Transoxiana
During the Mongol era, the region of Transoxiana was the site of many bat-tles. The name comes from the Oxus River— called Amu Darya in Arabic—and means "beyond the Oxus." The Oxus starts in the Hindu Kush mountains in a region bordered by modern China, India, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Transoxiana included land west and north of the river in the heart of Central Asia. The region's many rivers enabled farmers to irrigate crops and led to the development of several key cities, such as Samarkand and Bukhara, located in modern Uzbekistan.
In 1218, Chinggis turned his attention to Kara-Kitay, west of the Altai Mountains. A defeated tribal chieftain named Kuchulug (d. 1218) had fled there from Mongolia after Chinggis rose to power. Kuchulug managed to take control of Kara-Kitay, and Chinggis feared he might assemble an army that could threaten the Mongols. A Mongol force of about 20,000 men invaded Kara-Kitay. The people welcomed them, since Kuchulug had killed a local prince and limited the practice of Islam, the major faith in that area. Kara-Kitay quickly fell to the Mongols.
The growing Mongol Empire now bordered Khorazm, a Muslim empire that stretched from the Caspian Sea to Transoxiana and south into what is now Afghanistan. Its ruler was Sultan Muhammad, who was also called Khorazm-shah (d. 1220). In 1218, he provoked Chinggis by refusing to punish a Khorazmian governor who had killed hundreds of Mongol merchants. The governor believed the merchants’ trading expedition contained spies-which it most likely did, as Chinggis wanted to know the military strengths and weaknesses of his neighbors. One Mongol survived the attack and reported back to Chinggis. The angry Great Khan then sent three ambassadors to Sultan Muhammad, demanding that he punish the governor who ordered the massacre. The Khorazmian ruler not only refused, he murdered one of the ambassadors. Chinggis said, “The Khorazm-shah is no king, he is a bandit,” (quoted by Paul Ratchnevsky in Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy). The Great Khan then prepared his troops for their first major war in the west.
By the spring of 1219, Chinggis had amassed an army of about 200,000 soldiers. His forces included Uighurs and Karluks, an ethnic group from Kara-Kitay, all split into three main sections. The Khorazmians had a larger army composed of Muslim Turks and Persians. Sultan Muhammad, however, did not want to meet the Mongols on the open battlefield, because he was not sure how to confront a three-pronged threat. The Khorazmian ruler also doubted the loyalty of his troops. Most of them were Turks who favored his mother over him. Sultan Muhammad did not trust them to obey his orders, and they did not work well with the Persians in the army. The sultan kept his forces stationed in the various cities of the
Empire, where they became easy targets for the Mongols. Chinggis and his youngest son Tolui (1193-1233) led the attack on the major city of Bukhara before heading to the capital of Samarkand.
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Using the Enemy
As he took prisoners, Chinggis dressed some of them as Mongols and had them march under Mongol banners ahead of the real Mongols during the next battle. This strategy made the Mongol army look bigger than it was, and lured enemy troops into wasting time and energy fighting the prisoners, rather than the Mongols themselves. The Mongols, however, did not use all prisoners this way. Some were allowed to buy their freedom, while skilled craftspeople were always spared, and were kept to work for the army or were sent back to Mongolia.
In perhaps one of the deadliest wars in history, the Mongols slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Khorazm soldiers and civilians.
Historians of the day put the death toll in the millions. The Arab historian Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233) wrote (as quoted by David Morgan in The Mongols), “a tremendous disaster such as [this] had never happened
Before. . . . It may well be that the world from now until its end. . . will not experience the like of it again.” Most modern historians doubt the high death toll reported in the traditional sources. Still, no one doubts that the conquest of Khorazm was brutal. In each city, the Mongols took all the valuables they could find, destroyed the protective walls, and slaughtered thousands of Khorazmian soldiers. In Bukhara, Chinggis told the people (as noted by James Chambers in The Devil’s Horsemen), “It is your leaders who have committed these crimes, and I am the punishment of God.”
In 1221 two Mongol generals, Jebe and Subedei (1176-1248), pursued Sultan Muhammad’s son as he fled from the advancing enemy. The generals did not catch him, but they did scout out part of the Russian steppes. The Mongols moved northward through Georgia into Russia, passing by the Sea of Azov and then along the Volga River. Jebe and Subedei eventually met up with the main Mongol army along the Jaxartes River, on the eastern edge of Khorazm. By this time, in 1223, Chinggis had defeated the Khorazmians and was slowly making his way back to Mongolia.
World History
