Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (26 page)

In areas under attack, Muslims did, of course, feel threatened by the Franj, even horrified by them, but they didn’t see in these attacks any intellectual challenge to their ideas and beliefs. And although the Crusades were certainly a serious matter for Muslims living along the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Crusaders never penetrated deeply into the Muslim world. For example, no real army ever reached Mecca and Medina, only a small raiding party led by a renegade whom even other Franj regarded as a despicable rogue. The Crusaders never laid siege to Baghdad nor did they p
enetrate historic Persia. People in Khorasan and Bactria and the Indus Valley remained completely unaffected by the incursion and largely unaware of it.

What’s more, the Crusades stimulated no particular curiosity in the Muslim world about Western Europe. No one expended much energy wondering where these Franj had come from, or what their life was like back home, or what they believed. In the early 1300s, Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, a Jewish convert to Islam, wrote an epic
Collection of All Histories
, which included the history of China, India, the Turks, the Jews, the pre-Islamic Persians, Mohammed, the khalifas, and the Franj, but even at this late date, the part about the Franks was perfunctory and undocumented.
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In short, the Crusa
des brought virtually no European cultural viruses into the Islamic world. The influence ran almost entirely the other way.

And what flowed the other way? Well, the Crusaders opened up opportunities for European merchants in the Levant and Egypt. During the Franj wars, trade between western Europe and the Middle World increased. As a result, people in places like England, France, and Germany obtained exotic goods available in the East, products such as nutmeg, cloves, black pepper, and other spices, as well as silk, satin, and a fabric made from a wonderful plant called cotton.

European merchants, pilgrims, and Crusaders (the categories were not always distinct) returning to Europe reported on the riches of the Muslim world and told tales about even more distant lands, places such as India, and the near-mythic islands of “the Indies.” These stories aroused appetites in Europe that kept growing over the years and were to have tremendous consequences later on.

In the Middle World, however, just as the calamity of the Crusades was subsiding, a second and far more catastrophic assault broke out.

The Mongols originated in the steppes of Central Asia, a vast treeless grassland with hard soil and few rivers. The landscape precluded agriculture but it was perfect for herding sheep and grazing horses, so the Mongols lived on mutton, milk, and cheese, burned dung for fuel, got drunk on fermented mare’s milk, and used oxen to pull their carts. They had no cities or permanent encampments but lived on the move, sleeping in felt huts called
gers
(known elsewhere as yurts), which they could easily dismantle and transport.

The Mongols were closely related to the Turks ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, and historians often group them together as the Turko-Mongol tribes. To the extent that they can be considered separately, however, the Turks generally lived further west and the Mongols further east. Where they overlapped, they intermingled somewhat.

Over the centuries a number of nomadic empires had formed and dissolved on the steppes, tribal confederacies that had no core principle of unity to hold them together. In the days of the Roman republic, a group of Turko-Mongol tribes called the Hsiung-nu congealed into a force so fearsome that the first emperor of a united China put about a million men to work building the Great Wall to keep them out. Once they couldn’t raid eastward, the Hsiung-nu turned west and by the time they got to Europe these steppe nomads were known as the Huns. Under Attila they swept all the way to
Rome before they dissolved.

In the early days of Islam, a series of ill-defined Turkish confederacies dominated the steppes, but once they moved south they morphed into Muslim dynasties, such as the Ghaznavids and the Seljuks.

The Mongols had raided the Chinese world for many centuries, and a succession of Chinese dynasties had kept them in check by giving them subsidies to stay away, by pitting Mongol chieftains against one another, and by funding upstarts against established chieftains. In this way they had kept the Mongols divided, although truth to tell, the Mongols, like tribal nomads generally, didn’t need much outside help to stay divided.

Then around 560 AH (1165 CE) the brilliant and charismatic Temujin was born. History knows him as Chengez Khan (in the West, Genghis Khan), which means “universal ruler,” a title he did not take on until he was about forty years old.

Chengez’s father was a chieftain among the Mongols but was murdered when Chengez was nine. His supporters drifted away, and the family fell upon hard times. For several years, Chengez, his mother, and his younger siblings were forced to live on berries and small game, such as marmots and field mice. Even so his father’s killers felt they would be safer if the son never grew up, so they hunted him throughout his teenage years, and even captured him once, but the boy escaped and did grow up, and lived to make his father’s enemies sorry.

Along the way, he attracted a posse of close companions called
nokars.
In Persian-speaking lands, the word later came to mean “hired help,” but in Chengez’s day it meant “comrade in arms.” Significantly, Chengez’s nokars did not belong to any single clan or tribe. What held them together as a group was one man’s charisma, so Chengez had, in his nokars, the seeds of an organization that transcended tribal loyalty and eventually helped him unite the Mongols into a single nation under his rule.

In 607 AH (1211 CE), Chengez’s Mongols attacked China’s decrepit old Sung Empire and cut through it like a knife into warm cheese. Seven years later, in 614 (1218 CE), the Mongols entered the history of the Middle World.

What sort of world did they come upon? Well, after the Seljuks conquered the Muslim world, other Turkish tribes followed them, gnawing away at the earlier Turkish victors’ holdings, and carving out frontier kingdoms of their own. One such kingdom had just started to emerge in Transoxiana, and was looking very much like the next big thing in the region. It was the kingdom of the Khwarazm-Shahs. Their king Alaudin Mohammed considered himself quite the military mastermind, and in his arrogance decided to teach the Mongols a lesson. He started by intercepting 450 merchants travel
ing through his kingdom under Mongol protection. Accusing these poor merchants of spying for the Mongols, he had them killed and took their goods, but he quite deliberately let one man escape so that he would take news of the massacre back to Chengez. He was looking for trouble.

The Mongol lord sent three envoys west to demand reparations. It was probably the last time Chengez would show himself so forbearing. And now, Alaudin Mohammed made his really big mistake. He executed one of the envoys and sent the other two home with their beards plucked
out. In this region, one could offer a man no more grievous insult than to pluck out his beard. Alaudin knew this full well, but he
wanted
to give offense, because he was spoiling for a fight—and he got one. In 615 AH (1219 CE) the great catastrophe began.

We often hear about the Mongol “hordes,” a word that evokes pictures of howling savages swarming over the horizon by the millions to overwhelm their victims with sheer numbers. In fact,
horde
is simply the Turkic word for “military camp.” The Mongols did not actually field incomparably huge armies. They won battles with strategy, ferocity, and, yes, technology. For example, when they attacked fortified cities, they employed sophisticated siege machinery acquired from t
he Chinese. They had “composite” bows made of several layers of wood glued together, which could shoot harder and further than the bows used in the “civilized” world. They fought on horseback, and their riding skills were such that some of their victims thought the Mongols were some new species of half-human, half-horse creature previously unknown to civilization. Their horses were hardy and fast but rather small, so a Mongol warrior could grip his horse with his legs, hang off on one side, and fire his arrows from under the horse’s belly, thus using the body of the beast itself as a shield. Mon
gols could ride their horses for days and nights on end, sleeping in the saddle and taking nourishment from veins they opened on their horse’s necks, so that after sacking one city they might suddenly appear at some distant other city so fast they seemed almost to have supernatural powers. Sometimes, the Mongols did bring along extra horses with dummies mounted on them to convey an impression of overwhelming numbers: it was just one more of their many military tricks.

In 615 AH (1219 CE) Alaudin Mohammed commanded far more troops than Chengez, but his immense army did him no good. Chengez smashed it and sent Alaudin fleeing for his life. Fragments of the Khwarazmi Turkish armies turned into gangs of thugs who rolled west, disrupting law and order, and even helped dislodge the last Crusaders from their fortresses, a foretaste of things to come. Chengez scorched Transoxiana, the lands on either side of the Oxus River and destroyed famous cities such as Bokhara, where the renaissance of Persian literature had begun two centuries earlier. He razed t
he legendary old city of Balkh, known to t
he ancients as “the Mother of Cities,” dumping its library into the Oxus River, hundreds of thousands of handwritten volumes swept away.

Then he marched on Khorasan and Persia, and here the Mongols attempted genocide. No other word really seems appropriate. Writing shortly after the events in question, the Muslim historian Sayfi Heravi said the Mongols killed 1,747,000 when they sacked the city of Naishapur, killing everything down to the cats and dogs. At the city of Herat, he put the toll at 1,600,000. Another Persian historian, Juzjani, claimed that 2,400,000 died in Herat. Obviously these number are inflated. Herat and Naishapur could not possibly have had anywhere near this number of inhabitants in the 1220s.
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Yet the numbers might not be quite as inflated as they may seem at first because when the Mongols came down upon the Islamic world, people fled from their depredations—they had to. The Mongols burned fields, destroyed crops, stripped peasants of their livelihood, and promoted tales of their murderous fury as a strategy of war. They intended for the news and fear of their deeds to travel fast and far so that subsequent cities they attacked would not put up any fight.

One city they attacked in northern Afghanistan was called—well, I don’t even know what it was called originally. Today, it’s called Shari Gholghola—the City of Shrieking, and all you see there now is a heap of rubble and mud and stones. So it’s quite possible that by the time the Mongols attacked any major city such as Herat, it was swollen by refugees from hundreds of miles around. It may be that when these cities finally fell, it wasn’t just their original population but the population of the entire region that perished.

No one could really know how many died. Surely no one actually went out to the battlefields and counted the dead. But even if these numbers aren’t really statistics, they function as impressions of scale, as expressions of how it felt to be alive in the shadow of such massacres, such horror. Nobody told any such stories about the Seljuks or the other earlier Turks. The Mongol invasion was clearly a disaster on a different scale.

Whatever the numbers were based on, there must have been some truth to them. Two histories completed around 658 AH (1260 CE), one in Baghdad, one in Delhi, gave almost exactly similar accou
nts of these horrors, roughly the same statistics for the casualties. The two historians could not have known each other, and they were writing more or less simultaneously, so neither one could have used the other as his source. Both then were recounting what was in the air, what people were saying from Delhi to Baghdad.

When the Mongols attacked Persia, they destroyed, among other things, the
qanat
, ancient underground canal works that were, to an agricultural society in a riverless land, life’s blood itself. Some of the qanats were destroyed outright and some filled up with sand and vanished just as surely as if they had been deliberately destroyed because no one was left to repair them. When the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi wrote a description of western Iran, northern Afghanistan, and the republics north of the Oxus River a few years before the Mongol invasion
, he described a fertile, flourishing province. A few years after the invasion, it was a desert. It still is.

Chengez did not live to carry out all the destruction wrought by the Mongols. He died in 624 AH (1227 CE), but after his death
his empire was divided among his various sons and grandsons, who continued the holocaust. The core of the Muslim world fell into the hands of Chengez’s grandson Hulagu, and since not all of this territory had been conquered yet, Hulagu took up where his grandfather had left off.