THIRTEEN

The Mongols and their Central Asia and Eastern European Successors

THE MONGOLS OR CHINGIZIDS

The recorded history of the Mongols begins only at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, for it is only with the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols and some Persian and Chinese sources of that time that any historical records become available. It seems, however, that the Mongols were originally a forest people, inhabiting the Siberian and Outer Mongolian forest fringes around Lake Baikal and the river basins to the south-east of it, rather than steppe nomads, even though it is as steppe conquerors, moving swiftly on horseback across vast distances, that they first appear in history. It also seems that the Mongols were, from the outset, intermingled and intermarried with the Turkish tribes of what is now Mongolia, so that the whole of the movements and conquests of the Mongols ought more properly to be described as those of the Turco-Mongols.

The father of Chingiz (in Mongolian, Chinggis), Yesügey, was the minor chieftain of a Mongol clan. Chingiz was perhaps born around 1167, and originally had the name Temüjin (= ‘blacksmith’). He rose to prominence in Mongolia through the patronage of a chief of the Turkish Kereyt tribe, Toghrïl, Wang or Ong Khān (Qa’an) (the Prester John of Marco Polo). Later, Temüjin quarrelled with Toghrïl, and defeated in battle first Toghrïl and then a Mongol rival Jamuqa. He had already acquired the title of Chinggis (? < Turkish tengiz ‘sea’ = ‘Oceanic, Universal [Qa’an or Khān]’), and at a Quriltay or assembly of Turco-Mongol chiefs in 1206 was acclaimed as Supreme Chief of all the Turco-Mongol peoples. He now expanded beyond the confines of Mongolia, and undertook campaigns against the Tibetan Tanguts of the Kansu and Ordos regions of north-western China, and in 1213 invaded China proper, sacking the northern capital of the Chin Emperors in 1215 and undermining their position. Turning westwards now, an invasion of Semirechye in 1218 gave Chingiz a common frontier with the territories of the Islamic Khwārazm Shāhs (see above, no. 89, 4). There had already been peaceful diplomatic contacts, but the incident at Utrār on the Syr Darya in 615/1218, when the Khwārazmian governor there massacred Chingiz’s envoys and a whole caravan of Muslim merchants accompanying them, precipitated the Mongol invasion of the Islamic lands. In 616–17/1219–20, Transoxania was conquered; Chingiz’s son Toluy was sent into Khurasan, and, after a momentary reverse at Parwān in Afghanistan, the last Khwārazm Shāh, Jalāl al-Dīn, was pursued into India (618/1221). Meanwhile, two other sons, Jochi and Chaghatay, were operating in the region of the lower Syr Darya and Khwārazm, destroying the homeland of the Shāhs; for the last years of his life, Jalāl al-Dīn was a fugitive, fleeing ever westwards before the Mongols.

It was the custom of Mongol chiefs to distribute sections of their territories to other members of their families, and this Chingiz had done before his death in 624/1227, allotting each of them a stretch of pasture ground (a yurt or nuntuq) for their followers and herds. The territories which the Mongols had already overrun were too vast to be ruled as a centralised state, and the Mongols themselves were politically and administratively quite unsophisticated; the Mongol language was not yet at this time a written one. Hence a bureaucracy had to be hastily improvised for the conquered lands, if only to divide up booty and to collect taxation for the khāns. The official classes of these lands, Khitan, Uyghur, Chinese and Persian, were drawn upon, and the Buddhist Uyghur Turkish secretaries, the bitikchis, were especially noteworthy. It is from two Persian Muslims in the Mongol service, ‘Aṭā’ Malik Juwaynī and Rashīd al-Dīn Fadl Allāh, that much of our knowledge of the early Mongols and their history comes.

Chingiz’s lands were accordingly divided among his four sons or their heirs in the following way.

(1) The eldest, Jochi, in fact died just before his father; it was the traditional steppe nomad practice to grant the pasture grounds farthest away from the home camp to the eldest son. Jochi’s inheritance now passed to his own son Batu. Jochi’s allocation had been of western Siberia and the Qipchaq steppe, extending into southern Russia and including also Khwārazm, which had always been linked culturally and commercially with the lower Volga lands. His son Batu founded the Blue Horde in South Russia, nucleus of the later Golden Horde, while Jochi’s eldest son, Orda, founded the White Horde in western Siberia, these two groups being united in the fourteenth century. At a later date, various khanates in Russia and Siberia evolved from the Hordes (see below, nos 136–8), while in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the descendants of another of Jochi’s sons, Shïban, namely the Shïbānids or Özbegs, made themselves masters of Khwārazm and Transoxania (see below, no. 153).

(2) The second son, Chaghatay, was given the Central Asian lands to the north of Transoxania, roughly those which had been held by the Qara Khitay and which came to be known now as Mogholistan, and extending into Eastern or the later Chinese Turkestan; to these were added Transoxania itself during Ögedey’s reign. The western branch of Chaghatay’s descendants in Transoxania soon came within the Islamic religious and cultural sphere of influence, but was brought under the control of Tīmūr Lang; the eastern branch in Semirechye, the Ili basin and across the T’ien Shan mountains in the Tarim basin, was more resistant to Islam. However, the eastern descendants of Chaghatay eventually helped to spread Islam in Eastern Turkestan, and they ruled there until the later seventeenth century (see below, no. 132).

(3) The third son Ögedey had been favoured by Chingiz during his lifetime as his future successor as Great Khān, and this was confirmed in 627/1229 by a Quriltay of Mongol chiefs. But within a generation the Supreme Khanate fell into the hands of the descendants of Toluy, although Ögedey’s grandson Qaydu retained his territories in the Pamirs and T’ien Shan, was recognised by the Chaghatayids and remained hostile to the Tolu‘id Great Khan Qubilay until Qaydu’s death in 703/1304.

(4) The youngest son Toluy had received, following traditional steppe practice as otchigin ‘guardian of the hearth’, the heartland of the empire, Mongolia itself. His sons Möngke and Qubilay followed Ögedey’s line as Great Khāns, but only Möngke retained the newly-built centre of Qaraqorum in Mongolia as his capital. The Great Khāns’ possessions included the Chinese conquests, where the Mongols became known as the Yuan dynasty and reigned until the second half of the fourteenth century. The cultural and religious attractions of Chinese civilisation proved strong for the Great Khāns in their northern Chinese capital of Peking; they became Buddhists, and their adherence to this faith, which was to become the dominant one in Mongolia itself, gradually opened up a breach with the subordinate Mongol khāns in western Asia and Russia, who adopted Islam in varying stages. It was one of Qubilay’s brothers, Hülegü, who launched a fresh wave of conquest upon the Islamic world and who founded the Il Khānid line in Persia; thus the khanates of western Asia ceased, for all practical purposes, to acknowledge the authority of the Great Khāns back in Mongolia and in Peking.

EI² ‘Mongols’ (D. O. Morgan).

R. Grousset, L’empire des steppes, Paris 1939, Eng. tr. The Empire of the Steppes. A History of Central Asia, New Brunswick NJ 1970.

J. J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests, London 1971.

B. Spuler, The Mongols in History, London 1971.

D. O. Morgan, The Mongols, Oxford 1986.

131

The Mongol Great Khāns, Descendants of Ögedey and Toluy, later the Yüan Dynasty of China

602–1043/1206–1634

Mongolia and the conquests made from there, then in Mongolia and China, then in Mongolia alone

Ögedey’s reign was one of resumed, triumphal conquest. That of northern China and what is now Manchuria, with the overthrow of the Chin dynasty and the annexation of Korea, was achieved, though it was not until 1279 that the Sung rulers of southern China were finally extinguished. At the other end of the Old World, Batu was raiding the South Russian steppes and central Europe, terrorising mediaeval Christendom (see below, no. 134, 1). Although Ögedey’s son Güyük had numerous offspring, the supreme khanate passed on Güyük’s death in April 1248 eventually to another line, that of Möngke and the descendants of Toluy. When Möngke’s brother Qubilay was hailed as Great Khān by a Quriltay in Mongolia which rival branches of the family did not attend, the descendants of Ögedey broke out in revolt, and under Qaydu and his son Chapar were for long an embarassment to the Great Khāns. They submitted in the end to the family of Toluy, but in later times various members of the house of Ögedey were raised to power in periods of revolution and unrest, and the great Tīmūr (see below, no. 144) set up two of these in Transoxania, Soyurghatmïsh and his son Maḥmūd, to replace the Chaghatayids there.

The Great Khāns in Qaraqorum and, after Möngke’s time, in Peking or Khān baliq (= ‘City of the Khāns’) led a life of a certain barbarian splendour, as the accounts of travellers and vistors from Western Europe like Marco Polo and from the Near East like the Armenian king Hayton show. Material wealth and plunder gained from the Mongol conquests flowed into the capital; artisans and craftsmen were gathered there; scholars, writers and religious leaders made their way to the khāns’ encampment. The Mongols displayed the traditional steppe tolerance of religions, or indifference to them, and were willing to give a hearing to the arguments of Latin and Nestorian Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Confucianists. Inevitably, in Mongolia and northern China, the original animistic shamanism of the Mongols gave way to one of the higher religions, in fact to Buddhism in the Tibetan Lamaist form. This became and has remained the dominant religion of the Mongols of Eastern Asia, and was even carried westwards to the Volga and Kuban river regions by the Oyrot Mongols or Kalmucks in their great migration of the early seventeenth century.

The Mongol Great Khāns gradually settled down to being yet another Chinese dynasty of barbarian origin, the Yüan, considered in traditional Chinese historiography as the Twentieth Official Dynasty and as ruling from 1280 onwards. They ruled in China until in 1368 they were replaced by the native Ming, but well before that they had ceased to have much influence over the Mongol khanates of central and western Asia. Only in Mongolia did the descendants of the Great Khāns survive with some independence, though under the general suzerainty of the Ming emperors.

Lane-Poole, 201–16; Zambaur, 241–3; Album, 43.

EI² ‘Čingiz-Khān’JJ. A. Boyle), ‘Kubilay’ (W. Barthold and J. A. Boyle), ‘Öldjeytü’ (D. O. Morgan); Eir ‘Čengīz’(D. O. Morgan).

L. Hambis, Le chapitre CVII du Yuan Che, les généalogies impériales mongoles dans I’histoire chinoise officielle de la dynastie mongole (= Supplement to TP, 38, Leiden 1945), 51–2, 71–3, 85–9, 106–9, 114–17, 128–32, 136–44. 153–5, 157–8 (tables based on both Chinese and Persian sources).

F. W. Cleaves, ‘The Mongol names and terms in the History of the Nation of Archers by Grigor of Akanc‘’, HJAS, 12 (1949), 400–43.

J. A. Boyle, ‘On the titles given in uvainī to certain Mongol princes’, HJAS, 19 (1956), 14654.

idem, The Successors of Genghis Khan, translated from the Persian of Rashīd al-Dīn, New York and London 1971, with a genealogical table at p. 342.

D. O. Morgan, The Mongols, with genealogical tables at pp. 222–3.