsuccessful military expeditions to the area of Burkhan Khaldun to find the body of Genghis Khan as well. Other scholars busied themselves with translations and some highly eccentric interpretations of Mongol history, such as the angle and power of the sun striking the earth in Mongolia being different than in other parts of the world. From the mixture of the absurd and the serious, the Soviets followed their own version of Mongol strategy in World War II. In a large-scale adaptation of the tactics Subodei used to defeat the Russians at the Kalka River in 1223, the Soviets lured the Germans ever deeper into Russia until they were hopelessly spread out over a large area, and then the Russians began to counterattack and pick them off one by one.
Virtually unnoticed in 1944 during the final bellowing paroxysms of World War II, Sayid Alim Khan, the former emir of Bukhara and the last reigning descendant of Genghis Khan, died in Kabul, Afghanistan, after nearly a quarter of a century in exile from the city he had ruled as a young man. The emir, who claimed descent through Jochi and the Golden Horde, had outlasted other branches of the family. In 1857, the British army removed the last Moghul emperor of India, Bahadur Shah II, and in the following year sent him off to exile in Burma in order that they might bestow his title on Queen Victoria, who became Empress of India in 1877.
When Alim Khan of the Manghit dynasty assumed power as emir of Bukhara in 1910, the Russians had already controlled his homeland for two generations, and he ruled more as a pampered puppet than did his ancestors of earlier centuries. Seven hundred thirty-one years after the first tribalkhuriltai met on the shores of the Blue Lake by Black-Heart-Shaped Mountain in 1189, a much different group, also calling itself a khuriltai but consisting of the delegates of the Bukhara Communist Party, met to depose his last descendant.
In the final week of August, he fled Bukhara, and after a brief attempt to mount a resistance from Tajikistan, he found refuge under British protection in Afghanistan, where he lived for the remainder of his life. As the emir departed, Bolshevik forces under Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze attacked the citadel in Bukhara, the same fortress where, precisely seven centuries earlier, the Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan had led the Mongols to their first victory in central Asia. On September 2, 1920, Frunze reported to Lenin that “the fortress of old Bukhara was taken today following a powerful attack by Red and Bukharian units.” With a dramatic flourish, he added that “tyranny and coercion have been vanquished, the red flag of revolution is floating over the Registan.”
Throughout most of the twentieth century, Russia and China maintained an accord dividing the homeland of Genghis Khan between them, with China occupying Inner Mongolia, the part south of the Gobi, and the Soviet Union occupying the other half, Outer Mongolia, north of the Gobi. The Soviets turned Mongolia into a buffer zone that they kept largely empty between themselves and the Chinese. Just as the British executed the sons and grandson of the last Moghul emperor of India in the nineteenth century, the Soviets purged the known descendants of Genghis Khan remaining in Mongolia in the twentieth century, marching whole families into the woods to be shot and buried in unmarked pits, exiling them into the gulag of Soviet camps across Siberia where they were worked to death, or simply causing their mysterious disappearance into the night of history.
In April 1964, the official Soviet newspaper Pravda issued a stern warning against attempting “to place the bloodthirsty barbarian Genghis Khan on a pedestal as a historically progressive personage.” The Chinese Communists countered the Soviet attack by charging that the Russians should be more appreciative of the Mongols since their invasion of Russia gave the Russians the opportunity “to get acquainted with a higher culture.” No matter how offended the Mongols may have been by the Soviet attacks on their hero, they remained fiercely loyal to the Russians.
The ensuing persecutions in Mongolia destroyed a whole generation of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and other scholars who specialized in topics tangentially connected to Genghis or the Mongol Empire. Somewhere in the 1960s, eight centuries after the birth of Genghis Khan, hissulde,the Spirit Banner that he had carried across Eurasia, disappeared from where the Communist authorities had kept it. From the time of this purge, the sulde of Genghis Khan has not been seen or accounted for. Many scholars assume that the authorities destroyed it in a final act of malice toward his soul. Still others hope that just perhaps the sulde lies forgotten in some dusty basement or bricked-up room from which it will, one day, be brought out to lead and inspire the Mongols once again.