ᠴᠢᠩᠭᠢᠰ ᠬᠠᠭᠠᠨ ᠪᠣᠯᠤᠨ ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠤᠯ ᠬᠡᠮᠡᠬᠦ ᠳᠠᠶᠢᠨ ᠤ ᠮᠠᠰᠢᠨ .pdf

Jacket design: Dominic Allen For a complete list of current titles ring or write to: PEN two famous men of peace sitting side by side with the most successful conqueror in history. But among present-day Mongolians Genghis enjoys a status not far short of divinity, while the neighbouring People’s Republic of China lays claim to him with almost equal enthusiasm. He has become a sort of global brand, with his image appearing on products from beer bottles to postcards as far west as Turkey. In 1995 the WashingtonPost voted him ‘the most important man of the last thousand years’. It is well known that he founded the biggest land-based empire the world has ever seen, stretching from the Black Sea in the west to Korea in the east, uniting peoples who until then knew nothing of each other’s existence. And yet it is surprising how little we really know about him – or rather how far the popular perception differs from what we do know. My aim in this book is to try to explain how Genghis achieved what he did, and to try to answer some of the questions that are still being debated today. Was he a true empire-builder, or just the world’s most successful bandit? Was he a genius who single- handedly altered the course of world history, or did he ride to success on the back of forces stronger than any human will? How did the Mongols conquer most of the known world? We can talk about motivation, courage, discipline and even military technology, Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page xvii Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine xviii THIRD PROOF xviii Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine but how exactly did these translate into success on the battlefield? Much of Genghis’ story is not for the squeamish. Behind such abstract words as ‘conquest’ and ‘empire’ lies the grisly reality that these were obtained by killing other people, or at least by terrifying them into submission. Did Genghis and his followers really kill the millions and produce the wastelands that they are reputed to have done? The Sources I have tried – as far as is possible when relying on translated works – to answer these questions by going back to the original sources. Very few of these, in fact, are ‘original sources’ in the sense that a modern historian would use the term; they are not, for example, contemporary eyewitness reports or administrative documents preserved in state archives. Instead they are mostly chronicles written within a few years or decades of the events they describe, but nevertheless subject to selectivity and bias. They are, however, essential if Genghis’ story is to be understood at all. For all practical purposes the only source for his early life – and the only Mongolian source for his career of conquest – is the book generally known as the Secret History of the Mongols. This work was probably written originally in Mongolian, using the script which Genghis adopted from the Turkish-speaking Uighurs, and at some point had come to be regarded as taboo to non-Mongols, hence the term ‘Secret’. However it has survived to the present day only in the form of a fourteenth-century Chinese transcription, under the title Yuan Ch’ao Pi Shih. We do not know the name of the author or precisely when it was written; the epilogue states that it was finished ‘in the Year of the Rat and the Month of the Roebuck’, but in the Mongol chronology a Rat Year recurred every twelve years, and there is still debate about which cycle is meant. Urgunge Onon, whose English translation is referred to in this book, argues persuasively for the year 1228, though some material must have been added later. This is only a year after the death of Genghis Khan, so the Secret History can be regarded as a near-contemporary source for the events it describes. This does not of course mean that it is necessarily Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page xviii Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine xix THIRD PROOF Introduction xix accurate. Much of the material dealing with Genghis’ ancestors is clearly mythical, and some historians – notably Arthur Waley, who published one of the first English translations – have regarded the whole work as fiction. Most scholars do not accept this argument, however, and Morgan has pointed out that the Secret History can to some extent be validated by comparison with a now lost work, the Altan Debter or Golden Book, which was used as a source by the Persian writer Rashid ud-Din. This is fortunate, because without the Secret History it is hard to see how any convincing account of Genghis and his era could be written. Nevertheless, from a Western viewpoint it is a particularly frustrating document, because it virtually ignores what we tend to see as the most significant aspect of Genghis’ career – the extension of his conquests after the unification of Mongolia itself. In fact it is not really what the modern reader would regard as a ‘history’ at all. Its focus is mainly genealogical, recording events because of the light which they shed on the relationships between members of the Khan’s family, and the privileges of various eminent Mongols which they legitimised, rather than because of their wider significance. For this reason the Secret History concentrates mainly on Genghis’ ancestry, his early years and the wars which gave him control of Mongolia, culminating in the great assembly or ‘quriltai’ in 1206, at which he was proclaimed supreme ruler. The Historyis by no means a eulogy, and includes several episodes which do not seem intended to enhance its subject’s reputation, but a recurring theme is the double-dealing of his various rivals and allies, who one by one attempted to stab him in the back and therefore had to be eliminated in self-defence. This process is assisted by the different flaws of character which make all these individuals unfit to rule, at least in comparison with Genghis. The result of this bias is that a narrative based on the Secret History – as the following account of his rise to power necessarily is – has a feeling of inevitability which could not have been apparent at the time. Mongolia, before Genghis unified it, had been fought over for several decades by a collection of warlords, all happy to eliminate their opponents by poisoning, assassination by hired thugs and other gangster methods. The reader should bear in mind that all we have Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page xix Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine xx THIRD PROOF xx Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine today is an account written by the henchmen of the most successful gangster. The events which followed Genghis’ takeover in Mongolia are covered in much less detail, even those involving the conquest of China which absorbed the bulk of Mongol energies for seven decades, and the campaigns in the west are mentioned almost as an afterthought. It is as though there was no need to explain to the Mongols how or why their ancestors managed to conquer most of the known world; once they had been unified and provided with effective leadership, the rest was inevitable. If this reflects a genuine contemporary Mongol perspective, though, it is one which does in fact explain a lot. The veterans of several decades of warfare against the most formidable of enemies – their fellow steppe dwellers – may well have found the campaigns against more ‘civilised’ victims easy going by comparison. The accounts of the ‘civilised’ victims themselves are naturally less sympathetic to the Mongols, which is why two of the Persian sources are especially valuable, because they were written by men who had attained high office in the service of later Mongol khans. Ata Malik Juvaini was Governor of Baghdad under Genghis’ grandson Hulegu, and his History of the World Conquerorcovers not only the life of Genghis but the reigns of his successors up to about 1260. Next to the Secret History this has been the most valuable source for the early Mongols, although it is not always easy to read; the narrative is not consistently presented in chronological order, so that Juvaini sometimes deals with the same events under different headings, and it is interrupted by countless digressions and quotations from earlier Islamic literature. The other important Persian chronicler is Rashid ud-Din, who was chief minister of Ghazan Khan, ruler of the Ilkhanid Mongol state which Hulegu’s family established in the Middle East. Rashid wrote around the end of the thirteenth century and naturally had to rely on earlier sources – including Juvaini – for the events of Genghis’ reign, but he nevertheless records a large amount of useful information which would otherwise have been lost. Unfortunately only part of his modestly-titled Jami al-tawarikh or Collection of Histories is available in translation. Also valuable is the Tabaqat-i Nasiri of Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page xx Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine xxi THIRD PROOF Introduction xxi Juzjani, who had actually served in the Khwarizmian army at the time of the Mongol invasion of 1219, and wrote his book about 1260 while in exile in Delhi. Not surprisingly he is fiercely anti-Mongol, but much of what he says is corroborated by Juvaini’s contemporary account. To Genghis and his followers China was by far the most important region outside Mongolia, and the bulk of their resources were devoted to conquering it. Therefore Chinese sources are invaluable for understanding the Mongol conquests, but unfortunately few of them are available in English. I have relied heavily on H. Desmond Martin’s work for the campaigns in China, and for the useful information on the Mongol army recorded by Meng Hung. The latter was a thirteenth-century general who wrote a perceptive report for the Sung Emperor on the invaders and the prospects for defeating them. Chinese official records tend to be short on military detail, but Hsiao has translated some relevant sections of the Official History of the Yuan dynasty which was established by another grandson of Genghis, Kubilai. Also useful is Waley’s translation of the account by Li Chih-ch’ang of the visit of the Taoist sage Ch’ang Ch’un to Genghis in 1222. When the expanding Mongol empire began to threaten Europe from the 1240s onwards several missions were sent east on behalf of the Papacy, ostensibly as ambassadors to the Great Khans, but in reality principally as spies, with instructions to report on the Mongols’ military abilities and other matters of practical concern. John de Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck have left especially valuable records, which are covered by De Rachewiltz in his Papal Envoys to the Great Khans. Dating from half a century later, but still valuable for our purpose, is the better-known account of Marco Polo, who served at the court of Kubilai Khan in China. Needless to say I am indebted to numerous more recent scholars whose works are listed in the Bibliography. Any reader wanting a more in-depth or wide-ranging study of Mongol history that is attempted here are recommended to consult these, in particular the books by De Hartog, Morgan and Rachtnevsky. There are many different ways of rendering Mongol, Chinese and Persian names into Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page xxi Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine xxii THIRD PROOF xxii Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine English, and the inconsistencies between various authorities can be confusing. In most cases I have tried to minimise the confusion for the reader by using the form of a particular name from the source in which it is most likely to be encountered – thus Mongol names tend to be taken from Onon’s translation of the Secret History, and Chinese ones from H. D. Martin. The latter therefore appear in the old Wade-Giles transliteration, which remains the most accessible system for English speakers. The choice between Genghis, Chinggis, Chinggiz and the numerous other ways in which the Khan’s title has been written is based purely on its familiarity to the general reader. Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page xxii Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine 1 THIRD PROOF Chapter 1 Genghis’ World The Country and the People Mongolia consists mainly of a high plateau at the eastern end of the belt of open grassland, or steppe, which stretches across most of Asia between the latitudes of forty and fifty degrees north. Further north lies the Siberian forest, and to the south, where not bounded by mountain ranges, the steppe merges imperceptibly into scrub and stony desert. The whole region is very distant from the sea, and so is subject to seasonal extremes of climate which, together with shortage of rainfall, make it generally unsuitable for agriculture. Therefore in pre-modern times its principal inhabitants were nomadic herdsmen who lived off their herds of sheep, cattle, camels and horses. Both the land and the people have traditionally been seen as remote and backward, but this stereotype is misleading. For one thing, through the southern part of the steppe zone ran the greatest east-west trade route of the ancient and medieval worlds, known from its most prestigious commodity as the Silk Road, which connected China, via a series of local middlemen, with the Mediterranean. The route not only allowed ideas and inventions to flow between the steppe and the agricultural civilisations to the south, but supported a string of wealthy cities along its course, from Hami on the borders of China west to Bokhara on the Oxus River, and beyond to Baghdad. The steppe itself had also been the source of world-changing technological developments, many of them based around the most characteristic of its wild fauna, the horse. Horses had probably first been ridden near the southern end of the Ural Mountains around 4000 BC, and 2,000 years later, in the same region, they were being yoked to the earliest war chariots. The spread of this Book-Genghis Khan_Gengis Khan 28/11/2014 10:24 Page 1 Genghis Khan and the Mongol War Machine 2 THIRD PROOF military technology has been linked to the dispersal of Indo- European languages across an area from Europe to India, suggesting that the steppe warriors had dominated their sedentary cousins from a very early date. By historical times the theme of nomadic horsemen descending from the high grasslands to pillage and conquer had become a familiar one, from the Skythians who wrecked the Assyrian capital at Nineveh in 612 BC to the Huns of Attila, who in the fifth century AD nearly did the same to Constantinople. Most important of all were the Turks, who during the six centuries after AD 600 moved south and west in a series of waves, eventually coming to dominate most of the Middle East, while at the same time their relatives did the same in northern China. But although Mongolia had been the original homeland of many of the Turkish tribes, it remained something of a backwater. Here the steppe zone reached its greatest altitude above s