It was several years before Subedei had an opportunity to press his case for an invasion of Europe. When he returned from Khwarizm, Chingis Khan’s eyes were again turned towards the east: Mukali who had been left in charge of the eastern campaigns had died, leaving the war against the Chin to deteriorate into a series of stalemate sieges; and the Emperor of Chin had signed a treaty with the khan’s impudent vassal, the king of the Tanguts.
While preparing for the invasion of Khwarizm the khan had made his will; he had known that the empires of Islam were far more splendid and powerful than his decadent enemies in the east and he had been apprehensive, but he had hoped to swell his confidence with the help of the huge army that stood under the command of the king of the Tanguts. The king of the Tanguts, however, although he paid tribute to the khan, had insolently refused his request for help and the ensuing bitterness had not been diminished by the brilliant victory. When in 1226 Chingis Khan set out to consolidate his empire in the east by bringing under its dominion the threatening empires of Chin and Sung, he began with the vengeful destruction of the Tanguts.
It was to be his last campaign. The Mongol sagas say that from the outset the khan was troubled by ill omens and although, almost inevitably, the campaign itself was a success, it was marred throughout by other misfortunes.
Soon after the march began, Chingis Khan fell from his horse while hunting. He had broken no bones, but the fall had caused a haemorrhage in his stomach and although he was able to hide his pain from his soldiers, he could not deceive those who were close to him. Both officers and surgeons pleaded that he should either postpone the campaign or else leave it to his subordinates, but it seems that, whatever the cost, he was determined to remain with the
40 the devil s horsemen
Army long enough at least to supervise the destruction of the Tanguts.
Growing steadily weaker, he watched his soldiers lay waste the countryside; whenever possible they dammed the rivers and when enough water had built up behind the dams, released it to flood the beleaguered cities. Once, when the flooded banks of the Yellow River froze over, the Tangut cavalry attempted a massed charge across the ice; sliding out of control and crashing into each other they were taken in the flank and slaughtered by the unfaltering Mongols who had wrapped the unshod hooves of their horses in felt. It must have been one of the most spectacular of Chingis Khan’s overwhelming victories, but he took no pleasure in it. A few weeks before he had received news from the west: Jochi was dead.
There were those who said that father and son had quarrelled again and that Jochi was plotting rebellion, but they were only those who had previously argued in favour of Jochi’s disinheritance and been thwarted by the reconciliation. On hearing the news Chingis Khan retired into his tent for several days lest his soldiers should see how pain and weakness had made him unable to hide his grief. When Ogedei’s son had been killed, he had simply said to him: ‘Your son is dead, I forbid you to weep.’
The king of the Tanguts died in a mountain stronghold and his son sued for peace. The khan agreed that the new king and his ministers should be allowed to come and discuss terms with him, but his thirst for vengeance had not yet been quenched and he commanded his guards that when the royal party arrived they were all to be executed on the spot.
By now Chingis Khan knew that he was dying and he sent out messengers to call his sons. Chagatai had been left behind commanding the reserve armies, but when Ogedei and Tolui came, they found their father, already unable to move, wrapped in furs and shivering in the dim red firelight of his tent. Driven by delirium into despair and self-pity he had at one time cried out to his officers: ‘My descendants will wear gold, they will eat the choicest meats, they will ride the finest horses, they will hold in their arms the most beautiful women and they will forget to whom they owe it all.’ But most of the time the fever allowed him to remain lucid. ‘A deed is not glorious until it is finished’, he said and he outlined to Tolui his plans for the completion of the campaign.
Some chroniclers say that he exhorted his sons to remain loyal to each other and obedient to Ogedei, and that he repeated to them the old Mongol fable about the snake with many heads that argued among themselves for so long that it froze to death in winter, while the snake with one head and many tails found shelter and survived; they also say that he reminded them of the parable of the man who could break one arrow, but could not break a bundle. Yet he had been teaching them these lessons all their lives and as the Mongol Empire was to expand after his death, the world was to see how well they had been learned.
Towards the end of August 1227 Kilugen, the soldier and poet who had been the khan’s companion since the tribal wars, was called to his commander’s bedside to receive his last orders. Detailed provisions were made for the disposition and administration of the empire and even for the division of the Tangut spoils and then, after entrusting Kilugen with the care of his wife Borte, Chingis Khan died. His last words were recorded by Ssanang Setzen, the Prince of Ordos, who compiled a legendary chronicle of the Mongol Empire in the seventeenth century: Tt is clear now that we must part and I must go away. Listen to the words of the boy Kubilai, they are wise; he will one day sit on my throne and he will bring you prosperity as I have done.’
As he had commanded, Chingis Khan’s death was kept secret even from his soldiers. Ambassadors were informed that he was not yet ready to receive them and staff officers and servants went in and out of his tent as though he was carrying on the daily administration of the army. Unsuspecting, the citizens of the beleaguered city of Ning-Hsia opened their gates, the king and his ministers came to meet the khan, and, in accordance with his orders, they were put to death. With the need for secrecy gone the khan’s death was revealed to the army and in the storming of Ning-Hsia that followed every living creature that c6uld be found was slaughtered.
Although instructions had been left for its completion, the campaign was suspended and as the soldiers prepared to carry their commander back to the steppes they chanted the dirge which Killugen had composed:
There was a time thou didst stoop like a falcon.
But now thou art borne in a slow-rolling wagon.
Oh my Khan.
Thy wife and thy children, thy people in council,
Hast thou forsaken them?
Oh my Khan.
Circling in pride thou didst lead like an eagle.
Like an unbroken colt thou hast stumbled and fallen.
Oh my Khan.
Sixty-six years thy people have prospered;
Dost thou take leave of them?
Oh my Khan.
On the journey the army marched slowly and in silence, but the news did not precede them: in accordance with tradition, even after they had reached Mongolia, everyone who met the procession was put to death and sent ‘to serve their master in the other world’.
For three months before his funeral Chingis Khan lay in state, while his commanders and vassal princes assembled from all over the empire. He had chosen to be buried on the side of a mountain that was then known as Burkhan Kaldun (God’s Hill) in the range that rises to eight thousand five hundred feet where the rivers Onon, Tola and Kerulen have their source, three hundred miles east of Karakorum and about ninety miles east of modern Ulan Bator. Forty jewelled slave girls and forty fine horses were later slaughtered and buried with him among the larches, cedars and pine trees, and a detachment of a thousand men from the Urian tribe was stationed at the foot of the mountain and charged with the duty of guarding it for ever. The soil was so fertile that within a few years the rich undergrowth had covered the khan’s grave so completely that the Urian guards could no longer find it, and although Tolui, Mangku and Kubilai were later buried on the same mountainside, today even the mountain has been forgotten and can no longer be distinguished from among the others.
The reign of Chingis Khan marked a turning-point in the history of the world. As a result of the campaigns which he began the old empires of China and Persia were swept away, and in the west the destruction of Khwarizm drove a small group of Turko-Mongol refugees towards Rum and Byzantium, where by the end of the century their leader, Osman, had founded the greatest of all the Turkoman empires. While his campaigns continued under his sons the isolation of Europe ended, suspicion was replaced by curiosity, and the two hemispheres of the old world were brought together. When the new world was discovered it was by men from the west who had set out to find faster sea routes to the east. Chingis Khan is numbered among history’s greatest conquerors and commanders, and it is perhaps only because of the horrifying slaughter and destruction that followed in the wake of his conquests that he does not stand above them all.
Like Napoleon, Chingis Khan was fortunate in the quality of his generals and many of his victories were as much due to the strategic genius of Subedei as to his own genius for organization and command in battle. The khan was a shrewd judge of his men; his highly trained officers were promoted for ability and achievement alone and were chosen for their skill and understanding of men as well as for their courage. ‘There is no man alive who is braver than Yessutai’, he said, ‘no march can tire him and he feels neither hunger nor thirst; that is why he is unfit to command.’
The indigent nomads whom he moulded into a modern army were out of necessity expert horsemen and archers, but they were also superstitious by tradition and bandits by instinct. He knew that although they had rallied to his standard for survival, they continued to fight because they believed in his ‘divine purpose’ and because he made them rich. Yet such was the natural discipline upon which he built that even the seizure and disposition of plunder was organized and controlled. John of Plano Carpini, the papal ambassador who visited the Mongol court twenty years after Chingis Khan’s death, wrote that the Mongols were more obedient to their lords than any other people.
Almost always outnumbered, Chingis Khan knew how to gain his objectives with the minimum amount of force. Relying on a vigilant intelligence network, he advanced his armies on a wide front, controlling them with a highly developed system of communication and using their supreme mobility to concentrate them at the decisive points.
Once the Mongol tribes had been consolidated, Chingis Khan might have been content to live off the tolls from the trade routes that he guarded and the tributes from the weaker princes that he protected. He was a self-made man whose strength came from the loyalty of his army and his own ability to command it, but the world around him was ruled by hereditary princes who presided over ancient cultures and grew rich through commerce. To them he was at first nothing more than an illiterate mercenary, but when his honest attempts at friendship were met with exploitation.
Deception and contempt, his awe turned to acrimony and his envy to malice. The devastation and slaughter in the empire of Muhammad ii may be the most abominable event in the history of Islam, but the death toll in the east surpassed it by many millions.
Today Chingis Khan is remembered as the almost proverbial personification of ruthless cruelty, and it is true that the scope of the devastation which he wrought has not often been equalled - but nor has the scope of his conquests. Sometimes he destroyed the cities, soldiers and subjects of one prince merely to strike terror into another, sometimes so that never again could they rise against him, and sometimes simply because they had been his enemies and he had no use for them. If defeated soldiers were loyal to their leader they might rally, and if they were not, the khan could not trust them, and so he killed them. His nomads had no use for cities that had once housed their enemies, unless they were a centre of trade from which they could draw revenue or a centre of administration from which they could govern, and what they did not use they destroyed. But Chingis Khan never saw himself as the aggressor; with the exception of the reconnaissance into Europe, which Subedei persuaded him to allow, whether in defence of an ally or as the result of a threat or a broken treaty, the Mongol army always marched in answer to at least some provocation.
In every other way Chingis Khan was a surprisingly enlightened and liberal ruler. He did not use murder as a political weapon and torture was rare. The laws which he codified governed over fifty nations and were far less cruel than the laws of Islam. It is true their common sense was coloured by the traditions and superstitions of the steppes. For example, it was forbidden to cut the throat of an animal killed for food; instead it was decreed that the animal should be slit open and bled by having its heart pulled out by the hand of the hunter. It was also forbidden to urinate in running water or to wash in it during a thunderstorm, and among the comparatively few crimes punishable by death were adultery and cattle theft. Nevertheless the laws also embodied many of the basic human rights that are still being fought for today. There was no discrimination between the subject peoples of the empire, women were emancipated to make them equal with the Mongol women of the steppes and in a world where Christians and Moslems had been fighting each other for over five hundred years and where even the
Buddhists, in spite of their claim to be the only major religion never to have stooped to persecution, had been persecuting Moslems in Kara Khitai, the laws of Chingis Khan tolerated all monotheistic religions. His was the first great empire to know religious freedom and when the first western visitors reached Karakorum they were amazed to find a city where churches, mosques and temples stood side by side.
Although he did not trust the soldiers of the defeated nations, his civil administrators were chosen from the ranks of their scholars and merchants. He rebuilt destroyed cities and reorganized ruined economies. He encouraged the commercial communities and gave them the security that they had lacked: tariffs remained constant; tax concessions were granted to speculative investors; trade routes, farms, markets and warehouses were policed and guarded by Mongol patrols; and, as a gesture to ‘consumer protection’, the death penalty was prescribed for merchants who allowed themselves to go bankrupt for the third time.
It seems that the one irrational blind spot in the character of the man whom his contemporary, Juvaini, described paradoxically as ‘a just and resolute butcher’ was fear of treachery and faith in the power of terror. If he had not set so much store by vengeful destruction and massacre and if he had won the same confidence from defeated soldiers as he did from their merchants and religious leaders, he might have been remembered today as even greater than the other conquerors in history. Unlike Napoleon he did not abandon one army and lead another to destruction, and his career did not have the same end. Unlike Alexander his empire continued to expand after his death and did not fall apart through the petty quarrels of his generals. Unlike many conquerors he seems to have had very little ambition for personal aggrandizement.
He ruled an empire, but he disliked titles. He was immeasurably rich, but he enjoyed it only within the bounds of a simple, nomadic life-style, collecting enormous herds of horses and keeping a magnificent table at which strangers were always welcome and where he often spoke of his preoccupation with controlling his fondness for wine. He had nearly five hundred wives and concubines, but his first wife, Borte, who had shunned all other suitors until Temujin became powerful enough for her father to accept him, was always paramount and only her sons inherited his empire. After his death in exile Napoleon was brought home and buried in
Splendour in Les Invalides; the beautiful tomb of Alexander now stands in the classical museum in Istanbul; for centuries Tamerlane lay beneath a single slab of jade in the Gur Emir at Samarkand; but the orphaned prince who led one of the most wretched peoples on earth to rule over the largest empire ever conquered by a single commander lies under the trees, overlooking the steppes, on the side of a forgotten mountain.
Under Chingis Khan’s will the Mongol homeland on the eastern steppes was bequeathed to his youngest son Tolui, the southwestern territories, including the former empires of Muhammad ii, were left to Chagatai, all the land that lay to the east was left to Ogedei, and the western steppes which had been the inheritance of Jochi were divided between two of his sons. Or da and Batu. For two years after his father’s death Tolui ruled as regent until the security of the empire was beyond doubt and the commanders and tribal princes were able to assemble to elect the new supreme khan. But the election was only a formality. Chagatai was the eldest, but he was stolid and severe and his father had thought him better suited to administer the law. There were many who would have supported Tolui, whom they admired for his courage, but his father had thought him too impulsive. Ogedei was the son whom Chingis Khan had chosen as the most capable of governing an empire because he was not only shrewd and determined but also easy-going, warm-hearted and generous, and the khan believed that this combination of qualities would make him a winning diplomat. At first Ogedei feigned modesty and refused to set himself above his brothers until, after forty days, Yeh-Lu Ch’u-Ts’ai persuaded him to take the throne and receive their submission.
The warm and generous side of Ogedei’s character soon made him popular with his subjects. He liked to ride along the roads with a small escort talking to travellers and giving alms to the poor; he allowed merchants to overcharge him, telling his critics that since they had come to him expecting to make a profit he did not want them to go away disappointed; and when he sat in judgement he enjoyed building a reputation for wisdom and mercy. Yet there was another side to the easy-going nomad. He had been impressed by the life that he had seen in Samarkand and he began to establish Karakorlim as a worthy capital for his empire. The city was extended, public granaries and warehouses were built and a regular system of food supply was organized whereby five hundred wagonloads of food were brought into the city every day. Ogedei himself supervised the construction of an enormous, richly decorated palace: the outer walls were said to be over an arrow’s flight in length, which by Mongol standards of archery could have been well over three hundred yards. He imported craftsmen from all over the empire; in the hall of his new palace he erected a gold fountain made in the shape of elephants, tigers and horses, and from the mouths of the animals wine and fermented mares’ milk (known as kumiz) poured continually into silver basins. Around his palace all the princes of the imperial family were ordered to build palaces of their own and two days’ ride away on the banks of the river Orkhon, he ordered Moslem architects to build him, as a tranquil summer palace, a pavilion even more splendid than any that could be found in Baghdad.
Yeh-Lu Ch’u-Ts’ai, who had remained chancellor, laid down rules of procedure and precedence for the new court and established schools where young Mongols would be educated to become civil administrators, having persuaded Ogedei that although the empire had been conquered on horseback it could not be ruled on horseback. He did not, however, succeed in persuading him to moderate his fondness for wine: when he showed him how it had corroded the inside of an iron bottle, the resulting restraint was only temporary, and when he suggested that he should halve the number of cups he drank each day, Ogedei childishly agreed and had new cups made that were twice the size of the old ones. As time went on responsibility for running the empire was to fall more and more into the fortunately honest and capable hands of Yeh-Lu Ch’u-Ts’ai.
Ogedei would probably have preferred to spend all his time in Karakorum, but he was bound by the will of his father and in 1231 he, Tolui and Subedei resumed the campaign against the Chin empire. A year later Tolui was dead, and as he had shared Ogedei’s weakness for wine, there were those who said it was the drink that killed him. By the spring of 1234 the Chin Empire had been conquered. Ogedei returned to Karakorum, which now looked like a capital city, and in 1235, when the defensive wall around it was finished, the proud emperor summoned all the khans, governors and commanders to attend his first great council.
After the withdrawal of the Mongol armies from the Khwarizmian empire, the Mongol Empire had retained real control only over its rich heartland in Transoxiana, leaving the desolated south and the plundered west in a state of destitute anarchy. After the fall of the Chin empire, the Sung had seized two of its cities and presented Ogedei with an excuse for declaring war. At the Mongol council Chagatai reported that his armies were already advancing into western Khwarizm and even Georgia to consolidate and expand the areas of his inheritance that had been infiltrated by the bandit armies of Jalal ad-Din, and Ogedei announced that an army under the command of two of his sons, Koten and Kochu, would be sent into the Sung empire to subdue the last of the free Chinese nations.
It seemed that the two surviving sons of Chingis Khan were already well set on a path that would multiply their wealth and increase their power as their father would have wished. But the orphaned grandson Batu had no rich cities, his army was only four thousand strong and the western steppes that had been his portion were not even under Mongol control. The time had come for Subedei to press his case.
With the fall of Chin the Mongol armies had already reached Korea; when Sung fell the eastern expansion of the empire would be confined by the ocean. Chagatai’s empire was already rich enough to finance its own expansion and that too would be limited one day by sea and desert. Or da had inherited the rich pasture lands of the northern steppes, but they were bounded by ice. The poor inheritance of Batu was his in name only. Although Jebe and Subedei had led an army across the western steppes, they had not conquered them, and although Ogedei had sent an army of thirty thousand men under the command of one of Batu’s younger brothers, Suntai, which had driven the surviving Saxins, Kanglis and other Kipchaks towards the city of Bulgar, it had been turned back by reinforcements under the Princes of Smolensk and Kiev. These steppes were the most dangerously weak point in the empire’s defences, but if they were consolidated they would offer its best opportunity for expansion. Subedei argued that the rule of the nomad empire ought to be extended at least to the end of the steppes, if not to unite the Turko-Mongol people, then above all to protect its own flank. After that the Mongol armies could work their way towards the ocean, conquering the nations of Europe one by one as they had conquered the nations of China.
The last time Subedei had crossed the western steppes his
Adventures had sown the seeds of a legend and his scheme to retrace his path was greeted with such universal enthusiasm that even the indolent Ogedei was inspired to declare that he would lead the expedition into Europe himself. Yeh-Lu Chu-Ts’ai soon persuaded him, however, that his place was in his new capital and that since the land to be conquered was in Batu’s province, it was Batu who should lead the army.
The invasion of Europe became the principal topic of the council. Subedei estimated that the campaign would take eighteen years and would require an army large enough to protect its own flanks and lines of communication and garrison captured cities, while retaining to the end a vanguard capable of defeating its enemies in the fleld. All of this was beyond the resources of Batu, but Ogedei was still enthusiastic and determined to support the expedition to the full. He decreed that the rest of the empire should be responsible for providing Batu with a crack striking force of seasoned Mongol soldiers and that among its officers there should be representatives of all the families of the sons of Chingis Khan. The rest of the army, he decreed, was to be conscripted from among the Turko-Mongol tribes who still lived in Batu’s province on the east of the Volga, and he gave him a corps of Mongol officers to train and lead them. The loyalty of these tribesmen was by no means certain, and capture would probably be a better description of their recruitment than conscription. But by now a large part of the necessarily increasing Mongol army was made up of conscripts from conquered territories and, with training, nomads who shared the same basic skills and life-style as the Mongols had provided some of the most reliable soldiers.
Preparations began as soon as the council broke up. Subedei planned that the army should be ready to cross the Volga into Russia at the beginning of winter 1237; by then the advance units should have subdued all the Kipchaks, Saxins and Bulgars on the east of the Volga and had time to bring back and train their prisoners. But the army which began to assemble in the spring of 1236 was formidable enough. There were several corps of Chinese and Persian engineers and already about twenty thousand conscripts. But above all there were fifty thousand of the most experienced soldiers in the Mongol army, among whose officers there were no less than ten princes: Batu’s brothers Orda, Siban, Berke and Sinkur, Chagatai’s son Baidar and his grandson Buri, Ogedei’s sons Kuyuk and Kadan, and the sons of Tolui, Mangku and Budjek.
The army that was to invade Europe stood under the nominal command of Batu Khan, a general who had already proved himself a worthy grandson of Chingis Khan, but the real authority lay with his chief of staff, Subedei, and in him the enthusiastic soldiers knew they had an unrivalled genius.
World History
