A History of the World (37 page)

But even with that record – establishing a military empire that changed the course of Chinese, Persian, Indian and Russian history – there is yet more to be said for Genghis as a unique shaper of world events. For despite their extreme brutality – of which more later – the Mongol hordes created a single space that linked east and west, China and the Mediterranean, as never before. Once the Mongol empire was established, Genghis and his successors provided a safe and well run route for silk, silver and other goods to pass between the emerging civilizations of Europe and China. The historian Ian Morris goes further. Because, he argues, the Mongols so devastated the great Muslim cities and cultures of Baghdad, Merv, Samarkand and Bukhara (which before the Mongols arrived were beautiful, advanced and teeming centres of culture and learning), they allowed the Mediterranean to leap ahead: ‘Because they did not sack Cairo, it remained the West’s biggest and richest city, and because they did not invade Western Europe, Venice and Genoa remained the West’s greatest commercial centres. Development tumbled in the old Muslim core . . . by the 1270s, when Marco Polo set off for China, the Western core had shifted decisively into the Mediterranean lands that the Mongols had spared.’
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Genghis was born to a Mongol chieftain but given a name belonging to one of the rival tribes, the Tatars, because his father had just returned home with a Tatar captive. So the boy was called Temujin. He was probably born in 1162, into a world of interminable rivalries between tribes and of frequent wars with the Chinese to the south. He was said to be afraid of dogs; at eight he was betrothed and taken, as was the custom, to the girl’s clan. But on his way home again his father was poisoned by hostile Tatars. Temujin boldly tried to claim leadership, as his father’s successor, but the Mongol tribe were not about to be told what to do by a nine-year-old boy. They cast the family off. Temujin, his widowed mother Hoelun and six other young
children, two of them half-brothers, were left homeless. They lived by foraging in the forest, gathering wild onions, seeds and herbs, eating the carcasses of dead animals and hunting small game. In a telling story, it is said that his mother gave Temujin and his brothers an arrow each and told them to break it. They did. Then she tied five arrows into a bundle and told them to break that. They could not. From unity, strength – a potent message for a banished boy.

At ten, it’s said, Temujin killed one of his half-brothers. Later, when captured by enemies of his father, he managed to escape despite being shackled in a huge wooden collar. This was (and is) the Wild East, and Temujin’s story resounds with further tales of horse thieves and famous feats until at last he rises in his clan, by force of personality, to a position of leadership. When he marries the young girl he had originally been betrothed to, and she is kidnapped (and probably raped), he and a childhood friend gather thousands of supporters and win her back – Temujin’s first military victory. He and the bride, Borte, would stay close throughout their lives, despite his concubines and slave girls.

So far, this is the exhilarating but small-time story of a local warlord on the rise. But Temujin had just begun.

The people of the Mongolian steppe were divided into rival groups, including Tatars, Uyghurs and Keraits, as well as Mongols. There is a clear parallel here with the development of lineage groups among the native American people of the Atlantic seaboard – hugely extended families, connected through cousinhood, and then further extended by alliance. Genghis Khan’s achievement was to find a way to meld the steppe tribes into a single people as they lived, rode and fought together – a bundle of arrows, not just one. He did this first by making shrewd alliances. By 1190 he had united all the Mongols, no small feat. Next, he turned his attention to the rival tribes, offering those he had defeated a share in future war spoils; and he also offered them brotherhood rather than exile or disgrace, thereby converting traditional enemies into new recruits.

Even so, a long and complicated steppe war followed, during which Temujin was nearly defeated, nearly shot dead with an arrow, and suffered reverses as well as victories. But his power steadily spread. One sorrow on the way was that a childhood friend with whom he had made a vow of everlasting blood-brotherhood had become a key
rival. Defeated, the friend refused to join Temujin. He said, according to the
Secret History
, ‘I would be the louse in your collar, I would become the splinter in your coat-lining.’ Temujin, about to become Genghis Khan, the great ruler, sadly acceded to his request and granted him death by strangulation. By 1206, Genghis had subdued and united the steppe peoples and was ready to amaze the world.

As a military leader, he relied not simply on awesome brutality towards those who refused to surrender. He also brought in a new system of law (and later, writing), and was quick to learn from others. He used networks of spies, Chinese siege machines and huge mechanical bows, and even gunpowder-based bombs in ways the nomads never had before. His first victims were the Tangut, or western Xia (or sometimes, ‘White Mongol’), a people whose empire was about twice the size of France and sat on the northern border of China proper, a sophisticated and advanced culture with good printing technology and a fine tradition of painting. Genghis more or less wiped it off the face of the map in what one of his modern biographers suggests may be ‘the first ever recorded example of attempted genocide’.
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He moved on to destroy the military power of the much bigger Chinese Jin dynasty, seizing the city that is today Beijing and forcing the Jin to retreat south, where Genghis’s successors would eventually hunt them down and end their dynasty entirely. His next victim was a khanate to the west of China, followed by the huge Khwarezmid empire with its gorgeous fortified trading cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Urgench and Merv, already mentioned. These became scenes of some of the most horrific massacres in history. With a force of more than a hundred thousand men, each with two or three horses in tow, and now carrying a long train of Chinese siege engines and slaves, Genghis and his generals rumbled across the mountains to these oasis citadels, which boasted underground canals and glittering domes and had grown rich on silk and slaves. And there he unleashed hell.

It has been estimated that his armies killed 1.25 million people, over two years, out of the Khwarezmid empire’s total population of around three million. This, as the historian John Man puts it, makes it perhaps the biggest proportional mass killing in history, ‘an equivalent of the 25–30 per cent population cut meted out by Europe’s greatest catastrophe, the Black Death’. The killings were done in batches after the cities had been taken, by soldiers working methodically, with
swords and axes, through the old and the young, fighters and non-fighters. Pyramids of skulls were left in the sand, and lagoons of blood. All manner of special cruelties were reserved for those who had resisted particularly bravely. Samarkand, which surrendered pretty promptly, still lost three-quarters of its people.

After this, Genghis’s armies divided. He turned south into Afghanistan and northern India, while his generals turned further north into the Christian kingdom of Georgia, destroying in 1221 the golden age it had enjoyed under its famous queen Tamara; and then further north still, towards Russia and Bulgaria. Major battles ensued, then a notable defeat of the Russian princes – after which they were crushed to death under a platform on which the Mongol generals were feasting. This probing attack revealed to the Mongols that there was plenty of rich grassland to allow them to drive much deeper into Europe. Under the rule of Genghis Khan’s son, they would be back.

On their return they destroyed the first great Kiev-based Russian Christian civilization, shattering its towns and scattering its people, so that when Russia began to re-emerge as a Slavic state it would be situated much further north, in Moscow and Novgorod, giving Russia even today a different character. Everywhere, the Mongols brought terror; everywhere, slaughter. From China to Europe they were soon being described in ways that echo the terrified and disgusted reactions to the Huns, seven hundred years earlier. The English chronicler Matthew Paris wrote that the Mongols were ‘inhuman and of the nature of beasts, rather to be called monsters than men, thirsting after drinking blood and tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and human beings’.

In his later years Genghis Khan showed increasing interest in spiritual matters, summoning a Dao sage from central China to instruct him in longevity and good living. It sounds unlikely, and may have been more about prolonging his life than any real interest in ethics: if so the sage failed to help, because Genghis died in his early sixties after defeating the Xia again – they had failed to support him in his central Asian campaign, and paid the price. He died with his eyes set on new victories in China.

There are numerous stories about his death, variously ascribed to illness, a fall from his horse or even murder by a concubine who had hidden a pair of pliers inside herself and partially castrated him. He was buried in secret, and although another story relates that everyone
involved was then killed to protect the sanctity of his resting place, this is probably as apocryphal as the pliers. Today, archaeologists believe they are homing in on the valleys where Genghis was buried, and it is quite possible that modern Mongolia will be the site of a spectacular discovery within a few years.

Genghis Khan’s successors spread the Mongol empire to its furthest extent, taking all of China and Korea and, in the West, defeating the Poles and the Hungarians, whose army included French and Germans too. The same methods of slaughter so well known in Asia were repeated in Europe. The Mongols were by now using gunpowder and bombs fired by catapult, which horrified and perplexed the backward Europeans. They could almost certainly have overrun Germany, France and Italy had they chosen to, but internal fissures were beginning to break up their empire and the Mongol armies turned back. By now they had, however, taken effective control of Russia, requiring the princes and cities still standing to pay regular tribute.

It is true that Mongol power brought a period of peace to central Asia, allowing merchants and explorers to travel safely from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Genghis, himself illiterate, oversaw the establishment of Mongol literacy. He showed complete religious tolerance, allowing Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others to worship as they wished. Yet his was the peace that follows devastation and the tolerance of the all-conquering and irreligious. The smooth path now ready for Marco Polo and others had been achieved at the price of destroying the great Islamic civilization of central Asia, as well as many Chinese and European centres. Though they now had their own capital – Karakorum, a poor place, by all accounts – the Mongols were uninterested in building anything more than pyramids of skulls (and they were certainly proficient at that). They left no interesting thought or literature beyond their own history, created little of beauty; and across much of the world that they conquered they did little with their winnings.

But Genghis changed the world. He unintentionally helped Christian Europe to rise over the Muslim empire, and brought an end to a time of Chinese division. Some have tried to make of him an early apostle of globalism and free trade. In his own land, Mongolia, he is a formidable national hero: his equestrian statue, the world’s biggest, gleams across the steppes, and his face glares from banknotes, hillsides
and hoardings. But the truth is that, though the world would have been very different without the rise of the banished boy, it would probably have been much better off, too.

Marco the Mouth

Around some individuals, stories gather like flies. It is said that when Marco Polo, the traveller and tale-spinner, returned at last to Venice after a twenty-four-year journey into China and the Far East, he and his companions were dressed in greasy silk robes, shaggy fur and Tatar rags. They could hardly remember their Venetian – indeed, they were barely taken for Italians – but when they slit the seams of their clothes, a cascade of rubies and emeralds fell out. This story first emerges nearly two centuries after Polo returned, in 1295. Long before that, though, the man himself was mocked for his exaggerations. In his old age he was known to the Venetians as Marco il Milione, or Marco Millions. This was probably a reference not to his wealth, but to his enthusiasm for overstatement: ‘millions’ of this, ‘millions’ of that. It is also said that on his deathbed, his friends urged him to admit his exaggerations so as not to meet his maker with lies on his tongue. He replied: ‘I never told the half of what I saw.’
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He would have made a good British tabloid journalist.

Or a successful one, anyway: for Marco Polo’s world-famous accounts of his journey to Mongolia and China, which transfixed medieval Europe, are hardly a model of good reporting. They include patent nonsense about the mythical Christian king Prester John, stories of miracles and fantastic hearsay met with during a journey that nobody trying to travel in his footsteps has ever been able to make proper sense of. There seems to be wild boasting about his important role in the Mongol Chinese court, none of it confirmed by the detailed Chinese records of the time. Many things that would strike most foreign travellers as noteworthy about the China of Marco’s time – the Great Wall, chopsticks, tea, the foot-binding of women, the Chinese way of writing – he does not even mention. One careful study by a British academic who studied in Beijing and delved deeply into the sources concluded that Marco had probably never been to China at all, and had combined hearsay with plagiarism from other accounts.
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Yet his book, dictated in a Genoese prison to a French-speaking writer of romantic chronicles, became a huge hit, and has stayed popular precisely because Marco Polo could tell a good tale. It gives us even today a vivid glimpse into the world left behind after the Mongol eruption. Many of the strange facts he related, such as the Chinese use of pieces of stamped paper as money and their habit of burning pieces of black stone for fuel, turned out to be true. Moving beyond China, Polo told of Indian customs that would have seemed extremely bizarre, such as the worship of sacred cows and the self-immolation of wives on funeral pyres, and of places where a strange viscous substance oozed from the ground and could be burned to produce heat. He brought the first news to Europeans of islands such as Java and the Spice Islands, and of Burma – a new world of marvels, somewhere over the horizon. So it is hardly surprising that the
Description of the World
, written in 1298, probably in French, and then hastily translated into Italian dialects, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Irish and many more languages, set the European imagination on fire.