1218: Mohammed-Shah the Khwarismian
The three great states that now bordered
the Mongols were the Chin Empire on the east, with its capital at Pekin; then
the Tangut kingdom of Hsia Hsi, along the upper reaches of the Yellow River,
where a dynasty of Tibetan origin ruled over a mixed sedentary population of
Mongols, Turks and Chinese; and, to the southwest, the kingdom of the Kara
Khitai, Buddhist nomads from Manchuria who had been displaced by the Chin
Emperors early in the twelfth century and had fought their way westward, to
found an empire at the expense of the Uighurs of the Tarim basin and the Moslem
Turks of Yarkand and Khotan. Their monarch, the Gur-Khan, was already a
formidable factor in eastern Moslem politics; and the Uighurs of Turfan were
his clients. The weakest of the three was Hsia Hsi, which, therefore, Jenghiz
attacked the first. By 1212 its King had accepted his suzerainty. Invasions of
the Chin Empire followed. A series of tremendous battles put the whole
countryside as far as the Yellow Sea and Shantung into his power; but the
Mongols were unused to attack fortified places, and the great walled cities
held out against him. It was only when a Chin engineer, Liu Po-Lin, entered
Jenghiz’s service that his armies began to learn the art of siege warfare. But
by 1226 the Chin Emperor was reduced to vassalage. Already by 1221 the Chin province
of Manchuria had been annexed, and Korea had acknowledged Mongol suzerainty.
When the last Chin Emperor died in 1223, his remaining provinces were
incorporated into the Mongol Empire.
Meanwhile, Jenghiz had extended his power
south-westward. At this time the Khwarismian Empire of Mohammed-Shah was at its
height. Mohammed was master of all Asia from Kurdistan and the Persian Gulf to
the Aral Sea, the Pamirs and the Indus. The Gur-Khan of the Kara Khitai found
him a disquieting neighbour and sought to embarrass him by inciting his vassals
in Transoxiana against him. The resultant wars seriously weakened the Kara
Khitai; and while Mohammed-Shah annexed their southern territory, the throne of
the Gur-Khan was usurped by a Naiman refugee prince, Kuchluk. Kuchluk, a
Nestorian by birth, had become a Buddhist on his marriage to a Kara Khitai
princess; but unlike the Gur-Khans, he was intolerant towards his Christian and
Moslem subjects. His unpopularity gave Jenghiz his chance to intervene. When a
Mongol army swept down into the Turfan basin, it was welcomed as a force of
liberators. The Uighurs gladly submitted to Mongol rule; and Kuchluk was
restricted to a small principality in the Tarim valley.
This expansion brought Jenghiz into direct
connection with the territory of the Khwarismians. Mohammed-Shah was not the
man to tolerate a rival as ambitious as himself. Embassies were exchanged
between the two potentates; but Mohammed was affronted when Jenghiz demanded
that, as Khan of the Turco-Mongol nations, he should be regarded as suzerain by
the Khwarismian prince. In 1218 a great caravan of Moslem merchants travelled
from Mongolia, and with them were a hundred Mongols, sent on a special mission
to the Khwarismian court. When the caravan reached Otrur, on the Jaxartes
river, in Mohammed’s dominions, the local governor massacred the travellers and
stole their goods, half of which were sent to the Shah. It was a provocation
that Jenghiz could not ignore. Seeing that war was about to break out, Kuchluk
made a bid to revive the Kara Khitai kingdom. In a brilliant campaign the
Mongol general Jebe pursued Kuchluk and his army through the length of his
dominions and finally slew him in a valley high in the Pamirs.
1221:
Defeat of the Khwarismians
With Kuchluk gone, Jenghiz was ready to
set out against the Khwarismians. It was a formidable undertaking.
Mohammed-Shah was said to be able to put half a million men into the field; and
Jenghiz would be operating a thousand miles from his home. In the late summer
of 1219 the Mongol army of two hundred thousand men left its camp by the river
Irtysh. The Khan’s vassal kings, such as the prince of the Uighurs, joined him
on his westward march. Mohammed-Shah, uncertain where the Mongols would strike,
divided his troops between the line of the Jaxartes and the passes of Ferghana,
with his main body waiting by the great Transoxianan cities of Bokhara and
Samarkand. The Mongol army made straight for the middle Jaxartes, and crossed
the river by Otrur. Part of the army was left to besiege the town, a slow task,
for the Mongols were still unpractised at siege warfare; part moved down the
river to attack the Khwarismian army on its banks; part moved up the river to
cut off the army in Ferghana; and Jenghiz and his main troops marched straight
on Bokhara. He arrived there in February 1220. Almost at once the civilians
opened the gates of the city to him. The Turks in the citadel resisted for a
few days, then were slaughtered to a man, together with the Moslem imams who
had encouraged them to fight on. From Bokhara Jenghiz moved to Samarkand, while
Mohammed-Shah, unable to trust his troops, retired to his capital at Urgenj, on
the Oxus, near Khiva. At Samarkand, where Jenghiz was joined by his sons, who
had captured Otrur, the Turkish garrison at once surrendered, hoping to be
enlisted into the conqueror’s army. But he distrusted such unreliable soldiers
and put them all to death. A few civilians tried to organize resistance, but in
vain. They too were slain. Jenghiz next sent his sons to lay siege to Urgenj.
There the defence was more formidable; and quarrels between the Khan’s sons
delayed its capture for a few months. Meanwhile Mohammed-Shah fled to
Khorassan, pursued by an army under Jenghiz’s most trusted generals, Subotai
and Jebe. He escaped from his pursuers, only to die, broken and deserted, in
December
1220,
in a little island in the
Caspian Sea.
A
better fight was put up by Mohammed’s son,
Jelal ad-Din, who joined the Khwarismian army in Ferghana, and retreated into
Afghanistan. At Parvan, just north of the Hindu Kush, he severely defeated the
Mongol army sent to suppress him. Jenghiz himself had moved across the Oxus,
past Balkh, which submitted to him and was spared, to Bamian, in the central
Hindu Kush. The fortress held out against him and in the course of the siege
his favourite grandson, Mutugen, was slain. When therefore the city was taken
by assault, not a living creature was left alive in it. Meanwhile his son Tului
and his son-in-law Toghutshar campaigned further to the west, capturing Merv,
out of whose male population only four hundred trained artisans were spared,
and Nishapur, where Toghutshar was killed, and which suffered exactly a similar
fate. Toghutshar’s widow presided in person over the massacre. The artisans
from both cities were sent to Mongolia. In the autumn of 1221 Jenghiz advanced
through Afghanistan to attack Jelal ad-Din and caught up with him on the banks
of the Indus. In a desperate battle on 24 November the Khwarismian army was
destroyed. Jelal ad-Din himself fled across the river and took refuge with the
King of Delhi. His children fell into the victor’s hands and were massacred.
The Coming of the Mongols
Jenghiz spent about a year in Afghanistan.
The huge city of Herat, which had at first submitted quietly to the Mongols,
had revolted after Jelal ad-Din’s victory at Parvan. A Mongol army besieged it
for several months. On its capture, in June
1222,
its whole population, amounting to
hundreds of thousands, was put to death. The slaughter lasted for a week. The
ruined cities and wasted lands were provided with Mongol administrators,
supported by enough troops to keep the cowed inhabitants in order. Jenghiz then
returned to Transoxiana, which was less desolate. There he installed a
Khwarismian governor, Mas’ud Yalawach, with Mongol advisers to watch and
control him. Mas’ud’s father, Mahmud Yalawach, was sent eastward to govern
Pekin, an honorific method of further ensuring Mas’ud’s loyalty. Jenghiz
recrossed the Jaxartes in the spring of 1223 and journeyed slowly back across
the steppes, reaching the Irtysh in the summer of 1224 and his home on the Tula
river next spring.
The fantastic conquests of Jenghiz-Khan
did not pass unnoticed by the Christians in Syria. It was known that he was
attacking the greatest Moslem power in Central Asia; and the Nestorians, with
their churches spreading all across Asia, could testify that he was not
ill-disposed towards the Christians. The Khan himself was a Shamanist, but he
liked to consult Christian and Moslem priests, with a preference for the
former. His sons were married to Christian princesses, Keraits, who had
considerable influence at his court. It might well be that he would serve as an
ally for Christendom.
1222: The Mongols reach the Caucasus
These hopes were somewhat shaken in the
course of
1221.
The army sent by Jenghiz under
Subotai and Jebe to capture Mohammed-Shah failed in its immediate purpose. The
Shah eluded them and doubled back to the Caspian.
But
the Mongol generals moved on to the west.
In the summer of
1220
they captured and
pillaged Reiy, near the modern Teheran, but spared most of the inhabitants.
Next, Qum was taken and its inhabitants all massacred. A similar fate befell
Kasvin and Zenjan, but Hamadan submitted in time and escaped after paying an
exorbitant ransom. The Emir of Azerbaijan bought off an attack on Tabriz; and
the Mongols passed by, in February
1221,
to attack Georgia. King George IV, son of Queen Thamar, led out
the Georgian chivalry to oppose their advance, and was routed at Khunani, just
south of Tiflis. It was a disaster from which the Georgian army never quite
recovered. But the conquerors turned back southward. Hamadan had revolted and
must be punished; and on their way to sack and destroy the city they only paused
to pillage Maragha, in Azerbaijan. They spent the remainder of the year in
north-west Persia. Early in 1222 they turned north again, and after ravaging
the eastern Georgian provinces and defeating the troops sent to restrain them,
they passed on along the Caspian coast, through the Caspian Gates, towards the
territory of the Kipchaks, between the Volga and the Don. The Kipchaks hastily
allied themselves with the tribes of the northern Caucasus, the Alans and the
Lesghians; but when Subotai and Jebe offered them a share of the booty, they
did not intervene while the Mongols crushed the Caucasians. Inevitably, the
Mongols next turned on them. They hoped to save themselves by bribing the
Russians to come to their help; but on 31 May 1222, a great Russian army, led
by the Princes of Kiev, Galich, Chernigov and Smolensk, was destroyed on the
banks of the Kalka river, near the Sea of Azov. The Mongol generals did not
follow up their victory. They entered the Crimea and pillaged the Genoese
trading station at Soldaia, then swept away to the east, only pausing to
destroy an army of the Kama Bulgars and ravage their country. They rejoined
Jenghiz-Khan by the river Jaxartes, early in 1223.
The Western victims of this vast raid
hopefully regarded it as an isolated phenomenon, a ghastly cataclysm that would
not recur. But Jenghiz was delighted with his generals. They had not only done
some valuable reconnoitring and had discovered that there was no army in western
Asia that could stand up to them; but also they had so terrified the nations
there by their ruthlessness that when the time should come for serious
invasion, no one would dare to oppose them.
When Jenghiz-Khan died in 1227, his
dominions stretched from Korea to Persia and from the Indian Ocean to the
frozen plains of Siberia. No other man has ever created so vast an empire. It
is impossible to explain his success by some theory that the Mongols had any
economic urge for expansion; it can only be said that they were a suitable
instrument for an expansionist leader. Jenghiz was the architect of his
destiny. But he himself remains mysterious. In appearance, we are told, he was
tall and vigorous, with eyes like a cat’s. It is certain that his physical
endurance was great. It is certain too, that his personality profoundly
impressed everyone who had dealings with him. His skill as an organizer was
superb; and he knew how to choose men and how to handle them. He had a genuine
respect for learning, and was always ready to spare a scholar’s life; but
unfortunately few of his victims were given time to prove their scholarship. He
adopted the Uighur alphabet for the Mongols and founded Mongol literature. In
religious matters he was tolerant and ready to give aid to any sect that did
not oppose him politically. He insisted on a just and orderly government. The
roads were cleared of brigands; a postal service was introduced; and under his
patronage commerce flourished and great caravans would pass in safety every
year across the breadth of Asia. But he was completely ruthless. He had no
regard for human life and no sympathy for human suffering. Millions of innocent
townsfolk perished in the course of his wars; millions of innocent peasants saw
their fields and orchards destroyed. His Empire was founded on human misery.
1227: Succession of Ogodai
The death of the great conqueror gave the
outside world a respite. Nearly two years passed before the succession to his
empire was settled. By Mongol custom, the eldest son and his descendants had
the right to succeed to the empire, but the youngest had the right to retain
the homelands and the duty to call the assembly that would confirm the
succession. Jenghiz had broken with custom and had named his third son, Ogodai,
as heir to the supreme power, passing over his eldest son, Juji whose
legitimacy was questioned and whose military and administrative record was
unsatisfactory. His second son, Jagatai, was a brilliant soldier, but too
hot-tempered and impulsive to make a good ruler. Ogodai, though less
spectacularly gifted, had, so Jenghiz thought, the patience and tact to handle
his brothers and vassals. The youngest, Tului, was perhaps the ablest of the
brothers but was handicapped by his self-indulgent habits. As the prince
responsible for summoning the Kuriltay, Tului was the pivotal figure in
deciding the succession; and he persuaded the chieftains of the clan to carry
out Jenghiz’s wishes. Ogodai became supreme Khan, and great appanages were
allotted to his relatives. Jenghiz’s brothers took over the eastern provinces,
round the Amur river and in Manchuria. Tului kept the ‘hearth-lands’ by the
Onon. Ogodai’s personal patrimony was the old Kerait and Naiman territory.
Jagatai inherited the former Uighur and Kara Khitai kingdoms. Juji had already
died, but his sons, Batu, Orda, Berke and Shiban, were given the western
provinces, as far as the Volga. But, while the princes were allowed autocratic
rights over their subjects, they had to obey the imperial law of the Mongols
and accept the decisions of the supreme Khan’s government, which Ogodai set up
at Karakorum. The unity of the Mongol Empire was unimpaired.