As far as can be judged from the disparate sources, the personality of the Mongolian warrior-ruler Genghis Khan (1162-1227)—one of the most famous conquerors of history, who consolidated tribes into a unified Mongolia and then extended his empire across Asia to the Adriatic Sea—was a complex one. He had great physical strength, tenacity of purpose, and an unbreakable will. He was not obstinate and would listen to advice from others, including his wives and mother. He was flexible. He could deceive but was not petty. He had a sense of the value of loyalty: enemies guilty of treachery toward their lords could expect short shrift from him, but he would exploit their treachery at the same time. He was religiously minded, carried along by his sense of a divine mission, and in moments of crisis he would reverently worship the Eternal Blue Heaven, the supreme deity of the Mongols.
So much is true of his early life. The picture becomes less harmonious as he moves out of his familiar sphere and comes into contact with the strange, settled world beyond the steppe. At first he could not see beyond the immediate gains to be got from massacre and rapine and, at times, was consumed by a passion for revenge. Yet all his life he could attract the loyalties of men willing to serve him, both fellow nomads and civilized men from the settled world. His fame could even persuade the aged Daoist sage Changchun (Qiu Chuji) to journey the length of Asia to discourse upon religious matters. He was above all adaptable, a man who could learn.
Organization, discipline, mobility; and ruthlessness of purpose were the fundamental factors in his military successes. Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror, were weapons he regularly used. His practice of summoning cities to surrender and of organizing the methodical slaughter of those who did not submit has been described as psychological warfare; but, although it was undoubtedly policy to sap resistance by fostering terror, massacre was used for its own sake. Mongol practice, especially in the war against Khwarezm, was to send agents to
Demoralize and divide the garrison and populace of an enemy city, mixing threats with promises. The Mongols’ reputation for frightfUlness often paralyzed their captives, who allowed themselves to be killed when resistance or flight was not impossible. Indeed, the Mongols were unaccountable. Resistance brought certain destruction, but at Balkh, now in Afghanistan, the population was slaughtered in spite of a prompt surrender, for tactical reasons.
The achievements of Genghis Khan were grandiose. He united all the nomadic tribes, and with numerically inferior armies he defeated great empires, such as Khwarezm and the even more powerful Jin state. Yet he did not exhaust his people. He chose his successor, his son Ogodei, with great care, ensured that his other sons would obey Ogodei, and passed on to him an army and a state in full vigour. At the time of his death, Genghis Khan had conquered the landmass extending from Beijing to the Caspian Sea, and his generals had raided Persia and Russia. His successors would extend their power over the whole of China, Persia, and most of Russia. They did what he did not achieve and perhaps never really intended— that is, to weld their conquests into a tightly organized empire. The destruction brought about by Genghis Khan survives in popular memory, but far more significant, these conquests were but the first stage of the Mongol Empire, the greatest continental empire of medieval and modern times.
Sedentary civilization, a more ferocious military force, a more cumbersome material culture, a more complicated and hierarchical social structure, and a more coherent sense of tribal law. Their initial impact was physically more destructive than that of previous invaders, and their longterm impact perhaps more socially and politically creative.
First Mongol Incursions
The first Mongol incursions into Islamdom in 1220 were a response to a challenge from the Khwarezm-Shah Ala’ al-Din Muhammad, the aggressive reigning leader of a dynasty formed in the Oxus Delta by a local governor who had rebelled against the Seljuq regime in Khorasan. Under Genghis Khan’s leadership, Mongol forces destroyed numerous cities in Transoxania and Khorasan in an unprecedented display of terror and annihilation. By the time of Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, his empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Japan. A later successor, Mongke, decided to extend the empire in two new directions. From the Mongol capital of Karakorum, he simultaneously dispatched Kublai Khan to southern China (where Islam subsequently began to expand inland) and Hulegu to Iran (1256). Hulegu had already received Sunni ambassadors who encouraged him to destroy the Isma‘ili state at Alamut. This he did and more, reaching Baghdad in 1258, where he terminated and replaced the caliphate. The Abbasid line continued, however, until 1517. The Mamluk sultan Baybars I, shortly after his defeat of the Mongols, invited a member of the Abbasid house to “invest” him and to live in Cairo as spiritual head of all Muslims.
The Mongol regimes in Islamdom quickly became rivals. The Il-Khans controlled the Tigris-Euphrates valley and Iran; the Chagatai dominated the Syr Darya and Oxus basins, the Kabul mountains, and eventually the Punjab; and the Golden Horde was concentrated in the Volga basin. The Il-Khans ruled in the territories where Islam was most firmly established. They patronized learning of all types and scholars from all parts of the vast Mongol empire, especially China. Evincing a special interest in nature, they built a major observatory at Maragheh. Just as enthusiastically as they had destroyed citied life, they now rebuilt it, relying as had all previous invaders of Iran on the administrative skills of indigenous Persian-speaking bureaucrats. The writings of one of these men, Ata Malek Joveyni, who was appointed governor in Baghdad after the Mongol capture of that city in 1258, described the type of rule the Mongols sought to impose. It has been called the military patronage state because it involved a reciprocal relationship between the foreign tribal military conquerors and their subjects. The entire state was defined as a single mobile military force connected to the household of the monarch; with no fixed capital, it moved with the monarch. All non-Turkic state workers, bureaucratic or religious, even though not military specialists, were defined as part of the army (asker); the rest of the subject population, as the herds (ra‘iyyah). The leading tribal families could dispose of the wealth of the conquered populations as they wished, except that their natural superiority obligated them to reciprocate by patronizing whatever of excellence the cities could produce. What the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs had begun, the Mongols now accomplished. The self-confidence and superiority of the leading families were bolstered by a fairly elaborate set of tribal laws, inherited from Genghis Khan and known as the Yasa, which served to regulate personal status and criminal liability among the Mongol elite, as did the Shari‘ah among Muslims. In Il-Khanid hands, this dynastic law merely coexisted but did not compete with Shari‘ah; but in later Turkic regimes a reconciliation was achieved that extended the power of the rulers beyond the limitations of an autonomous Shari‘ah.
Conversion of Mongols to Islam
For a time the Il-Khans tolerated and patronized all religious persuasions—Sunni, Shi‘ite, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Jewish, and pagan. But in 1295 a Buddhist named
Mahmud Ghazan became khan and declared himself Muslim, compelling other Mongol notables to follow suit. His patronage of Islamicate learning fostered such brilliant writers as Rashid al-Din, the physician and scholar who authored one of the most famous Persian universal histories of all time. The Mongols, like other Islamicate dynasties swept into power by a tribal confederation, were able to unify their domains for only a few generations. By the 1330s their rule had begun to be fragmented among myriad local leaders. Meanwhile, on both Mongol flanks, other Turkic Muslim powers were increasing in strength.
To the east the Delhi Sultanate of Turkic slave-soldiers withstood Mongol pressure, benefited from the presence of scholars and administrators fleeing Mongol destruction, and gradually began to extend Muslim control south into India, a feat that was virtually accomplished under Muhammad ibn Tughluq. Muslim Delhi was a culturally lively place that attracted a variety of unusual persons. Muhammad ibn Tughluq himself was, like many later Indian Muslim rulers, well-read in philosophy, science, and religion. Not possessing the kind of dynastic legitimacy the pastoralist Mongols had asserted, he tied his legitimacy to his support for the Shari‘ah, and he even sought to have himself invested by the Abbasid “caliph” whom the Mamluks had taken to Cairo. His concern with the Shari‘ah coincided with the growing popularity of Sufism, especially as represented by the massive Sufi Chishti tariqah. Its most famous leader, Nizam al-Din Awliya’, had been a spiritual adviser to many figures at court before Muhammad ibn Tughluq came to the throne, as well as to individual Hindus and Muslims alike. In India, Sufism, which inherently undermined communalism, was bringing members of different religious communities together in ways very rare in the more westerly parts of Islamdom.
To the west the similarly constituted Mamluk state continued to resist Mongol expansion. Its sultans were chosen on a nonhereditary basis from among a group of freed slaves who acted as the leaders of the various slave corps. At the death of one sultan, the various military corps would compete to see whose leader would become the next sultan. The leaders of the various slave corps formed an oligarchy that exercised control over the sultan. Although political instability was the frequent and natural result of such a system, cultural florescence did occur. The sultans actively encouraged trade and building, and Mamluk Cairo became a place of splendour, filled with numerous architectural monuments. While the Persian language was becoming the language of administration and high culture over much of Islamdom, Arabic alone continued to be cultivated in Mamluk domains, to the benefit of a diversified intellectual life. Ibn al-Nafis (died 1288), a physician, wrote about pulmonary circulation 300 years before it was “discovered” in Europe. For Mamluk administrative personnel, al-Qalqashandi composed an encyclopaedia in which he surveyed not only local practice but also all the information that a cultivated administrator should know. Ibn Khallikan composed one of the most important Islamicate biographical works, a dictionary of eminent men. Shari‘ah-minded studies were elaborated: the ulama worked out a political theory that tried to make sense of the sultanate, and they also explored the possibility of enlarging on the Shari‘ah by reference to falsafah and Sufism.
However, in much the same way as al-Shafi‘i had responded in the 9th century to what he viewed as dangerous legal diversity, another great legal and religious reformer, Ibn Taymiyyah, living in Mamluk Damascus in the late 13th and early 14th century, cautioned against such
Extralegal practices and pursuits. He insisted that the Shari‘ah was complete in and of itself and could be adapted to every age by any faqih who could analogize according to the principle of human advantage (maslahah). A Hanbali himself, Ibn Taymiyyah became as popular as his school’s founder, Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Like him, Ibn Taymiyyah attacked all practices that undermined what he felt to be the fundamentals of Islam, including all forms of Shi‘ite thought as well as aspects of Jama‘i-Sunni piety (often influenced by the Sufis) that stressed knowledge of God over service to him. Most visible among such practices was the revering of saints’ tombs, which was condoned by the Mamluk authorities. Ibn Taymiyyah’s program and popularity so threatened the Mamluk authorities that they put him in prison, where he died. His movement did not survive, but, when his ideas surfaced in the revolutionary movement of the Wahhabiyyah (Wahhabism) in the late i8th century, their lingering power became dramatically evident.
Farther west, the Rum Seljuqs at Konya submitted to the Mongols in 1243 but survived intact. They continued to cultivate the Islamicate arts, architecture in particular. The most famous Muslim ever to live at Konya, Jalal al-Din Rumi, had emigrated from eastern Iran with his father before the arrival of the Mongols. In Konya, Jalal al-Din, attracted to Sufi activities, attached himself to the master Shams al-Din. The poetry inspired by Jalal al-Din’s association with Shams al-Din is unparalleled in Persian literature. Its recitation, along with music and movement, was a key element in the devotional activities of Jalal al-Din’s followers, who came to be organized into a Sufi tariqah—named the Mevleviyah (Mawlawiyyah) after their title of respect for him, Mevlana (“Our Master”). In his poetry Jalal al-Din explored all varieties of metaphors,
Including intoxication, to describe the ineffable ecstasy of union with God.
Ascent of the Ottoman Turks
It was not from the Rum Seljuqs, however, that lasting Muslim power in Anatolia was to come, but rather from one of the warrior states on the Byzantine frontier. The successive waves of Turkic migrations had driven unrelated individuals and groups across central Islamdom into Anatolia. Avoiding the Konya state, they gravitated toward an open frontier to the west, where they began to constitute themselves, often through fictitious kinship relationships, into quasi-tribal states that depended on raiding each other and Byzantine territory and shipping. One of these, the Osmanlis, or Ottomans, named for their founder, Osman I (ruled 1281-1324), was located not on the coast, where raiding had its limits, but in Bithynia just facing Constantinople. In the mid-i32os they won the town of Bursa and made it their first capital. From Anatolia they crossed over into Thrace in the service of rival factions at Constantinople, then began to occupy Byzantine territory, establishing their second capital at Edirne on the European side. Their sense of legitimacy was complex. They were militantly Muslim, bound by the ghazi spirit, spurred on in their intolerance of local Christians by Greek converts and traveling Sufis who gravitated to their domains. At the same time, ulama from more-settled Islamic lands to the east encouraged them to abide by the Shari‘ah and tolerate the Christians as protected non-Muslims. The Ottomans also cast themselves as deputies of the Rum Seljuqs, who were themselves originally “deputized” by the Abbasid caliph. Finally they claimed descent from the leading Oghuz Turk families, who were natural rulers over sedentary populations. Under Murad I
(ruled c. 1360-89) the state began to downplay its warrior fervour in favour of more conventional Islamicate administration. Instead of relying on volunteer warriors, Murad established a regular cavalry, which he supported with land assignments, as well as a specially trained infantry force called the “New Troops,” Janissaries, drawn from converted captives. Expanding first through western Anatolia and Thrace, the Ottomans under Bayezid I (ruled 13891402) turned their eyes toward eastern and southern Anatolia. Just as they had incorporated the whole, they encountered a neo-Mongol conqueror expanding into Anatolia from the east who utterly defeated their entire army in a single campaign (1402).
Timur’s Efforts to Restore Mongol Power
Timur (Tamerlane) was a Turk, not a Mongol, but he aimed to restore Mongol power. He was born a Muslim in the Syr Darya valley and served local pagan Mongol warriors and finally the Chagatai heir apparent, but he rebelled and made himself ruler in Khwarezm in 1380. He planned to restore Mongol supremacy under a thoroughly Islamic program. He surpassed the Mongols in terror, constructing towers out of the heads of his victims. Having established himself in Iran, he moved first on India and then on Ottoman Anatolia and Mamluk Syria, but he died before he could consolidate his realm. His impact was twofold: his defeat of the Ottomans inspired a comeback that would produce one of the greatest Islamicate empires of all time, and one of the Central Asian heirs to his tradition of conquest would found another great Islamicate empire in India. These later empires managed to find the combination of Turkic and Islamic legitimacy that could produce the stable centralized absolutism that had eluded all previous Turkic conquerors.
World History
