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History of International Relations: A Non-European Perspective
More info and resources at: https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0074

Map of Tartaria from Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antverpiae: Apud Aegid. Coppenium Diesth, 1570), p. 207, https://archive.org/details/theatrumorbister00orte

5. The Mongol Khanates

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongols created the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known. In 1206, Temüjin, an orphan and a former slave, united the many feuding clans which occupied the steppes to the north of China and took the title “Genghis Khan.” Once this feat was accomplished he turned to military conquests abroad. The Mongols’ armies were spectacularly successful. Their soldiers, consisting only of cavalry, were fast, highly disciplined and well organized, and they wielded their bows and lances while still on horseback. Since most lands between Europe and Asia were sparsely populated and quite unprotected, the Mongols quickly overran an enormous territory while most of the actual warfare consisted of sieges. Once they had mastered the art of siege warfare, the cities too fell into their hands. The Mongols fought in the jungles of Southeast Asia too, built a navy and tried to invade both Java and Japan. In 1241 they completely obliterated the European armies that had gathered against them and in 1258 they besieged, sacked and burned Baghdad. At the height of their power, the Mongols controlled an area which stretched from central Europe to the Pacific Ocean. It was a territory about the size of the African continent and considerably larger than North America. Although the Mongols counted only about one million people at the time, the lands they once controlled comprise today a majority of the world’s population.

The Mongols were known as merciless warriors who destroyed the cities they captured, sparing no humans and occasionally even killing their cats and dogs. Yet apart from their military superiority, they had nothing much to impart to the rest of the world. The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no religions, built no buildings, and they had not even mastered simple techniques such as weaving, pottery or bread-making. Rather, by conquering such a vast territory, and by unifying it under the same administration, they managed to connect parts of the world which had never previously been connected, or not connected as closely and efficiently. The results were profound and revolutionary. Throughout the land they controlled, the Mongols guaranteed the security of travelers and they encouraged trade by reducing taxes and facilitating travel. During the so-called Pax Mongolica, the “Mongol peace,” exchanges along the caravan routes of Central Asia became more intense than ever before. This was when Persian businessmen would go to China on regular visits and when a diplomatic envoy from a Mongol khan could visit Paris and take communion with the pope in Rome.

The Mongol Empire lasted only some 150 years. The political structure had already begun to crack by the middle of the thirteenth century and by the early fourteenth century it was disintegrating. In 1368, the Mongols lost control over their most prized possession — China. One important reason for the decline and fall of the Mongol empire was the perpetual infighting which took place among Genghis Khan’s descendants. By the middle of the thirteenth century, when his grandchildren were ready to take over the realm, the question of succession turned out to be impossible to settle. The outcome was a civil war which turned brothers against each other and eventually resulted in the division of the empire into four separate realms — the Golden Horde in Russia, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Yuan dynasty in China, and the Chagatai khanate in the traditional heartlands of Mongolia. Although these entities were closely related to each other in various ways, there were also constant conflicts between them. In addition, the Black Death, a contagious disease that spread quickly along the caravan routes, decimated the population and turned travel and exchange into deadly activities. As a result, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol Empire was once again a small kingdom confined to the steppes north of China. Its last remnant was conquered by the Manchu armies in 1635. Other vestiges of the Mongols and their descendants lived on, most successfully in the form of the Mughal Empire in India, founded in 1526 by Babur who counted himself as a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Read more: The Mughal Empire at p. 64.

From Temüjin to Genghis Khan

The boy who was to become Genghis Khan was born in 1162, not far from the current Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. He was given the name Temüjin. Like all Mongolian boys, Temüjin learned to ride a horse at a very early age, to tend the family’s animals and to hunt. His father was a chieftain, and well respected within the society of nomads, but there were many chieftains on the steppes. Indeed, the people we call the Mongols were only one of many nomadic tribes — in addition, there were Merkits, Naimans, Keraits, Tatars, Uyghurs, and so on — and the Mongols were not even the largest group among them. Each tribe was divided into clans and lineages, and many of them were in perpetual conflict with each other — over grazing rights, horses and treasure. They traded with each other, but they also raided each other’s camps looking for women to take as wives, or for children to capture and keep as slaves. Indeed kidnapping was a common way to obtain a wife, especially for those who were too poor to be considered eligible husbands.

Then disaster struck. Temüjin’s father was killed and the family was cast out by their clan who decided that they did not have enough food to feed them. Instead, at the age of only eight, Temüjin had to help his family eke out a living gathering plants on the steppe and hunting in the forest. Remarkably the family survived, although their camp was raided and Temüjin was taken prisoner and made into a slave. At the age of seventeen, he managed to escape his captors and marry a girl, Börte, to whom he had been engaged while his father was alive. Yet Börte too was abducted by a rival tribe. This event, however, was to be the beginning of Temüjin’s career as a conqueror. Together with a small band of followers, he attacked the kidnappers and took back his wife. He meted out an act of terrible revenge on her captors — killing the men and enslaving their women and children.

Temüjin’s skills as a raider soon attracted wider attention and before long he concluded a treaty with one of the traditional chieftains, which gave him access to a far larger contingent of men. This was the band of warriors which he went on to leverage into an ever-increasing force as every successful raid attracted ever more of a following. The people who were loyal to him he treated as family members, while those who crossed or betrayed him were given no mercy. In 1206, Temüjin called a kurultai, an assembly of the leading chieftains, where he was elected khagan, khan of khans. He took the name “Genghis Khan” for himself. There is no consensus on what “genghis” actually means and in any case the pronunciation in Mongolian is closer to “chinggis.” The people he united came to be called “Mongols” after the name of his own tribe. Genghis Khan was now the supreme leader of perhaps 1 million people and some 15 to 20 million horses, sheep, and goats.

A nomadic state

Once in power, Genghis Khan put in place a legal and institutional framework that would help break the cycle of violence in Mongol society and prevent the kinds of events that had wreaked havoc in his own life. One aim was to abolish the traditional divisions into tribes, clans and lineages. Consequently Genghis Khan abolished aristocratic titles and promoted people according to merit. He was also keen to advance the careers of people from other tribes than his own — or indeed, once the foreign conquests had begun, of people other than Mongols. Genghis Khan also decimalized the army, as it were. That is, he divided the men into groups of ten — known as arban — drawn from different sections of Mongol society. Each arban was then ordered to live and fight together as loyally as brothers. From the point of view of the government, each group of ten men was treated as a family and thereby as the basic unit not only of military but also of social life. The ten-groups were then multiplied by ten to produce groups of 100, 1,000 and 10,000 soldiers. A group of 10,000 men, that is, soldiers, was known as a tumen.

A new legal code, the yassa, was also established which criminalized a number of actions, in particular those which Genghis Khan knew to be a cause of conflict. Thus the abduction of wives and the sale of women were declared illegal, together with the enslavement of fellow Mongols. Theft of cattle or horses became a capital crime and anyone who found a lost animal was obliged to return it or be condemned to death as a thief. There were further laws against raiding and looting and regulations for where and during which times of the year animals could be hunted. All children, moreover, were regarded as the legitimate offspring of their parents regardless of the circumstances under which they had been conceived — a provision which helped to recognize children born from mothers who had been taken away as slaves. Freedom of religion was also officially recognized by the Mongol authorities. Although Genghis Khan himself was a Tengrist, there were Muslims, Christians and Buddhists among his subjects. Only complete freedom of religion could prevent conflicts among them.

Tengrism

Tengrism has historically been the predominant religion among the peoples of Central Asia. Tengrism combines animism with shamanism and the cult of ancestors. It worships Tengri, a supreme power that is associated with the sky. Tengri is the force that determines everything from the weather to the fate of individuals and nations. Tengri, say Tengrists, is the unknowable One who knows everything and who judges people’s actions as good or bad and rewards them accordingly. Tengrists believe in spirits too. There are spirits of trees, mountains, planets, and ancestors, and they are either evil, benevolent or of mixed temperament. Some shamans have powers that resemble those of spirits, such as the power of prophecy or the ability to cast spells. Genghis Khan was a Tengrist, and so were all Mongol rulers until the early fourteenth century when some of them converted to Islam. To this day it is common for Mongols to refer to their country as Munkh khukh tengri, the land of the “eternal blue sky.” This is not a weather report as much as the hope of divine protection.

There has been a revival of Tengrism in Central Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Or rather, some academics and politicians have sought to promote Tengrism as an indigenous alternative to foreign religions such as Christianity and Islam. Neo-Tengrists are particularly active in Kyrgyzstan where a scientific center for Tengrist studies has been set up in the capital Bishkek. Observers claim that 60 percent of the rural population follow Tengrist traditions. In 2011, a proponent of Tengrism, Kubanychbek Tezekbaev, was put on trial in Kyrgyzstan for inciting religious and ethnic hatred because of statements he made in an interview describing Muslim clerics as “former alcoholics and murderers.” Tezekbaev is an outspoken critic of what he sees as the growing influence of fundamentalist Islam in his country, especially among young people. He calls himself a half-Muslim. “I don’t fully follow Islam, I just partially follow some Muslim rituals. I am a pure Kyrgyz.”

The rules of the yassa code were enforced by trials which were held in public and all Mongols, including Genghis Khan himself, were bound by the letters of the law. All important matters, including questions of succession and foreign policy, were to be discussed and decided on in a kurultai, the parliament of chieftains.

What brought the Mongols together more than anything, however, was the decision to embark on military conquests. In line with Mongol traditions these were not wars as much as raids as their object was, initially at least, not to occupy land or kill enemies, but to loot — horses and slaves at first, and later grain, treasure, and all kinds of productive resources. This more than anything was how Genghis Khan built support for himself. Every city they captured was looted according to a set formula, with shares for everyone, from the 10 percent given to Genghis Khan and his family down to smaller shares for orphans and widows. Yet the expectations of the Mongol people multiplied over time and no one was ever quite satisfied with what they had already acquired. This is what set the Mongols on the path to loot the whole world.

To the south of the Mongols, between themselves and the Song dynasty in China, were a number of tribes who had managed to establish kingdoms of their own. The most successful of these was the Jurchen who had made war on the Song dynasty and forced them to move their capital to Hangzhou in the south of China. Read more: The Mughal Empire at p. 13.

Other neighbors were the Tanguts, a kingdom of Tibetan-speaking people, and the Khanate of Qara Khitai, a kingdom located further west on the steppes towards Russia. Genghis Khan took on these kingdoms and their armies one by one and before long he had defeated them all — the Tanguts in 1210, the Jurchen in 1214 and Qara Khitai in 1218. There were rich spoils of war to be had from these conquests, in particular from the Jurchen who controlled some of the trading routes which brought Chinese merchandise to Central Asia and beyond.

These military successes put the Mongols in contact with the Khwarazmian Empire in the far west. The Khwarazmians were the rulers of Persia, but also of present-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and much of Afghanistan. Yet the Khwarazmians were a city-based state, not a band of nomads, and they laid claims to all the resources and the historical heritage of the Persian states of antiquity. From the Khwarazmian point of view, the Mongols were nothing but an annoyance and initially Genghis Khan was convinced that the Khwarazmians were too powerful to attack. Instead, he dispatched a diplomatic delegation to their court asking for the right to trade. When some of the envoys were killed and others were returned with their faces mutilated, Genghis Khan was outraged. He dispatched another delegation which was treated in much the same fashion. After this experience Genghis Khan had no choice but to attack. And in 1220, after an exceptional ride through the Taklamakan desert, his mounted warriors descended on the city of Bukhara, in today’s Uzbekistan, and caught the Khwarazmians by surprise. Genghis Khan gathered the local potentates in the city’s biggest mosque and explained to them that he was God’s punishment for their sins. Then he killed them all and thoroughly looted the city. The neighboring city of Samarkand was captured in the same fashion. As news of these spectacular attacks reached other parts of the empire, the Khwarazmians lost their self-confidence. Genghis Khan gave them an ultimatum — to surrender without a fight or to be annihilated. Within a year the entire empire was in his hands.

After this spectacular victory, the Mongols were no longer simply a loose federation of horsemen but a proper empire in control of some of the richest cities in the world. They had possessions and thereby responsibilities. They were also suddenly a Middle Eastern power and before long they continued their raids with attacks in the Caucasus. Georgia, a Christian kingdom, was to become a particularly loyal ally. Once the Mongols had established themselves in the Caucasus, in turn, they came into contact with the Kievan Rus, the fledgling Russian state in present-day Ukraine. However, in 1227 an unexpected uprising among the Tanguts forced Genghis Khan to return home. This is also where he died, aged sixty-five years old, under rather mysterious circumstances. Some say that he was wounded in a battle, others that he fell off his horse, or perhaps that he was killed by a Tangut woman he had taken as a concubine. In any case, his body was buried in a grave without markings according to the customs of his tribe. By the time of his death the Mongols controlled the center of the entire Eurasian landmass — from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea.

Genghis Khan in today’s Mongolia

During the Communist period, 1924–1992, when the Soviet Union exercised a strong influence in the country, textbooks used in Mongolian schools described Genghis Khan as a “reactionary” and an “enemy of the people.” However, in commemoration of the eight hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1962, a monument was erected in his honor and an academic conference was held to discuss his life and legacy. The conference ended with applause, cheers, and chants for Genghis Khan. Agents for the KGB, the Soviet secret service, who were present on the occasion, reported the event to Moscow. This resulted in purges within the leadership of the Mongolian Communist Party. Those who had sided with Genghis Khan were regarded as enemies of the Soviet Union.

Since the end of Communism, there has been a strong revival of interest in Genghis Khan in Mongolia and he is now regarded as a national hero. Mongolians are quick to insist that his reputation as a bloodthirsty barbarian is vastly exaggerated. In 2008, a private company erected a 40-meter-tall equestrian statue of him in stainless steel at the cost of 4.1 million U.S. dollars. Entering the statue, visitors can take an elevator to Genghis’s head and enjoy a panoramic view of the Mongolian steppe.

In today’s Mongolia, Genghis Khan’s name and likeness can be found on products ranging from liquor bottles and energy drinks to cigarette packages and candy, as well as on the bills people use to pay for these items. The Mongolian parliament has discussed the risk of trivializing his memory, but the discussions have not so far resulted in any legislation. Since 2012, the first day of the first winter month of the year has been designated as Genghis Khan’s birthday and a national holiday. His actual birthday is unknown. According to the customs of his tribe, Genghis Khan was buried in a grave without markings. It is said that 10,000 horses trampled over the ground where he was buried, that a forest was planted over the site or that a river was diverted to cover it. Not surprisingly, the grave has never been located.

How to conquer the world

The key to the military success of the Mongols was their extraordinary army, which consisted entirely of cavalry — soldiers mounted on the backs of fast Mongolian horses. Although all men up to the age of seventy were conscripted, the army comprised no more than 100,000 men. Often they were divided into several armies that operated independently of each other. What they lacked in numbers, they made up for in terms of speed and mobility. For one thing, they had no supply train. Instead, the soldiers carried strips of dried meat and curd with them in their saddlebags which they could eat while on the move. All soldiers had access to several horses which they switched between. The horses would graze on the land which they covered and they could be milked or tapped for blood to drink or eaten by the soldiers. Dead soldiers would simply be left to decompose where they fell or be picked at by wild animals, in accordance with Mongol custom. In addition, the Mongols had no slow-moving engineering corps. Instead the engineers built what they needed — bridges or assault weapons for attacking city walls — with the help of whatever material they found on the spot. Moreover, the Mongol armies were used to fighting in wintertime when most other armies took time off. And their horsemanship was of course second to none. Each Mongol warrior had been on horseback since he was a toddler and could fire off arrows while in full gallop towards an enemy. Their bows were so tightly strung that it took two men to do it.

Compared with the armies of agricultural empires, the Mongols used entirely different battlefield tactics. They fought sneakily, with no regard for chivalric conduct or fair play. A favorite ruse was to feign defeat and beat a retreat. As the enemies came in pursuit of them, they would be ambushed and picked off one by one. Another ruse was to make an assault at night, and make fires which made the Mongol army look far larger than it really was. They would then proceed to attack from all directions at once. Battlefield tactics such as these required discipline and a high level of coordination. These skills were initially honed during the hunts, known as nerge. The Mongol chieftains would organize hunting parties, comprising thousands of participants, which encircled herds of deer and other prey, driving the animals before them as they gradually tightened the circle. As each man quickly learned, any failure of discipline and coordination allowed the prey to escape. On the battlefield these lessons were adapted to military use by commanders who relied on torches, whistling arrows and flags to direct their troops. The chief aim of the Mongol generals was to strike terror in their enemies. To loot a city in a spectacular manner was not only a way of getting one’s hands on treasure, but also, and above all, a way of sending a message to the people in the next town that all resistance was futile. By striking terror in their enemies, their will to resist was broken. However, in relation to the cities that surrendered peacefully the message was equally clear: as long as you behave yourselves, and faithfully pay a 10 percent tax, your assets will be safe and your inhabitants protected.

After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, his sons and grandsons continued these wars.

Genghis Khan’s family tree

The Mongol Empire at its height spanned much of the Eurasian landmass, but it was not the creation of only one man. When Genghis Khan died in 1227, the Mongols had not yet arrived in Europe, not taken the Middle East and not occupied China. These conquests were for Genghis Khan’s successors, his sons, and grandsons, to complete. Family trees are always complicated and difficult to remember, but these are the main branches of Genghis Khan’s tree:

Börte, 1161–1230, Temüjin’s wife and grand empress of the empire. Börte was not Temüjin’s only wife, but the couple seem to have had very fond feelings for each other. She was his trusted advisor and was given her own lands to manage. Börte gave birth to four sons:
Jochi, 1181–1227, was not Temüjin’s son since he was born too soon after Börte’s return to her husband. He was never accepted by his brothers as the legitimate successor to their father. When Genghis Khan divided his empire, Jochi got the westernmost part, a territory that later came to constitute the Golden Horde, in today’s Russia.
Chagatai, 1183–1242, was the leading critic of Jochi and was considered a hothead by his brothers. He inherited the Central Asian parts of the empire from his father, later known as the Chagatai khanate. He was very fond of airag. Read more: How to make kumis at p. 117.
Ögedei, 1186–1241, was the third son and successor to Genghis Khan. He expanded the empire into the Middle East, attacked the Jin dynasty in China and moved into Korea. It was during his reign that the Mongols expanded into Europe too.
Tolui, 1192–1232, was the youngest of Genghis Khan’s sons. He inherited the traditional Mongol heartlands from his father. His descendants ruled Mongolia until 1691.

Tolui, in turn, had four sons, but there were intense rivalries and occasionally wars between them.

Möngke, 1208–1259, improved the administration of the empire. During his reign, the Mongols occupied Iraq and Syria. After his death, a war broke out between his brothers regarding the right of succession.
Kublai, 1215–1294, was the Mongol ruler who occupied China in 1271 and founded the Yuan dynasty which was to last until 1368 when it was overrun by the Ming. He moved his capital to Beijing.
Hülegü, 1218–1265, occupied much of Western Asia, including Persia, and was responsible for the sacking of Baghdad in 1258. His forces lost an important battle at Ain Jalut in 1260, against the Mamluk rulers of Egypt. His part of the empire became later known as the Ilkhanate, located in today’s Iran.
Ariq Böke, 1219–1266, was the youngest son of Tolui. After the death of Möngke in 1259, he claimed the throne but was defeated by his brothers. He died aged only forty-five years old. Rumors had it he was poisoned.

In 1235, his son Ögedei, who replaced him, called in a kurultai to decide on the future direction of the conquests. After some debate it was decided to make a move on Russia and Europe. Subutai, the leading general, was the one who first discovered Europe in the 1220s. When the new campaign began in 1236, he set his sight on the Volga River, inhabited by the Bulgars, and this was where a three year-long campaign began. The Mongols quickly discovered that the various Russian city-states were divided among themselves, and that they were only weakly defended. In accordance with their custom, they began by dispatching diplomatic envoys, asking the Russians to submit willingly. Only a few cities took up the offer, however, and those that did not were promptly attacked. Ryazan, 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow, was first in line. From here the Mongols moved on to Kiev, the main city in Russia at the time, which was captured in December 1240. In the end, only a few towns, such as Novgorod and Pskov in the north, survived the onslaught. One long-term consequence was that Kiev lost influence throughout Russia and that Moscow gained in prominence. The prince of Muscovy, who sided with the Mongols, acted as an intermediary between the foreign invaders and the various Russian leaders.

Now the Mongol armies suddenly found themselves on the doorstep of Europe. In the spring of 1241, in a two-pronged attack, they simultaneously moved into Poland in the north and Hungary in the south. The Europeans were completely taken by surprise, but eventually a combined army of Czech, Polish and German knights was assembled. Two battles ensued — at Legnica in Poland on April 9, 1241, and at Mohi, Hungary, two days later. On both occasions, the European armies were completely routed.

The Mongol invasion of Europe

In the winter of 1241, the Mongol armies found themselves in Europe. The immediate reason was their pursuit of the Cumans, a nomadic people whom the Mongols regarded as their subjects. The Cumans had left their regular grazing lands north of the Black Sea and sought refuge in Hungary. The Mongols had insisted that the Hungarian king return them, and when he refused the Mongols came looking for them.

The Mongol armies had no problems operating during the winter months. Indeed, this was when rivers were frozen, which made it easier for their horses to cross, but winter warfare was not common in medieval Europe. Moreover, the Mongols operated with two separate armies — one in Hungary and one in Poland. Eventually, they came as far as the walls of Vienna and they also reached several towns under the control of the Hanseatic League. On March 24, 1241, they sacked Krakow in today’s Poland.

After the initial confusion, the Europeans eventually put together a common defense. The Mongols were met by a collection of Polish, Czech and German forces, together with a contingent of chivalric knights sent by the pope. Two battles ensued — at Legnica, Poland, on April 9, 1241, and, in a far larger confrontation, at Mohi, Hungary, two days later. The Europeans were defeated on both occasions. In fact, the European armies seem to have been more or less obliterated. As a result, in the summer of 1241, Europe was defenseless against further attacks. But the Mongols did not invade. When news reached them of the death of Ögedei Khan, the Mongol commanders decided to return home. Although they conducted new raids in Poland in 1259, 1286 and 1287, the Mongols never again bothered with a large-scale invasion.

The Mongols continued swiftly across eastern Europe and into the lands of the Holy Roman Empire; meanwhile the scouts who preceded them came right up to the city walls of Vienna. This, however, was when news reached them from Mongolia that Ögedei Khan had died and that a kurultai was to be assembled to elect a new leader. Since Ögedei’s brothers had all recently died too — either in battle or under some distinctly suspicious circumstances — it was clear that the title of khagan this time would be given to one of Genghis Khan’s grandchildren. Since several of the potential candidates for the job were engaged in the European wars, they had to return home to fight for the position. Despite the brilliantly executed campaign and their decisive victories, the Mongols never invaded Europe.

Kalmykia, Europe’s only Buddhist republic

Kalmykia is a republic in the Russian Federation, located between the Black and the Caspian Seas. The Kalmykian republic, with some 300,000 inhabitants, is the only place in Europe where a majority of the population is Buddhist. The Kalmyks were nomads originating from today’s Xinjiang who arrived in the seventeenth century, most probably in search of better pasture for their animals. Read more: Khotan to the Khotanese! at p. 32. In their new location the Kalmyks became nominally the subjects of the czar. They were supposed to protect Russia’s southern borders, but in practice, Kalmykia constituted its own independent khanate. The Kalmyks kept in close contact with their kinsmen in Xinjiang and also with the Dalai Lama, the Buddhist leader in Tibet.

In the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire asserted itself in Central Asia. Russian farmers settled here and Moscow tried to control the Kalmyks. In a desperate move, a large portion of them decided to return to Xinjiang, but many died on the way. In the civil war which followed the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Kalmyks sided with the opposition. This too turned out to be a disastrous mistake. After the Bolshevik victory, many were forced to flee. Some Kalmyks went to Belgrade in Serbia where they established Europe’s first Buddhist temple in 1929.

But their troubles were not over. In the 1930s the Kalmyks were forced to join the collective farms set up by the Soviet regime and many Buddhist monasteries were closed. During the Second World War, Kalmykia was invaded by the Germans. In 1943 Stalin declared the Kalmyk people collectively guilty of cooperation with the enemy and they were deported to various locations in Siberia and Central Asia. In 1957, after the death of Stalin, they were allowed to return home but in many cases only to find that their land had been taken over by Russians. Badly planned and badly executed attempts by the Soviet authorities to irrigate the steppe turned their grazing lands into deserts.

Today some 60 percent of Kalmykia’s population are ethnic Kalmyks, while 30 percent are Russian. The proportion of Russians has been going down since the fall of Communism, primarily because the Kalmyks have higher birthrates. Although very few Kalmyks live as nomads on the steppe, many still practise their religion. In 1991 the Dalai Lama visited the republic.

Yet the Mongols stayed on in Russia. Here they maintained a presence in the new capital they built for themselves on the Volga, named Sarai. This was where various Russian princes showed up to pledge allegiance to the Mongols and to receive a jarlig, a tablet which identified them as legitimate rulers recognized by the Great Khan himself. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, this Russian part of the Mongol Empire, known as “the Golden Horde,” increasingly came to assert its independence. As a result, it came into conflict not only with external enemies but also with other parts of the Mongol lands. It wasn’t until 1480, however, that the Russian princes finally assembled a united army strong enough to defeat the enemy. Even then, instead of simply disappearing, the Golden Horde broke up into smaller units which took their places among the other Russian city-states. In 1556, Sarai was conquered and burned, but the successor states lived on. One particularly successful successor state was the khanate on the Crimea peninsula which was annexed by Russia only in 1783. The last descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a country was Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, who was overthrown by the Red Army of the Soviet Union in 1920.

Muhammed Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara

Muhammed Alim Khan, 1911–1920, was the last Emir of Bukhara, in today’s Uzbekistan. His family considered themselves the direct descendants of Genghis Khan via Nogai, Genghis’s great-great-grandson. Once the Mongols had been ousted from Russia, the Nogai Horde, as it was known, retreated to two main areas, one north of the Black Sea, the other north of the Caspian Sea. From here they conducted raids on Russian territory, absconding with young boys whom they sold to the Ottomans in Constantinople as soldiers. Read more: Janissaries and Turkish military music at p. 94.

Little by little, however, the Nogais were pushed south and eastwards by Russian settlers and by the advancing Russian army. In the end, they came to inhabit an area in Central Asia known as Transoxania, with Bukhara and Samarkand as its two main cities. Here the family established themselves as emirs in 1785. Yet the Russians eventually caught up with them and in 1868 they occupied and annexed much of the emirate. The remainder became a Russian protectorate in which the emirs retained full power only over domestic matters.

At the age of thirteen, Muhammed Alim Khan was sent to Saint Petersburg to study government and modern military techniques. In 1910, when he succeeded his father, he tried to reform the country but soon realized that any lasting changes only were going to make his own position more precarious. He was challenged by modernizers — a movement known as “Young Bukhara” — who sought a far more radical transformation of society. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, these radicals called on the Soviet state to help them and in September 1920 the Red Army intervened. A “Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic” was established. This was exactly 800 years after Genghis Khan himself first had invaded Bukhara. Muhammed Alim Khan was the last of Genghis Khan’s direct descendants to rule a state.

Dividing it all up

Once the Mongol princes returned from Europe in 1241, a prolonged struggle ensued over the succession, which pitted Genghis Khan’s grandchildren against each other and which, for a while, resulted in an open war among them. During the coming decade, the Mongols were too occupied by this conflict to pay much attention to their empire. It was only with the election of Möngke Khan in 1251 that the foreign conquests resumed. This time the first targets were the Muslim caliphates in the Middle East. Although Persia had been conquered already by Genghis Khan himself, the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad had not been subject to sustained attacks. It was Hülegü, Möngke’s brother, who was in command of these armies. He began by dispatching envoys to Baghdad with a list of grievances and demands. In November 1257, after the caliph had refused to provide him with the answers he wanted, Hülegü attacked. Baghdad was besieged and, once gunpowder had been used to undermine the city walls, it surrendered. The looting lasted for a full seventeen days. In the confusion the attackers set fire to the city. The destruction of Baghdad, 1258, is remembered to this day as the event which put an end to what the Arabs remember as their “Golden Age.” Read more: Arabian Nights at p. 79.

Their presence in the Middle East put the Mongols in contact with the Mamluks in Cairo. The Mamluks were slaves in the service of the sultans and they were soldiers who in several respects resembled the Mongols themselves. Read more: An international system of caliphates at p. 86.

Many of them were descendants of nomadic tribes and they too were highly trained and disciplined. In September 1260, at Ain Jalut, in today’s Israel, the Mongols were defeated. Although they had lost battles before, the Mongols would always come back to avenge their losses and exact a terrible punishment on their enemies. Yet after Ain Jalut this did not happen and the Mongols never made it to Cairo. This victory, and the way Cairo was spared while Baghdad was looted, decisively transferred power within the Muslim world to the Mamluks. From the fourteenth century onward it was Cairo that was the center of Muslim civilization. After the defeat at Ain Jalut it was clear that the enormous Mongol Empire had found its westernmost frontiers. This in itself was a problem, however, since the success of the Mongol armies depended on constant expansion. There were now no more spoils of war to distribute.

Their presence in the Middle East also put the Mongols in contact with the Faranj, the “Franks,” known in Europe as the “Crusaders.” To the Europeans, the Mongols seemed at first to be heaven-sent. Any enemy of the Muslims, they argued, must be a friend of ours. According to one interpretation common at the time, the Mongol forces were those of Prester John, a legendary Christian ruler who was said to have founded a mighty kingdom somewhere in the Far East. Even once they realized their mistake, however, the Crusaders remained keen to form an alliance with the Mongols. Several diplomatic missions were dispatched both by the Mongols and the Europeans.

Rabban Bar Sauma, Mongol envoy to the Pope

Rabban Bar Sauma, 1220–1294, was a Nestorian monk who became a diplomat for the Mongol khan and visited Europe. Born near present-day Beijing, and apparently of Uyghur descent, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but because of the ongoing wars, he was forced to turn back. Instead, he spent several years in Baghdad, which at the time was a part of the Ilkhanate. From here he was dispatched to Europe on a diplomatic mission to seek an alliance with France. The idea was that the Mongols and the Europeans should join forces against their common, Muslim, enemy.

Rabban Bar Sauma began his journey in 1287. First, he crossed the Black Sea to Constantinople where he had an audience with the Byzantine emperor. He then continued on to Italy, sailing past Sicily where he observed a spectacular eruption of Mount Etna. He arrived in Rome, but too late to meet the pope who had just died. Instead, he went to Florence, Genoa, and Paris where he spent a month as the guest of the French king. In Gascony, which at the time was an English possession, he met the king of England. Both the French and the English were enthusiastic about the idea of a military alliance, but the details were difficult to work out. Going back to Rome, Bar Sauma was received by the newly elected pope who gave him communion on Palm Sunday, 1288. From here he returned to Baghdad with gifts and messages from the various European rulers he had met. This is also where he spent the rest of his days, compiling a book in which he recounted his far-flung travels. Rabban Bar Sauma died in Baghdad in 1294. The military alliance between the Europeans and the Mongols never materialized.

Nestorian Christians, by the way, are the branch of Christianity which expanded in an eastwardly direction from antiquity, forming thriving congregations in Central Asia, India and in China during the Tang dynasty. The Nestorians were independent of Rome and worshiped according to their own rituals. They denied that Christ could simultaneously be both god and man. Today a few hundred thousand Nestorians remain, mainly in Iraq, Syria, Iran and the United States.

Yet although Hülegü’s armies invaded Syria several times, they never coordinated their attacks with the Crusaders in a meaningful fashion. In the end not only the Mongols but also the Faranj were defeated by the Mamluks. Read more: Saladin and the Crusaders at p. 88.

Soon enough the Mongol armies who had conquered and sacked Baghdad came to think of themselves as a separate political entity, and their leader, Hülegü, to think of himself not as a general or a governor working for the Great Khan in Mongolia, but as a khan with a khanate of his own. This realm, made up of Persia and big chunks of Central Asia and the Middle East, came to be known as the “Ilkhanate,” or “subordinate khanate.” Much like the Arabs who had conquered these lands before them, the Ilkhanate khans and their courts came to be heavily influenced by the local, essentially Persian, culture. That is, in a radical transformation of their own ways of life, the Mongols got off their horses and settled down in cities. They also adopted Islam as the official religion of the state and the khans became great supporters of scholarship and the arts. The most celebrated example is the astronomical observatory at Maragheh which, in addition to astronomers, had mathematicians, philosophers and medical doctors in residence. Yet, and much as in the case of the Golden Horde in Russia, the Ilkhanate began to fall apart in the first half of the fourteenth century, and eventually it was broken up into a number of small successor states. The most famous among them was the state which, in the fourteenth century, Timur, or Tamerlane turned into a vast, if short-lived, empire.

The only neighbors which the Mongols had not yet successfully attacked were the Chinese. This is surprising given how relatively close China was to the Mongol heartlands and how singularly wealthy the country was. Although Genghis Khan had already successfully occupied the nomadic buffer states which were located between the Mongols and the Chinese, he never made any sustained attacks against the Chinese. It was only once Möngke was elected khagan in 1251 that China came back into focus. China at this time was ruled by the Song dynasty, 960–1279, is one of the most celebrated dynasties of China. Read more: China and East Asia at p. 13.

Militarily, however, they were weak and the Jurchen had already forced them to relocate their capital to the southern city of Hangzhou. Although this move constituted an embarrassment, the Song continued to thrive economically, and they still controlled some 60 percent of China’s population. Hangzhou, amazed visitors reported, had no fewer than 12,000 bridges across the canals of the city and the most beautiful women in the world.

Möngke Khan had picked his brother Kublai to be in charge of the invasion of China, but Kublai had no aptitude for war, and besides he was too fat to ride a horse. He moved only reluctantly against the Chinese, complemented by the generals who Möngke himself had dispatched to support him. The strategy was to attack the Song court using diversionary tactics, starting with an invasion of Sichuan to the west and Yunnan to the southwest. If the Mongols gained control of these areas according to plan, they could attack the Song from all sides at once. Yet the death of Möngke Khan in 1259, and the subsequent struggle over the succession, meant that China once again became a less important concern. Although the wars eventually resumed, it took another twelve years before Kublai Khan could declare himself emperor of China, and another ten years after that before he had decisively defeated the last pockets of Song resistance. Eventually the last Song emperor, an eight-year-old boy, committed suicide together with his prime minister and 800 members of his family. From 1279 on it was Kublai Khan who held the “Mandate of Heaven” as the leader of a new dynasty, the Yuan.

While the attacks on China were taking place, the Mongols successfully invaded the Korean peninsula where the kings agreed to pay regular tributes. Kublai Khan also tried to invade Japan. He assembled an army of some 100,000 men for the purpose, but the ships which they constructed were not quite seaworthy, and besides the invaders were unlucky with the weather.

Kamikaze

The Mongols tried to invade Japan twice. Late in the autumn of 1274, a Mongol fleet of some 300 ships and 20,000 soldiers reached the Japanese island of Kyushu. At the ensuing battle, the inexperienced and badly equipped Japanese army was defeated, yet an impending storm convinced the Mongol generals to set out to sea so as not to become marooned on the shore. The fleet was destroyed and the few ships that remained in the harbor were easy for the Japanese to deal with. In the summer of 1281, the Mongols attempted another invasion. Again, however, a large typhoon appeared and wiped out their fleet. The Mongols, clearly, were not very experienced seamen and the flat-bottomed boats they had built for the passage to Japan were not well suited to the task. After these experiences, the Mongols gave up their attempts to invade the country.

Given that they had been saved twice by miraculous typhoons, the Japanese began to believe that their country enjoyed divine protection — that the winds, kaze, were sent by the gods, the kami. The Kamikaze was also the name given to the Special Attack Units of the Japanese air force established towards the end of the Second World War. The unit sent pilots on suicide missions with the goal of dropping their planes, themselves and their explosive cargo on important enemy targets — on American airplane carriers in particular. The pilots were all volunteers — young recruits without much training whom the military authorities considered expendable. In fact, there were many more volunteers than airplanes. At least 47 Allied ships were sunk by means of these suicide pilots, some 300 ships were damaged and altogether 3,860 pilots were killed. However, the term “kamikaze pilot” was not used in Japan during the war. It is instead an American term which was imported into Japan after 1945, together with many other features of American culture.

The first invasion in 1274 had to be aborted and the second invasion in 1281 failed miserably. Japan, as a result, was never occupied. Cut off from China by the presence of the Mongols, Japan had to depend on its own resources. Kublai Khan also tried to invade Java, in today’s Indonesia, and his armies conducted campaigns in Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. Due to the hot and humid weather, however, these expeditions were hampered by disease, in a land which was in any case unsuitable for soldiers on horseback due to its tropical terrain and thick jungles.

Kublai Khan’s favorite wife died in 1281; his favorite son and chosen successor died in 1285. After that, he grew increasingly despondent and withdrew from the daily business of government. He fell ill in 1293 and died in 1294. The last years of the Yuan dynasty were characterized by famines and distress among ordinary people. The reigns of the later emperors were short and marked by intrigues and rivalries. Uninterested in administration, they were separated both from the army and from people at large. The Yuan dynasty was eventually defeated by the Ming, a native Chinese dynasty, which replaced them in 1368. The Mongols retreated to Mongolia, forming what is known as the “Northern Yuan dynasty,” but they never rescinded their claims to the Chinese throne. They ruled Mongolia until 1635 when they were deposed by the Manchus, descendants of the Jurchen tribes which Genghis Khan had defeated so easily four hundred years earlier.

An international system of khanates

In the first part of the thirteenth century, the Mongols invaded almost the entirety of the Eurasian landmass, yet already by mid-century their empire began to fall apart. As long as Genghis Khan’s descendants could agree on the election of a khagan, the empire could be described as united, but after the death of Möngke Khan in 1259 no such consensus could be reached. Möngke’s brothers — Hülegü, Kublai and Ariq Böke — began fighting with each other and the conflict soon escalated into a civil war — the Toluid Civil War, named after Tolui, their father — which resulted in four separate Mongol khanates being established: the Golden Horde in Russia, led by Batu Khan; the Ilkhanate in Persia, led by Hülegü Khan; the Chagatai khanate, comprising the traditional heartland of the Mongols, led by Chagatai Khan; and the Yuan dynasty in China, led by Kublai Khan. As we saw, these entities had asserted their independence for some time already, and the outcome of the Toluid War only confirmed the situation on the ground. And yet, throughout these conflicts a number of commonalities remained. If nothing else, they were united by personal ties and a shared commitment to a Mongol identity. The result is an international system with quite distinct characteristics. Perhaps we could talk about “the international system of the Mongol khanates.”

One distinct feature was the fact that Genghis Khan’s descendants had strong economic interests in the countries they ruled. The 10 percent share they received of all loot soon came to constitute considerable economic assets. What they owned was not just treasure but productive resources — men, animals, fields, factories, and ships. Before long they developed an extensive personal stake in the economic activities and the economic well-being of the entirety of the Eurasian landmass. The khans, from this perspective, were more like leaders of a multinational corporation than leaders of armies or states. Yet this particular multinational cooperation was also a family business. When the empire came to be divided into four separate realms, the economic stakes were impossible to divide in the same fashion since all khans maintained large assets — known as khubi, “shares” — in each other’s territories. Thus Hülegü in the Ilkhanate owned 25,000 households of silk workers in China which were ruled by his brother Kublai, but he also owned entire valleys in Tibet and had claims on furs and falcons from the steppes of the Golden Horde. Such cross-cutting ownership was duplicated in the case of the other khans and their families, creating an intricate pattern of economic interdependence.

Although the khanates became ever more rooted in the societies they ruled, they did maintain a distinct Mongolian identity. Or at least, they made considerable efforts to do so.

Tuvan throat singing

Tuva is an autonomous region of the Russian republic, located just north of today’s Mongolia, right in the geographical center of Asia. For some 500 years, Tuva was a part of the Mongol Empire; in the nineteenth century it was dominated by China; from 1921 it was an independent country, and in 1944 Stalin made it a part of the Soviet Union. Protected by heavy forest, by the Altai mountains and by Soviet restrictions that kept outsiders out, traditional Tuvan culture has remained strong. A large proportion of the 300,000 inhabitants are still pastoralists — tending sheep, goats, horses and reindeer — or they are hunters and fishermen.

What more than anything has made Tuva famous is its tradition of throat singing. Throat singing, overtone or polytonal singing, is a technique that allows you to sing several notes at once. The trick is not only to employ the vocal cords but also other parts of the respiratory tract. In normal song, these other organs are vibrating too, creating what we think of as “timbre,” but the throat singers have found a way of increasing the level of the sound produced in this way. In Tuva there are at least five different versions of the technique, varying depending on which part of the human anatomy is emphasized. The main style, khoomei, is also the Tuvan name for throat singing in general.

Throat singing is common among Mongols too, and Tibetans, and it is widely practiced among people of the arctic north, including by Inuits in North America. In Tuva, they think of throat singing as a way of imitating the sounds made by rivers, animals, and mountains. This way of singing is a means of communicating with nature. The singers often accompany themselves on the igil, the horse-head fiddle, or on large drums. The technique plays a role in shamanic practices too. Today several artists combine throat singing with other musical genres, including jazz and hip hop.

This awareness of their shared descent helped unite the khanates even as they increasingly asserted their independence. For example, they insisted on using Mongolian in communications with officials and adopted a version of the Uyghur alphabet in order to use the language in their official correspondence. Meanwhile, knowledge of Mongolian was forbidden to non-Mongols — although the princes of Muscovy must have ignored the ban since speaking Mongolian became popular at their court. When Kublai Khan moved his capital to Beijing in 1264, he reserved a large area in the center of the city — corresponding roughly to what today is known as the “Forbidden Palace” — where he and his court set up their ger, their tents, which they continued to prefer to regular buildings. There were hills in this enclosure too, and animals which members of the court could hunt in the traditional Mongolian fashion.

How to make kumis

Fermented mare’s milk, milk from female horses, is the traditional drink of choice for people on the steppes of Central Asia, including the Mongols. The Mongols call it airag but it is commonly known as “kumis” from kımız, its Turkish name. Kumis is a slightly alcoholic beverage, but not very much so — only 2–3 percent. Traditionally, the milk was fermented in bags made from horse-hide which were strapped to a saddle and jogged around in order to prevent coagulation. After a day on horseback, the milk was ready to drink. In industrial production today, the drink ferments at 27 degrees Celsius and it is ready to drink in about five hours. The fermentation process is caused by a combination of lactic acid bacteria and yeast.

The Greek historian Herodotus, fifth century BCE, described mare-milking among the Scythians, a nomadic people living on the steppes of Central Asia, and the friar William of Rubruck who visited the Mongols in the thirteenth century gave an account of kumis drinking. “It is pungent,” he reported, “and when a man has finished drinking, it leaves a taste of milk of almonds on the tongue, and it makes the inner man most joyful and also intoxicates weak heads, and greatly provokes urine.” Milking a horse is more difficult than a cow and it yields far less milk. Moreover, mares cannot be milked continuously but only for a few months after the foals are born. A mare typically produces between 1,000 and 1,200 liters of milk during a season.

Kumis drinking caught on as a health fad in the decades before the First World War, in particular in Russia. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and authors Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov all tried the “kumis cure.” The Kyrgyz capital Bishkek is named after the paddle used to churn the mare’s milk during the process of fermentation.

The key aspect of this identity was the experiences that all Mongols shared as nomads on the steppes of Central Asia. The logic of nomadic societies differs from the logic of sedentary societies in crucial respects. According to the Confucian rhetoric, farmers were considered the most important social class since they produced the food which fed everyone else. Merchants, by contrast, were the least important since their labor contributed nothing which did not already exist. To the Mongols, however, this made no sense. As their own example clearly demonstrated, the farmers’ way of life was nowhere near as important as the Confucians assumed. It was obviously possible to feed a nation that did not put stakes into the ground. Thus the Mongols demoted farmers to one of the lowest ranks in society, below prostitutes but above beggars.

They also thought of land quite differently. The Mongols were interested in booty but not really in territorial acquisitions. They would take what they could get their hands on and then move on. As a result, the Mongols never had to defend a fixed position. To them there was no military difference between attack and retreat; they were as happy to defeat an enemy who pursued them as one they themselves pursued. This is also why their empire left no monuments or buildings. During Genghis Khan’s reign the Mongols did not even have a proper capital. Instead, Genghis would take his court and his advisers with him in a ger, a type of yurt, mounted on a cart which was pulled by a set of strong horses. He toured the country and the world accompanied by his capital. It was only during Ögedei’s reign, in 1235, that Karakorum became more than a collection of tents, but even then the city was used mainly for storing the treasures that the soldiers brought home. The Mongols left a very light footprint on the land they occupied, we might say. Even a once-large city such as Sarai in the Golden Horde has left traces that only an archaeologist can appreciate.

The only thing the Mongols built were bridges. Bridges were crucial for allowing armies to mobilise and giving merchants free passage. The Mongols built them whenever they were needed. They were also experts at breaching walls. They recruited Chinese engineers who taught them how to construct siege engines. Before long the Mongols were building their own catapults, trebuchets and battering rams — siege warfare being the only area in which they made technological advances. Before the thirteenth century the defenders had usually had the advantage during a siege, but after the Mongol invasions this was no longer the case.

The Mongols also built bridges and breached walls metaphorically speaking and thereby helped facilitate interaction between all the corners of their far-flung empire. It was during the Pax Mongolica that Europeans first acquired a taste for Asian luxury goods and Chinese inventions first reached Europe. The most obvious part of this trade-friendly infrastructure was physical. Although the various routes which made up the “Silk Road” had been in place for a long time already, the Mongols radically improved them, making travel easier, safer and quicker. They referred to the system as örtöö, a network of interconnected relay stations where travelers could stop to rest and replenish their supplies, change horses, engage in trade or swap information and gossip. The relay stations, or caravanserai, were set approximately thirty kilometers apart. Staffing and maintaining these stations was a way to pay one’s taxes and twenty-five families were responsible for each one. The network was used for government officials too and for communicating with generals and administrators throughout the empire. Important travelers would carry an imperial seal, known as a paiza — a small tablet made from gold, silver or wood — which assured them protection, accommodation, and transportation but also exemption from local duties. The paiza worked as a combination of passport and credit card. Read more: Sogdian letters at p. 20.

In addition to the physical infrastructure, the Mongols provided legal and institutional infrastructure. One example is the standardization of weights and measures. By making sure that goods were weighed and measured in the same fashion throughout the empire, the Mongol authorities made it easy to compare prices. Money was standardized too. In 1253 Möngke Khan created a department of monetary affairs that issued paper money of fixed denominations. This made it possible to pay taxes in cash instead of in kind. This vastly improved the state’s finances. Even time itself was standardized, or at least the days and months of the year. At observatories in both the Ilkhanate and in Mongol-run China, calendars were produced which showed the same astronomical data.

However, it was not only people and goods that traveled along the örtöö network, but also disease.

The Black Death

The trade routes of Central Asia did not only disseminate goods and ideas but also diseases such as the bubonic plague, known as the “Black Death.” The contagion first hit the Mongols, then the Arabic world and Europe. The first wave came in the 1340s and later waves in the 1360s and 70s. In 1347, the story has it, the Mongols had laid a siege on the prosperous Genoese city of Caffa on the Crimean peninsula, yet their army was already seriously weakened by the disease. In an act of what would come to count as biological warfare, the Mongols catapulted the corpses of their dead across the city walls, thereby infecting the inhabitants. In October the same year a Genoese ship fleeing the city anchored in the harbor of Messina, Sicily. By the time they arrived, it was clear that its crew too carried the disease. From Messina the plague spread quickly along Europe’s trade routes, reaching southern England the following year. It is estimated that some 75 million people died from the plague worldwide and 20 million people in Europe alone — perhaps as many as half of the continent’s population. Read more: The Columbian exchange at p. 156. Although it was obvious to everyone that the disease was spread through contagion, no one understood the biological mechanisms involved. Initially, it was rats that had become infected, then the rats were bitten by fleas which in turn bit humans. The disease causes the lymph nodes to become sore and to swell to the size of apples. In about 80 percent of the cases, death would follow within two days.

Everyone looked for an explanation for the great calamity. Weak and marginal groups were often identified as culprits — Catalans, Jews, beggars and the poor — but the weak and the marginal were dying too and could not, in the long run, serve as scapegoats. A religious explanation made more sense. The outbreak, various firebrand preachers explained, was God’s punishment for the sins of mankind. Throughout Europe, the deaths led to labor shortages which made it easier for serfs to renegotiate their contracts with their lords or to simply run away and settle on their own land. As a result, the medieval feudal economic system was more difficult to maintain. The Black Death helped pave the way for economic markets and thereby for capitalism.

In the latter part of the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague hit first China, then the Mongols, the Arabic world and finally Europe in a series of successive waves. It is estimated that some 75 million people died worldwide and that China lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population, and Europe perhaps half. The disease had a profound and immediate impact on commerce and on the Mongol Empire itself. Although contemporaries had no notion of epidemiology, they understood that the disease was spread through contagion and that people who suddenly appeared in their midst from infected lands were potential carriers. As a result, people became suspicious of travelers, merchants, foreigners and mendicant monks. With a sharp reduction in trade, the örtöö network temporarily collapsed.

The Mongols have had a singularly bad press. They are known as bloodthirsty barbarians who annihilated entire cities, killing all inhabitants together with their cats and dogs. And the Mongols did indeed use terror as a means of defeating their enemies, but it is not clear that their way of making war was substantially more destructive than that of other people at the time — or, indeed, more destructive than wars fought today. Another question concerns their long-term impact on the societies they invaded. In China, Russia and the Middle East, the Mongols have often been blamed for causing economic and cultural stagnation. Arab scholars have pointed to the destruction of Baghdad as the pivotal event that ended their “Golden Age” — right at the time when the revival of learning was making Europe increasingly dynamic. Chinese scholars have similarly faulted the Mongols for ending the Song dynasty — during which China came tantalizingly close to embarking on an industrial revolution of its own. Some Russian scholars, meanwhile, have blamed the Golden Horde for the fact that Russia never managed to keep up when the rest of Europe was modernizing. Yet apart from the direct destruction they wrought, it is not at all clear that the impact of the Mongols, on the whole, was negative. Indeed the opposite case can be made — that the Mongols encouraged commerce and innovation by enabling the flow of goods, services, and new ideas to every corner of the enormous Eurasian landmass. The exchange facilitated in this fashion had a civilizing impact even as it undermined or irrevocably destroyed the local culture.

Lev Gumilev and Eurasianism

Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev, 1912–1992, was a Soviet historian, anthropologist and translator, and the son of two celebrated poets, Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. His father was shot when Lev was only seven years old and he spent most of his youth in Soviet labor camps. His mother, who had always been critical of Stalin, even wrote paeans of the regime in an attempted to help her son, but to no avail: Gumilev was freed only after Stalin’s death. Upon his release he began working at the Hermitage Museum in Moscow where he studied the history of the Khazars and other people of the Central Asian steppes. Gumilev was a neo-Eurasianist who believed Russian identity to be closer to the identity of the peoples of Central Asia than to Europeans.

The Eurasianist movement originally arose among the Russian diaspora in Western Europe in the 1920s. Although the Eurasianists were staunchly anti-Communist, they defended the October Revolution of 1917 as a way to protect Russia against European capitalism and its materialistic values. Yet when their main organization in 1929 turned out to be sponsored by the Soviet regime, the Eurasianists lost credibility. In today’s Russia, Eurasianist arguments are used to defend the notion of a “Greater Russia,” a Russia which is based on Asian rather than European values, and which once again incorporates Central Asian states within its territory. A Eurasian Economic Community was established in October 2000, with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as members. Some observers regard the organization as a way of recreating a Soviet-style empire or perhaps a twenty-first-century version of the Golden Horde.

Gumilev’s most notorious argument was that the Mongol invasion never happened. Rather, he said, the small Russian principalities concluded a defensive alliance with the Mongols in order to repel the European forces which had attacked them from the west. Read more: The Mongol invasion of Europe at p. 109. Gumilev supported the nationalist movements of Tatars, Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples, as well as of Mongolia, but his ideas were rejected by the Soviet authorities and he, much like his parents, was unable to publish anything he wrote. This changed when the Soviet Union disintegrated in the 1980s. Then Gumilev came to be widely read by nationalists in both Russia and in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Timeline

1206	Temüjin is elected khagan. Takes the name “Genghis Khan.”
1220	Genghis Khan enters Bukhara. Sacks the city and kills its inhabitants.
1227	Death of Genghis Khan. His son Ögedei succeeds him.
1236	Invasion of Russia begins.
1241	The Mongols defeat the European armies at the battles of Legnica and Mohi, but return to Mongolia. Their invasion of Europe never takes place.
1258	Baghdad is sacked. The caliph is rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. End of the Arab “Golden Age.”
1260–1264	The Toluid wars, fought between Genghis Khan’s grandchildren. Led to the division of the empire into four separate khanates.
1260	The Mongol armies are defeated at Ain Jalut, in today’s Israel.
1274	First attempt to invade Japan. The Japanese saved by kamikaze.
1279	Kublai Khan establishes the Yuan dynasty in China.
1347	The Genoese city of Caffa in the Crimea is infected with the bubonic plague.
1368	The Yuan dynasty falls.
1556	Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde, is conquered and burned.
1635	The last remnant of the Mongol empire — the Northern Yuan — is conquered by the Manchus.
1920	Muhammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, and the last direct descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a country, is deposed by the Soviet Red Army.

Short dictionary

caravanserai, Persian	Relay station in the örtöö network.
faranj, Arabic	Literally, “Frank.” Name given to the waves of armies from Europe who invaded the Middle East from the eleventh to the thirteenth century.
ger, Mongolian	“Tent.” What the Turks refer to as yurt.
jarlig, Mongolian	A document given by the Mongol khagan to Russian princes to authorize their rule.
kamikaze, Japanese	The “wind of the gods” which was thought to have protected Japan from a Mongol invasion.
khagan, Turkish	The “khan of khans,” equal to emperor. The title given to the leader of the Mongol Empire, but also to other rulers in Central Asia.
khubi, Mongolian	“Share.” Share of economic assets held by members of the Mongol elite.
kurultai, Mongolian	The assembly of Mongol leaders. Responsible for electing khagan and for making decisions regarding foreign conquests.
örtöö, Mongolian	Yam in Russian. Systems of roads and relay stations that covered much of the Mongol empire.
paiza, Mongolian	A tablet that gave the bearers right of passage and exempted them from taxes when traveling along the örtöö network.
pax mongolica, Latin	“Mongol peace.” A period in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Mongol presence throughout Eurasia facilitated commerce and travel.
yassa, Mongolian	“Order” or “decree.” The legal code of the Mongol empire which regulated many aspects of social and economic life.

Think about

From Temüjin to Genghis Khan

Describe the social relation in the traditional societies of the Asian steppe.
What explains Temüjin’s success as a military leader?
What is a kurultai?

A nomadic state

Which administrative reforms did Genghis Khan undertake?
What are the challenges of creating a nomadic empire?
Why was the Mongol victory over the Khwarazmian Empire a pivotal event?

How to conquer the world

How was the Mongol army organized? What made it so successful?
Describe some of the battlefield tactics employed by the Mongols.
Why did the Mongols never invade Europe?

Dividing it all up

How did the Mongol empire come to be divided? Give a brief description of its constituent parts.
How did the Mongols eventually come to occupy China? Which challenges did the Mongols face when ruling the country?
Why did the Mongol invasion of Japan fail?

An international system of khanates

Describe the road network maintained by the Mongols.
What was the “Black Death” and what impact did it have?
How should we assess the long-term impact of the Mongol invasions?

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