Genghis Khan

Britannica's entry on Kublai Khan treats the Mongols before 1206 as a parvenu nomadic power — in practice no more than largely autonomous tribes, more or less unknown to recorded history¹. The empire that erased that obscurity was founded by Genghis Khan in 1206, originating from the Mongol heartland in the steppe of central Asia². By the late 13th century it reached from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Danube River and the shores of the Persian Gulf in the west². At its peak it covered some 9 million square miles (23 million square km) of territory — the largest contiguous land empire in world history².

The named actors in these struggles include the Merkits, a tribe living in northern Mongolia³, and the Kereit and the Naiman Turks². Feuds were inherited: the Merkits bore Temüjin a grudge because his father Yesügei had stolen his own wife Höelün from one of their men, and in their turn they abducted Temüjin's wife Börte³. The Tatars stand apart in the record for the severity of their fate — many were massacred — while, apart from the rulers of the defeated tribes, the bulk of a tribe's manpower was incorporated into the growing Mongol army⁴.

Documentation for this world is thin and late⁴. For knowledge of his early life we depend on a single Mongolian work, the Secret History of the Mongols, most of which was written probably in 1228 or 1240, within a short time of Genghis Khan's death⁴. Britannica adds that, with the exception of the saga-like Secret History, only non-Mongol sources provide near-contemporary information about his life³. Its topic entry describes the Secret History as an imperial chronicle dealing with the life and times of Genghis Khan and his successors, written about 1240⁵.

Britannica dates Genghis Khan's birth to 1162 near Lake Baikal, Mongolia, and his death to August 18, 1227³; the same entry calls him a Mongolian warrior-ruler and one of the most famous conquerors of history³. His birth name was Temüjin, and he was born to a royal clan of the Mongols³. Certainty, however, stops there: the date of birth is not known for certain, with some scholars choosing 1162 and others 1167, and he was named Temujin after a Tatar captive⁶. Iranica gives 'probably' 1167, in northeastern Mongolia, and calls him the founder of the most extensive land empire known to history⁴.

Boyhood brought catastrophe³. When he was nine, his father Yesügei was poisoned and Temüjin was held captive by his former supporters; he later escaped, killed his half-brother, and began gathering supporters and manpower in his teenage years³. WHE puts him at nine or twelve when his father, the tribal leader Yisugei, was poisoned by a rival — too young to maintain the loyalty of his father's followers, so that he and his mother were abandoned on the steppe⁶. One episode from captivity survived in detail: captured by the Taychiut, who, rather than killing him, kept him around their camps wearing a wooden collar, he noticed during a feast that he was being ineptly guarded, knocked down the sentry with a blow from his wooden collar, and fled³.

Börte's abduction became the first great test of his alliances³. The Merkits had ravished her, and the campaign to recover her drew in Toghril of the Kereit and Temüjin's boyhood friend Jamuka; Britannica notes that no authority other than the narrative of the Secret History is available for the episode³. No firm date is given in the sources for it³.

Two legend layers cling to the early record⁶. WHE reports the legend that the infant was born clutching a clot of blood in his right hand — an ominous omen of things to come⁶. The Secret History itself does not open with the child at all: it begins with a blue-grey wolf, born with his destiny ordained by Heaven Above, whose wife was a fallow doe⁷.

After becoming the head of his clan, Temüjin forged alliances with other clans, exterminated the existing clan nobility, and overpowered enemy tribes such as the Tatars³. Britannica summarises the achievement that followed as bringing all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under the rule of himself and his family in a rigidly disciplined military state³.

Two alliances stand out in the record of these years³. Toghril furnished 20,000 men and persuaded Jamuka, a boyhood friend of Temüjin's, to supply an army as well — the coalition that recovered Börte³. Britannica is careful about that story: the contrast between Temüjin's destitution and the huge army furnished by his allies is hard to explain, and no authority other than the narrative of the Secret History is available for it³.

His victories over the Kereit and then the Naiman Turks gave him undisputed authority over the whole of what is now Mongolia². The formal recognition of that authority came at a quriltay — an assembly of princes and notables — held in 1206, as the sources quoted below record in their own words⁴.

In 1206 an assembly of leaders declared him universal emperor of the Mongolian steppe³. Britannica specifies the setting: Temüjin, son of Yesügei, was elected Genghis Khan of a federation of tribes on the banks of the Onon River — the year regarded as the beginning of the Mongol empire². WHE places the great conference, a kurultai, at the Kerulen river, where a Mongol confederation formally declared Temujin their leader and gave him the title Genghis Khan, likely meaning universal leader⁶.

The army was rebuilt from the ground up⁶. Genghis made his army more secure by avoiding the Mongol tradition of forming divisions based on tribes, which then might split due to age-old rivalries⁶. To better secure his own position, he formed and then expanded his elite bodyguard, the kesikten, from 800 to 10,000 men⁶. The new structure was based on mingan, or thousands — units composed of about 1,000 warriors and their families, which outsiders often incorrectly identified as tribes⁸. Iranica calls the army his most impressive creation: organized in the usual steppe fashion on a decimal system, it was a force of cavalry archers, later supplemented by a siege train when cities in China and Persia had to be dealt with⁴. The khan's bodyguard in turn transformed into the locus of a central government, its members drawn from both inside Mongolia and from conquered territories — participants, in the term of the scholars JSTOR Daily cites, in a school of national assimilation⁸.

After 1206 the Mongol expansion and the great conquests began; whether as a means of preserving the newly won unity, because of climatic conditions, or as a result of the adoption of an ideology of world rule, is uncertain and much disputed⁴. From 1206 until his death in 1227 he ruled the empire he had founded⁶. In this way he built the foundations of an empire which would, under his successors, ultimately control one-fifth of the globe⁶.

Iranica identifies his principal target as China, which at that time was divided into three realms: Hsi Hsia (Xixia) in the north-west, the Chin (Jin) dynasty of the Jürchen in the north, and the native Chinese Southern Sung dynasty in the south⁴. The first attack (1205–09) was directed against the Tangut kingdom of Hsi Hsia (Xi Xia), a northwestern border-state of China, and ended in a declaration of allegiance by the Xi Xia king². After several expeditions against the Hsi Hsia, the Chin empire was first invaded in 1211⁴.

The fall of Beijing in 1215 marked the loss of all the territory north of the Huang He (Yellow River) to the Mongols². During the following years the Jin empire was reduced to the role of a buffer state between the Mongols in the north and the Chinese Song empire in the south². In 1218 the Khara-Khitai state in east Turkistan was absorbed into the empire². Then came the crisis at Otrar: the assassination of Muslim subjects of Genghis Khan by the Khwārezmians led to a war with the sultanate of Khwārezm (Khiva) in west Turkistan (1219–25)².

The Mongols invaded Transoxania in 1219 in a carefully coordinated three-pronged attack, and the Khwārazm-Shāh fled, dying on an island in the Caspian⁴. The great Transoxanian cities, Bukhara and Samarkand, fell and were sacked⁴; together with the capital Urgench, they were taken by Mongol armies in 1220–21². Their fate was mild compared with that meted out to Khorasan at the hands of Genghis Khan's youngest son, Tolui: according to the contemporary historians, the province was devastated, its cities razed to the ground, and its people massacred in the millions⁴.

Genghis Khan relocated two of his best generals, Jebe and Subutai, from Persia, which he was in the final stages of conquering, to the Eurasian steppe⁹. There they led 20,000 soldiers against the last remaining nomadic herders, the Cuman-Kipchak⁹. Advance troops, after crossing the Caucasus, even penetrated into southern Russia and raided cities in Crimea in 1223². The army's hunting technique, the nerge — encircling a large area on horseback and corralling the prey into an ever shrinking circle — served as a battlefield maneuver in the 1241 campaign⁹.

In 1227 the Mongol dominions stretched over the vast regions between the Caspian and China seas, bordering in the north on the sparsely populated forest belt of Siberia and in the south on the Pamirs, Tibet, and the central plains of China². Iranica's judgement is that Genghis Khan had laid the military foundation of an empire which was to continue expanding for a further half century⁴.

A similarly destructive campaign was launched against Xi Xia in 1226–27 because the Xi Xia king had refused to assist the Mongols in their expedition against Khwārezm². The death of Genghis Khan during that campaign increased the vindictiveness of the Mongols². WHE records that he died on 18 August 1227 of an unknown illness, perhaps initially caused by falling from his horse while hunting a few months earlier⁶. At the time he was back in northwest China besieging the Xia state's capital, Zhongxing, and the news of his death was kept from the Mongol army until the city had capitulated and its inhabitants been slaughtered⁶. The Xi Xia culture — a mixture of Chinese and Tibetan elements, with Buddhism as the state religion — was virtually annihilated².

His body was then transported back to Mongolia for burial, but the location of his tomb was kept a secret — a decision that has caused much speculation ever since⁶. Medieval sources mention that the tomb was in the vicinity of the sacred mountain Burkan Kuldun, and that his son Ogedei sacrificed 40 slave girls and 40 horses to accompany his father into the next life⁶.

He had certainly formed the nucleus of an imperial administration that was to stand his successors in good stead⁴. The fuller civilian machinery belongs to his son and successor: under Ögödei the empire put local government bureaucracies in north China, Turkistan, and Iran under a central administration overseen by a senior bodyguard officer, issuing coins, conducting censuses, building cities, and adopting a taxation system based on a Chinese model⁸.

The empire was run on the move: at the peak of their success in 1259 the Mongol people numbered under a million, yet they ran an empire that covered most of Russia, China, and Iran, without abandoning their nomadic lifestyle⁸. In 1220 Genghis Khan, the great Mongol conqueror, established his headquarters at Karakorum and used it as a base for his invasion of China¹². In 1235 his son and successor, Ögödei, surrounded Karakorum with walls and built a rectangular palace supported by 64 wooden columns standing on granite bases; many brick buildings, 12 shamanistic shrines, and two mosques were once part of the city¹². Karakorum's ruins lie on the upper Orhon River in north-central Mongolia¹², within the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape — a 121,967-hectare World Heritage area whose grassland is still grazed by Mongolian nomadic pastoralists¹³.

The succession was provided for in advance: the empire was to be divided amongst his sons Jochi, Chagatai, Tolui, and Ogedei, with each ruling a khanate, although Jochi would predecease his father in 1227⁶. Ogedei, the third son, became the new Great Khan in 1229, after his father's death⁶.

His immediate successors created the largest empire ever to exist, spanning the entire Asian continent from the Pacific Ocean to modern-day Hungary in Europe¹⁴. The Mongol empire was at its largest two generations after Genghis Khan and was divided into four main branches, the Yuan — the empire of the Great Khan — being the central and most important¹⁴. Kublai Khan, his grandson and greatest successor, was the fifth emperor (reigned 1260–94) of the Yuan dynasty, and in 1279 he completed the conquest of China begun by Genghis Khan, becoming the first Yuan ruler of all of China¹. The other Mongol states were the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia (ca. 1227–1363), the Golden Horde in southern Russia extending into Europe (ca. 1227–1502), and the Ilkhanid dynasty in Greater Iran (1256–1353)¹⁴.

A more devastating wave of conquest came with Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü, when Mongol forces subjugated all of Iran and by 1258 had also taken Baghdad, bringing to an end the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258)¹⁵. Hülegü (r. 1256–65) assumed the title of Il-Khan, meaning lesser Khan, subordinate to the Great Khan ruling in China; this branch, which became known as the Ilkhanids (1256–1353), centered its power in northwest Iran¹⁵. East Asian elements absorbed into the existing Perso-Islamic repertoire created a new artistic vocabulary, one that was emulated from Anatolia to India¹⁵.

Within the Ilkhanate the religious register shifted quickly: Abaqa was succeeded by his brother Tegüder, who had converted to Islam as a youth, taking the name Aḥmad, and whose short reign (1282–84) included a campaign to reinstate Islam as the official religion¹⁶. With the accession of Ḡāzān (r. 1295–1304), the Il-khanate entered a new and dynamic era¹⁶. With the unexpected death in 1335 of Abu Saʿīd, who had set out to meet the reported advances of an invasion from the Golden Horde, the ruling house basically came to an end¹⁶. The wider pattern was the same across the Mongol world: eventually the Mongols became part of the sedentary societies they had so easily overwhelmed, and many converted from traditional shamanism to Tibetan Buddhism or Islam¹⁰.