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The Devil’s Horsemen THE MONGOL INVASION OF EUROPE James Chambers BOOK CLUB ASSOCIATES This edition published 1979 by Book Club Associates by arrangement with Weidenfeld and Nicolson Copyright © 1979 by James Chambers All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Morrison and as the boat pulled away the shore behind became thick with mounted archers charging hopelessly into the water, their arrows falling short in its wake. When he came to the throne of Khwarizm in 1200 as Muhammad II, Ali ad-Din also inherited the enormous army with which he had already begun the easy conquest of Khurasan. His empire had been founded by Khutbeddin Muhammad, a Turkish mercenary who had governed the area on behalf of the Seljuks and acquired enough wealth and power to declare independence. Although the indigenous population was Persian, Muhammad n ’s courtiers and soldiers were the Turkish descendants of Khutbeddin’s mercenaries, and the fierce corps of horsemen who formed his bodyguard were Kanglis, a tribe of Kipchaks or eastern Cumans from the steppes beyond the Aral Sea, imported by his mother Turkan Khatun, who was the daughter of their chief. Against such soldiers as these the peaceful Persian people of Khurasan could offer no more than token resistance. Although he was ambitious, Muhammad was irresolute and un­ imaginative. He bolstered his lack of security with the strength of his army and camouflaged his lack of confidence with vanity. The easy conquest of his ill-defended neighbours offered him the 1 2 THE DEVIL'S HORSEMEN opportunity not only to indulge an army that was too large to justify in time of peace, but also to increase his own wealth and enhance his reputation. Continuing the campaign that he had begun under his father, he led his army through the rich, irrigated farm lands that had once been desert, secured the ancient cities and annexed the whole of Khurasan to his empire. The operation took not much longer than the time required foi* his army to cover the distance, but it brought him the prestige that he longed for. While he proclaimed himself to the world as ‘the chosen prince of Allah’ and his sycophantic courtiers nicknamed him the second Alexander, his neighbours, fearful of his army and his ambition, began to offer him tribute and allegiance. To the east of Muhammad's empire lay the empire of Transoxiana and to the north-east of that, the powerful Buddhist empire of Kara Khitai, which bordered the eastern steppes and screened the kingdoms of Islam from the new empire of the nomad Mongols. When Muhammad, ‘the chosen prince of Allah’, refused to pay any further tribute to the infidel rulers of Kara Khitai, Osman, Emperor of Transoxiana, transferred his own allegiance from Kara Khitai to Khwarizm. Both Osman and Muhammad believed that internal struggles would prevent the Buddhist army from protecting its interests, but when Kara Khitai was invaded from the east by the Mongols, Muhammad saw the chance that even his caution could not resist While Kara Khitai fell to the Mongols the Khwarizmian army marched almost unopposed into Transoxiana. By opportunism, and without ever really testing his army in the field, Muhammad had made himself one of the most powerful rulers in Islam and with the revenues of Transoxiana in his coffers he was unquestionably the richest. Lying between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, rivers which were known in the west as the Oxus and the Jaxartes, desolated in the north by the impenetrable desert of Kizil Kum and only made fertile in the south by extensive irrigation, Transoxiana was not rich in natural resources, but across its heart ran the overland trade routes of the world. At the eastern end of the road on the Syr Darya stood the commercial centre of Khojend, in the west near the Amu Darya the mosques, universities and carpet warehouses of Bukhara and between them the city that Muhammad II had chosen for his new capital, Samarkand. Huge suburbs shaded by poplar trees and decorated with THE FIRST MOVE WEST 3 fountains and canals surrounded a city so rich that even within its walls every house had a garden. In the factories the citizens wove silk, cotton and silver lame, the Persian craftsmen worked saddles, harnesses and decorated copper and the workshops of the Chinese quarter produced the rag paper that was used throughout the Middle East. From the fields beyond the suburbs the farmers exported melons and aubergines wrapped in snow and packed in lead boxes. The vast population exceeded five hundred thousand. It was in Samarkand that Muhammad's courtiers housed their treasures and their harems and lived in a splendour that was unequalled even in the east; it was from there that they rode out to hunt dressed in cloth of gold with tame cheetahs clinging on to the saddles behind them. Muhammad settled down to enjoy the magnificence of his new capital, but he did not disband his army. An avaricious tax collec­ tor, he was as unpopular among the Persian inhabitants of his huge empire as were his plundering Turkish soldiers. To allay his fears of rebellion the army had to be kept at full strength and to keep that army contented and maintain his reputation as a conqueror he would occasionally lead it out on minor expeditions against neigh­ bouring cities in the south. Muhammad Shah’s Persian subjects were, however, helpless. They could turn only to their religious leaders, but these were engaged in a series of sectarian quarrels, and Nasir, Caliph of Baghdad, and spiritual ruler of Islam, had neither the temporal power nor the unity to offer anything more than a desultory chain of hopeless intrigues. It was after his siege of Ghazna in 1216 that Muhammad first learned of these intrigues. The threat was insignificant, but Muhammad was a timid man. He determined to depose the caliph and replace him with a puppet. Receiving the submission of Azerbaijan and Fars which lay along his route, he marched his army towards Baghdad. It was as though the Holy Roman Emperor were to lead an army towards the gates of Rome. But if the caliph was powerless, Allah was not. The army was dispersed in the mountains by a fierce snowstorm and many of those who did not die of exposure had their throats cut by Kurdish bandits. Muhammad was forced to withdraw, and for the time being, the caliph survived. Returning to Bukhara the shah found three ambassadors waiting for him. They were men of Khwarizmian origin who had been 4 THE DEVIL’S HORSEMEN living in Kara Khitai and they carried gifts so precious that even the shah was impressed: gold ingots and a huge gold nugget, jade and ivory ornaments and cloaks spun from the wool of white camels. When they had laid these before him they delivered a letter. I send you these gifts. I know your power and the vast extent of your empire and I regard you as my most cherished son. For your part you must know that I have conquered China and all the Turkish nations north of it; my country is an anthill of soldiers and a mine of silver and I have no need of other lands. Therefore I believe that we have an equal interest in encouraging trade between our subjects. Beneath the letter was a seal and on it inscribed, ‘God in heaven, the Kah Khan, the power of God on Earth. The Seal of the Emperor of Mankind.’ That evening the shah dined with the ambassadors. If the un­ concluded feud with the caliph and the depletion of his army had not embarrassed the ‘chosen prince of Allah’ with more insecurity than he could tolerate, he might well have treated the infidel barbarians with the contempt that they deserved. He knew very little about the Mongol conquerors from the east, although self- interest had made him send messages of good will during the invasion of Kara Khitai, but if the khan could be trusted the advantages of a trade agreement were obvious. He questioned his guests, asking if the ‘Emperor of Mankind’ was really as powerful as his letter claimed, and the ambassadors, forewarned of his vanity, replied tactfully that although powerful, he was not as powerful as the shah; and they answered honestly when they said that he did not have as many soldiers. Muhammad seemed satisfied by the flattery and by 1218 a commercial treaty had been signed. Khwarizmian trade with the east could now continue unaltered by the spread of Mongol rule and protected by an alliance too powerful to be challenged. The Caliph of Baghdad, growing hysterical as he watched the shah’s army regaining its strength, decided to make one last effort to save his neck and sent a secret messenger to the Mongol khan pleading for his intervention and warning him not to trust the ambitious shah. So elaborate were his precautions that the message was tattooed on to the envoy’s shaved head and he was not allowed to set out until the hair had grown again. But the effort was wasted. At the Mongol capital of Karakorum the messenger was told that THE FIRST MOVE WEST 5 the khan was at peace with the shah and he was sent home without an audience. Soon after the treaty was signed the first Mongol caravan arrived at Otrar beyond the Syr Darya, led by three Moslem merchants and accompanied by a Mongol ambassador, commissioned to buy the luxurious products of Transoxiana for the nobles at the Mongol court. The shah, who had not heard how the khan had treated the caliph’s messenger, still doubted his reliability and when he received a letter from Inalchuk Khwadir Khan, the governor of Otrar, reporting his suspicions that these merchants were spies, he ordered that if the case could be proved the men were to be put to death. It is possible that the merchants were spies, since all Mongol merchants were expected to make military reports wherever neces­ sary, but it is unlikely, since Otrar was so near to the border that the Mongols must have known everything about it already. In either event the suspicion was insignificant enough to warrant no more than a complaint, but the five hundred camels laden with gold, silver, silk and sables were too much of a temptation for the rapacious governor. Without an investigation or a trial he murdered the ambassador, the merchants and the men who led their camels and confiscated their property. The governor had exceeded his authority and Muhammad could easily have placated the inevitable Mongol outrage by expressing his own abhorrence of the crime and punishing the culprit, but when Ibn Kafraj Boghra arrived at Samarkand as an ambassador from one ally to another, escorted only by two Mongol soldiers and demanding merely that the murderer should be tried and punished, the shah burned the beards and hair of the escorts and gave them Boghra’s severed head to carry back to Karakorum. It is difficult to see what the shah hoped to gain by such appar­ ently calculated arrogance. Certainly he was ashamed that the richest prince in Islam had been obliged by temporary weakness to make a treaty with an infidel, but the result of his treachery and insults was bound to be a declaration of war. Muhammad had never been a diplomat, he had assumed his reputation as a con­ queror and it would seem that he had begun to believe his own publicity. His army was stronger than ever now; he had four hundred thousand men in Transoxiana alone, twice as many as the Mongols had ever managed to raise. Perhaps he believed that he could control the trade routes to the east himself, or perhaps he 6 THE DEVIL’S HORSEMEN saw this as another opportunity to enhance his reputation by fight­ ing a defensive war on his own ground with vastly superior numbers and prove himself the only man on earth capable of defeating ‘The Emperor of Mankind’, Chingis Khan. Whatever his motive, the outcome was disaster. Mobilizing for the last time what was the most effective army in the world, the Mongol khan turned it towards the west. For the rest of his life and the life of his successor it was never to be disbanded. Temujin, Chingis Khan, had retired alone to the haunted shores of Lake Baikal in the grim mountains of northern Mongolia. With the exception of his ten thousand strong imperial guard, the garri­ sons in conquered kingdoms and one expedition in China, his soldiers had been sent home to their tribes. Satisfied with the size of his empire and always in awe of the civilizations that surrounded him, he had begun to live like them through trade and diplomacy, but the paranoia that had influenced his early life was returning and his love of war was never satisfied. The generosity and loyalty for which he was justly respected in the east had been met in the west with contempt. ‘The greatest pleasure/ he had said, ‘is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.’ From now on his policy would be that his empire should never be bounded by a kingdom strong enough to threaten its security. Mongol tradition demanded that the murder of the ambassadors should be avenged and if .there was to be a war of attrition it might as well be also a war of conquest. Returning to his city of tents at Karakorum, Chingis Khan summoned his nation of soldiers and sent one last message to the shah: ‘You have chosen war. That will happen which will happen and what it is to be we know not; only God knows.’ In Transoxiana the magnificent army of Muhammad Shah waited for the Mongols to advance. Four hundred thousand Khwarizmian Turks and Persian auxiliaries as well as thousands more armed slaves were drawn up in a cordon along five hundred miles of the Syr Darya, with lines of communication stretching back through the garrisoned cities of Khojend, Samarkand and Bukhara into Khwarizm and Khurasan. Mounted on thoroughbred horses and armed with decorated helmets, burnished shields and steel blades that had been bent to the hilt in the forges, the THE FIRST MOVE WEST 7 Khwarizmian cavalry lived in luxurious camps that were served by trains of camels and elephants, but much of the rest of the army was inexperienced and ill-disciplined and morale was low. The Persian civilians were not entirely opposed to the idea of a Mongol invasion. They had heard that after the invasion of Kara Khitai plundering had been forbidden and religious persecution had been brought to an end; the Persian merchants preferred the idea of high taxes and martial law to the present exploitation and in­ security. Even the Turkish officers were losing what little faith they had left in the shah whose judgement seemed to have been clouded by his dreams and his fear of defeat. His son and heir, Jalal ad-Din, who was as courageous and talented as his father was vain and incompetent, had pointed out that none of the c