1

The Steppe and the Sown

The Turk has two pairs of eyes, one at the front and the other at the back of his head [… and] spends more time in the saddle than on the ground. Uninterested in craftsmanship or commerce, medicine, geometry, fruit-farming, building, digging canals or collecting taxes, they care only about raiding, hunting, horsemanship, skirmishing with rival chieftains, taking booty and invading other countries. Their efforts are all directed towards these activities, and they devote all their energies to these occupations. In this way, they have acquired a mastery of these skills, which for them take the place of craftsmanship and commerce and constitute their only pleasure, their glory and the subject of all their conversation. Thus, they have become in warfare what the Greeks are in philosophy, the Chinese in craftsmanship.¹

This description of the Turks by al-Jahiz (d.869) recommending their qualities as warriors and defending their inclusion as mamluks (military slaves) in the caliph’s armies could quite as easily have been a description of the Turco-Mongol tribesmen of the twelfth and thirteenth century Eurasian steppe on the eve of their irruption into the sedentary world under the banner of Chinggis Khan. They were all denizens of the vast steppe lands that stretched from Eastern Europe right across the northern hemisphere, brushing the arid deserts of Turkestan, lapping the slopes of the Urals and disappearing into the wastes of Siberia while encompassing much of valleys, highlands and plateaus of Inner Asia. For Iranians, the horsemen of Turan were their legendary rivals while for the Chinese they were the barbarians forever howling at their gates.

Away from these colourful theatrics, the nomadic people of the steppe had always managed a solid working if symbiotic relationship with their urbanised and agricultural neighbours, the people of the sown. The nomad might profess horror at the restrictions that cultivated and farmed land imposed on his wandering flocks, but he was happy to barter with the ‘dust scratchers’ for the fruit of those sown fields and to enjoy the pleasures and clever produce of those despised cities. The sophisticated urbanites had equal disdain for these rude savages with ‘faces like leather-covered shields’² and their crude ways, but they were happy to buy from them their crafts and fine meat and dairy products. A Song dynasty envoy to the Jin court who encountered the Tatars firsthand described them as

‘very poor, crude and incompetent’ whose only talent was mounting their horses and following along with the rest. They lived further out in the steppe and northern forests and were untroubled by the refinements of Chinese civilisation.³

He witnessed the yearly raids called ‘thinning the ranks’ that the Jin troops and their allies launched between 1160 and 1190 to replenish their slave markets of northern China with Tatar captives. In fact, Chinggis Khan only stopped paying the annual tribute to the Jin emperors (1115–1234) in 1210, though it was another ten years before the Jin courtiers, at the Great Khan’s insistence, ceased to refer to the Mongols as ‘Tatars’, a wholly inappropriate term since that tribe had been annihilated and ceased to exist.⁴

THE TATARS

The name ‘Tatars’ had become the generic term for the Eurasian steppe tribes by the late twelfth century. Its first recorded usage was in the Turkic Kul-tegin inscription of 731 referring to the enmity between the ‘30 Tatars’ and the ‘nine Tatars’ and the Turks, and then later the appellation specifically refers to the nomadic tribes in the Hulun Buir⁵ area of north-east Inner Mongolia who Rashid al-Din claims numbered 70,000 divided into numerous clans. Ibn al-Athir, the historian of Mosul, claims that like the Khitans the Tatars remained infidels, and Mahmud Kashghari, the eleventh-century lexicographer, inferred that they spoke Mongolian as well as Turkish.

The Tatars owed their ascendancy over the other Turco-Mongol Eurasian tribes to the Jurchen who employed them as juyin to enforce Jin control over the steppe, its trade routes and resources. It is said that the children of Tatar chiefs enjoyed silver cradles, gold nose rings, pearl encrusted quilts and gold embroidered silk garments, while Mongol chiefs were reduced to employing wooden stirrups and bone arrows. The Tatars’ fate was eventually sealed when they scornfully poisoned a traveller who had stopped at their camp to claim hospitality, as was his right according to the yasa. That traveller, Yesugei Bahadur, was returning from his son Temujin’s betrothal in marriage. No doubt fatefully, Temujin had himself been named after a Tatar warrior whom his father had killed in battle, and now as son he had inherited not only a name but a bloody feud, which he finally terminated in 1196 with the complete obliteration of the Tatar leadership and their status as a powerful tribe. However, their legacy continued in Europe, Persia, Russia, India and among the Arabs, who all continued to use the term ‘Tatar’ in preference to ‘Mongol’. It was particularly appropriate for the Europeans since the designation ‘Tatars’ suggested that they were indeed denizens of Tartarus or Hell.

Though the Tatars suffered physical annihilation, all the Turco-Mongol Eurasian tribes present at the Great Quriltai of 1206, other than the Mongols, were disbanded and subsumed into the greater supratribal group which then came to be known as the Mongols, the ‘people of nine tongues’,⁶ the people of the Yeke Monggol Ulus (Great Mongol State). The state included the peoples of the Kereit, Merkits, Naiman, Tatars, Mongols, Onggirats, Oirats, Tayichi’ut, Buriat, Borjigid, Barghu, Onggut, Kiyat, Jalayrids and a host of subdivisions all of whom had united under one ruler and one law, the yasa. This unprecedented event that united all the nomadic steppe tribes, the ‘people of the felt-walled tents’,⁷ who had been fighting and warring among each other for countless generations, was followed by an equally remarkable development when within a decade most of the neighbouring semi-nomadic tribes and even sedentary people and countries willingly abandoned their ethnic appellations and identities and dissolved themselves within the tidal sweep of the Chinggisid revolution and, united, called themselves Mongols.

Now it has come about that the people of the Khitai, Jurchen, Nankiyas (South China), Uighur, Qipchaq, Turkoman, Qarluq, Qalaj, and all the prisoners and Tajik races that have been brought up among the Mongols, are also called Mongols. All the assemblage takes pride in calling itself Mongol.⁸

THE STEPPE

The steppe, the lands dominated by nomadic pastoralists, had united with the sown, those lands dominated by farmers and urbanists. Although Chinggis Khan had forged a revolution and led the united peoples of the steppe in a series of culminating raids into the lands of the sown, within his lifetime and increasingly after his death many of the lands that were conquered welcomed the globalised empire into which they were being absorbed.

The Turco-Mongol nomadic tribes grazed their flocks over a vast area that is commonly referred to as the Eurasian steppe. The Eurasian steppe covers a wide zone stretching from Eastern Europe to Manchuria and passes through the south Russian steppe, Kazakhstan, Zungharia, Qinghai province and Mongolia. South of this region the steppe transforms into desert, a vast arid zone punctuated with islands of urban and sedentary settlements. In contrast, the prairies, grasslands and gentle mountain slopes of the steppe were devoid of farming settlements or towns. Those who would dwell on the steppe were pastoral nomads and hunters, and life necessitated their seasonal migration in constant search of water and grass.

Though the nomads generally renounced fixed settlements and fixed dwellings, their migration routes were often rigid. As a result, cultivation on a limited scale was practised by these steppe migrants, who would sow suitable crops that they would be able to harvest later on their return migration. Constantly on the move, constantly alert to the environmental, climatic and human changes around them, and constantly prepared for danger and threats, the pastoral nomads were a natural martial force, and war was everyone’s business. Every herdsman doubled as a fighter and raider, and the culture of the steppe resounded with tales and songs of their warrior heroes. These nomads were pastoral armies.

Temujin came from the Turco-Mongol heartlands. The further from these remote valleys and rivers, such as the Orkhan valley and the River Onon, the more interaction there was between the wholly nomadic tribes and those tribes who were assuming sedentary lives. Turco-Mongol people such as the Khitans or Liao had become semi-nomadic, and many among them had even adopted or had certainly adapted the trappings of Chinese culture. Other Turkic people like the Uyghurs, many of whom were merchants, had accepted urban lives, but for those living on the Mongolian plateau their nomadic lives progressed as they had for centuries without need of urban permanence or the limitations of fences and stone walls. What is so remarkable about the rise of Temujin is that he emerged out of the heart of this extremely remote region, secluded and inaccessible even today, from a small dispossessed family group abandoned even by their own extended family and tribe. From total obscurity, ‘a people emerged from the confines of China and made for the cities of Transoxania [Transoxiana]’.⁹ led by Temujin who had acquired his knowledge of the outside world, his aspirations and his inspiration from the heartlands of Mongolia.

The Mongolian plateau is a distinct geographical and topo-graphical region which encompasses modern-day Mongolia, Inner Mongolia and Transbaikalia. Mongolia has traditionally been said to lie between the Altai Mountains in the west and the Khingan range in the east, while being bordered by the Tianshan Mountains to the south and Lake Baikal in the north. These permanently snow-capped peaks reach over 4,000 metres while the plains, generally at around 1,000 metres in the south-west, slope down to 500 metres above sea level in the north-east. The 2,210 square kilometres of Hulun Nuur (Lake Hulun) and the 615 square kilometres of Buir Nuur (Lake Buir) drain the appropriately named Hulun Buir steppe region, while the great River Selenga drains into the world’s deepest lake, Lake Baikal, whose drainage basin covers north-central Mongolia and western Transbaikalia. The Onon and Kherlen rivers both receive their waters from the Hulun Buir steppe and eventually wash into the Pacific Ocean. In the south, the vast Gobi desert formed a natural barrier to the lands of the Mongols, while in the north thick Siberian forests similarly isolated the region. Within this enclosed area fir, cedar and beech trees thrived on the moist slopes and deep valleys that alternated with steppe lands, mountain meadows and woodlands, which thinned out nearer the hot, dry winds of the inhospitable Gobi. July and August brought scorching heat, which transformed the sweeping, undulating carpet of green scattered with a rich blossom of flowers that had appeared with the spring and struggled into early summer. October saw the landscape gradually turn white as winter snows began the annual blanketing of the whole region and rivers and streams froze over in the bitter cold. These harsh conditions continued until the April thaw, forcing both man and beast to adapt to this unforgiving cycle of extremes. The Vatican spy John of Plano Carpini witnessed snow in June 1246,¹⁰ admittedly highly unusual for a region where temperatures reached in excess of 38 degrees. Violent squalls, thunder and lightning, desert storms driving burning sands and biting gusts of Siberian cold, along with its unremittingly hostile landscape, sculptured and nurtured some very hard men and women for whom the struggle to survive in this merciless milieu was innate.

The tribes

Greater Mongolia, or historical Mongolia, occupied the most easterly part of the great Eurasian steppe, and it has been inhabited by Turks, Mongols and the Tungus tribes since ancient times. These Altaic tribes were united linguistically and ethnically, and they shared similar social traits and customs, but their fierce independence of spirit precluded any sense of political concord until the appearance of Temujin in the later twelfth century. The genius of Chinggis Khan was his achievement in unifying the Turco-Mongol tribes whose custom hitherto had been self-destructive and directed inward in hostile rivalry, leaving themselves open to the blatant manipulation of the Jin kings to the east.

Each tribe or two tribes lived separately; they were not united with one another, and there was constant fighting and hostility between them. Some of them regarded robbery and violence, immorality and debauchery (fisq va fujur) as deeds of manliness and excellence. The Khan of Khitai used to demand and seize goods from them. Their clothing was of the skins of dogs and mice, and their food was the flesh, of those animals and other dead things […] The sign of a great emir amongst them was that his stirrups were of iron; from which one can form a picture of their other luxuries. And they continued in this indigence, privation and misfortune until the banner of Chingiz-Khan’s fortune was raised.¹¹

For most of these nomadic people the tribe was the basis of their strength and their identity, and their loyalty to their khan was unquestioned. Temujin understood this and was able to use this sense of loyalty and identity to his advantage. His family’s abandonment by their tribe had allowed him to question the basic premise of the society with unfettered eyes shorn of the emotional crust of generations of unchallenged tradition.

There was little social cohesion above the level of the fiercely independent tribe, and tribal leaders generally resisted the formation of supratribal authority unless the forfeiting of their autonomy promised very great rewards. Wealth was generally measured by the possession of livestock, the protection and amassing of which were the overriding concerns of the tribe. When alliances, confederations and supratribal arrangements were entered into, the motivation behind such moves was the protection or amassing of wealth. Chinggis Khan was remarkable from the outset in that he was able to form so cohesive and unified a supratribal polity out of such a hostile and mutually suspicious collection of warrior tribes.

The tribes of Turco-Mongols in the twelfth century can very generally be divided into the purely pastoralists (cattle and sheep grazers) and the forest hunters/fishers. The less numerous forest hunters could be found around Lake Baikal, the source of the River Yenisey and the upper reaches of the River Irtysh, whereas the pastoralists occupied the lands south of this region, from the foothills of the Altai Mountains to Hulun Nuur and Buir Nuur. However, just as forest hunters raised cattle and tended sheep so too did pastoralists grow crops and cultivate land selectively, and all united in a passion for the hunt. In fact, the hunt, referred to as the nerge, or battue, played an extremely important role in the life of all the Turco-Mongol tribes. The targets of the organised hunts were wild donkeys, antelope, boar, game and even lions, as well as rival tribes and enemies. Lassoes, bows and arrows, and spears were all employed. The nerge served the function of recreation, military training, food gathering and the provisioning of winter food stocks, and it was an event in which the whole tribe partook. Horses, cows, sheep, goats and camels were also reared to provide the tribe’s basic nutritional needs, and cows, goats, camels and horses were used as beasts of burden or draught animals. As well as being a source of food and wool, sheep were also kept for the leather they produced. Animals were slaughtered in early winter and preserved or frozen for the long winter months.

The pastoralists moved from one highland area to another several times each year, the distances travelled limited by the size of their flocks, and they rarely stored fodder. The choice of settlement site had to be carefully considered, especially in winter, so that their different animals’ dietary needs could all be met, often a major problem with the size of their flocks. These nomads were very aware of any infringement to the easy access of their animals to grazing land and reacted with animosity to any limitations placed in their path. They grudgingly accepted the vagaries of the weather and the periodic displays of nature’s displeasure when rivers burst their banks or rock falls or earthquakes destroyed their pastures, but they reacted unanimously with violent contempt when man-made obstacles created problems.

In fact, tales of that violence were often fictitious, and the steppe and the sown maintained a symbiotic working relationship, and neighbours such as the Uyghurs, Khitans and the Jurchens quietly introduced nomadic society to some of the luxuries and advantages of the settled, sedentary life. Violence was generally directed at their fellow nomads who were felt to be impeding and intruding on each other’s lives and flocks. With growing clans and expanding flocks the inevitable resulting conflicts created another problem. The basic unit of Turco-Mongol society was the highly patriarchal clan divided into a number of sub-clans, and these clans were strictly exogamous, which meant that brides had to be sought from outside the clan. Where an uncooperative atmosphere existed, this troublesome tradition would often compound an already fraught situation. When brides were not offered willingly, they would be seized forcibly. This abduction of brides became the basis of many bitter cross-generational feuds including the one between the Merkits and the Borjigids, Temujin’s clan, which ultimately affected the stability of the thirteenth century’s globalised world.

However, under other circumstances, brides would also be used to cement intertribal alliances. Polygyny was common among those who could afford it, even though women generally enjoyed a very high status among the Turco-Mongols. Where marriages were agreed, they were usually agreed between clan elders and were often seen as a commercial or political pact or contract. Polygyny was practised, but the first wife retained her status as chief wife regardless of the relationship between herself and her husband. Dokuz Khatun (d.1265) broke these traditions. She was not Hulegu’s first wife, but she remained his well-respected chief wife despite being childless, and she maintained a large and influential ordu until their deaths in 1265. On a man’s death, his estate went to the youngest son of his chief wife, and this son was regarded as the guardian of hearth and home, the otchigin, a uniquely Mongol practice. Though Temujin’s tribe, the Borjigids, had once possessed status and influence, on the death of his father Yesugei, any position or standing they might have assumed evaporated and the tiny family group was forced to etch out a life of penury on the banks of the River Onon.

The Kereits had long been a very powerful tribe even though they had come originally from the Turks. They were accepted as Mongols however, and many of them had converted to Nestorianism, originally in 1000 CE according to Bar Hebraeus. They occupied the upper reaches of the River Orkhon and much of their continued influence was said to be spread through their much sought-after daughters who had been strategically married throughout the tribes. The Naimans, another very powerful tribe, lived west of the Kereits, and their lands extended from Lake Zaysan to the higher reaches of the River Selenga, and from Ubsa Nuur in the north to the River Qara Irtysh in the south. The Naiman had been very reluctant to submit to Chinggis Khan, and famously Kuchluq Khan (d.1218) from their ruling clan fled into exile rather than submit. Kuchluq’s close ties to his neighbours, the Uyghurs, facilitated his move into the semi-nomadic and urbanised western regions.

During Temujin’s youth power lay with the Tatars and the Merkits. The Merkits were forest dwellers and hunters who resided south-east of Lake Baikal along the lower River Selenga, while the Tatars who enjoyed the patronage of the Jin Emperor lived in the east, south of Buir Nuur. The Tatars had attracted the attention of the Jin because they were considered a potential if not actual threat. The Tatar’s bellicosity and the reputation of their fighting men ensured a high profile and their resulting association with the Eurasian steppe’s history of conquest and barbarity. The Tatars became the generic name for all Turco-Mongol tribes, and this association survived Chinggis Khan and his attempts to quell the term’s usage.

Other tribes figured in pre-Mongol history and were resurrected by Rashid al-Din, the vizier and historian of the Chinggisids, in his Compendium of Chronicles (Jami‘ al-tawarikh) and so deserve a brief mention. The Kirghiz’s claim to fame is that they drove the Uyghurs out of Mongolia in 840 and gained a reputation for their brutality before they were confronted by the Khitans and driven to the regions around the upper Yenisey. The Oirat were forest dwellers from west of Lake Baikal who dominated the region after the return of the Yuan Emperor to Mongolia following his court’s expulsion from China by the Ming in 1368. The Tayjut occupied the heart of Mongolia and, together with the Borjigid, formed the original Mongols who peopled the confluence of the Onon and Ingoda rivers where the steppe merged into forest, and the tribes existed both as pastoralists and forest hunters. The Onggut lived in the semi-arid region south of the Gobi and were converts to Nestorianism. They were called ‘White Tatars’ by their Chinese neighbours. The Jalayrid, who were to become particularly famous after the fall of the Iranian Ilkhanate in 1335, originated in the steppe lands between the Onon and the Selenga rivers, while the Onggirat lived south-east of Buir Nuur.

The Uyghur’s history is certainly closely entwined with that of the Turco-Mongols, but they cannot be considered members of that broad grouping. The Uyghurs had embraced the sedentary and urban lifestyle, though elements among them still practised nomadism and could be classified as semi-nomadic. In fact, in 745 CE they established a kingdom with its capital, Ordu Baliq, on the River Orkhon near to the first Chinggisid capital, Qaraqorum. The Uyghur kingdom swallowed up Mongolia and extended to Tibet and Eastern Turkestan. Their kingdom was short-lived though, and in 840 it was destroyed by the Kirghiz coming from the the River Yenisey in the north-west. Eventually the Uyghurs established a state on the north-east boundary of the Tarim basin which was absorbed without resistance by the advancing Chinggisids. The Uyghurs, who were religiously diverse, became administrators, ambassadors and merchants in the new expanding empire, and their alphabet, a Semitic script, was utilised by the Chinggisids for the writing of Mongol documents and official forms until the invention of Phags-pa.

ALTERNATIVE KINSHIP

Because of the strictly enforced rules of exogamy and the wide practice of abduction of brides from hostile tribes, categorising tribes according to ethnic, religious or even linguistic groups presents problems. In his study of the tribal composition of the medieval Mongol tribes, Owen Lattimore¹² divides the tribes into those clans that enjoyed the status of rulers and the clans classed as subordinate. The subordinate status was a result of either the clan suffering military defeat or because it felt in need of the protection of a stronger group. Within the clans, kinship was an element of its organisation, but kinship did not necessarily mean blood kinship. Instead there existed the institution of the anda, which was a very close bond voluntarily entered into and sealed with a sworn oath and the mixing of blood creating two equal ‘brothers’. These freely created kinships were considered as strong as, if not stronger, than actual blood ties.

Another form of freely entered kinship common at this time was the institution of the noker, which was the voluntary adoption of a new leader devoid of any form of familial ties. The term noker has entered the Persian language, and from implying an associate or comrade it came to mean ‘follower’ and it now means ‘servant’. The would-be noker was obliged to formally renounce his loyalty to any former clan to which he might be bound by blood connections. Again, the connections between the noker and the adopted leader were as strong, if not stronger, than the bonds of blood.

With the practice of abduction of wives, the buying and selling, bartering and exchanging of human commodities, and the strict imposition of exogamy and polygyny, the Turco-Mongol tribes remained religiously, linguistically and ethnically diverse. Therefore, to create and enforce a sense of common identity, there appeared a plethora of spurious genealogies binding the clan’s members through loyalty to a common ancestry and a shared history. Rather than grouping together close-knit families tied by subliminal DNA bonds, tribes and clans worked on a network of political arrangements and agreements, cemented by personal and emotional experiences. Though the tribal system had underpinned centuries of steppe history, Chinggis Khan was able to abolish it with a swift series of decrees agreed in the course of one quriltai, the Great Quriltai of 1206, which saw Temujin crowned as Chinggis Khan, ruler of ‘the people of the felt-walled tents’ and the ‘people of nine tongues’.¹³ Replaced by a neat manageable system of decimal units, the tribes dissolved into a unified command structure overseen by the Great Khan and his most loyal and trusted generals, each of whom was a commander of a tuman (10,000). From there commanders, selected on merit, were appointed to oversee squadrons of 1,000, 100 and 10. Loyalty and success were rewarded.

WOMEN

Despite the prevalence of polygyny, women played a role in all aspects of the tribe’s life, including the fighting.¹⁴ During prolonged campaigns, women accompanied their husbands and were expected to take over all the duties of their menfolk when they were absent fighting. Women rode horses, took charge of the draught animals and their carts, which were often of considerable size, and of course performed more traditionally female tasks such as milking, stitching and sewing, including the arduous sewing of the felt tents. The milking of mares, however, along with the manufacture and repair of arrows, bows, saddles and the special qumis bags were tasks reserved for men. Tribal chiefs routinely consulted with their wives, and it was expected that the women should proffer their opinions and advice. Sorqoqtani Beki¹⁵ (d.1252), wife of Tolui Khan (d.1232), exercised great power behind the scenes and influenced the reigns of her sons, all four of whom achieved office and three of whom achieved imperial office. The enlightened rule of Qubilai (r.1261–94) and Hulegu (r.1258–65) clearly bore her imprint and influence. When Mongke Qa’an (r.1251–9) dispatched his brother Hulegu to Iran, he publicly instructed him to listen to his chief wife: ‘Consult Dokuz Khatun on all matters.’¹⁶ Women often exercised considerable real power, as is demonstrated by the regencies of Toregene Khatun (widow of the Great Khan Ogodai; regency 1241–6) and Oghul Qaimish (widow of the Great Khan, Guyuk; regency 1248–51). The principal wife and her children were invariably awarded special status. Only the sons borne by Chinggis Khan’s principal wife, Borte Fujin, were considered eligible for succession. Upon a man’s death, his wives, considered part of his estate, were inherited by his youngest son, following the practice of ultimogeniture. The natural mother was not included in this inheritance package.

Considering the far from subjugated role that women played in Mongol society, it appears strange that they accepted their roles as wife and mother so readily after abduction. Such abductions were forced on older and married women and could likely happen to a woman on more than one occasion. Babies born in such circumstances were fully accepted by the abductors as was the case with Temujin’s first born son, Jochi, whom Borte gave birth to around nine months after the end of her own abduction by the Merkits. In this case Chinggis Khan declared that Jochi be awarded all the rights and the status due to him as his first-born son, and he was defiantly deaf to the whispering and doubts expressed concerning Jochi’s paternity. Women might well have been treated on occasion as commodities in the human bazaar to be bartered and sold, but men were equally bought and traded or passed on as gifts and prizes, especially when captured during military operations. Once a slave did not mean always a slave, however, as the example of Terkan Khatun, queen of Kirman (r.1257–83), clearly testifies.¹⁷

RELIGION

The religious tolerance of the Mongols was unique in a very intolerant world, and various theories have been advanced to explain this defining trait.¹⁸ They were Shamanists, and Shamanism remained with them, however gently and hidden, until the end. Shamanism was itself a very tolerant faith without dogma and without scripture. It preached communion with and respect for the elements and could comfortably accommodate alternative belief systems. Shamanism was also a very practical religion concerned with the here and now rather than with the nutritional needs of the soul. Rituals were followed to ensure success and to avert misfortune. Prayers were offered to cure illness or to ensure victory. Burnt sheep shoulder blades were interpreted to unveil the future and avoid calamity. The Shamans offered a connection to the spirit world and communication with the ancestors, who should always be appeased. The teachings of Islam, Buddhism and Christianity belonged to another world, and the Mongols did not perceive any conflict and therefore they felt no threat or hostility from the practice of those religions. Instead they saw their tolerance of other religions and the appeasement of other practitioners as a kind of cosmological insurance and their encouragement of prayers for their own well-being as extra divine cover. ‘The Mongols believed in taking out as much celestial insurance as possible,’¹⁹ as David Morgan would have it, and he cites a wonderful passage from Edward Gibbon possibly awarding the Mongols with a clarity of vision not fully deserved.

The Catholic inquisitors of Europe who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of the barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.²⁰

The Mongols’ distinctive religious tolerance has sometimes been interpreted as indifference, while others have noted their tantalising interest in conversion and their frequent expressions of intention to proclaim their faith in Islam or Christianity or whatever religion was expedient or relevant at any given time. Tales of secret baptisms, conversions and religious sympathy are scattered among the sources, and during the period when the Europeans were still a force in Syria and Palestine, it is clear that the Chinggisid elchis (envoys) would deliberately suggest that the Mongol khans were in the process of converting to Christianity.

It was not difficult for the Mongols to create this impression since they all had a genuine deep interest in theology and one of their most characteristic pastimes was the grand staging of court debates, often theological and battled out between proponents of rival faiths.²¹ One of the fullest accounts of these grand theological verbal jousts is provided by the Papal envoy William of Rubruck (1220–93), who travelled to Mongke Khan’s court in 1254.²² Nestorianism was already well established throughout Asia, and Islam had increasingly begun to find followers among the Turco-Mongols, and while Qubilai Khan sent his bishops west to act as Archbishop of Tabriz and to lead an embassy to Europe and the Vatican, the Holy See appointed bishops to Hangzhou and the Yuan capital, Khanbaliq (Beijing).

Despite verifiable conversions, many Mongol converts were still met with scepticism and cynicism due in part to their reluctance to abandon all facets of their deeply entrenched Shamanist beliefs and practices. Ghazan Khan (r.1295–1304), who championed Chinggisid Islam in Iran, left himself vulnerable to attack from his enemies because of his continued adherence to the yasa and aspects of Shamanist ritual.²³

The Shamanism as practised by the Turco-Mongols derived from animism with detectable elements of Chinese cosmology and Mazdaism. The absence of public and communal worship and lack of clearly recognisable clerics led many to believe that they followed no religion at all and were simply Godless heathens. Yet, at the other extreme, the learned Persian bureaucrat, ʿAta Malik Juwayni saw no real conflict between the faith of his Mongol masters and Sharia law. He claimed that Chinggis Khan

abolished reprehensible customs which had been practised by those peoples […] and established such usages as were praiseworthy from the point of view of reason. There are many of these ordinances that are in conformity with the Shariʿat.²⁴

The shaman was a powerful figure within the tribe. As Temujin rose in stature and his following spread, the shaman Teb-tenggeri, also known as Kokochu, challenged his authority with the aim of becoming at the very least the power behind the throne. So threatened did Chinggis Khan feel, even though he was surrounded by his loyal commanders of a 1,000 and the ranks of his faithful followers, that he was unable to relax until Teb-tenggeri was dead and his back-bone broken. Chinggis’s extreme anxiety is expressed dramatically in the pages of the Mongol’s own great epic, the Secret History, which implies that his quick removal of the funeral tent and any remains of the shaman indicate the fear that Teb-tenggeri’s followers might retaliate for their leader’s murder.²⁵

For the Mongols, Shamanism was essentially a form of ancestor worship plus the animistic reverence for mountain tops and river springs. Tenggeri, the Sky God, could be approached from mountain peaks, and in order to initiate contact, headdresses or hats had to be discarded and belts thrown over the shoulder. Juwayni described Chinggis Khan’s impassioned pleas to Tenggeri to advise him how to react to the provocation of the Khwarazmshah. He was reluctant to go to war with a neighbour whom he perceived as powerful and dangerous. ‘[F]or three days and nights, [he] offered up prayer, saying: “I was not the author of this trouble.”’²⁶

THE STEPPE BEFORE CHINGGIS KHAN

Chinggis Khan and his united Turco-Mongol hordes were not the first invaders from the steppe to shatter the uneasy truces of the Chinese northern territories. The Khitans, who eventually became known as the Liao, stormed out of the steppe from beyond the ‘Great Wall’²⁷ and conquered the rich, arable lands of northern China. The semi-nomadic Khitans settled these lands rather than merely plundering and destroying what they had overrun, and soon they become absorbed and tamed by the civilisation they there encountered. It was then that they assumed the Chinese name ‘Liao’ and adapted Chinese cultural mores and practices to their increasingly sedentary lifestyle. It was in this way that the Khitans extended ‘Chinese’ rule deep into Mongolia, establishing garrisons in the Orkhon valley and driving out those Turco-Mongol tribes unwilling to submit to the west. However, the Khitans were to meet with a dramatic change in their fortunes c.1120 when they in turn were displaced from power by a far superior military force from the north. The Jurchen from Manchuria forcefully drove the Khitan ruling class out from the lands they had settled in northern China and forced those who remained into a life of servitude.

The Jurchen founded the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and promptly declared war on their neighbours to the south, the venerable Song dynasty (960–1279), though it is suspected that there had been collaboration between the two against the Liao and that the recriminations had arisen after arguments over the spoils and conflicting claims on the land. The Jin dynasty dominated the whole region and continued to influence and manipulate the Turco-Mongol heartlands as well as China. Though the Jin Emperor Xizong (r.1135–1149) studied the Chinese classics and adopted Han cultural traditions, Jurchen nobles retained the top positions and Khitans remained oppressed and discriminated against. Though still able to exert influence over their nomadic neighbours, the Jurchen launched a large construction programme to build two important sections of the Great Wall – the Border Fortress, or the Boundary Ditch. It was formed by digging ditches within which lengths of wall were then placed. In some places, subsidiary walls and ditches were added for extra strength. Work began in about 1123 and was completed by about 1198, accounting for more than 2,000 km of wall known as the Old Mingchang Walls and New Great Walls. In 1161 the Jurchen formed an alliance with the Tatars and helped them enforce their domination over the other Turco-Mongol tribes and end the ambitions of their former ally, Qabul Khan (r.1130–46), great-grandfather of Chinggis. It was through the alliance with the Tatars that the Jin dynasty was able to retain its grip on power over northern China. The Jurchens continued to dangle the allure of their support before their warring neighbours, including the Kereits, and in this way ensured their continued domination.

Meanwhile, as Temujin was uniting the Turco-Mongol tribes to his banner and raising his eyes beyond the horizon of his steppe homelands, the Islamic world was riven in strife. Though he thought himself invincible and to many he appeared unchallengeable, the Khwarazmshah was a dangerous paper tiger. He thought himself the most powerful ruler in the Islamic world and yet he had not even gained the support let alone recognition of the Caliph of Baghdad, nominal leader of the Sunni Islamic world. His own state, which encompassed much of Iran and western Turkestan, was riven with ethnic rivalry between Turks and Tajiks, as Persians were often known. His mother had the solid support of the Qipchaq Turks of the north, while he had the grudging support of the Ghurids and Persian statelets from the south. On his border to the east ruled the Qara Khitai, exiled Khitans who ruled over a Muslim population with the support and recognition of the ʿAbbasid Caliph of Baghdad. The Khwarazmshah was an unstable despot with grand delusions of power and ambitions nurtured by those illusions.