Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (41 page)

8

Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Conquests

The Pax Mongolica

After the death of Khabul Khan, who had been recognized by the Jurchen as paramount ruler in the Eastern Steppe, the nascent Mongol realm broke up. Civil war raged until Temüjin, great-grandson of Khabul Khan, forged the Mongols into a new nation. As Chinggis Khan, he led the Mongols in a series of lightning campaigns that unified most of Central Eurasia and some of the periphery as well. His sons continued the conquests, until at its height the empire stretched from Eastern Europe to the East China Sea and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf. The Mongols reunified and reexpanded Central Eurasia by conquest of all of Central Eurasia and parts of the littoral, including the steppe zone, Russia, Persia, Central Asia, Tibet, and China. The Mongol Empire was the world’s first land superpower.

Though the successors of Chinggis Khan soon began fighting among themselves, they succeeded in bringing much of Eurasia into one commercial zone that produced staggering amounts of wealth for the Mongols and others who participated in the commerce. But the spread of the Black Death across the continent in the fourteenth century devastated many areas, especially Western Europe, and conflicts among the Mongol successor states weakened them, bringing an end to the Pax Mongolica.

The weakness of the Mongols’ Central Asian successor states was exploited in the late fourteenth century by a brilliant general of Mongol origin, Tamerlane, who conquered an empire from the Near East to India and from Russia to the Persian Gulf. Though the empire quickly fissioned into its constituent parts upon his death, its core, Western Central Asia, experienced a last blaze of cultural glory under Tamerlane and his successors, the Timurids.

The Mongol Conquests

The beginnings of the Mongol Empire are to be found in the intertribal politics and warfare on the Eastern Steppe following the overthrow of the Khitan by the Jurchen. The Tungusic-speaking Jurchen were not a steppe people like the Khitan and did not maintain a military presence in the steppe. Instead, they supported the strongest single people there, the Tatars. The peoples of the Eastern Steppe were divided, and none of them could establish dominance over the others in the face of the powerful Tatars. When Khabul Khan, head of the Borjigin lineage, managed to put together a Mongol confederation, and the Jurchen were unable to dislodge him by force, they recognized his position as paramount ruler of the Mongols (in 1146/1147), though they also officially considered him their vassal. After his death, his successor, his cousin Ambaghai, was captured by the Tatars and sent to the Chin court, where the Jurchen killed him. The Mongols then selected Khabul Khan’s third son Khutula to succeed as Khan, giving rise to enmity against him and his descendants by the descendants of Ambaghai. Khutula attacked the Tatars, largely unsuccessfully, and his end is unknown. After him the early movement toward a unified Mongol realm disintegrated into internecine warfare, which dominated the Eastern Steppe when Khabul Khan’s grandson Yesügei (d. 1175/1176), who had begun to reconstitute a Borjigin confederation, was murdered by the Tatars and his people and flocks were taken away by a pretender to the succession, leaving Yesügei’s wife and children alone in the steppe.

The rise of the Mongols in the Eastern Steppe coincided with the decline of their Mongolic neighbors, the Kara Khitai, in the west. The last Gür Khan, Mânî (r. 1177/1178–1211),
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was weak and unable to stop the growth of the Khwarizmian Empire, especially under its most aggressive ruler, Muḥammad Khwârizmshâh (r. 1200–1220), who though the vassal of the Kara Khitai captured Transoxiana from them in 1210–1212. With the loss of much of their wealth and power, other vassals fell away.

In the Eastern Steppe, Yesügei’s eldest son Temüjin (ca. 1167–1227) and his brothers stayed in the wilderness with their mother, living off the land.
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Temüjin grew up wily, courageous, and strong. Slowly the scattered remnants of his clan reassembled under his banner. Eventually other clans joined him, and he acquired powerful allies. In 1196 he and the chief of the Kereit made an alliance with the Jurchen, who had earlier broken with the Tatars. Together they attacked and defeated the Tatars. As a reward, the Chin gave the Kereit chief the title Ong Khan,
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while Temüjin received a lesser title. In 1202 Temüjin led his forces against the Tatars once again and this time crushed them, executing all adult males in revenge for their murder of his father and other ancestors.
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Temüjin defeated his last major rival, his intermittent friend and ally Jamukha, who in 1201 had been proclaimed
Gür Khan
‘Universal Ruler’. Having unified the peoples of the Eastern Steppe, Temüjin was given the title Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan) ‘Universal Ruler’ in 1206 at a great meeting of the Mongol tribal leaders.
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With the power and mandate bestowed upon him by Heaven, as he and his sons believed, he set out to subjugate the un-submitted peoples of the four directions.

Rather than immediately attacking the Jurchen’s large and powerful Chin Dynasty, most of which was in alien Chinese territory, in 1209 Chinggis led an army against the Tangut, who were the neighbors of the Chin on the south and southwest. Their Hsi-hsia Dynasty controlled not only the north-south trade routes from the western part of the Eastern Steppe to Central Asia and China but also the major east-west trade routes between China and Central Asia. Although the Mongol siege of the Tangut capital was unsuccessful, in 1210 the Hsi-hsia ruler agreed to acknowledge Chinggis as his lord and to supply troops for future Mongol military actions. The treaty was sealed with the marriage of a Tangut princess to Chinggis, and the Mongols withdrew.

The Kara Khitai Empire had been the main power to the west of the Tanguts during Chinggis’s rise to power. While it had been severely weakened by the attacks of the Khwârizmshâh, nevertheless, it remained a force in its central domains east of Transoxiana. Küčlüg (Güčülük), a leader of the Naiman nation,
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who had opposed Temüjin’s rise to power down to the end, fled west to the Kara Khitai realm, where he was admitted in 1208. Having become an adviser to the ruler, Mânî, he used his position to carry out a coup and take control himself in 1211.
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In that year Chinggis received the voluntary submission of the Uighurs in the northern Tarim region,
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and of the Karluks as well. Both had been vassals of the Kara Khitai,
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and both sought the protection of the Mongols in the face of the internal turbulence and external attacks destroying their former overlords. The Mongols thus gained unhindered access to Eastern Central Asia, and indirect control over part of it.

In the same year, Chinggis finally attacked the Jurchen. But he encountered an unexpected problem. Though the Mongols easily defeated Chin armies in the field, they had little success against Chinese cities, which were fortified with enormous walls. Yet the Mongols soon found they had valuable allies within the Chin state—the Khitan who had settled in the region under the Liao Dynasty and still lived there under Jurchen rule.
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With the help of the Khitan and the Chinese they had taken into their army, as well as the Uighurs, the Mongols learned how to use siege machinery to capture cities. When Chinggis discovered that the Jurchen had moved their administrative capital to K’ai-feng, he attacked the Central Capital (Peking), which he had already approached in his earlier attacks into Chin. On May 31, 1215, the city surrendered to the Mongols.
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In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the rulers of Khwârizm had expanded their realm to an empire by means of campaigns across Central Asia and Iran into Iraq. The Khwârizmians stationed garrisons across this large territory to hold their new conquests. By 1215 the realm of the ruling Khwârizmshâh, ‘Alâ’ al-Dîn Muhammad (r. 1200–1220),
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included Iran and nearly all of Western and Southern Central Asia with the exception of the remnants of the former Kara Khitai Empire he had not been able to take from his overlords. In the process of expansion, he had moved his capital from Khwârizm to the more centrally located city of Samarkand. His army was large, strong, and battle-hardened. He had already become the most powerful single ruler in the Islamic world at the time, and his realm was still expanding. His eye was mainly fixed upon the politically revitalized caliphate based in Baghdad, the ruler of which was the direct successor of the early Abbasids and the bestower of legitimacy on Islamic rulers. At the same time, though, he was hungry for the weakening realm of the Kara Khitai. In 1215, having learned of the newly unified Eastern Steppe, he sent an embassy to the Mongols.

In 1216 Chinggis sent his general Jebe to the west after Küčlüg. Jebe defeated the Kara Khitai forces sent against him and took several cities. Because Küčlüg was a Buddhist convert and persecuted Muslims, the local people, most of whom were Muslim, hated him. When Jebe announced a reversal of Küčlüg’s religious policy, the overjoyed Muslims went over to him, and Küčlüg fled for his life.
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Jebe’s forces chased Küčlüg into Badakhshan (northeastern Afghanlrtan), where he was killed in 1218.
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The Mongols thus secured a strategic outpost in Western Central Asia.

In that year, Chinggis sent an embassy to the Khwarizmians to propose a peace treaty. It was agreed upon within a few days of their arrival. Not long afterward, a large Mongol trade mission consisting of some 450 Muslim merchants arrived in Utrâr. It was stopped by the Khwârizmshâh’s governor, who accused the merchants of being Mongol spies, confiscated their property, and executed them. However, one of the men escaped back to the Mongols. Chinggis sent an embassy to the Khwârizmshâh to demand wergild for the murdered men and punishment of the governor responsible for the outrage. Instead of responding as requested, or sending another embassy to negotiate the matter, the Khwârizmshâh insulted the Mongols and killed the envoys.

Chinggis then put aside his war with the Jurchen to deal with the Khwârizmshâh. In 1219 the Mongols invaded the Khwarizmian Empire with three huge armies. The Khwârizmshâh had posted his forces in garrisons around his newly conquered territory. Rather than gathering them to face the Mongols together, he kept them at their posts. The Mongols easily captured the garrisoned cities one by one and thus defeated the huge, seasoned Khwarizmian army, taking control of most of Western and Southern Central Asia by 1223. Though the Mongols pursued the Khwârizmshâh across his realm without catching him,
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they subdued his empire, leaving on the throne those local rulers who submitted to them and stationing Mongol tax collectors there. When some cities subsequently rebelled and killed the Mongol representatives, the Mongols retook the cities and, following traditional Asian warfare practice, executed most of the inhabitants.
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Chinggis retired to Mongolia in 1223. He now turned his attention to the Tanguts, who had failed to send their warriors to join the campaign against the Khwarizmians in 1218, as they had promised to do as vassals of the Mongols. The Tanguts had also withdrawn their troops from the campaign against Chin in 1222,
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and when Chinggis sent envoys to them warning them to mend their ways and keep to the terms of the treaty, they reviled him. Although Chinggis died before the completion of this campaign, the Tangut realm was conquered in 1227. It was fully incorporated into the Mongol Empire and became one of its most important appanages or fiefdoms. One reason it was important is the fact that the Tangut Empire had developed a culture that was as refined as China’s and in some ways similar to it, but nevertheless distinctively non-Chinese (and also non-Jurchen Chin). Although the Mongols had of necessity to rely upon the Chinese for help in ruling Chinese territory under their control, they generally distrusted and disliked the Chinese and were much more inclined toward fellow Central Eurasians, especially in matters connected with religion and state organization.