3

Out from the Steppe

A persistent myth that survives among the tales, legends and topoi that constitute Mongol history is the belief that Chinggis Khan and his small coterie of loyal supporters backed by a united army of nomadic warriors acted alone and unaided. The image of their arrival, unexpected and unheralded, followed by the unprecedented ferocity and barbarity of their attack owes much to the chronicles of the time. This defining portrait served both the victims of the Mongols’ onslaught and the perpetrators and instigators of attack equally well. The anonymous medieval Russian text Chronicle of Novgorod and its powerful account of the first encounter between Europeans and the Tatars has done much to cement the impression of the helplessness of those unfortunates cast in the path of this tsunami of destruction.

They appeared suddenly, without warning, without reason and left just as abruptly, without explanation for their savagery or vengeance. No one recognised their language, no one had witnessed their approach and no one had any explanation for their sudden exodus. Then, like so many of the people of those times, encouraged by their chroniclers and bearded holymen, they hardened themselves with the numbing faith in their merciless God and his mysterious ways and the conviction that their sinful lives had brought this calamity on them. ‘God alone knows.’¹

Juwayni’s quote of a Persian eyewitness succinctly summarised the initial impact of the Mongols in Iran: ‘They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they departed.’² This image re-enforced the impression that the Mongols appeared unheralded and projected an aura of menace and extreme foreboding. In fact, this image was largely a deliberate construct and false in that their attacks were usually planned and supported by elements on the ground. For a variety of reasons local support was often proffered or resistance was often absent or half-hearted. The myth of invincibility quickly became enmeshed with the reality as victory followed triumph and defeated armies rallied to the loyal ranks and added their own accounts of the inevitability of Mongol victory and their own hopeless but matchless bravery in the face of overwhelming destiny.

Modern reports continue to support the impression that help and involvement by non-Mongol actors was somehow undesirable and practised with an element of reluctance while at the same time offering no explanation as to why this should be so, if indeed it were so. In fact, the Mongol irruptions were greeted by a variety of reactions both negative and decidedly positive. It is also worth stressing that possibly the Gods were also smiling on the Tatar hordes as many assumed they were³ since recent evidence from climatologists studying tree-ring formations have concluded that between the period of 1211 and 1225 the weather over the Eurasian steppe was unusually benign. Neil Pedersen, a tree-ring specialist with the Lamond-Doherty Earth Observatory, claims that the weather, which they have estimated during this decade was unlike any other period experienced over the Mongolia region in the past 1,100 years, allowed for horse stocks, initially the key to Mongol power to increase. ‘What makes our new record distinctive is that we can see 15 straight years of above-average moisture,’ Pedersen explains. ‘It falls during an important period in Mongol history and is singular in terms of persistently wet conditions.’ The prolonged period of good conditions meant abundant grasses and a corresponding increase in the herds of livestock and war horses that became the basis of Mongol power. These 15 years contrasted markedly with the long and exceptionally severe droughts that ravaged the region during the 1180s and 1190s, causing unrest and division.⁴

With the irruption of Chinggis Khan into the sown, the myth makers went into overdrive. Chinggis Qa’an had his loyal following now numbering very many thousands. Those hard-core loyalists and veterans of Lake Baljuna could now be rewarded suitably, and they became his military arms ready to stretch themselves over the lands to the south, east and west. Chinggis Khan needed to act fast, firstly to quell any possible dissent, secondly to replenish his treasury and thirdly to pre-empt and counterplay any who would think of challenging his rise and supremacy. His ardent followers might shout themselves hoarse with their cries of loyalty, but if their saviour did not deliver that support would evaporate and prove as ephemeral as their unity. Chinggis Khan had to provide the spoils and booty to keep his men content, and he needed triumph and victory to maintain his image and legend.

TANGUT (XIXIA)

Chinggis Khan’s initial move was against the Tangut (Xixia) in 1209, an expedition against a small adversary but one organised on Chinese lines, which provided his newly fashioned forces with much needed experience and confidence and an opening of a western front for future campaigns. The raid on the Tangut forced them to retreat into their fortified capital. Chinggis had not come across such defences before and he had no immediate answer to this alien tactic of hiding behind fortifications. Although, the Tangut king eventually accepted the Mongols’ terms, it was an important lesson for them. Chinggis allowed a Tangut administration to continue in power, and the Tangut king pledged to supply future Mongol military operations with troops. To cement the allegiance he presented Chinggis with a princess as a new wife. Chinggis Khan was content with submission and neutralising, confident that his flank was protected for his planned assault on a far more ambitious target, the Jin dynasty of the Jurchens.

CONQUEST OF CHINA

Chinggis Khan’s conquest of Xixia was followed immediately after by an invasion of the Jurchen, a move which had the open support of the Khitans (Liao) and the tacit support of the Song court, both of whom had suffered a humiliating defeat c.1125 which had been so traumatic that the shame still burned. The Jurchen had first subdued the Khitans forcing many into exile and the rest into servitude after this Manchu-Tungus people thundered out from the north and occupied what is now northern China. Their chieftain Aguda made effective use of cavalry helped by Khitan turncoats and by his death in 1123 he had conquered all the territory held by the Khitan. Aguda’s successor, Taizong (r.1123–35), now felt free to turn on the Jurchen’s erstwhile ally, the Song. eventually driving them from their northern capital, Kaifeng. The Song armies retreated and eventually established a capital in the southern city of Hangzhou which was, significantly, named Xingsuozai, ‘temporary capital’ (hence, Marco Polo’s Kinsay) and crowned Gaozong (1127–62) the new emperor. Despite a peace treaty signed in 1141–2 between the Jurchen’s Jin dynasty and the Song, China was divided and the Song proved incapable of breaking the stalemate until the irruptions of Chinggis Khan provided an opportunity to possibly regain former lands and hence their clandestine support for the Great Khan.

Not only did the Jin regime harbour a sizable minority of resentful Khitans who had been unable to flee east with their brethren to found the Central Asian kingdom of the Qara Khitai, but the Jurchen themselves were split between those who favoured closer cultural and political ties with China and welcomed the gradual Sinicisation of their society and those who resisted and resented the erosion of their traditional mores and way of life. The Song/Jurchen peace treaty established the official borders between the two hostile states rather than peace, and a complete cessation of hostility was never achieved. The Jin never felt overly secure in their new state, fearing rebellion from within, political instability among their ruling elite and military threats from both the south and the north-west where they had erected a string of fortifications, walls and moats, especially in the region which today comprises Inner Mongolia. Many of the soldiers who manned these frontier outposts were Khitans, and when they saw the Chinggisids massing on their borders there was little will to fight or resist an army many saw as liberators rather than conquerors.

The fall of the Jin

The Chinggisids’ final victory over the Jurchen was not fully realised until well after the Great Khan’s death in 1234. During those long years the newly constituted Mongol armies were able to learn and perfect new battle techniques, incorporate new weaponry and soldiery into their ranks, and expand and train the administrative and trading areas of the Empire. They also captured or extorted vast amounts of plunder in silks and gold and took hundreds of Jin captives, including engineers and soldiers. In his typically logical and determined fashion, Chinggis and his staff studied the problems of the assault of fortifications. With the help of the captured Jin engineers, they gradually developed the techniques and built the siege engines that would eventually make them the most successful besiegers in the history of warfare. Many of their captives were found to be willing advisers and recruits. These were Khitans who had been defeated and exiled 100 years before and the memories and resentment among them were still strong, as was their deeply felt animosity towards the Jurchens. The Khitans proved to be instrumental in the formation of the Chinggisid Empire from the very beginning and at each stage, particularly in the integration of the east and west sides of the Empire, since the Khitans had long lived among the Iranians, the Turks and the Chinese.

Chinggis Khan and his generals, assisted by the Khitan specialists, were soon making their own improvements and developing their own techniques. The two Chinese engines which the Mongols adopted, and later modified when they compared them to the siege weapons of the Persians, were the light catapult or mangonel which could launch a 1 kilogram missile over 100 metres and required a crew of 40 prisoners to create the tension on its ropes, and a heavier machine, with a crew of 100 that would fire a 10 kilogram projectile over 150 metres. Although the lighter device was limited in range, it had the advantage that it could be dismantled and carried with the main body of the army. Both of these machines could be used to either launch rocks at walls and gates or to hurl naptha or burning tar into the enemy’s ranks. After their campaign against the Khwarazmshah c.1220, the Chinggisids adapted the siege machines captured from the Shah’s army. The Islamic design was adapted to the lighter Chinese models to create something similar to the European catapult or trebuchet, with a range of more than 350 metres. Chinggis’s men also adapted the ballista, which looked like a giant crossbow and fired a heavy arrow over the same range as a mangonel but with far more accuracy. Ballista were light enough to be carried onto the battlefield.

The most important war-making technique that the Mongols adopted was the Chinese invention of explosives. These were used either in the form of rockets, which were fired en masse into the enemy’s ranks, causing little damage but much alarm; or as grenades – clay vessels packed with explosives and hurled either by catapult or by hand. Virtually every new military invention was taken up and adapted by the Mongols, and with these machines they quickly developed the modern principles of artillery.⁵ A prolonged battering from rocks, burning tar, grenades and fire bombs into the enemy lines would be followed up by an attack from mounted archers. These carefully rehearsed manoeuvres depended on great mobility and discipline. Although the bombardment was not nearly as accurate as the mounted archers, it spread fear and confusion among the enemy and made the archers’ job easier.

Assimilation

Chinggis Khan knew that his troops needed booty but that the obvious source of that booty was finite and not inexhaustible. He had to stabilise the source of his revenue and wean his followers away from their reliance on battle and the dubious fruits of the battlefield. In addition, his armies were inexorably expanding as defeated troops and cowered combatants surrendered or signed up with the victors. Some like the Khitans defected gladly, never having owed any loyalty to the Jurchen occupiers from Manchuria, as did increasing numbers of Chinese who likewise felt no loyalty to the Jin Emperor. These troops brought with them new skills and armaments and instructed the Chinggisids in siege warfare and the conquest of cities.

Initially the Jin had bribed the invaders to return to the steppe, which of course they did, but only for the winter, and the next season they were back and the pillaging started again. The so called ‘Great Wall of China’ presented no problem for the steppe armies since they simply by-passed it from the south and in this way lay siege to the Jin’s northern capital, Zhongdu, a town close to the site of modern Beijing. The Great Wall was more a string of often unconnected fortifications, sections of moat and wall, and it would be left to the Ming emperors to connect these various sections of fortification in order to create the great barrier of later fame. The Muslim trader Khwaja Jaʿfar, a Baljuntu, was sent to infiltrate the Jurchen court, and in 1214, on behalf of Chinggis Khan, he was eventually able to conduct peace negotiations with the besieged city of Zhongdu. It fell to the Chinggisid forces in 1215, long after the Jin Emperor had retreated and established his capital in the less exposed city of Kaifeng on the Yellow River.

The assimilation of Khitan and Chinese troops also revealed alternatives to rewarding combatants with pillage and plunder, and the steppe generals began to see the advantages to be had from a living, working population rather than a dead or scattered one. Increasingly not only did fighters defect and sign up with the victorious army but Khitan and Chinese administrators and traders also wanted to join what was becoming very clearly the winning side and a side which was making every sign of staying. In 1218 the Khitan Yelu Chucai joined the Chinggisid administration and he is credited with hastening the pace of transformation of the new administration from a predatory vehicle of steppe oppression to a functioning bureaucracy for the effective governance of the country’s resources. Even though he was a Khitan, the Confucian scholar Yelu Chucai and his father and grandfather had served the Jurchen regime faithfully and he was fully prepared to serve the new conquerors while at the same time determined to influence their policies in the interests of their subjects. He is recorded as explaining to the Great Khan, Ogodai (r.1227–41), that though the Empire had been conquered on horseback, it could not be ruled on horseback. Just as the invincible Chinggisid army crushed all before it and gained strength and nourishment from those troops it defeated and absorbed, so too did the nascent steppe political structures overrun the local governments and then absorb, observe, learn and develop the dynamic and fresh administrations that were emerging right across Asia. It was these early bureaucrats in particular who became the backbone of the emerging empire.

The legendary noyan Muqali assumed responsibility for the campaign in the east, which was increasingly becoming dependant on non-Mongol forces. The Jurchen regime had few friends, and both the Khitans and the Song remembered the events of a century before when the invading armies from Manchuria overthrew the Khitan (Liao) state in c.1120 and in 1127 ousted the Song from their capital in Kaifeng. From their ‘temporary capital’ in Hangzhou, the Song were able to influence the indigenous Chinese in the north, and the Liao of course, who were ethnically close to the Mongols, fully integrated with the Chinggisids. With the absorption of the Khitans, and the Uyghurs in the west, the nature of the Chinggisid Empire was irreversibly changed.

By 1211 at a grand quriltai on the River Kerulen, the Great Khan accepted the formal recognition of sovereignty over the Uyghurs and the Qarluq thus securing the new empire’s western borders. The defeat and submission of the Jin was not so easy, but the process of defections, military victories and coercion had been set in motion. Meanwhile, action was also taken against any remaining resistance from the steppe, and in 1217 Subodai and Tokuchar massacred the last of the Merkits. Chinggis Khan was able to say to his eldest son, Jochi, who had asked his father to spare the youngest son of the Merkit commander Kodu in recognition of his skills at archery, ‘It is for you that I have conquered so many empires and armies. Why do we require him?’ And with that the last of the Merkits was killed.

Prince Kuchluq

Finally, Chinggis gave the order to hunt down and annihilate the last steppe rebel, the Naiman prince Kuchluq, who had continued to defy Chinggis Khan and now ruled in the west as neighbour to the mighty sultan of Islam, the ruler of the lands of the west, the mighty Khwarazmshah, ʿAla al-Din Muhammad. Kuchluq had escaped the field of battle after having contemptuously defied the cautious tactics of his father, ‘Old woman’ Tayang Khan, and sought sanctuary in the west with the ‘exiled’ Khitans (Liao) whose empire had become an established player in the Islamic world. The Qara Khitai as they were known, though still Buddhists, ruled over their Muslim subjects with equanimity and justice and had earned the respect and sometimes the support of not only the regional leaders but of the caliph in Baghdad and the contemporary intelligentsia and cultural elite including the writers of the very influential Mirror for Princes. Hailed as a ‘Mighty Wall’⁶ against the infidel hordes threatening the Dar al-Islam’s eastern borders, the Qara Khitai enjoyed the active support of the caliph al-Nasir (r.1180–1225) who saw such support as also undermining his enemy, the Khwarazmshah. It was rumoured in some quarters that the Caliph had even appealed to Chinggis Khan for help against the reviled Khwarazmshah who had established a rival caliphate in his domains.⁷ Though the Qara Khitai court had almost become a fixture of the medieval Islamic world, its gurkhans had neither forgotten their roots nor their desire to return home to northern China. When the princely figure of Kuchluq of the Naiman arrived at their court seeking shelter and safety, the traditional customs of steppe hospitality were not forgotten and Kuchluq was awarded a regal welcome which eventually included the hand of a Khitan princess in marriage. Recognising his experience, Kuchluq had initially been appointed a military adviser and he had been allowed to integrate his own Naiman troops into an elite force⁸ but his true intentions were soon revealed and calling upon the military assistance of the Khwarazmshah he soon assumed control of the domains formerly under the command of the gurkhan. For the Muslim subjects of these lands, these events did not merely represent a change of leadership but more the end of the world as they knew it.

[Kuchluq] compelled the inhabitants to abjure the religion of Mohammad, giving them the choice between two alternatives, either to adopt the Christian or idolatrous creed or to don the garb of the Khitayans.⁹

The muezzin were silenced, the schools were closed and destroyed, and finally the imams were herded outside the city walls and assembled before the Naiman prince in the plain. When the Imam of Khotan was publicly crucified at the gates of his own seminary as punishment for winning a grand theological debate held in public by their new ruler, Kuchluq, the Muslims in despair turned to the only resource left them, prayer. But, Juwayni reveals ‘the arrow of prayer hit the answer and acceptance’ and ‘God Almighty, in order to remove the evilness of Kuchluq, in short space dispatched the Mongol army against him.’¹⁰ For Juwayni, the matter is clear. God’s purpose in unleashing the might of the Chinggisid army was twofold: he would first save the faithful of Turkestan and rid the Muslims of their oppressor, Kuchluq Khan, and secondly he would also undermine the Khwarazmshah and reveal him in his true light, as an ally of heretics and infidels, namely his self-appointed Alawite caliph and the villainous Kuchluq.

THE QARA KHITAI

The Qara Khitai (Black Cathays) were descendants of the Khitans (Liao), semi-nomadic Turco-Mongols, who fled westward in the 1120s after their defeat by the Jurchens from Manchuria. Though many Liao were left behind resentfully serving their new masters, the Jurchens, in northern China, a mass migration ensued under the leadership of Yelu Dashi (d.1142), moving west until they reached the lands of Turkestan. In 1141 after defeating the last Great Saljuq, Sultan Sanjar at the historic Battle of Qatwan, they established a state in Transoxiana and Turkestan.¹¹ It was their defeat of the Muslim Saljuqs which gave rise to stories of the Christian king, Prestor John, answering the call of the hard-pressed Crusaders in the Holy Lands. They practiced the religious tolerance endemic to the Eurasian steppe societies and Christians, Buddhists, Manichaeans and Muslims all existed harmoniously under their decentralised regime. They were accepted and recognised by their Muslim subjects but also very significantly by the wider Islamic world, including the caliph al-Nasir in Baghdad. The Khitans were adopted by the Islamic world as their ‘Great Wall’ against the barbarians to the north and east. Muslim sources such as the Persian medieval commentator ʿArudi Samarqandi’s Chahar Maqala¹² refer to the Qara Khitai in the most respectful and positive terms. Even though they were accepted and became an integral part of the Islamic world, the Qara Khitai never lost their dream of returning to their ancestral lands in northern China, usurped by the hated Jurchen.

The Naiman prince Kuchluq, the last remaining enemy from the days of Temujin’s rise to power, still retained his oppressive grip on power over the Qara Khitai. Kuchluq was a Buddhist neophyte and he ruled his newly acquired kingdom with a convert’s zeal, the Muslim population suffering accordingly. Such was the hatred felt for Kuchluq by his Islamic subjects, that the Mongols were viewed as potential liberators and Chinggis Khan as their saviour. Their former rulers, the Qara Khitai whom Kuchluq had brutally ousted, had been popular and their ethnic ties to the Mongols were duly noted by the Muslims suffering under the cruel oppression of their new ruler, Kuchluq. For Chinggis Khan, Kuchluq who had gathered to his cause the remnants of the rebel Naimans, represented a potential military threat and also unfinished business.

During the Chinggisid raids into the Jin territories, many Khitans had defected to the Mongol forces, so with the arrival of the Mongols in neighbouring Uyghur lands, many Qara Khitai saw a potential ally against the usurper, Kuchluq, rather than an invader. In 1218 Chinggis Khan sent his general Jebe Noyan to dispose of Kuchluq, a task which he completed promptly and with the support of the Qara Khitai people. The oppressed Muslim peoples of eastern Turkestan rose up and welcomed the armies of Chinggis Khan under the command of Jebe Noyan as liberators and they ‘knew the existence of this people [Mongols] one of the small mercies of the Lord and one of the bounties of divine grace’.¹³

The incorporation of eastern Turkestan, and the lands and people of the Qara Khitai was one of the most significant phases in the development of the Mongol Empire since it was these people whose influence was to be so crucially important and pervasive in the organisation and administration of the growing empire. The Khitans shared common roots, traditions and culture with the Mongols. However, they had already progressed far from their nomadic beginnings and in the Qara Khitai they had a fully developed state and the experience of statecraft and administration and these were things they were now willing to share with their new masters and allies, the Mongols. Just as the top commands and military posts had gone to those who had shared Temujin’s lean times, many of the Empire’s top administrators emerged from the ranks of the Qara Khitai and the Uyghur.

One reason for the collapse of the Qara Khitai forces other than the widespread dislike of Kuchluq and the popular uprising at the appearance of Jebe Noyan, was the weakness of the Qara Khitai army. With the connivance of Kuchluq, Sultan Muhammad, the Khwarazmshah, and vassal of the Qara Khitai had risen in revolt against the gurkhan of the Qara Khitai. While the Sultan declared Khwarazm, Khorasan, Persia, Ghur [Afghanistan] and Transoxiana independent and under his sovereignty, Kuchluq imprisoned the gurkhan and made himself ruler of eastern Turkestan and the remaining lands still under nominal Qara Khitai control. The dispirited army he inherited were no match for the growing Mongol forces who arrived at his borders fresh from their victories in the east.

THE SINS OF THE FATHER

It is doubtful that Chinggis Khan ever intended to launch a military assault on the mighty Khwarazmshah who reigned supreme and unopposed over the eastern lands of the Dar al-Islam. If Juwayni’s account is to be believed, the Great Khan was a reluctant adversary and would have far preferred to establish a flourishing commercial relationship with his new powerful neighbour. There was room for both emperors. ‘I am the sovereign of the Sun-rise, and thou the sovereign of the Sun-set.’¹⁴ Certainly, it was not an ideal time to enter into another major military conflict since his newly acquired lands in China were not yet secure and he risked overreaching his resources. The Chinggisid intelligence network had not yet reached the sophistication of later years, and the Great Khan might still have believed the self-regarding tyrant’s delusions of grandeur. In fact the Shah was heir to a Saljuq iqtaʿ whose iqtadar, his father Tekish (d.1200), had declared his autonomy and built up a formidable army. The reign of Tekish is a complicated catalogue of internecine murder and intrigue, and the ebb and flow of power from one warlord to the next was a musical chairs of petty ascendancies with Ghurids, Qara Khitais, Khwarazmians, Qara Khanids and Qipchaqs contributing the chairs. This resulted in his son ʿAla al-Din Muhammad eventually seated astride the largest throne and believing the propaganda fed to him by his courtiers.

Though the Khwarazmshah had managed to consolidate his hold over the eastern Islamic world, his arrogance and undisciplined, savage troops alienated him from the Caliph of Baghdad, al-Nasir, who refused to hear his request for the khutba to be read in his name during Friday prayers. In a desperate bid to win the recognition of the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Nasir (1158–1225) and be awarded the same status as his predecessors the Saljuqs whose sultans’ names had been recited in all the mosques in the lands of the faithful, inscribed on the coins of the realm and read in the khutba, ʿAla al-Din Muhammad ibn Tekish Khwarazmshah (r.1200–20) sent a delegation to the Caliph, pleading that his father Tekish had in 1194 already had the last Great Saljuq sultan, Togril III b. Arslan (r.1176–94), killed in battle at Rayy¹⁵ and that no other ruler or dynasty possessed the stature to command the honour that he sought and demanded. When Caliph al-Nasir refused his embassy the Khwarazmshah withdrew his own recognition from the Caliph who he henceforth declared a usurper of the caliphal throne. Not only did he declare the ʿAbbasids illegitimate but he stated his belief that ‘the Sayyids of the line of Hussein had the right to the Caliphate’.¹⁶

The ʿAbbasid Caliphs had been backward in undertaking holy wars in the way of God Almighty and though possessing the means thereto, had failed to defend the frontiers, to extirpate the heterodox and the heretical and to call the infidel to the True Faith, obligatory to all in command; and so had neglected this pillar, which is the main pillar, of Islam.¹⁷

He unleashed his troops whose reputation for cruel barbarity exceeded that of the Mongols and then proceeded to appoint a ‘caliph’ of his own. These incursions greatly alienated the traditionalist Sunnis from the Khwarazmshah.

The Khwarazmshah had solidified his own position as undisputed ruler of the eastern caliphate, he had undermined al-Nasir’s opposition to his continued political and military rise and he had also weakened the situation of his only other sizable enemy, the Qara Khitai. To strengthen the impact of his denunciation of al-Nasir, he also appointed his own choice of caliph to lead the Muslim world, a certain Sayyid ʿAla al-Mulk (or ʿImad al-Din) Tirmizi, an appointment which caused local controversy among his own ulema.¹⁸

It is said that Caliph al-Nasir was so enraged by these manoeuvres of the Khwarazmshah that he actually sent word to a rising power in the east, Chinggis Khan, to request his help in ridding himself of this troublesome neighbour. Ibn al-Athir records Persian claims that ‘he is the person who roused the Tatars’ ambition for the lands of Islam and wrote to them about that’.¹⁹ Such a move on the Caliph’s part is not so outrageous as it might initially appear. The Qara Khitai had for many years acted as the Caliph’s local ally and had ruled wisely and justly with the consent of their Muslim subjects. They practised religious tolerance, a characteristic of the Turco-Mongol ethnic group of which they were a part. The Caliph might well have expected a friendly reception from Chinggis Khan and indeed he might well have received just such a friendly reception if the Khwarazmshah had not intervened and murdered those initial Mongol envoys.

The Shah claimed the caliph al-Nasir to be in league with his pagan enemies and neighbours the Qara Khitai, which was at least partially true, and declared the Baghdad caliphate thereby invalid and in consequence endorsed the candidacy of an Alid anti-caliph, ‘a sultan who succoured Islam and had passed a lifetime in Holy War, that sultan had the right to reject that Imam and to set up another [in his place]’.²⁰ However, since this unilateral declaration had no doctrinal basis and had no popular Shiʿite support, the anticipated rallying of the true and faithful to the Khwarazmian banner never materialised.²¹ In fact the Khwarazmshah had little real support at home and his hold on power was increasingly tenuous, though he appears to have remained blind to the precariousness of his situation surrounded as he was by silver-tongued advisers. His throne remained afloat because of a lack of any united opposition and the absence of any credible or charismatic figure strong enough to topple him.

His mother commanded great loyalty and support from the Qipchaq Turks who formed the core of his fighting forces and who were responsible for most of the atrocities with which his armies were associated. Terkan Khatun was part of the legacy that Tekish’s son had inherited and she provided the fragile and dangerous alliance forged by marriage which established a modus vivendi with the northern, part pagan, Qipchaq tribes. It was Terkan Khatun who was able to ensure that her son’s empire would be neither united nor stable and who would later choose the security of Chinggis Khan’s hospitality rather than accept the proffered protection of Ai Chichen, the mother of her stepson Jalal al-Din. It was Terkan Khatun’s links with the steppe tribes, her lineage associated variously with the Qanghli,²² the Yemeki Baya’ut²³ and the Qipchaqs of whose khan she was reputedly the daughter,²⁴ that established a degree of stability in the expanded Khwarazmian Empire and at the same time ensured a permanent state of tension in the army and the government. ‘We are Ghurs, you are Turks and we can never live together’²⁵ – so said the Ghurid amirs expressing the sentiments of the Persian factions in this state where the ascendancy of Terkan Khatun’s bloc was increasingly becoming manifest.

The reputation of the Khwarazmian military for barbarity, and even the Khwarazmshah’s eventual downfall, was often blamed on the Qipchaq tribesmen.

Mercy and compassion were far removed from their hearts. Wherever they passed by, that country was laid in ruin and the people took refuge in their strongholds. And indeed it was their cruelty, violence and wickedness [lit. ‘uncleanness’ = paganism] that brought about the downfall of the Sultan’s dynasty.²⁶

In ʿAla al-Din’s army most of his top commanders were connected with his mother’s tribe, and to ensure their continued loyalty he had to appease his mother’s wishes. Juwayni, who was inspired to eulogise thus over the memory of this formidable woman, ‘Whatever thou dost, the cruel world will write “Oppression” upon thee with sharp pens,’²⁷ claimed that Terkan Khatun held her own separate court and financial bureau dealing with the appointment of officials and iqtaʿs²⁸ and that her influence extended into her son’s affairs and the running of the kingdom as a whole. This plus the usual accusations of licentiousness, murderous machinations and ungodly behaviour painted a damning portrait of the rival power behind the throne with only Shihab al-Din Muhammad al-Nasawi dissenting from this view, he seeing the Sultan’s mother as just and impartial.²⁹ What is beyond dispute is that Terkan Khatun wielded considerable real power in the state before the advent of the Mongols and in the interlude after the Shah had fled, a fact which the Great Khan himself recognised when he instigated his stratagems to bring down the Sultan’s kingdom after hostilities had been initiated. It was she who seized the capital of Gurganj and the surrounding provinces after the disintegration of the Empire was underway and was supported by the remnants of the army that still held her in great esteem, though all of course to no avail.

BLIND AMBITION

On the eve of the Mongol invasions, therefore, the bloated Khwarazmian Empire could in no way be viewed as a coherent or a stable entity. From the Mongols’ viewpoint the Khwarazmshah had appeared an extremely formidable opponent. He apparently commanded a huge army and controlled a vast area of territory and if he had listened to and utilised some of his able commanders, he could have been in a stronger position to ably confront the enemy from the east. However, the Khwarazmshah forbade any communication between his generals, so fearful was he of conspiracy, and strategy could only be discussed in his presence. He was a paper tiger with ambition.

This hostility from the west, when added to the tension nearer home between the factions supporting his mother and their antipathy towards the more sedentary Persianised elements of his state, left the Sultan in a very tenuous position and goes some way to explain his bizarre battle strategy adopted against the armies of the Great Khan when the Mongol invasion got underway. The Sultan was unable to present a united front to Chinggis Khan simply because he did not have one to present and he was also fearful of a military rebellion should he attempt to concentrate all his forces under a central command. Throughout the kingdom the common people were suffering crippling taxes violently imposed by desperate tax farmers, lawlessness caused by chronic political instability, and rebellion and resistance were being fomented everywhere. Nasawi quotes an amir, Badr ad-Din al-ʿAmid, as declaring to Chinggis Khan after his surrender at Utrar, ‘The Khan should know that the Sultan is in my eyes the most hated creature of Allah because he has destroyed many of my relatives. If I were in a position to take vengeance on him I would do so, even if it cost me my life.’³⁰ As the military state grew so the demands on the treasury for the upkeep of the ill-disciplined soldiery many of whom were Qipchaq pagans or Muslim in name only, increased. The bureaucracy, based on the principals of Saljuq prime minister Nizam al-Mulk’s administration (1063–92), could not be sustained and the breakdown divided the land-owning classes, the urban aristocracy, the merchant classes and the supporters of Terkan Khatun, who favoured a traditional Saljuqid administration, as well as the ulema already disaffected after the break with Baghdad, from the palace and often from each other. It was the disastrous events at Utrar that threw the true extent of the Kingdom’s disunity into sharp perspective. That the Khwarazmshah did not immediately denounce the massacre of a caravan of Muslim merchants confirmed the alienation of the commercial classes and convinced others that Chinggis Khan was to be the judgement of God on the pseudo-Muslim ‘Ata’ al-Din Muhammed.

If the accounts of the Delhi-based historian Juzjani are to be accepted, the Khwarazmshah had detailed knowledge of not only the extent of the Mongols’ power but of their reputed barbarity. His envoy the Sayyid, Baha al-Din, had travelled to Tamghaj to ascertain the truth of the stories reaching the Shah concerning Chinggis Khan’s conquests in the east and reported back in graphic detail the veracity of the Great Khan’s reputation. So great had the slaughter been outside the city of Tamghaj that the envoys were forced to struggle for days through congealing human fat.

When we had proceeded onwards another stage, the ground had become so greasy and dark from human fat, that it was necessary for us to advance another three stages on that same road, until we came to dry land again.³¹

The Shah’s interest in the Great Khan’s affairs were not aroused through apprehension at a coming storm from the east, Juzjani suggests, but more from professional concern as to the influence such developments might have on his own ambitions towards the countries of Hind and Jin. ‘The ambition to appropriate the countries of [Hind and] Chin [Jin], had become implanted in the heart of Sultan Mohammed, Khwarazmshah.’³² To keep his troublesome army occupied and paid, the prospect of further military adventures would have been tempting to the Shah and with one early partial victory over Mongol forces in 1215–16³³ to encourage him, Shah Muhammad would have found it easy to disregard the wishes and advice of his merchants who saw a more lucrative future in cooperating with the initially conciliatory neighbours from the east.

The military operations by the Mongols in northern China had resulted in widespread agricultural devastation and as a result new sources of grain and other such produce had to be found for the Mongolian homelands. The pervasive hostilities had disrupted the usual channels for trade, and vital supplies had to be imported making use of the ubiquitous Uyghur and Muslim middlemen, ‘trading barbarians of the Western countries’.³⁴ For Chinggis Khan the lands of the Islamic west would have been viewed as an attractive area in which to encourage free trade using these Muslim merchants, many of whom had already established commercial ties with the lands now under his sway, to act as middle men. These merchants would have been acquainted not only with the awesome military side of the Mongols’ nature but with their record of religious tolerance, or more accurately, indifference, and that relations with the new conquerors could be mutually beneficial. There is no evidence of any hostility towards Muslims from the Mongols. ‘For in those days the Mongols regarded the Moslems with the eye of respect, and for their dignity and comfort would erect them clean tents of white felt.’³⁵ While underestimating the threat from the Mongols and overestimating the true capabilities of his own forces, the Khwarazmshah effectively alienated an important and influential sector of his empire when he executed the Great Khan’s envoys, and was blamed both directly and indirectly for the Utrar massacre. His lame excuse that the Muslim merchants were spies in the pay of the infidel was disingenuous since it was widely known and generally accepted that merchants were a source of intelligence, news and gossip and in turn acted as a conduit for propaganda, religion and ideas wherever they travelled. The Khwarazmshah himself tried to employ Khwarazmian Muslim Mahmud Yalavach, an ambassador and later a great statesman of the Mongols, to act as his ears at the court of the Great Khan. The only intimation of any covetous intentions emanating from the Mongol court was Chinggis Khan’s reputed reference to the Khwarazmshah as his most favoured son should a peace treaty be concluded between them.³⁶ However, Ata al-Din Muhammed regarded the Great Khan not so much as a threat and a rival for the lands of Central Asia but as an infidel usurper of the lands of Jin which his ambition had already concluded were destined for him and the greater glory of Islam. Just as he could dismiss the caliph of God in Baghdad and replace him with his own appointment, so too could he dismiss this rude barbarian slouching in from the east towards the Dar al-Islam.

Faced with the immanent irruption of the Mongols, the Khwarazmshah made no attempt to heal or unify his deeply fragmented and disunited country. Rather he further isolated himself with his delusions of grandeur and disregarded the one class who might have brought some form of financial salvation for his kingdom in the form of increased commercial ties and expanded business links with the wealthy markets of the Far East. The murder of the Utrar merchants sounded the death knell for his empire.

[The governor of Utrar] in executing his command deprived these men of their lives and possessions, nay rather he desolated and laid waste a whole world and rendered a whole creation without home, property or leaders. For every drop of their blood there flowed a whole Oxus; in retribution for every hair on their heads it seemed that a hundred thousand heads rolled in the dust at every cross-roads.³⁷

This final act damned him in the eyes of his fellow Muslims and these feelings awoke strong emotions years after the event. The words of an Imam of Herat reporting the sentiments of Chinggis Khan whose prisoner he had been and spoken to Juzjani reflected infidel views with which the faithful could identify and clearly demonstrated the chasm between the Shah and his supposed subjects. ‘Khwarazm Shah was not a monarch: he was a robber. Had he been a monarch he would not have slain my envoys and traders who had come to Utrar, for kings shall not slay ambassadors.’³⁸ Before launching his devastating forces onto what he initially supposed to be an imperial army, the Mongol chief sought guidance and strength from Tenggeri: ‘I was not the author of this trouble; grant me strength to exact vengeance’,³⁹ words surprisingly close to those reported by Bar Hebraeus:

O Lord and Creator of the Universe, Thou knowest what my object was, and that it was intended for good. And this mine enemy hath begun and he wisheth for evil. Therefore I entreat Thee to reward him according to his works.⁴⁰

None of the sources dispute the fact that the Khwarazmshah brought about his own destruction and that of the lands of Islam through his own misguided deeds. It is interesting that Rashid al-Din entitles the section of his narrative dealing with the 1220 capture of Bokhara as ‘Genghis Khan arrives in Bukhara [Bokhara], and the details of its liberation (istekhlaṡ)’, even though he deals with the destruction and killing which took place in the city as well as the infamous incident of the blasphemous misuse of the great mosque and the chests. In fact, as Juwayni makes clear, Tolui Khan was unaware that he had entered a mosque and thought that such a magnificent building was one of the Shah’s extravagant palaces and therefore deserving of his contempt and disdain.

Numbers

The weaknesses and factionalism present in the Khwarazmian Empire quickly became apparent to Chinggis Khan once he had turned his attention westward with the intention of exacting revenge for the terrible breaches of international protocol perpetrated by the rogue shah. The ease with which the Great Khan swept across Central Asia and Khorasan is often explained by the vast numerical superiority of his armies, though the subject of figures cited in the various sources is a highly contentious one. Juzjani claims an army of 700,000 or 800,000⁴¹ men assailed the Khwarazmians, whereas the Secret History records the total manpower at Chinggis Khan’s disposal at the time of the 1206 quriltai as 105,000⁴² and Rashid al-Din with access to the Altan Debter reckons the Mongol princes inherited a total force of 129,000 men at the time of the Great Khan’s death in 1227.

If Chinggis Khan had moved westward with a force of 800,000 men, 4,000,000 horses, 24,000,000 sheep,⁴³ plus families and servants, it is unlikely that he could have afforded to show the later magnanimity he did to those towns which surrendered peacefully to his visitations. From the towns which did fall to his forces, considerable numbers of hostages and slaves were taken, including artisans, many of whom would have been of little practical use on campaign, and this would have required a complex backup system in order to facilitate their transfer to Qaraqorum and would have constituted a serious drain on his available manpower. Though undoubtedly large, the Mongols employed terror tactics and propaganda to maximise the effect of the forces that they did command. ‘It is a peasantry in the dress of an army, of which, in time of need, all, from small to great, from those of high rank to those of low estate, are swordsmen, archers, or spearmen.’⁴⁴ But it was a peasantry whose full-time occupation was horsemanship, hunting and training for war. It was a life which the commanders and the commanded were immersed in totally, and their discipline was almost instinctive. How many of those men would be called upon at any particular time to take part in actual combat cannot be known. If the precise number of fighting men can never be assessed with any real degree of accuracy, there can be no doubt that the Mongol army formed a very large and dangerously formidable foe.

THE PUNISHMENT OF GOD

Though the voices most clearly heard and those which have resonated most influentially with the annalists of Europe have been those whose agenda needed the Mongols to be portrayed as Islam’s nemesis and the harbingers of death and destruction, one seldom heard tradition records a far different account. In many accounts of the destruction caused by Chinggis Khan’s forces, the Mongol armies are seen as agents of a vengeful God visiting death and destruction on a sinful mankind, in particular the Armenian sources where the chroniclers were invariably clerics who naturally interpreted natural events as well as catastrophic political events as moves and strategies on a divine and universal chessboard. In such accounts man is powerless and helpless in the hands of an angry and reproachful God. Chinggis Khan himself is reported to have told the grandees of Bokhara that he was on a divine mission. ‘I am the punishment of God. If you hadn’t committed great sins, God wouldn’t have sent a punishment like me upon your head.’⁴⁵ In Sufi circles events were seen in even more extreme terms, and not only were the Mongol armies seen as agents of an angry God but the leader of those terrible armies was himself the representative of God. The Qalandar shaykh Qutb al-Din Haydar reputedly warned his followers to flee from the Mongols because they could not be defeated since they were under the protection of God. ‘They are bringing a dervish with them and they are under the protection of that dervish.’⁴⁶ This claim is made elsewhere with further elaboration. Sometimes the Mongol hordes are led by a nameless figure dressed in white gowns, flowing turban and fulsome beard and other times he is named as Shaykh Najm al-Din Kubra, other Sufi shaykhs or even Khizr, the immortal prophet of the Unseen World himself. Dawlatshah, not the most reliable of chroniclers, relates that ‘saints of the faith’ saw ‘the people of God and the prophet Khizr in front of the army of Chingiz Khan, guiding that army’ and he narrates the conversation between the doomed Khwarazmshah and his heroic son, Jalal al-Din, where the father explains his despondency and despair after repeatedly hearing a chant from the unseen world declaiming ‘Oh infidels, kill the evil doers.’⁴⁷ In fact this eerie chant recurs in other Sufi accounts and underlines a very common thread in Muslim narratives of the time that the Khwarazmshah’s actions and behaviour and his response to the overtures from Chinggis Khan brought about the calamity which shook the Muslim world.⁴⁸ The fall of the Khwarazmshah depicted as an act of a vengeful God might also have explained for many the speed and apparent ease with which the Chinggisid forces swept across the Shah’s domain and possibly the use of gunpowder which would not have been witnessed in military conflicts by the people of the ‘western regions’ at this time.

The Shah’s ignoble end arrived in a befitting manner. He died of pleurisy alone and in agony on a small island, near the port of Abaskun in the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea, aware that his kingdom was lost, his wife had been violated and presumably murdered, his women were disgraced and in slavery, his sons were dead. ‘He was so dumbfounded and stunned that the world turned black before his eyes. He writhed in worry and anxiety and bemoaned that catastrophic and horrible event until he gave up the ghost.’⁴⁹

Jalal al-Din Mingbirdi

In fact the Khwarazmshah was survived by his son Jalal al-Din Mingbirdi who had an ambiguous legacy, depending on whose history is believed. After a valiant battle against a Mongol army which saw him briefly triumphant, Jalal al-Din was eventually cornered by Chinggis Khan himself on the banks of the Indus. Plunging boldly into the fierce waters the young prince made good his escape and in so doing earned the amazed admiration of the Great Khan who ordered his men to cease their pursuit, exclaiming, ‘In all the world no one has either seen or heard of such a man among the renowned ancients.’⁵⁰ That he abandoned his wives and children to an uncertain future receives little attention in the sources, and Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah remains an enigmatic figure equally reviled, eulogised and even deified in the many commentaries and chronicles that he has inspired. Juwayni eulogised him in his history as a heroic figure who re-awoke Persian honour and refused to kowtow to the Turanian Mongols and he conveniently ignored the ragtag mercenary army which Jalal al-Din led over nearly two decades in a murderous jaunt ‘leaping all over [Iran] like a stag’.⁵¹ Juwayni was a pen-pusher while Jalal was the man of action he could never be and his eulogy seems to be an indulgence, a private joke for his educated friends, though his account of the Prince’s end agrees with other versions.⁵²

Jalal al-Din is most infamously remembered in the Caucasus, where his drunken and murderous debauchery stains peoples’ memories to this day. Certainly the Khwarazmians were far more feared than the Mongol armies by Christians and Muslims alike. In the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, a church now overlooks the ravine marking a turn in the powerful River Kur where the Sultan threw the bodies of his victims and those who refused to renounce their faith. The Kartlis Tskhovreba, or History of Georgia, recounts the horrors of his occupation of the country in the final tome of that medieval narrative, the anonymous Hundred Years’ Chronicle. The anonymous cleric dwells on the horrors inflicted on the people of Georgia in lingering detail, and though he acknowledges Jalal al-Din’s role in the destruction, he blames the kings, the mtavaris and the many who ‘turned their face toward evil and sank into disease and the suffering of Sodom and Gomorrah’.⁵³ For the chronicler, the Sultan’s greatest mischief the ‘recounting [of which] fills [him] with shame’ was not the murdering of countless helpless citizens, mothers and babies whose corpses filled ‘the streets, ravines, and ditches’ but the destruction of their churches and the defilement of their icons which he forced his victims to trample upon, ‘beheading those who refused to do so’.⁵⁴ Jalal al-Din continued to torment the Georgians, in fulfilment of God’s wrath in the view of the chronicler, until his forces were defeated and scattered by the approaching Chinggisids and he fled from their superior might, seeking haven alone and anonymously in the mountains of Kurdistan. ‘Finding him sheltering there, an ordinary resident killed him’ and stole his ‘sash, saddle, and quiver trimmed with precious stones’.⁵⁵

Rashid al-Din reports on the Prince in a more dispassionate tone detailing his alcoholism, which would seem to account for his occasional displays of valour and heroics and his far from glorious double dealing in his relations with figures as diverse as the sultan Iltumish of Delhi; his brother Ghiyath al-Din; his one-time iqtadar Baraq Hajib; the Qutlughshah of Kirman; Abu Bakr, the ruler of Shiraz, and the warlords of the Caucasia. He narrates the famous story of Jalal al-Din’s murder in 1231 at the hands of Kurdish bandits who waylay the finely dressed traveller for his clothes, which proved to be their undoing when they proceeded to display their fancy garments back among their companions in town. So conspicuous were they in such finery that word soon reached the lord of Amid who ordered the men seized and upon their confession, executed.⁵⁶ Both Rashid al-Din and Juwayni also relate other reports that in fact the Sultan did not die and that he in fact renounced his former wayward ways, willingly surrendered his clothes and weapons, and adopted the life of the wandering Sufi. It is even reported that so devout did Jalal al-Din become that he was touched by divine light and never actually died but rather entered some kind of occultation awaiting the right time to appear once more among men. Jalal al-Din’s mercenary army continued to spread terror and mayhem through western Asia, usually in the pay of local warlords until they were finally assimilated into the Mamluk forces of Egypt.

Interregnum

When Chinggis Khan turned his attention away from Iran and turned his forces back to the east, Iran was left under military rule with a number of Iranian city states pledging loyalty to the Great Khan. However, the country remained on the Empire’s periphery and in many ways suffered from neglect, remaining at the mercy of the various armed elements that sought to benefit from the state of near anarchy that settled over the country in the absence of any strong central command. The Chinggisid military governors became yet one more set of brigands bringing chaos and instability to the Iranian plateau with its isolated walled cities surrounded by hostile deserts and mountains that had been abandoned to the competing armies of the Khwarazmians, the Assassins, Kurds, Lurs, caliphal troops and any others who could muster a force of armed horsemen. The country was to remain in this state of political suspension until the coronation of the Toluid Great Khan Mongke c.1250 when a delegation from the northern Iranian city of Qazvin requested the appointment of a king for their blighted region and its absorption into the Empire-proper.

Iran then was left very much to its own devices after the collapse of the Khwarazmshah’s regime. Two noyans, Jebe and Subodai, had been dispatched to conduct a reconnaissance trip around the Caspian Sea during the early part of which operation they inflicted dreadful destruction on the northern regions of Iran. The various figures which are commonly quoted from this period, with 2,400,000 dead in Herat by one account⁵⁷ or a more modest 1,600,000 by another,⁵⁸ and a mere 1,747,000 killed in Nishapur,⁵⁹ are so excessive as too be unreal. What they reflect is the traumatic nature of the attacks and the victims’ perception of relentless waves of violence and destruction perpetrated by coldly disciplined ranks of armoured might. Other armies would dissolve into a drunken rabble of looting and rapine once victory had been scented. The Chinggisid troops would remain in formation and under orders until their commanders ordered otherwise. Booty was collected for orderly distribution later, and the populace was also scrutinised for potential monetary worth. Cambridge scholar Charles Melville⁶⁰ has examined the sources and compared them with the chronicles of other medieval conflicts and he sees little evidence that the Mongols were more destructive or murderous than any other army of that time. What marked them out from other combatants was their discipline and sense of purpose. It was, however, the massacres conducted in northern Iran that established the Mongols’ reputation for barbarism. Ibn al-Athir, whose infamous rant against the Chinggisid army where he regretted ever having been born so awful was their visitation, never actually had any direct contact with any Mongols and his reports were based solely on hearsay. Yet his descriptions of their depravity form the basis of most people’s image of the Tatar army.

FINAL YEARS

A record exists of Chinggis Khan’s last years due to his insistence on finding the elixir of life. He had heard a tale of a certain holy man from the east who possessed the secret of eternal life, and the Great Khan duly summoned the man, Chang Chun, a Daoist sage. Chang Chun explained that he knew the secret of eternal spiritual life but not of eternal earthly life and Chinggis eventually became reconciled to that. A disciple of Chang Chun recorded a diary of their journey across Asia and Turkestan to meet Chinggis Khan and has left a chronicle of life in those lands recently conquered by the Mongols and accounts of their meetings with the Great Khan.

Chinggis determined upon returning to Mongolia before meeting his fate, but before his end he wished to take final revenge upon the Tanguts (Xixia), the first people outside of the steppe who he had conquered 20 years previously. The Tanguts had failed to send him re-enforcements to help him with his campaigns in the west and for this perceived treachery he was determined to exterminate them. It has been said that the Mongols’ actions were the first recorded act of deliberate genocide in recorded history and there no longer remains any trace of Tangut history in the region today.

Chinggis Khan died in 1227 after a fall from a horse before he was actually able to personally kill the ruler of the Tanguts, though someone else murdered him shortly after. Chinggis Khan’s burial site was a closely guarded secret and it has still never been found. Rashid al-Din claims that all those involved in the actual burial were subsequently killed in order to preserve the secrecy of the site but this story is not repeated elsewhere.

It was with the fall of the Khwarazmshah that Chinggis Khan truly established his power throughout Asia and laid the foundations for a global, multicultural empire that would reshape the world forever. From the city of Samarqand alone it is said that 100,000 tradesmen and craftsmen plus an unknown number of women and children destined for domestic service were transferred to the east. Such population transfers, initially forced and later voluntary, took place throughout the Chinggisid period and represented one of the greatest movements of population in history. Leaving the steppe in 1206, consolidating an administration before absorbing the Tangut, undermining irrevocably the Jurchens of northern China and then finally calling the Khwarazmshah’s bluff and laying his kingdom, the gateway to the Islamic world, in ruins, Chinggis Khan prepared the way for his Chinggisid revolution which would reshape the known world. He sought not to conquer and destroy but to master and to transform. His early life had been harsh and unjust, and he sought better for his descendants who would wear ‘gold-brocaded robes’, savour gastronomical delicacies, ride the best mounts and enjoy the most tempting of the Empire’s temptresses.⁶¹