MAKERS
of the
MUSLIM
WO R L D
Chinggis Khan
MAKERS
of the
MUSLIM
WO R L D
Chinggis Khan
MICHAL BIRAN
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
CHINGGIS KHAN
A Oneworld Book
Published by Oneworld Publications 2007
Copyright © Michal Biran 2007
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CONTENTS
List of Maps,Figures and Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
INTRODUCTION: WHY CHINGGIS? 1
1: ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD
ON THE EVE OF THE MONGOLS 6
2: TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 27
3: WORLD CONQUEST: HOW DID HE DO IT? 47
4: THE CHINGGISID LEGACY IN THE MUSLIM
WORLD 74
5: FROM THE ACCURSED TO THE REVERED
FATHER AND BACK: CHANGING IMAGES OF
CHINGGIS KHAN IN THE MUSLIM WORLD 108
6: APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS: A COMPARATIVE
APPROACH 137
Selected Bibliography 163
Index 174
v
LIST OF MAPS, FIGURES AND
I L L U S T R AT I O N S
MAPS
Map 1
Map 2
Map 3
Map 4
Map 5
The Mongol Empire by the Time of the Death of Chinggis
Khan and in the Height of Its Expansion 4–5
Asia before Chinggis Khan 24
Chinggis Khan’s Campaigns of Conquest 48
The Four Mongol Khanates ca. 1290 80
Asia in the Mid-Seventeenth Century:The Chinggisid
Legacy (with Qing expansion in the Eighteenth
Century) 103
FIGURES
Figure 1 The Genealogy of Chinggis Khan 30
Figure 2 Main Descendants of Chinggis Khan 77
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.
2.
3.
Chinggis Khan dividing his empire among his sons, leaf
from Rashid al-Din’s Jami’al-tawarikh, Moghul India, reign
of Akbar (1556–1605).The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gift of Francis M.Weld, 1948 (48.144) 124
Mongolian Stamps Commemorating the 750th anniversary of the Secret History of the Mongols, 1990 144
Chinggis Khan’s mausoleum in Inner Mongolia, China
(photograph: Michal Biran) 150
vii
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
I would first like to thank Patricia Crone, both for asking me to write
this book and for her sharp editorial comments.My biggest debt is to my
quriltai of experts, comprised of Tom Allsen, Reuven Amitai and David
Morgan. Each of them read through the whole text and enriched it with
many valuable comments, suggestions, and more idiomatic English,
thereby greatly contributing to the book’s final shape. I am also
indebted to my colleague and friend Yuri Pines, my student Shay Shir,
and my father Uzi Pumpian, who read the entire manuscript in the role
of mythical general readers. Thanks are also due to Samuel N.
Eisenstadt, Anatoly M. Khazanov and Ron Sela who commented on
various chapters.
Many people helped me by suggesting, gathering and processing references. They include, apart from most of the above-mentioned,
Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn, Yoav Di Kapua, Roy Fischel, Vincent
Fourniau, Andrei Gomulin, Ziv Halevi, Sophia Katz, Fumihiko
Kobayashi, Nimrod Luz, Timothy May, Hyunhee Park,Yael Sheinfeld,
Gideon Shelach and Anke von Kugelagen. I am especially grateful to
Maria Ivanics, who allowed me to use her translation of the Daftar
Chingiz namah prior to its publication, and to Eyal Ginio for his expert
and patient help with Ottoman texts. I also thank Tammar Sopher for
producing the maps; Zeev Stossel for technical help; and the
Metropolitan Museum for their permission to reproduce an illustration
of Chinggis dividing his empire among his sons from a sixteenthcentury Moghul manuscript of Rashid al-Din’s Jami’ al-tawarikh [1948
(48.144)]. Thanks go also to the students in my Mongol and Central
Asian seminars at the Hebrew University.
All my friends suffered from my obsession with Chinggis Khan, but I
would like to especially thank Nurit Stadler who sacrificed many coffeebreaks for discussing points, arcane and otherwise, in the Great Khan’s
ix
x CHINGGIS KHAN
biography. Lastly, I am also indebted to my sons,Yotam and Itamar, who
already know about Chinggis Khan much more than is healthy for
children of their age.
This book was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant
no. 818/03).
I N T RO D U C T I O N : W H Y
CHINGGIS?
What event or occurrence has been more notable than the beginning of the
rule of Chinggis Khan, that it should be considered a new era?
Rashid al-Din [d. 1318], ed. Karı̄ mı̄ 1959: 1:16,
cited in Morgan 1988: 51
Chinggis Khan was not a Muslim.Why, then, should he be included in a
series entitled the Makers of the MuslimWorld?
The answer is simple: Chinggis Khan is included in this series because
he and his heirs made a real difference in the history of the Islamic world,
as the above quotation from the greatest historian of the Mongol era
clearly suggests.What is less obvious is the nature of this difference. On
the one hand, Chinggis Khan slaughtered many believers, pillaged their
riches and inflicted upon them an unprecedented disaster, so that he
came to be seen as the arch-enemy of Islam.On top of this,his grandson’s
demolition of Baghdad is often seen as the end of medieval Islamic civilization, which thereafter lost its leading position in world history and
began to lag behind the West.This memory of the Mongol legacy is still
widespread, especially in the Arab world, and was recently invoked by
Saddam Hussein who, on the eve of the American invasion of Baghdad in
2003, depicted the U.S. government as the modern Mongols. In the
Turco-Iranian world, on the other hand, Chinggis Khan also became the
revered father of, and a source of political legitimacy for, several Muslim
dynasties, especially after the conversion to Islam of the Mongols in Iran
and, later, in southern Russia and Central Asia. Chinggis’s descendants
ruled over significant parts of the Muslim world up to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and he was therefore given a place in the pantheon
of Muslim heroic figures.Thus Chinggis’s biography became an integral
part of Muslim historiography, and the political and religious needs of
1
2 CHINGGIS KHAN
Chinggisid and even some non-Chinggisid rulers therefore influenced
the way Chinggis Khan has come to be depicted in different Muslim contexts.Moreover,institutions and concepts of legitimation ascribed to the
Great Khan were instrumental in shaping much of the late medieval and
early modern world, in the Abode of Islam and beyond, and the intellectual horizons, political boundaries, and ethnic composition of the postthirteenth-century Muslim world were deeply affected by Chinggisid
rule. Chinggis Khan therefore was not only a destructive force in the
Islamic world but also a constructive influence, whose legacy survived,
especially in Central Asia, long after his death and well into the
modern era.
This perspective is also the answer to another obvious question: why
another book on Chinggis Khan? There is no dearth of books dedicated
to the great conqueror, recently crowned by The Washington Post as the
man of the (second) millennium, and several recent books provide a
more positive and complex picture of him than in the past (e.g.
Weatherford 2004; Lane 2004).Yet a book concentrating on his role in
the Muslim world has not yet been written. Even those who stress
Chinggis Khan’s role in the shaping of the modern world emphasize the
connections between Europe and China, marginalizing his impact on
the Muslim world. Moreover, unlike many other biographies of
Chinggis Khan, this book, though written mainly for a general audience, is based on close reading in a vast array of primary sources from
the Islamic world and beyond; it also incorporates the recent upsurge of
new and innovative research on the Mongol Empire.
The volume starts with a short description of steppe society and the
political situation in Asia and the world of Islam before the rise of
Chinggis Khan. The second chapter reviews the society in which
Temüjin, the future Chinggis Khan, was born and rose to prominence,
tracing his career until he was enthroned as Chinggis Khan in the assembly (quriltai) of 1206.The third chapter analyses his conquests, with special emphasis on his invasion of the Muslim world and its implications,
and tries to explain the factors behind the overwhelming success of
these conquests.The fourth chapter summarizes the major effects of the
Chinggisid enterprise on the Muslim world, stressing the persistence of
Chinggis’s descendants as rulers of Muslim states and their contribution
INTRODUCTION 3
to the broadening of the horizons of the Muslims and to the further
expansion of the world of Islam. It also reviews the legacy of Mongol
statecraft, emphasizing the role of Chinggisid institutions, especially
concepts of legitimation and law in the Turco-Iranian world, as well as
the Mongol impact on ethnic and geopolitical changes in the Muslim
world.The fifth chapter discusses the different images of Chinggis Khan
in various Muslim contexts. It looks at how Chinggis’s new role as a
founding father of Muslim dynasties, and originator of the political and
social order for which they stood, required a reshaping of his biography
in different Muslim contexts in the centuries following his death, and
how the rise of nationalism marginalized his role in Muslim history and
brought him back into the position of an accursed enemy. The last
chapter compares Chinggis’s position in the Muslim world with the evolution of his myth in other contexts, mainly in Mongolia and China but
also in Russia and the West, thereby providing a comparative approach
in which to view Chinggis’s afterlife in the Muslim world.
Map 1. The Mongol Empire by the Death of Chinggis Khan and
in the Height of its Expansion
1
ASIA, THE STEPPE, AND THE
I S L A M I C WO R L D O N T H E E V E
OF THE MONGOLS
The Tatars are from the Turkic people, and the Turks are all from the offspring
of Kumar b. Japheth
Ibn Khaldun [d.1406] 1957: 5:1098
Chinggis Khan set the stage for a new phase in Muslim and world history, yet he was a successor to many centuries of interaction between
the nomads and the sedentary world. Chinggis Khan’s hordes were not
the first to advance into the Islamic world from the region known after
them as Mongolia.They were preceded by the Turks, who ruled a vast
region stretching from Manchuria to the Caspian sea in the sixth and
seventh centuries, and Muslim Turks, descendants of the subjects of the
Turkic empire, ruled in much of the eastern Islamic world on the eve of
Chinggis Khan’s accession.The Turkic advance into the Muslim world
was much more gradual – and much less traumatic – than that of the
Mongols, yet their precedent, and the fact that most of them were
Muslims by the time the Mongols appeared on the scene, had a lasting
effect on the Mongols’ later relations with the Muslim world. In fact,
due to their common nomadic lifestyle, the Mongols were often conceived of by Muslim writers as a new kind of Turk.
The Mongols can be seen as the continuators of twoTurkic traditions.
First, the legacy of the steppe empires established in Mongolia, among
6
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 7
which the Turkic empire was by far the most important, and second, the
legacy of the Mongols’ immediate predecessors, the nomadic (or seminomadic) inter-regional states that arose in Manchuria and Central Asia
in the tenth to twelfth centuries; the Central Asian ones were mainly
founded by Muslim Turks.This chapter reviews these two legacies and
the continuities between the Mongols and their predecessors; yet,
before doing so, it begins with a short overview of steppe nomadism as
practiced by Chinggis Khan and his precursors. In order to complete the
background to the pre-Chinggisid world, the chapter then introduces
the major political entities in Asia on the eve of Chinggis’s appearance
and concludes with the ways they shaped his rise to power.
STEPPE NOMADISM
Mongolia is part of the Eurasian steppe belt which stretches from
Manchuria in north-eastern China to Hungary in Eastern Europe,
bounded by the Taiga forests in the north and by a desert belt in the
south.Although mountain ranges rise in the steppe margins, the steppe
is basically a flat, treeless plateau, without significant barriers which
would restrict movement.The largest land empires ever created – the
Turkic, the Mongol, and the Russian – ruled in this realm. Ecologically,
the steppe belt is a continental, northern and arid region, characterized
by marginal rainfall, short growing seasons and a harsh climate, with
tremendous differences between day and night, summer and winter.
This unforgiving environment supports very low population densities:
the Republic of Mongolia, Chinggis Khan’s homeland, also known as
Outer Mongolia1, is larger than France, Germany, the United Kingdom
and Italy combined; its population, however, numbers only about
2.5 million people.The wealth of a Mongol chief was therefore mainly
measured in people (and livestock), not in territory.
1
Outer Mongolia as opposed to Inner Mongolia, also part of Chinggis’s
homeland, which is now a Chinese province bordering the republic of Mongolia.
The division originated in the seventeenth century when the Mongols, first the
Inner or more southern confederations and then the Outer, or northerners,
submitted to the Manchus, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911. See chapter six.
8 CHINGGIS KHAN
The steppe environment supports only marginal agriculture, mainly
in river valleys, yet the limited rainfall (250–500 ml a year) produces
rich grassland, which provides good pastures, making pastoral
nomadism the main source of subsistence throughout the steppe. Most
of the needs of the pastoralists – herdsmen of goats, cattle, camels and
above all of sheep and horses – are provided by their livestock.These
mainly include meat and milk products (including qumis, the alcoholic
beverage derived from fermented mare’s milk, the steppe’s beer), wool
(used also to make felt for covering tents), and hides.To provide the best
possible grazing grounds for their mixed herds, most of the herding
population moves seasonably “in search of water and grass”.This movement, however, is not haphazard or aimless, but follows an annual, and
usually fixed, cycle from summer to winter camps, sometimes with
alternative spring and autumn camps as well. The migrations are not
necessarily very long – an annual cycle of 150–600 km was common in
Mongolia – yet calculating the migration’s route and schedule, taking
into account the needs of the mixed herds, requires careful planning,
which the Mongols later put to use in their military campaigns.
Even when expertly planned,however,the nomadic economy is fragile and hardly autarkic.The livestock wealth of the nomads is vulnerable
to adverse weather conditions and disease, and unlike farmers, nomads
cannot amass their beasts for a rainy (or all too dry) day. Nor can a pastoral economy supply grains, raw materials or many manufactured
goods: a pure nomad is a poor nomad. The nomads usually supplemented their pastoral economy with hunting, which also provided
military training and entertainment, and even with marginal agriculture in the river valleys.Yet to have a more convenient existence, they
depended on their sedentary neighbors.
Sedentary supplies can be acquired in several ways, such as by trade,
diplomacy,raids or conquest.Since pastoral nomadism has certain characteristics – mainly mobility – which lend themselves to successful war,
the nomads usually secured their relationship with the sedentary population through the tremendous military advantage they had – until the
modern period – over most of their sedentary neighbors. Nomadic life
requires every man – and woman – to ride and shoot from an early age,
to develop survival skills and resilience and to adapt constantly to
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 9
changing circumstances. Moreover, everyday missions, such as supervising the herds or participating in hunting, served as military training
too, for both individuals and groups. There is no word for soldier in
Mongolian, since every nomad became a soldier through coping with
the steppe’s daily challenges.
The main social unit in the steppe was the tribe.The tribe was based
on shared political and economic interests and centered around its
chief, although most of its members were also connected by – real or
(mostly) spurious – genealogical ties to one putative ancestor. As a
political unit,roughly whatever following a chief could muster,the tribe
could be ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous. Many of the
Mongol tribes in Chinggis’s time contained bothTurkic and Mongol elements and the Secret History, the main Mongol source for Chinggis’s
reign, defines them as people of nine tongues.
The tribe was a rather fluid structure, mainly due to the lack of an
orderly succession system in the steppe.Two contradictory succession
modes coexisted – lineal and lateral. According to the lineal tradition,
succession passed from father to son; according to the lateral mode, succession passed to the chiefly clan’s senior male, usually the late chief’s
brother, moving down to the youngest brother before passing to the
next generation.This meant that with each chief’s demise there were
several competing candidates, whom other members of the leading clan
would often join.The choice among them was usually based on talent:
the most competent of the eligible heirs was elected to succeed. The
election of a new chief was confirmed in several rites, and in the Mongol
case it was solemnly declared in a grand assembly (quriltai) of the tribal
nobility.Yet succession struggles were part and parcel of tribal politics,
and the losers often tended to split off and create their own units.
Another reason for the fluidity of the tribal system was the tribe’s
complex structure.The tribe was constructed of a varying number of
hypothetically related clans and lineages, each containing several
(roughly five to 100) families. Lineages could easily split, as a result of
internal discord or an increase in numbers, and divide into several
branch lineages, not all of them necessarily remaining with the original
tribe.Alternatively, they could incorporate other lineages and grow to
become a clan or even a rival tribe to their original unit.
10 CHINGGIS KHAN
Besides the division into descent groups, the tribe was also separated
into several strata: nobles, commoners and dependencies. The nobles,
known as white heads or bones, owed their status to their direct descent
from the tribe’s or lineage’s progenitor, and provided the tribe’s political
leadership.The junior or collateral lines of the descent groups formed the
commoners, known as the black heads or bones.Though the nobles usually had bigger herds and better pasturelands, there was no sharp social
distinction between the two lines, nor was there any dramatic difference
in lifestyle. At the bottom of the social ladder were the dependents or
slaves, usually acquired in raids on nearby tribes or sedentary people.
Devoid of their own herds, they were obliged to work for their masters as
herders, domestics or agricultural laborers and to join them in battle.
Another component of the tribe, and a major device for founding
alliances in non-kinship terms, were the nökers (companions). A nöker
was an individual who chose to attach himself to a leader of his own
choice despite the lack of any kinship between the two. Renouncing his
blood loyalty to his own clan, the nöker provided military support or any
other commission for his chosen lord, and in return received protection, provisions and food. Nökers were recruited from various social
strata and origins and they were the main instrument through which a
rising talented chief, such as Chinggis Khan, could acquire a following.
Tribes in Mongolia were exogamous, meaning that they married
only outside the tribe, and marriage alliances were an important device
for cementing inter-tribal coalitions. Polygamy was common, though
there was a distinction between the principal wife and lesser women and
only the sons of the former were eligible as successors for their father’s
positions.Women played an important role in all aspects of tribal life,
including fighting, and sometimes enjoyed real political power: several
Chinggisid khatuns (noble ladies) served as the empire’s regents after
their husbands’ demise.
Another form of inter-tribal alliances was the anda, sworn or blood
brother.This was a voluntary alliance between equals (often chiefs) who
chose to treat each other as brothers.They strengthened their oath by
drinking from a beaker in which a few drops of the new brothers’ blood
were mixed, and the alliance was considered more bonding than natural
kinship.
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 11
Another channel of inter-tribal relations was the shaman, the Mongol
“priest,” the mediator between the nomads and the supernatural world.
At the head of the supernatural hierarchy was the blue and eternal heaven
(köke möngke Tengri), the sky god of the steppe, quite a natural choice in a
treeless, seldom cloudy, landscape. Beneath Tengri (and his much less
significant “wife,” the earth and fertility goddess, Itügen), but above
the world of men, was the world of the spirits, representing either
human ancestors or physical phenomena such as trees, mountains, and
winds.While in a trance, the shaman was able to move between the different worlds, connecting men to spirits and even having a direct link to
Tengri. Dressed in white, the steppe’s most honored color, carrying a
drum and adorned with various kinds of insignia (often wolves’ skin) to
help him enter into a trance, the shaman performed different kinds of
divination and healing. Consulted in all important occasions such as child
birth, war, the planning of a journey, weather forecasts, and ceremonies,
the shaman easily gathered considerable political power which he could
use for or against his tribal chief. Moreover, as a member of the shamans’
“guild,” the shaman (or shamaness) would wander among different
tribes, and the links he acquired often benefited his own tribe.The practice of shamanism did not prevent the nomads from adopting other religions – as in East Asia in general, religion was not exclusive in Mongolia.
The nomads were familiar with many religions, and could adhere to
several of them simultaneously. Even if they did not subscribe to them,
however, the inclusive nature of religion usually resulted in tolerance
toward all religions.
The tribal organization sufficed for most of the nomads’ everyday
needs, such as defining migration routes, solving conflicts and even
arranging small-scale raids. However, the emergence of a supra-tribal
unit, from confederation to more centralized nomadic empires, was not
uncommon.The most complex and enduring nomadic empires arose in
Mongolia, where the ecological boundary between steppe and town is
the clearest and where the tribesmen were confronted with China,
the greatest and most enduring sedentary empire in the region. The
nomadic empires usually arose in times of crisis, often related to the
necessity of coping with a sedentary neighbor.The creation of a supratribal unit was therefore basically ephemeral (like dictatorship in
12 CHINGGIS KHAN
Rome). Its maintenance was highly dependent on the personality of the
empire’s leader, and on his ability continuously to reward his followers,
who, being nomads, could easily decamp for greener pastures. This
reward was usually dependent on the leader’s ability to extort goods
from his sedentary neighbors, by either trade, diplomacy, raids or conquest. Gradually, nomadic empires also developed other means which
helped them preserve their unity, means which were inherited by
Chinggis’s Mongols.
THE LEGACY OF THE STEPPE EMPIRES
In terms of political culture, religion and military organization, the
Mongols followed the precedents of former steppe empires that originated in Mongolia,notably the Xiongnu (third century B.C.E. to fourth
century C.E.), the Turks (sixth to eighth centuries), and their successors,the Uighurs (744–840),among which theTurkic Empire was by
far the most influential. These empires developed an ideology that
legitimated the emergence and maintenance of a supra-tribal structure, and employed a military organization that was a crucial element
in the consolidation of such a structure.
The focus of the steppe ideology and the primary source of supertribal unity in the steppe world wasTengri (Heaven),the supreme sky god
of the steppe, who was able to confer the right to rule on earth on a
single clan.2 The heavenly charisma resided in the whole royal clan; each
of his members could theoretically be elevated to the Khaqanate, the
supreme office of the ruler, while non-members were not eligible candidates for the throne.The Khaqan was the political and military leader of
the empire,and his possession of the mandate fromTengri was confirmed
by success in battle on the one hand, and by shamanic ceremonies on the
other.As Tengri did not bestow his mandate on every generation (i.e. the
steppe world was often left without a unifying Khaqan),this confirmation
2
Whether this notion originated in the Chinese concept of the Mandate of
Heaven, in a similar Iranian concept or in an Indo-Aryan concept brought first to
the steppe and then into China, is beside the point for our survey.
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 13
was important for securing the Khaqan’s power.Yet the Khaqan also had
certain shamanic functions of his own, which enabled him to dismiss
shamans whenever they threatened his authority.The center of the world
ruled by the Khaqan was the area around the Ötükän mountains near the
Orkhon river in Central Mongolia, a territory that was already considered the sacred land of the nomadic world under the Xiongnu. It was
there the Turks left the famous Orkhon inscriptions in the eighth century
and where the Mongol capital, Qara Qorum, was built more than four
hundred years later.
Apart from ideology, another long-lived feature of the steppe imperial tradition was decimal military organization, first attested under the
Xiongnu.The army was organized in decimal units of 10, 100, 1000 and
10,000, and since every nomad was a soldier, the military organization
was actually an important means of social organization.Although up to
the time of Chinggis Khan the decimal units were arranged along
roughly tribal lines, their existence was an important mechanism of
control that enabled the Khaqan to bypass and neutralize tribal cohesion
and authority.The decimal organization was also useful for incorporating new nomads into the empire’s army. The establishment of a royal
guard, also attested from the Xiongnu onward, served the same functions and enabled the ruler to create a new elite, personally loyal to him,
thereby also contributing to the longevity of the empire.
Decimal organization and Turkic ideology were used also by the
imperial successors to the Turks, the Uighurs in Mongolia (744–840)
and the Khazars in the European steppe (ca. 620s–965). Both ruled over
empires of a smaller scale and in both the elite also adopted a universal
religion, Manichaeism and Judaism respectively, side by side with its
Turkic tradition. Even though no nomadic people aspired to unite the
steppe from the collapse of those empires until the rise of the Mongols,
its universal tradition still served as “an ideology in reserve” (Di Cosmo
1999: 20), ready to be revived if the creation of a supra-tribal empire
were to be attempted again.
Despite the ideology of the Khaqan’s world dominion and his disciplined army, and despite the vast territory controlled by the Turks at the
height of their power – from the borders of China to the Byzantine frontiers – neither theTurks nor their pre-Chinggisid successors in Mongolia
14 CHINGGIS KHAN
ever tried to conquer the sedentary states that bordered the steppe.
Instead they consciously preferred to remain in the steppe, using their
mobility and superior military skills to secure their economic interests
in the sedentary world through raids, war and diplomacy, which enabled
them to obtain tribute, trade, or revenues from China and other sedentary powers.The world which Tengri bestowed upon the Khaqan to rule
was, until the rise of Chinggis Khan, the world of the steppe.
The Immediate Predecessors:The Inter-Regional States
The period that immediately preceded that of the Mongols did not
witness the rise of a new steppe empire, but rather the emergence of
another kind of state in the Steppe. Emerging from the tenth century
onward, these states originated not in Mongolia but either in Manchuria
or in Central Asia, that is, in regions in which nomad and sedentary
coexistence was much more prevalent than in the Mongolian steppe.
They rose to power against the background of a power vacuum that had
characterized the steppe since the fall of the Uighurs (840) and the
decline of the sedentary empires that bordered the steppe: the collapse
of Tang China (906), the fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate (based
in Baghdad) from the middle of the ninth century, and the decline of the
Samanids in north-eastern Iran andTransoxania from the mid tenth century. In the western steppes, these states were established by splinter
groups of the Turks, such as the Qarakhanids (c. 950–1213) and the
Seljuqs (c.1044–1194),or former mamluks (military slaves) such as the
Khwarazm Shahs (c. 1097–1231); while in the east, and of more immediate relevance for the Mongols, the founders were Manchurian
peoples.The first were the Khitans, once part of theTurkic world, under
significant Uighur influence, who established the Liao dynasty
(907–1125) and later the Qara Khitai (Western Liao) dynasty in Central
Asia (1124–1218). The Khitans’ successors in northern China were
the Jurchens, their former vassals, who founded the Jin dynasty
(1115–1234).
Unlike their steppe predecessors, these peoples did conquer parts of
the sedentary states that bordered the steppe, thereby creating empires
in which a nomadic (or semi-nomadic) minority, backed by a strong
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 15
military machine, ruled over a multi-ethnic nomadic and sedentary
population. This in turn required appropriate administrative skills as
well as new forms of legitimation. In establishing these states, the rulers
became closely associated with the sedentary traditions of the areas over
parts of which they ruled, whether Chinese in the eastern steppe or
Muslim in the western steppe (and in the case of Hungary, even
Christian). This sedentary influence played an important role in the
shaping of the royal institutions and the administrations of these states,
which included direct taxation of the sedentary population side by side
with tribute from China (in the eastern steppe) or a variety of indirect
means of revenue collection (in the western steppe).Yet these outside
influences did not eradicate the steppe past, which remained a major
part of the elite identity and government, even after some of the rulers
of these states became settled.
The pre-imperial history of the Mongols was closely associated with
the Manchurian dynasties. It was only after the Liao Khitans conquered
Manchuria in the early tenth century, driving most of its original Turkic
population westward, that the ancestors of Chinggis Khan entered
Mongolia. Coming from the region of the Liao river in southern
Manchuria,the Liao ruled over Manchuria,Mongolia and a small part of
northern China, centered around contemporary Beijing and known as
the sixteen prefectures, the only part of China-proper that the contemporary and ethnically Chinese Song dynasty (960–1279) was unable to
re-conquer during its attempt to unify the country.While the Chinese
territory was a small part of the Khitan realm, it was by far the most
populous and, economically, most important part of their empire.The
Khitans used a dual administration to control their complex realm: the
northern branch of the administration, mostly staffed by Khitans holding Khitan titles and wearing Khitan dress, controlled the affairs of the
nomads, Khitans, Mongols and others who retained their tribal structure. The southern branch, staffed by Chinese and Khitans holding
Chinese titles and wearing Chinese dress, handled the affairs of the
mostly Chinese sedentary population by retaining the pre-conquest,
Chinese bureaucracy.
Throughout their period of domination the Khitans remained preponderantly nomadic, and their emperor moved throughout the year
16 CHINGGIS KHAN
among his seasonal camps and the five capitals of his kingdom, with his
court following closely behind. Khitan cultural identity was also
expressed in their national scripts, still only partially deciphered, and in
their unique material culture, which is now well known through many
recent excavations in China. Simultaneously, however, the Khitans
adopted the Chinese imperial tradition and portrayed themselves, at
home and abroad, as champions of Chinese culture, no less than the
Song. Moreover, due to their military superiority, gained by their
nomadic forces that had access to weaponry and equipment produced
by the sedentary sector of their state, the Khitans managed to compel
the Song dynasty not only to pay considerable annual tributes of silk and
silver, but also to acknowledge them as equals. The Khitan emperor
therefore bore the title of the northern Son of Heaven, equal in status to
the Song emperor, the southern Son of Heaven, a division which stands
in sharp contrast to the original Chinese concept of “one sun in the sky
and one emperor upon earth.”The money and goods extorted from the
Song formed the basis for extensive Khitan commerce with lands to the
west. It was in this way that the ethnonym Khitan, in its Turkic form
Khitai (from which is derived Cathay in English), came to be associated
with China in the Muslim world, Russia and Medieval Europe. By combining different traditions, the Khitans managed to rule China, albeit
only a small part of it, without leaving “the back of the horse,” i.e. without giving up their nomadic ways, thereby setting a certain precedent
for the Mongols. Moreover, Liao garrisons and the cities they established in Mongolia earned the Khitans great prestige among the ancestors of Chinggis Khan.They also served as a channel for the transmission
of Chinese and Khitan institutions, such as the system of the jam (postal
relay system) and the ordo (camp of the ruler or a prince), to the
Chinggisids.
In the early twelfth century, however, the declining power of the Liao
emperors and their economic difficulties prompted the Jurchens, a
north-Manchurian subject tribe, to rebel. In 1114 a full-scale war broke
out between the Khitans and the Jurchens, resulting in the establishment
of the Jurchen dynasty known as the Jin (1115–1234), which succeeded
the Liao in 1125.The Jin not only subdued the Liao,but advanced further
into northern China. In 1127 they took over most of the north, up to the
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 17
Huai river, pushing the Song dynasty (thereafter known as the Southern
Song) hundreds of miles southward. The Jin retained the status of the
Northern Son of Heaven and the right of extracting tribute from the
Song. But the Jin were much closer to their far more numerous Chinese
subjects than the Liao, who kept one foot on the steppe, and they soon
abandoned Liao-style dual administration in favor of a Chinese-style
bureaucracy, although they did successfully maintain their own identity.
Unlike the Liao, the Jin never conquered Mongolia. Instead they
skillfully implemented the old Chinese policy of “using barbarians to
control barbarians,” or divide and rule, supporting one tribe against
another and then transferring their support whenever their original ally
became too strong.
While most of the Liao Khitans surrendered to the Jin, one Khitan
Prince,Yelü Dashi, preferred to move westward, hoping to return later
to restore the Liao dynasty in its former domains.After six years in western Mongolia, Dashi recognized his inability to challenge the Jurchen Jin
dynasty, and, aware of the relative weakness of the Central Asian kingdoms, he decided to seek a political future further to the west. In a
little more than a decade he successfully fashioned a new empire in
Central Asia that was known to the Muslims as the Qara Khitai (the Black
Khitans) and to China as the Xi Liao (Western Liao). After completing
their conquests in 1141,the Qara Khitai empire ruled the area stretching
between the Oxus river in the west and the Altai mountains in the east,
i.e., most of the modern Central Asian republics (Kirghizistan,
Uzbekistan,Tajikistan and south Kazakhstan) as well as Xinjiang in present-day China, and at least until 1175 they also exercised a certain sovereignty over western Mongolia, especially the Naiman tribe.The Qara
Khitai rulers bore the title Gürkan, universal khan, and were also designated as Chinese emperors. The Qara Khitai were Buddhists yet they
ruled over a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, but mostly Muslim, population.They used a unique blend of Chinese,Inner Asian and Muslim forms
of government to achieve a period of relative prosperity and stability in
Central Asia. Their empire was divided into a central territory, ruled
directly from the Qara Khitai capital Balasaghun,in north Kirgizstan,and
a cluster of subject kingdoms and tribes surrounding it, which were
ruled indirectly.
18 CHINGGIS KHAN
Among the subject kingdoms, which included the eastern and
western Qarakhanids described below, the Gaochang kingdom of the
Uighurs deserves special mention, due to its later significance for
the Mongols.This oasis state had been established by the remnants of the
Uighur empire who migrated from Mongolia to the region of modern
eastern Xinjiang (around Turfan) when the Kirgiz took over their
empire in 840. It was based mainly on trade and gradually became
Buddhist. The Uighurs acquired a reputation as cultural brokers, and
their familiarity with both steppe traditions and sedentary life was
highly appreciated by Chinggis Khan and his heirs. Under the Qara
Khitai, the Uighur leader, called the Idiqut, had to acknowledge Qara
Khitai supremacy and to comply with their initially modest financial and
military demands. He was, however, able to preserve both his title and
his army,as were most other Qara Khitai vassals,since the Khitans deliberately tried to minimize the change in their subjects’ life.
The Mongols were aware of the Qara Khitai, and much of their trade
with Muslim Central Asia seemed to have been conducted through Qara
Khitai subjects.Moreover,the unique blend of Qara Khitai institutions was
highly significant for the Mongols, since by using Chinese trappings to rule
over a mostly Muslim population, the Qara Khitai narrowed the gap
between the ways of ruling in Central Asia and in China,thereby facilitating
Mongol ability to borrow traditions and personnel from both directions.
In the Muslim world, the equivalents of the Liao and Jin were the
Turkic dynasties of the Qarakhanids and Seljuqs.While they did not have
a direct impact on the Mongols, a few words about them, and about the
role of the Turks in the Muslim world in general, are needed for understanding the pre-Mongol Muslim world. The Muslims first met the
Turks in Central Asia in the eighth century when the latter’s imperial
heyday was already over, but they nonetheless soon learned to appreciate the Turks’ military prowess. From the ninth century onward the
Turks became an increasingly important factor in the Muslim armies,
both under the Abbasid caliphs (750–1258) and in the regional dynasties
that emerged from the ninth century onward as the caliphs’ power
declined. Most of the Turks entered into the abode of Islam as mamluks
or ghulams, military slaves, bought as boys and trained to serve as elite
soldiers in the Muslim armies. The Turks therefore first entered the
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 19
Muslim world as individuals, some of whom reached important posts
and eventually established their own dynasties. From the tenth century
onward they began to arrive as groups as, mainly under the influence of
the Iranian Samanid dynasty which ruled from Bukhara (875–1005),
Turkic tribes living outside the realm of the abode of Islam adopted
Islam. They advanced into the Muslim world and soon began to rule
parts of it.The first Turco-Muslim dynasty was the Qarakhanids, who
embraced Islam in the region of Kashgar (today China’s western-most
city) and began to expand into the Muslim world. In 999 they conquered Transoxania from the Samanids, while the more western territories of the Samanids were taken by another Turkic-Muslim dynasty,
the Ghaznavids (994–1186), who rose from the ranks of the Samanids’
military slaves.
The Qarakhanid-Ghaznavid wars, together with a chain of migrations
set in motion by the Khitans’ subjugation of Mongolia in the tenth century and by the emergence of the Tangut state in 1032 (about which see
below), brought about the rise of the Seljuq Turks. Originating in the
Turkic Oghuz tribes and embracing Islam in the late tenth century. In
1040 the Seljuqs defeated the Ghaznavids in Dandānqān near Marw,and,
continuing westward, they entered Baghdad in 1055, moving from the
margins of the Islamic world into its center.There the Seljuqs overthrew
the Iranian Buyid (also known as Buwayhid) dynasty (935–1055) and
proclaimed themselves Sultans, becoming the real power behind the
Abbasid Caliphs. Arriving as Sunni Muslim (as opposed to the Shiite
Buyids) and following the gradual penetration of Turks into the Muslim
world, the Seljuqs met with little opposition when they took over the
heart of the Islamic world.In Baghdad they appointed themselves Sultans
(literally:‘powers’) and took over most of the practical aspects of rulership, thereby marginalizing the Caliph, who, however, remained the
symbol of Islamic unity and provided legitimacy for the Seljuqs and for
all the otherTurkic dynasties.The Seljuqs’further success against the infidels – they defeated the Byzantine emperor in 1071, thereby laying
Anatolia open to Turkish penetration – strengthened their fame as warriors for the faith. Soon after their achievements in the west, the Seljuqs
renewed their interest in Central Asia. Meanwhile, from the mid
eleventh century onward, the Qarakhanids were divided into a western
20 CHINGGIS KHAN
khanate, centered in Transoxania, and an eastern khanate, which ruled in
easternTurkestan and Semirechye.In 1089 the Seljuqs took over Bukhara
and Samarqand and made the Western Qarakhanids their vassals, and
soon afterwards the Eastern Qarakhanids surrendered as well.
The Seljuq administration can be described as a dual administration
preserving steppe and sawn traditions in a way which has some similarities with the Liao case.The central administration was divided into the
diwan and the dargah (court).The diwan dealt with the civil management,
mainly with the collection of taxes. Staffed with Persian bureaucracy
and headed by the vizier, this wing of the administration continued the
traditional Abbasid patterns of government.The dargah was mainly military in character, and also had judiciary authority. It was staffed mainly
with Turkish military commanders and also with members of subject
rulers’ families kept as hostages. The court was itinerant and moved
between the several capitals of the Seljuqs.Yet the Seljuqs did not remain
nomadic, unlike the Khitans, and they experienced constant problems
controlling the considerable nomadic Oghuz population, known as
Turcoman, who continued to pour into the Middle East. The Seljuqs
transferred most of these nomads to the frontiers, using their military
skills in Anatolia and Azerbaijan, and established a strong and loyal
Mamluk force to balance the tribal army, yet theTurcoman continued to
threaten the stability of the state well into the twelfth century.
Most of the Seljuq empire was governed indirectly, by local dynasties
who had ruled the areas before the arrival of the Seljuqs (e.g. the Caspian
provinces; Qarakhanid Central Asia); by tribes that were allowed a considerable degree of autonomy (in Gurgan, Azerbaijan, Khuzistan and
Iraq); or through the iqta’ system.The iqta’, an assignment of land or its
revenue as a kind of salary, given mostly to military commanders, was an
established Muslim method of payment, which, however, became much
more widespread under the Seljuqs.The iqta’ saved the central government the need to find cash to pay its troops and facilitated the control of
the provinces. Originally the iqta’ did not include governing functions,
apart from the collection of taxes,and it was never meant to be hereditary,
but as the power of the central government weakened, iqta’ holders
became more independent, thereby contributing to the disintegration of
the empire. Another institution which reflects Seljuq steppe political
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 21
culture and eventually also contributed to their fall was that of the atabeg.
The atabeg (Turkic:‘father-prince’) was aTurkic commander appointed to
act as guardian and tutor to a young Seljuq prince, who had been given a
city or province to rule on his behalf until he was of age.The relationship
was often cemented by a marriage between the atabeg and the prince’s
mother.This system functioned properly when the central government
was strong, but as it weakened, the atabegs often deprived the princes of
their authority and created their own dynasties.
Indeed, by the late eleventh century, following the death of Sultan
Malikshah and his famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk, the Seljuqs also fell
prey to family rivalries and internecine strife.These resulted in attempts
by subject dynasties to assert their independence and in the rise of local
dynasties, either from the ranks of the provincial governors and iqta’
holders, or from the ranks of Seljuq atabegs. Seljuq weakness was first
apparent in the west, Iran and Iraq, because the east was still ruled from
Khurasan by the great Seljuq sultan, Sanjar (1118–1157).Yet Sanjar’s
later years were full of challenges. In 1141 he suffered a major defeat at
the hands of the Qara Khitai, who took over Transoxania.Their victory
also gave rise to a massive Oghuz migration into Khurasan, where they
threatened the very center of Seljuq rule, and even managed to hold
Sanjar as a prisoner in a golden cage for a few years. Sanjar’s weakness
paved the way for the rise of a new power, one that not only eliminated
the Seljuqs, but was also the first Muslim power that later had to confront the Mongols – the Khwarazm Shahs.
Centered along the lower course and delta of the Oxus, in the north
of modern Uzbekistan, Khwarazm sometimes brought the neighboring
steppe and desert areas under its political and cultural influence. Even
though it was connected by caravan routes to the Volga, Bukhara and
northern Iran, it was nonetheless separated by steppe and deserts from
Khurasan and Transoxania, its closest sedentary neighbors, and thus
retained its distinct identity.This identity was manifested in the use of
the old Persian title of Khwarazm Shah, special dress, carts and patterns
of rural settlement as well as a long tradition of de facto, if not always
formalized, independence in both pre-Islamic and Islamic times. This
tradition, together with the proximity of Khwarazm to the Qipchaq
steppe (the region stretching between the Black Sea and the Caspian,
22 CHINGGIS KHAN
also known as the Pontic steppe, after its main occupants from
1050, the Qipchaqs) with its ample nomadic population, made
Khwarazm the most dangerous vassal of the Seljuqs. The region had
been held since 1097 by a Turkish Mamluk of the Seljuqs, Anushtegin,
whose sons eventually succeeded him. But it was only under his grandson Atsiz (1127–1156) that Khwarazm began to assert its independence. While nominally remaining loyal, Atsiz managed to enlarge
considerably his territories in the Qipchaq steppe. He married the
daughter of the Qipchaq Khan, added to his army many nomadic warriors of the Qipchaq and Qangli (the Qipchaqs’ neighbors and relatives), and even tried to join forces with the Caliph against the Seljuqs.
In 1141, after the Seljuq Sultan Sanjar was defeated by the Qara Khitai
(whose attack was probably encouraged by Atsiz), the Khwarazm Shah
chose to submit to the Qara Khitai. After that he skillfully used his
alliance with the Qara Khitai to back his activity in the west, and took
maximum advantage of Sanjar’s difficulties with the Qarakhanids and
the Oghuz tribesmen of Khurasan.After Sanjar’s demise (1157) and the
collapse of Seljuq power in the East,Atsiz’s successors had even greater
freedom of action. His grandson,Tekish Khwarazm Shah (1172–1200),
who owed his crown to the Qara Khitai, directly challenged the Seljuqs,
eliminating the last Seljuq Sultan in 1194, and adding Persia and ‘Iraq
al-‘Ajam (western Iran) to his realm.After this victory,Tekesh expected
the Abbasid Caliph to give him the same status the Seljuqs had
enjoyed earlier.When the Caliph al-Nasir (1185–1225), who was striving to revive the authority of the Caliphate beyond Baghdad, refused,
the Khwarazm Shah turned against him, a policy which was strengthened under Tekesh’s son and successor, ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad
(1200–1220), who had the unenviable task of facing Chinggis Khan.
The Mongols owed much to their immediate predecessors in the
margins of the steppe, especially to their ability to combine nomad
and sedentary territories and populations under effective rule. These
states provided the Mongols with ready-made pools of officials,
experienced in mediating foreign rule, officials who came either from
among the indigenous bureaucrats and scribal classes of those states or,
more commonly, from ex- (or post-) nomads who were already active
(mainly as bureaucrats, governors or merchants) under the Mongols’
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 23
predecessors.The important role of the ex-nomads, Uighurs, Khitans
and, to a lesser extent, Khwarazmians and Khurasanians, in the ranks of
the early Mongol empire certainly supports this notion.
Moreover, these nomadic or post-nomadic states still shared many
features originating in nomadic political culture and social norms, which
were quite close to those of the Mongols.They shared social values, such
as the important role of warfare in everyday life, the high position of
women and merchants, as well as elements of political culture, such as
the importance of marriage alliances, the practice of hunting as a royal
sport, the policy of holding hostages, and certain aspects of military
organization.The position of women serves as a good example of this: in
both Liao China and Seljuq and Khwarazm Central Asia we find noblewomen (mostly empresses and queens) involved in politics, taking part
in military campaigns and sometimes leading their own considerable
armies.This is in sharp contrast to the normative position of women in
both China and the Muslim world, but it is very similar to the situation in
Chinggis’s Mongolia. Certainly the common nomadic culture facilitated
Mongol rule over the steppe region and its sedentary margins.
Asia on the Eve of the Mongol Conquest
On the eve of Chinggis’s rise, the political situation in Asia was rather
complex. In the east, China was divided into three kingdoms: in the
south was the ethnic-Chinese Song dynasty, by far the richest and technologically most advanced state of the time, but suffering from military
weakness which obliged it to pay considerable tribute to its northern
neighbor, the Jin dynasty.The Jurchen Jin dynasty ruled over Manchuria
and most of northern China, relying on its huge military machine of
both cavalry and infantry. By the late twelfth century the Jin were the
superpower in the region of Mongolia, and their emperor, known in
Mongolian as Altan Khan (the Golden Khan; Jin in Chinese means gold)
was certainly the most prestigious ruler (see chapter two). Northwestern China, mainly the modern provinces of Gansu and Ninxia (and
parts of Qinghai and Inner Mongolia), was ruled by the Xi Xia dynasty
(1032–1227), of Tangut origin, a kingdom closer to Tibetan than to
Chinese traditions, that left a rich Buddhist literature in its own
Map 2. Asia before Chinggis Khan
24 CHINGGIS KHAN
ASIA, THE STEPPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 25
language and script.The semi-nomadic Tanguts ruled over a very heterogeneous population, both ethnically and economically. One of the most
important sources of income of their state was trade, as they were major
mediators in the Silk Road trade between Central Asia and China, especially after the dissolution of the Liao and the rise of the Jin.They were also
one of the main sources of horses for the other China-based states.
West of theTanguts lay the Qara Khitai empire described above.Once a
flourishing and stable empire, by the early thirteenth century the Qara
Khitai were plagued by problems of leadership and by power-seeking local
governors and threatened as well by the ambitions of the Khwarazm Shah.
Behind the shrinking Qara Khitai empire was the newly established
and quickly expanding Khwarizmian empire, by far the major Muslim
power of the time, and yet troubled by weaknesses both personal and
structural, as was soon exposed by the Mongol invasion.The reign of
Muhammad Khwarazm Shah (1200–1220) saw both the height of
Khwarazmian power and its rapid fall: Muhammad started his career by
taking over the whole of Khurasan from the Ghurids (c. 1105–1215), a
Persian dynasty centered in modern Afghanistan, which succeeded the
Ghaznavids. With the help of the Qara Khitai in 1205 the Khwarazm
Shah attacked the Ghurids, pushing them back into their Indian
domains. Encouraged by this victory he turned against the Qara Khitai,
taking over Transoxania in 1210 and eliminating the Qarakhanids and
other local dynasties in 1212. In 1215 Muhammad eradicated the
Ghurids, though some of their mamluks clung to power in India
where they established the long-lasting Delhi sultanate (1210–1526).
Intoxicated by his new power, and knowing that the Caliph had tried to
incite both Ghurids and Qara Khitai against him, Muhammad then
turned against the Abbasids. He took a most unusual step, denying
Abbasid legitimacy and proclaiming an Alid as anti-Caliph, and then
began a march on Baghdad.The snowstorms in the winter of 1217–18
halted his forces in Kurdistan and Luristan, and unrest among the
Qipchaqs drove him back to Khwarazm where the Mongols soon
demanded his full attention (see chapter three).
At the height of Khwarazm expansion, its territory reached to the
frontier of the Caliph’s lands. Despite the Khwarazmian attempts to discredit him, the Caliph was still a major symbol of legitimacy in the
26 CHINGGIS KHAN
Muslim world, but his actual rule did not go far beyond Iraq. Around
him, several towns in al-Jazira (modern northern Iraq) and Iran were
ruled by atabeg dynasties, remnants of the Seljuq period, and a Seljuq
branch continued to rule in Anatolia (Rum) until 1307. Further westward,Egypt and Syria,parts of the Jazira and even eastern Anatolia were
subject to the Ayyubids (1187–1250), heirs of Saladin, who never managed to restore the greatness of their founder. The Ayyubid princes
fought among themselves and against the Franks, who maintained a
foothold on the Syrian coast. The Caliph’s reluctance to supply more
than nominal support for the Muslim struggle against the infidel
Crusaders was yet another source of tension in the already divided
Muslim world of the early thirteenth century.
CONCLUSION
Two factors in late-twelfth- to early-thirteenth-century Asia favored the
rise of Chinggis Khan. The first was the relative fragmentation of the
political power in many parts of Eurasia: in the steppe, China and the
Muslim world, there was no one central authority but rather multiple,
competing dynasties, even though some, most notably the Jin and Song,
were formidable military and economic powers.
The second factor was that most of these polities, especially those
closest to the Mongols, were established by people of Inner Asian
origin, mostly former nomads, who ruled over mostly sedentary but
ethnically heterogeneous populations. These inter-regional states not
only supplied precedents for nomadic conquest of sedentary realms but
also provided models for a state in which a nomadic minority, backed by
a strong nomadic army, ruled a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and mixed
nomadic-sedentary population. No doubt the nomadic social norms
apparent in these states, rather similar to the Mongols’ own, later contributed to the consolidation of Mongol rule.
These precedents notwithstanding, however, no one in the twelfth
century could have predicted the rise of the Mongols from an obscure
tribe to world conquerors. Nor would this have been possible without
the leadership of Chinggis Khan.
2
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA
Before the appearance of Chingiz Khan they had no chief or ruler. Each tribe
or two tribes lived separately; they were not united with one another and
there was constant fighting and hostility between them. Some of them
regarded robbery and violence, immorality and debauchery as deeds of manliness and excellence. ... Their clothing was of skins of dogs and mice and their
food was the flesh of those animals and other dead things; the sign of great emir
amongst them was that his stirrups were of iron, from which one can form a
picture of their other luxuries. And they continued in this indigence, privation
and misfortune until the banner of Chingiz Khan’s fortune was raised and they
issued forth from the straits of hardship into the amplitude of well being.
Juwayni 1997, 21–22
A man is worthy of leadership who knows what hunger and thirst are and who
can judge the condition of others thereby, who can go at a measured pace and
not allow the soldiers to get hungry or thirsty or the horses to get worn out.
(words of wisdom of Chinggis Khan) Rashid/
Thackston 1999, 2: 296
God has spoken to me, saying: “I have given all the face of the earth to Temüjin
and his children and I have named him Chingiz Khan”
Juwayni 1997, 39
The political fragmentation characteristic of much of Eurasia on the eve
of Chinggis Khan’s accession was found in twelfth-century Mongolia
too. In fact, it took Chinggis more time and effort to unite the tribes of
the eastern steppe than it took him to conquer half of the world.This
27
28 CHINGGIS KHAN
chapter focuses on Temüjin’s Mongolia and its tribal composition, and
on his own tribe, the Mongols, their origin and early history. It then
turns to the life of the young Chinggis himself, analyzing his spectacular
rise to power, his enthronement in 1206 and the measures he took to
reorganize Mongolian society, thereby laying the foundations for the
future empire and for his great conquests.
THE TRIBAL COMPOSITION OF MONGOLIA
The Mongolia into which Temüjin, the future Chinggis Khan, was born
was divided into several nomadic tribes, among whom Temüjin’s ancestors held a rather marginal position. At the time of his birth, the three
major tribes were theTatar in eastern Mongolia,the Kereyid in the center,
and the Naiman in the west.
The Tatars, old and bloody rivals of the Mongols, inhabited the steppe
south of the Kerülen river,next to the Jin’s northern frontiers.At the instigation of the Jin the Tatars often played an aggressive and active role in
steppe politics, and had far more resources than neighboring tribes.Their
name therefore become a generic appellation for the nomads of Mongolia
and was later used as a synonym for Chinggis Khan’s troops both in the
Muslim world and in Europe.In Europe,the identification of the Mongols
with the “Tartars” became widespread due to the similarity between the
name Tatar and the word tartarus, a Latin word for hell.
West of the Tatars lived the Kereyids, a tribe of Turkic origin, whose
core territory lay in the sacred realm of the Orkhon valley, a region
which apart from its legitimating role also had strategic and economic
importance, dominating the trade routes connecting Mongolia to China
and western Asia. In the twelfth century the Kereyids professed
Nestorian Christianity. They maintained close contacts with the Qara
Khitai kingdom to their west and enjoyed a relatively stable leadership.
As rivals of both Tatars and Naimans, they played a major role in
Temüjin’s rise to power.
West of the Kereyids, in the southern slopes of the Altai range and the
upper course of the Irtish river, lived the Naiman, literally “The Eight,”
the last tribe to submit to Chinggis. The Naiman ruling family and
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 29
nobility were of Turkic origin.They maintained close connections with
their western neighbors, the Qara Khitai and the Uighurs, and borrowed from them some rudiments of statecraft such as the use of seals
and of the Uighur script.Among the Naiman there were Buddhists and
Nestorian Christians, though their leader was famed as a powerful
shaman, specializing in weather magic.
Apart from these three major tribes several others deserve to be
mentioned: northeast of the Naimans, in the lower course of the
Selenga river, lived their allies, the Merkids.They were forest people in
part, divided into three main branches, and generally did not posses a
high degree of internal cohesion. North of the Merkids lived the forest
tribes, most notable among them the Oyirad, rather marginal at the
time of Chinggis’s rise but destined for a celebrated history in the postChinggisid world. The forest people pursued a nomadic (though not
pastoral) lifestyle in which hunting played a leading economic role.
Although they often chose to remain neutral in the inter-tribal warfare
in Mongolia, they were considered part of the manpower pool on which
expanding steppe-based empires could draw.
Southeast Mongolia, across the Gobi, was the home of two other
tribes, the Onggüd and the Qonggirad (also known as the Onggirad).
The Onggüds, a Nestorian and Turkic-speaking tribe, resided along the
Jin border with the Xi Xia, and considered themselves Jin vassals.
Northeast of the Onggüds, on the western slope of the Great Khingan
range, just west of the Mongols, lived the Qonggirad.This was the tribe
from which the Mongols traditionally took their brides, a custom that
continued after the founding of the empire.
The Mongols themselves lived in eastern Mongolia, between the
Kerülen and the Onan rivers, north of their main enemies, the Tatars.
According to their own tradition the Mongols originated from the union
of a blue-gray wolf and a fallow doe, which took place at Burqan
Qaldun, a mountain identified as one in the Khingan range where
Chinggis Khan was later born. Chinggis Khan, however, was not a direct
descendent of these mythological progenitors. One of their human
descendants in the eleventh generation, Dobun, was married to Alan
Qo’a (Alan the Fair) of the Qorolas tribe. After Dobun’s death she was
impregnated by Tengri, who appeared as a resplendent yellow man,
30 CHINGGIS KHAN
Figure 1. The Genealogy of Chinggis Khan
entering her tent through the smoke hole and departing on a moonbeam
disguised as a yellow dog. Alan Qo’a then gave birth to three sons, the
youngest of which, Bodonchar, founded the Borjigin clan, the senior
Mongolian lineage into which Temüjin was born several generations
later.
The name Mongol (Chinese: Mengwu) is first noted in the Chinese
sources of the Tang dynasty (617–906) as a part of the Shiwei confederation. Subject first of the Turkic empire and later of the Khitan Liao, it
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 31
was probably in the eleventh century that the Mongols migrated from
northern Manchuria into eastern Mongolia. This migration was
reflected in the Mongol epos as the one which brought the wolf and the
doe to Burqan Khaldun,a tradition later retold in many Muslim sources.
Qaidu, Alan Qo’a’s great grandson and Chinggis’s ancestor, was possibly active in late Liao times, but it is his great grandson and Chinggis’s
great grandfather, Qabul Khan, who is usually given credit for “ruling
over all of the Mongols”. Qabul’s “state” is dated by Chinese sources to
the mid twelfth century. Under his leadership the Mongols raided north
China, and the Jin dynasty, acknowledging Qabul’s authority over his
followers, offered to grant him a tributary position if he stopped the
raids.When invited to the court to conclude the details however,Qabul,
drinking heavily, tweaked the Jin emperor’s beard, an outrageous act
which ended the negotiations, although Qabul managed to escape
unharmed. The Jin were unable to avenge the insult, as Qabul died
shortly after his return, but had their revenge in the reign of his heir,
Ambaghai. A cousin of Qabul belonging to the Tayichi’ud clan,
Ambaghai was chosen to replace Qabul and to lead the Mongols against
their erstwhile rivals, the Tatars, who had then enjoyed Jin support.
During the conflict the Tatars captured Ambaghai and dispatched him to
the Jurchen court. There he was nailed to a wooden donkey and
painfully bled to death.Ambaghai was succeeded by Qabul’s third son,
Qutula, thereby bringing Mongol leadership back to the Borjigin,
Chinggis’s clan. Qutula is described as a Mongol Hercules, but while he
could break the back of a burly man as if he were an arrow shaft, he was
less successful in the raids he mounted against the Tatars and the Jin,
seeking revenge for Ambaghai. Nothing is known of his demise or the
appointment of his successor: apparently with his death the Mongol
polity fell apart. This disintegration can be dated to the early 1160s,
namely around the time Chinggis Khan was born.The Mongols’ early
attempts at state formation did not leave a helpful legacy for Temüjin:
Qabul, Ambaghai and Qutula were merely tribal war leaders who
bequeathed no institutional foundations on which to build. Moreover,
Chinggis’s father,Yesügei, third son of Qabul’s second son and a member
of the newly-established Kiyad, a sub-clan of the Borjigin, did not have
a prominent position among Mongol nobility.What Chinggis did inherit
32 CHINGGIS KHAN
from this recent history was merely a double enmity, one towards the
Jin, who had curtailed Mongol attempts at statehood, and another
towards the Tatars, who were responsible for the death of Ambaghai.
Later, they were to be responsible for the death of Chinggis’s father too.
Yet the lack of anything like a central government or even of a dominant
tribe in Mongolia at this time, and the fluidity of the tribal structure
deriving from this chronic political instability, created favorable circumstances for a talented young nomad to build up his own following.
TEMÜJIN’S YOUTH AND HIS RISE TO POWER
Contemporary Muslim and Chinese sources – with the notable exception of Rashid al-Din discussed below – are usually less informative
about Chinggis Khan’s early life than they are about his later conquests.
Most of them mention the eastern origin of the Mongols, who resided
on the fringes of North China; their submission to Altan Khan, the Jin
emperor; the destitution and poverty prevailing among them before
Chinggis’s rise; as well as some general observations on the nomadic
lifestyle of the Mongols, usually mentioning that “they had no religion,”
namely they did not adhere to any world religion. Chinggis Khan’s
youth and his rise to power are known mainly from the Secret History of
the Mongols, the only surviving Mongol work of the thirteenth century,
of which the chapters dealing with Chinggis are now usually dated to
1228. Another Mongol chronicle of the thirteenth century, the Altan
Debter (Golden Book), did not survive, but we have both Chinese and
Persian works based on it.The shorter, anonymous Chinese version is
known as Shengwu qinzheng lu (Record of the Personal Campaigns of the
Holy Warrior). It was written under Qubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294) and
later served as a main source for the chapter on Chinggis Khan in the
official history of the Mongol dynasty in China, the Yuan shi.The Persian
version of the life and times of Chinggis Khan is narrated by Rashid
al-Din (d. 1318), the greatest historian of the Mongols. Rashid al-Din,
further discussed in chapters four and five, had access to the Mongol
chronicle through oral transmission of Mongolian officials in Iran,
where he served as one of the grand viziers of the Mongol rulers
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 33
(ca. 1295–1318). To this he added information from earlier Muslim
records, mainly the History of the World Conqueror by Juwayni, a Persian
bureaucrat serving the Mongols (d. 1283) whose book is by far the most
detailed report on Mongol conquests in the Muslim world and also a
relatively elaborate record of Chinggis’s early life.All three sources and
especially the Secret History contain many legendary, mythical and folkloristic elements, yet they reflect the reality of nomadic life in thirteenth-century Mongolia. These three main sources, while sharing
episodes, often contradict each other in terms of details and chronology, and only a very general outline of Temüjin’s youth will be given
below.1
Temüjin was probably born in 1162.2 The eldest son of Yesügei and
Hö’elun of the Qonggirad, he was called Temüjin (literally: blacksmith)
after a Tatar chieftain killed by his father on the eve of his birth (calling
newborns after recently vanquished enemies was a common nomadic
custom).Temüjin was born holding a blood clot the size of a knuckle
bone, a symbol of his future glory and of the bloodshed which accompanied it. He spent his early years near the Onan river, where he already
found his first anda, Jamuqa, member of a different Mongol lineage, that
of the Jadaran, who was due to become Temüjin’s main rival for
supremacy. When Temüjin was nine years old his father arranged his
marriage to the daughter of the Qonggirad chief, the ten-year-old
Börte, further cementing the ties between the two lineages. In accordance with Mongol custom,Temüjin remained with his in-laws, but not
for long. His father,Yesügei, was poisoned by some Tatars during his
return journey from the Qonggirat, and on his deathbed he summoned
Temüjin back home.At the age of nine the orphaned Temüjin returned
to his mother,only to find out that nobody wanted a nine-year-old chief.
1
For a masterfully detailed (though not uncontested) reconstruction of
Chinggis’s life, see Ratchnevsky 1991; for a very compelling, albeit not always
accurate, biography of Chinggis, see Weatherford 2004. I have drawn heavily on
Allsen’s chapter in Twitchett and Franke, 1994.
2
The exact year is widely contested. I accept de Rachewiltz’s chronology. A
surprising source of support to this date (based on Chinese sources and accepted in
Mongolia) is found in a seventeenth-century Muslim astronomical treatise from
Quhistan. (See Kennedy 1991: 228). Other main alternatives are 1167 and 1155.
34 CHINGGIS KHAN
Most of Yesügei’s followers went over to the rival clan, the Tayichi’ud,
leaving Temüjin, his mother and brothers to their fate.This was the first
but certainly not the last time Temüjin was betrayed by relatives, a fact
that encouraged him to build his power base on non-kinsmen from an
early age. At this stage, if we believe the Secret History,Temüjin and his
family were on the verge of starvation, reduced to fishing and eating
roots for sustenance. It was after a dispute over a fish that Temüjin and
his brother, Jochi Qasar, killed their half-brother, Bekter, who had
seized their catch.The issue at stake was more than a fish: Bekter was
older than Temüjin, and though he was not a descendant of Yesügei’s
principal wife, he was a threat to Temüjin’s primacy within the family. It
is also possible that Temüjin killed Bekter to prevent him from marrying
Temüjin’s mother Hö’elun, for according to Mongol custom at the
father’s death his wives, except for the older son’s mother, became the
property of the eldest son.While fiercely rebuked by his mother for this
act,Temüjin never expressed remorse. Here and afterwards, he was not
to react lightly to affronts to his dignity. Soon thereafter, however, the
rival Tayichi’ud, fearful of a possible threat from Yesügei’s descendants,
seized Temüjin. Had they killed him, world history would have looked
different, but they merely enslaved him, fettering him in a wooden
cangue and rotating him among their different families. After a while,
with the help of a Tayichi’ud client, Temüjin managed to escape and
reunite with his family.Yet life remained difficult and none too secure.
The meager possessions of the family soon attracted bandits, who took
the family’s horses.Temüjin went out to retrieve them, returning in triumph and, at the same time, gaining his first nöker, Bo’orchu, who now
joined him.
Encouraged by this first victory,Temüjin returned to the Qongirrad
to ask for his bride. The Qonggirad remembered their alliance with
Yesügei and thus were willing to end the isolation of Chinggis’s family.
They gave him Börte as well as a magnificent sable coat as her wedding
present. With this coat Temüjin, again building on his father’s legacy,
tried to secure an alliance with one of the major tribes of Mongolia.
Sometime in 1183/4, he approachedToghril, later known as Ong Khan,
the leader of the Kereyids, andYesügei’s anda. Softened by the precious
gift, and remembering Yesügei’s help against his own family’s attempts
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 35
to dethrone him, Toghril accepted Temüjin as his adopted son and
promised help. Indeed, Toghril’s mere acknowledgment led to an
increase in Temüjin’s followers. Toghril, moreover, was soon asked to
give aid when the Merkids attacked Temüjin’s camp.Temüjin managed
to escape, but the Merkids kidnapped his wife in retaliation forYesügei’s
former abduction of Temüjin’s mother from the Merkid chief.The kidnapping of women was rather common in Mongolia – especially among
those who could not afford to pay the bride price – and did not necessarily require immediate retaliation.Temüjin, however, thought differently. He called on all his allies, includingToghril, who had his own score
to settle with the Merkids, and Temüjin’s own anda, Jamuqa, who was
allied with the Kereyids at this stage.With their help,Temüjin moved
against the Merkid. His reunion with Börte, who ran into his arms on
recognizing his voice, is one of the most touching episodes in the Secret
History (and one often retold in folktales, romances and, later, films).
Börte, however, came back heavily pregnant. Although she had spent
nearly nine months among the Merkids, Chinggis always regarded her
first-born, Jochi (literally: guest, visitor) as his own son, but others had
their doubts about Jochi’s paternity, and these doubts played a role in
depriving Jochi of a chance of succeeding his father. On a more practical
level, the battle against the Merkids was Temüjin’s first victory on the
field, through which he began to make a name for himself as a war
leader.
After this great victory Temüjin camped for a year and a half with
Jamuqa. In this period he gained a sizable following, attracting more and
more kinsmen and nökers to his side, and acquiring further military
experience. His exceptional military talents and growing popularity,
however, soon made him a competitor of Jamuqa. Following the advice
of his wife, and after the hated Tayichi’ud chose to align with Jamuqa,
Temüjin decided to separate from his anda. He moved into the upper
Kerülen, where around 1186 his uncles, perhaps seeing him as less dangerous than Jamuqa, enthroned him as khan of the Mongol tribe.While
Temüjin actually ruled mainly the Borjigin clan, since neither the
Tayichiu’d nor the Jadaran were subject to his authority, the enthronement nonetheless greatly enhanced his authority and prestige.The new
khan organized a household establishment, appointing his nökers as
36 CHINGGIS KHAN
cooks, herders, quiver bearers, waggoneers and chamberlains, thereby
creating the kernel of his future imperial guard.This rise in his position,
while welcomed by Ong Khan, alienated Jamuqa, who attackedTemüjin
in 1187, a clash which resulted in the one and only decisive defeat the
future Chinggis Khan ever suffered in the field. Temüjin’s political
wisdom (and Jamuqa’s lack of it) enabled him, however, to turn this
defeat into victory. Making full use of the exceptional cruelty with
which Jamuqa treated his opponents – he boiled seventy princes in large
cauldrons – Temüjin managed to convince many of Jamuqa’s supporters
to desert their master and join his camp. However, it is possible that the
battle had taken a heavy toll on Temüjin,3 for we know nothing of his
whereabouts until 1196, when we find him fighting against the Tatars.
Perhaps, as Ratchnevsky has suggested,Temüjin spent some of this time
in Jin captivity.This period seemed to have been a trial also forTemüjin’s
main ally,Toghril. Being threatened by his brothers,Toghril had to find
refuge in the Qara Khitai realm,andTemüjin was instrumental in restoring him to power when he had returned from his exile, probably around
1195 to 1196.4 In 1196, however, both Temüjin and Toghril fought
against the Tatars with the Jin’s encouragement. Apparently, the Jin
wanted to build up Kereyid authority as a counterweight to the Tatars,
thereby givingTemüjin andToghril an opportunity to avenge themselves
on their long-time enemies. Following their victory, the Jin gave Toghril
the title of Ong Khan (Chinese wang, prince), while Temüjin received
the lesser title of j’aut- quri (Khitan: commander of hundreds). This
battle marked the beginning of a series of feuds among the tribes of
Mongolia in which Temüjin and Ong Khan most often stood together,
raiding groups of Naiman and Merkid, while Temüjin also brought into
line Mongol lineages such as the Jürkin, who defied his leadership.
The ongoing success of Temüjin and Ong Khan prompted Jamuqa,
now an open enemy, to forge his own coalition. In 1201 an alliance of
lesser tribes enthroned Jamuqa as Gürkhan (universal khan). Choosing
the title so far used in Mongolia only by the Kereyid (and originating in
3
Rashid al-Din ascribed the cauldrons’ episode to Chinggis himself.
The dating of Ong Khan’s escape to the Qara Khitai and his restoration are
still in dispute. Cf. Togan 1998; Ratchnevsky 1991 and de Rachewiltz 2004, who
dated it to between 1198–1201.
4
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 37
the Qara Khitai realm) was a direct challenge to Ong Khan’s leadership.
Both Toghril and Temüjin moved against Jamuqa. Ong Khan inflicted a
heavy defeat on him which led Jamuqa to plunder the camps of his own
followers, further fracturing his coalition. Temüjin’s main aim in this
campaign was the Tayichiu’d, Jamuqa’s supporters and his former tormentors. Subduing them on the Tula river, despite being seriously
wounded in action, he systematically executed their leaders and incorporated the people into his own following.The Tayichi’ud were broken
once and for all, and as a bonus Temüjin received the allegiance of one of
their clients, Jebe, who turned out to be one of his most brilliant generals. In addition the Qnggirad, his wife’s tribe and a former ally of
Jamuqa, also chose to submit. Although Jamuqa’s power was not yet
completely broken, the victory greatly increased the prestige and
authority of both Ong Khan and Temüjin.
Temüjin used his growing power to settle scores with the Tatars.After
resting his troops, the Mongols, without the Kereyids, attacked the Tatars
in the autumn of 1202 at their pastures near the Khalkha river. Before the
battleTemüjin had ordered his troops to refrain from plunder until victory
was assured, a rule strictly enforced from that day onward. The battle
resulted in a crushing defeat for theTatars,andTemüjin ordered that all the
maleTatars taller than the linchpin of a cart (i.e.above two feet) should be
executed, and that the rest should be divided amongst his troops. Only
women and children now survived from the Mongols’major enemy,once
the dominant tribe in Mongolia;Yesügei’s death was avenged.
After this great victory,Temüjin controlled all of eastern Mongolia,
his power nearly equaling that of Ong Khan. This required an adjustment in their relationship. Ong Khan suggested appointing his promising adopted son as his legitimate heir.Temüjin accepted and as a means
of further cementing the alliance asked for the latter’s granddaughter as
a wife for his eldest son.The father of the bride-to-be, Ong Khan’s son
Senggüm, refused. Envious of Temüjin’s success, and coveting his
father’s throne for himself, he convinced the aging Kereyid leader that
Temüjin was undermining his authority and had to be killed. Jamuqa,
who had apparently improved his relations with the Kereyids since
1201, also played a part in persuading Ong Khan to betray his adopted
son. Planning to lure Temüjin to a feast where he could assassinate him,
38 CHINGGIS KHAN
Senggüm informed him that he agreed to the wedding. Temüjin went
out toward the Kereyid camp unsuspecting, but was warned in the last
moment by two loyal shepherds. He managed to escape, but was forced
to run away with only a few followers.Taking refuge near the river or
lake of Baljuna, probably south of the Khalkha in southeast Mongolia,
Temüjin saw his life-long enterprise on the verge of collapse.Yet he was
moved by the fidelity of those who stayed with him during this period of
trial.Together they drank from the bitter water of Baljuna and swore to
share both the bitter and the sweet consequences of the task ahead.
Having been present at Baljuna later conferred high honor on the participants. Those who remained with Temüjin at this time were an
extremely heterogeneous group: Khitans from northern China,
Tanguts, Muslim traders from Central Asia, and perhaps also Indians. It
also included Kereyid and Naiman, but not one Mongol apart from
Temüjin and his brother Jochi Qasar, again proving the supremacy of
personal loyalty over kinship. For our purposes, the important thing is
that it was in Baljuna that for the first time Muslims began to play a role
in the life of Chinggis Khan.
Gradually, however, more Mongol contingents rejoined Temüjin.
Still outnumbered, he went against the Kereyids, the battle causing
heavy casualties on both sides. Temüjin let his troops rest for the
summer, trying to enlist as many allies as possible, including many
Kereyid defectors, for the decisive showdown with Ong Khan. In the
autumn of 1203 the Mongols launched a counter attack, overwhelming
their rivals after a bitter three-day battle. Ong Khan, who had escaped
into Naiman territory, was killed by their guard who refused to believe
that the pitiable old man before them was the famous Kereyid leader,
while Senggüm (son of Ong Khan) fled southward into the Xi Xia realm.
Temüjin was relatively generous to his defeated enemies, forgiving their
commanders, marrying Kereyid princesses to his sons and dividing
their troops amongst his army. Eastern and central Mongolia was now
under his control, including the strategic and sacred realm of the
Orkhon valley. Many Muslim sources suggest that his supremacy in
Mongolia began at this stage.
The new situation also meant that Temüjin’s domains now bordered
on the territory of the Naiman, the major tribe in western Mongolia. In
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 39
1204 Chinggis Khan moved against them in what was to be his last
decisive battle before the unification of Mongolia. The threatened
Naiman Khan proposed an alliance to the Onggüds in order to attack the
Mongols simultaneously from two fronts, but the Onggüds preferred to
submit to Temüjin.The Naimans still had an alliance with the Merkids
and with Jamuqa’s clan, the Jadaran.Temüjin took great care in planning
this battle, appointing his first bodyguard (kesig) before launching the
attack.Aware of his numerical inferiority, he also ordered his vanguard
to light fires at night, thereby creating the impression they had a much
bigger force than they actually had, a trick often used in later Mongol
campaigns. The two armies met near the Altai mountains, where the
Naiman coalition suffered a major defeat.All the Naimans who survived
the onslaught were incorporated into the Mongol army. In addition, a
number of tribes that accompanied the Naimans also chose to submit.
With the demise of Tayang Khan of the Naiman,Temüjin’s only serious rival in Mongolia remained Jamuqa.The latter fled from the battlefield but was soon captured by his own people, who handed him to
Temüjin.Temüjin executed them for betraying their master, but subsequently, in 1205, also put to death his former anda. Although Merkid
and Naiman elements continued to resist and the forest tribes were still
to be subjugated,Temüjin was now the uncontested lord of Mongolia.To
formalize his status, a Grand Assembly (Mongolian: quriltai) was summoned in the spring of 1206 to the source of the Onan river, where the
tribes of Mongolia invited Temüjin to be their leader. His white battle
standard with the nine flying yak tails was raised, and the shaman Teb
Tengri installed him as Chinggis Khan.
The etymology and meaning of the title Chinggis Khan have been
long and fiercely debated. The two leading opinions are those of
Pelliot, who argues for the meaning of Oceanic, hence universal, Khan
(from Tenkiz, Turkic: Ocean), and de Rachewiltz, who supports the
meaning of mighty, strong, or firm Khan (from ching, Mongolian:
hard, strong). But whatever its literal meaning, the title obviously
implied superiority over other rulers. Moreover, unlike Gürkhan, the
similar-meaning title chosen by Jamuqa or Ong Khan, Chinggiz Khan
was a completely new title, so that its adoption signaled the beginning of
a new era.
40 CHINGGIS KHAN
Several factors, apart from his well-attested military talent, contributed to Chinggis’s rise to prominence in Mongolia. First was his
political skill, making the best out of any alliance available to him –
whether by marriage or anda – and not hesitating to turn against former
allies when the need arose, usually after blaming them for betraying
him.
A second factor wasTemüjin’s “egalitarian” policy: he treated his rank
and file well, dressed his people in his own clothes, allowed them to ride
his own horses, and let them eat the same food as he ate himself.Treating
his soldiers “as if they are my brothers,” Chinggis never required them to
undertake tasks beyond their physical abilities and never allowed their
commanders to beat them. Furthermore, he distributed the booty
equally among all the participants in the raid, securing shares even for
the widows and orphans of those who perished in the battle. Chinggis
thereby acquired a reputation for generosity, a highly regarded trait in
nomadic societies. In return for fair treatment he demanded full devotion and obedience, and whoever failed in this was harshly punished.
Still, the rules were clear and the rewards for loyalty were equal to the
punishments for disobedience. Moreover, given his frequent disappointment in his kinsmen and the fact that he came from a relatively
minor lineage in his tribe, Chinggis did not ascribe much importance to
people’s descent or to their position in the tribal hierarchy but rather to
their individual talents and loyalty. This policy presented people of
humble origin a unique opportunity to rise to prominence in his newly
assembled troops, and they flocked to his side.
Another factor contributing to Temüjin’s success was his widely
attested personal appeal. Even as a child Chinggis had an imposing
appearance, his future father-in-law being impressed by the “flashing
eyes and lively face” of the nine-year-oldTemüjin.As a man Chinggis was
distinguished by his height: he was powerfully built and had “cat-like”
eyes. His appearance and qualities attracted many to his side, and not a
few of his first adherents were envoys or merchants employed by others
who chose to stay in his service.
Chinggis Khan’s unique qualifications as administrator and organizer, another major reason for his success, were clearly manifest after he
had united the Mongol tribes in the quriltai of 1206.
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 41
INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES: MONGOLIA IN
TRANSITION
Several Muslim sources, perhaps anachronistically but in accord with
modern anthropological theories, relate that the Mongols enthroned
Chinggis Khan under pressure from an external threat, either the Jin or
(much less plausibly) the Khwarazm Shah.Turning outside against enemies could have also supplied additional sources of wealth for Chinggis’s
supporters.Yet despite these economic and political conditions, the first
task Chinggis Khan turned to during the 1206 quriltai and in the whole
incubation period of 1204–9 was the reorganization of Mongolia’s
nomadic society. Well aware of the fluidity of alliances which played
such a pivotal role in his rise to power,Chinggis took measures to ensure
a much more centralized, political-military system before launching
major raids, carefully laying the foundations for the nascent Mongol
empire. The Secret History devotes much space to the administrative
arrangements and the lists of nominations, thereby attesting to their
importance.The focus of this reorganization was the army, the judicial
system and the religiously inspired ideology.
The reorganization of the army was one of the most revolutionary
acts of Chinggis Khan and a major reason for his future success.
Moreover, since every Mongol was a soldier, the military reorganization
meant also a dramatic social change, breaking up the traditional tribal
configuration. Under Chinggis Khan, the whole manpower of Mongolia
was reorganized into decimal-based military units of 10, 100, 1000 and
10,000.The unit of one thousand (Mongolian: mingghan) was the basic
structural element of the army.Ten mingghan were grouped to form a
tümen, unit of 10,000, only when the need arose, and a commander of
one of the mingghan was entrusted with the leadership of the larger formation, although he also continued to lead his own thousand.The decimal organization was a traditional Inner-Asian institution, but while the
pre-Chinggisid decimal units were organized along tribal lines and led
by the tribal chief, Chinggis’s units were composed of many tribes, and
at their head stood his loyal followers, the nökers. Tribes which had
peacefully submitted to the rising Chinggis, such as the Onggüd, the
Qonggirad, the Oyirad, or the Jalayir, retained some of their integrity,
42 CHINGGIS KHAN
providing whole units of a thousand, but opposition tribes such as the
Kereyid,Tatar, Merkid, and Naiman – or what was left of them – were
broken up and distributed among the different units.The soldier’s unit
became his new focus of identity, and the commanders replaced the
tribal chief as the new nobility of the Mongols.The soldier’s loyalty was
now to his unit commander and to the latter’s commander, Chinggis
Khan. Chinggis used this opportunity to reward his loyal followers, personally nominating each of the 95 commanders of a thousand. Many
nökers rose to power in 1206 from the lowest ranks of shepherds, stewards, or even carpenters. The physical extermination of most of
Mongolian tribal nobility during Chinggis’s rise to power facilitated the
completion of this revolution.
Over and above the ordinary military formations, Chinggis created
his imperial guard (kesig). At 10,000 men strong in 1206, the guard
became a fundamental institution of the Mongolian state, fulfilling several key functions.The guard was responsible for the Khan’s personal
security, guarding his tent in shifts day and night. It also took care of the
Khan’s well-being, comprising officers responsible for his food and
drink, garments, weapons, and herds as well as for writing his decrees
and recording his deeds. In addition, the guard had police functions,
apprehending thieves and enforcing order, and served also as the elite
troops of the Mongols.The kesig was recruited from the decimal units,
whose commanders were asked to assign both their sons and their best
warriors to it, regardless of their genealogy.The kesig therefore served
as both a reservoir of hostages, an additional insurance for the commanders’ loyalty (sons of subject rulers were later added to this reservoir),
and as a training center for future Mongol commanders endowed with
good genes or proven quality, and often both. Most of Chinggis’s leading generals, including Jebe, Sübedei and Muqali (mentioned in the
next chapter), soon to be sent across Asia, grew up in the ranks of the
kesig. Being a member of the kesig was highly prestigious, and indeed it
was the nursery of the new ruling class of the Mongol empire, both on
the field and outside it, and the nucleus of much of its future central
administration.
Chinggis Khan also fixed specific regulations for ensuring the smooth
management of his new state. These included the duties and rights of
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 43
commanders and soldiers, notably forbidding transfers among units and
imposing strict discipline; rules regarding military training through
hunting; and the basics of penal law.These regulations, which continued
to evolve throughout Chinggis’s life and afterwards, and were allegedly
recorded by the guardsmen, probably served as the basis for the famous
Grand Jasaq (usually known in its Turkish form, Yasa), the legal code
ascribed to Chinggis Khan, which is one of the most disputed subjects in
the study of Mongol history.5 The Jasaq is considered to be one of
Chinggis’s greatest achievements, because, albeit probably encompassing much of the former Mongol customary law, it was at least partly
invented by Chinggis “from the page of his own mind without the toil of
pursuing records or the trouble of confirming with tradition” (Juwaynı̄
1997: 23–4). Chinggis therefore was not only the enforcer, but also the
giver of law.
The common wisdom in the research literature till the 1980s was
that at the 1206 quriltai Chinggis gave his followers a coherent legal
code, the Jasaq, to mark the foundation of his new polity. As David
Ayalon and David Morgan have shown, however, this is not supported
by the sources. Part of the problem derives from the fact that jasaq in
Mongolian means both law or legal code and an individual order or act
of law, and the scattered references in the Secret History (none of them
related to the 1206 quriltai) seem to refer to specific orders, not to a
comprehensive legal code. Moreover, no copy of the Jasaq survived, and
no historian ever claimed to have read it. It would seem that the Jasaq in
a coherent form was put into writing only in the reign of Chinggis’s heir,
Ögödei, who is described in Chinese sources as promulgating it during
his accession ceremony. Even though it is impossible to restore the full
content of the Jasaq, obviously the Mongols of the thirteenth century
and afterwards (and many of their subjects and neighbors) believed that
it existed and knew what it intended.The Jasaq seemed to have been an
adaptable and dynamic code, which continued to evolve after Chinggis’s
time and into which his various successors added their own regulations
(for the Jasaq’s later relationship with the Muslim law, the shari’a, see
5
For the Jasaq see Morgan 2005; deRachewiltz 1993; Aigle 2004. I basically
follow Morgan.
44 CHINGGIS KHAN
chapter four).Yet Chinggis Khan was always considered the source of
the Jasaq and the origin of its sanctions.
But while Chinggis did not create a comprehensive legal code in the
1206 quriltai, he did establish a juridical authority meant to enforce the
new order and supervise its administration. He appointed his adopted
brother or son, the Tatar Shigi Qutuqu, to be the chief judge (yeke
yarghuchi) of the Mongols. Shigi Qutuqu, helped by several of the night
guards, was to arbitrate in disputes, try evildoers, and divide and apportion subject people and later also appanages. He was also asked to register his decisions – and Chinggis’s legal decrees – in a blue register,
thereby creating a body of precedents for future use, perhaps another
foundation for the Jasaq.The mere idea of record keeping was another of
Chinggis’s innovations: in 1204, following the battle with the Naiman,
and under their influence, Chinggis adopted the Uighur script for writing Mongolian. Literacy, certainly, was an asset in administrating a state
and, later, empire and soon became an important criterion for promotion and advancement. And it was used for other purposes as well: the
first surviving specimen of Mongolian writing records the winner in an
archery match from 1225.
Apart from reorganizing the army and the juridical system, Chinggis
also took measures to strengthen his political-religious ideology, which
became a major source of his legitimacy. The heavenly mandate
which the shaman Teb Tengri conferred upon Chinggis during the 1206
quriltai had deep roots in the steppe (as discussed in chapter one). Just as
in the case of the Turkic empire, however, the world over which Teb
Tengri enthroned Chinggis was the world of the dwellers of the felt
tents, namely the world of Mongolia and of the steppe. Chinggis, however, made two important changes in this concept. First, after the series
of successful conquests discussed in chapter three, he broadened the
mandate realm from the world of the steppe to the entire world.
Second, already during the incubation period following his coronation,
he diminished the shaman’s role as the link between the ruler
and heaven, replacing it with his own direct and personal connection
to Tengri.
The replacing of Teb Tengri arose not for reasons of doctrine but of
politics.Teb Tengri, aware of his power as the voice of Heaven, first tried
TEMÜJIN’S MONGOLIA 45
to sow dissention within Chinggis’s family, noting that Heaven considered transferring the mandate to Chinggis’s brother, Jochi Qasar. Only
the intervention of their mother saved Jochi Qasar from Chinggis’s
wrath.Teb Tengri, however, continued to gather around him those dissatisfied with Chinggis’s reforms, breaching his newly instituted regulations by encouraging people assigned to Chinggis’s younger brother,
Temüge, to desert their units and join him. Chinggis decided that the
feud between the shaman and his brother would be settled in a traditional wrestling match. According to his orders, however, his brother
stationed three strong men outside the Khan’s tent, and before the
match started they seized Teb Tengri and broke his spine. Chinggis
declared that the shaman’s fate was the will of heaven. While he had
appointed another shaman (of a smaller tribe) and continued to use the
services of astrologers and diviners throughout his rule, by eliminating
the noted shaman Chinggis Khan asserted not only the primacy of
imperial power over that of the priests – as accepted in East Asian traditions – but also his close and personal relation to Heaven.
Chinggis’s intimate connection with the supernatural is stressed in
both Mongolian and Muslim sources. Major manifestations of this connection are the Khan’s super-human origin; his skill in magic, deception
and scapulimancy (divination by interpreting cracks in the burned
shoulder bones of sheep); and also his consultations with Tengri before
taking important decisions.These were highly personal consultations,
made sometimes on a high mountain or after several days of prayers; the
victories that followed were accordingly ascribed to Tengri’s support.
By placing himself in a shaman’s position, Chinggis Khan enhanced the
sacral component of his leadership, bolstering his prestige among the
Mongols.
While simultaneously organizing his realm and consolidating his
legitimacy, Chinggis continued to work toward securing his hold in
Mongolia.The main opposition came from the remnants of the NaimanMerkid coalition, and campaigns against them had already begun on a
small scale in 1206. In 1208, a year after subjugating the forest tribes,
Chinggis moved against the Naiman-Merkid coalition with full force,
crushing them near the Irtish river.The Merkid leader was slain, though
some princes fled westwards to the Uighur realm, while the Naiman
prince Güchülüg took refuge in the Qara Khitai domains.This victory
not only gave Chinggis fame outside Mongolia, but also demonstrated
the superiority of his newly centralized army over the rival tribal levies.
However, even when most of his energy was turned toward the outside
world (as will be discussed in the next chapter), Chinggis still took precautions to defend his rear. Only the series of victorious conquests outside Mongolia convinced even its most stubborn tribesmen that they
would be better off by remaining under Chinggis Khan’s standard.
Unifying Mongolia was a long and tortuous process, but Chinggis
learnt its lessons. Determined to avoid the fluidity of the tribal alliances,
he chose to devote a few years to creating a new, more centralized,
structure for his state. This consolidation period established a firm
infrastructure for his future conquests and rule.
3
WO R L D C O N QU E S T : H OW D I D
HE DO IT?
Never had anything like it been heard of. Even Alexander [The Great] who all
sources agree in saying was the ruler of the world did not come to dominate it
so rapidly, but needed ten years to do so; he did not kill anyone but was content
with the submission of the people. But in just one year [the Mongols] seized the
most populous, the most beautiful and the best cultivated parts of earth whose
inhabitants excelled in character and urbanity. In the countries that have not yet
been overrun by them, everyone spends the night afraid that they may appear
there too.
Ibn al-Athir 1966: 12:235, cited in Spuler 1972: 31
There is nothing surprising in the fact that after 1206 Chinggis Khan
commenced preparations for attacks on his sedentary neighbors: the
natural course of action for a newly established nomadic empire was to
turn outward.This supplemented the nomadic economy by acquiring
riches from its sedentary neighbors, allowed the leader to reward his
followers and therefore consolidate his position, and focused the energies of his followers on external objectives, thereby deflecting attention
from internal differences.What is surprising is that Chinggis Khan was
far more successful than any nomadic chief before or after: he died
ruling over the largest territory a single man had ever conquered – from
northern China to the Caspian sea, from Afghanistan to the fringes of
Siberia. This chapter reviews Chinggis Khan’s campaigns, stressing
the gradual transition from raiding to conquest, and consider the
47
48 CHINGGIS KHAN
internal consolidation of the empire, trying to explain the unusual success of Chinggis Khan (and his descendants), with special reference to
the role of the Muslim world in his rise to unprecedented power. Four
issues are crucial in this regard: the organization and strategies of the
army, including the calculated use of devastation; the willingness to
learn from foreigners; Chinggis’ political skills; and success itself, an
important element in nomadic political ideology.
THE CONQUESTS
If the natural course for Chinggis Khan was external expansion, the natural direction was China, the time-honored objective of the nomads
from the Mongolian steppes. Among the three contemporary Sinitic
states, Chinggis decided to start with the smallest – and weakest – the
Tangut Xi Xia empire, a good but not-too-dangerous test for his newlyassembled troops. Attacking the Xi Xia had other advantages: first, the
Tanguts were allies of the Jin; subduing them would therefore deprive
the Jin of an important ally in later confrontations with the Mongols and
enable Chinggis Khan to secure his western flank. Second, the Tanguts
controlled a significant part of the Silk Road trade and were therefore
important for securing Mongol participation in this ongoing commerce.
On a more personal level, the Xi Xia had given refuge to many Kereyid
Map 3. Chinggis Khan’s Campaigns of Conquest
WORLD CONQUEST 49
leaders, most recently Ong Khan’s son, Senggüm, a rival of Chinggis
Khan.Although Senggüm soon fled the Xi Xia domain southward (only
to be killed a few years later by Turks from India), the Tanguts were still
guilty of sheltering Mongol refugees. Indeed, revenge and the elimination of potential rivals are the apparent motivations for Chinggis Khan’s
first campaigns,much more so than any grand design for world conquest.
The attacks on theTanguts began by raids on their territories in 1205,
1207 and, on a more massive scale, from 1209 onward. In 1211 these
raids resulted in Xi Xia’s submission. The Tanguts agreed to give the
Mongols a significant tribute of camels, brocade and gyrfalcons, to end
their alliance with the Jin, and to provide, when required, auxiliary
troops for the Mongol army.To cement the deal Chinggis Khan obtained
a Tangut princess to marry. Conquest was not the goal at this stage, and
the Mongols, satisfied for the moment, returned home. Mongol success
against the Tanguts was not overlooked by the Central Asian powers to
the West: in 1209 the Uighur ruler, well aware of the growing Mongol
power from their vigorous pursuit of the Merkid who had fled into his
territories in 1208, and until then a vassal of the Qara Khitai, transferred his allegiance to Chinggis Khan.This was the first submission of a
sedentary polity to the Mongols and the Uighur ruler, receiving a
Chinggisid princess in marriage, was declared Chinggis’s fifth son.Thus
begun a fruitful relationship between the two peoples as the Uighurs
remained important cultural brokers for the Mongols throughout the
period of the united empire (1206–1260) and beyond.
Following the Uighurs, another Qara Khitai vassal submitted to
Chinggis Khan in 1211.This was Arslan Khan, leader of the Qarluqs of
Qayaliq (in modern south-eastern Kazakhstan), who became the first
Muslim ruler to join the Mongols.The ruler of Almaliq, a neighboring
Muslim city also previously under Qara Khitai rule, soon followed. For
Chinggis Khan, however, the main implication of the Tangut submission
and that of their western neighbors was that it enabled him to attack the
Jurchen Jin dynasty in northern China.
Chinggis had many reasons to challenge the Jin. First, as the neighboring superpower,it was only to be expected that Jin would continue its
traditional policy of inciting one steppe tribe against another, in order to
undermine the newly-achieved unity in Mongolia. Jin’s war with the
50 CHINGGIS KHAN
Song in 1206–8 and the subsequent succession struggle and internal
unrest delayed the Jurchen reaction to the rise of Chinggis Khan, but in
1210 the Jurchen emissaries returned to Mongolia, demanding that
Chinggis pay tribute to Altan Khan.This was of course another bone of
contention: theoretically Chinggis was still a vassal of Jin, an intolerable
position for someone with his ambitions. In addition, Chinggis had
several old grudges against the Jin: a historical one, relating to the
Jurchen execution of his ancestor Ambaghai, and a more recent one,
because the newly enthroned Jurchen emperor (Weishao Wang
1209–1213) had insulted him while he was bringing tribute to the Jin.
Beyond this, the riches of the Jin were a perfect source of booty for
rewarding his troops. No wonder then that when Jin envoys came in
1210 to inform him of Weishao Wang’s enthronement and to ask for
tribute, Chinggis spat in their face and prepared for war.
In 1211, after leaving a considerable force to secure his rear in
Mongolia, Chinggis Khan advanced southwards toward Jin territory. He
had already gathered much information about the Jin situation, both
from allied merchants and from Chinese, Jurchen and especially Khitan
turncoats who chose to join him before or during the campaign. The
Mongols advanced in two columns, the eastern one led by Chinggis and
the western by his trusted general Jebe. Jin border fortifications (not to
be confused with the GreatWall of China, which did not exist at the time)
were crossed without problem since their defenders, the Onggüds, had
already submitted to Chinggis Khan.The troops under Chinggis’s command defeated the elite troops of the Jin, while Jebe’s forces took the
strategic Juyong mountain pass guarding the Jin central capital,Zhongdu
(modern Beijing), his troops preventing Jin garrisons stationed on the
Xi Xia border from coming to the aid of their capital. The Mongols
ravaged and plundered the countryside around the city, without, however, attacking the city itself. In the winter of early 1212 the Mongols
withdrew northward, either because Chinggis Khan suffered an injury,
or simply because they had all the booty they could carry off.
The Jin regained the pass and much of their lost territories, but in the
fall of 1212 the Mongols returned.They took the Juyong pass, this time
with the help of Ja’far Khwaja, a Muslim merchant and a veteran of
Baljuna. Familiar with the region from his commercial travels, Ja’far
WORLD CONQUEST 51
guided the Mongol troops at night through a narrow mountainous path
and, when Jin soldiers woke up the next morning, they were taken completely by surprise.This time the Mongols penetrated much deeper into
Jin territory. Divided into three columns, they wrought havoc in the
agricultural lands north of the Yellow River, and blockaded Zhongdu.
Despite the desire of his generals to annihilate the Jin, Chinggis preferred to conclude with peace.This was because the main goal of this
campaign was still booty and because the siege was taking a heavy toll on
his troops. In addition, while he was already building up a force of siege
engineers, Chinggis was not yet confident in his troops’ ability to assault
a heavily fortified city such as Zhongdu.The peace agreement, negotiated by Ja’far and rather similar to the one concluded with the Tanguts,
secured the Mongols plenty of gold, silk and horses, accompanied by a
Jurchen princess.The Mongols lifted the siege and rode northward.
Immediately after signing the peace agreement,in summer 1214,the
panic-stricken Jin court chose to take a traditional Chinese step and
transferred its capital further to the interior, in this case to Kaifeng on
the Yellow river, where they thought they would be well beyond the
reach of the Mongol army. Chinggis saw this move as a deliberate
violation of the agreement, and he ordered his troops to renew the
siege. Zhongdu held for eight months, after Mongol attempts to take it
by storm failed. In May 1215, after the city’s population, reduced to
cannibalism, had lost all hope, the Mongols entered Zhongdu.The end
of the siege was followed by a week of carnage and pillage, which
allegedly left the streets of the Jin capital greasy from human fat.
Simultaneously, another Mongol force advanced to the northeast,
along the Manchurian coast.The Jurchen homeland was already in turmoil, as many Jin generals, sensing the dynasty’s weakness, had tried to
carve out their own ephemeral kingdoms. Some of the Jin generals were
not ethnically Jurchen and the Mongols, at this stage enthusiastically
incorporating the petty kings, fully exploited their grudges against the
Jin. By far the most important allies the Mongols gained in Manchuria at
that point were the Khitans,remnants of the Liao dynasty destroyed earlier by the Jin. Submitting en masse in 1215, the Khitans played a pivotal
role in the subsequent subjugation of northern China and in the early
Mongol administration. By 1216 a large part of the Jurchen homeland
52 CHINGGIS KHAN
was already in Mongol hands, and the Jin dynasty, deprived of its central
capital, was on the verge of collapse. At this stage, however, Chinggis
Khan left Muqali, a trusted general, in charge of the ongoing small-scale
operation against the Jin (which Muqali continued till his death in
1223), while the Great Khan and his army turned back to face the new
challenges from the west.This time, however, Chinggis Khan left governors and garrisons behind.The conquest had begun.
The change from raiding to conquest at this stage was tactical, not
strategic, dictated by battlefield conditions and by Jin behavior. The
Jurchens proved they were unreliable in keeping peace agreements, and
therefore Chinggis Khan sought their complete destruction, a goal that
could best be achieved by leaving governors and garrisons in Zhongdu
as a base for further operations.It was also at this stage that the Mongols,
under Muqali’s direction, systematically begun to collect and allocate
“useful people,” e.g. artisans and military technologists from northern
China, in addition to using conquered peoples in their army.Yet by conquering northern China, although deviating from the custom of former
steppe empires in Mongolia, Chinggis Khan can be seen as following the
Liao and Jin pattern, namely aiming to create another East Asian state of
nomadic origin.The change into a real world empire began only after
Mongol involvement in the Muslim world.
What made Chinggis turn westward was a challenge to his leadership
of the Mongol world. First, the forest tribes of north-western Mongolia
rebelled again, and in 1216 Chinggis Khan sent his generals to subdue
them completely. In the same year he also dispatched his loyal general,
Jebe, to cope with a more serious challenge which arose further westward,in the lands of the Qara Khitai.In 1208,when Chinggis had fought
the Merkid and Naiman tribes, one Naiman prince, Güchülüg, escaped
into the Qara Khitai realm. The Qara Khitai Gürkhan, plagued by his
eastern vassals’flirtation with the Mongols and the growing power of his
western rival and former vassal, the Khwarazm Shah, warmly received
the Naiman prince, and gave him his daughter in marriage, hoping the
refugee would enlist his kinsmen to help the declining Qara Khitai
empire. Güchülüg, however, did not remain loyal to his father-in-law
for long. In 1211, the year after the latter had lost his richest province,
Transoxania, to the Khwarazm Shah, Güchülüg deposed the Gürkhan
WORLD CONQUEST 53
and usurped the Qara Khitai throne, gradually enforcing his authority
throughout their former domains. Chinggis Khan’s western vassals
complained to their overlord about Güchülüg’s oppression, and the
challenge to Chinggis Khan’s hegemony of such a rival power headed by
a Mongol was obvious enough.In 1216 therefore Jebe led a considerable
Mongol force, augmented by Uighurs and Qarluqs, against Güchülüg.
Here, as in northern China, the Mongols warmly welcomed turncoats,
and made full use of their familiarity with the terrain and the rival army.
Güchülüg chose not to confront the Mongols on the field. Instead he ran
away, aware of the divided loyalties of his troops. Jebe pursued him,
finally killing him in the mountainous region of Badakhshan (in northeastern Afghanistan) in 1218.
The vacuum created by Güchülüg’s death meant that the region over
which he ruled (most of modern Xinjiang and Kirgizstan) became part
of the emerging Mongol empire, and soon proved to be an excellent
base for their next military campaigns.
The conquest of the former Qara Khitai realm was quicker and much
easier than that of northern China. It was also uncharacteristically
benign, mainly because the Mongols were interested in incorporating
the considerable reservoir of nomadic troops formerly under
Güchülüg, who were glad to replace this cruel and cowardly usurper
even with Chinggis Khan. The religious factor may also have played a
role in the easy conquest of the sedentary – and mostly Muslim – population.The rule of Güchülüg greatly increased the religious tension in
Central Asia. Pro-Mongol Muslim sources even report that Güchülüg,
a Christian who after his marriage to the Qara Khitai princess also
adopted Buddhism,gave his subjects,even the many Muslims,the rather
curious choice of adopting Christianity or Buddhism, or donning
Khitan garb and, moreover, prohibited any public manifestation of the
Islamic creed.Aware of the situation, Jebe, upon entering Kashgar, the
Muslim city in which Güchülüg had taken refuge, proclaimed that
everyone could adhere to his forefathers’religion.In this way he gained the
population’s support long before the Mongols seized Güchülüg, and was
praised as the liberator of the Muslims. According to the more matter
of fact Chinese version of events, however, Kashgar and its neighboring towns surrendered only after the Mongols displayed Güchülüg’s
54 CHINGGIS KHAN
head in their streets.Whatever the importance of the religious factor in
the Qara Khitai conquest, the annihilation of the empire considerably
enlarged the territory, manpower, wealth and prestige of Chinggis
Khan. It also meant that he now ruled a significant Muslim population,
and, more importantly, he now had a direct border with the strongest
Muslim power in the eastern Islamic world, the empire of the
Khwarazm Shah.
The relationship between the Mongols and the Khwarazm Shah
began before the subjugation of the Qara Khitai realm. Aware of the
rumors about the new leader of Mongolia and his victories in China, in
1215 the Khwarazm Shah sent an embassy to inquire about the new
power. The ambassadors arrived at newly-conquered Zhongdu, but,
strangely enough, their grisly descriptions of the looted Chinese capital
did not impress the Khwarazm Shah, perhaps still intoxicated from his
recent series of successful campaigns in Transoxania and Iran. Or
possibly the Mongol contingents in the west had not demonstrated their
military superiority in the clashes between them and the Khwarizm
Shah’s forces, for they were under orders to avoid fighting with the
Khwarazmian army. At this point Chinggis Khan was pursuing a nonaggressive policy toward the Khwarazm Shah, his main concern being
the revival of the trade routes between eastern and western Asia, which
Güchülüg had tried to block. In response to the Khwarazmian embassy
Chinggis therefore sent back three Muslim merchants with a message
calling for peace, friendship and free movement of traders between the
ruler of the East, Chinggis Khan, and the ruler of the West, Muhammad
Khwarazm Shah. In the message, however, Chinggis Khan referred to
the Khwarazm Shah as his dearest son, an offensive term for the haughty
sultan. But after he had questioned the messengers about Chinggis
Khan’s force and achievements, the Khwarazm Shah appears to have
accepted the pact.
The amity was shortlived, however.While the information about the
early contacts between Chinggis and the Khwarazm Shah is confused
and maybe fictional, all sources agree that the Utrar incident in 1218
was the event which sparked the war between the two rulers.Moreover,
even the most anti-Mongol Muslim sources agree that the “bad guy” in
the affair was not Chinggis Khan but Muhammad Khwarazm Shah,
WORLD CONQUEST 55
whose arrogant and short-sighted behavior inflicted a terrible disaster
on the Muslim world. Following their agreement, Chinggis Khan sent a
huge caravan of mostly Muslim merchants to Khwarazm. When the
embassy arrived in Utrar, a city on Khwarazm’s eastern frontier (in
today’s southwestern Kazakhstan), the local governor, offended by the
merchants’behavior and coveting their goods,accused the merchants of
spying.Obtaining the Khwarazm Shah’s permission,he confiscated their
goods and killed them, not knowing that “for every drop of their blood
there would flow a whole Oxus.” (Juwaynı̄, 1997: 80). When the
enraged Chinggis Khan heard about the massacre, he was still calm
enough to suggest a diplomatic solution, demanding that the Khwarazm
Shah execute the governor of Utrar and return the caravan’s goods to
restore peace between the two realms.The Khwarazm Shah killed one
of the three envoys Chinggis Khan had sent him, thereby breaching the
norm of the ambassadors’“diplomatic immunity.” The other two he sent
back, not before shaving their beards to humiliate them as well as the
one who had dispatched them.This meant war.
Later Muslim sources sometimes blamed the Abbasid Caliph, alleging that, annoyed by Khwarazm Shah’s attack on his legitimacy and by
the abortive Khwarazmian campaign in Iraq in 1217, he had urged
Chinggis Khan to invade the Muslim world. This view, probably originating in Khwarazmian propaganda and later embellished with details
such as the caliph sending a regiment of Franks to Chinggis Khan for
operations against Khwarazm, seems to be groundless.The Utrar incident was certainly a sufficient casus belli.
Chinggis Khan did not set out for the west before carefully preparing
what was about to be by far his largest and logistically most complicated
campaign.The preparations included appointing a successor. Chinggis
Khan was already nearly sixty years old, he was about to go on a dangerous mission, and, as one of his wives pointed out, it made sense to secure
his realm by avoiding the most common danger for a nomadic empire: a
struggle over succession.The selected heir, Chinggis Khan’s third son,
Ögödei, was chosen because of his generosity and affable character
which gave him the best chance of keeping the family together.
Whether Chinggis Khan meant permanently to entrust Mongol leadership to the Ögödeid branch of the family was an issue fiercely (and
56 CHINGGIS KHAN
sometimes bloodily) contested in Mongol and post-Mongol politics
for centuries.
But most of Chinggis’s preparations were military rather than political: he collected troops and specialists from his subjects, including,
most importantly,northern Chinese siege engineers.TheTanguts refused
to send auxiliaries westward, maybe because their troops were already
assisting Mongol operation against the Jin,but the Mongol army included
northern Chinese, Khitans, Uighurs, Qarluqs, and troops from theTarim
Basin population previously under Güchülüg’s rule. Many of the soldiers
were familiar with the terrain and the enemy, since Transoxania and
Khwarazm as well as many of Chinggis Khan’s western vassals had formerly been under Qara Khitai rule.The Mongols thus had good intelligence.The force also had quite a significant Muslim segment. In 1219 this
composite Mongol army advanced to Utrar, the root of the conflict.
There, Chinggis divided his troops: two sons, Ögödei and Chaghadai,
stayed to besiege Utrar; Jochi, the eldest son, was sent down the Jaxartes
river, heading for Khwarazm, while Chinggis Khan, his youngest son
Tolui and the main Mongol army advanced toward Bukhara. Even more
than in North China, the ability of the different Mongol columns to act
separately and then rejoin and act together or start a new mission was a
major feature of the Mongol campaign in the Muslim world.
Though his army was numerically by far superior to the Mongol force,
the Khwarazm Shah did not try to confront the Mongols in the field.
Instead, perhaps afraid of his own soldiers no less than of the Mongols,
Muhammad Khwarazm Shah divided his troops into garrisons at his principal towns and improved their fortifications.The descriptions of Sultan
Muhammad rebuilding Samarqand’s walls while muttering to himself:
“what am I doing, it’s futile to confront the Mongols anyway” are anachronistic, but there is no doubt that the defensive strategy he chose was
ill conceived and probably would not have served him well even if it had
been executed with greater vigor.
After five months of siege the Mongols entered Utrar, putting the
whole populace to the sword in retribution for the caravan incident.
Utrar’s citadel and walls were leveled to the ground and its ruler was
brought alive to Chinggis Khan who personally supervised his execution. While Utrar was besieged, Chinggis Khan advanced toward
WORLD CONQUEST 57
Bukhara, a major commercial and religious center of Transoxania which
was less heavily fortified than Samarqand, the Khwarazmian capital.
Instead of taking the usual route to Bukhara, via Samarqand, Chinggis
Khan, with the guidance of a local defector, chose to cross the allegedly
impenetrable Kizil Kom (red sands) desert (see map 3).The appearance
of the Mongol force in early 1220 before Bukhara’s gates, some 650 km
behind the enemy line, was therefore totally unexpected.The stunned
Khwarazmian garrison turned to flight, but was overtaken by the
Mongols and slaughtered to a man.The startled population, led by its
religious officials, opened the city gates to the Mongols.A few hundred
soldiers, however, remained in Bukhara’s citadel, from which they
offered strong resistance to the Mongols for twelve days before being
overwhelmed and killed.The fate of Bukhara can be seen as a model of
Mongol treatment of the Transoxanian cities: the people were herded
out of the town so that it could be looted without interruption. Useful
people – mainly artisans, especially weapon makers and weavers – were
selected for transportation eastward to work for the Mongols.Young
men were taken to serve as arrow fodder in the Mongols’ next battle,
and young women were taken for the pleasure of the invading troops. In
addition, Chinggis Khan demanded compensation, equal to the value of
the goods taken from his merchants in Utrar, from the city’s notables
and wealthy traders.While the city was sacked, a fire broke out, reducing the wooden houses to ashes. Juwayni depicts Chinggis Khan as
addressing the Bukharans from their Friday mosque (which, mistaking
it for the Shah’s palace, he had turned into a stable), and claiming “I’m
the punishment of God! If you had not committed great sins he would
have not sent a punishment like me” (Juwayni 1997: 105).This may well
be anachronistic, but no doubt the rumors about the coming of an
unknown bewildering enemy began to spread rapidly.
From Bukhara, Chinggis Khan turned toward the Khwarazmian capital, Samarqand, arriving with a sizable host of Bukharan citizens who
created the impression of a huge army. A significant segment of the
Khwarazmian troops, who had already chosen to switch sides, also
joined him, as did Ögödei and Chaghadai after the fall of Utrar.When
Chinggis learned that the Khwarazm Shah had already fled westward, he
sent two of his finest generals, Jebe and Sübetei, to pursue him, while he
58 CHINGGIS KHAN
himself attacked the capital. Samarqand was heavily fortified, guarded
by a huge garrison of the Khwarazmian elite troops strengthened by elephants, but it took only a few days of siege to convince the city’s religious authorities to open the gates for the Mongols.The Mongols did
not harm them but they systematically destroyed the city walls, creating
“free passage to horse and foot.” Then they drove out the population,
apart from those who received the protection of the religious leaders,
and plundered the city.The citadel garrison that continued to fight after
the city surrendered was slain and the citadel ruined. 30,000 artisans
were sent to Mongolia, together with beautiful women;“arrow fodder”
was also collected for the continuation of the campaign. Chinggis Khan
appointed governors, and the remains of the population were allowed
to buy their right to enter the city. With the conquest of Samarqand
(May–June 1220), nearly all of Transoxania was in Mongol hands less
than a year after the Mongols crossed the Jaxartes. Chinggis retreated to
the steppe south of the city, resting his army and horses for the summer.
In the meantime Jochi was advancing through the lower Jaxartes
region toward Khwarazm, the homeland of Sultan Muhammad. With
the assistance of his brothers, who joined him after Samarqand submitted, he defeated the renowned Khwarazmian commanders in 1221, and
reduced Urgench, the surviving capital of Khwarazm, into an “abode of
jackals and the haunt of owl and kite.” The Mongols took the town,
destroying the buildings and slaughtering its inhabitants. After the
remains of the population had been driven out of the city and divided
according to their skills, the coup de grace was the opening of the Oxus
dikes.The city was flooded, its remaining buildings collapsed and even
the few who had found good hiding places were flushed out. Jochi and
Chaghadai then continued northward, defeating the nearby Qipchaq
tribes, traditionally Khwarazm’s allies, one after another.
Simultaneously Jebe and Sübetei were sweeping across northwestern Iran in pursuit of the Khwarazm Shah.They advanced throughout Iran, raiding the countryside and receiving the submission of many
terrified cities, and reached the borders of Iraq, where the horrified
Caliph began to recruit a united Muslim front against them.When they
found out that the Khwarazm Shah had gone to Azerbaijan, however,
they turned northward, postponing the conflict with the Caliph for a
WORLD CONQUEST 59
few decades. Incapable of anything but flight, the desperate Khwarazm
Shah finally found refuge on a small island in the Caspian Sea where, in
late 1220 or early 1221, Jebe and Sübetei heard about his death (of
either heart break or pneumonia). This “second Alexander” ended his
life lonesome and destitute, buried in the rotten shirt of the only slave
still serving him.
His pursuers, however, returned home the long way round: they
continued through Azerbaijan into the Caucasus and up to the Crimea,
defeating the local people and tribes (Georgians, Alans, Qipchaqs and
Circassians), and galloping across the Russian steppe, where in May
1223 they crushed a coalition of Qipchaq tribes and Russian princes in
the battle of the Khalka river, near the Azov Sea.The conquest of Russia
however was left to Chinggis’s heir: following this great raid, Jebe and
Sübetei retreated from the Russian steppe, the Caucasus and Azerbaijan
without leaving garrisons or governors, to rejoin Chinggis Khan’s
troops on their way back to Mongolia.
Before Chinggis went back, however, he had to make sure that no
opposition would remain in the former Khwarizmian realm. For this
reason he sent Tolui to Khurasan, the large and important Khwarazmian
province south of the Oxus, the fortified cities of which challenged the
Mongol troops. Chinggis soon found himself involved in pursuing Jalal
al-Din Khwarazm Shah,Muhammad’s son and eventual heir,and the only
Muslim leader to offer effective opposition to the Mongols at this time.
After his father’s death, Jalal al-Din made for Ghazna (in modern
Afghanistan), his former appanage, and managed to rally a considerable
following, composed of local people and remnants of the Khwarazmian
troops.With their help he managed twice to inflict defeats upon small
Mongol contingents, the only setbacks they suffered during their western campaign.These provoked Chinggis to come to defeat Jalal al-Din in
person.The two finally met in November 1221 on the banks of the Indus
river.The warrior qualities of Jalal al-Din won the admiration of Chinggis
but this did not enable him to win the battle: deserted by half of his
troops, and watching the other half being slain by the Mongols, Jalal
al-Din barely escaped by riding into the river and crossing into India.
With the shattering of Jalal al-Din’s force, the war in the west was practically over, though Tolui continued to fight in Khurasan till 1223, as did
60 CHINGGIS KHAN
Jebe and Subetei further northward. The chase after Jalal al-Din, first
into India and then to Azerbaijan, continued till his death in 1231,
thereby keeping a Mongol presence in the Muslim lands west of
Transoxania even after Chinggis Khan turned back to Mongolia.
Before attacking, Mongol forces always sent messengers calling on
populations and polities to submit and destroy their fortifications.The
Mongols proclaimed that they would do no harm to those who surrendered peacefully, but would not leave alive anybody who resisted them,
a dire threat which worked well especially after stories about the fate of
Transoxania began to spread. One must bear in mind, however, that
even cities that submitted peaceably were harshly treated. Some were
indeed spared of plunder and slaughter but the Mongols always
demanded manpower and taxes for their continuing conquest, sometimes several times a year. This explains why so many cities rebelled
against the Mongols, especially when the rumors of Jalal al-Din’s
victories began to circulate. Rebellious towns, however, were treated
without mercy, and Tolui’s march through Khurasan was therefore
extremely brutal. Moreover, revenge was still a major issue for the
Mongols and therefore most unfortunate were the places where a
Chinggisid was killed in battle: none of the citizens of Bamyan, in
Afghanistan, survived after Chinggis’s beloved grandson fell during the
fighting for the city (though unlike the Taliban in March 2001 the
Mongols kept the great Buddha sculptures of the town intact). In
Nishapur, a major city in Khurasan whose populace was guilty not only
of rebellion but also of killing a son-in-law of Chinggis Khan,Tolui and
his widowed sister first exterminated the whole population (including
cats and dogs) and then yoked oxen and ploughed over the city.
The sources recall a few acts of personal courage among the fighting
Muslims, but there are many more stories of panic, including that of a
single Mongol soldier who captured a hundred Muslims; even with these
favorable odds none of the Muslims dared resist, all waiting patiently in
line while the Mongol beheaded one after another.The speed, efficiency
and disdain for human life which accompanied the conquest can certainly
account for this kind of panic.The hasty disintegration of the Khwarazm
empire, however, resulted also from the internal weakness of this newly
fashioned polity, whose subjects and troops lacked cohesion or loyalty.
WORLD CONQUEST 61
Moreover, since the Khwarazm Shah had annihilated most of the local
elites in the regions he conquered,there were few leaders,apart from his
son, who could offer more than local resistance to the Mongols.
After resting his troops from the pursuit after Jalal al-Din, Chinggis
considered going back to Mongolia through India, but the climate and
terrain convinced him to turn back north.A bad omen sealed his decision: in the Afghan mountains the Mongols encountered a rhinoceros.
The appearance of the unknown beast, understood as the mythical unicorn, was explained by Chinggis’s astrologer as an immediate order to
leave the Indian route and return home through Transoxania. More
practical reason for the quick march northward was the news on the
rebellion of the Tanguts, who in 1223 withdrew their troops from the
Mongol force deployed against the Jin.
The war against the Tanguts was Chinggis’s final campaign. In the
spring of 1225, when he finally returned to Mongolia, leaving only governors and small garrisons in the west, he offered the rebellious Tangut
monarch an opportunity to signal his submission by sending his son as a
hostage to the Mongol court.The latter declined and in 1225 he went so
far as to sign a peace treaty with the Jin. In spring 1226 the Mongols
appeared on the Tangut western border, and in several coordinated
columns subdued the Xi Xia urban centers one after another. By early
1227 they besieged the Tangut capital, the last stronghold of the Xi Xia.
Shortly before its final collapse, in August 1227, Chinggis Khan fell ill
and died, apparently from the complications of a riding accident he had
suffered nearly two years beforehand. (Or, more colorfully, his heart
was said to have weakened after he had seen the white-as-milk blood of
the injured Tangut ruler; or he was mortally injured during intercourse
with his Tangut concubine, who wished to avenge her kin).According to
his orders, the Tangut campaign was continued, and their capital fell in
September, without the enemy knowing that the Mongol leader was
dead. Either because this was Chinggis Khan’s last wish or because the
Mongols wanted to assuage their pain on their leader’s death, the
Tanguts were treated with extreme ferocity; their capital was turned
into dust and its population was eradicated. According to Mongol custom, Chinggis Khan was buried in a secret place high in the mountains.
Legend says that soon after his body was put to rest a huge tree rose and
62 CHINGGIS KHAN
covered the grave and that all the rank and file who had participated in
his funeral were killed, so they would not be able to reveal the tomb’s
location.The secret was indeed well kept, and the search for Chinngis
Khan’s grave has continued ever since, attracting archaeologists, adventurers and politicians from around the globe to this day.
* * *
In the transformation of Chinggis Khan from a successful chieftain to
world conqueror, the invasion of the Muslim world was a turning point.
This was not only because it significantly enlarged the territory under his
possession,adding the lands of modern Uzbekistan,Tajikistan,Afghanistan
and parts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (while raids conducted by his
army also crossed Iran, the Caucasus and parts of Russia) or the amount of
people and riches at his disposal.The speedy annihilation of the Khwarazm
Shah’s power also enhanced his prestige and bolstered his public image as
someone pre-destined by Heaven to conquer the entire world. Moreover,
this invasion also closely exposed him to a sedentary culture different from
that of China,the major reference point of Mongolian nomads throughout
history. Unlike his predecessors Chinggis Khan could now learn “the laws
and the customs of the cities” not only from China but also from the
Muslim world; the stock of administrative, military and cultural tools he
appropriated was therefore larger and more diverse than those of former
nomadic empires.Chinggis was no longer following the Liao or Jin model,
he was launching one of his own, and the creative use the Mongols found
for the diverse traditions of their subjects was soon to become one of the
main hallmarks of their multi-cultural empire.
Owen Lattimore has pointed out another strategic advantage of the
invasion which also served to distinguish Chinggis’s experience from that
of the Liao and Jin: by turning from North China to Turkestan, Chinggis
Khan was avoiding the classical mistake of previous steppe rulers, namely
to leave the steppe unsubdued when they established themselves in northern China, with the result that they were sooner or later overthrown by a
fresh nomadic force from the steppe. By incorporating the steppe people
of both the eastern and western steppes under his authority, as he did by
conquering Central Asia, Chinggis Khan secured his rear and enabled his
heirs to continue with the conquest of the sedentary regions without
WORLD CONQUEST 63
being threatened by a newly established nomadic force (Lattimore
1963: 6–7; cited in Morgan 1986: 73). Nothing suggests that, when
Chinggis Khan turned toward Khwarazm, he had such a grand design in
mind, but the near monopoly on steppe warriors he achieved following
his Central Asian campaign greatly facilitated further expansion.
Moreover, it was during the Central Asian campaign, partly due to the
vacuum established after the demise of the Khwarazm Shah (and
Güchülüg before him), that conquest became a strategy, not a tactic.
Chinggis Khan found himself ruling over vast territories and began to
turn them into an empire.
FOUNDATIONS OF AN EMPIRE
Going over Muslim descriptions of the Mongol invasion, a never-ending
scene of bloodbaths and devastation, it is tempting to adopt their point
of view and to treat the Mongols like an apocalyptic whirlwind of
destruction, descending from nowhere and leaving swathes of
wasteland behind. This, however, is far from the truth. There was a
method in the madness, both strategically and politically.
Even though the numbers of victims mentioned in the chronicles are
greatly inflated – no medieval Muslim city contained the 2.4 million
people which, according to Juzjani, was the number of people murdered
at Herat – certainly the destruction and loss of life which accompanied the
Mongol onslaught were on an unparalleled scale. And yet the Mongols
hardly indulged in wanton cruelty for its own sake; the destruction and
massacres served Mongol strategic considerations, not their sadistic
needs. This strategy derived mainly from demographic considerations:
the Mongols were always outnumbered by their subjects and rivals.
Butchering whole cities was one way by which the Mongols tried – cruelly but effectively – to deal with this demographic imbalance. Moreover,
the mass killing was also a very effective psychological weapon: if one city
was massacred,the next city was more likely to surrender without further
resistance, thus avoiding unnecessary Mongol casualties.The devastation
had psychological value as well as serving tactical needs: despite their
improved technical ability and equipment, storming fortified towns was
64 CHINGGIS KHAN
always a time-consuming and costly undertaking. By reducing walls and
fortresses to ashes, the Mongols ensured that they would not have to deal
again with such fortifications, and this policy also facilitated the further
movement of nomadic troops in the region. Moreover, the devastation
and depopulation were meant to limit future resistance, both by the panic
they created and because the Mongols ravaged much more territory than
they kept:Chinggis Khan left governors inTransoxania but his troops devastated Khurasan,Iran,Azerbaijan and the Caucasus.By acting in this fashion, like a tsunami or tidal wave, as Timothy May described it, raiding and
wrecking havoc over a vast territory and then consolidating their authority in only part of it, the Mongols created a broad belt of destruction
around their borders. This belt protected their territory from future
opposition, facilitated their continuous expansion, and created pasture
lands.Motivated by the wars’practical demands,by their blind obedience
to Chinggis Khan and his generals and by their firm belief that they were
implementing the will of Heaven, combined with a certain nomadic disdain toward sedentary people “who eat grass like beasts,” often supplemented by the desire to seek revenge, the Mongols were able to practice
mass killing and destruction without remorse.
Moreover, the incredible amount of destruction had a considerable
impact on the shaping of the governance in the emerging empire.While
the Mongols’ steppe predecessors practiced mainly indirect rule, preserving most of the former order and leadership in their subject territories, the Mongols, whose violent conquest often eliminated local
rulers and elites alike, of necessity created a more direct mode of government.The Mongols were justly suspicious of the local population,
whose willingness to cooperate with the conquerors was certainly hampered by the brutality of the conquest, so they preferred to limit the use
of locals in their administration and to rely mainly on imported foreign
specialists.
The Mongols’ pragmatic cruelty came as a shock to the Muslim
world, not least because it was so different from the behavior of earlier
steppe conquerors they had known: even though some of their invasions
did include killing, looting, and destroying, the Turks arrived gradually,
in relatively small groups and after going through a process of acculturation, which often included Islamization and prepared them for a
WORLD CONQUEST 65
symbiotic relationship with their sedentary subjects. The Mongols,
however, came with tremendous speed and without acculturation.
Moreover, they imported to the region the cruel methods of East-Asian
warfare. Chinese and Mongol sources (the Secret History) are much more
prosaic than Muslim and later European sources in their descriptions of
the Mongol invasion: even the grisly descriptions of the Jin capital,
Zhongdu, derive from Muslim and not from Chinese witnesses.
Descriptions of pre-Mongol warfare in China routinely include features
such as elimination of the non-combatant populations during internal
conflicts, and during the Jin-Song war of 1206–8 we hear of prisoners’
heads being hurled by the dozens into a besieged town with catapults,
suggesting that war in the Chinese vicinity tended to be bloodier, more
cruel and marked by a more thoroughgoing indifference to human life
than in the Muslim east at that time.This may partially account for both
the behaviour of the Mongols and for the Muslim shock.
All this being said, however, one should bear in mind that the destruction and depopulation caused by the Mongols were neither permanent nor
were they irreversible.1 Again it is easy to buy into the gloomy,apocalyptic
narrative of the Muslim sources, which suggest that a thousand years will
not be enough to repair the damage done by the Mongols.This, however,
is quite misleading. True, the devastation was not uniform and some
regions, especially those within the outer band of destruction and later on
those located on the frontiers between rival khanates, revived very slowly
or never achieved their former glory.Yet in parts of the Mongol empire,
e.g. Transoxania, the revival was nearly as fast as the ruination, and the
Mongols were responsible for this as well,though less directly than for the
initial destruction.This is because during his stay in Central Asia Chinggis
Khan was not only carefully coordinating the movements of his forces,but
also laying the institutional foundations for his empire.
Several policies were apparent already in the 1220s, and they reflect
a central planning that gradually rises above the day-to-day demands of
warfare.Throughout the battles, for example, artisans were registered,
1
This was first pointed out by Bernard Lewis in 1968, although he turned
attention mainly to parts of the Muslim world which were not harmed by the
Mongols. I argue that even major parts that were harmed were quickly restored.
66 CHINGGIS KHAN
transported and relocated to Mongolia, northern China or Uighuristan,
to meet the needs of the empire – from weapons to gilded brocade –
while East Asian craftsmen, physicians and farmers were transferred
westward when required.The routes and bridges from East toWest Asia
were constantly repaired and broadened to allow the fast traffic of
troops, edicts, envoys and goods. Trade was much encouraged by the
Mongols, not only by creating the required infrastructure of travel but
also because, made suddenly wealthy with newly acquired booty, they
were both enthusiastic consumers of and major investors in international commerce.Already by 1221, as military operations in Central
Asia were reaching a climax, an active commerce in luxury goods had
already developed within the Mongol empire, comprising Mongolia,
northern China, Uighuria, Khurasan and the Hindu Kush mountains. In
Mongolia itself bulk goods like flour were also sold at an elevated price,
since the traders,many of them Muslims,were quick to exploit the freespending attitudes of the nouveau-riche Mongols. The Mongols also
soon recognized the need to communicate with subjects in their native
languages and a host of secretaries recorded Chinggis’s edicts in
Chinese, Uighur and Persian.
Simultaneously Chinggis Khan was also laying the basis for a local
administration, appointing commissioners or darughachis (literally,“those
who press the seal”) in the regions in which the Mongols intended to stay.
At this point the commissioners held both civil and military authority.
Their mission was to ensure that the town, region, or social group under
their sway would remain under Mongol rule and provide the empire with
what it needed in the form of taxes or manpower.The other part of their
responsibility was, therefore, to help these places return to normalcy.The
people chosen for these posts were men “familiar with the customs and
laws of the cities,” who had already proven their loyalty to the Mongols. In
fact the appointment was often a reward for a special service: the first
darughachi in northern China, appointed in 1215, for instance, was Ja’far
Khwaja, the merchant who guided the Mongols through the mountain
passes into northern China.The Mongols’ commissioners came from a
variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, but they were literate,
multilingual, and with earlier experience either as traders or in the
bureaucracy of former post-nomadic empires (mainly Khitans, Uighurs,
WORLD CONQUEST 67
Khwarazmians). Many of them were assigned to regions far from their
original home. Thus Chinggis Khan (or his son) sent the Khwarazmian
trader MahmudYalawach to rule in northern China while the KhitanYelü
Ahai came to govern Transoxania, presiding over a multi-ethnic staff,
which included many Chinese.At least in the case of Transoxania we have
good evidence that already in 1222 and certainly in 1224–5 life there was
already springing back to normal.Chang Chun,the Daoist patriarch summoned by Chinggis Khan who spent 1222–23 in Transoxania, is often
quoted as saying that after the Mongol onslaught Samarqand’s population
was reduced to one quarter of its original 100,000 households.Less attention has been given to his evidence of the thriving markets, and the flourishing agriculture of Samarqand where grain, vegetables and fruits
(including the famous melons which captivated every traveler to the
region throughout the ages) were abundant.While the echoes of the war
are still felt in the account of Chang Chun, the travelogue ofYelü Chucai,
the Khitan advisor and astrologer of Chinggis Khan who accompanied him
in his western campaign and remained in Central Asia several months after
him, till late 1225, is even more impressive. Chucai described Samarqand
as a heavenly place, dedicating many poems to its beautiful gardens.The
city had “a very wealthy and dense population” with striving monetary
commerce, and exceptional agricultural products. Bukhara, he added,
was even richer than Samarqand, and Urgench, the newly rebuilt
Khwarazm capital, was richer than both.The agricultural revival, attested
by the two Chinese travelers,is especially worth noting,since the depopulation and the neglect of irrigation work during the Mongol invasion were
often described as resulting in an enduring damage to agricultural
production. The Chinese, Khitan and Tangut farmers Chang Chun met
near Samarqand probably bore some of the responsibility for the quick
recovery of Transoxanian agriculture. Muslim biographical sources also
attest that when Mongol governors began functioning, people who had
sought refuge in the mountains or elsewhere gradually returned to the city
and to their fields.
The undisturbed profession of Muslim religious life, also attested by
Chang Chun, despite the unbelief of both rulers and governors, must
have also contributed to the quick revival. There was nothing antiIslamic in Chinggis Khan’s campaign against Khwarazm, and indeed his
68 CHINGGIS KHAN
“religious tolerance” is one of the few features of his career that have
always been deemed positive by outside observers. The Mongols
emerged in a multi-religious environment in which no religion was considered exclusive. Chinggis Khan certainly held holy men of all faiths in
high esteem. Those who impressed him, like the Daoist priest Chang
Chun he summoned to Central Asia to reveal to him the secret of
longevity, or the Buddhist patriarch Hai Yun his generals had encountered in North China, received tax exemptions and other privileges. In
return they were supposed to pray for the Khan’s wellbeing.2 Devoid of
any missionary zeal, Chinggis Khan was ready to let everybody adhere
to his own faith, as long as the customs of the different religions did not
conflict with Mongol customs and as long as the religions displayed no
threat to his political position. If it did pose a threat, as in the case of the
shaman Teb Tengri, no ecumenical considerations limited his actions.
Nor did the Mongols hesitate cynically to use religion for tactical
needs: when Jebe and Sübetei arrived at Armenia, for example, they put
the sign of the cross over their soldiers’ shields, to convince the
Christian Armenians to refrain from fighting their co-religionists.When
the latter relaxed after seeing the cross, Jebe and Sübetei attacked
them. The Mongols were also quick to acknowledge the benefit of
winning people’s acquiescence through their religious leaders and
through freedom of worship. Their religious tolerance was therefore
part of their practice of Realpolitik. meant not only to secure them, in
the words of David Morgan, maximum celestial insurance (Morgan
1986: 44), but also, perhaps mainly, to facilitate their rule in the
subjugated lands.
Another of Chinggis’s actions was to assign appanages to his family
members. Most famous (and disputed centuries after his death) were
2
No Muslim holy men, however, impressed the Khan like Chang Chun or Hai
Yun. The closest example is that of the Herati qadi Wahid al-Din. Falling off
unharmed from the walls of Herat, he was considered by the Mongol troops to be
blessed. They brought him to Chinggis Khan, who asked him whether the Muslim
scriptures predicted his rise to power. The qadi cited apocalyptic traditions on the
coming of the Turks, and the Great Khan was highly pleased. The qadi, however,
lost the Khan’s favor after he had pointed out that if Chinggis continued to massacre the population, nobody would be left to commemorate his fame.
WORLD CONQUEST 69
the appanages he allocated to his four major sons. Jochi, the eldest, was
the first to receive his territorial basis in the Irtish valley, and this
territory was later to be extended to the northwest “as far as the hoofs
of the Tatar horse had penetrated.” The other family members got their
territories later, probably during the early 1220s. Chaghadai received
the land between Uighuria and the Oxus, roughly the former Qara
Khitai territory; Ögödei got Zungaria (in northern Xinjiang) and the
western slopes of the Altai, a small territory since as the future Great
Khan he was going to receive plenty of lands ex officio; and the appanage
of Tolui, the youngest, was in the fatherland, Mongolia. In fact the
assignments were more numerous and complicated, including allocation of territory and people to Chinggis’s brothers, wives, daughters,
and other kin.The reasoning behind these allocations was double: first,
in continuation of theTurco-Mongol tradition, the empire was regarded
as a jointly owned property, a common pool of wealth meant to benefit
the whole Chinggisid family. Second, assigning each prince a wide area
for the grazing of his herds was meant to avoid conflict.The outcome,
however, was nearly the opposite, as local and central interests were
often at odds.Already in Chinggis’s lifetime, Jochi’s identification with
his own territory gave rise to rumors that he had tried to ally himself
with the Muslims (of Khwarazm) against his father,a policy which might
have led Chinggis to engineer his death, which occurred about
six months before his own.The tension between the collegial character
of the empire and its central government remained a feature of the
Mongol empire after Chinggis’s death.
THE SUCCESS: WHY DID SUCH CONQUESTS
NEVER HAPPEN BEFORE?
The circumstances at the time of Chinggis Khan’s rise to power, above
all the political divisions in Mongolia and Asia and the ripening of a postnomadic tradition in the Eurasian steppe, certainly contributed to his
success, as discussed in chapters one and two. But the actions Chinggis
Khan took himself account for the major part of his unparalleled
achievements.We can start with his military machine.
70 CHINGGIS KHAN
The Army
The Mongols did not succeed due to a technological breakthrough or
magic weapon: in terms of armament and tactics they basically continued the traditional form of steppe warfare.3 What made them superior
to other steppe armies was their better organization and strategic planning.
As seen in chapter two, the Mongol army was not organized according
to tribal lines. Its generals were therefore chosen not on the basis of
descent or status but rather according to their military talents, proven in
the wars in Mongolia, and their personal loyalty to Chinggis.The quality
of leadership in the Mongol army was therefore much higher than in former nomadic troops, and Chinggis could rely completely on a brilliant
group of generals, assigning to them tasks in different and distant fronts,
and thereby enabling the Mongols both to conduct complex coordinated
operations and to campaign simultaneously in different parts of Asia.
Another distinguishing feature of the Mongol army was its strict discipline. This was maintained by fostering the loyalty of the troops to
their generals, who became their new “chiefs”, and above them, to
Chinggis, as well as by draconian measures; anyone found plundering
without permission was put to death as was anyone who abandoned his
unit or fled the field.The key idea behind these draconian measures was
that the warriors must act as a unit and not according to their individual
aspirations. Collective training, mostly in the form of great hunts (practiced also by earlier nomadic warriors) also strengthened this notion.
The strict discipline was essential for coordinated operations, which
characterized so many Mongol campaigns.
The decimal organization of the army was also a useful mechanism for
incorporating former rivals or subject troops,in that it made it possible to
disperse them among different units.This efficient incorporation meant
that the more the Mongols conquered, the more manpower they had for
their next conquests.
3
Recently the role of gunpowder weapons was mentioned as one reason for
Chinggis Khan’s success. Yet while Chinese and Mongols certainly used incendiary
projectiles and the Mongols may have played a leading role in introducing gunpowder to the Muslim world and to Europe, there is no decisive evidence for the
use of firearms or cannon in the battles fought by Chinggis and his immediate heirs.
WORLD CONQUEST 71
Mongol campaigns were thoroughly planned.The planning included
obtaining information about the enemy and his terrain from traders,
subjects and turncoats, and also during the campaign through the use of
scouts advancing some 50 km ahead of the main force.The planning also
included the assignment of specific missions, routes and pasture lands to
generals who headed individual columns, and the fixing of timetables
and meeting points in which the columns were to meet during the campaign. Another facet of the central planning was the procurement of
weapons, first by collecting and distributing the plundered enemy’s
weaponry and later by distributing those produced by conscripted artisans’ colonies for their Mongol masters.The armament of the Mongols
also improved as their conquests continued.
In the field, the Mongols made maximum use of the mobility of their
light mounted archers, using classical steppe methods such as hit-andrun tactics accompanied by showers of arrows, surprise attacks, encircling maneuvers, ambushes and feigned retreat.They preferred first to
disperse the enemy’s field armies, ravage the countryside and small
towns, and to take the main stronghold (e.g., Zhongdu, Samarqand, the
Xi Xia capital) only after its population had been physically and psychologically exhausted.The Mongols were masters of psychological warfare,often meant to conceal their numerical inferiority,and they did not
hesitate to use deceit and subterfuge.The most successful psychological
warfare, which was also a strategic asset, as described above, was the
unparalleled use of massacre and devastation. The tsunami strategy
applied in the Khwarazm war was essential for Mongol success. Finally,
the Mongols targeted leaders, hunting them down and eliminating
them, thereby securing the submission of their troops. In this way,
Chinggis Khan created a formidable military machine which managed
to mobilize military resources more efficiently than earlier nomads,
and, moreover, the more the Mongols conquered, the more resources
they accumulated for future expansion.
TheWillingness to Learn from Others
Another major reason for Chinggis’s and his heirs’ success was their
willingness to learn from foreigners – subjects, neighbors, and visitors
72 CHINGGIS KHAN
– and their skill in doing so. This was apparent in the military field,
where the Mongols appropriated much of the military knowledge of
both China and the Muslim world in forming their own units of siege
engineers, and established workshops for weapon manufacturing
manned by their subjects.After Chinggis’s time, they even built a navy:
quite an achievement for people who originated so far from the sea.Yet
the military part was only one facet of a more comprehensive Mongol
policy: Chinggis was quick to realize that consolidating an empire
required new skills that the Mongols lacked,and he either adopted these
– as he did with the Uighur alphabet as early as 1204 – or employed specialists who possessed such knowledge. Nomadic culture creates generalists, and every nomad is versed in a variety of skills that allow him to
survive in the steppe, but these are not enough for ruling a world
empire. The Mongols therefore looked for specialists of all kinds,
whether in the domain of religion, military technology, weaving,
astronomy,or medicine and the like,and redistributed them across their
empire. The manning of Mongol administration by such specialists in
Chinggis’s time is another manifestation of their resourceful use of the
talents of their subjects.
Political and Diplomatic Skills
As he proved already during the unification of Mongolia, Chinggis Khan
was not only a great military leader and an extremely open-minded
man, he was also a unique political leader.Thus, for example, he skillfully exploited ethnic, dynastic and religious conflicts among his rivals;
he used two influential groups, religious men and traders, to gain support among his subjects; he had an eye for talented people whom he
promoted regardless of their descent or former status; and he understood the importance of appointing an heir for securing the smooth
transition of power after his death. Moreover, he chose well: his successor, Ögödei, proved himself highly capable not only in the field but also
in governance, developing many of his father’s ad hoc decisions into a
systematic policy in the fields of administration, religion and law.
WORLD CONQUEST 73
SUCCESS
But beyond the favorable context, his unique military and political leadership and his open-minded approach to new knowledge and skills, a
major factor in the overwhelming success of Chinggis Khan was success
itself. His career seems to prove the cliché that nothing succeeds like
success. Every victory he gained further stimulated his soldiers to continue fighting for him and encouraged rivals to submit without a fight. In
this respect fate and fortune also played a role in his success: Chinggis
never suffered a humiliating defeat; his later victories were easier and
quicker than his first attempts in China – nothing stained his unmatched
record. Therefore, every additional victory also bolstered his public
image as a person pre-ordained by heaven to conquer the world, a mission which under his heirs became the collective destiny of the
Mongols. Initially Chinggis aspired only to rule over the Mongol ulus,
the felt-tents dwellers, or the nomadic world centered in Mongolia.The
broadening of the horizons occurred gradually, due to the flight of rivals
to neighboring empires (the Tanguts and the Qara Khitai) and through
the increased presence of literati of Chinese and Khitan origin among
his advisers, for whom ruling all-under-heaven was the natural ideology
of a ruler. More than anything else, it was his unprecedented success
against the Khwarazm Shah which convinced Chinggis – as well as his
contemporaries – that he owned the qut or suu, the charisma and divine
grace. His career was therefore pre-ordained, and whoever opposed
him, also opposed the will of heaven, which meant that he was doomed
to failure and had to be subdued. Moreover, his overwhelming success
also convinced Chinggis that the mandate he had received was wider
than those of his nomadic predecessors, in that it encompassed the
whole world, with both its nomadic and its sedentary realms.This is evident from the will Chinggis Khan left to his sons: to subjugate every
place which dared to oppose the Mongols.
Chinggis Khan’s invasion into the Muslim world was a turning point
in his road into world conquest. It also proved a turning point in the history of the Muslim world, as will be discussed in the next chapter.
4
T H E C H I N G G I S I D L E G AC Y I N
T H E M U S L I M WO R L D
They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they
departed.
Juwayni [twice!!] 1997: 107.
In these days when, thank God, all corners of the earth are under our control and
that of Chinggis Khan’s illustrious family, and philosophers, astronomers, scholars and historians of all religions and nations – Cathay, Machin, India, Kashmir,
Tibet, Uyghur and other nations of the Turks, Arabs and Franks – are gathered
in droves at our glorious court, each and every one of them possesses copies of
the histories, stories and beliefs of their own people, and they are well informed
of some of them.
Rashid/Thackson 1998–9: 1: 6 (Ghazan Khan commissioning the
writing of Jami‘ al-tawarikh by Rashid al-Din)
And the sun of the creed of Muhammad casts its shadow over countries whose
nostrils had not been perfumed by the scent of Islam ... whereas today so many
believers in the one God have bent their steps thitherwards and reached the farthest countries of the East and settled and made their homes there, that their
numbers are beyond calculation or computation.
Juwayni/Boyle 1997: 13
One of the common popular ideas about the impact of Chinggis Khan
and his heirs in the Muslim world is that they left no legacy beyond
destruction.After about a century (with the fall of the Mongol state in
Iran in 1335), they simply vanished from the Muslim stage leaving
74
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 75
nothing positive behind, having caused disastrous destruction that
would take centuries to repair. The negativity of this legacy is often
stressed by Muslim authors in the comparison of the Mongol invasions
and the Arab conquests of the seventh to eighth centuries: the conquests
of Islam, almost devoid of massive massacres and destruction, were
more gradual, and encompassed less territory. However, they resulted
in the rise of an enduring civilization distinguished in its religion, language and script, while those of Chinggis Khan were allegedly
ephemeral, resulting only in devastation and decline.
The historical picture, however, is much more complex. First, as will
be demonstrated in the first part of this chapter, the Mongols did not
disappear from the Muslim world in the fourteenth century. In fact,
descendants of Chinggis Khan ruled in the western steppe, Muslim
Central Asia, and India until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Second, while the Mongols never created a civilization comparable to
the Muslim one, Mongol rule left a rich and enduring legacy in the
Muslim world and beyond.The nature of this legacy, however, makes it
easy to ignore or denigrate it, since what the Mongols left behind was
not their ethnic culture but their decidedly different imperial culture.
Thus Chinggis Khan neither preached a new religion nor tried to disseminate his shamanic beliefs; instead his descendants eventually
embraced one of the universal religions represented by a certain group
of their subjects. Nor did Chinggis Khan promote Mongolian as this
empire’s lingua franca. The Mongol empire remained multilingual,
and, in the Muslim world, the Mongols began to replace Mongolian
with Turkish as early as the thirteenth century. Yet Mongol imperial
culture – comprising not only the Mongols’ own social and cultural
norms but also the indigenous traditions and institutions of the conquered people and of the foreign traditions imported by the Chinggisids
– left its enduring mark on the Muslim world.This, as will be explained
in the remainder of this chapter, was mainly in terms of broadening
Muslim horizons through intensive cross-cultural contacts, the further
expansion of Islam, ethnic and geo-political changes, and political
culture.
76 CHINGGIS KHAN
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: THE ENDURANCE OF
THE CHINGGISIDS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
The Mongol expansion into the Muslim world and elsewhere continued
throughout the period of the united Mongol empire (1206–1260),
leading to the creation of the greatest continuous land empire in world
history, which at its height stretched from Korea to Hungary, from
Anatolia,Afghanistan and Burma to Siberia and north-west Russia (see
map 1).Three out of the four khanates which rose after the dissolution
of the empire in 1260 eventually embraced Islam.While toward the mid
fourteenth century all of the khanates experienced political upheavals,
which led to the dissolution of the khanates in China and Iran, the
Muslim steppe khanates in Central Asia and southern Russia still had a
long – and sometimes celebrated – history. This preserved the
Chinggisids in the Muslim world up until the eve of the modern period.
One of the features that distinguishes the Mongols from the bearers
of other steppe empires was that they continued to expand for several
generations after the death of their founding father.The period of continued expansion was also the time in which Mongol imperial institutions, policies and ideology crystallized. Ögödei, Chinggis Khan’s son
and successor (r.1229–1241), played a leading role in both of these
developments.Assuming the title Qa’an or Great Khan, Ögödei established his position as superior to his brothers who bore only the title
khan, though he still stressed the collegial character of the empire. He
founded the Mongol capital, Qara Qorum (“Black Sands”) in the
Orkhon valley in central Mongolia, the sacred territory of the Turks and
Uighurs,and created the jam (Turkish:yam),the mounted postal courier
system. Post stations were established at stages a day’s journey apart
(about every thirty-three to forty-five kilometers at a normal, somewhat leisurely, pace), and they provided horses, fodder and couriers for
authorized travelers, who were able to cover about 350–400 km a day.
The system enabled the Qa’an to transmit his orders efficiently and
acquire information from the far reaches of the empire, in addition to
securing the routes for ambassadors and merchants. Ögödei also shaped
the central administration of the empire, employing professional administrators from the conquered regions, regulating revenue collection and
Figure 2. Main Descendants of Chinggis Khan
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 77
78 CHINGGIS KHAN
military recruitment, and differentiating between civil and military
functions.The Mongol ideology of world conquest was further elaborated and openly proclaimed under Ögödei, contributing to a new wave
of expansion.The Islamic world, however, did not rank high in Ögödei’s
plan of conquest, as his sights were set first on China and Europe.
In 1234 the Mongols annihilated Chinggis Khan’s bitter enemy, the
Jin dynasty, and in 1237–41 they wrought havoc in Europe, devastating
southern Russia and Ukraine and reaching up to Germany before
retreating back into Hungary. During all this time, a small Mongol force
under the general Chormaqan operated in Iran, pursuing Jalal al-Din
Khwarazm Shah, who was finally killed by locals in 1231 near Maragha
in Azerbaijan. Thereafter, this same force continued to raid Iraq and
al-Jazira (northern Mesopotamia) and subdued Georgia and Armenia.
Following Ögödei’s death, this contingent, now under the command of
Baiju, advanced into Anatolia, defeating in 1243 the Seljuqs of Rum
(who remained Mongol vassals till their extinction in 1307).This was
achieved during the interregnum, which preceded the rise of Ögödei’s
eldest son Güyüg (r.1246–1248) to the imperial throne, a period in
which the Mongols were ruled by Ögödei’s widow Töregena, and
during which most expansion was halted. It was only in the 1250s, after
the rise of a new Qa’an, Möngke, descendant of Ögödei’s brother,
Chinggis Khan’s younger son, Tolui, that the Mongols advanced substantially into the Muslim world again.
Möngke rose to power after a bloody coup d’état in which the Toluids
replaced the Ögödeids as the empire’s rulers. His accession was followed
by massive purges of the Ögödeid and Chaghadaid branches and their supporters, as well as by administrative reforms that furthered centralization.Through efficient use of censuses, Möngke was able to mobilize the
resources of his vast realm and use it for further expansion.As leaders of
the new campaigns he appointed his brothers: Qubilai was sent to China
and Hülegü to the west, toward the Muslim world. Hülegü left Mongolia
in 1253 and started his easy pace westwards, heading a multiethnic army
whose composition, logistics and specialists reflected the height of
Mongol ability to utilize people, knowledge, and goods for their aims.
Hülegü’s first destination was the home of the Assassins, a Shi‘ite Isma’ili
sect based in Alamut castle in the mountains of northern Iran and famed
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 79
for their use of political murder for eliminating their rivals.When they
threatened to assassinate the Qa’an, the Mongols assaulted. In 1256, after
a series of long sieges, Hülegü defeated the Assassins, thereby achieving
what many former Muslim rulers had tried in vain. His victory was celebrated by Muslim historians writing of the Mongols as a major contribution to Islam. Without meeting much opposition in Iran, Hülegü
continued toward his next target, the Abbasid Caliph. In early 1258
Hülegü’s forces stormed Baghdad and killed the last Caliph,who was supposedly wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by the hooves of their
horses.The bloody end to the Abbasid Caliphate, which had held sway for
five hundred years and remained the main symbol of unity in the Muslim
world, has been depicted ever since as the Mongols’ greatest offence
against Islam, although many Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites, took part
in Hülegü’s conquest.Baghdad was also singled out for looting,arson,and
destruction. This was due to the Caliph’s haughty attitude toward the
Mongols as well as his status as a universal ruler,and therefore competitor
of the Mongol Qa’an.The fate of Baghdad was also due to the initiative of
the many Christians (mainly Armenians and Georgians) who participated
in the conquest of the Muslim sanctuary. By 1258, however, the devastation of Baghdad was the exception rather than the rule, for by Möngke’s
time Mongol campaigns were intentionally less destructive.
After Baghdad Hülegü turned to Syria, taking Aleppo and Damascus
before his army was halted – for the first, but certainly not the last time
– by the rising Mamluks (slave soldiers) of Egypt in the famous battle of
c
Ayn Jalut (modern Ein Harod in northern Israel) in 1260. It was perhaps not quite so impressive a feat as it may seem, for Hülegü had left
with most of his troops before the battle to go to Azerbayjan and only a
small part of his forces had remained to fight in Syria. Still, the battle
justly earned a reputation as a turning point in the Mongol advance into
the Muslim world, for logistical, political and military circumstances
were such that the Mongols never managed to get beyond northern
Iraq, except for a few months in 1300 in which they ruled Syria and
Palestine.
Hülegü’s departure for Azerbayjan was due to Möngke’s demise in
1259 and its possible political implication on Hülegü’s position. After
Möngke’s death, a fierce succession struggle ensued between his two
80 CHINGGIS KHAN
other brothers, Qubilai and Arigh Böqe.Their struggle greatly intensified the dissolution of the Mongol empire.The very size of the empire,
significantly increased under Hülegü and Qubilai,encouraged these divisions, as did the Chinggisid princes’ growing identification with their
newly conquered regions. In contrast to the situation during the time of
Chinggis Khan, these were now mostly sedentary territories which did
not share the nomadic steppe tradition. Moreover, the Mongol expansion on all fronts had now come close to the ecological borders of the
steppe, a fact which made later expansion much more difficult.
At the end of the struggle, Möngke’s successor, his brother Qubilai,
reaffirmed his position as Great Khan in 1264, and the empire was, for
all practical purposes, divided into four independent khanates. The
Khanate of the Great Khan, later known asYuan dynasty (1271–1368),
was headed by Qubilai (r. 1260–1294) who moved the imperial capital
from Qara Qorum to Khanbaliq or Dadu, modern Beijing. He ruled
over northern and southern China (conquered in 1276–9), Manchuria,
Mongolia, parts of eastern Turkestan, and Tibet. Hülegü and his heirs,
known as Ilkhans (“the submissive khans,” i.e. those who obey the Great
Map 4. The Four Mongol Khanates ca. 1290
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 81
Khan in China) ruled in the newly conquered regions in the Middle East
– Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Anatolia, and Iraq – territories
which Qubilai assigned to Hülegü in return for the latter’s support of
Qubilai’s cause against their brother Arigh Böqe. The Chaghadaid
Khanate, descendants of Chinggis Khan’s second son, held power in
Central Asia, from Uighuria to the Oxus, i.e. from eastern Xinjiang to
the western border of Uzbekistan. The Golden Horde, the khanate
headed by the descendants of Chinggis Khan’s eldest son Jochi, governed the Russian principalities, Eastern Europe to Hungary,
Khwarazm, the Qipchaq steppe, and Siberia eastward to the Irtish river
(see map 4).The division of the four khanates did not match the division
of Chinggis’s land before his death. The Ögödeids, descendants of
Chinggis’s successor, were deprived of any khanate, and despite the
heroic attempt of Ögödei’s grandson, Qaidu (r. 1271–1301), to
reestablish an Ögödeid state in Central Asia, this political unit was swallowed up by the Chaghadaid realm after his death.The Toluids held two
khanates:that of the Great Khan and the Ilkhanate established by Hülegü
and confirmed by Qubilai – not by Chinggis. These anomalies often
caused tensions and confrontations among the four khanates, but
despite the many – and often bloody – disputes among them, the
khanates were well aware of their common kinship and history.
Mongol dominion over Muslim lands began as infidel rule, but less
than a hundred years afterTemüjin had been proclaimed Chinggis Khan,
his descendants began to embrace Islam. In 1295, with the rise of the
Ilkhan Ghazan (1295–1304), Islam became the state religion in Mongol
Iran, and the Ilkhans began to compete for the leadership of the Muslim
world. Around 1313, under the Golden Horde Khan Özbeg, Islam
became the state religion of the Golden Horde, thereby broadening the
abode of Islam and creating a strict boundary between the Muslim elite
of Turks and Mongols and their mostly Christian subjects. The
Chaghadaids in Transoxania embraced Islam in the 1330s, and it took a
few more decades for the Muslim religion to find its way into the eastern part of the Chaghadaid Khanate, known as Moghulistan. In China
and Mongolia, however, the Mongols adopted Tibetan Buddhism.
The golden age of the khanates was the latter half of the thirteenth
century and the beginning of the fourteenth.Toward the mid fourteenth
82 CHINGGIS KHAN
century, and certainly by the second half, they all began to encounter
political problems.This led to the end of two of the four khanates and to
important changes in the surviving two.The Ilkhanids were the first to
fall, in 1335, though Mongol dynasties continued to rule in parts of the
Ilkhanid realm into the late fourteenth century. In the 1380s, most of the
original Ilkhanid realm became part of a new Turco-Mongolian empire,
that of Tamerlane (see below).The Yuan dynasty in China followed the
Ilkhanate in 1368, when it was overthrown by Chinese rebels who eventually established the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Many Mongols, however, fled to Mongolia, where they retained their independence.
Around the mid-fourteenth century the Chaghadaid Khanate was
divided into two parts:the western,Transoxania,and the eastern,known
as Moghulistan (“land of the Mongols”, encompassing modern north
Kirgizstan, south Kazakhstan, and Xinjiang). Both parts witnessed a rise
in the power of the emirs, military commanders, at the expense of the
khans, a phenomenon which contributed to the fall of both the Ilkhanate
and the Yuan. In the east, the khans of Moghulistan managed to reestablish their authority and control the emirs by the end of the fourteenth
century, and they held power until the mid to late seventeenth century,
when they were gradually replaced by Sufi sheikhs. Soon afterwards the
region was absorbed into the emerging Qing dynasty (1644–1911) from
China.
In the western part of the Chaghadaid Khanate, the actual power
remained with the emirs, mainly due to the rise of Tamerlane
(r.1370–1405),aTurco-Mongol Muslim emir who soon emerged as the
de facto leader of Transoxania, and aspired to revive the Mongol
empire. Not being a descendant of Chinggis Khan,Tamerlane (Persian:
Timur-i lang,Temür the Lame) could not assume the title khan. He was
known as emir, military commander, and, after marrying several
Chinggisid princesses, also as küregen (Mongolian: son-in-law).Through
most of his rule he set up Chinggisid khans as puppet rulers and also
assembled a host of Mongol princes of the different branches in his
court, portraying himself as their patron.
While he also used Islam as a major element of legitimation,
Tamerlane consciously tried to imitate Chinggis Khan: he plundered
both Russia and India and died on his way to conquer China. Part of his
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 83
imitation was the practice of deliberate destruction, and the towers of
skulls he left behind him won a worldwide fame, surpassing even
Chinggis’s reputation for devastation. Moreover, like Chinggis,
Tamerlane succeeded in consolidating his personal charisma. In Central
Asia he became a source of prestige, myth and legitimation second only
to Chinggis Khan himself (see chapter five). Tamerlane’s political and
institutional achievements, however, were much less impressive than
Chinggis’s, and his empire began to shrink and disintegrate soon after
his death.Tamerlane’s descendants ruled in Transoxania and Khurasan
throughout the fifteenth century.Their political weakness compensated
for by the artistic and architectural flowering in their realm, their reign
was known as the Timurid renaissance.This period also witnessed the
rise of the Eastern Turkic literary language called Chaghatay, after the
turkicized form of the name of Chinggis Khan’s second son, Chaghaday,
as a major literary language.This is the only case in which a Mongolian
name became attached to an element of high culture. Many of the
modern Central Asian tongues (Uzbek, Kazakh, Uighur) developed
from the Chaghatay language.
The Timurids also established matrimonial relations with the
Chinggisids in Moghulistan.They were finally driven out of Transoxania
in the early sixteenth century by the Uzbeks, a Chinggisid-led people
originating in the Golden Horde (about which see below). OneTimurid
prince, Babur, descendant of Tamerlane by his father and of Chinggis
Khan by his Moghul mother, escaped to Afghanistan. In 1526 he conquered Delhi and founded the Moghul (or Mughal) dynasty which ruled
in India until 1858.This name for Babur and his heirs derives from the
fact that in post-thirteenth-century India any invader from the south
was called Moghul; theTurkic form of the word Mongol.They, however,
called themselves al-Timuriya, the Timurids. (The legendary wealth of
the Moghuls in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries gave birth later to
the English ‘Mogul,’ a rich and successful businessman.)
The mid fourteenth century saw also the rise of the emirs in the
Golden Horde realm. Moreover, in 1380 those emirs suffered a major –
and first – defeat by a coalition of Russian princes in the battle of
Kulikovo, near Moscow. Soon afterwards the Khan Toqtamiish
(r.1381–1395), a Chinggisid prince who had begun his career as
84 CHINGGIS KHAN
Tamerlane’s protégé, managed to reestablish Chinggisid rule in the
Golden Horde and overcome the Russian challenge. His success, however, threatened his non-Chinggisid patron. In 1395 Tamerlane invaded
the Golden Horde, burned and looted its capital, Sarai, and advanced to
the gates of Moscow.The Golden Horde survived for another century,
but its disintegration soon became apparent as it found it more difficult
to maintain its superiority vis-à-vis the emerging power of Muscovy and
Lithuania on the one hand, and its internal cohesion on the other. Major
splits in the Golden Horde occurred during the fifteenth century: in
1438 it was divided into the khanate of Kazan and “the Great Horde.”A
further division in 1441 brought about the creation of the Khanates of
Astrakhan and Crimea in two of the most urban and sedentary parts of
the Golden Horde. At the same time various splinter groups from the
Golden Horde’s steppe regions, mainly the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and
Nogais, began to coalesce and assert their independence. The Great
Horde was destroyed by the Khanate of Crimea (itself under Ottoman
overlordship from 1475) in 1502, but part of its territory had already
been taken by the rising Moscow, the nucleus of Tsarist Russia. Kazan
and Astrakhan fell to Ivan the Terrible in 1552 and 1554, and in 1783
Catherine the Great annexed the Khanate of Crimea. Most of the
Golden Horde Muslim population, however, retained their separate
identity under Russian rule.
Simultaneously with the fall of the Great Horde, in the early sixteenth century, the Uzbeks, the main nomadic splinter group of the
Golden Horde, completed their migration southward, taking over
Transoxania from the Timurids in 1501.The Uzbeks revived Chinggisid
rule in the region, consciously holding up Chinggis as their model, and
they held power in Central Asia until the 1920s, although their
Chinggisid leadership collapsed in the mid to late eighteenth century.
The Kazakhs, another Chinggisid branch that separated from the
Uzbeks in the mid fifteenth century, took over some of the territory of
Moghulistan, and perpetuated Chinggisid rule in Central Asia up to the
nineteenth century.
In short,despite the decline of the Mongol khanates in the fourteenth
century, Chinggisid dynasties continued to be part of the Muslim world
until the modern era.
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 85
BROADENING MUSLIM HORIZONS:
CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACTS AND THEIR
SIGNIFICANCE
The Mongol successor states were only one facet of the Mongol legacy.
Another, and perhaps the most significant, consequence was the globalizing effect of the Mongol empire and the cross-cultural exchange both
inside and outside the empire that it inspired. Certainly the vast dimensions of the empire contributed to this, but the Mongols were not
simply a passive medium through which the sophisticated sedentary
subjects learnt from one another. Instead, through their imperial policies and active support of international trade, the Mongols actively promoted inter-cultural exchange which influenced the Muslim world as
well as other parts of Eurasia.
The Mongols’ active role originally derived from the fact that the formation of the empire, its continued expansion, and the establishment of
its administration required a huge mobilization of people throughout the
empire. This mobilization was the first step toward cross-cultural
exchange and integration.The mobilization can be explained primarily
by demographic considerations. During the time of Chinggis Khan, the
total population of Mongolia numbered approximately 700,000.
Therefore,human capital was of primary importance to the nomads,and
the political struggles that accompanied the formation of the Mongol
state concentrated on the control of people and herds rather than territorial gains.The demographic balance also meant that in order to continue to expand, the Mongols had to make use of the already conquered
(and submitted) subjects. The first and perhaps most wide-ranging
means for Mongol mobilization was therefore the army. Hence Chinggis
Khan appropriated defeated nomads and tribes, organized in new
decimal units,among Mongol princes and commanders and sent them to
fight across Eurasia: a process that continued on an even larger scale in
the campaigns of his heirs.
Mobilization was not limited to the military sphere. As soon as the
Mongols found themselves rulers of an empire with a significant sedentary sector, they realized they lacked not only numbers but also specialists.They therefore looked for experts and collected and redistributed
86 CHINGGIS KHAN
them across Eurasia, regarding human talent (from both inside and outside the empire) as a form of booty, to be shared among family members
like material goods.This process involved groups – such as the 100,000
artisans taken in 1221 from Transoxiana to Mongolia and China, and the
northern Chinese farmers sent to Merv and later transferred to
Azerbaijan – as well as (many) individuals, specializing in various fields.
These included military specialists like the two siege engineers
Isma’il and Jalal al-Din who were sent by the Ilkhan Abaqa to Qubilai,
and were instrumental in the Mongol conquest of southern China;
leading religious figures, such as the Daoist monk Chang Chun, summoned by Mongol khans;physicians,astronomers,interpreters,technicians, cooks and even athletes. Möngke once sent Hülegü his best
Mongolian wrestler requesting him to find a worthy local rival, thereby
instituting one of the very first international championship sporting
matches.
The collection of specialists was systematized already in the late
1230s by means of census, which classified people according to their
skills (such as military and artisan). Later on, the different khanates
competed for these specialists and exchanged them in order to better
control and exploit the economic and cultural resources of their sedentary possessions and to enhance their kingly reputation.
The mobilization process was often painful – the Samarqandi artisans
transferred to northern China probably mourned their fate, the ruin of
their homeland and the murder of their kin, rather then rejoiced at the
opportunity to exchange artistic techniques with their Chinese colleagues – but at the same time that the Mongols were mercilessly
destroying human and cultural resources, they were also creating conditions in which long-distance cultural exchange flourished.
The Mongol policy of ruling through foreign specialists also encouraged mobilization and exchange. Originating in Mongol numerical
inferiority and their fear of potential local resistance, this policy was
already practiced by Chinggis Khan (see chapter three). It was further
systematized and documented in Yuan China, where the Mongols
created a special category of semuren (people of various kinds), second
only to the Mongols and more privileged than their Chinese subjects,
for their foreign (non-Chinese and non-Mongol) subjects. Yet many
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 87
foreigners were also active in the other Mongol khanates.The Mongols
preferred foreigners who originated in the inter-regional nomadic
empires, i.e. who were not only skilled in the laws of the cities but also
had connections to the steppe (e.g. Khitans, Uighurs, Khwarazmians),
though other talented people were also welcome (the most famous
example being Marco Polo). In order to secure the loyalty of these foreigners, the Mongols aspired to give them “a taste of home,” and therefore brought foreign (mostly Muslim or Central Asian) food, medicine
and entertainment into Yuan China.While the situation in China is far
better documented than that in the other khanates, a certain presence of
Far Eastern food, medicine, knowledge and entertainment was attested
to in Mongol Iran and apparently also in the Chaghadaid Khanate and in
the Golden Horde.
Most of what was transmitted throughout the empire was not the
Mongols’ own culture but rather elements of the culture of their sedentary subjects. However, it was the Mongols who initiated the bulk of
these exchanges. Most of these bearers of culture were agents of the
empire (e.g. diplomats, merchants, administrators, artisans, soldiers or
hostages).The Mongols also served as a filter, determining which particular cultural goods would be diffused across Eurasia. They showed
great interest in fields that were compatible with their own norms,
notably with their shamanistic beliefs, such as astronomy, divination,
medicine (i.e. healing) and geomancy, and thus also promoted scientific
transfers. In short, the flow of people, ideas and goods across Asia was
determined to a large extent by what the Mongols liked, needed and
were interested in. Persian astronomers, for instance, arrived in Yuan
China not because they or their Chinese counterparts sought scientific
exchange, but because the Mongols wanted a second opinion on the
reading of Heaven’s portents (Allsen 2001: 211).
Trade was, obviously, another means of promoting cross-cultural
exchange, and the Mongols played an active role here too by promoting
long-distance commerce. The process of state formation among the
nomads in itself stimulated trade through an increased demand for precious metals, gems, and especially fine cloth.All of these were needed to
assert authority in a newly formed polity. Chinggis Khan was certainly
aware of the benefit of commerce (which indirectly led to the
88 CHINGGIS KHAN
Khwarazm campaign), and Muslim merchants were among his earliest
supporters, joining his side even before he completed the unification of
Mongolia. Moreover, after the early conquests, the Mongol elite, the
main beneficiaries of the booty brought in by the conquests, became
extremely wealthy.They recycled this wealth by investing in their commercial agents, the ortogh, who were mostly Muslims and Uighurs.The
ortogh was a trader (or trading company) who acted on behalf of, or who
was financed by the capital of, a Mongol (or other) notable in return for
a share of the profit.The profits were used for the lavish consumption
characteristic of the “nouveaux riches.” The establishment of Qara
Qorum also promoted trade since the resources of the Mongolian
homeland could hardly support a big city (by the standards of the
steppe).The Mongols were ready to pay generously for the privilege of
remaining in the steppe while at the same time enjoying the best of the
agricultural world. Many traders eagerly exploited these opportunities, benefiting from the safe roads and the access to the post stations.
Even after the dissolution of the empire into the four khanates, Mongol
governments continued to promote both local and international trade,
which provided taxes, markets, profits, and prestige.The khanates competed for commercial specialists, provided infrastructure for transcontinental travel, and were even actively involved in the manipulation of
bullion flow. Mongol capitals in Azerbaijan, the Volga region, Central
Asia and northern China became hubs of international markets. Other
cities,first in Mongolia and later mainly in northern China,became centers of artisanship and industry for the expanding empire. New cities,
centers of commercial exchange, materialized along the Silk Roads,
especially in the Volga region but also in Central Asia.
At the same time as land routes flourished during the Pax Mongolica,
the maritime routes also thrived.The Indian Ocean, for example, was a
central route for trade between China, India and Iran; and the Black
Sea and Mediterranean connected the Golden Horde with Mamluk
Egypt, Byzantium and Western Europe, and the Ilkhanate with the
Italian city states. Muslims from inside and outside the empire continued to play a leading role among the merchants, but Uighurs,
Chinese and Europeans were also amongst those who benefited from
the open world of the Chinggisids. While long-distance trade was
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 89
usually conducted in relays before the Mongol period (that is, traders
only traveled from station A to B and transferred their goods there to
another merchant who continued to station C, and so on), under
Mongol rule people often traveled the entire length of the Silk Routes –
the notable example again being Marco Polo.The trade routes encompassed regions vaster than the empire: India maintained close commercial ties with Iran, China and Central Asia (especially after the
Islamization of Transoxania) and the Italian city states held colonies in
the Ilkhanate and the Golden Horde and took an active part in the trade
to Central and East Asia.
What effect did these cross cultural contacts have on life in the
Muslim world? The wide-range mobilization and the expanding trade
led to the frequent and continuous movement of people, goods, ideas,
technologies, knowledge, plants, and even germs, throughout Eurasia,
thereby encouraging Eurasian integration. The best evidence of the
growth of knowledge about the world in the Muslim realm under
Mongol rule comes from Iran.The Ilkhanate had especially close relations with Yuan China.They were ruled by the same Chinggisid branch
and were closely connected politically and economically. Moreover,
both were heirs to ancient civilizations, and they shared their cultural
resources in fields as various as historiography, medicine, military technology, geography, cartography, astronomy, and painting. One of the
best examples of the broadening of Muslim horizons under the Mongols
was Rashid al-Din’s Jami’ al-tawarikh (“Collection of Chronicles”), the
first true world history to be written in the Muslim world or, for that
matter, anywhere else. Rashid al-Din (d.1318), a physician of Jewish
origin, who probably began to serve the Mongols in the early 1290s,
served as the co-vizier under the Ilkhans Ghazan (r. 1295–1304) and
Öljeitü (r. 1304–1316), and was one of the main cultural brokers active
in the Ilkhanid court. Ghazan ordered him to write a history of the
Mongols, and later, at Öljeitü’s insistence, this was extended to the history of all the nations in the known world. Indeed, The Collection of
Chronicles included more than a detailed history of the Mongols from the
pre-Chinggisid period to the rise of Chinggis Khan and the reigns of his
successors up to Temür Öljeitü, Qubilai’s successor (partially based on
Mongol sources accessible to Rashid al-Din through his friend Bolad, a
90 CHINGGIS KHAN
Mongol who had served as Qubilai’s emissary in Iran).The collection
also included sections dedicated to the history of China, India, the
Muslim world, the Jews, and the Franks, as well as detailed genealogical
and geographical appendices.The book was compiled with the help of
oral informants and written sources derived from the nations in question. It was put together by a committee of research assistants working
under Rashid al-Din, in a way quite similar to the manner in which official histories were compiled in China.The result was a quantum leap in
the knowledge of the world available in the Muslim Middle East, especially concerning China, Mongolia and East Asia at large.The book was
highly popular, and while there was hardly any continuation to Rashid
al-Din’s histories of the nations, the history of the Mongols, including
that of Chinggis Khan and his infidel (and Muslim) heirs, became an
integral part of general histories of the Muslim world (see chapter five).
Another field in which cross-cultural contacts had a lasting effect in
the Muslim world was the field of art, especially painting. Mongol rule
led to a combination of two pre-Mongol Muslim traditions: the
Byzantine-influenced style developed in Baghdad and the Seljuq or
Turco-Iranian prevalent in Iran, both enriched by the fruits of the
encounter with East Asian art. Chinese influence on Persian painting in
the Mongol period is obvious, especially in landscape painting, which
reflected new concepts of space developed byYuan painters, but also in
motifs, symbols and themes. The Ilkhanid period (just like the Yuan
period in China) was a time of great development and activity in painting, especially in the field of illuminated manuscripts, characterized by
larger pictures (partly due to the improved paper arriving from China)
and more paintings in a manuscript.The new forms and methods created in Iran were disseminated throughout the Islamic world and continued into the Timurid period, to become the standard of quality
painting from the Ottoman empire to Central Asia and Moghul India.
Not all the imported knowledge was warmly received. After all, it
was connected to the alien rulers and often came too soon and too fast.
A notable example was the failure of the Ilkhans to institute the use of
paper money in Iran. A well-established means of exchange in China,
paper money was adopted in Iran in the 1290s under the guidance of
Qubilai’s representative, Bolad, and was intended to solve the monetary
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 91
problems of the Ilkhanid court: the court claimed a monopoly on precious metals and tried to force its subjects to exchange their coins with
the new paper currency. Despite the draconian measures taken to
enforce the new monetary system, it was a complete failure. People
refused to give up coins and the attempt to enforce the use of the paper
money led to a halt in trade, which forced the Ilkhan Geikhatu to end the
experiment after a mere two months. Paper money was not reintroduced in the Muslim Middle East until the modern period. However,
the repercussions of this experiment went beyond currency, for it was
in connection with paper money that printing was first introduced into
the Middle East. By rejecting the paper money, the Muslims surrendered the use of printing, and this was one of the reasons why printing
remained absent from the Muslim Middle East until the late eighteenth
century, when it was adopted under European influence. Certainly, not
all,or even most,of what was displayed in Iran due to the broad horizons
of the Mongols was adopted, but the assimilation of certain crops, food
and customs is apparent.
The period also saw the expansion of Muslim arts (especially textile and
performing arts), cuisine, science (such as medicine, astronomy, mathematics) and military technology into China.We have much less information about the situation in the Chaghadaid Khanate or the Golden Horde,
but there is enough evidence to attest to the broadening of connections and
exchange in their realms too, and the resulting cultural influence.
Moreover, the Mongol “globalization” also had an impact on Muslim
life beyond the frontiers of the Mongol Empire.Apart from the general
expansion of Islam discussed below, two prime examples are the travels
of Ibn Battuta and theYemeni dictionary known as the Hexaglot (i.e. “six
languages”). Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/9) was born in Tangier, Morocco,
far from Mongol rule. In 1324 he left his hometown to perform the
pilgrimage to Mecca, in what turned out to be the beginning of some
30 years of travel which led him around most of the then-known world,
including, according to his claims, the entire Middle East, the Qipchaq
steppe, Afghanistan, Central Asia, India, China, South-East Asia, Africa
and southern Europe, a greater distance than Marco Polo or any other
traveler of the period covered.During his travels,he visited all of the four
Mongol khanates.Such an unprecedented and lengthy journey was made
92 CHINGGIS KHAN
possible mainly due to the “global” world created by the Chinggisids.The
travelogue that Ibn Battuta prepared after his return home acquired
immediate popularity. It included brief accounts of the places he had visited and his adventures there, supplemented by notes which reflected his
major fields of interest: saintly men and their tombs, rulers, women and
food.The information Ibn Battuta provided is not always reliable – he
often depended on previous sources without acknowledging them, and
at times confused historical and chronological details – yet some of his
descriptions (of East Africa, southern India, the Maldives, Mali, the
Chaghadaid Khanate) are particularly invaluable because there are few
other sources for these areas from this time. He is also a major source for
understanding the Islamic scene in the Mongol khanates in the early fourteenth century. More important for our purposes here, Ibn Battuta’s
Rihla (“Journey”) greatly broadened North African (and other Muslim
regions’) knowledge of the world. Indeed, in North Africa, his descriptions remained the basis for information on the Mongols, China, and
India for centuries.
Another example of the broadening of Muslim horizons in the
Mongol period is the King’s Dictionary, prepared inYemen of the 1360s by
one of the rulers of the Rasulid dynasty (1228–1454).The Sunni Rasulids
were one of a number of Turkic dynasties that came to power during the
decline of the Seljuqs. Named after Muhammad b. Harun who had
served as a messenger (rasul) in the service of the Abbasids, they arrived
in Yemen with their overlords, the Ayyubids, in the late twelfth century
and emerged as an independent kingdom after the Ayyubids’ departure
of the region in the 1220s.The dynasty made full use of the opportunities
opened by Mongol rule, and Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta both attest to
the thriving commerce in Aden, the Rasulid capital, in the thirteenth to
fourteenth centuries.The dictionary was compiled by the king al-Malik
al-Afdal ‘Abbas b.‘Ali (r.1363–1377),famous as a man of learning rather
than as a warrior or statesman. It includes vocabularies in no less than six
languages: Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Mongol, Greek and Armenian, the
major political, commercial and cultural languages of the eastern
Mediterranean and western Asia during the Mongol era. Beginning with
the name of God (Allah, translated as Tengri in Mongolian and Turkic),
the dictionary consists of lists of vocabulary in various fields (such as
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 93
heaven and earth, human body, kinship terms, time and seasons, geography, textile, plants, food and drink, animals; colors, weapon, and numbers.The Hexaglot was composed after Ilkhanid rule in Iran had already
come to its end,yet it was done under cultural influences stemming from
the Chinggisid world, being part of a tradition of multi-lingual dictionaries encouraged by the Mongols.The Mongols used several languages
and scripts in the management of their empire, and this feature acted as a
major catalyst in the growth of language study throughout Eurasia.They
generously rewarded those with linguistic skills, and mastery of both
Mongolian (in its spoken or written forms) and foreign languages often
conferred status and power.The Mongols organized schools for language
training, encouraged translation and sponsored or inspired the compilation of multi-lingual vocabularies.Although the Hexaglot is unique in the
number and combination of languages registered, it is quite representative of its age, for we find multi-lingual lists of terms appearing in Iran,
China, Armenia, Korea, North India, Egypt, and Crimea. The major
beneficiary of this linguistic cosmopolitanism was Persian, which was
studied simultaneously in China, Crimea and Italy in the thirteenth to
fourteenth centuries. This was a most appropriate choice since it was
already the language of learning in a wide area stretching from Central
Asia to Anatolia.
The existence of travel literature and dictionaries was not just the
result of cross-cultural contacts, it also facilitated further contacts. In
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this led to a growing degree of
Eurasian integration.The closer ties were loosened somewhat after the
fall of the Mongol khanates in Iran and (especially) in China,not the least
due to the effects of the Black Death, the fast spread of which was also
due to this integration. But in at least some fields (e.g., art, historiography, cuisine) the integration of Eurasia had a lasting effect on postMongol Muslim culture.
The Expansion of Islam
Juwayni (d. 1283), writing before the Islamization of any of the Mongol
states, mentions that there had been a notable expansion of the realm of
Islam in the wake of the Mongol conquests. He attributes this to the
94 CHINGGIS KHAN
flourishing trade and contacts encouraged by the Mongols as well as to
their tolerant attitude toward religions in general (Juwayni, 1997:
13–19).The first expansion of Islam at the time was eastward.Though it
never became the dominant religion in either Mongolia or China, three
of the four Mongol khanates embraced Islam, thereby accelerating its
diffusion in eastern Central Asia, China, and the East European steppes.
Indirectly the Mongols also contributed to the Islamization of more distant regions such as India, South-East Asia, and even Africa, mainly by
accelerating Muslim presence there.
The Islamization of the three Mongol khanates (the Ilkhanate in the
late thirteenth century, and the Golden Horde and the Chaghadaid
Khanate in the early to mid fourteenth century) was a long and complex
process, stemming mainly from the close and continuous contact
between the Mongols and their Muslim subjects, most notably the
Turkish officers and soldiers, who were the bulk of the Mongol armies.
Conversion stories give the impression that Mongol islamization began
with a royal conversion and then spread from the top down. However,
at least in the cases of the Ilkhanate and the Chaghadaids, the process
seems to have started at the bottom, among the rank and file of the army
– mainly due to acculturation, intermarriage and the activity of charismatic preachers – and then moved upward.While the role of spirituality or inner conviction in conversion dynamics cannot be denied,
obviously political motives also played a part, at least in the rulers’ conversion. In the Ilkhanate, for instance, the conversion of the Ilkhan
Ghazan (1295–1304) took place during his struggle to win the crown
and secured him the alliance of a leading commander – a Muslim
Mongol – as well as Muslim segments of the army. Moreover, the annihilation of the Caliphate meant that there was no proclaimed leader for
the Muslim world (as the Pope was for much of the Christian world).
Thus,when the Mongols embraced Islam,they could easily join the competition for Muslim leadership. Furthermore, as Muslims, the Mongols
enjoyed a legitimacy that no infidel rulers could hope for in the eyes of
their Muslim subjects, and this might have been another incentive for
their conversion, at least in the Ilkhanate (or, at any rate, a favorable
by-product). In the Golden Horde, by contrast, the Mongols’ adoption
of Islam emphasized the distinction between them and their Christian
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 95
Russian subjects, drawing them instead closer to theTurks of the region.
Another factor which facilitated conversion was Sufi activity.The Sufis,
with their stress on tolerance toward other religious traditions and their
skill in “magic” (perhaps not dissimilar to the shaman’s role) were portrayed as the agents behind the royal conversions, and they have retained
their central position as agents of Islamization ever since. Royal conversions, and the campaigns against infidels which usually followed them
(such as the intermittent persecution of Buddhism in Iran during
Ghazan’s reign), further consolidated the position of Islam in the
Mongol khanates. While in the Ilkhanate most of the population was
already Muslim, the conversion of the Chaghadaid Khans and of the
Golden Horde caused Islam to be carried further into the steppes of
Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. The mid-fourteenth-century
Islamization of the Mongols thus resulted in the emergence of a new
Turco-Mongolian elite in the region that lies between the Tian Shan
mountains (in East Central Asia, in Kyrgyzstan and China) and the
Volga.This elite was Muslim, spoke Turkish and honored the traditions
of the Mongol empire. It is difficult to recall another era in which so
vast a territory has shared so much in terms of language, religion and
culture.
As mentioned above,the Mongol state in China never embraced Islam,
but the Mongol period none the less led to a considerable increase in the
Muslim presence in China and contributed to its proliferation all over the
country, establishing long-lasting Muslim communities in north, northwest, and southwest China.The Muslims arrived in China through two
main ways: as conscripts or as free agents.The conscripts were mainly the
thousands of artisans whom the Mongols deported to the east from
Chinggis’s time onward. Many of them were Central Asians, primarily
from Transoxania, who had formerly been sent to Qara Qorum but were
moved to northern China when Qubilai transferred the Mongol capital
from Qara Qorum to Shangdu and later to Khanbaliq (Beijing). Among
those who arrived voluntarily, traders formed an important group.
Originally attracted by the commercial opportunities in the Mongol
empire, many of them, including those who came from Iraq and Syria,
chose to settle in China on a permanent basis, thereby establishing new
communities along the trade routes.The regular contact between China
96 CHINGGIS KHAN
and the Muslim world during the period first of the United Empire and
thereafter of theYuan dynasty and the Ilkhanate assured a constant flow of
Muslim experts into China, some of them remaining there. Mongol policies of ruling through strangers also meant that many Muslims could find
lucrative offices inYuan administration, where they came to play a leading
role, especially in the financial administration under Qubilai. Most
famous among them was Ahmad (d. 1282), a Central Asian who became
Qubilai’s major financial adviser and his left prime minister (the second
highest post inYuan administration),before being assassinated by his envious Chinese opponents.Another arena in which Muslims were especially
active was the Yuan local administration. Here the most prominent
example is Sayyid Ajall (1210–1279), a descendant of a notable Bukharan
family who had already served the Mongols during Ögödei’s reign. In
1271 Sayyid Ajall was appointed as Qubilai’s governor inYunnan,in southwest China, a tribal frontier area which had hitherto formed an independent kingdom known as Dali. Sayyid Ajall and his descendants, who
succeeded him, managed to draw this area into the Chinese cultural
sphere,where it has remained ever since,mainly by promoting Confucian
learning. At the same time, however, they also promoted Islam. Sayyid
Ajall attracted many Muslims to the southwest and converted some of its
original population.The significant contemporary Chinese-Muslim community in Yunnan traces its origin to him, and Zheng He, the famous
Muslim admiral who led the Chinese navy in its unprecedented voyages in
the fifteenth century, is also considered to be his descendant.
Conversion was another means through which Muslim presence in
China increased. Rashid al-Din recounts that Qubilai’s grandson, who
bore the Buddhist name Ananda and who governed the former Tangut
country, embraced Islam and managed to convert most of the 150,000
Mongol troops under his command.The Gansu-Ninxia region in northwest China where Ananda was stationed has remained a center of
Chinese Islam to this day. In general, one can note that before the Yuan
dynasty, Muslims in China were mainly concentrated in the ports on the
south-east coast, having arrived by the maritime trade routes, whereas
from theYuan period onward there were important Muslim communities inland as well, especially in the north, northwest and southwest,
where many of them have endured until the present.
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 97
Less directly, the Mongol period also led to the further expansion of
Islam into India. Chinggis Khan’s invasion of Central Asia caused many
Central Asian Muslims to flee southward, into the subcontinent. Many
of the refugees were well-educated.The most famous among them is the
historian Juzjani, who later wrote a detailed description of the Mongols
from his refuge in Delhi, unsurprisingly depicting them in a hostile vein.
Juzjani and the many other scholars who followed the same route contributed significantly to the Muslim culture of the newly-established
Delhi Sultanate.
Later immigrants from the Chaghadaid and Ilkhanid realms also
increased the Muslim presence in India.When worsted in some conflict
with their confreres, Mongols and their subjects often sought asylum in
Delhi, and already in the late thirteenth century an entire quarter of the
capital was called Chinggisi after them. If not already Muslims, they converted after their arrival, to be known as Neo-Muslims. Often military
leaders, they became a significant element in the political life of the sultanate. Waves of immigrants continued to arrive in Delhi in the fourteenth century, often in conjunction with the fate of Islam in the
Chaghadaid realm: Ibn Battuta reports that after the deposition of
Tarmashirin (Chaghadaid Muslim khan 1331–1334), 40,000 (i.e. a large
number) of his Muslim supporters, including commanders of tümens and
hundreds, migrated to Delhi.Another group of Khurasani emirs arrived
in 1342–3,perhaps after the deposition of the Muslim Halil Sultan.These
Mongol soldiers contributed to the expansion of the Delhi Sultanate into
south India.The expansion of the maritime trade caused by the commercial policies of the Mongols also led to the establishment of large Muslim
communities in south Indian ports, mainly Gujarat. Some of these communities later played an important role in the conversion of additional
regions.
More indirectly still, the Mongols contributed to the spread of Islam
into other regions, mainly South East Asia and Africa. It began to thrive
there, at least in the East African case, long before the Mongol period (as
was the case in China and India),but since the main agents of Islamization
were traders, the flourishing commerce in the Mongol empire gave the
process a considerable boost.Thus Marco Polo observed that the kingdom of Perlak in northern Sumatra “is so much frequented by the Saracen
98 CHINGGIS KHAN
(i.e. Muslim) merchants that they have converted the natives to the law
of Muhammad,” and by the end of the thirteenth century we have further
evidence of the beginning of Islamization in Malay and Java. Some of the
agents of conversion were Muslims from China and India (Gujarat),
often people who came eastward or southward due to Mongol
upheavals. In a similar manner, the growing Muslim commercial activity
resulted in the further spreading of Islam into Africa, mainly in Mali,
Zanzibar and Zimbabwe, to name but a few places.
The Islamization of these regions was far from complete in the thirteenth century. Marco Polo mentions that only the town people converted in Perlak: the hill dwellers were still living like beasts.
Accordingly, Ibn Battuta was rather frustrated in his attempts to enforce
Muslim law (especially women’s modest attire) in the Maldive islands or
in Mali in Africa. Gradually, however, the traders, often complemented
by Sufis, on the one hand, and economic and political benefits that the
elite derived from being part of a universal Muslim community on the
other, led to the further consolidation of Islam in these regions, often
with lasting results. Perhaps the best proof for the expansion and vitality of the Muslim world in the Mongol period is that Ibn Battuta was able
to travel so widely throughout Asia and Africa and still feel at home
wherever he went (except for China and Sardinia); he could even make
a living as a Muslim judge during most of his travels.
Geopolitical and Ethnic Changes
Despite the tendency of Muslim and Russian thinkers (as well as some
Chinese nationalists in the early twentieth century) to ascribe everything that went wrong with their civilizations to the Mongols’influence,
the Mongols did not make drastic changes in the Eurasian geopolitical
balance.The initial invasions were traumatic enough, but the destruction was limited in both its extent and duration.As soon as the Mongols
understood that they could get more from their lands by taxing them
instead of ravaging them – and this was apparent already during the
reign of Chinggis’s grandson, Möngke (1251–1259) – they consciously
attempted to limit the damage.This does not mean that there were no
exceptions, and the bloody conquest of Baghdad in 1258 is by far the
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 99
most famous example. Furthermore, regions that became buffer areas
between the Mongols and their enemies (such as Iraq, especially
al-Jazira) or later between the rival Mongol khanates (Khurasan and
Uighuria) certainly suffered from multiple raids throughout the thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries, and regions which the nomads
turned into full pasture lands (e.g., Moghulistan) were badly harmed
even in the long run.Yet together with the calculated or accidental devastation, there were also positive attempts by the Mongol khans to
restore the productivity of their lands, attempts that were facilitated by
the multiple possibilities of regional and international trade.World historians therefore agree that in general the Muslim Middle East and
China retained their status as the world’s leading productive regions,
both during and after the Mongol conquests (Abu Lukhod 1989, 352ff;
Frank 1998, 75–84, 108–116).
Mongol rule was, however, geopolitically important in two ways.
First, it led to a shifting of the political center in most regions included
in the empire, sometimes with lasting results. Second, the administrative divisions that turned into four separate Mongol khanates after 1260
were influential in shaping later political boundaries and ethnic identities. Both were certainly felt in the Muslim world.
Mongol rule led to a changing of the capital of each of the established
khanates, mostly in the general direction of north-east.This might have
originally reflected the location of Qara Qorum, the Mongol capital on
the Orkhon river, or the nomads’ need to reside closer to the steppe. For
example, this meant that the capital of the eastern Islamic world shifted
from Baghdad to Tabriz in Iran’s Azerbaijan (see map 3).Tabriz remained
Iran’s capital till the late sixteenth century,and theTimurids,the Qara and
Aq Qoyunlu, and the Safawids competed for control over it, due more to
its prestige than to its strategic or economic value.Even after the Safawids
established their capital in Isfahan, Tabriz remained a privileged city,
being, for instance, the residence of the Iranian heir apparent until the
early twentieth century.The ephemeral capitals of Mongol Central Asia
did not have an enduring legacy, but in the other Mongol khanates this
process had more lasting effects, leading to the rise of Beijing in China
and to the importance of Moscow – not a seat of a Mongol court but the
leader of the Mongols’ subject principalities – in Russia.
100 CHINGGIS KHAN
Mongol rule in Iran also contributed to the emergence of that country as a distinct political and ethnic entity within the Muslim world.The
use of the name Iran to denominate a political entity, a Sasanian concept
not used during early Muslim rule in Iran, was revived under the
Mongols.This fulfilled their wish to find an adequate denomination of
their ulus which would not stress their abnormal position vis-à-vis the
other Mongol khanates.Under Ilkhanid rule,the Persian language gained
supremacy over Arabic as a vehicle for writing history in the eastern
Muslim world and soon became the written lingua franca of the TurcoMongolic world.The pre-Islamic Persian past, as recounted in the Book of
Kings, enjoyed a renewed interest and, in its illuminated versions prepared for the Ilkhans, the Persian kings and heroes were dressed in
Mongol attire, thereby stressing Mongol identification with Iran’s preIslamic past.The orientation of the Ilkhanate toward China revived the
close connections between Iran and the East, more apparent in the
Sasanid period than in the Abbasid one. Even the Ilkhanate’s borders
were closer to those of the Sasanid empire (and of modern Iran). In
ethnic terms, the Mongol conquests brought a wave of Central Asian
nomads into Iran.These mostly Turkic elements remained in the region
after the dissolution of the Ilkhanate and have become a consistent element of Iran’s multi-ethnic population and society. Moreover, until the
end of the nineteenth century these Turkic nomads and post-nomads,
which eventually included many of the Mongols who remained in Iran,
held much of the political and military power in Iran (Fragner 1997).
As for the rest of the Middle East, the Mongol annihilation of the
Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, turned Iraq – once the center of the
Islamic world – into the provincial backwater it remained in later centuries. Under the Mamluks, whose state was the only Muslim entity that
successfully defied the Mongols, Egypt increased its position as an alternative, leading center of the Muslim world, and the establishment and
consolidation of the Mamluk regime owed much to its successful struggle against the Ilkhanate. Even the beylik (principality) of Uthman
(known in Turkish as Osman), later to become the Ottoman Empire,
rose inside the Ilkhanid sphere of influence.A recent controversial article goes so far as to suggest that the Ottomans originated from Golden
Horde refugees (Heywood 2000). In general, the Mongol period
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 101
completed the process of Turco-Mongol (as opposed to Arab or
Persian) dominance of the ruling elites of the Middle East, a process
which had begun as early as the ninth century.
The legacy of the other Muslim khanates, the Chaghadaid state and
the Golden Horde, is more complex. The Golden Horde is often
described as the nucleus of Muscovy and Russia as a Eurasian empire,
which, however, rose not from the Golden Horde but out of its debris.
The Chaghadaid Khanate has no modern counterpart, although, as
mentioned above, it did give birth to the empire of Tamerlane and
indirectly to the Moghul dynasty in India.Yet in terms of ethnic changes,
the impact of the Mongol period was most apparent in Central Asia, and
many of the Muslim people in the modern realms of the Chaghadaids
and the Golden Horde emerged as a result of the ethnic changes induced
by the Mongols.
Mongol policies, especially the devastation that accompanied initial
conquests, the mobilization of the army, the formation of new administrative divisions under the Mongol empire, the Mongol policy of ruling
through foreigners, and, finally, imperial disintegration, which forced
many new collectivities to refashion their identities, were crucial for the
ethnic changes. These circumstances all led to the dispersion of many
long-established steppe peoples (such as the Tanguts, the Uighurs, the
Qipchaqs, and the Khitans) and to the emergence of new collectivities,
which formed the basis for many of the modern Central Asian peoples
(e.g., the Uzbeks and Kazakhs), as well as “pockets” of Muslims in contemporary Russia (such as the Tatars and Nogais). From the fourteenth
century onward, most of the pre-Mongol steppe people were either
assimilated into the sedentary civilizations surrounding them, mainly in
China or Iran, or reduced to clan or tribal units in the new collectives
established by the Mongols.The majority of these new ethnic formations
coalesced after the collapse of the Mongol empire around the leadership
of a certain Chinggisid prince (e.g. Özbeg, Nogay, Chaghadai and also –
in the non-Chinggisid realm – ‘Uthman).The name of the collective was
not always identical to the name of its actual leader – in the case of the
Uzbeks, the name only appeared several decades after the death of the
Khan Özbeg, and became important only more than a hundred years
after his death – but his supporters saw themselves as his nökers and
102 CHINGGIS KHAN
named themselves after him. Most of these new groupings emerged in
the Golden Horde realm during or after its dissolution, when the masses
of Turco-Mongol people had already become Muslim.Thus Islam was an
important component in the identity of these new collectivities. For
instance, a major part of the appeal of Özbeg as an ancestor was the fact
that he introduced Islam as the state religion of the Golden Horde.The
degree of nomadism was also an important factor in the identity of these
people, differentiating, for example, between the more settled Uzbeks
and the nomadic Kazakhs. Most of the former steppe people, as well as
some of the original Mongol tribes, remained as tribal or clan units
within the new groupings.Thus we find Khitan, Qipchaq, Merkid, and
Naiman among the tribes composing most of the modern Central Asian
people.Yet, while there might have been some solidarity between the
Uzbek Khitai tribe and the Kazakh Khitai tribe, for example, their main
allegiance was to the new Chinggisid leadership of their post-Mongol
collective, either Uzbek or Kazakh. In this respect, Chinggis Khan was
second only to Stalin in reshaping the ethnic map of Central Asia.
THE LEGACY OF MONGOL STATECRAFT
Mongol institutional legacy varied in the various civilizations it
affected.A more profound effect was felt in the regions where Mongol
rule endured longer and where there was no strong indigenous tradition of a centralized state, namely in Central Asia and Russia.A certain
institutional legacy, however, can also be discerned in China and Iran,
and in the Muslim world the repercussions of Mongol influence reached
beyond the limits of the empire. It is also worthwhile to differentiate
between practical borrowing of Mongol institutions on the one hand,
and adopting Mongol political ideology on the other.
The basic component of Mongol statecraft was the Chingissid principle: the notion that only descendants of Chinggis Khan were eligible to
bear the title “khan,” which denotes the highest political office.Although
attempts to manipulate this principle began rather early (e.g., under
Tamerlane), in Central Asia it remained valid until the late eighteenth
century. The Chinggisid principle was relevant in other parts of the
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 103
Map 5. Asia in the Mid-17th Century: The Chinggisid Legacy (with Qing expansion in the 18th Century)
104 CHINGGIS KHAN
Muslim world as well, partly because the destruction of the Caliphate
left a void in Muslim concepts of legitimation. The Moghuls in India,
though emphasizing their Timurid genealogy, also made use of their
Chinggisid connections as a legitimating element. Even in the Ottoman
empire, where Chinggisid descent played no part in the rulers’ identity,
the Uzbeks and the CrimeanTatars enjoyed a special prestige due to their
Chinggisid genealogy, and the sultans adopted the title Khaqan (originally Turkic but widely used in the pre-Ottoman period by the Mongol
Great Khan). Even Muslim dynasties that deposed the Chinggisids (e.g.,
the Manghits in eighteenth-century Bukhara who replaced the ToqayTimurid Uzbeks, the Kongrat who replaced the Arabshahids Uzbeks of
Khiwa around the same time, or the Sufi Khwajas in eastern Turkestan
who took the place of Moghulistan’s Chaghadaids in the seventeenth century) stressed their maternal kinship to the Chinggisids or married
Chinggisid princesses to bolster their (mostly Islamic) legitimation.
The Chinggisid principle also had an impact on Muscovy, where as
late as 1575–6 Ivan the Terrible abdicated in favor of the Chinggisid
Symon Bekbulatovich. It remained important to Russian politics until
the westernization policies of Peter the Great in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. Yet even in the nineteenth century,
Chinggisids living in the Russian empire demanded status as nobles on
the basis of their genealogy.The Chinggisid tradition was also relevant in
Qing China (1644–1911), where the ruling Manchus, after marrying
Chinggisid princesses and obtaining the imperial seal from Chinggis’s
heirs, defined themselves as the successors of the Chinggisids.They used
this status as one facet of their complex legitimation, which was
particularly useful during their struggles with, and subjugation of, the
Mongolian tribes (see chapter six).
In Central Asia adherence to the Chinggisid legacy was also expressed
in the continued importance of the Yasa (Mongolian:Jasaq),the collection
of laws ascribed to Chinggis Khan. Even after the Islamization of the
Mongols in the fourteenth century the Yasa continued to be used together
with Muslim law, the Sharica, despite several apparent contradictions
between the two systems (such as the elevated position of Chinggis Khan
among the Yasa’s adherents and the rules of ritual slaughter).These contradictions were highlighted by the Mamluks,who questioned the piety of
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 105
the Ilkhans and Tamerlane alike for their supposed adherence to the Yasa.
The contradictions sometimes embarrassed Central Asian rulers, too,
such as Shahrukh,Tamerlane’s son, who appears to have tried to abolish
the Yasa but who could not eliminate its use. It certainly embarrassed the
Central Asian Muslim clergy, who at times tried to Islamisize the ceremonies prescribed by the Yasa.For example,the felt carpet over which the
newly-elected Uzbek khan, ’Abdallah, was supposed to be elevated as an
important part of his enthronement in 1583, was washed in water from
the Zamzam well in Mecca, thereby giving an Islamic touch to a
Chinggisid pagan ritual. On the whole, however, the Yasa and the Sharica
coexisted peacefully in Central Asia, each having its own sphere of application. The Yasa was particularly authoritative in political and criminal
matters and in the realm of court ceremonies and protocol, while the
Sharı̄ca prevailed mainly in matters dealing with cult, family law, personal
status and contracts.The Muslim Central Asian khans and commanders
who adhered to the Yasa certainly saw themselves as exemplary Muslims.
The Yasa was also important in other parts of the Muslim world. It
remained valid in Moghul India,where it was often mentioned in order to
highlight the rulers’ links to Chinggis Khan and Tamerlane. Its practical
use, however, seemed to have been confined to the realm of court ceremony and etiquette.The Yasa may have encouraged the promulgation of
the Ottoman codex of “secular” law, the Qanun, and it also influenced
Ottoman court etiquette. Even the Russians borrowed diplomatic practices from the Golden Horde, i.e., from the Yasa – a fact that was later to
facilitate Russia’s relations with Muslim dynasties, mainly the Ottomans.
Our partial knowledge of the Chinggisid Yasa of the thirteenth century
makes it hard to establish how close Timurid or Uzbek laws were to the
original Yasa (whatever that may have been; see chapter two). It seems,
however, that in the post-Mongol world the Yasa – not unlike the Qur’an
today – was used both as a concept that conveyed immense authority and
was therefore invoked to legitimize policies, customs and regimes, and as
a continuously evolving legal code.The Yasa legitimated different forms of
government, both the relatively centralized regime of Tamerlane in the
fourteenth to fifteenth centuries and the highly decentralized and tribalized rule of the Uzbeks in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.As a legal
collection, some of the items ascribed to the Yasa in seventeenth-century
106 CHINGGIS KHAN
Central Asia, such as the status of the appanage of Balkh (in modern
Afghanistan) as the seat of the heir apparent while the khan resided in
Bukhara, were not a part of the Yasa even in the sixteenth century. Even
more anachronistic is the claim by‘Abdallah Khan in the late sixteenth century that he performed the holiday prayers at the festival prayer grounds
outside Bukhara according to the Yasa of Chinggis Khan. Indeed, when he
captured Bukhara in 1221, Chinggis Khan went to these grounds, according to the thirteenth-century historian Juwayni, but he was not interested
in praying. He had assembled the leaders of Bukhara there in order to confiscate their wealth.These anachronisms notwithstanding, many Central
Asians (including Babur) believed that the Yasa perfectly reflected the situation during the time of Chinggis Khan, and the mere fact that such evolving laws and customs were sanctioned by Chinggis’s name is significant
enough. Ultimately, by the mid to late eighteenth century the authority of
the Yasa had faded, but for five centuries it was the final arbiter of appropriate political behavior in Central Asia, where Chinggis Khan was second
only to the Prophet Muhammad as a source of law and legitimation.
Borrowing of other elements of Mongol statecraft was of a more utilitarian nature.The Mongols developed efficient means to rule an empire
and this fact was not overlooked by their successors.The Iranians (or the
Chinese) did not need the Mongols to lay the foundations of an imperial
system, but in Russia it was the example of the Golden Horde which was
influential in turning a number of city states into the nucleus of a grand
Eurasian empire, while Tamerlane’s empire also owed much to Mongol
precedents (of both the Chaghadaids and the Ilkhanids). Separate Mongol
institutions were also retained in the different realms.Thus, for example,
the Mongol post system continued to be used in Iran, as well as in China
and Russia.The administrative division called tümens, originally formed to
provide a Mongol military unit of 10,000 (tümen) with manpower or provisions, survived Mongol rule in Central Asia and Iran; a situation not
unlike the survival of the Yuan system of provincial divisions (sheng) in
Ming China. Iran and Central Asia retained the Mongol concept of landholding.The soyurgal (Mongolian: reward, hence appanage) replaced the
Muslim Iqta’ as a popular term for land holding and payment for officers.
Unlike the classical Iqta’ (discussed in chapter one), the soyurgal was
hereditary and it granted its owner administrative and political rights over
THE CHINGGISID LEGACY 107
his appanage. Other Mongol financial institutions were influential in Iran,
Central Asia,and Russia,where,for instance,the tamgha (custom tax) was
retained even after the Islamization of the khanates, despite its un-Islamic
character, and in general the taxation system of Iran into the Safawid
period and of Timurid Central Asia preserved its Mongol features. In
Iran, Central Asia, and Russia, the names of the currency –tümen in Iran,
kepek and den’ga (or tanga) in Central Asia and Russia – go back to the
Mongol period, suggestive of its role in the shaping of later currency systems. Mongol military institutions, eagerly adopted in both China and
Russia, were less influential in the Muslim world due to the wide use of
the alternative Mamluk system, which proved its superiority to (or at
least its ability to cope with) the Mongols. In the long run, however, the
advance of firearms, another technology the Mongols transferred across
Eurasia, eventually marginalized the Mongol military legacy.
Clichés such as “if the Mongols had not burned Baghdad, the Muslims
would have been the first to develop an atomic bomb” or other, more
subtle attempts to ascribe the relative decline of the Islamic world vis-àvis the West to the destruction wrought by Chinggis Khan and his heirs,
are still heard today, especially in the Arab world.The reasons for the rise
of the West and the “decline” of the East are far beyond the scope of this
book, but certainly Chinggis Khan and his heirs bear little responsibility
for this phenomenon. On the contrary, as this chapter has attempted to
demonstrate, the Chinggisid legacy in the Muslim world was far from
exclusively destructive. It included a long-lasting cultural effervescence, artistic and scientific exchange, booming international trade as
well as new forms of legitimacy and law, considerable expansion of the
world of Islam, and new groupings of Muslim peoples. Few of us would
have liked to live under Chinggis’s rule or even under his heirs’, yet in
retrospect Chinggis not only conquered the world, he also changed it.
The same, often cruel, means which enabled a small nomadic minority
to establish its rule over most of Eurasia, were also instrumental in creating conditions in which long-distance cultural and religious exchange
flourished and new political culture and ethnic identities emerged.
The complex and long-lasting legacy of Chinggis Khan in the Muslim
world is also expressed in his central place in the Muslim historiographical tradition, as will be discussed in the next chapter.
5
F RO M T H E AC C U R S E D TO T H E
R E V E R E D FAT H E R A N D B AC K :
C H A N G I N G I M AG E S O F
CHINGGIS KHAN IN
T H E M U S L I M WO R L D
The reason God wanted to elevate the might and glory of Chinggis Khan, his
forefathers and ancestors, and his children and offspring and to raise the condition of that family was to strengthen the religion of Islam and propagate the law.
Rashid al-Din, (d. 1318); (Rashid/Thackston 1998–9: 1: 16)
You should know that from the beginning of the world and the creation of Adam
and up to our days, there has been no Padshah, Sultan, Caliph, Caesar, Khan,
Khaqan, Faghfur (emperor of China), Kisrā, Raja, Jipāl (king of Lahore), Porus
(Fūr, a Raja slain by Alexander) and Tuba’ (king of Yemen), amı̄r or king in the
world who had more capacity for ruling than Chinggis Khan and his descendants.
Shabankarah’i, (d. 1357) 1986: 223
Chinggis Khan was a man of blood and fire. Directly he felt bored, he would
remember the cities he had destroyed by fire, the men, women and children,
the books, birds, cats, trees and grass he had wiped out; his boredom would
then vanish and in place there would prevail a feeling of bliss that was like a solitary star twinkling in the nights of the earth’s desert ... He commanded the sun
to set and its light to pale and, immediately and without hesitation, it obeyed.
Zakaria Tamer, (b. 1931) “The Day Genghis Khan Became Angry”, in
Tamer 1985: 91, 94
108
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 109
Chinggis Khan’s invasion of the Muslim world was highly dramatic, and
not surprisingly most contemporary sources devoted a considerable
amount of space to this event.The first depiction of Chinggis Khan in
Muslim literature was as an arch enemy of Islam, often described as the
“accursed” (mal’ūn or la’ı̄n), and grisly descriptions of mass killing and
destruction by his troops abound in both contemporary and later
Muslim sources, including those written by subjects of his descendants.
However, with the Islamization of the Mongols in Iran and later in
southern Russia and Central Asia, and the incorporation of the
Chinggisid principle (i.e. the notion that only Chinggis’s descendants
deserved to be rulers) into Muslim political culture, Chinggis Khan also
became the revered father of,and a source of political legitimacy to,several Muslim dynasties in the Turco-Iranian world.
The endurance of Chinggisid rulers and concepts in the Muslim
world meant that Chinggis did not vanish from the historical literature
after the thirteenth century. On the contrary, like Alexander the Great
(Dhu al-Qarnayn,“he with the two horns” in the Muslim tradition) or the
Sasanid rulers of pre-Islamic Iran, Chinggis Khan became an integral
part of Muslim history, even though he was not a Muslim. Sections
devoted to Chinggis and his heirs appear in a large variety of Muslim literary genres from the thirteenth century onward, especially in universal histories1 but also in many dynastic chronicles, geographical and
administrative encyclopedias, religious literature, mirrors for princes,
biographical dictionaries and, especially in Central Asia, in epic and
popular literature.
Moreover, as in the case of the prophet Muhammad, there was a huge
increase in “knowledge” about the hero after his death, and the political
and religious needs of Chinggisid and even some non-Chinggisid rulers
1
Muslim universal histories are compilations that begin with the creation, followed by a brief account of the prophets culminating with Muhammad, whose
biography is followed by that of the first four caliphs. The rest will typically be
divided into chapters for each Islamic dynasty more or less in a chronological
order. A special place was usually reserved for the dynasty under which the work
was written. The prototype of Muslim universal histories goes back to Arabic
works such as Tabari’s (d. 923), but for the Turco-Iranian world the main models
were the Persian works of Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) and Mirkhwand (d. 1497).
110 CHINGGIS KHAN
therefore influenced the way Chinggis Khan was depicted in different
Muslim contexts. Just like the changes of Muhammad’s biography in the
hadith literature, “new” episodes in Chinggis’s biography reflected not
so much the reality in his lifetime but the problems of the period in
which his biography was written.
Apart from the political reworking, however, lots of new information
about Chinggis,some of it originating in oral traditions,also found its way
into the Muslim sources.This included, for example, the purported constellation of the stars during his birth (Chinggis was a Libra), and many
fables and “words of wisdom” attributed to him. Some of those sayings
were rather universal (not to say banal), such as those calling for respect
for the law, the elders and the social hierarchy, or praising the value of a
capable woman (Rashid/Thackston 1998–1999: 2: 296). Other anecdotes more closely reflected Chinggis’s nomadic heritage, e.g., when
Chinggis explains that his aim is to benefit his family and supporters:
It is my sole purpose to make their mouths as sweet as sugar by favor, to
bedeck them in garments spun with gold, to mount them upon fleet-footed
steeds, to provide their animals with grassy meadows and to have all harmful
brambles and thorns cleared from the roads and paths upon which they travel
and not to allow weeds and thorns to grow in their pastures.
Rashid/Thackston 1998–9:2:298
Another example is the story in which Chinggis Khan ordered the killing
of the husband, brother and son of one woman because they had violated
the Yasa.When the woman came to ask for his mercy, he allowed her to
exempt one of the three. She chose the brother, explaining that she could
have a new husband and a new son, but a brother was irreplaceable.
Chinggis liked her reasoning and spared the life of all three. The
most impressive aspect of this story (which could easily have been told
of other rulers and periods) is the context in which it appears, in a
late-fourteenth-century voluminous Mamluk work entitled Tabaqat
al-shafi’iyya al-kubra (the comprehensive biographical dictionary of
Shafi’i law scholars),a work dealing mainly with the biographies of scholars of one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam.This was certainly not
the most obvious place for a (highly constructed) biography of Chinggis
Khan, yet the author, the Syrian scholar al-Subki (d. 1371), included it in
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 111
his work, considering the Mongol invasion one of the major events of the
times. In general, al-Subki followed the “accursed paradigm,” describing
Chinggis as a savage and the Mongol invasion as a huge tragedy for the
world of Islam, but this particular anecdote was meant to illustrate
Chinggis’s unmatched wisdom, and so were others in his work (Subki
1964: 1: 331).Thus even those who cursed Chinggis were aware of his
unique achievements and character. This certainly facilitated his later
transformation from arch villain into revered father.
Since I cannot discuss all the Muslim literature on Chinggis Khan,
stretching as it does over a vast area and nearly 800 years, I shall confine
myself to analysing some examples of the changes in Chinggis’s biography in the Muslim world, concentrating on two major themes related to
his enduring political legacy.The first is the partial monotheisation of his
figure, which was meant to overcome the problematic nature of using a
pagan figure such as Chinggis as a source of legitimation.The process of
“monotheisation” is apparent particularly around the time of Mongol
conversion to Islam, the first half of the fourteenth century, although it
continued to evolve afterwards, and most of the examples are taken
either from the writing in the Ilkhanate (1260–1335) or in the Mamluk
Sultanate (1250–1517).
The second theme highlights the function of Chinggis as progenitor of
the political order. It examines those manipulations of Chinggis’s biography which were meant to make it usable for legitimation of political and
social orders quite different from his own.This began soon after his death,
in order to legitimate the balance of power between the different Mongol
branches, and continued to evolve, even among non-Chinggisid dynasties, as long as the Chinggisid principle remained valid, namely down to
the nineteenth century. Chinggis’s role as a source of legitimation, however, was limited to the Turco-Iranian world and was especially durable in
the lands of Central Asia.
The last part of this chapter analyzes the image of Chinggis in the
modern Muslim world, with examples from both the Arab world (mainly
Egypt) and Central Asia. It argues that the change of political concepts in
general, and the rise of the nation-state in particular, deprived the
Chinggisid political legacy of most of its meaning and caused Chinggis
Khan to be seen once again as the accursed conqueror and despot.
112 CHINGGIS KHAN
CHINGGIS THE MONOTHEIST
When the Mongols became Muslims, Chinggis came to be seen as
the forefather of many Muslim dynasties. For the ideologues of the
dynasties in question, this posed the problem of how to cope with the
fact that Chinggis had inflicted more damage on the Muslim world than
anyone before him and that he was, on top of that, an infidel; indeed, a
pagan. Unlike the full appropriation of Chinggis in Tibetan Buddhism,
adopted by his descendants in China and Mongolia (see chapter six), no
Muslim source that I have read ever claimed that Chinggis was a
Muslim. He was, however, depicted as a tool of God, thereby justifying
his atrocities, and certain details of his biography were adjusted to
better accommodate him to the monotheistic world order.
God’s tool
Chinggis Khan’s contemporaries (and not only in the Muslim world)
tended to depict the Mongol invasion in apocalyptic terms. Thus the
Muslims often connected it to traditions in which the infidel Turks
invade the Muslim lands as part of the signs preceding the day of resurrection.The Sufi Najm al-Din Ghazi (d. 1256) even suggested a general
explanation for the coming of the End of Days, namely that the reality of
Islam had disappeared: its leaders only paid lip service to it and were not
really devoted to it.Therefore God sent the unbelieving Tatars to overturn the “meaningless forms that remain” (Najm al-Din Razi 1982:
382–383; Lewisohn 1995: 57–58).
Since the End of Days did not arrive, however, other explanations for
the Mongol invasion had to be found.Typically for a medieval society,
pro-Mongol and anti-Mongol sources explained the coming of the
Mongols as part of God’s plan, a divine punishment: a view quite consistent with the way Chinggis and his heirs depicted themselves.The sins
for which God chose to punish the Muslims by sending Chinggis Khan
were usually connected to the Khwarazm Shah Muhammad, Chinggis
Khan’s main rival in the Muslim world. Several thirteenth-century
sources imply that by enlarging his empire to the east (at the expense of
the Qara Khitai) the Khwarazm Shah had breached the wall or dam
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 113
separating the Abode of Islam from the wild eastern steppe, thereby
bringing the Mongols into the Muslim world. Fourteenth-century
sources are more explicit, describing the disaster brought about by the
Mongols as a response to the Khwarazm Shah’s killing of Chinggis
Khan’s (Muslim) traders in Utrar in 1218, or even to his execution of
the Sufi Majd al-Din Baghdadi (d. 1219), who had been accused of
having an affair with a noble Khwarazmian lady. In all cases, the cause
seems rather too small in relation to the effect, perhaps because in the
fourteenth century the evidence of the Mongol depredations was less
visible than in the thirteenth century and could therefore be explained
as originating in such specific actions. More importantly, identifying
Mongol atrocities as God’s will meant that they were rendered compatible with Chinggis’s image as a revered father.The grisly descriptions of
massacre and devastation were dutifully repeated in later Muslim
sources, remaining one of Chinggis’s trademarks, but they did not serve
as an indictment any more. They did however allow adherents of the
accursed paradigm to retain their negative view of the conqueror.
Moreover, in pro-Mongol sources Chinggis was depicted not only as
God’s punishment but as an integral part of a divine plan which in the long
run meant to benefit the Muslims.Already, Juwayni (d. 1283, before the
islamization of the Mongol khanates) had underscored the expansion of
Islam under the Mongols, and their contribution to the Muslim world.
He emphasized their liberation, in 1218, of the Muslims of Semirechye
from the religious oppression of Güchülüg, the Naiman prince who took
over the Qara Khitai empire, and finished his book with Hülegü’s annihilation of the Assassins in 1256, a task which many Muslim rulers had
attempted in vain to achieve, and which Juwayni compared to the
Prophet’s victory over the Jews of Khaybar.Trying to retain the Mongols’
pro-Muslim image, Juwayni did not include in his book a description of
the Mongol attack on the Abbasid Caliphate, an event which was harder
to depict in a sympathetic light, even though as Hülegü’s governor in
Baghdad he had certainly had a first-hand knowledge of the episode.
After the Islamization of the Mongols, God’s plan became clearer.
Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) therefore presented a general framework for the
reason behind Chinggis Khan’s atrocities.As part of God’s housekeeping
of the world, He periodically chose “a great and mighty lord of fortune”
114 CHINGGIS KHAN
who would cleanse the realm of the evil, corruption and decay which had
emerged during the course of the passage of eons. God had chosen
Chinggis Khan for this mission, and those who resisted him therefore also
opposed God and were destroyed.When he finished cleansing the world,
Chinggis created the imperial Yasa and Yosun (customs),spread justice,and
nurtured his subjects.True, during the completion of the conquest of the
world Chinggis caused much harm to Muslim urban areas, but as a balm
for that, the people who inflicted such wounds to the Muslim world subsequently embraced Islam, thereby serving as a clear and obvious proof of
the perfection of the divine power. The security and wealth of Iranian
Muslims under the Muslim Ilkhan Ghazan (Rashid al-Din’s patron,
r. 1295–1304) and the strength of Islam under his reign (in terms of both
converting the Mongols, Uighurs and sun worshippers and uprooting the
polytheists and opponents of Islam) compensated for the misery Muslims
had encountered at the hands of Chinggis Khan’s troops.This view enabled
Rashid al-Din explicitly to claim, as cited at the head of this chapter, that
God’s elevation of the Chinggisid family was actually meant to strengthen
Islam (Rashid/Thackston 1998–9: 1: 16, 141–142). Later Sufi hagiographies describe a Muslim saint guiding Chinggis’s forces in their invasion
into the Muslim world, thereby stressing his role as God’s tool.
Monotheisizing Chinggis’s Biography
Chinggis Khan’s religious functions in his own shamanic environment
are well attested in Muslim (and other) sources. In post-islamization
sources, however, there is a clear tendency to “monotheisize” those elements of Chinggis Khan’s biography, although without ignoring their
indigenous background.
A good example is the origins of Chinggis Khan.While the shamanic
myth recalled in The Secret History ascribed the origin of the Mongols to
the union of a blue wolf and a fallow doe, Rashid al-Din gave the
Mongols a much longer ancestry originating in Japheth son of Noah,
thereby locating them in a monotheistic genealogical framework, which
was maintained in many subsequent Muslim works. Japheth was chosen
because in Muslim tradition he was the father of theTurks,whom Rashid
al-Din understood as closely related to the Mongols. He showed this
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 115
again by creating a relationship between the Mongols and Oghuz Khan,
the first Muslim Turk in Muslim tradition and the mythical forefather of
the Seljuqs and later the Ottomans, a relationship which continued to
evolve throughout the years.2
In connection with the direct ancestry of the Mongols, Rashid al-Din
adduced another tradition: the Mongols once inhabited a valley called
Ergene Qum, confined by impenetrable mountains and forests. After
their number grew and the valley became too narrow for them, they
broke out by melting an iron mine with bellows.The Mongol forefather
who emerged from Ergene Qum was called Börte China (Blue Wolf);
his wife was called Qo’ai Maral (White Doe), and all the Mongols were
their descendants. Rashid al-Din thus recast the animal myth of the
Secret History, depicting the direct forefathers of the Mongols not as wolf
and doe, but rather as humans bearing animal names, thereby neutralizing its shamanic background. The Ergene Qum theme probably
reflected an indigenous Mongolian tradition, though not one mentioned in the Secret History. It bears a striking similarity to the origin
myths of the Turkic empire (sixth to eighth centuries), and was connected to the Mongols already by Juzjani, who wrote in Delhi in the
1260s and who ascribed the breaking of the wall to Chinggis himself.
This connection was facilitated by the fact that Temüjin, Chinggis’s original name, meant blacksmith. Muslim, Christian and Tangut (but not
Mongol or Chinese) sources claimed he was a blacksmith, therefore
skilled in melting iron walls. Several other versions of the story are
retained in fourteenth-century Mamluk works, and it is often embellished with details originating in the Quranic story of Alexander imprisoning Gog and Magog, a barbarian nomadic people first mentioned in
the Old Testament, behind an iron wall (Quran XVII:93–8; Ezekiel
XXXVIII:39). It also surfaces in European sources on Mongol history,
where it gathered details from the Syriac version of the Alexander
2
The Mongols are described either as Oghuz’s enemies (as in Rashid) or as his
only surviving descendants (e.g. in Qazwini’s Ta’rikh-i Guzida). The Ottomans
tend to depict the Mongols as a lesser branch of the Oghuz and as later comers to
Islam while the Uzbeks claim for Mongol priority, describing Oghuz as a descendant of Mongol Khan, father of the Mongols. See, e.g. Munajjim Bashi 1868: 1:
668–71; and Abu Ghazi 1970: 12–25.
116 CHINGGIS KHAN
Romance. In the context of monotheisization, however, the most striking feature appears in Qazwini’s variant of the story. Hamdallah
Mustawfi Qazwini, an Ilkhanid official and Rashid al-Din’s disciple
(d. ca. 1330s) describes the escape of the Mongol forefathers into
Ergene Qum as hijra, giving it a status equal in importance to the
prophet Muhammad’s hijra which had begun the Islamic era.
Immediately after this monotheistic statement, however, Qazwini mentions that at Ergene Qum the two Mongol forefathers (in his case the
two surviving male descendants of Oghuz Khan: Kiyan, the progenitor
of Chinggis’s clan, the Kiyat; and Nökür) met a wolf, with whom they
had descendants; but he adds that this tradition is “weak” (i.e. not well
attested).
The amalgamation of monotheistic and shamanic elements in the
stories of Chinggis’s origin is best illustrated in the development of the
story of Alan Qo’a, Chinggis’s ancestress, whose miraculous impregnation is another obvious supernatural element in Chinggis’s genealogy.
According to the Secret History,after the death of her husband,Alan Qo’a
was impregnated by a luminous being who left her tent disguised as a
yellow dog.Already Rashid al-Din (and most of the subsequent Muslim
literature) omits the dog, ascribing the impregnation to a more abstract
luminous creature.Although he describes the story as a manifestation of
divine power and defines “Alan Qo’a’s pure womb”as the oyster shell for
the precious pearl of Chinggis Khan’s existence, Rashid al-Din remains
skeptical about its credibility. In a further attempt to historicize the
myth he tries to force it into a chronological framework, dating it either
to the first part of the Abbasid Caliphate (established 750) or to Samanid
times (819–1005). Fifteenth-century Timurid chronicles, however,
already have exact dates: either 986–987 c.e. (376 according to the
Hijri calendar), or in the times of Abu Muslim (d. 755), the maker of the
Abbasid Revolution.
The story of Alan Qo’a was first compared to the virgin birth of
Mary, mother of Jesus, the Maryam of the Quran, by the Mamluk official and encyclopedist,al-’Umari (d.1348),who saw the Alan Qo’a version as a poor and implausible imitation of the Marian legend. For all
that, both al-’Umari and other Mamluk sources, familiar with several
versions of the story, conclude from the episode that Chinggis Khan was
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 117
called “the son of the sun,” a term that stresses his non-monotheistic
connections. In Timurid and Moghul sources beginning with Yazdi
(d. 1428), however, the Marian comparison is very much emphasized. It
is adduced as a definite proof for the credibility of Alan Qo’a’s story (and
for her chastity).Alan Qo’a was impregnated by a ray of light that became
a luminous shape inside her tent,just as Mary (Maryam) was impregnated
by the angel Gibril (who blowed his breath into the fold of her shirt).
Another monotheistic context for Alan Qo’a’s story is suggested by
the inscriptions on Tamerlane’s mausoleum in Samarqand, where his
genealogy is given from Alan Qo’a downward (more about this below).
After stressing that Alan Qo’a was not a prostitute, it explains that she
was impregnated by a ray of light coming through the top of the tent,
that took a human shape inside it “and it is said that he [the light turned
into human] was one of the descendants of amir al-mu’minin ‘Ali b. Abi
Talib (Semonov 1948–1949: 57, cited in Aigle 2000: 154).The divine
light which impregnated Alan Qo’a is therefore connected to God’s
hidden light emanating through Adam via the Prophet Muhammad into
the family of ‘Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law and the founder
of Shi’ite Islam, thereby creating a connection between the families of
Chinggis Khan, Tamerlane and the Prophet. While such a claim, so
beneficial for Tamerlane’s legitimation, was hard for most historians to
accept, nonetheless it placed the Mongol shamanic myth in an Islamic
framework.
The shamanic element was not completely eliminated, however, as is
apparent in the Daftar-Chingiz-namah (“The Book of Chinggis’s
Legend”), an anonymous popular folkloristic Turkic work from the late
seventeenth century which originated among the Volga Tatars, by then
already under Russian rule. (Ivanics 2002 and forthcoming; Frank
1998:15–17). In this work, which traces Chinggis’s genealogy from
Japheth, son of Noah, Chinggis is a son of Alan Qo’a – a theme which has
more in common with the Mary legend and which appears already in
thirteenth-century Armenian sources – yet in the Daftar, the event is
presented in a much more miraculous fashion than in earlier Muslim or
Christian sources. Chinggis Khan’s father, named Duyin Bayan (“Seed
from God”) was also a luminous creature. He too was conceived by a
light beam which visited the daughter of Altan Khan, the Chinese (or
118 CHINGGIS KHAN
Jurchen) emperor, while she was locked in a stone palace. Sent away (by
boat) due to her pregnancy, she found refuge among the Kiyat lineage
and gave birth to Duyin. When he came of age, Duyin married Alan
Qo’a, daughter of a Sultan related to Altan Khan. She gave him three
sons, but Duyin did not think they were worthy of succeeding him. On
his death bed he promised his followers that after his demise he would
father a worthy son, who would be conceived when he, Duyin, would
climb down as a light beam into Alan Qo’a’s tent, leaving in the form of
a wolf. His three sons duly stationed scouts near Alan Qo’a’s tent after
his death, and they saw a radiant sunshine descended from heaven that
made them lose consciousness. When they awoke, they saw a bluishgrey wolf with a horse’s mane coming out of the tent. He cried
“Chinggis Chinggis,” and disappeared in the forest.Alan Qo’a’s son was
therefore named Chinggis. He was born with golden diapers and with
the seal of the prophet [sic] Gabriel on his shoulder. His shoulder blade
resembled the back of a wolf and his beauty was like the beauty of
Gabriel, leading everybody who caught sight of his face to declare he
was ready to die for him (Daftar, in Ivanics, forthcoming, 1v–16v).
This tradition, certainly reflecting the Turkic-shamanic environment
and giving such a prominent place to the wolf motive,has acquired some
new monotheistic elements.These include the reference to Japheth as
Chinggis’s ancestor and the seal of Gabriel, reflecting the seal of
prophethood that Muhammad had between his shoulders. In Muslim
tradition, as mentioned above, Gabriel was God’s messenger who was
sent to impregnate Maryam and to announce to her the expected virgin
birth.Thus the story might have also alluded to the Marian legend. In
popular literature, as opposed to official chronicles, there was no need
to eliminate the Turkic-shamanic layer, typical in later works of the
Golden Horde.
The amalgamation of monotheistic and shamanic elements appears
also with regard to Chinggis Khan’s relations with the Divine. The
steppe sky God, Tengri, was easily equated with Allah, yet Chinggis
Khan’s capacities as shaman are well attested in Muslim (and other)
sources. In sources written after the Mongol conversion, however,
there are at least two examples in which his shamanic capacities are
combined with monotheistic features.
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 119
The first example appears in Shabankarah’i’s description of the life of
Chinggis Khan. Shabankarah’i (d. 1357), a Kurdish historian from southern Persia who wrote in the last decades of the Ilkhanate, and who usually
follows Juwayni’s account of Chinggis’s life,stresses the close relationship
between Chinggis and God: “Even though he was not a Muslim, he had
true friendship with God”, he claims (Shabankarah’i 1986: 227).
According to him, Chinggis addressed God after the Utrar massacre,
asking him to make him the ruler of the Muslims (Tājı̄kān),since he would
have to attack them – despite his wish – due to the Khwarazm Shah’s
behavior. At the end of his address Chinggis raised his head from the
ground and “they said he heard a voice saying: Go, because We will place
them under your rule;We will give the whole world to you.”When he
came down from the hill, Chinggis began to make preparations to take his
revenge on the Khwarazm Shah (Shabankarah’i 1986: 233–234.)
This paragraph certainly echoes the Mongol imperial ideology of
world dominion conferred on Chinggis Khan and his descendants by
heaven, but Shabankarah’i places it in a monotheistic context of a man
speaking to God and hearing his voice replying to him, a description
which brings to mind God’s biblical promise to Abraham (Genesis
12:1–3).The friendship between Chinggis Khan and God also brings to
mind the figure of Abraham, known in Arabic as God’s friend
(al-khalı̄l). It should also be mentioned that in the Muslim tradition
Abraham was the first h.anif, a term ascribed to an original monotheist
(i.e. not yet Jewish, Christian or Muslim). It seems that while Chinggis
could not be Islamized, post-conversion sources tried to “hanifize” him,
thereby entering him into the monotheistic world order.
This is even more apparent in the second example, studied by Reuven
Amitai. It appears in a Mamluk text, the universal encyclopedia of
al-Nuwayri (d. 1333), though it probably originated in late Ilkhanid circles.According to this tradition,Chinggis Khan became an ascetic and isolated himself in the mountains.The reason for his asceticism was that he
asked a Jew:“What gave Moses, Jesus and Muhammad their exalted position and spread their fame?” The Jew answered that they loved god and
devoted themselves to him.When Chinggis Khan asked if the same means
would work for him too, the Jew answered positively, adding that the
Jewish books predicted that Chinggis Khan would have a victorious
120 CHINGGIS KHAN
dynasty. Hence Chinggis Khan left his iron work and his family and
became an ascetic in the mountains, eating only permissible food
(mubahat). Nuwayri describes him dancing, spinning and receiving
pilgrims who came to adore him. He adds that at the same time he did
not obey any religion and did not belong to any religious community.He
just had love for god, and this was the beginning of his rise (Nuwayri
1984: 27:302;Amitai, 2004).
This paragraph describes Chinggis Khan performing a complex
shamanic ritual, and echoes the imperial ideology of the Mongols.Yet it
also reflects a monotheistic context, because the role of the Jew as a harbinger of Chinggis Khan’s greatness immediately brings to mind the
role of the Jews and the Jewish scriptures as harbingers of Muhammad’s
prophecy (and Jesus’ before him). By asking about Moses, Jesus and
Muhammad, Chinggis Khan implicitly identifies himself as on a par with
the great Muslim prophets (more about this below).The stress on eating
the permitted food, in sharp contrast to early Muslim descriptions of
Mongol diet, which includes pigs, dogs and blood, is also significant
because the Mongol menu was often described as an important facet in
their barbarianism and incompatibility with Muslim norms. Moreover,
the term used (mubahat) has Sufi connotations: this is food left on the
ground that poor sufis can gather and eat. Chinggis Khan’s religious
behavior as displayed in this episode therefore reflects a sort of Mongol
“Hanifism,” i.e. an undefined longing for monotheism before the adoption of Islam, nicely blended with his shamanic role.
Nuwayri’s mention of Chinggis Khan along with Moses, Jesus and
Muhammad brings us to the final theme, Muslim understanding of the
reverence the Mongols showed for their forefather. Several Muslim
sources equate Chinggis Khan to a prophet.While this certainly places
him in a monotheistic context,it does so in a negative way since there is no
prophet in Islam after Muhammad.The first treatment of Chinggis Khan
as a prophet to the Mongols appears in the Mamluk work of Ibn Wasil
(d.1296,but wrote in 1260s),who connects this status to Chinggis Khan’s
being the source of Mongol law. The famous Syrian jurist Ibn Taymiyya
(d. 1328) claims that the Mongols worshipped Chinggis Khan as a son of
god, equated him to the prophet Muhammad and followed the “infidel
shari’a” he conveyed out of his head. Ibn Taymiyya therefore does not
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 121
accept the Muslim Ilkhans as true Muslims, accusing them of polytheism.
Later Mamluk authorities simply claim that Chinggis Khan’s followers
obeyed him as the followers of the prophet obeyed the latter, or even as
loyal slaves obey the Creator, thereby neutralizing the tension related to
prophetic status. In Ilkhanid sources, the most peculiar reference to
prophecy appears in the history of Wassaf (d. 1328), who tells the story of
Sa’d al-Dawla, the Jewish wazir of the Ilkhan Arghun (1284–1291). Sa’d alDawla claimed that Arghun inherited the prophethood of Chinggis Khan
and that he tried to establish a new religion on the eve of Mongol Islamization, planning to turn the Ka’ba in Mecca back into an idol temple.The
mention of Gabriel as a prophet in the Daftar and the stress on Chinggis’s
beauty,a typical prophetic feature in Muslim tradition,suggests that on the
popular level Chinggis remained connected to prophecy. Already in the
late Ilkhanid period, however, Shabankarah’i makes this connection a positive one.After proclaiming that success such as that of Chinggis Khan must
have originated in divine grace, he adds: “And if he (Chinggis) had been a
Muslim, he would have partaken of prophecy and with his wisdom,
escaped the tricks of fate (i.e. death)” (Shabankarah’i 1986: 223). The
emphasis here is on Chinggis’s intimacy with God, which had made him
nearly equal in status to a prophet, and not on the prophethood.
In sum, by depicting Chinggis Khan as the tool of God, by partly
monotheisizing the myths of his origin, and by synthesizing his shamanic
indigenous functions with monotheistic “Hanifite” ones, pro-Mongol
Muslim sources succeeded in making the Great Khan a highly honorable
figure in the Turco-Persian Muslim collective memory, befitting his new
position as the founding father of Muslim dynasties. Hints of his new
role appeared even in the Arabic speaking world of the Mamluk sultanate. Some of the elements used by the pro-Mongol Muslim sources,
however, could have been utilized also for retaining the accursed paradigm, which was more prevalent in the Arab world.
CHINGGIS AS PROGENITOR OF THE
POLITICAL ORDER
If the attempts to monothesize Chinggis’s biography were partly aimed
at legitimating his position as a revered father of Muslim dynasties, the
122 CHINGGIS KHAN
examples in this section illustrate changes in Chinggis’s biography in
which he was used to legitimate others – mainly later dynasties and
leaders, both his descendants and others.
Already in the mid thirteenth century, Chinggis’s authority was especially called upon to justify the outcome of the succession struggles
among his descendants. He was therefore described as showing special
favor to his younger son,Tolui,as part of the efforts ofTolui’s son,Möngke
(r. 1251–1259) to legitimize his seizure of the Qa’anate from the
Ogödeids,descendants of Chinggis’s successor.Later on,Chinggis’s favor
toward certain grandsons,such as Hülegü (r.1260–1265),the founder of
the Ilkhanate; Qubilai (r. 1260–1294), who established theYuan dynasty
in China or Shiban, Jochi’s son and the ancestor of the Shaybanid Uzbeks,
was emphasized by the historians of the relevant realms.
Chinggis was often also invoked to legitimate territorial divisions,
which originated long after his time.Thus, for example, mid-fourteenthcentury Iranian regional works portrayed Chinggis granting Tolui the
right to rule in Iran, thereby justifying the rule of the Ilkhans there, a
thorny point in Ilkhanid legitimacy because – unlike the rights of the
Jochids or Chaghadaids – their right to Iran was not originally sanctioned by Chinggis. In a variant on this theme, the Mamluk author Ibn
al-Dawadari (d. 1335) described Chinggis having a dream in which God
explained to him that he had given him the world – apart from its western part (Egypt and North Africa), thereby predicting the future limits
of Mongol rule in the Muslim world (and as a by-product giving
Mamluk rule some pre-ordained glory).
More creative manipulations of Chinggis’s biography were required
for legitimating non-Chinggisid rulers.The best known examples come
from Timurid histories, which provide an enormous amount of information on Chinggis’s life.Tamerlane’s connection with the Chinggisids
was projected backwards into the period of both leaders’ ancestors.The
Secret History mentioned the Barulas, Tamerlane’s tribe, as one of the
many tribes which descended from Alan Qo’a, thereby giving him a
common ancestress with Chinggis Khan. Timurid sources, beginning
from Yazdi (d. 1428) who wrote under Tamerlane’s son, Shahrukh
(r. 1409–1447), not only stressed this common descent but also added
an episode which allegedly took place in the generation in which
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 123
Chinggis’s and Tamerlane’s genealogies separated, that is between
Tumanay Khan’s twin sons, Qabul (Chinggis’s great grandfather) and
Qachulai (Tamerlane’s forefather). One night Qachulai dreamt that he
saw four stars rising successively from the breast of Qabul.The last of
these stars filled the entire world with its brilliance, diffusing light to
other bodies which sprang from the fourth star and continued to glow
even after it had set. He then saw seven stars rising from his own breast,
followed by an eighth star which cast its light everywhere and from
which lesser bodies, each illuminating a different region, emanated.
When he asked his father to interpret his dream, the latter explained
that Qabul’s descendant in the fourth generation – Chinggis Khan –
would subjugate the world and divide it among his sons, while
Qachulay’s descendant of the eighth generation – Tamerlane – would
also be a great conqueror, whose sons would share his glory.Tumanay
Khan then asked his sons to take an oath in his presence that the khan’s
throne would belong to Qabul while Qachulay would hold the military
and administrative authority.The oath, written in the Uighur script and
sealed with a red seal, was deposited in the khan’s treasury and later surfaced in Chinggis’s time.The dream not only predicted later historical
events, namely Tamerlane’s rise to power, but also defined the later relationship between the Chinggisids and the Timurids (see chapter four).
Interestingly, Abu al-Fadl, who retold the episode in the sixteenthcentury Akbar namah (The Book of Akbar), written in India for the
Moghul ruler Akbar (r. 1556–1605),Tamerlane’s descendant, explained
that Tumanay (or Yazdi) did not interpret well the dream: Qabul’s star
indeed referred to Chinggis, but Qachulay’s eighth star was actually not
Tamerlane but Akbar.Although there were fifteen generations between
Qachulay and Akbar, only seven of them (that he did not specify) bore
enough merit to be included among the series of stars, and Akbar was the
eighth and most luminous one. (Woods 1990; Quinn 1998).
Another way of legitimizing Tamerlane through Chinggis’s biography
was the leading position of Qarachar,Tamerlane’s ancestor who was a contemporary of Chinggis Khan. In thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury sources Qarachar is barely mentioned, and all we know about
him was that he was one of Chaghadai’s commanders. In the Timurid
sources, however, Qarachar appears in every important juncture in
124 CHINGGIS KHAN
Chinggis Khan dividing his empire among his sons, leaf from Rashid al-Din’s Jami’
al-tawarikh, Moghul India, reign of Akbar (1556–1605).The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gift of Francis M.Weld, 1948 (48.144). As an important source of legitimation,
Chinggis is a very popular figure on Islamic illustrated manuscripts. Here, in an illustration
from the reign of the great Moghul ruler Akbar Chinggis is depicted in a very Indian fashion
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 125
Chinggis’s life: he was among the first tribal leaders who submitted to
him, he advised him throughout his career, and he was present in Baljuna,
standing by Chinggis in his hardest trial and playing a pivotal role in the
battle against Ong Khan. Qarachar also played a leading role on the eve of
Chinggis’s death when the latter reaffirmed his successor. In pre-Timurid
sources this episode either was not mentioned or it was described as an
informal gathering of Chinggis and his sons Tolui and Ögödei. In Timurid
sources, however, the confirmation of the will is a solemn gathering, in
which not only is Qarachar present, together with all of Chinggis’s sons,
but Chinggis praises his wisdom and advises his sons to follow his counsel.
Chinggis then brings in the original covenant of Tumanay Khan, to
which he appends an edict conferring the Qa’anate on Ögödei and
entrustingTransoxania and the adjustment lands to Chaghadai.Entrusting
Chaghadai to Qarachar, he orders his son to consider him his partner in
rule and possession and never to disregard his advice, and appoints
Qarachar to command Chaghaday’s army and administration until
Chinggis’s death. Tamerlane’s forefather therefore enjoyed the favor of
Chinggis, who treated him almost like a son, and his special position in
the Chaghadaid realm was sanctioned by Chinggis’s last wish. No doubt
this episode, repeated in Moghul but not in Uzbek sources, did much to
enhance the legitimacy of Tamerlane and his descendents.
A similar use of Chinggis’s biography appears in a nineteenthcentury Chaghatay work, the Firdaws al-iqbal (Paradise of Good
Fortune) of Shir Muhammad Munis, written in Khiwa between 1805
and 1842. This work, the largest historical work in post-classical
Chaghatay, was commissioned by the first khan of the Qongrat
(Mongolian: Qonggirad) dynasty, Eltüzer (r. 1804–1806), who after
removing the Chinggisid puppet khan from Khwarazm proclaimed
himself khan of Khiwa. Like Tamerlane, the Qongrats were nonChinggisids who replaced the Chinggisids as actual rulers and in
Eltüzer’s case, also as the nominal rulers, bearing the title khan. Like
Tamerlane, too, Eltüzer tried to prove the legitimacy of his dynasty
through the special connections between his forefathers and Chinggis’s
family. Even in the Secret History, the Qonggirad (like the Barulas) and
the Kiyat shared a common ancestry, and Mongol wives, including
Chinggis Khan’s Börte, were traditionally taken from them. Indeed
126 CHINGGIS KHAN
Munis stresses this fact; yet he also tries to show that the Qonggirad’s
tribal chief, Eltüzer’s ancestor Tinim Güregen (Tinim,“the son-in-law,”
a title also borne by Tamerlane after he had married Chinggisid
princesses) had held the highest position under Chinggis and his heirs,
as Qarachar had done.Thus, the Qongirrad chief excelled in the battle
against Jalal al-Din Khwarazm Shah just as Qarachar did against Ong
Khan; and his subsequent appointment as a deputy of Jochi, Chinggis’s
eldest son and the ancestor of the Golden Horde and of the Chinggisid
rulers of Khwarazm, mirrored the appointment of Qarachar in the
Chaghadaid realm. Munis even brought in a parallel to the agreement
between Qabul and Qachulai, although this was in the seventeenth
century, long after Chinggis’s time. (Bregel 1982, Bregel 1997).
The parallels between Munis’s work and the Timurid chronicles
attest to the continuing vitality of the Chinggisid tradition even in the
early nineteenth century. Even after the Qongrat Khans, by then already
settled, had deposed Chinggis’s descendants, they still turned to
Chinggis Khan to provide them with legitimacy.
The Daftar Chingiz Nameh develops a different perspective. Here
Chinggis Khan is used to legitimate the tribal order of the Volga Tatars.
The most striking feature of Chinggis’s biography in the Daftar is its
near complete disregard of Chinggis’s campaigns both in the tribal
arena and in the wider world.The changes in his biography here are thus
much greater than in theTimurid or Qonggirad chronicles,which basically retained the thirteenth-century framework. In the Daftar Chinggis
gains his leading position among the tribes not through his valor in
battle but rather by impressing the tribal chiefs with his charisma (i.e.,the
unnatural circumstances of his birth, his unique beauty, and his attractive personality), causing them to invite him to be their leader – as was
indeed the custom in the later Golden Horde. After he agreed to lead
them, there is one sentence saying that Chinggis waged many wars and
subdued many khans and hordes, but these are not described at all.Thus
the devastation – the detailed descriptions of which appear in all the
other sources mentioned above – is completely omitted.Instead we find
Chinggis mostly hunting, yet his main function is to assert the relative
position of the tribal leaders (begs) subject to him.To each of those who
had invited him to rule, Chinggis assigns a specific tamgha (brand, seal),
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 127
tree, bird, battle cry and later also body armor, all of which become the
tribe’s characteristic features. Chinggis’s sons are mentioned in passing
but obviously the tribal leaders are portrayed as much more important
to the realm, a situation which also reflects the late Golden Horde reality. The role of the great conqueror in the Daftar is reserved for
Tamerlane, who is described (in the work’s next chapters) as the tool of
God, fighting the infidel Russians and many others, and as an ideal
Muslim ruler. Chinggis, on the other hand, is portrayed as the progenitor of the tribal political and social order. Other works of Central
Asian popular literature of the eighteenth century, such as the Chingiz
namahs (Books of Chinggis) prevailing in Central Asia or Kunuz al-A’z.am
(The Great Treasures, a legendary biography of Tamerlane), though
often concentrating on local heroes – Tamerlane, Edigu (a Nogai amir)
or Jochid khans – also reserved for Chinggis the position of either the
ancestor or the creator of the political order. Obviously in the popular
mind the rise of Chinggis Khan marked the beginning of a new era in
Central Asian history,the repercussions and concepts of which were still
apparent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
What we have seen so far illustrates Chinggis’s prominent place in
post-Mongol Muslim literary sources and some of the different uses of
his biography. Chinggis’s prominent place was particularly apparent in
the Turco-Iranian world and in Central Asia.This was not only because
of the longevity of his descendants’ rule there but is also related to the
prevailing types of historical writing: Chinggis retained an especially
prominent position in realms in which universal histories were the common format (e.g. the Timurid realm) or where history was explained in
terms of genealogy (e.g. Uzbek and post-Uzbek Central Asia).The shift
from universal to strictly dynastic or regional histories led to a decrease
in his prominence.Thus, for example, Safawid historiography in Iran,
building on Timurid models, began with an upsurge of universal histories, but from the late seventeenth century it focused more on a dynastic
history of the Safawids or on a history of the Shi’a (The Safawids were
Twelver – or Imami – Shi‘ites), thereby marginalizing the role given to
non-Safawids or non-Shi‘ite heroes, including Chinggis Khan.Another
apparent case is Egypt.Whereas under the Mamluks in the thirteenth to
fifteenth centuries we find a wealth of information about Chinggis Khan
128 CHINGGIS KHAN
and the Mongols, and a highly universalistic approach to history, the
Mongols are nearly completely absent from the historical sources of
Ottoman Egypt (1517–1789), in which historical writing became local
and provincial, just like the country itself. Even in the chronicle of
al-Jabarti (1753–1826), by far the most noted historian of Ottoman
Egypt, Chinggis is mentioned only as Hülegü’s grandfather in the
description of the battle of ‘Ayn Jalut.The shift from universal histories
to more local or to recent and contemporary ones is apparent also in the
Ottoman Empire, especially from the eighteenth century onward, and
in Moghul India from the seventeenth century.This historical shift also
reflects the political framework, now more regional than universal.Yet
it was the modern period with its new concepts of political identity
that played the major role in marginalizing Chinggis in the Muslim
world and in the revival of the accursed paradigm.
NATIONALISM AND THE MARGINALIZATION
OF CHINGGIS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
Chinggis Khan’s enduring political legacy was the main reason for the
reshaping of his biography and image in the Muslim world.The changing
concepts of political identity in the modern world, mainly with the rise
of national ideologies, thus led to his marginalization in the Muslim
realm, while giving him a central place in other parts of the world, such
as Mongolia and China (see chapter six). As territory and language
replaced dynastic loyalty as major identity makers, Chinggis’s position of
the revered father was no longer meaningful in the Muslim world. By the
new nationalist criteria, he was a complete outsider, a foreigner from far
away Mongolia who did not speak any Muslim language,and who arrived
as an invader.As Islam became part of the new national identity in most
Muslim countries,Chinggis’s unbelief also came to be (or more precisely
remained) problematic.The nationalistic view of history adopted in most
Muslim nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries therefore
tended to present Chinggis as an outsider who wrought havoc and then
vanished, his impact on the late-medieval Muslim world utterly denied.
He returned to his position of the accursed enemy.
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 129
Nationalistic views of history apart, the renewed demonization of
Chinggis was fuelled also by the fact that Muslim historians were gaining greater access to Occidental – Western European, Russian, Marxist
– concepts of Chinggis Khan, which were particularly negative in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see chapter six).The image of
Chinggis as a cruel and barbarian oriental despot was easily supported
by medieval Muslim sources, which stressed the great fear that
Chinggis’s subjects had for him, and was therefore highly appealing to
modern Muslim historians.
The revival of the accursed paradigm and the modern appropriation
of Chinggis took a somewhat different form in different Muslim contexts. I will focus on the Arab world (mainly Syria and Egypt) on the one
hand,and Central Asia (mainly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) on the other.
By way of preliminaries, it should be noted that Chinggis’s tyrannical
image is found not just in historical, but also in literary works.The two
Muslim accounts best known in the West to depict him as an arbitrary
despot are those by the Syrian Zakaria Tamer (b. 1931) and the Kirgiz
Chingiz Aitmatov (b. 1928).Tamer’s short stories Genghis Khan and The
Day Genghis Khan Got Angry (cited at the beginning of this chapter) were
published in 1978, and can be read as an allegorical criticism of tyrannical
rule in the contemporary Arab world. Aitmatov’s famous novel The Day
Lasts More Than a Hundred Years includes a legend about Chinggis Khan’s
white cloud, describing how the Great Khan lost Heaven’s favor on his
way to conquer Europe by enforcing inhuman laws such as prohibiting his
subjects from having children till they had completed their conquest task.
The beautiful legend, which includes many details and motives of the
Secret History, depicts Chinggis as an arbitrary ruler of the Stalinist type,
and indeed it was only added to the 1991 edition of the book (originally
published in 1981), following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Arab nationalism arose in the nineteenth century against the background of growing European interference and the Ottoman reforms.At
first it was directed against Ottoman rule in the Arab lands, and the
Mongols were grouped together with “the other” Turks (from the
Abbasid Mamluks of the ninth century to the Ottomans) as those who
bore responsibility for the Arab’s (or Muslim’s) lagging behind the west.
The Mongols, however, held a special place among this group, since the
130 CHINGGIS KHAN
rhetoric of Arab nationalism gave a prominent place to the fall of
Baghdad in 1258.This was marked as the culmination of Arab weakness
and the beginning of their dark age, in which they were politically dominated by non-Arabs. As the grandfather of the destroyer of Baghdad,
Chinggis was portrayed as a barbarian savage who began the demolition
of civilization which culminated in Hülegü’s actions. Moreover, in
most of the nationalistic histories (beginning with Jurji Zaydan’s Tarikh
al-tamaddun al-islami [History of Islamic Civilization] written between
1902 and 1905) the Mongols were excluded from the realm of Islam:
they never managed to establish a long-lived state in the Muslim world
and they never showed any interest in Muslim civilization, being merely
lucky to arrive while it was already declining, mainly due to European
attacks.Those writings also often completely ignored the Islamization
of the Mongols, which would have made them insiders of Muslim, if not
Arab, culture (Zaidan, 1902–1905:4: 204–212; see also Rifa’i 1970;
Huwayri 1996; cf. Hasan 1954: 324–327).
Without the credit for the Islamization of his descendants, Chinggis
remained only an outsider barbarian enemy. But even in that capacity, his
importance was downgraded. In sharp contrast to medieval realities, the
main rivals of the medieval Arab world (and of the Mamluks) in Arab
national literature were not the Mongols but the Crusaders, the alleged
forefathers of the western powers and later the Zionists.Thus one of the
first examples of modern presentations of the history of the Arabs, Durus
al-tarikh al-arabi (Lessons of Arab History) a textbook for
secondary schools composed by Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwazah
(1887–1984), an Arab nationalist activist of Palestinian origin in the
1920s, mentioned the Tatars only in one sentence, as sealing the
Caliphate’s end, and completely ignored them in the section dealing with
the Mamluks.The Crusaders’ wars, on the other hand, are given a whole
detailed chapter (Darwazah 1929; Choueiri, 2000; Haarman 2001). A
certain exception to the neglect of the Mongol threat is the battle of ‘Ayn
Jalut, the most impressive Mamluk achievement against the Mongols.
This is celebrated especially in Egyptian textbooks of the 1950s and 1960s
as the battle which saved Egypt, the Muslim world, and Europe, from the
barbarian Tatars; in the textbooks of the United Arab Republic
(1958–1961) it even appears as a model of Egypto-Syrian cooperation.
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 131
Yet even these books gave more prominence to Mamluk battles against
the Crusaders than to anti-Mongol campaigns. (See, for example, Amin
Sa’id 1959: 8; Shihabi, 1965: 144–145; al-Qawsi 1966: 176–181.)
Recently, however, the Mongols came back to the frontline of the
enemies of Arabs and Islam due to the American invasion of Iraq in
2003. The American siege on Baghdad invoked the memory of thirteenth-century atrocities.Accordingly,Arabic internet sites and articles
compared George W. Bush with Hülegü, his brother Möngke and with
Chinggis himself. A recent Egyptian popular history of the Mongols
(“from their beginning to the battle of ‘Ayn Jalut”) devoted entire pages
to a thorough comparison between the Mongols and the Americans,
both, according to the pious Muslim writer, nations without history
who paved their way to world leadership with heaps of skulls (Native
Americans in the American case) and who have aspired to annihilate
Islamic culture. Islam, as proven by the the ‘Ain Jalut experience, will
eventually be able to defeat its enemies if it revives its unity and its Jihadi
spirit (Sargani 2006: 371–395).This new interest in the Mongols, however, is primarily because Chinggis and his heirs now have became relevant to the Arabs’conflict with the West, an asset which, unlike the
Crusaders, they lacked until the American invasion of Baghdad.
Needless to say, this new genre, stressing Chinggis’s and his heir’s antiIslamic feelings as the main motive for their expansion, also completely
ignores the Islamization of the Mongols.
The exclusion of Chinggis and his heirs from the Muslim world was
easier in the Arabic speaking world than in the Turco-Iranian world, but
there, too, modernism brought about the reconceptualization of
Chinggis as the accursed despot. In twentieth-century Iran the
Mongols, once a legitimate link in Iranian dynastic history, molded into
both a Muslim appearance and a Pre-Islamic Persian one, became a synonym for huge devastation and traumatic alien conquest, which, however, failed to destroy Iranian culture. Although there are several solid
Iranian studies of the Ilkhanid period (notably Abbas Iqbal’s), the period
does not loom large in modern Iranian historiography. In postrevolutionary histories of Iran, the Persian-speaking Jalal al-Din
Khwarazm Shah, Chinggis’s main rival in the Muslim world, is highly
praised and more space is given to Iranian families active under the
132 CHINGGIS KHAN
Mongols than to the conquerors themselves. (e.g. Penahi 2002; Islam
Niya, 2004; Navzari 2004; Mackey 1996: 71).
In Turkey the treatment of Chinggis is more ambivalent.While many
Turkish children are still given his name, Chinggis is not included in
the official Turkish pantheon, and his achievements, e.g. the Yasa, are
ascribed to a Turkic tradition which had formed before him and upon
which he built.The Mongols are treated (in continuation of Ottoman
genealogies) as unsavory relatives, a marginal branch of the Turks, especially when compared to locals such as the Seljuqs or the Ottomans or
even to the non-local Tamerlane, who was at least a good Muslim. (For
example, Türk Ansiklopedisi 1964;q.v.Çingiz Han;ÇingizYasasi; TheTurks
2002, vol. 2; Pope 1997.)
In Central Asia, modern discourses of history and nation first
appeared in the mid nineteenth century,3 but the truly profound change
occurred with the establishment of Soviet rule from 1917 and the
enforcement of Stalin’s concept of ethnic nationalism. Stalin defined
ethno-national identity as composed of common language, territory,
economy and psychological make-up, and the application of this concept to Soviet Central Asia resulted, in the 1920s to the 1930s, in the
establishment of five republics: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan,
Kirgizstan, and Turkmenistan. These newly established political
entities were required to reassert their identities within their newly
created boundaries according to Stalin’s scheme, and the new identities
were detrimental to the image of Chinggis Khan. First, Chinggis was
once again an outsider in terms of language, territory, and religion;
3
Apparent manifestation of these new concerns and the pan-Islamic trend
which accompanied them appears in al-Tawarikh al-bulghariyya, a nineteenth
century work attributed to Husam al-Din b. Sharf al-Din al-Bulghari. This work
was composed in the same region in which the Daftar was compiled a century and
a half beforehand, and became the most popular and widely read historical work
among Volga Ural Muslim throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In this work Chinggis is portrayed as the infidel Khan of China, against
whom the Muslim ruler, Tamerlane, sent his troops after Chinggis had refused to
adopt Islam. Eventually Tamerlane kills Chinggis, thereby representing the
victory of Islam. Here Chinggis is no more the progenitor of Muslim political
order but an alien and infidel enemy. Frank 1998: 78–80.
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 133
second, as a nomad he represented a “primitive” stage of socio-political
development in the Marxist scheme; third, as a putative enemy of the
“Russian nation,” which under Stalin’s rule became the major source
of loyalty for all Soviet citizens, he had no chance of historical clemency
(see chapter six). Anti-Chinggis topoi were quickly disseminated
from Russia into Central Asia, where the vilification of the Khan became
even stronger than in the Arab world, since there were no Crusaders
there to overshadow him. In the official histories of the Soviet Central
Asian republics, therefore Chinggis was often depicted as a bloody
barbarian tyrant who brought about not only notorious immediate
destruction but also long-term stagnation to the history of the
Asian nations.
The collapse of the Soviet Union opened a new period in the history
and politics of the Central Asian republics. It did not bring, however,
major improvement of Chinggis’s image. In post-Soviet Central Asia
territorial nationalism became much more powerfully pronounced
than in the USSR era, and Chinggis therefore remained an outsider,
unfit for the role of national hero, especially where local candidates
were good enough. A comparison of Chinggis’s position in Uzbekistan
and Kazakhstan, both named after people long ruled by his descendants,
is revealing of the impact of contemporary political needs on heroic past
figures. In Uzbekistan Chinggis remained marginal since the country
produced its own hero:Tamerlane. Unlike Chinggis,Tamerlane was not
just local – his birthplace and his capital Samarqand are both inside the
territory of modern Uzbekistan – but also Muslim, and so a much more
appropriate national symbol. Moreover,Tamerlane had been a favorite
hero of Central Asian popular literature from the eighteenth century
onward and he was also a model of personal, authoritarian government
well appreciated by Uzbekistan’s president Karimov. He had left a visible and impressive legacy of monumental building and his “international” fame nearly equals that of Chinggis. Tamerlane therefore
became the father of post-soviet Uzbekistan (even though the historical
Uzbeks had driven his descendants out of Central Asia), and his sculptures replaced those of Lenin and Marx in the central squares of
Tashkent and Samarqand. During this reconstruction of Tamerlane, his
historical debt to Chinggisid concepts was completely forgotten.
134 CHINGGIS KHAN
Instead, Tamerlane is remembered as the one who defeated the
Mongols, just as he did India, Russia, and the Ottomans.4
For the Kazakhs,who did not have a local hero of Tamerlane’s caliber,
Chinggis’s place in the historical tradition is more ambivalent. On the
one hand, Russian and Soviet influence has been much stronger in
Kazakhstan than in Uzbekistan and the former negative attitudes toward
Chinggis and the Mongols are still apparent. On the other hand, while
Kazakh celebrities such as Ablai Khan (r. 1771–81), who led Kazakh
opposition to the Zungars in the eighteenth century, adorn the Kazakh
coinage, they are revered mainly by their descendants.What with the
lack of commonly accepted national heroes, there are voices – mostly
from the ranks of publicists and people from the technical sciences –
who call for appropriating Chinggis. Chinggis’s place, however, is not
based on his position as the revered father of the Jochid princes who
established the Kazakh union but rather on making him local, by claiming he was a Kazakh. The “Kazakhness” of Chinggis is based on the
existence of tribes and clans bearing names of thirteenth-century
Mongolian tribes in modern Kazakhstan, on genealogical manipulations, and on wild etymologies, which suggests that the names of
Chinggis’s forefathers were all Kazakh names. (Such absurd claims, for
example the similarity between the names Yesügei and Issaq, have
recently led a Ukrainian author to claim that Chinggis was a Jewish
descendant of the Khazars [Zinukhov 2005].) Thus the Kazakh amateur
historian Kalibek Daniiarov claims that the Kiyat, both Chinggis’s clan
and a tribe in modern Kazakhstan, was originally a Turkic, Kazakh tribe,
descending from Oghuz Khan.The clan appears in the fifth to seventh
centuries when the Kazakhs allegedly ruled the steppe. In the 970s the
territory of Bodonchar,Alan Qo’a’s son and Chinggis’s ancestor, one of
the leading Kiyat members, was located in the proto-Kazakh Kimek
state in Kazakhstan. In the early thirteenth century the Kazakh Kiyat
tribe was living on the borders of Mongolia, where the Kazakh Temüjin
was born. Later he declared himself Chinggis Khan and returned to
4
Moreover, in the region of medieval Khwarazm, now known as Khiwa or
Qara Qalpakstan in northern Uzbekistan, the main local hero is Jalal al-Din
Khwarazm Shah, whose fame rests mainly on his opposition to Chinggis. This
further contributes to Chinggis’s vilification in Uzbekistan.
CHANGING IMAGES OF CHINGGIS KHAN 135
conquer his homeland Kazakhstan.This speculation enabled Daniiarov
to appropriate all of Chinggis’s achievements for Kazakhstan,dismissing
the claim that Chinggis was a Mongol as a mere myth (Daniiarov 1998:
175; 2001: 17–26, 349–362; http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/
20040406–123017–2002r.htm).The Kazakhness of Chinggis, however,
is highly controversial even in Kazakhstan. Though it found a certain
support among some nationalists in the new Kazakh upper and middle
classes, professional Kazakh historians dismiss it completely and call for
a more “scientific” evaluation of Chinggis’s role in the shaping of the
Kazakh identity, instead of depicting him as the sum of all evil or as the
revered local father. (See, for example, Zardykhan in www.unesco.kz/
kazhistory/001_18.html.)
It is worth noting that the Kazakh Muslim minority in Mongolia had
a completely different explanation for Chinggis’s Kazakhness.
According to this version (which goes back to medieval manipulations),
Temüjin was not a member of the Kiyat tribe.He was not fathered by the
KiyatYesügei, but was in fact the son of the Merkid to whom his mother
was married before Yesügei had kidnapped her. Hence Chinggis was
a Merkid, just like most of the Mongolian Kazakhs (Bulag 1994;
Diener 2004).
In the post-Soviet world Chinggis has found supporters among some
Muslim minorities in Russia, mainly the Tatars, heirs of the Volga
Bulghars.With the end of communist indoctrination, Chinggis and the
Golden Horde regained their heroic status and proved useful for
constructing identities separate from that of the Russians. Thus, for
example, the sixteenth-century Russian conquest of Kazan, currently
the capital of Tatarstan, an autonomic republic inside Russia, had previously been celebrated as one of the great achievement of the expanding
Russian empire, beneficial to all its ethnic groups, but in recent years it
had become a day of mourning in Tatarastan. The day of the battle of
Kulikovo in 1380, the first Russian victory over the Golden Horde, has
been officially commemorated in Russia since 1995 as the day of victory
of the Russian warriors over the Mongols-Tatars. In 2001, however, the
council of Muftis of Russia issued a protest against this celebration,
claiming that it does not contribute to the country’s national unity.The
stress in these views (which has not so far influenced the mainstream
136 CHINGGIS KHAN
Russian assessment: see chapter six) is more on the local heritage of the
Golden Horde, but as a by-product Chinggis is slowly shifting once
more from the accursed despot to the revered father.
Modern dilemmas and manipulations notwithstanding, one should
not ignore the important and multi-faceted role of Chinggis in the premodern Muslim world. The infidel who devastated Muslim lands
became God’s intimate friend,the forefather of many Muslim dynasties,
a source of legitimation for many others and the progenitor of the political and social order in Central Asia. It is hard to think of any other nonMuslim who won such prominence in the post-Muhammad world or
who had received such extensive coverage in Muslim historical and epic
literature. Chinggis Khan’s unique career and enduring legacy certainly
won him a place of honor both in Muslim literature and in the line of the
makers of the Islamic world.
6
A P P RO P R I AT I N G C H I N G G I S :
A C O M PA R AT I V E A P P ROAC H
Born by the fate of the Supreme Tengri
From its beginning creating the supreme State
[Temüjin] caused all those of the world to enter his power
Temüjin became famous as the Great Chinggis Khan
[He] Brought the Five-colored Nations into his power
Set into order the state of the pleasant world
Invited kun-dga’ snying-po, the Supreme Sa-skya Lama,
And was the first to propagate the religion of Buddha.
The Jewel Translucent Sutra (sixteenth century) (Elversklog 1999: 78)
This land so rich in beauty
Has made countless heroes bow in homage.
But alas! Qin Shihuang and han Wudi
Were lacking in literary grace
And Tang Taizong and Song Taizu
Had little poetry in their soul.
That proud son of Heaven, Genghis Khan
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.
Mao Zedong, “Snow”, 1945; http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/
1325/2003–12–26/90@72437.htm; Mao Tse-tung, 1959: 22, 36
137
138 CHINGGIS KHAN
Zingis Khan, whether we regard him as a conqueror or legislator, was, perhaps, the greatest prince that ever appeared in history. He not only secured the
empire of all Asia to his posterity for some ages, but even to this day two thirds
of that immense continent remains in the possession of princes of his blood ...
the Emperor of China, the Mogul of India, the great Chan of Tartary and the
princes of the Krim Tatars derive their blood from Zingis; and it is remarkable
that at one period there were five hundred crowned heads of his race in Asia.
From the advertisement to Alexander Daw’s tragedy Zingis,
presented at Drury Lane theatre, London, 1768; Daw 1769: 1
Chinggis Khan was a maker of the Muslim world, but he has also maintained a strategic position in the making and imagination of other parts
of the world.This last chapter reviews the development of Chinggis’s
image in Mongolia and China and more briefly his position in Russia and
the West, thereby providing a comparative framework in which to view
Chinggis’s fate in the Muslim world.In the non-Muslim realms Chinggis
remains a powerful political symbol, often with strong religious and
cultural overtones, and there too his image shifts between the poles of a
super hero and an arch enemy.
MONGOLIA
Given his continuing importance in the post-Chinggisid Muslim world,it
is somewhat surprising that the Great Khan did not always retain his political prominence in his homeland. In 1368 when Chinggis’s heirs,Yuan
dynasty rulers, were overthrown by the ethnic-Chinese Ming dynasty
and driven from Beijing to Qara Qorum, Chinggis’s name was not sufficient to keep the Mongols united.The political framework in Mongolia,
a series of rival confederations competing for power, prevailed until the
eighteenth century when Qing China, led by the Manchus, took over
Mongolia.The Chinggisid principle was challenged in Mongolia,whereas
it was preserved in the Muslim world. True, Chinggis’s direct descendants, known as the Golden family, continued to adhere to it as well as
practicing the Chinggis Khan cult based on Yuan precedents, and they
usually headed at least one of the tribal confederations of Mongolia.Yet
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 139
their Chinggisid claim was insufficient to assert a leading position in
Mongolia nor was it enough to unite the feuding tribes.
In the late sixteenth century, the search for a broader common
ground led Altan Khan, the Chinggisid leader of the Tümed confederation in Mongolia, to adopt Tibetan Buddhism – thereby creating the
famous title Dalai Lama, the Oceanic Lama, as he called the Tibetan
priest who converted him. The Mongols had adhered to Tibetan
Buddhism when they ruled in China, but abandoned it after the fall of
the Yuan. Reintroduced to Mongolia by the Chinggisid Altan Khan,
Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia was quick to incorporate Chinggis,
giving him a central place in its cult and imagery. Since, unlike Islam,
Buddhism is not an exclusive religion, Chinggis’s shamanic role was
not an obstacle to such inclusion. In sixteenth-century Mongolia, as in
Yuan times, Chinggis was defined as an incarnation of the ancient
Chakravartin, the universal ruler who turned the wheel of the Buddhist
Law (Dharma), modeled after the Indian king Ashoka; but now he was
also connected genealogically to the ancient kings of Tibet and India, and
later to the Buddha himself. He was also portrayed as the incarnation of
the bodhisattva Vajrabani (“holder of the thunderbolt,” one of the more
martial figures in the Buddhist pantheon deriving from the Indian god of
thunder). Due to the quick spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia
from the sixteenth century onward, the Buddhist incorporation of
Chinggis Khan contributed significantly to his popularization as a
symbol not only among his noble descendants but also among Mongol
commoners. It is also in this period that we find Chinggis described as
the founder of many of Mongolia’s customs, from marriage ceremonies
to the best way of treating horses.
The conversion to Buddhism also inaugurated a period of literary
renaissance in Mongolia, where it flourished in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries,before and during Manchu rule.Many epic chronicles, most of them with a strong Buddhist flavor, were composed in this
period and many dealt with the Mongol golden past. In this literature,
Chinggis’s biography went through significant changes in order to make
him better suited for his new Buddhist role. The manipulation of
the inherited Mongol tradition seen here makes that attested to in the
Muslim world seem quite negligible.The ancestors of the Mongols – the
140 CHINGGIS KHAN
Blue Wolf and Fallow Doe of the Secret History – were personalized (just
like they were in Rashid al-Din’s work), and described as descendants of
the Tibetan and Indian kings who arrived in Mongolia from Tibet;Alan
Qo’a was impregnated by the Lord of High Qormuzda, an important
deity in the Buddhist pantheon, thereby making Chinggis a son of God.
Chinggis’s birth was ordained by the Buddha; Chinggis was born not
with a clot of blood but with a seal – the symbol of political leadership,
not of violence; Chinggis was the first to propagate the religion of
Buddha in Mongolia and the one who invited from Tibet the supreme
Sa-Skya lama (summoned by Chinggis’s grandson, Qubilai, in thirteenth-century works), allegedly giving him the final religious authority while retaining political authority for himself. Chinggis’s wars were
meant to save the world from evil kings and many of his battles became
scenes of miraculous combats won by supernatural skills. Thus, for
example, Chinggis’s last battle with the Tanguts was described as a personal combat between Chinggis and the Tangut ruler, decided by shapeshifting: the Tangut monarch transformed himself into a snake, but
Chinggis turned into a Karaudi, the king of all birds; theTangut ruler was
then transformed into a tiger, but Chinggis became a lion, king of all
beasts. Finally the Tangut khan was transformed into a boy; Chinggis
then turned into Qormuzda, the Lord of High, and the Tangut was
exhausted and captured (Sayang Sehen,Erdeni-yinTobchi,cited in Jagchid
1988: 302).The “total war” of the Mongols was therefore turned into a
series of magical confrontations rich in folkloristic details, but omitting
both its strategic and military uniqueness and the devastation it caused.
Even Buddhism, however, was not enough to unite the Mongols, and
their lack of unity, as well as Manchu manipulation of the symbol of
Chinggis (discussed below), were among the main reasons for the Qing
takeover of Mongolia. This took place in different stages, from the
incorporation of the Chahar Mongols, Chinggis’s descendants who
populated southern Mongolia, later known as Inner Mongolia, in 1634,
to the inclusion of the Khalkha confederation of northern or Outer
Mongolia in 1691 and the massacre of the Zunghars (or Oyirads) in
western Mongolia in the mid-eighteenth century. During this period
there were several attempts – mainly led by the non-Chinggisid
Zunghars – to invoke the theme of pan-Mongolian unity, but none of
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 141
them succeeded. Another, initiated by one of the Khalkha Khans after
the Qing had incorporated the Chahar Mongols, involved the selection
of a Bogdo Gegen, a living Buddha, a Mongol boy who would be the reincarnation of earlier great religious figures.The Bogdo Gegen was meant to
emancipate the Mongols from their submission to Tibetan priests and to
become a symbol which would facilitate Mongol unification, both religiously and politically.The first Bogdo Gegen,selected in the late1630s,won
popularity and prestige in the religious sphere, but he was less successful politically, being too closely identified with the khan who appointed
him. In 1757, a Chinggisid was chosen to be the new Bogdo Gegen after a
Khalkha rebellion.The fact that he was a Chingisid improved his chances
of combining political and religious legitimacy. In its capacity as the
Khalkha’s overlord the Manchu-Qing government therefore decreed
that later reincarnations should no longer be sought in Mongolia, but
only in Tibet, which by then was under firm Manchu control. Later, the
Qing fostered an expansion in the number of the incarnations, thereby
further fragmenting the Bogdo Gegen’s authority.
Manchu colonial rule, however, inadvertently contributed to the
resurgence of Mongol unity. While they appropriated Chinggis and
the cultural capital that accompanied him, the Manchus undermined
the traditional leadership and lifestyle in Mongolia in order to facilitate
their rule. They created new administrative divisions, which cut
through the established khanates and limited the seasonal migration
routes. This, combined with the need to finance Qing bureaucratic
apparatus in Mongolia, contributed to the country’s impoverishment.
Concomitantly, Qing encouragement of the further spread of Buddhist
monasteries created a situation in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, about forty percent of the males in Outer Mongolia were monks,
contributing to demographic decline in this sparsely-populated region.
This deteriorating economic situation created opportunities for the
penetration of Russian and Chinese merchants’ into Mongolia, despite
the Manchu’s initial attempts to isolate this country from its neighbors.
In the nineteenth century, when the Manchus, facing a huge population
growth in China and occupied on other fronts, revoked the isolation
policy, a vast Chinese colonization of Mongolia began.This led not only
to the increasing interaction between Mongols and Chinese but also to
142 CHINGGIS KHAN
the further decline of the Mongols’ socio-political status and their loss
of choice pasturelands to the incoming Chinese.The increasing tension
with the Chinese immigrants, and the impact of national ideas arriving
from Russia,contributed to the emergence of a new Mongolian national
identity, directed primarily against the Chinese.
For Mongol nationalism, Chinggis Khan, the most famous native son,
its great unifier who had subdued parts of both China and Russia, was of
course the obvious choice for a national hero.Thus,more than six hundred
years after his death Chinggis transformed, in Almaz Khan words, from
imperial ancestor of his Golden Family to an ethnic hero and national
symbol of all the Mongols (Khan 1995: 248). Aside from retaining his
divine status and his position as culture founder, Chinggis was again hailed
as a political symbol,a great conqueror who had led the unified Mongolians
to international fame. His new role found expression, for example, in the
first Mongol historical novel, The Blue Chronicle (Köke sudur) published in
1871 by Injannasi, a descendant of Chinggis of the twenty-eighth generation from Inner Mongolia.The novel reports Chinggis’s biography according to the Secret History and Chinese sources, and presents Chinggis and his
companions as realistic – even if larger than life – heroes, not as Buddhist
saints. It also introduces many fictional secondary characters, whose
romantic adventures add much to the work’s appeal (Hangin 1973).
The nascent Mongolian national movement did not manage to free
Inner Mongolia from Chinese rule, but it did succeed in securing the
autonomy of Outer Mongolia after the Manchu-Qing dynasty fell in
1911 – the only part of Qing conquered territories which remained
outside China’s control. In 1911 Mongolia became a theocracy led by
the Bodgo Gegen, and Buddhism, not nationalism, remained the main
cement bonding the Mongols. Yet Mongolia’s autonomy was only
achieved by Russian and later Soviet support. Mongolia was swiftly
engulfed in the Russian civil war, which brought about the 1921 revolution, when the Soviet Red Army, allegedly checking China’s attempts to
retake Mongolia, established a pro-Soviet government under the nominal rule of the restored Bodgo Gegen.With his death in 1924 Mongolia
became the People’s Republic of Mongolia, a Soviet satellite.
Under the Communist regime, the Mongols were not allowed to use
their national symbol, Chinggis Khan. In a way similar to his fate in Soviet
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 143
Central Asia, under the dominating Soviet narrative Chinggis was reinterpreted as an enemy of mankind even in his homeland. In the 1930s to
1940s Chinggis’s name became virtually taboo in Mongolia. Both
Buddhism and the Chinggis Khan cult were repressed; the Cyrillic alphabet replaced the script that Chinggis had chosen for his people in 1204;
and historians who had tried to portray Chinggis in a positive light were
dismissed and exiled. Instead, modern heroes such as Sühebaatar
(1893–1923), the leader of the 1921 revolution; Choibalsan, the
Mongolian prime-minister (1936–1952); and his friend and model,
Joseph Stalin,were glorified in Mongolia. The History of the People’s Republic
of Mongolia, which was published in 1954 in Mongolian and Russian,
referred to the period of Chinggis Khan as a reactionary, backward and
feudal age.Yet even in the official Socialist writing, Chinggis’s vilification
was not complete. The feudal oppressor of the masses was grudgingly
accorded recognition for the creation of the Mongolian state and thus for
providing impetus for social development.His campaigns of conquest and
the massacres which accompanied them, however, created obstacles for
further social development, therefore defining his reign as reactionary.
Moreover, the official Socialist historiography, due to its stress on the
national character of the People’s Republic of Mongolia, paradoxically
strengthened the political dimension of Chinggis’s figure as opposed to the
religious and folkloristic ones.Official propaganda notwithstanding,however, Chinggis retained much of his reputation on the popular level.
Chinggis’s popularity was manifested in the huge celebrations planned on
the occasion of Chinggis’s 800th birthday in 1962. However, despite the
relaxation of the political climate in the post-Stalin U.S.S.R. and its
satellites, the celebrations were canceled at the last moment, either on
Moscow’s orders or under the direction of the alarmed Mongolian
Communist Party, and their organizers were imprisoned.
The relaxation of communist indoctrination in Mongolia since the
1970s and especially under the glasnost of the 1980s has led to a gradual
recovery of Chinggis’s position.This tendency has reached new heights
since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the new – and this time real
– independence of Mongolia. Post-1991 Mongolia has embraced
Chinggis as its national symbol without restraint.He appears on coinage
and postage and it seems as if nearly everything – from Ulaanbataar’s
144 CHINGGIS KHAN
Mongolian Stamps Commemorating the 750th anniversary of
the Secret History of the Mongols, 1990
international airport to different brands of alcohol – is named after him.
More surprising, the same Chinggis who was depicted as a barbarian
and reactionary tyrant is now playing a leading role in Mongolia’s peaceful – and highly praised – transition from communism to democracy.
Modern Mongolians stress Chinggis’s role as creator of a united Mongol
state – his political and civil legacy – as opposed to his military one.
Chinggis’s conquests are described as a mere “product of their time”
which suffices for explaining the cruelty and devastation that accompanied them. In contrast, his policies are said to have set the stage for consultative institutions (the Quriltai, the inspiration for the name of the
contemporary Mongol parliament, Hural) and participatory government, the rule of law, independent judiciary and equality before the law
(the Yasa /Jasaq) and even human rights (Enkhtuvshin and Tsolmon
2003). In fact, some western researchers also attribute the quick shift
from communism to democracy to Mongolia’s nomadic political culture, which goes back to Chinggis Khan (Sabloff 2002). Contemporary
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 145
Mongols also stress Chinggis’s universal importance, and his significant
contribution to economic and cultural exchange between East and
West, and many international activities are planned for the celebration
of the 800th anniversary of the 1206 quriltai in 2006. Currently the
Mongols also take pride in the growing popularity of their national hero
in other parts of the world, mainly China and the West.
CHINA
The Mongols only conquered parts of the Muslim world, but they conquered the whole of China, their conquest being the first time that the
whole Middle Kingdom fell into foreign hands. But while in certain
periods Mongol rule did indeed exemplify traumatic barbarian conquest
for the Chinese, the appropriation of the Mongols there began earlier
than in the Muslim world and was much more complete. Moreover, due
to the firm incorporation of Inner Mongolia, the most populated part of
Chinggis’s homeland, into the Chinese polity beginning in the seventeenth century, and further, since more Mongols now live in China than
in Mongolia, Chinggis remained a highly relevant symbol in modern
China.In contrast to his lot in the contemporary Muslim world,Chinggis
is currently one of China’s most celebrated national heroes.
In 1263 Chinggis posthumously acquired an imperial status in China.
On the eve of the establishment of the Yuan dynasty and the final conquest of southern China, Chinggis’s grandson, Qubilai Khan, declared
himself a Chinese emperor and conferred on his grandfather the title of
Taizu, the “Supreme Ancestor.” Chinggis therefore became the revered
father of the Yuan dynasty, and was placed at the apex of the Chinese
world order, as the recipient of the Heavenly Mandate, which enabled
him to found a dynasty. His unprecedented conquests and Qubilai’s
eventual reunification of China were interpreted as definite proof of his
firm hold on the mandate. Moreover, Chinggis’s political prominence
was reinforced by religious belief and practice:Yuan emperors, following steppe traditions of ancestor worship, performed a special ancestral
cult for Chinggis Khan and, with the adoption of Buddhism, also
declared him an incarnation of Chakravartin (the king who turns the
146 CHINGGIS KHAN
wheel of the Buddhist law), a position he later re-assumed in Mongolia,
as mentioned above.
The Ming dynasty which succeeded the Yuan in 1368 preserved
Chinggis’s position as theYuan founding father,and even the Ming founder
himself affirmed the validity of Chinggis’s mandate.The first chapter of
the Yuan shi (the official Yuan history), written under the Ming in 1370,
begins with Chinggis’s ancestors (commencing with Alan Qo’a’s miraculous impregnation by light and the subsequent birth of Bodonchar, the
wolves and other animals excluded) and ends with Chinggis’s death. It
retains Chinggis’s Buddhist titles, but stresses his military genius. The
chapter is, however, very laconic in the description of the conquests, and
mostly ignores the devastation which accompanied them. It also gives
more space to the events in China than to the western campaign. This
Sinocentric point of view generally characterizes the Yuan shi, which
barely acknowledges the Eurasian facet of theYuan dynasty and gives only
sporadic details on the other Mongol khanates. As a result, the Ming
authors of the Yuan shi, while preserving Chinggis’s position as the
dynasty’s founder, also belittled his career, placing him in the same category as that of the founders of the Liao or Jin dynasties: a non-Chinese
who established a Chinese-like dynasty that ruled for a relatively short
period, serving most importantly as a precursor to the Ming.
In the late Ming, however, after a series of defeats that the Mongols
inflicted on the Chinese (and which led among others to the construction of the so-called Great Wall of China), the Yuan was conceived differently.While still retaining its legitimate dynastic status, theYuan was
reinterpreted by many scholars as a traumatic experience, a historical
aberration, when China was ruled by foreign barbarians instead of ruling them. Moreover, insofar as Yuan inherited the mandate of the Song
dynasty (960–1279), this meant that its true history should begin with
Qubilai, who conquered the Song, and not with Chinggis, who was
henceforth increasingly marginalized.
Chinggis came back into the limelight in China when it was once more
conquered from Inner Asia, this time by the Manchus, heirs of the
thirteenth-century Jurchens, who overthrew the Ming and established the
Qing dynasty (1644–1911).The Manchus had spent much of their predynastic period in close proximity to the Mongols, and borrowed from
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 147
them most of their political culture, including the Chinggisid principle.
After subduing the Mongol Chahars, Chinggis’s direct descendants, in
1634, the Manchus appropriated their symbols of authority, such as the
Chinggisid seal and the cult of Chinggis Khan. Like Tamerlane and other
non-Chinggisid rulers in the Muslim world, the Manchus married
Chinggisid princesses and portrayed themselves as Chinggis’s legitimate
heirs. Moreover, the Manchus also adopted Tibetan Buddhism and were
therefore able to fashion another type of bond with Chinggis.The Manchu
fore-fathers,Nurgachi (d.1626) and HongTaiji (d.1643),presented themselves as Buddhist incarnations of Chinggis and Qubilai,and these positions
were continuously held by later Manchu emperors ruling from Beijing.
Building on their religious and genealogical (if only marital) connection to Chinggis, the Manchu portrayed themselves as Chinggis’s true
heirs, employing the Chinggisid principle as one facet of their complex
legitimacy, in a way reminiscent of its use by Muslim rulers of
Chinggisid descent.This appropriation proved successful: in 1691 the
Manchus, relying also on their military might, managed to convince the
Khalkha Mongols to support the “Chinggisid” Manchus against the nonChinggisid Western Mongols, the Zunghars (Oyrats). With the
Khalkha’s help the Manchus eventually managed to triumph over the
Zunghars, thereby achieving what many Chinese dynasties attempted to
do in vain throughout history – subdue the nomads of Mongolia.The
Mongols became part of the five peoples who made up the bulk of
the subjects of the Qing dynasty, the others being the Manchus, the
Chinese, the Tibetans and the Muslims.
For the Manchus, Chinggis was useful not only for ruling the
Mongols but also for governing their Chinese subjects. From the beginning of their imperial enterprise, Nurgachi and Hong Taiji showed great
interest in the history of the foreign conquerors of China who had preceded them, especially the most successful ones – the Mongols, whom
they saw as a source of historical lessons which would facilitate their
own future conquest and rule of China. In 1644, on the eve of the
Manchu’s entry into Beijing, the official histories of the Liao, Jin and
Yuan were translated into Manchu. In the historical precedents which
the Manchus cited in their internal and external correspondence in the
first half of the seventeenth century, they gave the place of honor to
148 CHINGGIS KHAN
Chinggis Khan as the ultimate example of a foreigner who had held the
mandate of heaven in the Middle Kingdom.
The continued interest of the Manchus in the history of China’s foreign dynasties also led to a large increase in the historical study of theYuan
in Qing China.This was mainly the work of Chinese scholars, who, while
frequently focusing on the role of Chinese literati under Mongol rule,
also studied the history of the Mongol themselves. Since Chinggis’s biography was part of Yuan history, it was routinely included in general histor-ies of China compiled under the Qing and in the more specific studies
devoted to the Mongols, which combined information from the Secret
History with that of Yuan private histories, memoirs and inscriptions.
In the nineteenth century this field was given a boost by the discovery
of Muslim sources on the Mongols.The discovery was made mainly by
Chinese diplomats who gained second or third hand access to Muslim
sources on the Mongols while serving in Europe. Pleased to find
common historical ground between China and theWest, they translated
parts of these sources into Chinese and the extracts were incorporated
into later works on Yuan history.1 This enabled the Chinese to broaden
their knowledge on Chinggis and to give more space to his western campaigns.The XinYuan shi (the new official history of theYuan), a culmination of Qing efforts, published only under the Chinese republic in 1922,
included one chapter on Mongol origins and two chapters on Chinggis’s
reign (until 1206 and afterwards). The vicissitudes of Chinggis’s conquests received more space in the XinYuan shi, yet as dynastic founder he
still enjoyed a positive historical assessment.
The intense Chinese nationalism of the early twentieth century,
initially directed against the Manchus but hostile to any non-Chinese
1
The pioneering work was Hong Jun’s Yuan shi yiwen zhengbu jiaozhu
(An Annotated Edition of Translated Supplements to Yuan History). Hong
(1840–93), a Chinese diplomat who had served in Berlin and St. Petersburg,
translated a collection of passages mainly from the translation of Rashid al-Din’s
work and from D’Ohsson’s multi-volume work (published 1834–35) on the
Mongols (see below) commenting on their relation to Yuan history. His work
was a source for major Chinese compilations such as Tu Ji’s (1856–1921)
Mengguer shiji (Historical Records on the Mongols) and Ke Shaomin’s
(1850–1933) Xin Yuanshi (the new official history of the Yuan).
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 149
domination, caused the Mongol conquest and the Yuan period once
again to be perceived as a trauma to the Chinese, and later to serve as a
popular analogy for the Japanese occupation of the 1930s to 1940s.The
very right of theYuan to rule was questioned, and some historians even
suggested that it should be deleted from the Chinese dynastic circle,
which should pass directly from the Song dynasty to the Ming.
Ironically, however, at the very time when he was being ousted from
his position as Chinese emperor, Chinggis regained his position as a
useful political symbol in China.This was because in the early twentieth
century Chinese nationalists were trying hard “to pull the nation’s
skin over the imperial body,” that is to say, to retain Chinese control over
non-Chinese territories occupied by the Qing, which included Inner
Mongolia and to which the nationalists also hoped to add Outer
Mongolia. The resurrection of Chinggis commenced in the 1930s,
during the increasing competition for the control of Inner Mongolia
among Chinese nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) and
his Nation’s Party (the Guomindang, previously abbreviated as KMT),
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the Japanese occupation
forces and their puppets. In 1935 Chiang Kai-shek was the first to
declare Chinggis a Chinese national hero: Chinggis, a Chinese emperor
regardless of his ethnicity, was the first Chinese to conquer Russia, and
his heirs’ long domination over Moscow was taken as a historical precedent for Chiang Kai-shek’s ultimate victory over the Chinese communist party, which Chiang saw as an extension of Moscow. In the same
year, however, the emerging CCP leader, Mao Zedong, told the
Mongols of Inner Mongolia that only by fighting together with the
Communists could the Inner Mongolian nation preserve its glorious
Chinggisid heritage. In marked contrast to Soviet Communist rhetoric,
in which Chinggis was depicted in extremely negative terms, that of the
Chinese communist party incorporated Chinggis Khan as a hero and
used him as a symbol for its own ends.
In 1939, when the Chinese feared a Japanese occupation of all Inner
Mongolia, the Guomindang transferred Chinggis’s “relics” from their
Ordos shrine eastward, into the province of Gansu.The Communists,
however, eventually secured Mongol support, mainly since they
promised autonomy to Inner Mongolia, a policy implemented already
150 CHINGGIS KHAN
Chinggis Khan’s mausoleum in Inner Mongolia, China (photograph: Michal Biran)
in 1947 before the Communists’ final victory in 1949, which was
greatly facilitated by the Mongols’ support.2
After the Communists’ victory, Chinggis’s position in the People’s
Republic of China was modified according to the PRC’s ideological shifts
and its nationalities policy. It began with a honeymoon in the early 1950s
when the state established Chinggis’s mausoleum in the Ordos, where
his relics (now returned from Gansu) were stored. By erecting the mausoleum the PRC,just like the Qing dynasty beforehand,appropriated the
Mongols’ cultural capital, and freely manipulated the character of the
Chinggis ritual. Thus the Chinese government permitted only one
annual ceremony for Chinggis, as opposed to the monthly rituals that
2
Interestingly, the Japanese also took part in the race for appropriating
Chinggis. Japanese tradition identified Chinggis Khan with a tragic Samurai,
Minamoto Yoshitsune (1158–1189), whose elder brother Yoritomo ordered
him to commit suicide, fearing his popularity. The legend says that Yoshitsune let
his vassal die for him, while he escaped northward, managed to get onto the continent and into Mongolia, where he appeared as Temüjin and eventually became
Chinggis Khan.
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 151
had prevailed before, and this ceremony was fixed to the summer,
whereas the main ceremony had previously been held in the spring.The
whole ceremony lost much of its religious symbolism and became an
entertaining event celebrated with sport matches, dancing, music and
propaganda stressing the unity of the nationalities. This Communists’
bear hug,which was accompanied by a vast Chinese colonization of Inner
Mongolia, was unwelcome for many of the Mongols in China, yet even
they had to admit that Chinggis’s lot was by then much better in China
than in outer Mongolia, where his cult was completely forbidden.
Chinggis was briefly relegated to his classical Soviet position of tyrantwarlord in the late 1950s, but his fortunes were restored when the SinoSoviet split of the early 1960s turned him into a useful political weapon.
Articles in leading Chinese academic journals, while still condemning
Chinggis’s campaigns in northern China, praised his progressive role as
the unifier of the Mongolian tribes, the founder of Mongolian statehood,
promoter of East-West relations and the one who started the move
toward the reunification of China, and the conquest of Russia. Chinggis’s
800th birthday in 1962 was therefore celebrated with great pomp in
China – and even in Taiwan – in sharp contrast to its suppression in the
People’s Republic of Mongolia and despite Soviet protests that “Beijing
wiped the blood from Chinggis Khan’s hands and gave him a new and progressive role in Chinese history,” preferring “a national-bourgeoisie
stand” to proletarian internationalism (Hyer 1966: 703).
Chinggis’s restoration in China, however, suffered a new setback
during the vicissitudes of the Cultural Revolution (1967–1976).There
were concerted attacks on the traditional heritage of the Mongols, as on
that of the other nationalities in China, including the Chinese themselves.
The Mongols were put under pressure to integrate into Han culture and
their resistance led to the death of more than twenty thousand Mongols;
the Chinggis mausoleum was pillaged, some of its relics destroyed, and
the whole site became a salt factory. This violence ended however,
with the beginning of reform policy in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping.
The new shift in the minorities policy since the early1980s brought
about the restoration of Chinggis’s mausoleum and the renewal of the
annual celebrations there under the banner of “Mongols and Han are
one family.” New Chinese national policy, which emphasizes China as a
152 CHINGGIS KHAN
common homeland of all of its fifty-six nationalities, had a dramatic
effect on the re-conceptualization of Chinggis and his heirs. Now the
history of each “minority” is considered an integral part of Chinese history, and the historical heritage of the Mongol nationality occupies a
pride of place within the larger Chinese heritage.The Mongol conquest
is no longer considered as traumatic, or even as foreign rule, but rather
as a time during which the Mongolian “minority” ruled over the whole
country. Moreover, thanks to its inclusion of Tibetans, Uighurs, and
Muslims (all of whom are important parts of China’s contemporary
mosaic of nationalities) into a “Chinese” state, the Yuan is seen as a key
period in the development of China’s multi-ethnic identity, a period
which contributed decisively to the cohesiveness of the Chinese nation
(Qiu 2002: 143).This new interpretation of history has paved the way
for a huge increase in Chinggis’s popularity in China since the 1990s, a
phenomenon paralleled by similar developments in Outer Mongolia
and the West.This in turn has resulted in a China-Mongolia competition
on appropriating Chinggis.
The Sino-Mongol contest over Chinggis is manifested, for instance,
by the race to discover the Khan’s tomb. In the year 2000 Chinese
archaeologists announced that they had found the tomb of Chinggis on
Chinese soil – in the Altai mountains in Xinjiang, an announcement
which Mongolia refused to accept – and which has in fact never been
proven. In 2003 an American-Japanese expedition working in Mongolia
solemnly declared that it had found the tomb in central Mongolia, some
300 km northeast of Ulaanbaatar, a discovery of which Chinese archaeologists remain skeptical. The government of Mongolia, unwilling to
disturb the dead, has not so far allowed further excavation of the site, so
both identifications remain conjectural. At the same time, the Chinese
have tried to make the best of the mausoleum in Inner Mongolia, claiming that it is more important than the secret location of the real tomb. In
2003 the authorities announced their intention to enlarge the existing
mausoleum, and to make this out-of-the-way locale into a major tourist
attraction which will include a vast “Chinggisland,” a huge amusement
park. In 2004, as the project encountered financial difficulties, the
Chinese government considered turning it into a private Chinese enterprise. This caused huge protests in both Inner and Outer Mongolia,
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 153
against the attempt “to sell Chinggis to Chinese capitalists,” protests
which revealed that even Chinese manipulation of Chinggis has its
limits.
Nowadays, Chinggis is enjoying the government’s favor and is starring as one of China’s most prominent national heroes. Chinggis’s wax
sculpture stands in the National History Museum in Beijing next to the
most prominent emperors in Chinese history; he is praised as the first
Chinese who conquered Europe, and many books, films and TV series
celebrate his achievements, mainly his positive role in unifying the
Mongols and enlarging Chinese territories. This successful Chinese
appropriation of Chinggis is an impressive testimony to the remarkable
ability of Chinese nationalism to transform a national trauma into a
national triumph.
RUSSIA
China’s successful appropriation of Chinggis Khan is even more striking
when compared to the Great Khan’s position in Russia, another region
conquered by the Mongols which also became the homeland of certain
(though less ample) Mongolian groups, notably the Buryat and the
Qalmuq. In Russia, Chinggis remains the sum of all fears and a key
“Other” against whom Russian nationalism coalesced. This position
began with the memory of the bloody Mongol conquest of Russia,
which, unlike the situation in the Muslim world and China, remained
the only foreign conquest of the country throughout its history. The
religious factor also played a significant role: Russia’s chronicles
depicted Chinggis and theTatars from an explicitly religious perspective
as infidel outsiders motivated by the devil who sought only to harm
Orthodox Christians.The conversion to Islam of the Golden Horde, the
Chinggisid state which ruled in Russia till 1480, made things even
worse, since it meant that the Christian Russians were subject to the
inferior and hated Muslims, an especially insulting situation for a people
in whose identity the church had such a prominent position. In order to
avoid facing the humiliating implications of that situation, Rus’ chronicles chose what Halperin termed “an ideology of silence” (Halperin
154 CHINGGIS KHAN
1985), namely avoiding as much as possible the issues of Tatar conquest,
sovereignty, or rule, and reducing Russo-Mongol relations to a series of
bloody Tatar “raids.” This background facilitated the delegitimization of
Mongol rule, known in Russia as the Tatar Yoke, after the fall of the
Golden Horde in the early sixteenth century. Russia’s disengagement
from the Steppe and from Asia was reinforced in the early eighteenth
century with its accelerated westernization, introduced by Peter the
Great (r.1672–1725),despite (or because of) Russia’s great institutional
debt to the Golden Horde (see chapter four).The notion of the “Tatars”
as the “Other” was reinforced by confrontations of Imperial Russia with
Asian opponents such as the Ottomans, Central Asian Muslims and the
Japanese, being employed as late as 1969 during Sino-Soviet military
clashes. European notions of superiority and later racist and colonialist
ideologies were introduced into Russian historiography. Not only were
the Mongols the sum of the Asian stereotypes against which Russia’s
new identity was built,they were also blamed for the difficulties Russian
westernization encountered. Even more than in the heyday of Arab
nationalism, in Imperial Russia, especially in the height of Russian
nationalism in the nineteenth century, the Tatars were blamed for anything and everything that went wrong with Russian history or contemporary life: isolation from Western Europe, “missing” the Renaissance
and Reformation, economic and cultural backwardness, stagnation and
even seclusion of women. Russian historical writing in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, based on the Rus’ chronicles, denied any
credit to the years of the Golden Horde rule, refusing even to incorporate the studies of Russian orientalists and archaeologists who dealt –
very successfully – with different aspects of the Golden Horde culture.
In the twentieth century this national paradigm converged with Marxist
views of the Mongols as an undeveloped, reactionary, and feudal nation.
The Mongols continued to be portrayed as the greatest disaster in
Russian history, and Chinggis Khan, a genius of destruction and an
enemy of mankind, was compared to Hitler and, at the height of the
Sino-Soviet dispute, also to Mao as a major threat to Russia’s safety and
world peace.
Post-Soviet Russia did not rush to revise these positions.While some
academic works gave a more balanced evaluation of Russia’s relations
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 155
with the Golden Horde, and acknowledged the Mongols’ positive role
in the history of Russia’s minorities such as the Tatar and Buryat (see, for
example, Halperin 2004: Gorskii 2000), a recent provocative book,
which claimed, among other things, that the Mongols never conquered
Russia and that the Horde was just another name for Mother Russia,
won much more popularity (Fomenko 1994). Chinggis finds sympathy
among Russia’s Mongolian and Turkic minorities, both Muslims –
notably the Tatars (see chapter five) – and Buddhists, mostly among the
Mongolian Buryats and Qalmuqs. Among the contemporary Buryats,
for example, who in the Soviet period were perceived as Chinggis’s victims, he is nowadays celebrated both as a part of a previously suppressed
Buddhist culture and as a powerful political symbol, both of the Buryat
nationality and of a pan-Mongol unity (Skrunnikova 2005). More
surprisingly, Chinggis is also popular in the circles of the extreme right
and among Russia’s post-Soviet communists, both connected to the
Eurasian movement. Eurasianism, the counter-current of the dominant
Russian discourse, claims that Russia was neither European nor Asian
but a world unto itself.This view, best represented by Trubetzkoi’s 1925
article “The Legacy of Genghis Khan:A Perspective on Russian History
not from the West but from the East,” (Trubetskoi 1991) argued that
Chinggis Khan was the father of Russia: the Mongol conquest was a central event of Russian history; its impact on Russia was not entirely
negative; Russian expansion eastward was one of the most important
aspects of Russian history; and Russia’s unique position as connecting
East and West should become a major factor in determining its future
policy. The Eurasianists enjoyed a certain popularity among Russian
émigrés in the 1920s but remained marginal to the general historical
discourse in Russia. Today, contemporary Eurasianists in Russia’s
extreme right are still presenting themselves as Chinggis’s “spiritual
children.” They see Russia as a legitimate successor to Chinggis’s
empire that should continue his mission of uniting the Eurasian geopolitical space through further expansion under an autocratic leadership (see website http://arcto.ru/modules.php?name = News&file =
article&sid = 1182; Khazanov 2003). Despite these exceptions, on the
whole Russia has not appropriated Chinggis, but rather kept him in the
villain’s role.
156 CHINGGIS KHAN
THE WEST
Chinggis never conquered Western Europe, yet his unique career
awarded him a certain place in Western collective memory. Chinggis
was an outsider, an oriental ruler, whose figure shifted between conflicting images, first due to the actual Mongol threat on Europe and later
due to fluctuating images of the East, especially of China (to which he
was connected from Marco Polo onward) and of the Ottomans (who
were widely considered to be offspring of the Mongols). In religious
terms, Chinggis changed from the Scourge of God and the Antichrist in
the first half of the thirteenth century into a true believer in God in the
fourteenth-century Travels of John of Mandeville and then to an example of
the rule of reason and talent that ignores religion in the early
Enlightenment. Politically, Chinggis shifted from being an ideal, wise,
and sometimes even romantic ruler, in Polo’s and Chaucer’s works of
the fourteenth century, to the oriental despot par excellance in the late
Enlightenment. His positive image was at its height in the fourteenth
century, with the growing European contacts with Asia, after the
Mongols ceased to be a threat to Europe and before the Ottomans
became one, and in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century as
part of the Europeans’ enthusiasm for China and their coming to terms
with the Ottomans, as well as with European awareness of the continuous Chinggisid legacy in many parts of Asia.The early eighteenth century also saw the publication of the first biography of Chinggis in
Europe, Petis de la Croix’s (1622–1695) Histoire du Grand Genghizcan
(The History of Genghizcan the Great), published after his death, in
1710, and translated into English in 1722.The author, a “secretary and
interpreter to the King [of France] in the Turkish and Arabic languages,”
wrote his book in response to a French minister’s request. The latter
became interested in Chinggis as a model of rulership after hearing de la
Croix’s translation of an Ottoman poem about the Great Khan. In general, the Ottomans were the main channel through which western historical study of Chinggis began, and Muslim sources were the main
building blocks for retrieving the Khan’s biography. In de la Croix’s case
this resulted in a rather balanced and highly influential historical
narrative.
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 157
The early eighteenth century also saw the Jesuit translation of a
Chinese biography of Chinggis based on a Qing compilation, and
in addition he became the hero of two successful European plays:
Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine (The Orphan of China, 1755) and
Daw’s Zingis (1768), the enthusiastic advertisement for which is cited at
the head of this chapter. This picture, however, changed drastically
from the late eighteenth century, with the later Enlightenment’s disillusionment with China and the East and the growth of the notion of western superiority. Montesquieu (1685–1755) and Adam Smith
(1723–1790) portrayed Chinggis as a savage, barbarian tyrant and he
soon became a model for oriental despotism. In the nineteenth century
this was augmented with racial concepts, in which the Mongols gave
their name to the yellow race, identified with servility, stagnation
and primitivism; and Down’s syndrome (Trisomy 21), a genetic defect
associated with low intelligence and even degeneration, came to be
known as Mongolism. Indeed the major work devoted to the Mongols
in the early nineteenth century, D’Ohsson’s four volume Histoire
des mongols depuis Tchinguiz Khan jusqu’a Timour Bey ou Tamerlane (History
of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to Temür Bey or Tamerlane)
depicted Chinggis and the Mongols in a rather grim light. D’Ohsson, an
Armenian diplomat in the service of the Swedish embassy in
Istanbul and later in Paris, who worked mainly with Muslim sources
(including many Mamluk Arabic works), commemorated Chinggis as
the one who said: “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his
enemies and drive them before him, to ride their horses and take away
their possessions, to see the faces of those who were dear to them
bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his
arms”(D’Ohsson 1834–1835: 1: 404, based on Rashid al-Din). The
despotic and cruel rule of the Mongols, he noted, made an extraordinarily ugly picture, but it was needed for an understanding of the
events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (D’Ohsson
1834–1835: 1:V–VII).
Even though he had never completely lost his charm as the noble
savage and the genius warrior, Chinggis continued to be depicted as a
cruel barbarian despot, associated first and foremost with death and
destruction, from the nineteenth century onward. It was this image of
158 CHINGGIS KHAN
him which passed to the Middle East, to be adopted by Arab and Iranian
nationalists, as discussed in chapter five.
Chinggis’s image has, however, undergone a dramatic change in the
last part of the twentieth century and in the first years of the twenty-first
century. Globalization, the new universal supranational ideology,
enabled the West to appropriate Chinggis as an insider, not an outsider,
the father of the first globalization. Chinggis became one of the makers
of the modern world, including the West, and therefore a much more
complex and popular figure than before.The reemergence of the East as
a significant power in world history, a renewed fascination with the
exotic “other,” and the major advance of academic study of the Mongols
in recent decades also contributed to his growing popularity. In 1995
the Washington Post, perhaps jokingly, elected Chinggis as “the man of
the (second) millennium,” noting that he “has combined humanistic
civilization and barbarism in one body perfectly” (see website
http://www.sconet.state.oh.us/Communications_office/Speeches/1999/osb
a.asp), and Chinggis loomed large in millennial conclusions of other
forums too. This does not mean that Chinggis has lost his association
with death and destruction – when the American president was called
Genghis Bush on the eve of his invasion to Iraq it certainly was not a
compliment – but this is no longer his only or major characteristic.The
Oxford scientists’ claim of 2003, that they had discovered a specific
DNA of the Y chromosome common to some 16 million males in the
Old World who are thought to be Chinggis’s descendants, a discovery
which led western reporters to crown Chinggis as the most prolific
lover the world had ever encountered, also considerably added to his
charm (Zerjal et al. 2003: 717–721).
Also influential were a series of art exhibitions, notably the
Metropolitan Museum of New York’s 2003 exhibition “The Legacy
of Genghis Khan:Courtly Art and Culture inWestern Asia,1256–1353”
and Bonn’s 2005 “Dschingis Khan und seine Erben,” which
portrayed the artistic dialogue under the Mongols, and a number
of books and TV films which celebrated Chinggis’s achievements,
stressing – like the present study – that his legacy has been far more
complex and constructive than that of havoc and massacre on a
large scale.
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 159
Eight hundred years after the 1206 quriltai, Chinggis Khan is very
much alive in the world’s collective memory, despite the fact that the
nomadic world in which he rose to power and in whose terms he should
be understood has almost vanished completely. Moreover, the plasticity
that his figure acquired throughout these eight hundred years is impressive: Chinggis is known as one of the great enemies of culture, as a cultural ancestor, and as a great promoter of cross-cultural contacts.
Religiously, Chinggis is conceived as an important Buddhist deity; the
locus of shamanic cults; the Antichrist; a friend of God; a Muslim
hanif (early monotheist); and an arch-enemy of Islam. Chinggis is also
invoked as a genius conqueror and strategist; a savage barbarian and a
sophisticated law giver. Politically, he shifts from the oriental despot par
excellence up to the harbinger of democracy, celebrated in between as the
unifier of Mongolia; the harbinger of Chinese unification and of Eurasian
unity; the revered forefather of Chinese and Muslim dynasties and the
arch enemy against which other states and empires coalesced their identity. Chinggis was a Mongol; nowadays he is also Chinese, Kazakh,
Buryat and “man of the world” – the father of the first globalization.
This multiple image and its continuous evolution is partially
explained by the phenomenal scope of Chinggis’s career which made
him remembered in each of the realms on which he had an impact –
Mongolia, China, the Muslim world, Russia, and Western Europe.
Another reason is the range of activities on which Chinggis left an
enduring mark: military exploits; establishing an enduring and functioning empire; promulgation of law; and causing massive destruction,
which eventually, however, also laid the foundation for future intensive
cross-cultural contacts. Moreover, Chinggis did not remain only an historical figure: his life has inspired a host of epic myths, legends, and literary works from Buddhist compilations to English and French plays,
Hollywood movies, Chinese TV series, Muslim chronicles, eposes and
religious works, and historical novels from around the world. These
helped to keep him in the social memory and magnified his symbolic
power as an individual who is seen as transcending all others and therefore can become a focus of social and political collectiveness.
While in the West the use of the Chinggis symbol has been merely an
intellectual pursuit, in Mongolia, China, and even Russia, and certainly
160 CHINGGIS KHAN
in the Muslim world, the Great Khan has played an important role in the
construction of political identities and entities, at least in certain periods. Chinggis has been invoked not only for justifying conquests but
mainly for legitimizing political power in its different forms. His diverse
role in the various parts of the world has been determined mostly due to
his changing value for constructing collective political identities – universal, dynastic, tribal, and national. The unprecedented scope of his
achievements has made him an extremely useful model for governments with universal aspirations, such as Tamerlane’s empire,Yuan and
Qing China, and even Mamluk Egypt and Imperial Russia, in both the
Mongols served as the key “other” against whom the empires asserted
their identity. The Chinggisid principle, another by-product of
Chinggis’s unique success, secured his position as a revered progenitor
of dynasties and tribes wherever his descendants retained power and as
long as history remained perceived in dynastic or genealogical terms,
i.e., into the nineteenth century in certain parts of the world, notably
Central Asia.The rise of nationalism as the world’s major political ideology therefore had an enormous impact on Chinggis’s appropriation.
Theoretically, nationalism limited Chinggis’s relevance only to places
where there were Mongols, and indeed it turned him into a persona non
grata in most of the Muslim world.Yet it also made him a national hero
not only of Mongolia, but also of the whole of China and, more hesistantly, also of other Mongolian people, such as the Buryats, the
Qalmuqs, and even among the Turkic and Muslim Tatars and Kazakhs.
The rise of modern universal, supra-national, political concepts, mainly
Communism and globalization, also in turn influenced Chinggis’s image
and his position as a national symbol, either for worse, in the case of
Communism, or for better, in globalization’s case.The changing political circumstances continue to shape and reshape Chinggis’s image in different parts of the world.
Due to his marginalization in the modern Muslim world, and
because he was not a Muslim, Chinggis is not automatically associated
with the Muslim world.Yet, as this book has attempted to demonstrate,
Chinggis and his heirs have been closely connected with the world of
Islam and have played a significant role in its pre-modern configuration.
Muslims were among Temüjin’s first supporters, even prior to his
APPROPRIATING CHINGGIS 161
enthronement as Chinggis Khan, and they played a certain role in the
success of his conquests. More significant, it was Chinggis’s campaign
into the Muslim world which completed his transformation from a successful nomadic chieftain on the fringes of China to world conqueror of
an unparalleled scale.The speedy annihilation of the Khwarazm Shah’s
power not only drastically enlarged the territories and manpower under
Chinggis’s control, but also enhanced his prestige and bolstered his public image as someone pre-destined by Heaven to conquer the entire
world. Moreover, this invasion also closely exposed him to a sedentary
culture different from that of China, the major reference point of
Mongolian nomads throughout history. The stock of administrative,
military and cultural tools under Chinggis’s disposal, when he turned to
organize his newly acquired empire, was therefore much more diverse
than that which had been available to former nomadic conquerors.The
creative use Chinggis and his heirs found for the diverse traditions of
their subjects was soon to become one of the main hallmarks of their
multi-cultural empire. Muslim cultural heritage was highly appreciated
by the Mongols, not least due to the nomadic background of the Muslim
Turks, and it became an important component of the Mongol imperial
enterprise.
This should not make us forget that the Muslims also suffered
immensely from Chinggis’s campaigns and from those of his heirs, the
infamous destruction of Baghdad being the most renowned example.
Yet after recovering from the initial shock of the Mongol invasions,
many Muslims were quick to exploit the new opportunities offered by
the Chinggisid age, in terms of trade, employment, travel, cultural and
scientific exchange, and conversion. The Mongol period was a key
period in the expansion of Islam not least because in three out of four of
the Mongol khanates Islam managed to conqueror its conquerors:
namely, the Mongols embraced Islam.
The Islamization of the Mongols opened a new stage in the relations
between Chinggis Khan and the world of Islam. Chinggis’s political
legacy – notably the Chinggisid principle and theYasa – were adopted by
his Muslim heirs and even by some non-Chinggisid rulers and dynasties,
and new Muslim people coalesced around different Chinggisid
branches or around names of Chinggisid princes. The history of
162 CHINGGIS KHAN
Chinggis and his heirs became an integral part of Muslim historiography
and of other literary genres, and Chinggis’s position as the revered
forefather of many Muslim dynasties and peoples won him a place of
prominence in Muslim literary tradition, unchallenged in the postMuhammadan world by any other non-Muslim.
The rise of nationalism, as discussed above, drove Chinggis into the
fringes of the Muslim collective memory and returned him to his initial
role of the ultimate villain. But this modern vilification and marginality
should not disguise the debt the Muslim world owes to the nomadic
conqueror who tumbled into it in the early thirteenth century: the
legacy of the Mongols in the Muslim world includes, aside from huge
amounts of death and desolation, a long-lasting cultural effervescence,
thriving artistic and scientific exchange, and booming international
trade, as well as new and enduring forms of legitimacy and law, considerable expansion of the world of Islam, and the emergence of new
Muslim peoples. In terms of political culture, ethnic composition, and
intellectual and artistic traditions, it is impossible to understand the
post-thirteenth century Muslim world without taking into account the
Chinggisid legacy.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL
The bibliography includes the main secondary sources consulted for the
different chapters (with preference to works in English, which are more
accessible), as well as full references to works mentioned in the notes.
Here I would like to refer to some general works as well as to mention
some of the primary sources about Chinggis, which are available in
English translation.
The best introduction to the Mongol empire is still David O.
Morgan’s The Mongols (Oxford, 1986; an updated edition is anticipated
soon). For a quick glance on what’s new in the field of Mongol studies at
least up to 1999, see Peter Jackson (2000), “The State of Research:The
Mongol Empire, 1986–1999” Journal of Medieval History, 26: 189–210.
The works of Thomas T. Allsen, the most prominent historian of the
Mongol empire active today, deserves a special mention – and are well
attested in the bibliography below – since they, most notably his Culture
and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge, 2001), contributed
immensely to a more complete understanding of the Chinggisid enterprise.Two recent collected volumes, which contain many useful articles
on the Mongols, are also worth mentioning.These are The Mongol Empire
and its Legacy (Leiden, 1999), edited by Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David
O. Morgan, and Mongols,Turks and Others:Eurasian Nomads and the Outside
World (Leiden, 2005), edited by Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran.
From the many biographies of Chinggis, the most scholarly is Paul
Ratchnevsky’s, Genghis Khan: His Life and Times (trans.Thomas Haining,
Oxford, 1991), the English translation of which is even better than the
1983 German original. Among more recent Chinggis’s books, Jack
Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New
163
BIBLIOGRAPHY 165
and H. Cordier. Reprinted, NewYork, 2 vols).A selection of translated
paragraphs on the Mongols and a very useful annotated bibliography of
translated sources on the Mongols in general appear in George Lane’s
Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule (Westport, CT, 2004).
CHAPTER 1
Allsen,Thomas T. 1996.“Spiritual Geography and Political Legitimacy in the
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J. Oosten. 116–135. Leiden.
Barfield,Thomas J. 1989. The Perilious Frontier:Nomadic Empires and China.
Oxford.
Barthold,V.V. 1968. Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion. trans.V. Minorsky,
London. Fourth edition.
Bentley, Jerry, 1993. OldWorld Encounters. NewYork.
Biran, Michal 2005. The Qara Khitai Empire in Eurasian History:Between China
and the IslamicWorld. Cambridge.
Buell, Paul D. 1992.“Early Mongol Expansion in Western Siberia and
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1–32.
Christian, David 1998. A History of Russia,Central Asia and MongoliaVol.1.
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Golden, Peter. B. 1982.“Imperial Ideology and the Sources of Political Unity
amongst the Pre-Chinggisid Nomads of Western Eurasia,” Archivum
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Ibn Khaldun, cAbd al-Rahman 1957. Kitab al-cibar. Beirut. 7 vols.
Khazanov,Anatoly M. 1984. Nomads and the OutsideWorld. Cambridge.
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166 CHINGGIS KHAN
CHAPTERS 2 AND 3
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CHAPTER 4
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INDEX
(Arrangement of subheadings is alphabetical, except under Chinggis Khan, life and
military career, where they are arranged in page number order)
Arghun Khan 121
Arigh Böqe 80, 81
Armenia 68, 78, 81
army, Mongol 37, 56, 85; war against
Khwarazm Shah 56; leadership in
70; organization and discipline of
13, 41–3, 70–1; treatment of
soldiers 40; use of defectors 38, 50,
53, 57, 71
Arslan Khan 49
art 90–1; exhibitions on Chinggis 158
artisans, use of in Mongol empire 52, 57,
58, 66, 86, 95
Assassins, annihilation of 78–9, 113
Astrakhan 84
astronomy 87
atabegs 21
Atsiz Khwarazm Shah 22
Ayalon, D. 43
‘Ayn Jalut, battle of (1260) 79, 130
Ayyubids 25, 92
Azerbaijan 20, 58, 59, 64, 78, 81, 88
’Abbas Iqbal 131
Abbasid Caliphate 14, 18, 22; Mongol
attack on 79, 100, 113; Muhammad
Khwarazm Shah and 25, 55
’Abdallah Khan 104, 105
Ablai Khan 134
Abraham 119
Abu al-Fadl 123
Aden 92
Afghanistan 60, 62
Africa, islamization of 94, 97
Agriculture 8, 67
Ahmad (financial adviser to Qubilai) 96
Aitmatov, C. 129
Alan Qo’a 29–30, 116, 118, 140, 146;
compared to Mary 116–17, 118
Akbar (r. 1556–1605) 123
‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad 22
Aleppo 79
Alexander the Great 47, 59, 108, 109, 115
Almaliq 49
Altan Khan (Jurchen emperor) 24, 32, 50
Altan Khan (Mongol leader who adopted
Buddhism) 139
Ambaghai (cousin of Qabul Khan) 31, 50
Amitai, R. 119
Ananda (grandson of Quibilai) 96
Anatolia 19, 20, 25, 78, 81
anda (blood brothers) 10; of Chinggis 33,
40
Anushtegin 22
Arab nationalism 129–32
Babur 83, 105
Baghdad 19, 99; conquest of 79, 98–9,
130
Baiju (general) 78
Balasaghun 17
Baljuna Lake 38, 125
Balkh 105
Bamyan 60
Barulas tribe 122, 125
174
INDEX 175
Beijing (see also Zhongdu) 99
Bekter (Chinggis’s brother) 34
biographies of Chinggis Khan 32–3, 127,
142, 156–7
Black Sea 88
The Blue Chronicle 142
Bodonchar 30, 134, 146
Bogdo Gegen 141, 142
Bolad 89, 90
Books of Chinggis (Chingiz nameh) 127
booty 50, 51, 57, 88; distribution of 40
Borjigin clan 30, 31, 35
Börte (Chinggis’s wife) 33, 34, 35
Buddhism 29, 53, 147, 155; Chinggis and
139–40, 145–6, 155; in Mongolia
81, 139, 141, 142; Qara Khitai and
17, 18
Bukhara 19, 20, 67; capture of 57, 105
al-Bulghari, Husam al-Din 132
Burqan Qaldun mountain 29
Buryats 155, 160
Bush, G.W. 131, 158
Caliphate see Abbasid Caliphate
Catherine the Great 84
Caucasus 62, 64
censuses 78, 86
Central Asia 14, 17, 18, 19, 94; Chagadaid
Khanate 81, 82, 101; conquest of
62–3, 66–7; image of Chinggis in
132–6; institutional legacy 102–3,
104–5; Muslims from, in India 97;
Muslim population 17, 18, 94;
Tamerlane and 82–3; trade with 88,
89; Uzbeks in 84
Chaghadai (Chinggis’s son) 56, 57, 58,
69, 125
Chagadaid Khanate 81, 82, 97, 101; Islam
in 81, 94, 95
Chaghatay language 83, 102–3, 104–5
Chahar Mongols 140, 141
Chang Chun 67, 68, 86
charisma 71, 73
Chaucer, Geoffrey 156
Chiang Kai-shek 149
China (see also names of dynasties) 24, 86;
Chinggis’s expansion to 48–52;
communists and Chinggis 149–50;
Cultural Revolution attack on
Mongols 151; image of Chinggis in
145–53; and international trade 88,
89; Islam in 94, 95–6; Khitans in
15–16; Mongol administration of
66, 67; Mongol raids into 31;
nationalism in 148–9, 160; preMongol warfare 65; use of foreign
specialists 86–7
Chinggis Khan: assessments of:
demonization of 129, 130–1, 133,
143, 149, 154, 157; image of, in
China 145–53; image of, in Russia
153–5; image of, in the Muslim
world 108–36; marginalization of,
in the modern Muslim world
128–36, 160; Mongol nationalism
and 142, 143–4; as one of makers of
modern world 158; Western views
of 156–8; depictions of, in
Muslim literature 109–11;
asceticism of 119–20; atrocities of,
as will of God 112, 113–14; as
enemy of Islam 109, 111, 114, 129;
as father of Muslim dynasties 121–7;
monotheistic elements of origins of
114, 116–17, 118; as part of divine
plan 112–14; as prophet 120–1;
relationship with God 118–20;
shamanistic elements of origins of
114–15, 116, 117–18; life and
character: genealogy 30, 31; birth
and origins 33, 114–18, 140; early
life 33–4; marriage 33, 34, 35;
murder of half-brother 34; nökers
35–6, 41; given title of Khitan 36;
from Temüjin to Chinggis Khan 39,
41; appearance 40; political skills
40, 70–1; as administrator 40, 41,
42–4, 66; and Yasa 43–4; as shaman
176 CHINGGIS KHAN
Chinggis Khan: assessments of (cont.):
44–5, 118, 120; religious tolerance
44–5, 68; and the supernatural 45,
140; appointment of successor
55–6; use of foreign specialists 56,
57, 62, 66, 71–2; death and burial
61–2, 152; assignment of territory to
family members 68–9; success of
73; public image 73, 161;
descendants 77, 158; interest in
commerce 87–8; wisdom 110,
111; as blacksmith 115; and
Buddhism 139, 140, 145–6, 155;
800th birthday celebrations 143,
151; mausoleum 150, 152;
military career: khan of Mongol
tribes 35–6; and Jamuqa 35, 36,
37; alliance with Toghril 35, 36, 37;
attack on Merkids 35; fights Tatars
36, 37; treatment of defeated
enemies 37, 38, 39, 52, 57, 58, 60;
loyalty to 38, 40; territory of 38,
47, 54, 62; and Naimans 38–9,
45–6; bodyguards 39; planning of
campaigns 39, 56, 71; reorganization of army 41–3, 70–1,
85; imperial guard 42; opposition to
45–6, 52–3; conquest of Xi Xia
empire 48–9; submission of Uighurs
49; conquest of Jin empire 49–52;
challenge from Güchülüg 52–3;
conquest of Qara Khitai 53–4; and
Khwarazm Shah 54–60; capture of
Bukhara 57, 105; siege of
Samarqand 57–8; treatment of
conquered cities 51, 52, 57, 58, 60,
63–4; war against Tanguts 61, 140
Chinggisid principle 102–4, 109, 138–9,
147, 160
Choibalsan, Khorloghiyin 143
Chormaqan (general) 78
Christians 28, 29, 55; and conquest of
Baghdad 79; in Russia of Golden
Horde 153–4
commissioners 66–7
communism 144, 149–50; influence of,
on image of Chinggis 160
conquest 52–63; treatment of cities 51,
52, 57, 58, 60, 63–4
court etiquette 105
Crimea Khanate 84
cross-cultural exchange 85–7, 89–90;
arts and 91–3; trade and 87–9
Crusaders 25, 130–1
currency 90–1, 106
Daftar-Chingiz-namah (‘The Book of
Chinggis’s Legend) 117–18, 121,
126–7
Dalai Lama 139
Damascus 79
Daniiarov, K. 134–5
darughachis (commissioners) 66–7
Darwazah, Muhammad ‘Izzat 130
Delhi 83, 97
destruction [of cities] 51, 57, 58, 60,
63–4, 65, 98–9
diplomatic practices, Yasa and 105
D’Ohsson, C.M. 157
Dow, Alexander 157
Egypt 25, 127–8, 130–1; Mamluk Egypt
79, 100, 160
Eltüzer Khan 125–6
emirs 82, 83
Ergene Qum myth 115–16
ethnic changes, Mongol influence 100,
101–2
Eurasianiam 106, 155
Europe, Mongols and 88, 156, 157
firearms 70, 106
food 87
foreign specialists 56, 57, 62, 66, 71–2,
85–7, 101
forest tribes 29, 39, 46, 52
Gabriel/Gibril 117, 118, 121
INDEX 177
Gaochang kingdom 18
geopolitical changes 98–101
Georgia 78, 81
Ghazan Khan 89, 94, 114
Ghaznavids 19
Ghurids 24–5
globalization 160; Chinggis as father of
158, 159
God, Chinggis’s relationship with 118,
119–20
Gog and Magog 115
Golden Horde 81, 83, 127; fall of 84;
historical memory of 135–6; Islam
in 81, 94–5, 106, 153–4; legacy of
101, 102; in Russia 81, 101, 106,
153–4, 155; and trade 88, 89
governors of conquered territories
52, 64, 66–7
The Great Treasures (Kunuz al-A’zam)
127
Great Wall of China 50, 146
Güchülüg 46, 52–3, 113
Gujarat 97
gunpowder 70
Gurkhan, of Qara Khitai 17, 39, 52–3
Güyüg 78
Hai Yun 68
‘Hanifism’ 119, 120
Hö’elun (Chinggis’s mother) 33, 34
Hong Taiji 147
Hülegü (Chinggis’s grandson) 78–9,
80–1, 86, 122
Hungary 15, 76, 78, 81
hunting 8, 9, 23, 29, 70, 126
Hussein, Saddam 1
Ibn Battuta 91–2, 97, 98
Ibn al-Dawadari 122
Ibn Taymiyya 120–1
Ibn Wasil 120
ideology of steppe empires 12–13
Ilkhanate 80–1, 82, 100, 122; culture in
89–90; immigrants from in India 97;
Islam in 81, 94, 95, 121; paper
money 90–1; and trade 88, 89
imperial guard 42
India: expansion of Islam into 97; Ghurids
in 25; Moghul dynasty 83, 103;
Tamerlane and 82; Yasa in 104–5
Indian Ocean 88
Inner Mongolia 7, 142, 149,150
institutional legacy 102–3, 106
inter-regional states 14–23, 26; sedentary
influence of 15
iqta’ 20, 106
Iran 22, 25, 62, 64, 78; art in 90; Buwayhid
dynasty 19; capital 99; Ilkhanate in
81, 89–90, 90–1, 95, 100, 122; image
of Mongols in historiography 131–2;
institutional legacy of Mongols 106;
Islam in 81, 114; persecution of
Buddhism 95; trade with 89
Iraq 81, 100; American invasion 131;
al-Jazira 25, 78, 99
Irtish valley 69
Islam: conversion to, in Mongol empire
94–8; expansion of 93–8;
identity of 102; in khanates 76, 81,
94–5
Isma’il 86
Italian city states, trade with 88, 89
Ivan the Terrible 84, 103
al-Jabarti 128
Jadaran clan 33, 39
Ja’far Khwaja 50–1, 66
Jalal al-Din Khwarazm Shah 59–60, 78,
86, 131
Jalayir tribe 41
jam (postal stations) 76, 89, 106
Jamuqa 33, 35, 36; death 39; enthroned
as Gurkhan 36–7
Japan, appropriation of Chinggis 150
Japheth, as Mongol ancestor 114, 117
Jasaq see Yasa
Java, islamization in 98
al-Jazira 25, 78, 99
178 CHINGGIS KHAN
Jebe (general) 37, 42, 50, 60, 68; attack
on Qara Khitai 52–3; pursuit of
Khwarazm Shah 57, 58–9
Jews 119, 120
Jin dynasty 16–17, 24, 28, 29;
annihilation of 78; attacked by
Chinggis 49–52; and Mongols
31–2, 36
Jochi (Chinggis’s son) 35, 56, 58, 81;
death of 69
Jochi Qasar (Chinggis’s brother) 34, 38, 45
Judaism 13
Jurchens 14, 16–17, 49–50, 51, 52
juridical authority 44
Jürkin clan 36
Juwayni, ‘Ata Malik 27, 33, 57, 74,
93–4, 105; pro-Muslim image of
Mongols 113
Juyong pass 50–1
Juzjani, Minhaj al-Din 97, 115
Kaifeng, Jin court moved to 51
Kashgar 19, 53
Kazakhs 84, 102, 160
Kazakhstan 62, 82, 132; image of
Chinggis in 133, 134–5
Kereyids 28, 36, 37–8, 42; alliance with
34–5
kesig (imperial guard) 42
Khalka confederation 140, 141, 147
Khalka river, battle of (1223) 59
Khanate of the Great Khan (see also Yuan
dynasty) 80, 81
khanates 80–2, 102; Islam in 76, 81,
94–5; Mongol administration
99–100; and trade 88
Khanbaliq (Beijing) 80, 95
Khaqanate 12–13
Khazars 13
Khitans 17, 23, 101, 102; allied with
Mongols 38, 51; governing in China
15–16; surrender to Jurchens 17
Khurasan 24, 59, 99; devastation of 60,
64; Seljuqs in 21, 22; Timurids in 83
Khwarazm 21–2, 58, 81
Khwarazm Shah 14, 21–2, 24–5, 54,
55–61; depicted as responsible for
Mongol invasions 112–13; Mongol
revenge on 119
Kirgizstan 17, 53, 82, 132
Kiyat lineage 125, 134, 135
Kizil Kom desert 57
Kulikovo, battle of (1380) 83, 135
landholding 106
Lattimore, O. 62
legal code see Yasa
legitimation, through Chinggis 103, 109,
111, 122–8
Lewis, B. 65
Liao dynasty 14, 15–16, 17
literacy 44
Lithuania 84
Majd al-Din Baghdadi 113
Malay, islamization in 98
al-Malik al-Afdal ‘Abbas b. ‘Ali (King of
Yemen) 92
Mamluks 18, 20, 104, 122; in Egypt 79,
100, 160
Manchuria 6, 14, 15–16, 24, 80
Manchus 141, 146–9; as heirs of Chinggis
147
Manichaeism 13
manuscripts, illuminated 90
Mao Zedong 149
Marco Polo 87, 89, 91, 92, 97, 98, 156
marriage alliances 49; tribal 10, 23
Mary, mother of Jesus, compared to Alan
Qo’a 116–17, 118
massacres 56, 57, 58, 60, 63; at Utrar
54, 55, 113
Mausoleum, of Chinggis Khan 150, 152
medicine 87
Mediterranean Sea 88
Merkids 29, 36, 42, 102, 135; battle with
35; Chinggis as a 135; coalition with
Naimans 39, 45–6
INDEX 179
Merv 86
military institutions 106
military intelligence 56, 71
military knowledge 72
Ming dynasty 82, 106, 146
Mirkhwand 109
mobilization of people 85–6, 89
Moghul dynasty 83, 103
Moghulistan 82, 83, 84, 99
Möngke (Chinggis’s grandson) 78–80,
86, 98, 122
Mongol empire 76, 80; administration of
66–7, 76, 78; divided into khanates
80–1, 99; geopolitical changes
99–102; globalizing effect 85–93;
languages of 66, 75, 93; legacy of
imperial culture 75; restoration of
damage 65, 67
Mongolia 7, 80, 81, 82, 88; Buddhism in
81, 139–40, 141, 142; Chinese
colonization of 141–2; image of
Chinggis in 138–45; independent
143–4; Inner 7, 142, 149, 150;
institutional changes 41–6; Islam in
94; literary renaissance 139–40;
nationalism in 142–3, 160; nomadic
empires 11–12, 14–15; Outer 7,
140, 142, 149, 151; population of
85; re-organization of army 41–2;
reorganized by Chinggis 41–6; in
Russian civil war 142; as Soviet
satellite 142–3; supremacy of
Chinggis 38, 39; tribes in 9–11,
28–32
Mongols 6–7, 29–32; Americans
compared with 131; Arab
nationalism and 129–30, 131;
cruelty of 63, 64–5; diet of 120;
islamization of 161–2; legacy from
predecessors 22–3; loyalty to
Chinggis 38; origin myths 29, 31,
114–15; predecessors 14–23; and
Qara Khitai 18
monotheization of Chinggis 111, 112–21
Montesquieu, Charles de 157
Morgan, D. 43, 68
Moscow 84, 99
Muhammad, the Prophet 109, 110, 121
Muhammad Khwarazm Shah 22, 24–5,
54–5; Chinggis and 54–5, 56; defeat
of 58–9
Munis, Muhammad 125–6
Muqali (general) 42, 52
Muscovy 84, 101, 103; Chinggisid
principle in 103–4
Muslim literature, depictions of
Chinggis in 109–136; as enemy of
Islam 109, 111, 114, 129; as
legitimator of political order 124–8;
as monotheist 112–21; origin myths
114–18, 140; universal histories
109, 127
Muslim world: arts in 90, 91; Chinggis’s
conquests in 53–61, 62, 63–9;
image of Chinggis in 160–2;
knowledge in 89–90; religious life,
post-conquest 67–8; Turks in
18–21
Naimans 17, 28–9, 36, 42, 102; coalition
with Merkids 39, 45–6; defeat of
38–9
Najm al-Din Ghazi 112
al-Nasir, Caliph (1185–1225) 22
nationalism 3, 129–32, 142, 148, 151,
153, 154, 160, 162
Nishapur 60
Nogais 84, 101
nökers (companions) 10; of Chinggis 35,
41, 42
nomadic empires 11–12; relations with
sedentary states 11, 14, 26, 62,
64–5
nomadism 7–12, 102
Nurgachi 147
al-Nuwayri, Shihab al-Din 119–20
Oghuz Khan 115, 116, 134
180 CHINGGIS KHAN
Oghuz tribe 19, 20, 21, 22
Ögödei (Chinggis’s son) 43, 56, 57, 69;
administration of 76, 77–8;
appointed successor to Chinggis 55,
72, 125; as Great Khan 76, 78
Ögödeids 78, 81, 122
Öljeitu Khan 89–90
Ong Khan (Toghril) 34–5, 36, 38;
alliance with Temüjin 36–7; death
of 38; and Jamuqa 37
Onggüds 29, 39, 41, 50
origin myths 29, 31, 114–15
Orkhon valley 28, 38, 76
Ottoman Empire 100, 103, 156;
depiction of Mongols in 115;
historiography 128; law of 105
Ötukän mountains 13
Oyirads 29, 41, 140, 147
Palestine 79
Pelliot, P. 39
Persia (see also Iran) 22
Persian language 93, 100
Peter the Great 104, 154
postal stations 76, 89, 106
printing 91
prophet, Chinggis as 120–1
psychological warfare 71
Qabul Khan (Chinggis’s great-grandfather)
31, 123
Qachulai (ancestor of Tamerlane) 123
Qaidu (Mongol ancestor) 31
Qaidu (Ögödei’s grandson) 81
Qangli tribe 22
Qara Khitai empire 17–18, 21, 24, 28;
conquest of 52–3; and Khwarazm
Shahs 22, 23, 52
Qara Qorum 13, 76, 80, 88, 99
Qarachar (ancestor of Tamerlane) 123,
125, 126
Qarakhanids 14, 18, 19–20, 25
Qarluqs 49, 53
Qazwini, Hamdallah Mustawfi 116
Qing dynasty (see also Manchus) 82, 146,
147; interest in Chinggis in 148,
150, 160; takeover of Mongolia
138, 140, 141
Qipchaq steppe 21, 81
Qipchaq tribes 22, 25, 101, 102; defeat of
58, 59
Qonggirad 29, 33, 37, 41; alliance with
Yesügei 33, 34; Chinggis as
legitimator 125–6
Qubilai Khan (Chinggis’s grandson) 78,
81, 140; declares himself a Chinese
emperor 145; as Khan of Yuan
dynasty 80, 95, 96, 122, 146
quriltai (grand assembly) 144; in 1206
39, 41, 43, 44
Qutula (son of Qabul Khan) 31
Rachewiltz, I. de 33, 36,39, 43, 164
raids 48–52
Rashid al-Din 32–3, 89–90, 109,
113–14; on origins of Chinggis
114–15, 116
Rasulids 92
record keeping 44
religious tolerance 68, 94, 95
rhinoceros, in Afghan mountains 61
Russia 62, 78, 84, 101; Chinggisid
tradition in 103–4; commemoration
of battle of Kulikovo 135; conquest
of 59; Eurasianism in 155; Golden
Horde in 81, 101, 106, 153–4, 155;
image of Chinggis in 153–5, 160;
Tamerlane and 82
Sa’d al-Dawla 121
Safawids 99, 127
Samanids 14, 19
Samarqand 20, 56, 57–8, 67
Sanjar, Sultan 21, 22
Sarai 84
Sasanid empire 100
Sayyid Ajall (governor on Yunnan) 96
Secret History of the Mongols 32, 33, 35, 41,
115, 116, 122, 164
INDEX 181
sedentary states 8, 11, 14, 15, 161;
nomadic conquest of 26, 62, 64–5
Seljuq empire 14, 18, 19, 25, 78, 115;
administration of 20–1
Semirechye 113
semuren 86
Senggüm (son of Ong Khan) 37–8, 49
Shabankarah’i, Muhammad b. ‘Ali 119,
121
Shahrukh 104, 122
shamanism 11, 13; Chinggis and 44; and
origin myths 114–15, 116, 117–18
shari’a 43, 104–5, 120
Shengwu qinzheng lu 32
Shiban (son of Jochi) 122
Shigi Qutuqu (Chinggis’s brother) 44
Siberia 81
siege engineers, use of 56, 86
Silk Road 24, 48, 88, 89
Smith, Adam 157
Song dynasty 15, 16, 17, 24, 50
South East Asia, islamization of 94, 97–8
Stalin, J. 102, 132, 133, 143
statecraft, Mongol legacy 102–7
steppe people (see also nomadism) 8;
Chinggis and 62–3; dispersal of
101–2; ideology of 12–13
al-Subki 110–11
succession struggles 122, 125
Sufis 82, 95
Sühebaatar, D. 143
Sumatra, islamization in 97
supernatural, Chinggis’s connection with
45, 140
Syria 25, 79
Tabriz 99
Tajikistan 62, 132
Tamer, Zakaria 108, 129
Tamerlane 82–3, 101, 104, 106, 126,
127; fame of, in Central Asia 132,
133–4; genealogy of 117, 122–3,
125–6; invasion of Golden Horde
84; legitimation of 117, 122–3, 125
Tanguts 24, 56, 101; attacks on 48–9;
Chinggis and 38, 140; rebellion of
61
Tarmashirin Khan 97
Tatars 28, 42, 101, 130, 154; Chinggisid
genealogy 103, 126–7; defeat of
37; image of Chinggis among
135–6, 160; and Mongols 31, 32,
36
taxation 106
Tayichi’ud clan 34, 35, 37
Teb Tengri 39, 44–5, 68
Tekish Khwarazm Shah 22
Temüge (Chinggis’s brother) 45
Temüjin (later Chinggis Khan) see Chinggis
Khan
Tengri (sky god) 11, 12–13, 29;
Chinggis’s consultations with 45
Tibet 80, 152
Timurid renaissance 83
Timurids 83, 84, 122–3, 126, 127
Toghril (later Ong Khan) see Ong Khan
Toqtamish Khan 83–4
Tolui (Chinggis’s son) 56, 59, 60, 69, 78,
122
Töregena (widow of Ögödei) 78
trade 87–9; Chinggis’s concern with
routes 54; maritime 88–9, 97; Silk
Road 24, 48, 88, 89; Tanguts and
24
traders 66, 141; and islamization 95–6,
97–8
Transoxania 21, 86, 125; conquered by
Qarakhanids 19; governance of 64,
67; Khwarazm Shah and 25, 52;
Mongol invasion 56, 57; Tamerlane
and 82, 83; Uzbeks in 84
Travels of John of Mandeville 156
tribes 9; break-up of 41–2; inter-tribal
relations 10–11; marriage alliances
10; migrations 8; structure of
9–10; succession system 9
Trubetskoi, N.S. 155
tsunami strategy 64, 71
182 CHINGGIS KHAN
Tumanay Khan 123, 125
Turco-Mongolian elite 82, 95, 101
Turcoman 20, 21
Turkestan 80
Turkey, historical treatment of Chinggis
132
Turkic empire 12, 13, 18–22
Turkmenistan 62, 132
Turks (see also Turkic empire, Seljuk
empire, Ottoman empire) 6, 7, 12,
14, 115
Uighur empire 12, 13, 18, 99
Uighur script 29, 44, 72
Uighurs 18, 23, 29, 101, 152; alliance
with Chinggis 49, 53
Ukraine 78
al-‘Umari 116
universal histories 109, 127
Urgench 58, 67
USSR (see also Russia) 132–3
Utrar 56–7; massacre 54, 55, 113; siege
of 56–7
Uzbekistan 21, 62, 132, 133; image of
Chinggis in 133; legacy of
Tamerlane 133–4
Uzbeks 83, 84, 101–2, 105, 122, 127;
Chinggisid genealogy 103; depiction
of Mongols in 115
Volga region 88
Voltaire, François 157
Wahid al-Din 68
warfare 23; psychological 71
Washington Post 158
Wassaf 121
Weishao Wang 50
West, image of Chinggis in 156–8
Western Liao dynasty see also Qara Khitai
14, 17
wolf, in ancestry myth 29, 114
women: capture of 57, 58; kidnapping
of 35; role of in nomadic states
10, 23
Xi Xia empire see also Tanguts 24, 48–9,
61
Xin Yuan shi 148
Xinjiang 82
Xiongnu steppe empire 12, 13
Yalawach, Mahmud 67
Yasa 43–4, 104–5, 114, 161
Yazdi 117, 122
Yelü Ahai 67
Yelü Chucai 67
Yelü Dashi 17
Yemen, King’s Dictionary 92–3
Yesügei (Chinggis’s father) 31, 33
Yoshitsune, Minamoto 150
Yuan dynasty 82, 138; Chinggis and 145,
146; Ilkhanate and 89, 90; later
Chinese perceptions of 148, 149,
152, 160; Muslims in 96; Qubilai
and 80, 95, 96, 122, 146; ruled
through foreign specialists 86, 87
Yuan shi 32, 146
Yunnan 96
Zaydan, J. 130
Zheng He 96
Zhongdu (later Beijing) 50, 95,152; siege
of 51
Zungaria 69
Zunghars 134, 140, 147