By uniting the Mongol tribes, Chinggis created a new nation. The tribes, however, had a long history of conflict, and the Great Khan was determined to use his power to create order. Soon after receiving his title, Chinggis said (as quoted by Paul Ratchnevksy in Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy), “Punish robbery within the nation and clean up deception. Execute those who have deserved death and impose fines on those who deserve such fines.”
Chinggis ruled by decree-his rules and decrees had the force of law. For many years, modern Western historians wrote about a legal code, the Great Jasaq, that Chinggis created for the Mongols in 1206. The Great Khan’s brother-in-law was made the chief judge, and he was in charge of
Recording the laws and making sure they were followed. In recent years, however, some historians have begun to challenge the idea that Chinggis created the Great Jasaq all at once. There is no direct written evidence of this legal code, just the works of later historians, such as Rashid al-Din, who quoted what was supposedly in it.
Currently, we do not know for sure if the Mongols of Chinggis’s time had a written legal code. They did, however, have unwritten tribal laws that endured into the khanate period. And many of Chinggis’s decrees were written down as formal laws. Future khans compiled these decrees and added their own, making a body of partly written and partly unwritten laws.
The Rule of Vengeance
During their early nomadic years, many Mongol feuds and wars resulted from vengeance —using violence to respond to a perceived offense or wrongdoing by a person or clan. In effect, the Mongols took the law into their own hands, because they did not have a government that would arrest and punish criminals. This idea remained during the early years of the empire, and a foreigner's personal insult to the Great Khan was sometimes used as an excuse to start a war.
What has been called the Great Jasaq dealt with areas such as military operations and foreign affairs. Since the army was so crucial to the Mongol Empire, the laws enforced strict military discipline. A soldier who did not stop to pick up a dropped bow or other equipment would be executed. Giovanni DiPlano Carpini noted (in The Story of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars) that “when the line goes into battle, if one or two or three or more flee from the squad of ten, all ten are killed. . . . Also, if one or two or more proceed daringly into the fight and the remainder of the ten do not follow, they are killed.” The Mongols also had strict laws regarding politics. Anyone who tried to rule without first being elected at a quriltai was executed.
As in other cultures, the Mongol legal system also included taxation. When they were strictly nomads, the Mongol leaders took a share of their people’s herds as a tax. As they began to rule over sedentary societies, the Mongols made each person pay a tax in goods or money. The Mongols also taxed trade, taking a percentage of the value of goods sold.
Since the uluses and wealth technically belonged to everyone in a khan’s family, the Mongol rulers needed a way to make sure the wealth they acquired was divided evenly. The system created to do this was the jarqu. The khan and other clan leaders met at the jarqu, which handled all clan affairs, not just money matters. Officials called jarquchi carried out the distribution of wealth for the clan members. In defeated lands, the jarquchi also conducted a census of the local population. The official count was used to determine how much tax the region owed to the Great Khan, who shared the money with local rulers as well as his family.
World History
