Storm from the east, p.3
Storm from the East, page 3
Meanwhile, larger political moves were afoot. In typical Chinese fashion the Chin, having become irritated by their Tartar clients’ growing insolence, enlisted the help of To’oril and Temuchin to act as mercenaries and remove the Tartar nuisance. The Mongols, eager to avenge themselves on their old enemy, threw themselves into the task. The subsequent defeat of the Tartars not only bathed Temuchin in further glory, but also dramatically altered the balance of power on the steppe. In gratitude for a job well done, the Chin honoured those responsible, bestowing a nominal title upon To’oril and renaming him Ong (Wang) Khan. (As the histories of this period of Mongol history were written and corrupted with stories from other cultures, Ong Khan soon became the best-known Christian prince of the East, and the name Ong or Wang later became confused with the word ‘John’, which helped nurture the seed of a great Christian myth.) Temuchin was also ennobled, receiving a minor title.
Although he was by now something of a military celebrity, he was content to remain in Ong Khan’s service. Together they waged campaigns across the steppe, from the Altai to the Khinghan Mountains. But their growing power and influence soon attracted enemies, and Jamukha, whose enmity towards Temuchin had only intensified, was quick to exploit this. He gathered round him an alliance of discontents – the Merkids, the Naimans, what was left of the Tartars, the Tayichi’uds and even Temuchin’s mother’s tribe, the Unggirad. The war that followed, an apparently uneven match between the armies of the Ong Khan and virtually all the rest of the steppe tribes, was fought during the winter of 1201–2. Jamukha’s confederation was badly organised, and sections were easily picked off and dispersed. The campaign came to a climax with the massacre of virtually the entire Tartar army in the foothills of the Khinghan Mountains, a revenge attack for the murder of Temuchin’s father, Yesugei.
SUPREME COMMANDER
As a result of these wars, Ong Khan’s Kereyid confederacy, staunchly supported by Temuchin’s Mongols, had successfully taken control of the eastern steppe. Yet as the campaign continued, the trust between the Ong Khan and his protege began to disintegrate. After the elimination of the Tartars, Temuchin had felt the time was right to seek a marriage alliance with the Ong Khan: Temuchin’s eldest son Jochi would receive the Ong Khan’s daughter as wife. The Ong Khan, irritated by his vassal’s impertinence, not to say his ambition, dismissed the idea outright. But the old man had also begun to fear Temuchin’s growing importance and it soon became apparent that, when on campaign, the two men no longer fought so well together. On more than one occasion Temuchin found himself almost overwhelmed by the enemy, with the expected relief from the Ong Khan’s troops having failed to arrive.
Gradually the clans began to sense that Temuchin was no longer in favour, and they started to desert him. It was another painful lesson about the realities of steppe loyalty. After an appalling encounter with an overwhelmingly superior Kereyid force, in which Temuchin’s second son Ogedei was badly wounded, they were forced to retreat with 4,600 men and found refuge on the shores of Lake Baljuna. He tried to make contact with his former patron, but was rebuffed. This period in the wilderness, thought to have been about 1203, is regarded by the early chroniclers as the greatest test for both Temuchin and his followers. In the years to come, those who could claim to have been with Temuchin at Lake Baljuna were assured of high honour.
Eventually the Kereyid confederation, now under the inferior command of the Ong Khan’s son, showed signs of fragmenting. More and more of the clans swung back to Temuchin’s side and, when finally he felt his strength adequate, he struck back – catching the Kereyid unguarded. The ensuing battle against superior forces was apparently an epic engagement that continued for three days. Victory finally came to Temuchin; the elderly Ong Khan fled the field, but was captured by a neighbouring tribe and executed. Temuchin, keen to refocus the loyalties of the enemy commanders, ordered that they should not be punished; he even went so far as to praise their heroism in public. But now the Kereyid were defeated they had to be absorbed into the Mongol nation, and to encourage this he took a number of Kereyid princesses whom he gave as wives to his sons. One of the Ong Khan’s youngest nieces, Sorghaghtani Beki, who was given to Temuchin’s youngest son Tolui, later became one of the most powerful figures in the empire and the mother of some of the greatest khans.
It might be assumed that by now Temuchin enjoyed absolute supremacy throughout the eastern steppe, but in fact, as a result of his victory over the Kereyid, he now faced even more determined opposition. The last remaining significant power in the region was the Naiman, a tribe that lived north-west of the traditional lands of the Kereyids – between the Selenga River and the Altai Mountains. It was here that an army of fugitives from the other defeated tribes had gathered. It was here, too, that Jamukha had sought refuge and was now plotting Temuchin’s downfall.
Temuchin realised the inevitability of this final encounter and so he called a quriltai, a meeting of the tribal leaders in his command, to plan the campaign. He wanted it to be a decisive confrontation, a victory that would spell either the end of all tribal conflicts – or oblivion. In preparing for this encounter, Temuchin restructured his army into groups of thousands, hundreds and tens. He also reorganised the command structure. When all this was complete, he consecrated his battle colours on the day of the Feast of the Moon, in the Year of the Rat (1204), and then began his march on the Naiman armies. By the time they encountered the enemy, an overwhelmingly superior force, the Mongol horses were exhausted. He decided to make camp and by lighting hundreds more fires than were necessary, successfully convinced the enemy scouts that his army was far greater than in fact it was. When the two armies finally stood before each other in the field, Jamukha studied Temuchin’s new battle order and, perhaps because it confused his own calculations, slipped quietly from the field even before battle was joined. The Naiman marched forward to meet the Mongols, but as Jamukha’s forces fell away behind their master the Naiman lost heart and were soundly crushed. The Naiman king died of his wounds, his son fled to the west and Jamukha, who had also taken flight, was finally captured and, according to the Secret History, was executed at his own request. Temuchin was now absolute master of all the tribes of Mongolia. At a quriltai in 1206 he was finally proclaimed as such, and invested with the title Genghis Khan.
THE NEW MONGOLIA
This account of Genghis Khan’s epic rise to power describes a struggle through a seemingly endless nightmare of alliance and betrayal. For historians who have attempted to bring to life the personality of one of the most important figures in world history, these events seem to supply some insight. Certain facts are unique. He emerged from an extremely marginal position within steppe politics and therefore had no firm base of support from which to launch his bid for outright leadership. Moreover, that support that he was able to gather invariably slipped through his fingers at the first hint that the tide seemed to be turning against him. This fickleness, it is argued, shaped his ideas not only about military strategy, but also about how to organise the political structure of the newly united Mongolia. Bitter experience had taught him that he could trust neither the individual clans nor even his close relatives, for even his uncles and brothers had at some time allied themselves with his enemies. They were just as likely to elect him khan one year and desert him the next. He understood that these ancient habits had to be broken and that the narrow interests of each tribal group had to be subsumed into the greater needs of the union. The traditional view is that Genghis Khan’s ideas about the future political structure of Mongolia were part of some vision of a nation that would eventually begin a campaign of world conquest. But a more recent view suggests that this new structure was the only possible answer to the problem of maintaining control over an army of nomadic horsemen that in 1206 probably numbered fewer than a hundred thousand men.
The traditional loyalty to tribal lords, or tus, had always been conditional and unreliable. According to the Secret History, the most formative experience in Genghis Khan’s early life was the period when he and his family were deserted by his father’s men after his death. Left to fend for himself, Genghis learned that the only reliable support was that which grew out of his own personal following. This group became the backbone of the army command, and consequently of the political powerbase. There were two basic relationships that developed. The first was the anda, the sworn brotherhood, which was effectively an alliance between equals as the respective partners swore both loyalty and support in times of trouble; support that included the men and families under the command of the respective ‘brothers’. This relationship withered somewhat under the new imperial structure, which replaced it with the nokor, someone who had sworn personal allegiance. Those who swore themselves as nokors were subservient to their patron and had proved themselves faithful in battle. A nokor could expect to be rewarded by being given command of a division of the new army, which, apart from bestowing prestige, also entitled him to a larger proportion of booty. However, anyone who betrayed his nokor could expect no mercy. When Genghis Khan came to set up the command structure of his army, the most remarkable aspect was the absence of most of his family members. There were no uncles, cousins, brothers, nephews or sons – with the exception of Jochi. Later, when the Mongol army had grown, he grudgingly distributed small units among his family. But he was always reluctant to entrust important affairs to his family and extremely suspicious – one might even say paranoid – about family motives. Throughout his struggle for supremacy Genghis Khan executed or threatened to execute about a dozen members of his family because of plots, real or suspected, to overthrow him or exploit some influence over him. On the other hand, he was extremely trusting and generous to those to whom he was not related and had proved themselves loyal in battle.
Genghis Khan also developed the keshig, or personal bodyguard, made up of seventy day guards and eighty night guards. As his power grew this expanded to some ten times its original size, and when finally he was proclaimed master of Mongolia it had expanded to about 10,000, made up of ten units of a thousand. Its leaders were recruited from the sons or younger brothers of his divisional commanders, thus reinforcing the new imperial loyalty. The keshig also provided a group of young warriors whose advancement would be tied to the new imperial government, and not to traditional tribal loyalties. Their duties, apart from the protection of the sovereign, included providing units of hand-picked warriors and messengers for special imperial duties. The development of this new model army often meant removing the traditional commanders of tribal armies and replacing them with commanders from another tribe. Genghis was even prepared to break up and scatter entire tribal armies within the ranks of other units, especially if they had been particularly unreliable in the past. So effective was this strategy that, as time passed, the old tribal divisions gradually disappeared. No one was allowed to move from one unit to another, on pain of death, without explicit permission. Discipline was strict and subject to central authority, and the men were regularly trained to fight as a large unit and not as individuals. Those who broke rank to loot or who engaged in private feuds were severely punished. Genghis’s aim was to make the army the focus of each individual Mongol warrior’s loyalty – and himself the focus of the army’s loyalty. Hard experience had taught him that the nation would have to be founded upon a personal following. Absolute autocracy was the key.
The reputation that Genghis Khan earned as a great general was based upon the fact that he had always been prepared to take greater risks than his enemies. He did so because he had no choice, he had nowhere else to go, and he needed the victories because failure would have meant being abandoned again. Victory brought him loyalty. In 1206 the newly proclaimed Genghis Khan, now aged thirty-nine, was, in terms of the Middle Ages, past the prime of his life. Yet now he stood at the head of a nation that, just a few years before, had not even existed. More importantly, he stood at the head of an army that needed some greater purpose. But what that purpose might be was by no means immediately apparent. All that he could possibly have understood was that he had to go on from there.
CHAPTER 2: From China to the Caspian Sea
THE LAW-GIVER
Soon after Genghis Khan was made master over all ‘the people with felt tents’, he is said to have set down his great Yasa, a promulgation of general laws. It was customary whenever a new steppe empire was inaugurated for the leader to ‘mark the foundation of his polity’ by establishing certain decrees. Genghis Khan’s famous code came to be regarded so highly that it set him above any previous nomadic chiefs as a great administrator and law-giver. The Yasa was supposed to have been set down soon after the quriltai of 1206, and entrusted to Genghis’s adopted brother, an orphan of the Tartars, Shigi-Qutuqu, who was made a kind of chief justice. It enshrined Mongol attitudes towards religious tolerance, exempted priests and religious institutions from taxation, prescribed the death penalty for espionage, desertion, theft, adultery and, in the case of a merchant, being declared bankrupt for the third time. It also forbade washing or urinating in running water, as streams and rivers were thought to be alive. The Yasa became the institutional foundation of the empire, evidence of Genghis’s wisdom and his vision of how the future empire should be governed.
However, modern historians cast doubts upon whether there was such a vision of a future well-governed empire, and suggest that a large proportion of what we know as the Yasa is really a body of case histories – accounts of judgements that became precedents for future cases. There is also an account from the great Persian historian, Rashid al-Din, of a large number of decrees uttered by Genghis. These maxims, or biligs, were recorded and have been mistakenly assumed to be fragments of the Yasa, but they were not a code of general laws. In addition to Genghis’s decrees and the body of case law, there is an inheritance of Mongol customs and traditions. In other words, the Yasa is no longer seen as the great foundation stone of the empire, but rather as a mixture of enlightenment and superstition that is as much an account of Mongol lore as law.
REVITALISING THE ARMY
There was, however, a far more influential institution that was structured and regulated by Genghis Khan and which strictly governed the way most Mongols lived their lives – the army. All men over the age of fourteen were expected to undertake military duty. Only physicians, undertakers and priests were exempt. Upon being summoned, the men were expected to leave their flocks, take with them four or five changes of horse, and travel to wherever their unit happened to be based. Wives and children were expected to follow, and if the army was abroad the family travelled with the herds. As new arrivals rode into the ordu (military camp) they would find it laid out along standard lines, so they knew exactly where to find the physician’s tent, or the armoury to collect their allocation of weapons. They would then move out to join their unit, which might be an arban – a simple unit of ten; a jagun – ten arbans or 100 men; a minghan – a regiment of ten jaguns or 1,000 men; or a tumen, a division of ten minghans or 10,000 men. The ordu was run by quartermasters, or jurtchis, who secured supplies and organised the running of the place.
A soldier was responsible for making sure his equipment was kept up to standard and was regularly inspected by officers. Failing to look after one’s equipment usually meant being sent home from the regiment. A soldier’s equipment began with a silk undershirt, a novelty learned from the Chinese. If he was unlucky enough to be hit by an arrow, although it might pierce the armour it was unlikely to penetrate the closely woven silk shirt. What tended to happen was that the silk was dragged into the wound with the arrow head. Removing an arrow embedded in flesh creates a much larger wound than when it entered, but with the silk wound tightly round the arrow head this became easier. By gently pulling the silk around the wound, the soldier or physician would turn the head of the arrow and remove it without ripping further flesh.
Over the silk he wore a tunic, and, if he was part of the heavy cavalry, he was given a coat of mail and a cuirass made of leather-covered iron scales. Each soldier carried a leather-covered wicker shield and a helmet of either leather or iron, depending on his rank. He was armed with two composite bows and a large quiver containing no fewer than sixty arrows. Light cavalry carried a small sword and two or three javelins, while the heavy brigade carried a scimitar, a battle axe or a mace and a 4 m (12 foot) lance. Soldiers were also equipped for travel. They were expected to carry on the horse clothing, cooking pots, dried meat, a water bottle, files for sharpening arrows, a needle and thread, and other useful little items. The saddlebag itself was usually made from a cow’s stomach, which, being waterproof and inflatable, also provided a useful float when crossing rivers.
One important institution Genghis Khan developed was to transform the nomadic horsemen’s favourite sport, the hunt, into a military drill. Whether the quarry was wolf, wild boar or deer, the hunt became a way of instilling into the minds of his soldiers the virtues of working and acting as part of a large single entity. These hunting exercises were conducted during the winter for about three months and every soldier participated. A variety of techniques were employed, depending on the size of the unit.
